SOMALIA-POLITICS: New Group Emerges To Protect Assets Abroad

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Moyiga Nduru

NAIROBI, Apr 2 1996 (IPS) - The Somali flag no longer flies at the residence of the former ambassador at Lower Kabeti Road here and the official cars are gone.

The flag was pulled down in 1994 when the building, owned by the Somali state, was bought by a Kenyan businessman. The cars were sold off, even the furniture was auctioned, in what marked the unequivocal end of a formal Somali presence in Kenya.

Now, thanks to the Kenyan judiciary, a body calling itself the Somali Affairs Monitoring Group, has claimed back the property from the businessman, to be held in trust by the Kenyan government until Somalia’s clan warlord-induced chaos is over, and an internationally recognised central government is formed.

“We have also contacted all governments in whose countries Somalia has assets to protect them until a new administration is formed in Somalia,” says the group’s spokesperson, Hussein Ali Dualleh, a former ambassador to Kenya.

The assets include those in New York, Washington, Geneva, Rome, Belgium, South Yemen, Egypt, Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania. “We also have planes and ships in the hands of private Somalis who grabbed them after the fall of the government in Mogadishu in 1991,” says Dualeh.

“Some of the planes are leased to Portuguese companies and the ships are used by private Somalis, in collusion, with Italian firms,” he alleges.

The fortune includes 175 million dollars belonging to the former government, which has been frozen in a Swiss bank, says Dualleh.

Mohamed Ibrahim, the lawyer who represented the group, claims that Kenya is the first country where the assets of a foreign country, in this case the ambassador’s residence, were sold to a private citizen.

“In the United States,” he points out, “we hear that the US government sealed the buildings, including cars, to protect them from falling into some unlawful hands. In Frankfurt (Germany) the authorities are preserving an airline belonging to the Somali government.”

“Under the Geneva Convention,” Ibrahim notes, “a host country is entitled to protect the assets of a country, like Somalia, whose central authority has collapsed.”

Somalia fell apart with the overthrow of President Mohamed Siad Barre in January 1991. His defeat by clan-based rebels left a power vacuum which his rivals, Gen. Mohamed Farra Aideed and Ali Mahdi, have been fighting to fill ever since.

Neither of the two men are recognised by the international community — nor is the self-proclaimed independent state of Somaliland in the northwest of the country — which prevents them from appointing accredited diplomats abroad.

The battle over the ambassador’s residence in Nairobi began in August 1994 when Kenyan businessman, Suleiman Rahemtulla Omar, acquired the property for 273,000 dollars from an unnamed Somali diplomat. The rented embassy building itself had long since been reclaimed by the landlord.

Immediately after the news leaked out, Dualleh and the group wrote to Kenya’s attorney general and to the ministry of foreign affairs, but got no response. “Then we decided to go to court and challenge the businessman there,” he said.

The plaintiffs, led by Musa Hersi Fahiye — the last accredited first counselor in the Somali embassy — argued that Kenya was under an international obligation to preserve the property.

“The Kenyan government is a signatory to the Vienna Convention, and such protection is irrespective of any diplomatic relations,” says Fahiye who was evicted from the property when the house was acquired.

The group, describing themselves as a council of Somali elders, argued that as Somali taxpayers, they had a right to sue. “Their taxes purchased the suit premises,” Fahiye observed.

The court agreed, and last week placed the property under the custody of the Kenyan government until a new government is formed in Somali to reclaim it.

The Nairobi-based committee, which claims to be politically neutral, has also stopped a group of former government officials from selling the embassy building in Brussels, Belgium.

“They tried to sell it,” says Hussein Dimbil, a senior member of the group, “but we managed to stop them from disposing of the property.”

Dualleh, the author of a book ‘Somalia: The Agony of a Nation’, is now planning to transform the group, which he says is above clan-based politics, in to peace mediators.

“Somalis are fed up of fighting,” says Dimbil. “People are looking for new avenues to resolving the conflict in the country.”

Dimbil accuses Aideed and Mahdi of prolonging the suffering of the Somali people. “To us, the answer is very simple — we want both of them to go. For seven years, the two have only shown us that they are only after their personal interests.”

He claims that, “Aideed and Mahdi are not interested in finding a solution to the conflict in Somalia because they have no close relatives in Somalia to worry about. All their children are abroad and studying.”

“Take Aideed, for example,” Dimbil argues. “His first wife and children are in the United States. The second wife shuttles between Canada and Nairobi. And Ali Mahdi’s first wife and children are in Canada and the second wife and children are in Egypt.”

He believes that if Aideed and Mahdi could reconcile, Somalia’s problem would be over “in a matter of 24 hours.”

“If we don’t get a solution within six months from now,” he says, “the international community should step in to get rid of the two.”

That however is not a likely scenario. The United States and the United Nations sent some 30,000 soldiers on a four billion- dollar operation to halt looting of food convoys by the warring militias and set up a transitional government after some 300,000 people died of famine and related illnesses between 1991 and 1992.

Washington withdrew its troops in 1994 after Aideed supporters had killed around 60 U.S. soldiers. In March 1995, the United Nations also pulled out, leaving Somalia at the mercy of its warlords.