A Dutchman by the name of Adrian Baldwin had written an article at Hiiraan, entitled “Bravo: The BBC Somali Team” in which he lavishly praised Yussuf Garaad, the editor of the Somali Service. According to the Dutchman, Mr. Yussuf Garaad had “taken the Service into a commendable level appreciated by those who really depend on their daily world news”. And to crown it all, he congratulated the Somali Service for their “professionalism, reliability, and accuracy of the news…”. This kudos are the crux of an overall sweeping and consummate adulation for Yussuf Garaad that permeates the whole article. These preposterous pronouncements are made on the basis of passing visual observations during his visits to Somalia between 1994 and 1998, and a subsequent conversation he had with Yussuf Garaad in Nairobi in 2003.

This adulation for Yussuf Garaad is all froth and no substance. It can be easily exposed as a farce. Firstly, it was Mohamed Abdullahi, and not Yussuf Garaad, who was head of the Service during the period 1994-1998, a time when Mr Baldwin was impressed to see listeners crowding around tea shops in Somalia for the 5.30 pm BBC Somali Service programmes. Little does he know that this impressive sight of Somalis listening to the BBC Somali Service goes back all the way to 1957 when the Service was first inaugurated. If credit has to be given where it is due, it should go to the founding fathers of the Service, in particular Mr Abdi Dualeh and all those other distinguished and highly respected announcers who by comparison would make Yussuf Garaad nothing more than a mall fry, and a rotten one at that.

Rather than enhancing the programmes of the BBC Somali Section, Mr Yussuf Garaad has on the contrary brought the Service-once the icon of Somali broadcasting stations-to an all-time low level. His first action after his nomination as editor was to shed close to a dozen highly experienced announcers who had worked for donkey years for the BBC and Radio Mogadishu and replaced them with his cronies from his clan- almost all amateurs with little broadcasting experience. Never in the history of the BBC Somali Service during its whole history of half- a- century of broadcasting has there been such an outcry against the Service to the extent engendered by Yussuf Garaad's unprincipled, partisan editorship of the Service

When the Dutchman praises the Service for its professionalism, reliability and accuracy of news, he has gone over the top. How can he make such a preposterous claim given that he is a foreigner who does not speak Somali and hence does not listen to the Service? Clearly, he is transmitting what Yussuf Garaad, wants to be conveyed. Such an unsupported, baseless claim makes you wonder whether the Dutchman is a mouthpiece for Yussuf Garaad or worse whether we are dealing with one and the same person .Yussuf Garaad is known to set up fictitious names that are credited with the articles and emails in his defence or self-promotion. The fact of the matter is that only those who listen to the Service on a daily basis are in a better position to judge the professionalism, reliability, and accuracy of the news. Mr Baldwin, the Dutchman, can hardly claim to be in that category. The more you read Mr. Baldwin article, the more it reads like Yussuf Garaad’s personal antics and not what you might expect from a detached, dispassionate and well-informed informed European

Unlike any previous heads of the Somali Service, Yussuf Garaad had come to wield almost unlimited freedom to run the Service as he wishes thanks to pliant staff, most of whom owe their recruitment to him, and a very molly-coddling Head of the African Service with whom he had, and still has, very close personal relations (for those who prefer a more lurid description of this relationship, please refer to Mohamed Siad Togan’s article: “the dogs bark but the caravan still rolls on” in Somaliweyn and Putlandpost).

In the on-going struggle between those who are trying to restore Somalia’s national government and the warlords who are determined to thwart this, Yussuf Garaad has openly sided with the warlords. It is ironic that all those former heads of the Somali Service, whether British or Somalis, had deep interest in Somalia, its people and its unity at their heart. Not so Yussuf Garaad who is devoid of patriotism and whose myopic vision is limited to his own personal interest and those of his warlord soul mates. This is the man that the Dutchman casts as a saint wronged by his detractors.

The Dutchman behaves almost like a typical Somali when he shields Yussuf Garaad from all complaints of abuse of his post by resorting to the well-known Somali tactic of charging his accusers as motivated by clan vendetta. This is a handy red herring for those who want to avoid blame and seek cover by invoking the bogey of clan hatred as the reason for complaints against them. It is similar to some blacks who are always eager to use the race card and accuse others who question on their wrong-doing of racism even when they are not. For the Dutchman, it is the clan vendetta that lies behind the campaign spearheaded against Yussuf Garaad by what he calls Puntland-related websites who are alleged to be pro-Abdullahi Yussuf’s government. This is what the Dutchman has to say:
“These webmasters wished the BBC to be the mouth piece of the interim president’s government and promote his policies. Unfortunately, when the chief editor asserted the neutrality and independence of the Service from the Somali politics, they decided to destroy his character and dedicated team that work so hard in the most difficult of circumstances. Their motive is to tarnish Mr. Garad’s character in order to persuade the World Service programme editors to dismiss him or demote him. Their means are to continually publish articles, interviews and lies against this good man and his team. And their objective is to get away with murder by knowingly lying and discrediting this highly professional individual and seeking his head. The World Service understands your motives and may not replace Mr. Garad with one of your kin. At least in the West, it doesn’t work that way”.

I am not an advocate for the websites mentioned by the Dutchman in his article. Suffice it to say, the accusations and innuendoes made by the Dutchman are spurious and contrived. Anyone who had been following these websites will attest to the fact that they had rarely taken a clear editorial position on the BBC Somali Service. On the rare occasions they did, as WardheerNews has, they had simply decried the support Yussuf Garaad gives in favour of the warlords and his bias against the government which the overwhelming Somalis everywhere want it to succeed. Contrary to what the Dutchman alleges, these websites had simply asked for even-handedness, impartiality, objectivity- standards that the BBC World Service never ceases to claim as its motto but rarely practices in the case of the Somali Service. Furthermore, almost all critical articles in these websites are from independent writers who use the space provided by these websites in order to air their concerns about the Somali Service and the great damage being done to it and above all to the Somali nation.

What the Dutchman does not know is that the Somali listeners, from every part of Somalia and the World, had been communicating their concerns more often to the Head of the BBC African Service, all of which, not surprisingly, were ignored (there is now a new head for Africa and the Middle East). If the Dutchman can conveniently accuse certain critical websites as being clan motivated, he will have a difficult time to question the integrity of close to 20 former BBC Somali Service announcers, serving the period from 1960s to 2000, and who collectively sent a damning complaint against Yussuf Garaad to the Director -General of the BBC World Service. These announcers come from every clan and region of Somalia. Only this month, there was the article I mentioned earlier by Prof Mohamud Siad Togane, who comes from Yussuf Garaad’s clan. And only last week, we had Ali Osman Samatar from Awdal region who persuasively responded to the Dutchman in an article in Hiiraan. I myself come from the North. These are given merely as examples.

I had exchanged email correspondence with the Dutchmen which I copied to Hiiraan and WardheerNews. It is interesting how, after my emails, the man has come down from his high horse and now says “Please understand! I'm not defending Mr. Garad”. In other words, his whole article which was nothing but a defence of Yussuf Garaad can now be ignored. I only hope he will apologise to those websites he maligned.

One advice the Dutchman has given me in his email reply is to win over Yussuf Garaad by petitioning him personally to address our grievances. But asking Yussuf Garaad to change and mend his ways is as promising as asking a Mafiosi to give up his criminal and venal habits and redeem. I advise all those who care about the Service to continue writing to the BBC and also to the Somali websites even if some of them are unwilling to publish anything critical of Yussuf Garaad- not always out of clan solidarity but a glaring deficit of patriotism.

Ali Geeleh
Email: aligeeleh@yahoo.co.uk

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