SOMALIA-POLITICS: Somali Exiles Look on and Wait for Better Days

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Moyiga Nduru

NAIROBI, Feb 27 1996 (IPS) - Two unarmed young men keep guard outside Islan Mohamed’s office here, checking the identity of unfamiliar visitors.

In his native Somalia, Mohamed’s Marehan clan would have provided him with more guards who, moreover, would have been armed with AK-47 assault rifles.

“I was the leader of about 45,000 people near the port town of Kismayu before the war broke out,” he says. “I lost everything. Then I decided to cross over into Kenya three years ago. Now, I am nobody.”

Not quite. The graying Mohamed still appears to command considerable respect among the many Somalis who pop in regularly at his one-roomed establishment, Al Saif Trading Company, located above a restaurant. Some stop by briefly after the afternoon prayer at the mosque next door to catch up with the latest news from Somalia, while others stay around longer to discuss the political troubles of their unstable nation.

“The situation in Somalia is very, very bad,” says Mohammed. “In Jan. 16, people died of cholera in Mogadishu. Last week three died in Baidoa of the same disease, caused by contaminated water, but the people of Kismayu are safe because of the presence of UNICEF (U.N. Children’s Fund) in their area.”

“What’s most disturbing is, however, the shortage of food in Somalia. We heard that four children died in Kismayu and two in Baidoa of famine-related diseases this week alone,” he tells IPS. “If emergency food is not rushed in within three months, thousands of people will die of starvation in the country.”

According to a recent U.N. report, Somalia has been hit by poor harvests and drought, followed by floods. These disasters, coupled with the insecurity caused by a protracted war between the country’s clans and the departure of U.N. troops, have made food scarce and costly.

This is not the first time that the people of strife-torn Somalia have faced famine. Between 1991 and 1992 some 300,000 people died of starvation, forcing the United States and the United Nations to send 30,000 soldiers in a four-billion-dollar operation to halt the looting of food convoys by armed militias.

Washington withdrew its troops in 1994 after 60 U.S. soldiers were killed by supporters of Somalia’s leading clan boss, Gen. Mohamed Farah Aideed. By March 1995, the United Nations had also pulled out, leaving Somalia at the mercy of its warlords, who have been at one another’s throats since then.

“To me, all these problems will end only if the Americans and the United Nations troops return to Somalia,” says Mohamed. “I tell you, if they return, it will be over in a matter of three weeks.”

“Everybody is ready to host the Americans and the UN troops except Aideed and his supporters,” he claims. “Without the U.S. and the U.N., there will be no solution to Somalia’s crisis.”

But Abdullahi Jama Barre, brother of late president Mohamed Siad Barre, disagrees. “No one can save Somalia. Not Europe. Not America. Not even the United Nations. It’s only Allah and the people of Somalia who can rescue their country,” he says.

Before the war, Barre ran a high quality hotel in Kismayu. “But the warlords destroyed everything. They removed my hotel doors and the toilets,” he explains. Like many of the wealthier Somalis here, he keeps up with the latest developments in Somalia by travelling “once in a while” to his country. He goes to Kismayu, controlled by his son-in-law, General Mohamed Said Hess (Morgan), a warlord backed by the late Siad Barre’s former supporters.

The 72-year-old Jama Barre, whose elder brother ruled Somalia for 22 years until he fled in 1991 as a group of rebels closed in on Mogadishu, claims that the United States and various relief agencies send food only to Mogadishu and distribute them to the supporters of the two main warlords — Aideed and Ali Mahdi.

In January more than 200 disabled men, women and children demonstrated in north Mogadishu, controlled by Ali Mahdi, for increased humanitarian aid and development projects that would create jobs. Most were people crippled in the civil war. They complained that relief agencies were giving too much of the aid meant for Somalis to gunmen who demand food as payment at roadblocks.

Said Barre: “We read from newspapers and hear on the radio that 10 million dollars or so worth of food and medicine have been donated to Somalia. Where do they go?”

“What we know is that white people come to Somalia, bring in fleets of cars and live in nice houses and spend the money on themselves, not on Somali people,” he alleged.

U.N. officials paint a different picture of Somalia. Earling Dessau, the Nairobi-based U.N. Humanitarian Co-ordinator for Somalia, wrote in a letter published Tuesday in a Kenyan paper that “it is unfair to judge a country as large as Somalia on the account of a few troubled towns and incidents”.

He said the World Food Programme (WFP) provided food to more than 1.6 million beneficiaries in 1995 — 90 percent through work- for-food programmes and 10 percent in the form of food handouts.

“This clearly reflects a change in the climate of Somalia today,” he wrote, adding that, in the northeast and northwest, labourers who are paid with food have built schools and vocational centres, worked on water and sanitation programmes, rehabilitated hospitals, repaired roads and supported teachers and health workers.

Other U.N. agencies have also been helping Somalia. In 1995, UNICEF rehabilitated 153 open wells countrywide benefitting approximately 200,000 people. The fund says it now supports 233 primary schools, attended by some 78,000 pupils and 722 Koranic schools which cater for about 55,000 children.

UNICEF has also provided 6,150 disadvantaged women with basic education and training in life skills. And, in conjunction with the U.N. Education, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), it held more than 95 teacher-training workshops in 1995, and printed 1.2 million primary level textbooks.

However, many of the Somalis who have fled their country since 1991 are still abroad. There are more than 300,000 of them in Kenya and many here appear relatively wealthy, especially when comapred to refugees from elsewhere in the Horn of Africa, like Ethiopia and Sudan.

“The Somalis crossed into Kenya with all their property,” says Feleke Andom (not real name), an Ethiopian refugee at Ifo camp, more than 700 km northeast of here. “The Somalis run shops and other businesses at the camp. Many of them also drive the latest brand of cars”.

But even those who seem well off say what they want most is for the war in their country to end so that they can return.

“At my age, I want nothing more than peace, stability and unity in Somalia,” Barre told IPS. “We can achieve this by disarming all the warlords”. He had no answer when asked how.

A self-proclaimed Aideed supporter here rejected the idea of disarmament. “Aideed stood up to the might of the United States. That was why he was elected president of Somalia last June,” he said.

Both Aideed and Mahdi claim to be president of Somalia. Neither has been recognised by the international community.