After the expulsion of the Islamist government in Mogadishu and their flight through Kismayo into dissipation, the question remains as to how to rebuild Somalia into a viable state. The clan rule that has led to fifteen years of chaos will return unless the transitional government can take control of the streets without appearing to be an Ethiopian puppet state. Meanwhile, the Islamists still want a piece of Somalia's future:

The road ahead for Somalia begins in places like Kismayo, dusty, chaotic, forlorn wrecks of cities where the list of dire needs like food, water, shelter, a fire department, law, order — and hope — is so overwhelming that people just shake their heads and smile when asked where they would begin.

In just two weeks, the Somali political world has been turned upside down, bringing ambitious governance and reconstruction issues into focus for the first time in 16 years. The Islamist forces that ruled much of the country for the past six months are out. The transitional federal government, which had been considered totally feckless by those both at home and abroad, is in. The surprising reversal is because of thousands of Ethiopian troops still in Somalia who routed the Islamists after Ethiopian officials declared the growing movement a regional threat.

Kismayo is an old Arab port town of 700,000 people, Somalia’s third most populous city, after Mogadishu, the capital, and Hargeysa, in the north. But town elders in all three places are struggling with the same questions: how to provide security; what to do with the remaining Islamists; how to determine the proper role for religion, an important theme in Somali society; and how to unify rival clans, rebuild infrastructure and live with the Ethiopians. Many Somalis say they are starting at less than zero.

“After nearly two decades of anarchy,” said Abdi Artan Adan, a retired diplomat in Kismayo, “people just don’t want to be ruled.”

One might consider that a starting point for democratic reform, using clans as models for political parties. When a people have decided that they do not want to be "ruled", it could present an opportunity for them to try self-government instead. If the Somalians could find a way to secure private property rights and establish a non-Islamist court system that would adhere to a constitution, the development of a parliamentary form of government could allow the multiple clans to act politically as they do now militarily and judicially.

However, the first task for the transitional government will have to be the elimination of the use of force by the clans. The government wants to collect weapons, and even the clans agree that disarmament will have to take place -- but no clan wants to go first. Even here, the transformation of clans into poltical parties could assist in this process by forcing the clans to compromise on a schedule of disarmament in order to gain access to the ballots.

The Islamists, meanwhile, have landed in Yemen and want to join the political process again:

Leaders of Somalia's defeated Islamic movement said yesterday that they were committed to peace talks which could cut the threat of an Iraq-style insurgency across the Horn of Africa.

Several senior figures from the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) slipped past both Ethiopian troops and US warships, and found refuge across the Gulf of Aden in Yemen.

And during talks yesterday in Aden, the Islamic delegation, which included the movement's influential foreign affairs chief Ibrahim Adow, said they were ready to talk peace.

Yemen has supported the transitional government against the ICU, but now apparently wants to act as power broker for the Horn of Africa. The Islamists, who got ignominiously routed, wants to regain its toehold in Somalia through negotiation rather than war, for which the latest fighting showed them particularly inept. The Somalian transitional government will probably resist this entreaty, and the Ethiopians will never allow it. The Islamists have been discredited as both an army and a government, and even though the Telegraph says negotiations might "cut the threat of an Iraq-style insurgency," no one believes they can reach accommodation with absolutists.

The next step will be the replacement of the Ethiopians with a pan-African force. The Ethiopians do not want to stay long in Somalia, and the Somalians don't want them there any longer than necessary. After they leave, the Somalians have to find their way to a government that absorbs the millenia-old clan model rather than force a replacement of it.

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