A mother receives a birth certificate for her youngest child in the village of Bindia, East Cameroon. Photo credit: UNICEF/Dejongh

By Catherine Wilson
SYDNEY, Jun 17 2025 (IPS)

Registering the birth of a newborn, which is taken for granted in many countries, has profound lifelong repercussions for a child’s health, protection, and well-being. But after initially increasing this century, the global birth registration rate has declined in the past ten years, with some countries in the Pacific and Sub-Saharan Africa facing significant challenges. Embracing new registration technologies, increasing political will, and increasing parents’ understanding of its importance are paramount to reversing the trend.

Today about 75 percent of all children aged under 5 years are registered, up from 60 percent in 2000, reports the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

But Bhaskar Mishra, Child Protection Specialist at UNICEF Headquarters in New York, told IPS that a recent slowdown is due to persistent challenges.

“Rapid population growth, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa, is outpacing registration systems. Weak infrastructure, limited funding, and low political prioritization have also contributed to the stagnation. Additionally, families often face barriers such as high fees, complex procedures, and limited access,” he said.

Some of these hurdles exist in East Africa, where the birth registration rate is 41 percent and the Pacific Islands where it is 26 percent. At the country level, it varies from 29 percent in Tanzania to 13 percent in Papua New Guinea and 3 percent in Somalia and Ethiopia. Of an estimated 654 million children aged under five years in the world, about 166 million are unregistered and 237 do not have a birth certificate.

In Papua New Guinea, the birth registration rate is being raised with the aid of mobile registration, an important means to reach rural and remote communities and help protect children living in vulnerable circumstances. Mangem IDP Camp, Madang Province, PNG. Credit: Catherine Wilson/IPS

“Systemic and social obstacles, exacerbated by the lingering effects of COVID-19, which reversed gains achieved in previous years, mean that progress must accelerate fivefold to meet the Sustainable Development Goal target of universal birth registration by 2030,” Mishra emphasized.

One country that is striving to meet the challenge is Papua New Guinea (PNG). The most populous Pacific Island nation of about 11 million people comprises far-flung islands and an epic mountain range on the mainland where people’s daily hardships include extreme terrain, lack of roads, and unreliable transportation.

More than 80 percent of people live in rural areas and, in Madang Province, in the northeast of the country, the Country Women’s Association has worked to increase maternal and health awareness among pregnant women.

“Some don’t have access to health facilities as they are in very remote areas and it takes hours to get to a health facility, so all births are done in the village. But health facilities in some communities are rundown, there is no maintenance on the infrastructure and no health workers on the ground, so that is the most challenging,” Tabitha Waka at the association’s Madang Branch told IPS.

For a mother, recording the birth of her baby could entail long journeys in community buses along dirt tracks and unsealed roads to the registration office, along with the cost of the fares.

“Lack of information is another challenge. These rural mothers don’t have this kind of helpful information and they don’t know the importance of birth registration. And, in some communities, due to traditions and customs, they only allow mothers to give birth in the village,” Waka continued. Just over half of all births in PNG take place in a healthcare facility, according to the government.

Births are registered and birth certificates issued to mothers at Nijereng Primary Health Centre, Adamawa State, Nigeria. Photo credit: UNICEF/Esiebo

But the country has made significant strides and, from 2023 to 2024, more than doubled the distribution of birth certificates from 26,000 to 78,000. Last July, 44 handheld mobile registration devices were supplied by UNICEF to the government and field officers have started a massive outreach mission to record births in local communities.

Then in December, the PNG Parliament passed a new bill to develop the national Civil and Identity Registry. “The Pangu-led government is a responsible government with policies based on inclusivity across the country… accurate and reliable identity information on our people is significantly vital for enabling effective service delivery and for their social well-being,” PNG’s Prime Minister, James Marape, told media in November.

There is already tangible progress, but the government’s goal to register up to half a million births every year “will require scaling up technology. The kits need to be deployed nationwide, especially in remote areas, and decentralizing certificate issuance,” Paula Vargas, UNICEF’s Chief of Child Protection in PNG told IPS. “There are bottlenecks in the process. For example, there is just one person in PNG authorized to manually sign birth certificates.”

On the other side of the world, more than half of all unregistered children live in Sub-Saharan Africa, and Ethiopia, among other countries in the region, is grappling with similar issues.

Located on the Horn of Africa, Ethiopia is more than twice the size of PNG and has a high birth rate of 32 births per 1,000 people, compared to the global average of 16. Here the majority of Ethiopia’s more than 119 million people also live in vast and remote regions.

But while birth registration is free and the government is training healthcare extension workers in the procedures, the urban-rural divide persists. The burden on rural parents of multiple visits, with long distances and costs, required to complete registration is impeding progress.  The birth registration rate in the rural Southern Nations, Nationalities, and People’s Region (SNNP) is 3 percent, which is the national average, compared to 24 percent in the capital, Addis Ababa.

Dr. Tariku Nigatu, Assistant Professor of Public Health at Ethiopia’s University of Gondar, told IPS that improvements could be driven by “integrating the registration service with the health system, [increasing] availability of resources to support interventions to boost birth registration and infrastructure for real-time or near real-time reporting of births.”

UNICEF has also assisted Ethiopia in deploying mobile registration kits to healthcare workers in remote communities, including those experiencing instability, “ensuring that children born during emergencies or while displaced are not excluded from legal identity and protection,” Mishra said. Currently a humanitarian crisis and insecurity are affecting people’s lives in the northern Tigray region following a civil war from 2020-2022.

Lack of understanding and misconceptions about birth registration also need to be addressed, Nigatu emphasized.

Birth registration is the first step to reducing the risk of children being exploited, abused, trafficked and coerced into child marriage. A young mother in Mozambique ensures her newborn is protected with a birth certificate and legal identity. Photo credit: UNICEF/Fauvrelle

“There are myths in some communities that counting the newborn as ‘a person’ at an early age could bring bad luck to the newborn. They do not consider the child worthy of counting before people know it even survives the neonatal period,” he said. This is partly due to the country’s high neonatal mortality of 30 in every 1,000 live births, with around half occurring within 24 hours after birth, he explained.

Messaging also needs to reinforce how birth registration is of lifelong importance to a child. There are high risks and human disadvantages for the uncounted millions of children without an official existence. They will have a greater fight to rise out of poverty, to resist sexual exploitation, abuse, child labor, and human trafficking, and to access legal protection, voting rights, even formal employment, and property ownership.

But birth registration is only the first step to their protection and well-being.

“It only works when backed by strong systems and services. This includes linking registration to services such as immunizations, hospital births, and school enrollment,” Mishra said.

In the wider context, having accurate birth and population data is essential for governments to plan public services and national development and equally critical to assessing progress on the Sustainable Development Goals.

Note: This article is brought to you by IPS Noram, in collaboration with INPS Japan and Soka Gakkai International, in consultative status with the UN’s Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC).

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In Somalia, water infrastructure projects are building climate resilience and reducing emissions by using solar panels to provide energy. A new report calls for recognizing and establishing a nexus between the water, energy and food sectors in the Horn of Africa. Credit: UNDP/Tobin Jones

By Naureen Hossain
UNITED NATIONS, Dec 13 2024 (IPS)

The Horn of Africa holds the resources and potential for lasting development and resilience. The countries in the subregion and development partners need to come together to invest in regional cooperation and resource management.

On December 12, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) launched the first-ever Human Development Report on the Horn of Africa subregion, which includes Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, and Uganda.

Horn of Africa Human Development Report 2024: Enhancing Prospects for Human Development through regional Integration, explores the key challenges that the eight countries and the subregion are experiencing in

In the Arab states and the African region, low productivity in economic activity will only continue in a “vicious cycle,” one that perpetuates poverty for the population. Abdallah Al Dardari, UN Assistant Secretary-General and UNDP Regional Director for the Arab States, remarked that the countries in the subregion have been taking what he described as a “siloed approach” to state affairs, even as its neighbors are dealing with the same issues. This is evident in how the region engages with the water and food sectors.

The report calls for recognizing and establishing a nexus between the water, energy and food sectors. Over 50 percent of the population across the Horn of Africa experience moderate to severe food insecurity and only 56 percent have access to electricity. Less than 56 percent have access to clean drinking water, yet the report indicates that this is not a consistent experience among the countries, given their geographical locations.

Conflict and disasters have also been persistent factors that have limited development in the Horn of Africa, as over 23.4 million people have been displaced in the wake of major conflicts in Sudan, South Sudan, Somalia, and internal conflicts like in Ethiopia.

The report presents three priorities that will help to accelerate human development and build resilience: build on increasing intra-regional trade, enhance collaboration in the water, energy and food sectors, and promote governance and peace.

The region could see a GDP increase of 3.9 percent by 2030 through liberalizing trade and reducing tariffs. The African Continental Free Trade Area (ACFTA) agreement would also boost trade were it fully implemented; the countries in the ACFTA need to ratify the agreement for them to benefit. Regional integration through collaboration on resource management can help foster sustainable growth and climate resilience, as the report suggests. This could be seen in improved access to electricity and shared food value systems. This could be valuable in a subregion that holds a high share of renewable energy sources such as wind, solar, and hydro and yet faces significant energy gaps.

“What we’ve attempted to do with this report is see if we can begin to see a shift in the narrative on this region,” said Ahunna Eziakonwa, the UN Assistant Secretary General and Director of UNDP’s Regional Bureau for Africa. In working towards integration in economic and political relations, she argued, partnerships need to be established within the subregion that is built on finding commonalities and shared purposes. Changing the narrative is key towards achieving sustainable development.

At the report’s launch, Eziakonwa remarked that certain demographics needed to be brought into the fold when discussing development, requiring a re-examination of the narratives associated with them. Young people make up a significant percentage of the population across the region, yet they have been characterized as the problem rather than the solution. Involving young people and recognizing the skills and perspectives they can bring to the table is critical, which will involve expanding socio-economic opportunities for the youth population that are not employed or in education. Investing in women’s participation in the development sector is also needed, for they have been largely left out of decision-making spaces and policy discussions.

Through this report, UNDP is calling on governments and development partners to invest in infrastructure and policy frameworks that build up human development and resilience in the Horn of Africa.

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Adenike Oladosu, ECW’s Climate Champion from Nigeria, during an interview with IPS at COP29. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS

By Joyce Chimbi
BAKU, Nov 20 2024 (IPS)

Education is under threat as multiple crises push children out of school and into harms way. COP29 Baku could break historical barriers that hold back education from playing a unique, critical role to accelerate the ambition of nationally determined contributions (NDCs) to the Paris Agreement, protecting people and planet from life-threatening risks of climate change.

“Together with our partners, we have launched a pilot program in Somalia and Afghanistan, working with communities to identify early action activities or anticipatory action to act against the impacts of climate and minimize its disruption on children’s lives and education in those countries,” says Dianah Nelson, Chief of Education, Education Cannot Wait (ECW), the global fund for education in emergencies and protracted crises within the United Nations. 

Towards embedding education into the climate finance debate, ECW held a series of COP29 side events on such issues as unlocking the potential of anticipatory action through multi-stakeholder collaboration; meeting the challenge of conflict, climate and education; climate change-resilient education systems in the most vulnerable nations; and protecting children’s futures: why loss and damage must prioritise education in emergencies.

Panel discussions brought together a wide range of public and private partners, policymakers, and data experts to highlight the benefits of acting ahead of predicted climate shocks to protect education. “The climate crisis is an education crisis, and education cannot wait. We, therefore, need to center climate action on education and build climate-smart school technology. And most importantly, we need anticipatory action to reduce or eradicate the impact of climate shocks on children. Everyone has a contribution to make, and every child has a dream. Uninterrupted access to education makes their dream a reality. We need to safeguard or protect our schools from being vulnerable, or being attacked in conflict, or even being washed away by flood,” Adenike Oladosu, ECW’s Climate Champion and Nigerian climate justice advocate, told IPS.

