07/12/06 10:14
The United States said on July 11 that its opposition to the emergence of a militant Islamist state in Somalia has won support from the country’s neighbors in east Africa.
Jendayi Frazer, assistant secretary of state for African affairs, said it was not clear if the powerful Islamist courts movement that has captured a large swath of southern Somalia can overcome clan barriers to form a broader political front.
Nairobi, Kenya, July 11, 2006 – President Mwai Kibaki and President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda have expressed concern at the deteriorating situation in Somalia and urged parties involved in the Somali conflict to resolve it without resorting to violence.
During discussions held at State House Nairobi on Monday, the two leaders further called upon the international community to support efforts being undertaken by the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) to resolve the conflict in Somalia
New York, Jul 07, 2006 – The Transitional Government in Somalia, which, since establishing itself within the country earlier this year has been besieged by renewed factional fighting and the territorial gains of Islamic militias, must be strengthened so that the “painstaking” gains in the long-chaotic country are not lost, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan says in a report released today.
Migrants Risk Sharks, Bullets On Boats From Somalia
NAIROBI, July 14, 2006 – While world attention is on a power struggle in south Somalia, a stream of would-be immigrants are dying on perilous journeys from the north-east tip to Yemen on rickety boats across shark-infested seas, aid groups say.
In a little-publicised daily drama, hundreds of Somalis and Ethiopians are being shot, eaten by sharks, and drowning each year as smugglers haul them across the Gulf of Aden.
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, July 4, 2006 – Members of a group listed by the United States as a terrorist band are now running the capital of neighboring Somalia, days after Islamic fighters wrested control of the city from warlords, Ethiopia's Prime Minister Meles Zenawi said on Tuesday.
"The renowned extremist and terrorist organization, al-Ittihad, is at the helm of the current leadership in Mogadishu," Meles told lawmakers during a review of the situation in Ethiopian relations with neighboring countries.
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Reuters
German troops return from a mission in Sudan, one of numerous African operations in which the German military participates.
Wednesday, July 12, 2006
While domestic politics has Germany distracted at home, Germany's growing influence in Africa gains little publicity.
Germany is unhappy. The whole nation is unhappy at having lost their prospect of winning the soccer World Cup on their home turf. They came so close, but in the end, all the raucous chanting of “Deutschland uber Alles” from the stands could not rally their team to overcome defeat by Italy, which went on to win the Cup.
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AU May Yet Become Another Talking Shop
July 6, 2006
So what came out of the Africa Union meeting in Banjul? The main stars were Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, all for different reasons.
Mr Chavez asked Europe and United States to apologise to Africa for colonialism and for enslaving Africans. Mr Annan warned Africans against the new "scramble for Africa", while President Ahmadinejad’s presence was viewed as a "morale booster as well as an assurance that Africa can make it."
Somali Islamic fighters in Baidoa
By David Blair
Baidoa, July 14, 2006 – The ruined town of Baidoa, where ragged gunmen roam bullet-scarred streets, is Somalia's alternative capital.
Pulverized buildings, choked with weeds, house the country's official government, which has a president, cabinet and 275-member parliament.
Barely 150 miles away, Islamist extremists have seized most of Somalia's real capital, Mogadishu, and the surrounding territory.
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No Live Exports Wanted
Victoria, July 10, 2006 – The Victorian Greens have called for an end to all live exports from Victorian ports, after labelling animal welfare standards to the Middle-East as "an embarrassment".
The call came as the Greens released its 2006 Victorian Animals Policy, the fifth policy release in the lead-up to the November state election.
But the VFF said it would lose out from the policy's proposed changes.
"It's no secret that animals are widely exploited for the benefit of humans," Greens Animals spokesman and candidate for the upper house seat of Western Victoria, Marcus Ward, said.
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Islamic Courts Delegation Flies To Khartoum From Mogadishu’s Airport
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Sharif Ahmed (centre) , the executive chairman of Mogadishu Islmaic Courts flanked by Yusuf Indha'ade ( 2nd left) and other militia commanders praying on Mogadishu International airport runnway tarmac yesterday.
