By The Star Staff Writer
MOGADISHU – The African Union called on the United Arab Emirates to stop its interferences in Somali affairs, saying such actions could undermine the Horn of Africa nation’s security and state-building efforts.
The chairman of the African Union Commission, Moussa Faki Mahamat, said the UAE’s meddling had jeopardized the hard-won gains so far made in Somalia, according to an AU statement on Sunday. The statement didn’t explicitly name the Gulf monarchy, but left no doubt about the country it was referencing.
“The Chairperson of the Commission expressed concern over increasing instances of external interference by non-African actors in Somalia’s internal affairs,” said the AU statement, “noting that this threatens to disrupt the peace-building and state-building efforts currently underway in Somalia, and risks reversing the hard-won gains so far made in the country thanks to the sacrifices of AMISOM and the Somali security forces.”
Mahamat, the statement said, “urged all concerned external actors to refrain from any action that may undermine Somalia’s progress.”
This is the first official statement by the continental body on the danger that Abu Dhabi’s open meddling poses to the burgeoning recovery in Somalia, where the Gulf state bypassed the central government and cut military and trade deals with the northern regional administrations.
The AU’s concern follows a strong condemnation from Kenya’s president, Uhuru Kenyattat, who this month lashed out at what he called “foreign agents” determined to weaken Somalia’s national government and divide its people.
“Somalia remains troubled,” Kenyatta said, “largely by foreign agents who weaken its government, who divide its peoples, and who threaten to reverse the gains we have so painfully won under” the African Union Mission in Somalia.
In recent months, Somalis have been accusing the United Arab Emirates of trying to divide heir country into clan-based fiefdoms by pitting regional administrators, especially politicians in the northwestern and northeastern regions, against the central government in Mogadishu. The UAE cut unilateral military and trade deals with politicians from the two regions to operate the ports of Berber and Bossaso and set up a military base there.
The deals irked the national government, which in March asked the United Nations Security Council to take action against Abu Dhabi for violating its sovereignty.
The UAE has since discontinued a financial support it was providing to the Mogadishu-based national army and closed an outpatient hospital it ran in the capital.
Somalia’s neutral position in the ongoing Gulf crisis pitting Qatar against four, Saudi-led Arab countries, including UAE, has also angered those countries which imposed an air, sea and land blockade on Doha.
The AU issued its statement after Mahamat met with Somalia’s premier, Hassan Ali Khayre, who was in Addis Ababa to confer with his Ethiopian counterpart, Abiy Ahmed.
The European Union has also last week expressed concern over the UAE’s involvement in Somalia’s internal affairs.
“There’s been a weaponization of the coastline,” said Alexander Rondos, the European Union Special Representative for the Horn of Africa, in Uganda, where the annual European Union meeting for heads of delegation in eastern Africa and Horn of Africa took place.
Thirteen countries, including Uganda, took part in that meeting which, according to Rondos, discussed possible spillover effects from the ongoing war in neighboring Yemen on Somalia.
“Oh Yeah,” he said. “It is very, very real threat.”
The back-to-back barrage of criticism toward the UAE underscores the growing frustration in the international community at Abu Dhabi’s recent attempts to erode the national government’s authority across the country by forging unilateral ties with rogue regional administrators. Those relationships have already sparked political differences between the government and other regions outside the capital, Mogadishu.
Rondos said the Gulf crisis could “easily undermine” security efforts in Somalia and even in South Sudan. “We don’t need something aggravating these efforts” in the Eastern and Horn of Africa region, he said.
The UAE has in 2015 deployed its force in Yemen’s southern and eastern provinces as a part of a Saudi-led coalition that invaded the poor Arab country to oust an Iran-backed rebel group, Houthis, who seized control of the capital, San’a. Many Yemenis, however, perceive the UAE troops in their country as occupiers whose only aim is to tear their country apart to occupy strategic ports and islands, such as Socotra and Abd al-Kuri island.
Rondos emphasized the urgency of rendering assistance to Somalia so as it can take over security responsibilities from the African Union peacekeepers who have been in the country for more than ten years.
“We need to hurry up and help the Somalis create their own capacity to provide security for their own citizens,” he said.