Dianah Nelson, Chief of Education at ECW, during one of the sessions hosted by ECW. The sessions highlighted the need to ensure there is funding for education for those on the frontlines of the climate crisis, armed conflict and other emergencies. Credit: ECW

These climatic impacts are already being felt in Pakistan. Zulekha, advisor/program manager of the Gender and Child Cell NDMA Pakistan, spoke about how the country has suffered “severe impacts from extreme weather. More than 24,000 schools were damaged in the 2022 floods, and nearly 3.5 million children were displaced and their educations put at risk. We were still reeling from the effects of the floods in 2023 when we started to launch the refresher of the Pakistan School Safety Framework.”

Oladosu spoke about the multiple, complex challenges confronting Nigeria and that anticipatory action “means bringing in the tools, through climate financing, to reduce the loss and damage. Anticipatory action addresses complex humanitarian crises in a proactive rather than reactive way to reduce the impact of a shock before its most severe effects are felt.”

She stressed that anticipatory actions are critical to avoid “losses that are simply irreplaceable, such as the number of days children spend out of school due to climate events, those left behind the education system, or even those who fall out of the system and into child marriages and militia groups.”

Education must reach every child impacted by a climate crisis they did not make. Credit: UNICEF

Lisa Doughten, Director, Financing and Partnership Division at OCHA, stated that in humanitarian crises, climate change “is significantly disrupting the overall access to education as schools temporarily shut down due to extreme climate events causing significant learning disruptions for millions of students. We have countries in conflict and fragile settings, and the climate crisis creates extremely difficult circumstances for, especially children and women.”

Doughten spoke about the need to leverage data to get ahead of predictable climate disasters and how OCHA works with various partners, including meteorological organizations, to monitor and use climate data. Using models that entail pre-planned programs, pre-determined triggers for weather events such as floods and storms, and pre-financing to ensure that funds are disbursed with speed towards anticipatory actions.

At COP29, ECW reiterated the power of education to unite communities, build consensus, and transform entire societies. In the classroom of the future, children will acquire the green skills they need to thrive in the new economy of the 21st century, and communities will come together to share early warnings and act in advance of climate hazards such as droughts and floods.

Graham Lang, Deputy Director at ECW, at one of the sessions hosted by the Global Fund aimed at ensuring those on the frontlines of the climate crisis, armed conflict and other emergencies are central to climate education action, decisions and commitments. Credit: ECW

Stressing that in this classroom of the future, “an entire generation of future leaders can build the will and commitment to break down the status quo and create true lasting solutions to this unprecedented and truly terrifying crisis. Unfortunately, multilateral climate finance has not prioritized the education sector to date, meaning a tiny proportion, at most 0.03 percent, of all climate finance is spent on education. While children have the most to offer in building long-term solutions to the crisis, they also have the most to lose.”

ECW says the connection between climate action and education is also noticeably underrepresented in NDCs, or national commitments to adapt to and mitigate the impacts of climate change. Only half of all NDCs are child and youth sensitive, and this is an urgent situation for, in 2022 alone, over 400 million children experienced school closures as the result of extreme weather.

According to the Global Fund, “on the frontlines of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, these disruptions will often push children out of the education system forever. In places like Chad, Nigeria, and Sudan, where millions of children are already out of school, it could impact the future of an entire generation. ECW’s disaster-resilient classrooms, for instance, boosted enrolment rates in Chad.”

Amid Chad’s multidimensional challenges compounded by climate change, climate-resilient classrooms whose construction was funded by ECW and completed in March 2022 meant that classrooms were more durable and accessible for children and adolescents with disabilities. These classrooms withstood the heaviest rainy season in 30 years, triggering widespread flooding. Committing needed finances and acting with speed and urgency means bringing solutions within reach.

Accordingly, ECW says a key step is increasing access to the main climate funds—including the Global Environment Facility and Green Climate Fund—and activating new innovative financing modalities to deliver with speed, depth, and impact, and that the funding needs to be faster, transparent, and fully coordinated across both humanitarian and development sectors.

Looking forward to COP30 in Brazil, ECW stressed that education must play an integral role in the new Loss and Damage Fund. Education losses caused by climate change take unprecedented tolls on societies, especially in countries impacted by conflicts, displacement, and other pressing humanitarian emergencies.

Further emphasizing that the “loss and damage connected with years of lost learning may seem hard to quantify. But we know that for every USD 1 invested in a girl’s education, we see USD 2.80 in return. And we know that education isn’t just a privilege; it’s a human right. Finally, we need to ensure the New Collective Quantified Goal on climate finance includes a firm commitment to educating all the world’s children. Not just the easy-to-reach, but the ones that are the most vulnerable, the millions whose lives are being ripped apart by a crisis not of their own making.”

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Girls in rural Somalia spend a large portion of their time helping with household chores. But thanks to Education Cannot Wait funding many girls are now able to receive an education. Credit: Save the Children

By Abdalle Ahmed Mumin
MOGADISHU, Jun 8 2021 (IPS)

Ten-year-old Sabah Abdi from Ali Isse, a small rural village on the Somaliland-Ethiopian border, scored well in her recent exams, placing third overall in her local village school of 400 students.

Yet is was just three years ago Sabah spent her days helping with household chores and herding goats, rather than studying because her pastoralist family could not afford her school fees.

“I’m very glad to be among the top three students in the village school. I am hoping to be a doctor and cure sick people in the village when I grow up,” Sabah told IPS.

Droughts, food insecurity prevent Somaliland children from attending school

Recurrent droughts, food insecurity, water shortages, poverty and inequality hinder efforts to get more Somaliland children in schools. Families in this part of Somaliland are dependent on their livestock for basic food and income, with many moving from place to place in search of good rains and pasture.

In July 2019, the Somaliland Government, Education Cannot Wait (ECW) – the United Nations global fund for education in emergencies and protracted crises – and UNICEF Somaliland launched a multi-year resilience programme to increase access to quality education for children and youth impacted by ongoing crises in Somaliland.

The Somaliland national primary net attendance ratio is estimated at 49 percent for boys and 40 percent for girls. Only 16 percent of children who are internally displaced and 26 percent of children in rural communities are enrolled in primary schools. 

If fully funded, ECW’s $64 million three-year education programme will reach 198,440 (out of whom 50 percent are girls) children by end of the third year, including 21,780 supported through ECW’s seed funding. Currently 18,946 students – 46 percent of whom are girls – have benefitted from the programme in 69 targeted schools in six regions. Out of these, a significant number of out of school children 6,342 (3,074 girls) have been enrolled in schools.

In addition, ECW has also launched two other similar multi-year investments in Puntland and in the Federal Government of Somalia and Member States in the amounts of $60 million and $67.5 million, respectively. The three programmes are aligned in outcomes and focus on increasing access to free education for the most marginalised children and youth, including for pastoralist communities.

“The positive impacts of ECW’s multi-year investments in Somalia and the tangible difference we are making together with our partners in the lives of Sabah and so many other marginalised girls and boys are heartwarming and inspiring. For the first time, many of these children and youth can learn and develop themselves in a safe, protective and inclusive environment,” said Yasmine Sherif, Director of Education Cannot Wait. “Yet, so much more remains to be done. I call on strategic donor partners to join our efforts and fully fund the three programmes. Together, we can restore the hope of a better future for Somalia’s most vulnerable children and youth.”

The Hani school in Sanaag region, Somalia. Credit: Save the Children

Free schooling thanks to ECW funding

The primary school Sabah attends offers free schooling thanks to support from ECW. It has enabled her and other kids from this rural community to start learning.

Sabah’s mother, Anab Jama, said she is now able to keep her children in the village school while her husband travels with the animals in search of fresh forage and water. “I stayed behind to take care of the children at school. I don’t want them to miss the free education,” Jama told IPS. 

Last year, ECW funding supported the distribution of education kits by local partners and the Somaliland Ministry of Education during the COVID-19 lockdown so children could continue their studies until schools reopened at the end of 2020. The kits included books and solar lamps.

“When the pandemic hit Somaliland, we closed down the school and sent kids back home,” Mohamed Abdi Egal, the headteacher of the Ali Isse primary school, told IPS. “There was not any other option we could provide to continue students’ learning. That was the biggest disruption we saw. When we resumed late 2020, we started to maintain social distancing and hand-washing.”

“Education is considered a vital element in the development of the community but when emergencies unfold like COVID-19 it shows how it hampers provision of essential services, including education,” Egal told IPS.

Thanks to funding 11,052 students, 4,568 of whom are girls, were able to sit for their grade 8 centralised final examinations in Puntland State, Somalia. Credit: Save the Children

Schooling tailored to pastoralist families’ needs

A year after the 2019 programme launched, the number of enrolments of children in the pastoralist community increased substantively – from 12 percent to 50 percent due to the programme design – said Safia Jibril Abdi, UNICEF Education Specialist in charge of managing the ECW-funded programme in Somaliland.

“Education always needs long-term planning. In the drought-affected areas families are on the move and besides that the children do the hard work, such as grazing animals. Girls are core for rural families when it comes to household chores,” continued Abdi.

“We started afternoon classes during the beginning of the school year [in August 2019] and teachers were hired. When the education timing matched the rural families’ lifestyle it brought impact and is much better for rural children.”

The programme targeted children 10 years and above and those who would be able to successfully complete their secondary education in five years within the constraints of their nomadic lifestyles.

Local community members in 15 locations across Somaliland have established education committees to ensure the long-term sustainability of providing education here.

“The goal was to increase access of children to the education with a safe environment. Also, the most important is to make the project sustainable for the local community,” Abdi told IPS. “Girls in school have certain needs, such as sanitary pads, which we provide to them. This helps teenage girls not miss ongoing classes during their periods.”

The UNICEF Education Specialist said that the benefits of the collaborative approach that saw the various actors, including the Ministry of Education, rural communities and civil society organisations, working alongside and with funding from ECW to deliver education for crisis-affected children made the initiative successful.

“It is a sad reality that one in every two children in Somaliland doesn’t have the opportunity for free education. With the launch of the ECW programme we are now able to reach these marginalised children many of whom are in the conflict affected and rural areas,” she said.

Meanwhile, Save the Children, an ECW partner working in Somalia’s Puntland State, has launched multiple distance learning initiatives, including uploading lessons online to help students continue their studies despite COVID-19 lockdowns.

As a result, 11,052 students, 4,568 of whom are girls, were able to sit for their grade 8 centralised final examinations.

“We have created an online learning programme under the ECW fund that targeted primary schools in Puntland. Currently 15,604 students, among them 6,924 girls, have access to education with the support of ECW in Puntland,” Ahmed Mohamed Farah, Save the Children’s ECW Education Consortium manager in Puntland, Somalia, told IPS.

As an ECW implementing agency, Save the Children aims to strengthen the Puntland government education system and enhance the quality by monitoring students’ dropout as well as managing the education system in the four regions it targets in the northeastern Somalia.

According to Farah, ECW funding also paid for the exam fees of 1,000 students from 51 target schools across Somalia.

“Certain students from the low-income families and those in the remote areas could not register for their national primary school exams due to the registration fees therefore we were able to cover for their exam fees.

“Six out of the 10 top grade students were girls. That is the impact,” Farah said.

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To learn more about Education Cannot Wait’s work for children and youth caught in emergencies and protracted crises, please visit: educationcannotwait.org and please follow @EduCannotWait on Twitter.

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United Nations are warning of another drought in the Horn of Africa. Eight years ago famine left more than 260,000 dead. Pictured here is a child from drought-stricken southern Somalia who survived the long journey to an aid camp in the Somali capital Mogadishu during the 2011 famine. Credit: Abdurrahman Warsameh/IPS

By James Reinl
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 25 2019 (IPS)

Humanitarian groups and the United Nations are warning of another drought in the Horn of Africa, threatening a repeat of the deadly dry spell and famine that claimed lives in Somalia and its neighbours eight years ago.