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Mogadishu, Somalia, July 15, 2006 (SL Times) – A 17 member delegation of the Islamic Courts left Mogadishu yesterday for the Sudanese capital Khartoum in order to take part in talks with the leaders of the so-called Transitional Federal Government of Somalia.
The Courts team flew from Mogadishu’s airport which was opened Friday for the first time in 11 years.
However the TFG’s president Abdillahi Yusuf announced yesterday that his government decided not to participate in the Khartoum talks.
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Global Assessments Of The Somaliland Foreign Policy
Special Guest Column
From the very beginning, I would like to clarify, that the Assessments given here are in no way ment as a critics to the current strategies of the foreign policies by the Somaliland Government. The aim is to give a broader perception from the German and European point of view on all the necessary strategies for the benefit of the Republic of Somaliland and Somalilanders as an Nation.
By the Assessment we must count what was achieved for the now 15 year’s old Republic of Somaliland within the global world policies. The results are by all means rather meager and this for some objective reasons...but also for some subjective weaknesses of the Government(s) from very beginning...
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Tuesday, 11 July 2006
House of Lords on Somalia
Lord Avebury (Liberal Democrat) Hansard source asked Her Majesty's Government:
How the international Somali contact group adds value to the efforts already being made by the Intergovernmental Authority on Development, the African Union and the United Nations towards peace and stability in Somalia; how they will seek to ensure that common objectives are pursued in these fora; and whether they will promote agreement among all concerned states on the development and territorial integrity of Somaliland.
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Islamists now control 95 percent of Somali towns
Mogadishu, 12 July (AKI) - The Somali provisional government and some of the so-called 'warlords' will soon form a military alliance against the Islamist militias which control the Somali capital, Mogadishu, and almost all towns, Somali sources told Adnkronos International (AKI) on Wednesday, speaking on condition of anonymity. The sources explained that the new alliance's chief objective will be to gain control of the military airport of Baledogle, west of Mogadishu - Somalia's only functional airport - and then to take the city of Jowhar, some 90 kilometres north of the capital.
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Somalia Contract Group, good idea, scholar Shinn tells Senate panel
Washington, July 12, 2006 – Former U.S. ambassador to Ethiopia and State Department coordinator for Somalia David Shinn says the United States' policy of working with international and regional partners to bring peace to Somalia is the right way to proceed.
Shinn, an adjunct professor at George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs, testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee looking into U.S. policy toward Somalia, a nation beset by instability for the past 15 years, at a July 11 public hearing.
Nairobi, Kenya, July 10, 2006 – Somalia's government will not take part in peace talks with Islamists due on Saturday, after fighting in Mogadishu, the prime minister has told the BBC.
Ali Mohammed Ghedi blamed the Union of Islamic Courts, which controls much of southern Somalia, for clashes in which at least 21 people were killed.
He said he would only hold talks with moderate groups and civil society.
Weak Somali Gov't to Boycott Peace Talks
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MOGADISHU, Somalia, July 14, 2006 – Somalia's nearly powerless interim government said Friday it would boycott weekend peace talks with the Islamic militia that has seized control of nearly all the nation's south, accusing the group of civilian massacres and ties to foreign terrorists.
The militia, however, sent negotiators Friday to the talks venue and portrayed the government as an obstacle to peace.
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The president of the Somali provisional government, Abdullah Yusuf
Mogadishu, July 14, 2006 – The president of the Somali provisional government, Abdullah Yusuf, said on Friday that "even if the Islamists now control the whole of Mogadishu and the city of Jowhar, this does not mean that we will allow them to rule over Somalia." "I am not the weak president of a weak government. At first I welcomed the Union of the Islamic Courts' (UIC) victory which wiped away the warlords, but now they are undertaking a path which is negative for the country," he added in an interview with the Arab London-based daily al-Sharq al-Awsat.
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Mogadishu, July 7, 2006 – Somali Muslims who fail to perform daily prayers will be killed in accordance with Koranic law under an edict issued by a leading cleric.
The requirement for Muslims to pray five times a day under penalty of death appears to confirm the hard-line nature of the increasingly powerful Sharia courts in the Somali capital, Mogadishu.
