| Front Page |
By Ahmed Farah Garad
Hassan Said, the “luminary” journalist of Somaliland, has been arrested at the mid-night hour. The sky has fallen overnight on Somaliland’s constitutional freedoms! President Rayale and his “cohorts” are the culprits.
Ali Gulaid, forever ready with a biting pen, urgently wrote from as far as San Jose, California, speaking of a Nation terrorized. Professor Ahmed Jama Botan, the gadfly of Somaliland, openly appealed to the president for the immediate release of the aggrieved journalist. Raqiya Omaar, long silent on the pages of the local press, could no longer be silent. Other less renown individuals cried foul from all four corners of the world.
In short, president Rayale and his police “thugs” have taken us all Somalilanders for a ride Al-Capone style!
Is all this hue and cry a genuine concern for our hard-won freedom of speech, or simply a storm in a tea-cup with political undertones? Is Hassan Said in reality a paragon of journalistic honesty and disseminator of the truth, as he is being portrayed by the doomsayers? Or is he a purveyor of barefaced fabrications and master of character assassination? I submit that he amply qualifies for the latter description, as can be proven before a court of law.
Part of Hassan Said’s problem is, of course, his lack of rudimentary training in the profession of journalism and its ethics. He does not seem to understand, as Dicey wrote long ago, that one person’s freedom ends where another person’s nose begins!
Be that as it may, I do hope that President Rayale and his Attorney-General would not be intimidated by the flood of ill-conceived criticisms, and that due process of law would take its full course.
Home | Contact us | Links | Archives