The British charity Oxfam said Thursday that more than 15 million people across drought-stricken parts of Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia now needed handouts and warned of a hefty death toll unless donors stumped up cash fast.

“We cannot wait until images of malnourished people and dead animals fill our television screens. We need to act now to avert disaster,” said Lydia Zigomo, Oxfam’s regional director for the Horn of Africa.

According to an Oxfam report, donors were quick to dig into the pockets for a drought in 2017, helping to stave off a famine that could have been as deadly as the 2011 dry spell that left more than 260,000 dead, and many more hungry and sick.

But while the humanitarian response was well-funded back in 2017, donor governments have not raised enough cash yet this time around, added Zigomo, a human rights lawyer from Zimbabwe.

“We learned from the collective failures of the 2011 famine that we must respond swiftly and decisively to save lives. But the international commitment to ensure that it never happens again is turning to complacency,” said Zigomo.

“Once again, it is the poorest and most vulnerable who are bearing the brunt.”

The U.N. refugee agency UNHCR has also sounded the alarm. Somalia’s recent April-June and October-December rainy seasons were drier than expected, worsening an arid spell that was already hitting farmers and herders across the turbulent country. 

Some 5.4 million Somalis were expected to be facing food shortages by September, and 2.2 million of them would need “immediate emergency assistance” UNHCR spokesperson Babar Baloch warned last month.

Donors had only handed over one fifth of the 711 million dollars that was requested in an appeal in May, added Baloch.

“The latest drought comes just as the country was starting to recover from a drought in 2016 to 2017 that led to the displacement inside Somalia of over a million people,” Baloch told reporters in Geneva.

“Many remain in a protracted state of displacement.” 

Last month, the European Union launched a 3.2 million euro scheme to manage water sources and agriculture and lessen the impact of drought, in cooperation with officials in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, and the northern breakaway region of Somaliland.

“Water and land are critical resources for the Somali economy and people’s livelihoods but are also extremely vulnerable to natural disasters and climate change,” said EU diplomat Hjordis D’Agostino Ogendo.

“While access to water needs to increase, needed infrastructures are to be designed and managed in a sustainable way.”

Somalia has seen little but drought, famine and conflict since dictator Siad Barre was toppled in 1991. The country’s weak, U.N.-backed government struggles to assert control over poor, rural areas under the Islamist militant group al Shabaab.

Droughts are getting worse globally, according to the U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD). By 2025, some 1.8 billion people will experience serious water shortages, and two thirds of the world will be “water-stressed”.

Though droughts are complex and develop slowly, they cause more deaths than cyclones, earthquakes and other types of natural disaster, the UNCCD warns. By 2045, droughts will have forced as many as 135 million people from their homes.

“With climate change amplifying the frequency and intensity of sudden disasters … and contributing to more gradual environmental phenomena, such as drought and rising sea levels, it is expected to drive even more displacement in the future,” added Baloch.

But U.N. experts say there is hope. By managing water sources, forests, livestock and farming, soil erosion can be reduced and degraded land can be revived, a process that could also help tackle climate change.

In 2011 Somalia also experienced severe drought and many were forced to leave their homes and make the long journey to an aid camp in the Somali capital Mogadishu. Credit: Abdurrahman Warsameh/IPS

By Tharanga Yakupitiyage
UNITED NATIONS, Jun 5 2019 (IPS)

Climate-related displacement and food insecurity is not a future possibility, but it is already happening and it’s only projected to worsen without urgent action in coming years.

Yesterday, ahead of World Environment Day, the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) sounded the alarm on the growing impacts of drought in Somalia.

“UNHCR and humanitarian partners fear that severe climatic conditions combined with armed conflict and protracted displacement could push the country into a far bigger humanitarian emergency,” said UNHCR spokesperson Babar Baloch.

As a result of below average rains and a worsening drought, an estimated 5.4 million people are likely to be food insecure by September in many parts of the Horn of Africa nation. Of those, over two million will be in severe conditions and in need of immediate emergency assistance.

The drought has also forced nearly 50,000 people to flee their homes in search of food, water, and aid. More than 7,000 were displaced last month alone.

“People who are already displaced because of conflict and violence are also affected by the drought, at times disproportionally,” Baloch added.

The latest crisis is occurring at the wake of a two-year drought that ended in 2017, which displaced over one million.

According to UNHCR, weather-related hazards such as storms, droughts, and wildfires displaced 16.1 million people in 2018.

Climate-related crises are only expected to occur with greater frequency across the world.

In a new, terrifying report, Australian think tank Breakthrough National Center for Climate Restoration warned that climate change poses a “new-to-mid-term existential threat to human civilisation.”

“This policy paper looks at…the unvarnished truth about the desperate situation humans, and our planet, are in, painting a disturbing picture of the real possibility that human life on earth may be on the way to extinction, in the most horrible way,” said Admiral Chris Barrie in the foreword.

The assessment warns that the world’s currently on its way to least 3° Celsius of global warming and projects that by 2050, one billion people in regions such as the Middle East and West Africa will have to relocate due to unliveable climate conditions.

There will also be severe decreases in water availability and a collapse in agriculture and food production.

“The scale of destruction is beyond our capacity to model with a high likelihood of human civilisation coming to an end,” the report states, noting that such climate impacts will accelerate conflict and instability.

But not all hope is lost.

The report urges governments to have strong leadership and mobilise resources “akin in scale to the World War II emergency mobilisation” in order to quickly build a zero-emissions industrial system.

“A doomsday future is not inevitable! But without immediate drastic action our prospects are poor. We must act collectively,” said Barrie.

UNHCR similarly called on more international action to prevent climate-related disasters, increase efforts to strengthen resilience, and protect those already affected by climate change.

Last month, aid agencies launched a 710-million-dollar appeal in response to the drought in Somalia. Only 20 percent has so far been funded.

“With climate change amplifying the frequency and intensity of sudden disasters, such as hurricanes, floods and tornados, and contributing to more gradual environmental phenomena, such as drought and rising sea levels, it is expected to drive even more displacement in the future,” Baloch said.

Displaced Somali at a camp on the outskirts of the city of Dire Dawa in eastern Ethiopia. Credit: James Jeffrey/IPS

By James Jeffrey
NEAR THE OROMIA-SOMALI REGIONAL BORDER, Ethiopia, Nov 21 2017 (IPS)

Ethnic animosity unleashed in Ethiopia has displaced hundreds of thousands as well as rendering all manner of usually sacrosanct loyalties obsolete.

“I was making my husband dinner in the evening but an hour after he returned from work he kicked me out of our home,” says Zahala Shekabde, a Somali married to an Oromo. “I pleaded with him, told him I loved him and that I have nothing else, but he said he didn’t want to listen and I must go otherwise he would hurt me.”Both regional governments deny their special police were involved while accusing the other of Machiavellian plots.

She left with nothing other than three children from a former marriage—her husband wouldn’t let her take her youngest child from their marriage.

Other displaced ethnic Somali with Zahala from all over Ethiopia’s Oromia region say there was no warning and explanation given for their evictions, other than the local Oromo where they lived, including local officials, telling them it was revenge for what had happened to Oromo in Jijiga, the capital of the Somali region.

Upwards of 50,000 ethnic Oromo had to leave the Somali region and beyond (officials from the opposing Oromia and Somali regions dispute whether the sum applies just to the Somali region or to the Horn of Africa—Oromo have also left Djibouti and Somaliland, where two Ethiopians were reportedly killed in the capital, Hargeisa).

This sequence of tit-for-tat ethnic-based violence and evictions was sparked after Oromo protests on Sept. 12 in the town of Aweday, between  the cities of Harar and Dire Dawa near the border between the two regions, led to rioting that left 18 dead, according to official figures, the majority being Somali traders of khat, the plant that when chewed acts as a mild stimulant. Somali who fled Aweday say it was closer to 40 killed.

Following Aweday, the Somali regional government began evicting Oromo from Jijiga and the region. Officials say this was for the Oromo’s own safety, and that not one Oromo died from ethnic violence in the region—a fact disputed by displaced Oromo.

“My husband was sick at home when I left for work on Sept. 20,” says Fateer Shafee from a village near Jijiga. “Later I got a call from him saying to come and collect the children as there was conflict nearby. When I got back I found the children but our home was burnt with my husband still inside. Everyone was running and hadn’t been able to get him out.”

Displaced Oromo sheltering on an industrial park on the outskirts of the city of Harar in eastern Ethiopia. Credit: James Jeffrey/IPS

In the numerous camps that have popped up and public buildings commandeered to absorb the displaced, Oromo and Somali tell equally convincing stories of ethnic violence, primarily carried out, they claim, by each region’s special police, while exhibiting even more convincing physical wounds of that violence.

Meanwhile, both regional governments deny their special police were involved while accusing the other of Machiavellian plots. At the federal level, the government faces accusations ranging from not doing enough to turning a blind eye to even abetting violence for political ends. Another option is it may simply not have the capacity to do enough, so widespread is the violence.

“It’s very difficult to tell if there have been acts of omission or commission at all levels,” says the head of one international humanitarian organization in Ethiopia, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The scale of what’s happened becomes clearer 80km east of Dire Dawa, just over the regional border in the Somali Region, where two giant camps for displaced Somalis are co-located in the lee of the Kolechi Mountains.

In the older camp are 5,300 Somali households—household size varies from 6 to 10 people—displaced by a mixture of drought and ethnic violence since 2015. In the newer camp are 3,850 households displaced by the recent violence.

“It’s uniformed police carrying out the bloodshed,” says one Somali man at the camps.

Another man had to flee Oromia’s Bale zone, hundreds of kilometers to the southwest, though he says that 500 Somali households remain there under constant harassment.

“They are rich farmers and are attacked each day,” he says. “The local Oromo tell the Ethiopian soldiers there one thing and then do another—it’s the worst example of conflict as the farmers are totally isolated and surrounded, and have no way of getting away.”

Displaced Somali at giant camps surrounded by the Kolenchi hills in Ethiopia’s most eastern Somali region. Credit: James Jeffrey/IPS

Inhabitants in both camps pull back clothing to reveal old bullet wounds, scars and lesions from burns, broken bones that never healed, and more.

A number of displaced Somali say they survived thanks to the intervention of soldiers from the national Ethiopian Defense Force. But it wasn’t enough to allow them to remain, or to return.

“If the federal government sends forces to keep the peace they stay for a week or a month and then after they leave it happens again,” says one Somali man. “We can’t risk staying.”

Oromia and Somali are the two largest regions in the country by area size, sharing a border of more than 1,400 km (870 miles). The Oromo constitute the largest proportion of Ethiopia’s population, numbering about 35 million, a factor Ethiopia’s other ethnic groups remain deeply conscious of—especially its 6.5 million Somalis.

Ethnic conflict along the border between the two regions and in the regional rural hinterlands has long occurred, and can be traced to grievances and still standing tensions from the Ethio-Somali war of the 1970s and further back to historical tensions over Oromo migration due to their significant numbers.

But ethnic violence in urban areas well removed from the border is particularly rare. Many say the violence is all the more shocking within communities that integrated peacefully for centuries, and within which intermarriage between Oromo and Somali was the norm.

In 2004, a referendum to decide the fate of more than 420 kebeles around the border—Ethiopia’s smallest administrative unit—gave 80 percent of them to the Oromia Region. This led to thousands of Somalis leaving areas for fear of repercussions.

The referendum still hasn’t been fully resolved, which some say could be one factor behind the current conflict, as may be the on-going drought putting further pressure on pasture and resources—but only to a degree.

