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Mogadishu Will Only Be Safe Once Abdullahi Arrives Maxamed Xaaji Ingiriis Nairobi , Jan. 20, 2005 With clan conflicts, lack of rule of law and chaos rife, Somalia is not hospitable to its inhabitants - Somalis and non-Somalis alike. Recently, there was the murder of the mayor of Cadaado Mohamed Mohamud Siad "Suley" and the killing of the well-respected former army general, Mohamed Abdi Mohamed, just after he had said his prayers at a mosque in Mogadishu. There is much senseless killing going on, such as the recent fatal shootings of the general manager of Al-Barakaat, Abbas Abdi Ali, again, in front of a mosque, and that of a prominent lawyer in the street of Bakaraha. These men were real treasures for Somalia and their deaths are tragedies that the country can ill afford.
It's not just in Mogadishu. In Hargeisa, the capital of somaliland, last week, two men who were related to Ismail Aden Osman, the Homeland Minister, were killed. Last year, there were murders of numerous foreign relief workers, including two British citizens, an Italian and a Kenyan national. Though Hargeisa enjoys relative peace, southern Somalia is a most perilous place to work. Lately, fierce fighting has flared up across the country. Inter-clan war backed by the fiendish business community of both sides is currently going on in the central regions of Hobyo and Gelinsor. Conflict also hit the Sool area, over a territorial dispute between Somaliland and Puntland. Certainly, these battles serve to entrench the image of Somalis in the Western world as a people who possess neither rules for war nor any kind of rule of law. But the traditional history of Somalia is against that. Our ancestors had a customary code of law called Xeer, which was used to defuse hostilities among clans and elders went to great lengths to placate tensions among them. Today, wicked politics dominate our culture, brushing aside the traditional Xeer. British journalist Joseph Winter writes, "Guns have become a part of everyday life in Somalia." A French aid worker by the true conception as saying "Somalia is a country where everybody wants to shoot everybody." The reality of Somalia is that warlords incite their militias to create and occupy power vacuums, aggravating the cycle of atrocities in the process. "The sooner the people of Somalia are helped to get rid of warlords, the sooner another potential safe haven for terrorists will have been removed from the map," an exiled Somali professor wrote last year. But the most basic challenge is how to interpret the problems of a population that shares a common religion, ethnicity, language, culture and so much more, which became fragmented. Somalia was among countries affected by the tsunami tragedy. The UN aid agencies and other international aid organisations hesitated to send rescue teams, food and clean water, citing lack of security. Hundreds of people reportedly died in the disaster and the scale of the tragedy turned out to be greater than it was first presumed. Harried by bandits with guns, people across the country still need urgent recovery from the wounds of war, and even the armed militias would not oppose their much needed rehabilitation. But even after a two-year long process of peace talks culminating in a government of national unity accommodating warlords that was approved in Kenya almost three months ago, the government is yet to relocate to Somalia. One of the reasons is that elected President Col Abdullahi Yusuf is not from Doesn't Mr Yusuf grasp that he's the one that the ordinary people are waiting for, the one to whom they're looking to set up a police force and reinstate stability, or is he just good at throwing the first stone at peace? ---------------------- Maxamed Xaaji Ingiriis is a Somali journalist based in Brussels. He has been associate editor with the Ayaamaha newspaper in Mogadishu for the past five years. E-mail: :ingiriis@yahoo.com
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Mogadishu, but from northeastern region of Puntland, which has no influence on what is happening in the country's most important yet most volatile city - the capital, Mogadishu. The president himself reportedly said in a meeting in Nairobi with his clan that, "Mogadishu has too many warlords and too many technical-wagons, and so it is not pragmatic to move to a city without law and order."