Possible Head: New flashpoint at the Gate of Tears

According to Arab legend the Bab-el-Mandeb or Gate of Tears waterway received its name from a massive earthquake that brought it into being, separating Africa from Asia at this point and drowning many thousands in the process.

Devastating as that must have been at the time, the quake was also setting up a problem that would exercise the minds of terrorism and security analysts thousands of years into the future.

Bab-el-Mandeb was an opportunity and a threat. The opportunity was the possibility of a new trade route between Asia and Europe that, even in modern times, cuts weeks off the sea journey. The threat was that whoever controls this 27-kilometre-wide strait could effectively hold the world to ransom.

We have enjoyed the opportunity offered by Bab-el-Mandeb ever since the cutting of the Suez Canal in the 19th Century completed the link between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean. Now we have to deal with the threat.

And yet the West remains strangely oblivious to what is happening in Somalia and Yemen, one a failed state, the other teetering on the brink of becoming one, that are crucial to the safe passage of ships through Bab-el-Mandeb between the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea.

That route, if interrupted, would have the potential to cripple the world’s economy. As an example, tankers carry some 3.3 million barrels of oil through the waterway every day, a significant proportion of all the oil that is moving on the world’s seaways at any one time.

Australian annual trade worth $25 billion annually would be affected by any shut-down or delayed passage. Veteran commentators will remember the chaos and economic dislocation caused by the closure of the Suez Canal after the Six Day War of 1967. Australia’s trade dependence on this route remains crucial today especially for the supply of European goods.

Pirates operating out of Somalia are but a warning of things to come. Indications are that al-Qa’ida may be moving more of its main base operations from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Yemen and, if it encounters too many problems there, on to Somalia. Press reports, based on comments by senior Somali officials, state that upwards of a dozen al-Qa’ida operatives have moved, with sizeable funds, to Somalia. These reports have the ring of truth, but need substantive intelligence-based confirmation.

Philip Eliason, a Canberra-based former diplomat and Middle East consultant who recently spent 13 months in Yemen, says that country is now the fulcrum in an arc of crisis running from Pakistan to northern Kenya. He believes there is an unsettling tolerance for al-Qa’ida’s ideology among the country’s mostly impoverished population.

Sheikh Abd al-Majid al-Zindani, a senior conservative cleric who is highly popular in the country, has been urging Yemenis to adhere to Osama Bin Laden’s goals. “He is too locally respected and powerful to be silenced despite being on a United States wanted list,” Eliason says.

“In addition, Yemenis who have fought in Afghanistan are held in high esteem.”

He doubts whether traditional government-to-government contacts work easily in Yemen. “The Government apparatus there is a shell. Yemen’s leading tribes, clans and families run the country’s affairs, in some cases like personal banks,” he said.

This is a view strongly held by many Yemeni and other foreign commentators who decry the failure, for example, of the country’s new Supreme National Anti-Corruption Commission to prosecute corrupt officials. Yemen’s Foreign Minister stated as much in a lengthy BBC TV interview in late January during the London Conference on Afghanistan and Yemen.

The asset-stripping culture of the ruling class means only risible recycling of falling national wealth to the people and little or no social and physical infrastructure repair, let alone growth. Perhaps 80 per cent of Yemen is beyond assured direct state control.

If Yemen is a mess by Western standards, it is well ordered and stable compared to Somalia where virtually the only law is the law of the gun. Since the ousting of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991, there has been no effective central government and its people have fled in all directions from starvation and violence.

A United Nations-supported transitional administration has little power and less territory while the Islamist group Al-Shabab, now formally allied with al-Qa’ida, is gathering strength in the south of the country and may well launch an assault on the capital, Mogadishu, in the next few weeks.

Its influence has recently forced music off Somali radio in a move reminiscent of the Taliban’s approach. Somalia shows growing religious conservativism aligned to Saudi sponsored Wahhabi thought, which is already widely manifest in Yemen at the expense of previously more tolerant Sufi and Shia Islamic currents.

It is easy to see how terrorism could flourish under these conditions, while the difficulties faced by anyone seeking to impose order in this strife-torn country are legion. Over the last two decades the United States, Ethiopia and the African Union have tried and failed.

So what is the answer to the grave problems growing in Somalia and Yemen? Overwhelming force is clearly not an option despite talk by Russia of a land assault to destroy Somali pirate enclaves. America has lost interest since its disastrous incursion into Somalia in 1992, and anyway will be fully engaged in battling the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan for some years to come. China will do nothing unless it sees some particular advantage to itself (perhaps oil flow from Sudan or Saudi Red Sea ports will tip its hand in future). Member states of the European Union will probably not be able to agree on a coherent, well resourced tough-love policy until it is too late.

Subtle diplomacy involving carefully-targeted aid with the moderate Arab States playing a key role is an essential component for countering the radicalisation or collapse of the state in Yemen. This approach has not been tried before by Western donors but is, out of necessity just beginning now. Australia can and should contribute. The West, however, would need to keep a low profile to avoid giving al-Qa’ida and other radical Islamic elements a chance to exploit the crusader factor, fuelling current quite wild assertions among senior voices in Yemen that we are somehow working for Israel’s interests.

Australia should also carve out a role for itself, possibly in cooperation with regional partners such as India. Training of security personnel and institutional strengthening are things we have managed quite successfully in the Asia-Pacific region and there is no reason why this expertise could not be exported to the Gulf. These are activities that would cost minor millions rather than billions and return a significant bang for the buck.

A stronger diplomatic presence in Yemen, possibly starting with the establishment of an honorary consul office or official consulate-general supported from our embassy in Riyadh, and extra backing for NGOs prepared to work in the country, would be more costly but likely to repay the investment. Our return would be a clearer understanding of conditions in Yemen while delivering some meaningful local level assistance.

There remains Somalia, an intractable problem with no solution in sight, but minimising its damaging influence over Yemen would be a valuable first step. Increased aid for other neighbouring states and maybe even tacit backing for the breakaway region of Somaliland would have the effect of isolating the protagonists in a relatively restricted area.

One thing is certain – we cannot continue with the fiction that problems in the Horn of Africa involve a few renegade and desperate pirates. The possibility of a major ship, maybe an ocean liner with hundreds of people on board, being hijacked by terrorists is real. That’s  before we even contemplate the potential of terror groups left to train and plot unmolested in a country almost entirely a militant’s safe haven. Somalia is infecting Kenya, upsetting Djibouti and worrying Saudi Arabia. If anything, the situation is deteriorating.

The problems of the Horn of Africa are the subject of a number of international conferences over the northern summer. The Yemeni capital of Sana’a hosts Yemen from the Threshold in May; the long-established Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter in England follows in June, with a meeting of the Gulf Research Council at Cambridge in July.

Australia should have officials and thoughtful academics in attendance to tap into the expertise and ideas generated by these gatherings and others like them, because if we cannot find innovative answers, the Gate of Tears may take on a new and equally unpleasant meaning over the next few years.