US fear of Horn of Africa radicals overblown-expert
By Matthew Green
ADDIS ABABA, Feb 7 (Reuters) – Fears that the Horn of Africa could become an incubator for international Islamic extremism are overblown, partly because plans to sow such militancy have already failed, a regional human rights expert said.
Washington has stepped up its scrutiny of Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Djibouti in its “war on terror,” concerned they might provide a pool of Muslim militants keen to join al Qaeda’s campaign against the United States.
But while small al Qaeda cells have twice struck nearby Kenya, the kinds of Islamist movements that could cultivate international “terrorist” groups no longer exist in the region, said Alex de Waal, director of the human rights group Justice Africa.
“There’s a lot of sound and fury coming out of the United States about the Islamist threat, so-called,” said de Waal, who is also the editor of “Islamism and its Enemies in the Horn of Africa”.
“This is fundamentally mistaken,” he said, presenting his book in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa over the weekend. “There is no organised militant jihadist constituency in this region any more.”
“This point is not accepted in the U.S. at all, because the U.S. seems to believe that the only people capable of taking on or defeating Islamists are Americans,” he said. “Through their own political errors, the Islamic project came to an end.”
The United States, expanding its watch for terror threats after the September 11 attacks, set up a base in Djibouti in 2002 to deter militants from activity in the region, particularly in lawless Somalia.
Sudan, whose Islamist government hosted Osama bin Laden in the early 1990s, remains on a U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism, though Khartoum has since 9/11 offered intelligence to U.S. agents.
De Waal’s book argues that Sudan’s Islamist leaders, who seized power in a 1989 coup, failed in their ambitions to export militant Islam to destabilise neighbouring governments during the 1990s and eventually gave up the idea.
According to de Waal, Sudan abandoned its ideologically inspired attempts to nurture extremism in the region partly because of U.S. pressure and the need to improve its relations with its neighbours, and because of splits in its leadership.
“GIVEN UP”
“Vibrant militant Islamist movements that could incubate al-Qaeda terrorism no longer exist in the Horn. They are exhausted and their erstwhile state sponsor in the region, Sudan, has given up on their cause,” his book says.
In Somalia, after the September 11 attacks the U.S. focused on al-Itihad al-Isamiyya, an Islamist group which staged attacks in Ethiopia from mid-1995.
Ethiopia intervened in August 1996 to destroy the group’s bases in Somalia, prompting it to scale back its strategy of developing a military base and work to promote its Islamic agenda through institutions like Somalia’s Islamic courts.
“Throughout the last five years, al-Itihad’s agenda has been focused on Ethiopia more than Somalia,” the book says. “But al-Itihad has never spelled out an international terrorist agenda.”