“There’s been drought before and no violence happened,” says the vice administrator of one of the Somali regional zones badly hit by the drought. “The main reason is politics and is hidden—this is all man-made.”

Ethiopia’s ethnic federalist system devolves power to regional states. Some observers note how this leaves the government in a quandary of respecting that devolution while also protecting the constitutional rights of Ethiopians, especially minorities, as regions increasingly flex their devolved muscles.

Recent trouble primarily occurred where notable minorities existed: Somali in Aweday, for example, and Oromo in Jijiga. More diverse cities such as Dire Dawa, with a less clear majority, have escaped violence for now.

Meanwhile, accusations go beyond political machinations by regional powerbrokers and the federal government to include the Ethiopian diaspora opposition and social media.

“The Oromo are being directed from Minnesota in America,” says one Somali official. “The Oromo in government don’t have enough respect or influence to coordinate this.”

Men lounging in Dire Dawa’s Chattara Market chewing khat, Ethiopia. Credit: James Jeffrey/IPS

By James Jeffrey
ADDIS ABABA, Mar 12 2017 (IPS)

Throughout a Sunday afternoon in the Ethiopian capital, Yemeni émigré men in their fifties and sixties arrive at a traditional Yemeni-styled mafraj room clutching bundles of green, leafy stalks: khat.

As the hours pass they animatedly discuss economics, politics, history, life and more while chewing the leaves. The gathering is a picture of civility. But in many countries khat has a bad reputation, with it either being banned or prompting calls for it to be banned. Khat is an institution, wielding enormous economic impact, as well as playing a major social and cultural role in societies.

Understanding khat—or as it is also known and spelt: jima, mira, qat, chat, cat; and whose leaves when chewed act as a psychotropic stimulant with what some would call amphetamine effects—is far from straightforward.

This innocuous-looking plant has experts variously claiming it is as mild as tea or as addictive as cocaine. Hence a few years ago khat’s international reputation presented a particularly conflicting picture: it was legal in Britain, banned in the US, celebrated in Yemen and vilified in Saudi Arabia.

In the Horn of Africa, khat is an institution, wielding enormous economic impact, as well as playing a major social and cultural role in societies. In the Somaliland capital, Hargeisa, you won’t find much khat-related dissent.

“It brings people together, it facilitates discussion of issues and exchanging information,” says local journalist Abdul, the corners of his mouth speckled with green mush. “In the West it’s often difficult for people to interact, but here they learn about their neighbours and what problems they have.”

It’s estimated 90 percent of Somaliland’s adult male population—and about 20 percent of women—chew khat for mirqaan, the Somali word for the buzz it can give.

Nowadays khat is so enmeshed with Somaliland culture and daily life it’s an important tax earner for Somaliland’s government. In 2014, khat sales generated 20 percent of the government’s 152-million-dollar budget, according to the Somaliland Ministry of Finance.

Khat is also the No. 1 employer in Hargeisa, the Somaliland capital, generating between 8,000 and 10,000 jobs, thereby offering much-needed respite to the country’s chronic unemployment problem that see 75 percent of its youth workforce jobless.

Meanwhile, for Ethiopia, khat is a major earner: Somaliland spends about 524 million dollars a year—about 30 percent of gross domestic product—on Ethiopian khat (many suspect the true figure to be much higher).

A woman and child surrounded by bags of khat they’ve brought to sell at Dire Dawa’s Chattara Market, Ethiopia. Credit: James Jeffrey/IPS

Another of Ethiopia’s eastern neighbours, Djibouti, is reportedly Ethiopia’s most lucrative external market. Hence the Ethiopian government looks on khat as a useful exportable product to other countries, bringing in sorely need foreign currency, the access to which presents a perennial problem in Ethiopia.

Much of Ethiopia’s prime khat grows in the hills around the prominent eastern Ethiopian cities of Dire Dawa and Harar, about 150km from the border with Somaliland. In Dire Dawa’s Chattara market, khat trading continues late into the night under naked lightbulbs iridescent in the hot darkness.

Between these two cities is the city of Aweday, which despite its smaller stature is in fact the hub of Ethiopia’s khat trade—hence its nickname: khat city.

The morning after the nightly trade and dispatch of bundles of khat around the region and world, every street beside the main road running through Aweday is covered in discarded green leaves. Meanwhile, trucks loaded with khat are hurtling eastward along rough roads through the Ethiopian lowlands, and planes with identical cargo are threading through azure skies, to make their deliveries in Djibouti, Somaliland and beyond.

Lower quality khat costs about 12 dollars a kilo in Hargeisa, rising to 26 for medium quality and 58 for high quality. The majority of customers typically spend between 2 and 10 dollars for a day’s worth of khat that throughout Somaliland amounts to a national daily spend of 1.18 million dollars, and from which the government gets its important tax cut.

“I worry about the health effects but it helps me with my work,” says Nafyar, who often works late nights for his administrative job in Hargeisa.

“To really understand khat you have to chew it.”

But others are far less willing to go to give khat the benefit of the doubt.

“The problem comes down to the man not being part of the family and the woman being left to do everything,” says Fatima Saeed, a political advisor to Somaliland’s opposition Wadani Party, who previously worked for 15 years with the United Nations. “Men sit for hours chewing—it’s very addictive.”

She highlighted other potential consequences for those chewing: “It can bring about hallucinations, sleeplessness, loss of appetite, deaden sexual urges, while in others it increases them.”

Furthermore, others point out the flipside of khat’s supposed economic windfall.

“Khat is a massive burden on Somaliland’s fragile economy since it means that a large percentage of its foreign currency is used to purchase khat,” says Rakiya Omaar with Horizon Institute, a consultancy firm that works on strengthening the capacity and self-reliance of institutions in Somaliland.

A Somaliland man picking khat leaves during an afternoon session in the capital, Hargeisa. Credit: James Jeffrey/IPS

Another problem stems from the fact that for khat to have the desired stimulating effect it must be chewed continuously for hours.

“We need to develop this country, and for that you should be working eight hours a day, but that’s not happening here,” says Omar, a British Somalilander who returned to Hargeisa to take advantage of perceived business opportunities in the emerging economy. He explains how many employees work half a day and then head off for an afternoon of khat.

Khat is accused of causing dependency at the detriment of gainful employment. Unemployed Somalilanders are certainly not deterred from their khat habit that can cost up to 300 dollars a month as they while away jobless hours, borrowing money from friends. 

Saeed says she supported lobbying to ban khat in the UK, and which proved successful with a ban being implemented in 2014, due to the negative impact khat was having on the Somali diaspora community there.

“Khat would arrive at 5 p.m. on the plane and by 6 p.m. men had left homes and wouldn’t return until 6 a.m.,” Saeed says. “After the ban it was like people woke up from a deep sleep—they started looking for jobs, being part of the family.”

But in the political context of Somaliland remaining an unrecognised country, cut off from global financial systems and investment, khat trade provides an obvious viable and sustainable commercial opportunity. Take that away and Somaliland’s economy might face even more strain.

Khat has a long history in the Horn of Africa and surrounding region. Its leaves were viewed as sacred by the ancient Egyptians, while Sufi religious men chewed khat to remain awake during nocturnal meditations on the Koran—hence khat’s affiliation with the divine. Now khat exists very much in the mainstream.

“It’s better than alcohol as you can still function normally afterwards,” says Abdul, who chews whenever he is on deadline. “It affects people differently, it depends on your personality: after khat some like to read, others to work.”

Among the 10 percent of Somaliland men not chewing khat, however, opinion differs markedly.

“I don’t chew as I know the effects,” says 24-year-old university lecturer Abdukarim at a busy Hargeisa coffee shop. “Initially you feel happy, confident, strong and high. The problem is the result. At the end you are weak. It should be banned, but I don’t want to say more here.”

Regulation of when khat’s imported across the border from Ethiopia and sold during the day in Somaliland would help temper present problems, Saeed says, as would implementing an age limit—currently there isn’t one. But, she adds, the present government won’t take any action due to the amounts of money and vested interests involved.

But many others continue to defend khat, arguing it plays an important communal role.

Well before the UK ban, the London Institute for the Study of Drug Dependence issued a factsheet stating: “In cultures where its use is indigenous, khat has traditionally been used socially, much like coffee in Western culture.”

Khat undercuts preconceived ideas, challenging our conceptions of what a drug is, of what addiction is, of what an addicted society looks like.

“I chewed khat for 30 years,” says one Yemeni man in the group meeting that Sunday afternoon. A successful businessman in Addis Ababa, he is smoking cigarettes but not chewing—the only one in the group. “Now I’ve had enough. I don’t miss it.”

In the capital people encounter a mishmash of chaotic local market commerce existing alongside diaspora-funded construction including glass-fronted office buildings, Wi-Fi enabled cafes and air-conditioned gyms, all suffused with characteristic Somali energy and dynamism. Credit: James Jeffrey/IPS

By James Jeffrey
HARGEISA, Somaliland, Feb 17 2017 (IPS)

Crossing African borders by land can be an intimidating process (it’s proving an increasingly intimidating process nowadays in Europe and the US also, even in airports). But crossing from Ethiopia to Somaliland at the ramshackle border town of Togo-Wuchale is a surreally pleasant experience.

Immigration officials on the Somaliland side leave aside the tough cross-examination routine, greeting you with big smiles and friendly chit chat as they whack an entry stamp on the Somaliland visa in your passport.“If you look at the happiness of Somalilanders and the challenges they are facing, it does not match.” --Khadar Husein, Operational director of the Hargeisa office of Transparency Solutions.

They’re always happy to see a foreigner’s visit providing recognition of their country that technically still doesn’t exist in the eyes of the rest of the political world, despite having proclaimed its independence from Somalia in 1991, following a civil war that killed about 50,000 in the region.

A British protectorate from 1886 until 1960 and unifying with what was then Italian Somaliland to create modern Somalia, Somaliland had got used to going on its own since that 1991 declaration, and today exhibits many of the trappings of a functioning state: its own currency, a functioning bureaucracy, trained police and military, law and order on the streets. Furthermore, since 2003 Somaliland has held a series of democratic elections resulting in orderly transfers of power.

Somaliland’s resolve is most clearly demonstrated in the capital, Hargeisa, formerly war-torn rubble in 1991 at the end of the civil war, its population living in refugee camps in neighbouring Ethiopia. An event that lives on in infamy saw the jets of military dictator Mohammed Siad Barre’s regime take off from the airport and circle back to bomb the city.

But visitors to today’s sun-blasted city of 800,000 people encounter a mishmash of impassioned traditional local markets cheek by jowl with diaspora-funded modern glass-fronted office blocks and malls, Wi-Fi enabled cafes and air-conditioned gyms, all suffused with typical Somali energy and dynamism.

“We are doing all the right things that the West preaches about but we continue to get nothing for it,” says Osman Abdillahi Sahardeed, minister for the Ministry of Information, Culture and National Guidance. “This is a resilient country that depends on each other—we’re not after a hand out but a hand up.”

Non-statehood deprives Somaliland of direct large-scale international support from the likes of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. For these members of the Somaliland Seaman’s Union at Berbera Port’s docks, it means they are not paid the same wages—they earn about $220 a month—as paid to foreign workers due to not belonging to an internationally recognised organisation. Credit: James Jeffrey/IPS

Increasing levels of exasperation within Somaliland’s government and among the populace are hardly surprising. Somaliland’s apparent success story against the odds remains highly vulnerable. Its economy is perilously fragile. Non-statehood deprives it of direct large-scale international support and access to the likes of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (I.M.F.).

As a result, the government has a tiny budget of about 250 million dollars, with about 60 percent spent on police and security forces to maintain what the country views as one of its greatest assets and reasons for recognition: continuing peace and stability. Also, it relies heavily on the support of local clan elders—it is hard for any government to prove its legitimacy when essential services need the help of international humanitarian organizations, local NGOs and the private sector.