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International News
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Ambassador Fall warns of a grave and continuing humanitarian emergency
PRESS RELEASE
New York 11 July - The Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Somalia, Francois Lonseny Fall, told members of the United Nations Security Council in New York yesterday that the rise of ‘hardliners’ within the Islamic Courts poses a serious threat to the peace process and to the country’s Transitional Federal Institutions (TFIs) in particular.
Ambassador Fall told the Council that expectations raised by the 22 June Khartoum meeting between the three main leaders of the TFIs and a delegation of the Islamic Courts, under the auspices of the League of Arab States, had been quickly eroded by cease-fire violations.
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J. Peter Pham
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With everything else that has happened in the busy world of foreign affairs over recent weeks, the descent of Somalia into the hands of Islamists has been largely pushed to the side. But FSM Contributing Editor J. Peter Pham, Ph.D., explains why American inaction and global diplomacy just aren’t helping the problem.
Like Cassandra after Agamemnon’s Greeks emerged from the Trojan Horse, I have had little time to derive any satisfaction from being justified in my longstanding warnings about the risks to international security centered in the Horn of Africa: Threats from radical Islamist groups the ignoring of which, in another moment under the inspiration of the Homeric muse, I called America’s Achilles’ heel. There have been simply been too many other battles to fight.
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By Claude Salhani, UPI International Editor
WASHINGTON, July 5, 2006 -- Ever since the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the United States has found itself in a war against an enemy it had very little intelligence on -- Islamist extremists. In the aftermath of the attacks and as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq dragged on, the United States struggled with the consequence of its inability to fully understand how to go about winning the hearts and minds of the majority of the world's 1.4 billion Muslims.
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The Somali Blogosphere
Washington Post
Confused by events in Somalia? We certainly were, so we checked out the website of Somalia's leading blogger, Bashir Goth, and then gave him a call. The bottom line, says Goth, is that the Islamic coalition (known as the Islamic Courts Union) that has taken control of Mogadishu from the warlords isn't all bad. They have brought order to a lawless city and even outspoken anti-Islamists like Goth are holding their fire for the moment.
Bashir Goth was the first Somali blogger and is now at the forefront of a growing Somali blogosphere that often challenges Western opinion. To get a sense of this Somali view, I collaborated with my colleague Tom Isherwood to check out Somali cyberspace. While foreign press largely condemned the rise of the ICU labeling them a new Taliban, these Somalis see some potential.
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Editorial
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On last Thursday the House of Representatives (Somaliland’s lower chamber of parliament) went on holiday without concluding its fierce debate on whether members of the Guurti (upper house) should be elected by popular vote or through the current system which has until now allowed the clans to appoint their representatives along an agreed upon power-sharing mechanism. Both the House and the public seemed to be divided on the issue.
Proponents of both options invoked provisions in the constitution to support their arguments. Though the constitution clearly said that the parliament should be elected by popular vote, however many people have been concerned that the Guurti might hose its traditional characteristic if directly elected. They argued that while the authority of the House of Representatives was based on popular vote, the Guurti derived its legitimacy from Somaliland’s pastoral democracy.
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Special Report
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REPORT ON FAMILIARISATION TOUR TO SOMALILAND
In November 2005, the Centre for Human Rights began investigating the possibility of a third destination for the LLM field trip. The reasons for increasing the number of field trip destinations to include Somaliland include the following:
Somaliland is a state in the making; it would be ideal for students on the programme to have a first hand experience of this.
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Opinions
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Book Review On Part 2:
The Bedrock Of The
Family By Mohammed Bashe H. Hassan
Part Two by Rhoda A. Rageh
A poem by Ms. Khadija Mohamed Qodaf on the negative view of modern living is an example of how partial the prevailing view of the book is: in rough translation, she says:
Meals to be made by men is death
Men tugging children to sleep is scandalous
Once the family tradition is shunned
Watching television resulting in the loss of values and
Women not threatened/disciplined by men have become ever more callous
Oh! Why don’t you send us back to the village of Beer?
In the last line Khadija includes herself in the women she is discussing but only symbolically. Since she admires the women who were beaten by men and she sees men tugging their children in bed as scandalous and those cooking meals for their family as death.
