Abdi-Noor Haji Mohamed is playwright, author and a poet who was on the run with his family in tow, like the estimated 100,000 thousand civilians who were crushed out of their houses just in the last two months of this year. Abdi- Noor found himself running to no where. The soft spoken polite writer does not curse the authors of this calamity. He merely wonders in his article on Hiiraan Online “Why do African leaders spend millions of dollars in killing their own people who were already dying from hunger and disease”. He sings to his daughter Maria:
“In the dusty lands of the Horn
they are fighting a dirty war
But in the shadows of despair
Their children are dying from hunger
Are they leaders of a nation?
Or are they killers of a nation
Is politics a shield to hide from reality?
Or is it a license to kill the innocent?
In the eyes of fear shock is the sparkle”
There is good. And there is evil. Today evil erupted with viciousness and visited carnage upon Abdi-Noor and his family and the two million people that live with him in this city of sorrows. The massacre of civilians must not be allowed to continue. We must confront evil and call mass murder by its name. We must banish hatred and revenge once and for all. On this day the curse of God will descend upon the living that bear witness and choose to remain silent. Any citizen, anywhere in the world, who has the moral courage to stand against genocide must speak out today loud and clear and repeat the words of solidarity made famous by President Kennedy “Ich bin ein Berliner ("I am a 'Berliner'")” - “Ich Bin Ein Hawiye”: I am a Hawiye citizen. I am a Hawiye citizen.
The First Genocide
This is not the first genocide that has happened in this cursed city, nor is it the first time that innocent Somalis faced murder and mayhem in its streets simply because they belonged to the wrong tribe at the wrong place. The first genocide unfolded in its ruthless streets in 1991 right after the fall of the Siyad Barre regime. In that year Hawiye militia burned, raped and killed any person of Darood origin regardless of age, regardless of gender and regardless of their role in the defunct regime. It was enough to be Darood to be massacred in
The Transformed Nature of the
The rhetoric of the war on terror has no explanatory power of what is happening in
There have been sporadic battles fought between the remnants of the defeated Union of Islamic Courts (UIC) and the Ethiopian forces ever since the Union of Islamic Courts was overpowered and roundly defeated by the Ethiopian Army in January of 2007. These night attacks of masked men were small and inconsequential.
From the time of the defeat of the UIC there were active negotiations between the Hawiye tribes on the one hand and the Transitional Federal Government of Somalia (TFG) and the occupying Ethiopian Army on the other. The crucial issue of disarming the city was on the table. Hawiye elders expressed fear that they will be left unarmed and at the mercy of another tribe who may have revenge on its mind. It did not help at all that the Ethiopian installed Somali president brought with him to Mogadishu his own militia- a fiercely loyal, battle hardened and exclusively from the president tribe, the Darood. The Hawiye were suspicious to say the least given the bitter history.
The new phase of the war started on March 24, 2007 as Abdillahi Yusuf decided to force the issue and forcibly disarm the opposing militia. There was of course a subtext to Yusuf’s grand design- that of intimidating and terrorizing the unruly population of the city to submit to his will. The indiscriminate bombing of clearly civilian areas with Multiple Rocket Launchers fired by the president’s militia from his palace in villa
It is important to note that over the last 4 decades Yusuf has led an insurgency of one kind or the other. He has shown an obstinate commitment to taking power by whatever means necessary. Unfortunately for him the exclusive reliance on tribal forces and his lust for absolute power rendered him incompatible with nation building even as a reincarnation of Siyad Barre (the last dictator of
On March 24, 2007 the spokesman of the Hawiye declared that the tribe will protect itself openly. The battle was joined. The Spokesman further announced that the tribal militia would shoot anyone who covers his face in the battles to come as a coward and as a part of the enemy within. It was a declaration of tribal war. But it was more. It was a tribal rejection of the masked men of the UIC. The dynamic of the war was transformed and the legitimacy of leadership that was enjoyed previously by the UIC has come fully into the hands of the Hawiye elders. The tribal elders were now the protectors of the people and their spokesmen. The UIC already dead was now buried.
The two sides of this war will of course use whatever rhetoric necessary to advance their cause. Regional and international forces will exploit the situation to settle their own scores while Somalis provide the potentially dead and the potentially dismembered. The naked truth of tribal warfare will remain the essential dynamic of this war. And when peace comes, and it will have to come one day, it will be a tribal peace too.
The Way Forward
No person of sound mind will dare to predict or prescribe a solution for the Somali crisis. This much is clear however. The solution to the Somali crisis will not be more war, more hatred or more vengeance. Nor will it about a strong man massacring his way to a Machiavellian peace based on fear and intimidation and corrupted “reconciliation conferences”. The African soil is littered with the carnage caused by strong men whose main weapon was the creation of inter-tribal death squads and hatred in search of personal power and personal glory.
The solution to the crisis will not cost money. Indeed money poured from foreign sources will only fuel the crisis as combatants engage in deadly maneuvers to guarantee their share on the basis of established reality on the ground. The $100 million dollars generously set aside by the
The solution to the Somali crisis will not require anything other than a genuine work of Somalis to broker an end to the cycle of genocide between the two Somali tribes of Darood and Hawiye. Like it was the case between the French and Germans in the European wars of the past, there will be no peace in
It is clear in my mind that such reconciliation is unlikely to take off without disengaging the forces in the battle field, without preventing Abdillahi Yusuf from massacring his way to power by devilishly nurturing hatred between the Hawiye and the Darood. It seems to me that removing Yusuf and his tribal militia from the city of death is the first step towards genuine reconciliation. Only free men who are not under the barrel of a gun can engage in genuine reconciliation.
The second step of reconciliation is to accept a verifiable just, democratic and free society as the basic guarantee to safety from domination and genocide. The same formula has worked for the breakaway nation of
Dr. Abdishakur Jowhar
E-mail:[email protected]