Indeed, Somaliland survives to a large extent on money sent by its diaspora—estimated to range from $400 million to at least double that annually—and by selling prodigious quantities of livestock to Arab countries.

All the while, poverty remains widespread and swathes of men on streets sipping sweet Somali tea and chewing the stimulating plant khat throughout the day testify to chronic unemployment rates.

“About 70 percent of the population are younger than 30, and they have no future without recognition,” says Jama Musse, a former mathematics professor who left Italy to return to Somaliland to run the Red Sea Cultural Foundation center, which offers cultural and artistic opportunities for Hargeisa’s youth. “The world can’t close its eyes—it should deal with Somaliland.”

Peace and security hold in Somaliland, so effectively that moneychangers can safely stash bundles of cash on the street. Credit: James Jeffrey/IPS

For now, Somaliland’s peace holds admirably well.

“If you look at the happiness of Somalilanders and the challenges they are facing it does not match,” says Khadar Husein, operational director of the Hargeisa office of Transparency Solutions, a UK-based consultancy focused on civil society capacity building in Somaliland and Somalia. “They are happy because of their values and religion.”

But others speak of the risks of encroaching Wahhabism, a far more fundamental version of Islam compared to Somaliland’s conservative though relatively moderate religiousness, and a particular concern in a volatile part of the world.

“Young men are a ready-made pool of rudderless youth from which militant extremists with an agenda can recruit,” says Rakiya Omaar, a lawyer and Chair of Horizon Institute, a Somaliland consultancy firm helping communities transition from underdevelopment to stability.

Almost everyone acknowledges the country’s present means of sustainment—heavily reliant on the private sector and diaspora—must diversity. Somaliland needs greater income to develop and survive.

Abdi Muhammad, a veteran of the Somali civil war, makes his feelings clear. Credit: James Jeffrey/IPS

For many, the key to Somaliland’s much needed economic renaissance lies in tapping into the far stronger economy next door: Ethiopia, Africa’s second most populous country and its fastest growing economy, according to the I.M.F.

Crucial to achieving this is Berbera, a name conjuring images of tropical quays and fiery sunsets. Once an ancient nexus of maritime trade, Berbera has long been eclipsed by Djibouti’s ports to the north. But Berbera Port is now on the brink of a major expansion that could transform and return it to a regional transportation hub, and also help fund Somaliland’s nation-building dreams.

In May 2016, Dubai-based DP World was awarded the concession to manage and expand Berbera for 30 years, a project valued at about 442 million dollars, including expanding the port and refurbishing the 268-kilometer route from the port to the border with Ethiopia.

Landlocked Ethiopia has long been looking to diversify its access to the sea, an issue of immense strategic anxiety. Currently 90 percent of its trade goes through Djibouti, a tiny country with an expanding network of ports that scoops at least 1 billion dollars in port fees from Ethiopia every year.

Somaliland would like about 30 percent of that trade through Berbera, and Ethiopia is more than happy with that, allocating such a proportion in its latest Growth and Transformation Plan that sets economic policy until 2020.

Ethiopia and Somaliland had already signed a Memorandum Of Understanding (MOU) covering trade, security, health and education in 2014, before in March 2016 signing a trade agreement on using Berbera Port. And Ethiopia could just be the start.

“It would be a gateway to Africa, not just Ethiopia,” says Sharmarke Jama, a trade and economic adviser for the Somaliland government during negotiations on the port concession. “The multiplying benefits for Somaliland’s economy could be endless.”

Somaliland officials hope increased trade at the port will enable greater self-sufficiency to develop the country, while also chipping away at the international community’s resistance over recognition.

“As our economic interests align with the region and we become more economically integrated, that can only help with recognition,” Sharmarke says.

Perhaps. The political odds are stacked against Somaliland due to concerns that recognizing Somaliland would undermine decades of international efforts to patch up Somalia, and open a Pandora ’s Box of separatist claims in the region and further afield around Africa.

But greater self-sufficiency would undoubtedly result from a resurgent Berbera, and without this crucial infrastructure revival Somaliland’s economic potential will remain untapped, trapping its people in endless cycles of dependence, leaving those idle youth on street corners.

On April 13, 2016, up to 500 migrants died after a boat capsized crossing the Mediterranean. Most media reported that a large portion of those who died were from Somalia. But in Hargeisa following the tragedy, locals noted how many of those who died were more specifically Somalilanders.

“Why are they leaving? Unemployment,” says Abdillahi Duhe, former Foreign Minister of Somaliland and now a consultant in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa. “Now is a very important time: we’ve passed the stage of recovery, we have peace—but many hindrances remain.”

Of the 69 journalists who died on the job in 2015, 40 per cent were killed by Islamic militant groups like Al-Qaeda and Islamic State. Startlingly more than two-thirds were targeted for murder, according to a special report by the Committee to Protect Journalists.

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said in its annual report that nine of those killings took place in France, second to Syria as the most dangerous country for the press in last year.

Globally 69 journalists were killed due to their vocation, including those slain for their reporting and those caught in crossfire or in conflict. The total for 2015 is higher than the 61 journalists killed in 2014.

The CPJ says it is investigating the deaths of a further 26 more journalists during the year to determine if they too were work-related.

In 2012, 2013, and 2014, those killed in Syria exceeded those than anywhere else in the world. But the fewer number this year dying on the job in Syria only means it is so dangerous that there are fewer journalists working there, said the report. Many international news agencies chose to withdraw staff anf local reporters were forced to flee, said the CPJ.

The report cited difficulties in researching cases in conflict including Libya, Yemen and Iraq. CPJ went on a research mission to Iraq last year investigating reports that some 35 journalists from the Mosul area had gone missing, were killed or being held by Islamic State.

The militant group has a grip on the city so the CPJ said it could only confirm the deaths of a few journalists. The committee’s report said it had received reports of dozens of other journalists killed but could not independently confirm the deaths or if indeed, journalism was the reason. It said several of these journalists are currently on CPJ’s missing list.

A mural for Avijit Roy in Dhaka, one of four bloggers murdered by extremists in Bangladesh this year. Credit: AP/A.M. Ahad

The Charlie Hebdo massacre that took place in Paris last January was claimed by Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Eight journalists at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo were targeted.

Islamic State in October murdered two Syrian journalists living in exile in Turkey, Fares Hamadi and Ibrahim Abd al-Qader. Abd al-Qader was given CPJ’s 1015 International Press Freedom Award as he was an early member of Raqaa is Being Slaughtered Silently, a Syrian citizen journalist group.

“In Bangladesh, members of an Al-Qaeda affiliate or another local extremist group, Ansarullah Bangla Team, were suspected in the hacking or stabbing murders of a publisher and four bloggers, including U.S.-Bangladeshi writer Avijit Roy, who was attending a book fair when he was killed,”said the report.

The Taliban in Pakistan claimed responsibility for the shooting of Zaman Mehsud, president and secretary-general of the Tribal Union of Journalists’ South Waziristan chapter and reporter for the Urdu-language Daily Ummat and Daily Nai Baat newspapers.

A security officer investigates the murder of Somali journalist Hindia Haji Mohamed, who was killed by a car bomb in December. Credit: AFP/Mohamed Abdiwahab

In Somalia, Hindia Haji Mohamed, a journalist and the widow of another murdered journalist, was killed in December when a bomb blew up her car in an attack claimed by the Islamic militant group al-Shabaab.

Governments around the world were jailing at least 110 journalists on anti-state charges. This is out of 199 total jailed, according to CPJ’s most recent annual prison census.—It shows how the press is being cornered and targeted by terrorists and also squeezed by the squeezed by authorities saying there were committed to fighting terror as well, it said.

More than two thirds of the journalists killed in 2015 were targeted and murdered as a direct result of their work.

The report said about one third of journalists’ deaths worldwide were carried out by criminal groups, government officials, or local residents who were, in most cases, drug traffickers or those involved in organized crime. They included Brazilian Gleydson Carvalho, shot dead by two men while he was presenting his afternoon radio show. He was often critical of politicians and police Brazil had six killings last year, the highest since CPJ began keeping records in 1992.

But Brazilian judicial authorities have made headway in combating impunity by getting six convictions in murder cases in the last two years, said the report.

South Sudan registered for the first time on CPJ’s index of slain journalists when unidentified gunmen attacked an official convoy killing five journalists traveling with a county official. The motive is still unknown but there have been various accusations. Some say this could have been the result of the power struggle between former Vice President Riek Machar and President Salva Kiir which set off the civil war in 2013.

The murders of the five landed South Sudan on CPJ’s Global Impunity Index, which highlights countries where journalists are murdered and there is no one held responsible so their killers go free.

South Sudan, Poland and Ghana appeared on CPJ’s killed database for the first time. In Poland, Łukasz Masiak, was fatally assaulted in a bowling alley after telling colleagues he feared for his life. He was the founder and editor of a news website and reported on crime and drugs and pollution. In Ghana, radio reporter George Abanga, was shot dead on his way back from covering a cocoa farmers dispute.

CPJ cites these trends from its research:

• Seventeen journalists worldwide were killed in combat or crossfire. Five were killed on a dangerous assignment.
• At least 28 of the 47 murder victims received threats before they were killed.
• Broadcast reporting was the most dangerous job, with 25 killed. Twenty-nine victims worked online.
• The most common type of reporting by victims was politics, followed by war and human rights.

CPJ, in 1992, began compiling detailed records on all journalist deaths. If motives in a killing are unclear, it is possible that a journalist died in relation to his or her work and CPJ classifies the case as “unconfirmed” and continues to investigate. CPJ said its list does not include journalists who died of illness or natural causes or were killed in car or plane accidents unless the crash considered hostile action.

(End)

Migrants looking down from the mountain behind the Spanish enclave of Ceuta in Morocco. Credit: Andrea Pettrachin/IPS

By Andrea Pettrachin
CEUTA, Sep 4 2015 (IPS)

In the middle of the mountains behind the border fence of Ceuta, the Spanish enclave in Morocco, and eight kilometres from the nearest Moroccan village of Fnideq, an uncertain number of migrants live in the woods. No one knows exactly how many they are but charity workers in Melilla, Spain’s other enclave in Morocco, say they could be in their thousands.

Ceuta is one of the main (and few) ‘doors’ leading from northern Africa to the territory of the European Union, and is a ’door’ that has been closed since the end of the 1990s, when the Spanish authorities started to build a tripe six-metre fence topped with barbed wire that surrounds the whole enclave, as in Melilla.

In the past, those waiting in the mountains for their turn to try to reach Spain had been able to build something resembling a normal life. They put up tents and at least were able to sleep relatively peacefully at night.Today, the migrants are forced to remain mostly hidden in small groups among the trees or in small caverns, and they know that all attempts to pass the Spanish border are almost certain to fail and end up with arrest by the Moroccan authorities

That all ended after 2012, when the Moroccan police started to burn down the camps and periodically sweep the mountainside, arresting any migrants they found, charged with having illegally entered the country.

These actions were the result of agreements between the Moroccan and Spanish governments, after Spain had asked Morocco to control migration flows.

The most tragic raid so far by the Moroccan police took place last year on Gurugu Mountain which looks down on Melilla. Five migrants were killed, 40 wounded and 400 removed to a desert area on the border with Algeria. According to the migrants, the wounded were not cured and were left to their own destiny.

Today, the migrants are forced to remain mostly hidden in small groups among the trees or in small caverns, and they know that all attempts to pass the Spanish border are almost certain to fail and end up with arrest by the Moroccan authorities.

They live, in their words, “like animals” and when speaking with outsiders are clearly ashamed by their condition, apologising for being dirty and badly-dressed.

The first thing many of them tell you in French is that they are students and that before having to leave their countries they were studying mathematics, economics or engineering at university.

