Violence, fear and confusion: welcome to the Horn of Africa

It looked like many of the dhows that sail the Gulf of Aden, a nameless boat identifiable only by its registration number – 11S2. This dhow, however, was not carrying fish, or even engaged in the lethal people smuggling trade conducted across these waters.Tracked by Yemeni intelligence officials, it was laden with a quite different cargo that had been loaded at Hes Bes on Somalia's arid coastline.When it was boarded late last year by Yemeni coastguards, the ship's captain and his crew of 12 were discovered to be ferrying arms into a country already awash with weapons. About 60 million handguns, at the last count, arm a population of 21 million people in Yemen. The arms traffic is hardly one-way. Indeed, Yemeni ships are more often smuggling arms in the opposite direction, to fuel the terrible conflict in Mogadishu and south central Somalia.The capture of the ship was a small event in the scheme of things, but an illustrative one. The Horn of Africa retains the potential to be one of the continent's most explosive regions, having suffered some of Africa's longest and most bitter conflicts during the past century. "The problem with this region as a whole," says Richard Dowden, director of the Royal African Society, "is that you cannot talk about Ethiopia without talking about Eritrea and Somalia. You can't talk about Sudan without mentioning Egypt." Dowden is convinced too that a failure to understand the nature of the relationships between the various neighbours by other countries – not least the US and Britain – has contributed to the difficulties in the area. With Yemen, just across the Gulf of Aden, added to the mix, the area's multi-layered security, economic and political problems appear so interconnected at so many levels as to seem irresolvable at a local one alone.This region has left its mark on the international consciousness over the past two decades for all the wrong reasons: war, famine and massive displacement of civilian populations.The most potent images, inevitably, are of disasters that struck westerners rather than the local populations: the Battle of Mogadishu that saw dead US servicemen dragged through the city's streets; the 2000 attack on the USS Cole by al-Qaida in the Yemeni port of Aden that killed 17 American sailors, and the kidnapping of western ships and tourists by pirates off Somalia's coast. Then there are the connections to the failed Christmas Day plane-bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who is believed to have received training and instruction from al-Qaida in Yemen.The profundity of the region's problems has seen it defined as one of the two anchors of the so-called "arc of crisis" – the locus of religious, economic and political faultlines which extends in a broad sweep through the Middle East, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, terminating in India.Yet the complexity of the relationships between the states that make up the area remains the least examined and least understood contributor to that arc.Last week, it was the turn of the prime minister of Somalia's beleaguered Transitional Federal Government, Omar Sharmarke, to dramatise what many see as the shortcomings of western policy towards the region – a tendency to ignore the potential fallout from and consequences of external intervention.Responding to the US offer to help Yemen in its fight against al-Qaida – and Gordon Brown's move to convene a summit on the issue – Sharmarke issued a warning. He said the sudden upsurge of interest after Abdulmutallab was linked to Yemeni-based extremists would only displace Yemen's problem to Somalia and other parts of Africa."Gordon Brown has rushed to call an emergency summit on Yemen," said Sharmarke, "but it must be understood that the problem will simply displace to Somalia unless there is corresponding support here. We call on Mr Brown to ensure that the summit agreed for the end of this January considers Somalia and Yemen jointly, and that resources are deployed immediately to assist our efforts against this scourge."Al-Qaida and their affiliates such as al-Shabaab [the Somali Islamist militia] are simply making sure that whilst Yemen is the subject of increased western attention and Somalia receives only empty gestures, they seize the opportunity to secure new supply routes and movement corridors for a move deeper into Africa."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jan/10/horn-africa-growing-instability