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By Dr. Abdishakur Jowhar
Mogadishu Librated. The era of chaos and street checkpoints where people are openly robbed in the middle of the day has come to an abrupt end. The ordinary thieves and thugs who turned warlords, who turned into mercenary dogs of war in America’s anti terror crusade, were eventually and thankfully chased out of Mogadishu like so many rats. One or two are still remaining, clinging tenuously to the hope of being saved by the tribe (or at least they did when I started writing this piece in morning of July 9, 2006; such is the pace of events in Mogadishu these days that change is measured in hours and days). Collectively the warlords must be cursing the day they met the first whispering agent of the agency.
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By Abdifatah Ismail
Harassment, maiming, and at times, the killing of immigrants is widespread in South Africa.
Just a few days ago, shops run by Somalis in Plettenberg Bay were looted and their properties worth many thousands of rand were destroyed by local hooligans. According to preliminary reports, Xenophobia is believed to have triggered this attack.
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Open Letter To Somaliland Parliamentarians
By Ibrahim Jibah Ismail
Ladies and Gentlemen:
As you have undertaken the responsibility of our country and people, I believe you will succeed in creating laws that will govern the entire country and benefit our people in terms of education, health, employment and reconstitution of the infrastructure. As you may be aware, there is little help coming from the international community to ameliorate the plight and the conditions of our people.
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By Abdirahman Ibrahim Abdillahi
Politics seems to be one of the elements that every country has in common. Yet some states are worst than the rest when it comes to human rights record, democracy, poverty alleviation, freedom of speech, developmental projects and rule of law. In order to survive these governments hide facts from their people keeping in mind that by telling the truth the people will remove from the power.
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By: Dr. Abdi Elmi Obsiye
A s we grow older, memories become more precious and always represent the truth. As a young kid you may remember some one who had given you a hit at the corner of the street, or you may remember that you were the fastest kid in your neighborhood.
Good memories can be painful or can show happiness. Whatever the memories are about, you wonder what impact you are going to leave to the young generations. Our memories clears up many obstacles in our life. Therefore we can’t change our past memories, but we can certainly pick up some of the useful tips from it.
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| FEATURES & COMMENTARY |
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Special coverage of U.S Testimony to the House Committee on International Relations Subcommittee on Africa, Global Human Rights, and International Operations
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Honorable Members of the Commission
Somaliland attained independence from the Britain on 26 June 1960. It existed as a separate independent state recognized by several countries in the United Nations for four days, before entering into the ill-fated union with Italian Somalia to form the subsequently failed state of Somalia. In that state, the Somaliland people were severely marginalized during the first nine years of the mafia-style run southern dominated civilian governments, followed by twenty years of brutal dictatorship, which especially targeted the northern population primarly to stamp out their burning desire to regain their lost independence.
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A NELSON man proudly stepped forward on Monday afternoon to be presented with his grandfather's newly-identified military medals by the Mayor of Nelson, Coun. George Adam.
And behind the dignified ceremony in the Mayor's Parlour in Nelson Town Hall was a trail of detective work that started last year soon after Mustansir Bashir brought the medals to this country from his parent's home in Pakistan.
Mr Michael Sutcliff, welfare officer for the Royal British Legion, Nelson, said: "It was at last year's Remembrance Day parade when this gentleman approached me and asked whether we could find out something about them.
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The country's main protagonists, including Islamic fundamentalists with suspected links to al-Qaeda, deeply mistrust one another, and have contradictory objectives
Friday, July 14, 2006
Western nations are concerned that Somalia's Islamic Courts Council, led in theory by Sheikh Sharif Ahmed, second from left, will emulate the Taliban in Afghanistan by imposing harsh fundamentalist laws.
Fears are increasing that radical Islamists in Somalia intend to impose their puritanical views on that violence-racked nation following the seizure of the capital Mogadishu and much of southern Somalia by Islamic militias.
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They didn't expect this to happen
MOGADISHU, Somalia - They have closed down makeshift cinemas showing World Cup soccer games. They have forcibly cut young men's hair if it is more than an inch long. Even before that, they banned a New Year's celebration on penalty of death.
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