Many of them are from Guinea, one of the countries most seriously affected by the Ebola epidemic, others come from Cote d’Ivoire, Gambia, Mali, Burkina Faso, all countries characterised by political turmoil of various types.

All of them have been forced to live in these woods for months or even years, waiting for their chance to pass the border fence.

The statistics show that some of them will certainly die in their attempts to reach Spain – either on the heavily fortified fences which encircle the enclaves or out at sea in a small boat or trying to swim to a Spanish beach.

Some of them will finally make it to Spain, perhaps after five or six failed attempts. In that case they will have overcome the first hurdle, escaping the “push-back operations” by the Spanish Guardia Civil, but they will still face the possibility of forced repatriation, particularly if they come from countries with which Spain has a repatriation agreement.

Many of them, however, will finally give up and decide to remain somewhere in Morocco, destined to a life of continuous uncertainty due to their irregular position in the country. You can meet them and listen to their stories in the main Moroccan cities, especially in the north. In most cases, they had escaped death in their attempts to reach Spain and do not want to risk their lives any longer.

Meanwhile a report on ‘Refugee Persons in Spain and Europe” published at the end of May by the non-governmental Spanish Commission for Refugees (CEAR), denounces how sub-Saharan migrants are dissuaded from seeking asylum in Spain, even if coming from countries in conflict such as Mali, Democratic Republic of Congo or Somalia, once they realise that they are likely to be forced to remain for months in a Centre for Temporary Residence of Immigrants (CETI) in Ceuta or Melilla.

In Melilla, for example, those who apply for asylum cannot leave the enclave until a decision has been taken on their application. Unlike Syrian refugees whose application takes no more than two months, CEAR said the average time to reach a decision for sub-Saharan Africans is one and a half years.

The CEAR report is only one of a long list of recent criticisms of the Spanish government’s migration policies from numerous NGOs and international organisations.

The main target of these criticisms has been the Security Law (Ley de Seguridad Ciudadana) passed this year by the Spanish Parliament with only the votes of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy’s Popular Party. The aim was to give legal cover to the so called devoluciones en caliente, the “push-back operations” against migrants carried out by the Spanish frontier authorities in Ceuta and Melilla in violation of international and European law.

On the Spanish mainland, said the CEAR report, migrant’s right of asylum is seriously undermined by the bureaucratic lengths of application procedures and the political choices of the Spanish authorities.

Calls from CEAR and other NGOs to end “push-back operations” seem very unlikely to be taken into consideration soon by the Spanish government and Parliament, in view of the general elections later this year.

Edited by Phil Harris   

Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud is seen in his presidential office inside Villa Somalia. Credit: UN Photo/Stuart Price

By Nora Happel
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 1 2015 (IPS)

The impeachment motion Somali parliamentarians filed against President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud on Aug. 12 has created a political standoff that might further threaten the country’s stability shortly ahead of planned elections in 2016.

Last week, the envoys of the United Nations, the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM), the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD), the European Union, the United States and the United Kingdom issued a joint statement, calling for a rapid resolution of the crisis and expressing their concern that the motion “will impede progress on Somalia’s peace and state building goals”.

"The chronic bane of Somali elite politics, particularly in the past two decades, has been a toxic cocktail of tribalism, malfeasance, and incompetence. President Hassan Sheikh is the embodiment of this syndrome." -- Ahmed Ismail Samatar, former member of the Somali Federal Parliament
“While we fully respect the right of the Federal Parliament to hold institutions to account and to fulfill its constitutional duties, the submission of any such motion requires a high standard of transparency and integrity in the process and will consume extremely valuable time, not least in the absence of essential legal bodies.”

“Emerging institutions are still fragile. They require a period of stability and continuity to allow Somalia to benefit from the New Deal Somali Compact and to prepare for a peaceful and legitimate transfer of public office in 2016,” the text added.

As a matter of fact, there are important procedural irregularities as well as legal obstacles arising from insufficiently developed institutions that stand in the way of a smooth running of the impeachment process and might indeed cause further political turmoil.

In accordance with article 92 of the Federal Government of Somalia’s (FGS) provisional constitution, the impeachment motion has been submitted by one-third of the members of parliament.

However, as reported by the Somali Current, at least 25 members of parliament out of a total of 93 deputies endorsing the motion claimed their names were used without their consent.

After the submission of the impeachment motion, the following step provided for under articles 92 and 135 of the provisional constitution will be a decision by the Constitutional Court, within 60 days, on the legal grounds of the motion, followed by a two-thirds majority vote in the Parliament.

However, at the time of writing, no Constitutional Court exists in the country – a major obvious hindrance, even though some analysts invoke the possibility of a decision by the Supreme Court acting on the matter instead, following the legal precedent of former article 99 of the 1960 Somali Constitution.

Another major question of debate concerns the charges against President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud. As outlined in a press statement by the Somali Federal Parliament, the impeachment motion lists a total of 16 charges against President Hassan, including abuse of power, corruption, looting of public resources, failure to address insecurity, human rights abuses, detentions of political dissidents, interference with the independence of the judiciary and intentional failure to meet the requirements for elections in 2016.

Article 92 (1) states that a deposition of the Somali president can only occur if there are allegations of “treason or gross violations of the constitution”. There is ongoing discussion whether the charges put forth by the parliamentarians present enough legal grounds for the motion to pass.

In a press conference last week, President Mohamud dismissed the charges against him, adding it was not the right moment for an impeachment procedure and accusing individuals of having “special interests” – a possible allusion to deputies seeking term extensions.

This suspicion has also been brought up, in an indirect way, in the above-mentioned joint press statement by the international community:

“We also recall that Somalia and all member states are bound by United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 2232, which sets out the expectations of the international community on the security and political progress needed in Somalia, and the need for an electoral process in 2016 without extension of either the legislative or executive branch,” the statement said.

In an interview with Voice of America, U.N. Envoy to Somalia Nicholas Kay repeated the international criticism of the impeachment motion.

He said, in the context of the upcoming election and ongoing attacks by al-Shabaab militants, Somalia shouldn’t “lose time [on] the political bickering that has brought down governments in the past.”

While some voices are more concerned about the impeachment motion itself as it will likely create further chaos and instability, others emphasise the validity of the charges and the need to hold the President and national institutions accountable.

Ahmed Ismail Samatar is former member of the Somali Federal Parliament. A candidate for the 2012 elections in Somalia, he is now working as professor and chair of International Studies at Macalester College.

Speaking to IPS, he said, “The chronic bane of Somali elite politics, particularly in the past two decades, has been a toxic cocktail of tribalism, malfeasance, and incompetence. President Hassan Sheikh is the embodiment of this syndrome.”

Unlike most international observers, Samatar does not necessarily see the elections in 2016 threatened by the motion: “If carried expeditiously and firmly, the proceedings need not thwart the mounting of the elections in September 2016.”

Last month, President Mohamud declared that he does not expect “one person, one vote” elections to be possible in 2016 due to persisting security challenges. However, he said in an interview with Voice of America, he is “aiming for the next best option” regarding transition of power in 2016.

Opposition parties have reacted angrily to the president’s statement, claiming that he uses the insecurity argument as a pretence to extend his mandate.

President Mohamud was elected in 2012 by a parliament made up of 135 clan elders in what the BBC described as a “U.N.-backed bid to restore normality to the country”.

However, instability, severe economic problems and continuing al-Shabaab attacks as well as the current political crisis seem to suggest that the country still has a long way to go to achieve normality.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Women sport their national pride at the annual Somaliland Independence Day celebration on May 18 in Hargeisa. Advocates argue that a political quota would give women a greater say in their country's policy-making. Credit: Adrian Leversby/IPS

By Katie Riordan
HARGEISA, Aug 27 2015 (IPS)

Bar Seed is the only female member in Somaliland’s 82-person Parliament, but activists hope upcoming national elections may end her isolation.

Gender equality advocates in the self-declared nation are currently renewing a push for a quota for women in government that has been over a decade in the making.

“The public’s opinion is changing,” says Seed hopefully.

Somaliland, internationally recognised as a region of Somalia and not as an autonomous nation, nonetheless hosts its own elections and has its own president.  It is often hailed as a burgeoning democracy that circumvented Somalia’s fate as a failed state. But noticeably absent from the decision-making process – to the detriment of the country’s development, activists argue – are women. [Somaliland] is often hailed as a burgeoning democracy that circumvented Somalia’s fate as a failed state. But noticeably absent from the decision-making process are women

With only Seed in Parliament, no women in the House of Elders known as the Guurti, and two female ministers and two deputies, supporters argue that a political quota enshrined in law is necessary to correct this gender imbalance.

“Nobody is going to take a silver platter and present it to women. We aren’t being shy anymore, we are saying: you want my vote? Then earn it,” says Edna Adan, a former foreign minister in Somaliland and founder of the Edna Anan University Hospital, a facility dedicated to addressing gender issues such as female genital mutation (FGM).

Adan has witnessed the debate about women in government evolve over the years, playing out as a political game often filled with empty promises to appoint more women in positions of power.  A measure to enact a political quota has twice failed to pass Somaliland’s legislature, once shot down by Parliament and once stymied by the Guurti.

But Adan believes conditions have ripened for women to make a final push for a quota as they have become more organised and strategic in their lobbying efforts.

While some accuse advocates of “settling” for their current demand of a reserved 10 percent of seats – meaning women would only run against women for eight spots in Parliament – Adan counters that setting the bar higher at the moment is unrealistic.

In addition to pushing for this 10 percent clause in an election law that Parliament is slated to review and debate in the coming months, advocates are also lobbying political parties to have voluntary quotas for their list of parliamentary candidates for seats outside those exclusively reserved for women.

A disputed extension decision made in May that postponed Somaliland’s elections for president, parliament and local councils until at least the end of 2016 and as late as spring 2017 drew the ire of the international community and much of civil society including organisations backing a women’s political quota.  Critics say the extension calls into question Somaliland’s commitment to a democratic process.

But the extra time may prove to be a silver lining for quota lobbyists. It could give them leverage to force politicians to prove their adherence to building an inclusive government in order to appear favourable to their constituents and the international community by pushing for more women in government.

“Women have threatened the parties that if they don’t support us, then we will not support them,” says Seed, who is a member of the Waddani Party, one of Somaliland’s two current opposition parties.

However, she explains that parties often publicly support ideas and mechanisms that push for gender parity but have a poor track record of following through with them. In many ways they have not been obliged to because, historically, women have not voted for other women in meaningful numbers.

“So they know it’s a bit of any empty threat but some are frightened [they could lose female votes],” Seed adds.

Also standing in the way of women is Somaliland’s deeply entrenched tribal and clan system that overshadows politics. In order to win elections, individuals need the support of clan leaders who sway the vote of members of their tribe, explains Seed. But since men are viewed as the stronger candidate, women rarely received clan endorsement.

A woman’s position is also unique in that she often has claims to two clans, the one she is born into and the one that she marries into, though this rarely works to her advantage.

“If a woman goes on to become a minister, both clans would claim her, but if she asks for help, they both tell her to go to the other clan,” said Nura Jamal Hussein, a women’s advocate who is contemplating running for political office.

The Nagaad Network, a local NGO dedicated to the political, economic and social empowerment of women, has been the buttress of the push for a quota. Its current director, Nafisa Mohamed, says that convincing women – who, according to some estimates, are about 60 percent of the voting bloc – to vote for women will be crucial to defying the status quo.

Given the cultural and religious barriers that women contend with, that status quo will be incredibly difficult to change, she says. Mohamed counts small victories like a change in hard-line religious preaching that denounced women’s presence in politics. She says approaching spiritual leaders on an individual basis to garner their support has proved fruitful and that they are generally warming to the idea of women in government.

But the power of religion in shaping public opinion is still palpable.

