Aweys’s Men At Bush House

EDITORIAL

As the vast majority of its listeners would agree, the Somali Service of the BBC has become a tool for promoting the cause of the Mogadishu-based Hawiye dominated extremists who misleadingly call themselves now the Islamic Courts Union.

On June 2006, the ICU’s militia defeated an alliance of warlords backed by the Americans and drove them out of Mogadishu. Although the warlords were in reality a bunch of unpopular gangsters interested only in extorting money from their own people and external backers as well, however that didn’t necessarily mean that the courts fared much better as far as Mogadishu’s residents were concerned.

But there was no doubt that the way in which the Somali Service had been reporting about the conflict between the courts and the warlords has influenced the outcome of the battle of Mogadishu in a significant manner.

News information and commentary broadcast by the Somali Service on the fighting were heavily biased in favor of the courts. For a period of about 4 months, listeners were targeted for highly selective news items, interviews and opinion polls that simply portrayed the warlords alone as the villains. For example nothing was mentioned about the implication of some of the leaders of the ICU in terrorist attacks that took place in Mogadishu and in Somaliland on 2002 – 2005.

Although the ICU was initially an exclusively Eyr/Habar Gidir project that was later modified to look like as though encompassing the whole Hawiye clan, however owning to the manipulative role played by Yusuf Garad, the editor of the Somali Service, in setting the news agenda, relevant background information concerning the clan-based structure and political orientation of the group was deliberately suppressed.

Instead, Yusuf Garad who is himself an Eyr, has kept promoting the ICU as a national Islamic political movement. But this has been a myth as demonstrated by the unfriendly way in which the citizens of Kismayo reacted to the ICU’s takeover of their hither to peaceful city last month. Almost half of the city’s population went to the street to protest what they correctly termed as “an invasion by a none native clan”.

But what is even more dangerous is the way the Somali Service has been treating the issue of a video footage purporting to be of a jailed terrorist suspect under going torture in a Hargeysa prison.

The alleged victim is Mohamed Ismail who was detained on September 23, 2005 in connection with a terrorist plot foiled by the Somaliland police in Hargeysa 2 days earlier. The Somaliland government has persistently held that the footage was fake and that Mohamed Ismail was never tortured by its investigators. In fact experts who have examined the footage say that it wasn’t real. Even Al-Jazeera refused to air it.

But Yusuf Garad took the unprecedented step of presenting a number of protests staged in Somaliland by supporters of the imprisoned Mohamed Ismail as though the video footage provided an incontrovertible evidence of torture.

Mr. Garad has hardly made an effort to remind his listeners of the fact that Mohamed Ismail and others including his cousins Hassan Dahir Aweys and Adan Hashi Eyro are being tried in the same Hargeysa court for a series of terrorist actions in Somaliland. Once again he tried to portray one side of a story, this time Somaliland, as a villain while presenting the other as the victim.

Disgustingly enough, ICU agents took up the issue to incite the public through the Somali Service for the sole purpose of instigating violence in Somaliland.

The editorial board of the BBC should keep aside its arrogance and aloofness for a moment in the face of the tremendous amount of legitimate complaints being aired by listeners against the monopolization of the airwaves of its Somali broadcasts by one clan. There is a need for a prompt investigation into how the Somali Service has been handling Somali news since, at least, early this year. The BBC shouldn’t become a tool for the incitement of hatred and extremism among Somalis. The Somali Service mustn’t be exempted from the highly regarded BBC standards for objectivity accuracy and neutrality that are duly applied within other programmes.

The Somaliland government has apparently failed to handle the issue of the video footage properly. The government’s ministry of Information hasn’t been bothered at all by the disturbing attention that the incident had attracted. Other departments of government stayed passive despite the dangerous implications of the affair to the stability of this country.

The Somaliland government must take the necessary steps to develop a strategy for communication that is capable of meeting the information needs of the public both here and abroad. At a time when Somaliland is being undermined from within by the ICU, the government needs to take some difficult decisions to make this country secure before its too late.

Source: Somaliland Times

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