The True Picture Emerges

EDITORIAL

By closing down independent radio stations and imposing severe restrictions on the local media as well as political activities, leaders of Mogadishu’s Islamic Courts Union have shown themselves in their true colors.

In July, barely few weeks after seizing power in Mogadishu, the ICU imposed a ban on cinema’s and the broadcast of world cup games in the areas under its control.

On July 4, ICU gunmen in the small town of Dhusa-Mareeb opened fire on young demonstrators protesting against the closure of a cinema that was scheduled to show a semifinal match of the World Cup. Two of the football fans, one of them a teenage girl, were killed. The ICU’s top leader Hassan Dahir Aweys was in Dhusa-Mareeb at the time of this incident.

A week later the ICU’s secretary for Information Abdirahim Ali Mudey decreed that their fighters should no longer be referred to as militiamen by the media. Instead, Mudey insisted ICU’s soldiers should be presented by all media branches as “Ciidanka Maxaakiimta” or troops of the Islamic courts.

All practitioners in the areas controlled by the ICU complied with the new edict including the BBC’s two correspondents in Mogadishu. Then came the closure of independent radio stations for broadcasting Somali songs containing moderate expressions of love, followed by countless incidents of harassment and arrests of journalists and political dissenters.

After seizing Kismayo on Monday, ICU’s militia shot into a crowd of residents who were protesting against the takeover. A 13-year old boy was killed and at least two other people were injured. The detention of scores of demonstrators was also reported coupled of course with the closing down of the town’s only private radio station.

Meanwhile the commander of the militia that seized Kismayo, Hassan Turki, confirmed that the strategic objective of the ICU is to bring the whole former Somalia including Somaliland under its control. And if in the past there were rumors linking the ICU to Al-Qaida, Turki didn’t put them to rest. He told a crowd of supporters in Kismayo on Tuesday that the “foreign faces” they saw among the ranks of the ICU militia were volunteer fighters from other Muslim countries.

Encouraged by the huge stocks of arms that it captured from the defeated warlords or received from the Eritreans, not to mention its access to an uninterrupted flow of Arab money from the Gulf, the ICU is bound to cause new upheavals in the Somali peninsula and beyond in the not distant future.

So far the ICU seems to be operating with impunity as far as the international community is concerned.

Despite the movement’s terrorist ties, its leaders travel to wherever they want including countries such as Djibouti and Qatar where the US maintains troops for counterterrorism.

Already Hassan Dahir Aweys is using part of his large reserves of petro-dollars to stir trouble in Somaliland. The Somaliland government’s reaction to these dangerous developments has until now been so passive. This is not acceptable.

President Rayale and his ministers should speak out by telling the people about what is going on. Opposition leaders should also make clear their positions on the threats posed by the ICU to the security and sovereignty of Somaliland. Somalilanders must understand that the leaders of the ICU are none than remnants of the defeated Faqash military officers who are this time clad in Sheikh’s robes.

Source: Somaliland Times

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