Mohamed Ali has served in Parliament since it was last elected in 2005. He backs legislation for a quota for women in government.  But asked if a woman could be president, he says it would be contrary to the teachings of the Quran, a view shared by many that IPS talked to.

While he hesitantly admits that he may one day change his views, he says others would accuse him of “not knowing one’s religion” if he advocated a woman for president.

Critics have brushed the quota off as an import from the West and an unnecessary measure that is pushing for change that a country may not be ready to undertake. Some also question if it will genuinely result in its desired effect that political empowerment for women will trickle down to other aspects of life.

Amina Farah Arshe, an entrepreneur, believes that if there was greater focus on economic empowerment for women, more political representation would naturally follow.

“I hate quotas. I want women to vote for themselves without it,” she says.  “But the current situation will not allow for that so we still need it.”

Edited by Phil Harris   

Exercise Milan 2014 for 17 navies of the Indian Ocean Naval Symposium, organised by Indian Navy, at the Andaman and Nicobar Command of the Indian Armed Forces. Credit: Indian Navy

By Nora Happel
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 20 2015 (IPS)

While the economic cost of Somali piracy has fallen and considerable progress has been made in deterring pirate operations, the latest attacks on Iranian fishing vessels by Somali pirates in the Indian Ocean may be another signal that it is too early to cut back international counter-piracy efforts, according to a new report.

The report by Oceans Beyond Piracy (OBP), titled “State of Maritime Piracy 2014”, underscores that due to restrictive reporting criteria, small-scale attacks on dhows and vessels are not always included in official piracy records."We still haven’t addressed the root causes of piracy. There are still ungoverned spaces on the coastline. There is still unemployed youth that might be attracted to piracy.” -- Jon Huggins

“[This] may hide a development that the reduced cost is masking – namely that Somali pirates still possess the means and capability – and are waiting for opportunities to strike,” it says.

Conditions conducive to the development of piracy in the first place, such as illegal fishing, poverty, political instability and a lack of economic opportunities, have not been properly addressed yet, according to the analysis.

As reported by the International Maritime Bureau (IMB), a specialised division of the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC), the number of pirate attacks has been steadily decreasing since Somali piracy peaked with 237 attacks in 2011. While the IMB had reported a total number of 75 attacks in 2012 and only 15 attacks in 2013, the number has fallen further to 12 attacks in 2014.

Even though the actual numbers of attacks, including on dhows and foreign fishing vessels, might be higher, a significant decline in piracy over the course of the past four to five years cannot be denied.

This is due to a variety of factors. Speaking to IPS, Oceans Beyond Piracy Program Director Jon Huggins highlighted in particular the efforts of the Contact Group on Piracy off the Coast of Somalia (CGPCS), which have allowed practical solutions to be developed.

Created in January 2009 pursuant to U.N. Security Council Resolution 1851, the CGPCS is an ad hoc international forum bringing together countries, organisations and industry groups to provide support to international counter-piracy efforts in Somalia.

As explained in a report by the European Union Institute for Security Studies (EUISS) dedicated to lessons learnt from the CGPCS, the CGPCS is a highly unconventional if not unique international governance mechanism due to its open architecture, informality and malleable structure. It was established outside the U.N. system to “ensure that it was as inclusive, apolitical, issue-driven, result-focused, efficient and flexible as possible.”

“The setting up of the Contact Group reveals the limits of existing security institutions in tackling non-traditional threats which are neither state-based nor of a strictly military nature and that therefore require new forms of policy response.”

Commenting on the practical solutions supported by the Contact Group, Jon Huggins identified a combination of four main mechanisms that were required to suppress piracy. He stressed that each of these mechanisms acting alone would not have proven successful.

Thus, as outlined by Huggins, one major reason for the decline in piracy was the military counter-piracy operations carried out by the international community, especially EU NAVFOR ATALANTA, beginning in 2008, and NATO Operation Ocean Shield, beginning in 2009.

However, as incidents of piracy kept going up, these operations were complemented by wide-ranging protection and self-defence measures and improved watch and awareness procedures adopted by the shipping industry. As recorded in the Economic Cost of Piracy report by OBP, these measures amounted to approximately five billion dollars in 2012, which represented around 85 percent of the total amount the international community spent on fighting piracy.

The measures adopted were part of a broader industry-generated mechanism named the “Best Management Practices (BMP) for Protection against Somalia Based Piracy.”

Another major reason for the decrease in piracy, according to Huggins, was the “private maritime security” who enacted standards and procedures for the use of force by Privately Contracted Armed Security Personnel (PCASP) in the maritime domain.

A fourth factor was the steady enforcement of the rule of law through an expanded prison system, including regional prosecution centres in the Seychelles and Kenya and four new prisons in Somalia built under the UNODC Maritime Crime Programme (MCP).

Two weeks ago, the CGPCS convened for its 18th annual session at the United Nations in New York. Participants commended the immense progress over the course of the past four to five years as evidenced by the decline in pirate attacks, but also stressed the need for continued engagement as piracy networks remain intact and 26 persons are still being held hostage by Somali pirates.

“Piracy has been contained but not eradicated,” Maciej Popowski, Deputy Secretary General for the External Action Service (EAS), said at a U.N. press briefing on the CGPCS 18th plenary meeting.

Therefore, he said, a major goal of the CGPCS gathering was to “look beyond the piracy itself” and deal with a whole range of important topics related to maritime security, such as illegal fishing, migration and smuggling of human beings.

Major economic, political and societal challenges persist in Somalia that might cause setbacks or provide a favourable breeding ground for piracy in the future. According to Jon Huggins, it is vital for the international community to “maintain a minimal effort to keep the suppression going” even though this might involve major financial expenses.

“At the height of piracy in Somalia in 2010, the international community spent seven billion dollars on counter-piracy measures. Last year we calculated 2.3 billion. This is the minimum that is required in order to stay – because we still haven’t addressed the root causes of piracy. There are still ungoverned spaces on the coast line. There is still unemployed youth that might be attracted to piracy.”

According to the United Nations Development Programme in Somalia (UNDP Somalia), 67 percent of Somalis aged 14-29 are unemployed. This is particularly worrisome given that over 70 percent of Somalia’s population is under the age of 30. The school enrolment rate is 42 percent, of which only a third are girls.

Hence, extreme poverty and a lack of prospects for the future for the large majority of Somalis constitute persisting security challenges in the country in addition to the unstable political situation and weak governance structures.

Moreover, there are fears of new threats emerging as a result of the enmeshment of pirate groups with jihadist networks. As reported by Foreign Policy, young Somali pirates in Hargeisa and Bosaso are detained in the same prisons as members of the al-Shabab militant group.

“That means there’s a very real risk that impressionable, disillusioned young men could be radicalised,” it warned.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

A boatload of people, some of them likely in need of international protection, are rescued in the Mediterranean Sea by the Italian Navy. The UN at 70 must “be fit for the purpose … otherwise it would be letting down people in need and compromising its legitimacy”. Photo credit: UNHCR/A. D’Amato

By Julia Rainer
VIENNA, May 14 2015 (IPS)

Events are being organised around the world to celebrate the 70^th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations, but a recent seminar held in the Austrian capital was not held to applaud the body’s past contributions.

Rather, the 45^th International Peace Institute (IPI) Seminar, held from May 6 to 7,  saw representatives from the political, NGO, media and military sectors come together to discuss the organisation’s capability to deal with the crises and challenges of the future.

There was consensus among participants that the difficulties in the realms of international peace and security are very different today from those that dominated the international community at the time of the foundation of the United Nations in 1945.The global scenario has seen the entry of non-state “actors” such as criminals and terrorists representing a real threat to stability of the international system that the United Nations was set up to safeguard

Not only has the number of member states quadrupled since then, the global scenario has seen the entry of non-state “actors” such as criminals and terrorists representing a real threat to stability of the international system that the United Nations was set up to safeguard.

At the same time, the planet is afflicted by other threats that do not stop at national borders, such as climate change, pandemics and wars, which have global dimensions and are extremely difficult to contain in our globalised world.

As Martin Nesirky, Director of the United Nations Information Service (UNIS) in Vienna, put it: “The UN grew from the ashes of World War Two and there has been no global conflict since then, but neither has there been global peace.”

This year, debate about reform of the United Nations comes at a time that represents a possibility for change and action on two major fronts.

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), although they have not yet been fully realised, are being pushed forward in the spirit of adapting a new development agenda in the form of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Furthermore, there are hopes that a global agreement on climate change will finally be reached in Paris in December at the U.N. Climate Change Conference.

According to U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, “this is not just another year, this is the chance to change the course of history.”

However, the not all participants at the IPI seminar were convinced that the United Nations could fulfil its destined role without adapting to the fast changing circumstances that shape the world community.

A hotly debated issue was the long demanded reform of the U.N. Security Council and the power of veto held by its five permanent members – China, United States, France, United Kingdom and Russian Federation – which were said not to represent the world community.

Some participants noted that the current geopolitical situation is marked by a breakdown of power relations which have complicated the work of the United Nations enormously.

Richard Gowan, Research Director at New York University’s Center on International Cooperation (CIC) and a Senior Policy Fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), expressed his concern about the escalation of power struggles in recent years.

“Tensions between Russia and the West, and to some extent China and the West, have severely impaired the UN’s ability to deal with the Syrian crisis and stopped the UN having a serious role in the Ukrainian crisis altogether.”

He called for resolution of ongoing geopolitical competition to enable the United Nations to regain the strength to deal with pressing crises” and warned that “if the Security Council breaks down, the rest of the UN will ultimately break down.”

Meanwhile, as the world faces the most severe refugee crisis since the Second World War, it was stressed that the proper functionality of international institutions – and of the United Nations in particular – is of the highest importance. More than 53 million people worldwide have been forcibly displaced today, a figure equal to the entire population of South Korea.

The last tragic incidents of hundreds of refugees drowning in the Mediterranean have shown that the international community is failing to ensure the security of those seeking a safe future in Europe. “Desperation has no measure and no cost,” said Louise Aubin, Deputy Director of the Department of International Protection at the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

During her work for the U.N. refugee agency, Aubin came face to face with the situation of the world’s largest refugee camp in Dadaab, Kenya, situated some 100 kilometres from the Kenya-Somalia border, which houses an estimated 500,000 Somali refugees, some of whom are third generation born in the camp.

“It’s impossible for me to explain as a parent that I would actually accept that situation,” Aubin said.” There is no way I would not do anything in my power to try to send my children somewhere else. And that somewhere else is across the Mediterranean.”

In the light of the recent tragedies suffered by refugees, participants said that it is necessary to create safe access to asylum in order for refugees to enjoy the rights that are theirs under international law.

It is clear that this responsibility does not lie only with the United Nations, they agreed, pointing to the role of the European Union in dealing with refugee flows.

However, both the United Nations and the European Union are only as strong as their member states allow them to be.

If the UN at 70 turns out not be fit for the purpose, it has to take immediate measures to become so – otherwise it would be letting down people in need and compromising its legitimacy.

Edited by Phil Harris    

Mohammed (left) and Ahmed, two Somali migrants who survived crossing the Mediterranean and are now hosted in one of Syracuse’s first aid and reception centres, although they are not planning to remain in Italy for long. Credit: Silvia Giannelli/IPS

By Silvia Giannelli
AUGUSTA, Syracuse, Italy , May 11 2015 (IPS)

Not even a month has passed since over 700 hundred migrants lost their lives in their attempt to reaching the shores of Italy and the media spotlights have already faded on the island of Sicily, Italy’s southern region and main gateway to Europe.

Yet, the migration flows have not stopped.

