SOMALIA-POLITICS: Refugees Fear More Years in Exile

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Moyiga Nduru

NAIROBI, Aug 9 1996 (IPS) - For Suliman Ahmed, the looming showdown between Somalia’s warlords could mean that he, and thousands of other Somali refugees here, will not go home soon.

Ahmed, 37, has already lived in Eastleigh, a sprawling surburb of the Kenyan capital Nairobi, for six years. He says he is now homesick.

Nearly one million Somalis have been pushed out of their country by a prolonged drought and the clan fighting that followed the overthrow of Mohamed Siad Barre’s regime in January 1991, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

“None of them can go home now,” says Ahmed, a former construction worker in the Somali capital, Mogadishu.

“From what I hear over the radio and from people fleeing Somalia, there is going to be fierce fighting in Mogadishu soon. It will erupt anytime,” he told IPS.

Since Sunday, Ali Mahdi, who controls north Mogadishu, has placed his troops on high alert.

He has warned that he and his ally, Osman Ali ‘Atto’, are considering ending their truce with the Aideed faction, which they declared last week following the death of their arch-rival General Mohamed Farrah Aideed, the ruler of south Mogadishu.

Mahdi and Atto had hoped that their foe’s death would lead to reconciliation between the various Somali factions.

Instead, the new faction leader, 35-year-old former U.S. Marine corporal Hussein Mohamed Aideed, has pledged to follow in his father’s footsteps and be tough with his adversaries.

In his maiden speech Monday, he vowed to “eliminate all internal and external enemies”, a warning widely interpreted in Somalia as directed at his father’s foes, Mahdi and Atto.

Further chances of reconciliation were blocked when Aideed, who returned from the U.S.last year, embraced his father’s idea of bringing all the Somali factions under his control.

Atto warned that Aideed’s inflammatory speech could “ignite” the clan war in Somalia, which resulted in the death of some 150 people in Mogadishu last month.

For some Somalis like 72-year-old Abdulahi Jama Barre, time is running out. “At my age what I want is peace, stability and unity. What I want is life without the warlords and their militias,” he says.

Barre, the younger brother of the late dictator Siad Barre, fled the resort town of Kismayu, about 400 kilometres south of Mogadishu, in 1991 after militiamen ransacked the hotel he owned.

“Now Somalis are scattered, roaming around the world. The Organisation of African Unity and the Arab League have failed the people of Somalia,” he charges.

But others note that despite regional and international efforts to bring peace, the fighting has not stopped.

Since 1991, five inconclusive major peace conferences on Somalia have been held in Djibouti, Ethiopia, Egypt, Kenya and Saudi Arabia.

“All of them collapsed, because they were held abroad and they did not take into account the participation of the ordinary people and clan leaders,” says Abdel Rahman Gabow of the faction United Somalia Congress (USC).

“We are now trying to persuade the international community to organise a peace meeting in Somalia,” he says.

The idea to hold a parley in Somalia is supported by Hussein Ali Dualleh, the author of ‘Somalia: The Agony of a Nation’, who believes such a conference can bring peace to his battered nation.

“I always argue that Somalis must meet in Somalia and talk and talk, if possible, for months until they reach a peaceful solution,” he told IPS recently.

In July, the European Union (EU) organised a conference in Naivasha, about 40 kilometres northwest of Nairobi, for Somali experts — mostly lawyers — to find an acceptable political formula for the country.

Unhappy with the EU’s growing activities in Somalia, the late Aideed had accused the Union of supporting terrorism, especially following Brussels’ grant of some 60 million u.s. dollars last month to areas controlled by his rivals.

Four days before his death on Aug.2 , a bed-ridden Aideed strongly condemned the EU and its Special Envoy to Somalia, Sigurd Illing. He claimed that the EU was responsible for the upsurge in fighting between his forces and that of his arch-rival Mahdi.

Aideed said that all of Mahdi’s attacks, including the assault on Ballidogle airport two weeks ago, were financed by the EU as part of its ongoing effort to devastate the Somali people.

UNHCR officials in Kenya have expressed concern at the prospects of more fighting between the factions in Somalia.

“We are prepared for the worst. But I hope war will not break out in Somalia,” UNHCR Representative Albert-Alain Peters told journalists here Wednesday.

Kenya’s leading independent newspaper, the ‘Daily Nation’, also predicts that peace is not just around the corner.

“Considering the humiliation of the failed United States-led UN bid to restore normalcy in Somalia, it is unlikely that another external effort will be made soon. And in the absence of such intervention, Somalia will continue to die at the hands of the militia leaders,” the paper warned.

The U.S. and the United Nations sent an intervention force to the Horn of African country, following the death in 1991-1992 of some 300,000 Somalis due to starvation, famine-related diseases and civil strife.

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

Hussein Aideed ironically was part of the U.S. contingency and was sent back to Los Angeles, California before U.S. troops mounted a hunt for his father for the ambush killing in June 1993 of 24 Pakistani peacekeepers.

Aideed survived the U.S.-led attempt to capture him dead or alive, despite the 25,000 u.s.dollars bounty put on his head by Washington.

According to the ‘Daily Nation’, regional leaders with contacts in Somalia should step in and bring the rival parties to a roundtable meeting to seek “genuine” peace.