Five days ago, on May 3, 300 people arrived in the port of Augusta, in the province of Syracuse, and among them were 19-year-old Ahmed and 22-year-old Mohammed.“That boat trip was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life, but I’m here, I’m OK and it will get better now” – Mohammed, a Somali migrant who survived crossing the Mediterranean to reach Italy

Both come from Somalia but they met in Libya, where they had worked for several months in order to save enough money to pay the smugglers running the traffic in migrants across the Mediterranean.

Ahmed and Mohammed are now hosted in one of Syracuse’s first aid and reception centres, but they are not planning to remain in Italy for long. Ahmed wants to go to Belgium, where some of his relatives already live, while Mohammed hopes to continue his trip towards Germany.

Crossing the Mediterranean was frightening, but they seem to have left all of their fears on the Libyan shores and their eyes are full of hope for the future.

“The sight of the sea from Libya was so scary, but when I look at it from here, it’s beautiful again,” says Ahmed, who is hoping to be able to study in Europe and become a doctor.

For Mohammed, “that boat trip was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life, but I’m here, I’m OK and it will get better now.”

Before leaving Libya, Ahmed had heard about the tragedy of the 700 who lost their lives, but that did not stop him because, he says, the risks are higher in Somalia than on the boats.

“The weather has been bad these days, but look how calm the sea is today,” a carabiniere standing in front of the centre told IPS. “We are getting ready for many, many more to arrive.”

Despite the fact that more than 25,000 migrants have already made it to Italy this year, the actual ‘migration season’ is just about to start. Meanwhile, Europe is lurching to answer southern European states’ request for help.

Currently, the Mediterranean is patrolled under Operation Triton, a border security operation conducted by Frontex, the European Union’s border security agency, which aims to deter migrants. Operation Triton replaced Operation Mare Nostrum, which had been a broader Italian search and rescue initiative.

During an extraordinary European summit on the refugee crisis in the Mediterranean held on Apr. 23, E.U. leaders agreed to triple funding for rescue operations in the Mediterranean, but this is far from being the ‘European solution’ to the migration crisis.

“Of course more capacity and more boats and early detection by planes increase the possibility of saving more people,” the Frontex press officer in Catania, Ewa Moncure, told IPS.

“But even with the best efforts, if people are put on these boats and sent to sea with no safety equipment, with not enough water, then nobody can guarantee that they will be found on time and that the rescue services will save everybody, because that would be simply a lie.”

While E.U. leaders continue to discuss possible naval blocks off Libyan territorial waters and southern European states try to open a debate on quotas of refugees to be shared among all member states, local authorities and Sicilian citizens are left with the task of handling the first aid and reception operations.

Augusta, a town of around 40,000 inhabitants, is one of the main bases of the Italian Navy in Sicily and it served as the headquarters of the Mare Nostrum operation, until it ended in October 2014.

Between April and October 2014, the town also hosted an emergency centre for unaccompanied minors, raising concerns and complaints of around 2,000 people who signed a petition to move the centre somewhere else and to propose naval blocks at the departure ports.

“This petition suggested exonerating from the allocation of migrants those municipalities that already suffer from economic insolvency and high unemployment levels, as is the case of Augusta,” Pietro Forestiere, local spokesperson for the right-wing Fratelli d’Italia party and one of the initiators of the petition, explained to IPS.

“The logic behind it is that you cannot ask someone who is already struggling to deliver proper services to its citizens to take care of migrant reception as well.”

The emergency centre of Augusta was eventually closed in October, but its example could be easily extended to the whole region, which suffers from the highest levels of poverty and the second highest unemployment rate in the whole of Italy.

Yet, despite the voices calling for strong action against immigration, it is very common to hear people in Augusta sympathise with the migrants, especially when it comes to refugees.

“They are made of flesh and blood, just like us. We simply can’t let them drown,” Alfonso, who owns a stand in the fish market, told IPS. “They are escaping war and poverty. If we can’t prevent them from coming, once they approach the coast, we must help them.”

Most citizens in Sicily do not appear to fear future arrivals. The problem is rather the feeling of being abandoned in handling the situation, as a customer at the market pointed out:

“This is a port, we have always been used to seeing foreigners around. The impact on our daily life is quite limited. Yet, something needs to be done, not so much for us but rather to help them, and we can’t do it on our own. This is a European – if not global – issue, and Europe must act.”

Edited by Phil Harris   

A U.N. peacekeeper from Niger is ready to begin a patrol at the Niger Battalion Base in Menaka, in eastern Mali, Feb. 25, 2015. Credit: UN Photo/Marco Dormino

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 21 2015 (IPS)

The United Nations is fighting a losing battle against a rash of political and humanitarian crises in 10 of the world’s critical “hot spots.”

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon says even the U.N.’s 193 member states cannot, by themselves, help resolve these widespread conflicts.“We need more support and more financial help. But, most importantly, we need political solutions.” -- U.N. spokesperson Stephane Dujarric

“Not a single country, however powerful or resourceful as it may be, including the United States, can do it,” he warned last week.

The world’s current political hotspots include Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, South Sudan, Somalia, Afghanistan, Ukraine, the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic – not forgetting West Africa which is battling the spread of the deadly disease Ebola.

Historically, the United Nations has grappled with one or two crises at any given time. But handling 10 such crises at one and the same time, said Ban, was rare and unprecedented in the 70-year history of the United Nations.

Although the international community looks to the world body to resolve these problems, “the United Nations cannot handle it alone. We need collective power and solidarity, otherwise, our world will get more and more troubles,” Ban said.

But that collective power is conspicuous by its absence.

Shannon Scribner, Oxfam America’s humanitarian policy manager, told IPS the situation is serious and Oxfam is very concerned. At the end of 2013, she said, violent conflict and human rights violations had displaced 51 million people, the highest number ever recorded.

In 2014, the U.N. appealed for assistance for 81 million people, including displaced persons and others affected by protracted situations of conflict and natural disaster.

Right now, the humanitarian system is responding to four emergencies – those the U.N. considers the most severe and large-scale – which are Central African Republic, Iraq, South Sudan, and Syria.

These crises alone have left 20 million people vulnerable to malnutrition, illness, violence, and death, and in need of aid and protection, she added.

Then you have the crises in Yemen, where two out of three people need humanitarian assistance; West Africa, with Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea asking for eight billion dollars to recover from Ebola; in Somalia, remittance flows that amount to 1.3 billion dollars annually, and are a lifeline to millions who are in need of humanitarian assistance, have been cut or driven underground due to banking restrictions; and then there is the migration and refugee crisis in the Mediterranean, where almost 1,000 people have died trying to escape horrible situations in their home countries, Scribner said.

The United Nations says it needs about 16 billion dollars to meet humanitarian needs, including food, shelter and medicine, for over 55 million refugees worldwide.

But U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric told reporters Monday virtually all of the U.N.’s emergency operations are “underfunded”.

Last month, a U.N. pledging conference on humanitarian aid to Syria, hosted by the government of Kuwait, raised over 3.8 billion dollars.

But the United Nations is appealing for more funds to reach its eventual target of 8.4 billion dollars for aid to Syria by the end of 2015.

“We need more support and more financial help,” said Dujarric. “But, most importantly, we need political solutions.”

But most conflicts have remained unresolved or stalemated primarily due to sharp divisions in the Security Council, the U.N.’s only political body armed with powers to resolve military conflicts.

Asked if the international community is doing enough, Scribner told IPS there is no silver bullet for dealing with these crises around the world because there are so many problems causing them: poverty, bad governance, proxy wars, geopolitical interests playing out; war economies being strengthened through the shipment of arms and weapons; ethnic tensions, etc.

The humanitarian system is not built for responding to the crises in the 21st century.

She said Oxfam is calling for three things: 1) More effective humanitarian response by providing funding early on and investing more in local leadership; 2) More emphasis on working towards political solutions and diplomatic action; and 3) Oxfam encourages the international community to use the sustainable development goals to lift more people out of poverty and address inequality that exists around the globe today.

Scribner said the combined wealth of the world’s richest 1 percent will overtake that of everyone else by next year given the current trend of rising inequality.

The conflicts in the world’s hot spots have also resulted in two adverse consequences: people caught in the crossfire are fleeing war-torn countries to safe havens in Europe while, at the same time, there is an increase in the number of killings of aid workers and U.N. staffers engaged in humanitarian work.

Over the weekend, hundreds of refugees and migrant workers from war-devastated Libya died in the high seas as a result of a ship wreck in the Mediterranean Sea. The estimated death toll is over 900.

On Monday, four staff members of the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF were reportedly killed in an attack on a vehicle in which they were riding in Somalia, while four others were injured and remain in serious condition.

Ian Richards, president of the Coordinating Committee of International Staff Unions and Associations (CCISUA), told IPS: “We’re appalled at the loss of our colleagues in Garowe, Somalia and are very concerned for those injured. They truly were heroes doing great work in one of the world’s most dangerous locations.”

He said the United Nations has been clear that it will continue to operate in Somalia and “our work is needed there.”

“We support the work of our colleagues in these difficult circumstances,” he said.

At the same time, Richards told IPS, “We should not lose sight of a context in which U.N. staff and, in the case of local staff, their families, are increasingly targeted for their work.”

It is therefore important, he said, that the secretary-eneral and the General Assembly fully review the protection the U.N. provides to staff in locations where their lives are at risk, so that they may continue to provide much-needed assistance in such locations.

Oxfam’s Scribner told IPS attacks on aid workers have steadily risen over the years – from 90 violent attacks in 2001 to 308 incidents in 2011 – with the majority of attacks aimed at local aid workers. They often face more danger because they can get closer to the crisis to help others.

Because local aid workers are familiar with the landscape, speak the local language, and understand the local culture, and this also puts them more at risk, she said.

“That is why it is not a surprise that local aid workers make up nearly 80 percent of fatalities, on average, since 2001,” Scribner added.

Last year on World Humanitarian Day, the New York Times reported that the number of attacks on aid workers in 2013 set an annual record at 460, the most since the group began compiling its database, which goes back to 1997.

“These courageous men and women aren’t pulling out because they live in the very countries where they are trying to make a difference. And as such, they should be supported much more by the international community,” Scribner declared.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The writer can be contacted at thalifdeen@aol.com

The United Nations, which is sheltering over 600,000 refugees from war-torn Somalia, has been ordered by Kenyan authorities to relocate the camp in three months.

“We have asked the UNHCR (the U.N. Refugee Agency) to relocate the refugees in three months, failure to which we shall relocate them ourselves,” said Kenya’s deputy president William Ruto in a statement Saturday.

“The way America changed after 9/11 is the way Kenya will change after Garissa,” he said, referring to the university that was attacked by Somali militants on Apr. 2.

Dadaab, the camp near the border with Somalia, is the largest refugee camp in Africa.

Macharia Munene, professor of international relations at the United States International University-Africa, said the logistics of moving hundreds of thousands of refugees across the border would be “a tall order”.

But he said there were now safe areas within Somalia from where the al Shabab armed group had been chased out by African Union forces in recent years.

“Kenya is in an emergency situation… Each country has an obligation to look after its people first,” he told Reuters.

In an effort to reassure Kenyans that the government is concerned with their safety, Kenya has been building a 440-mile wall along the entire length of the border with Somalia to keep out al Shabab militants.

But according to security and policy analyst Abdulahi Boru Halakhe, the strategy is ill-conceived. “Building the wall assumes that all al-Shabab members come from Somalia and ignores the group’s cells in Kenya and easy routes through neighboring Uganda and Tanzania,” he wrote in an opinion for Al Jazeera news.

“In fact, the suspected mastermind of the Garissa attack was a Kenyan schoolteacher from the town, and one of his accomplices was a son of a Kenyan government official.”

Joshua Meservey of the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center expressed his view that Kenya was scapegoating the mostly Muslim refugees for their own security failings.

Further, suggested Mohamed Abdi, a refugee at the camp, moving the camp inside Somalia would boost al-Shabab’s recruitment efforts among the camp’s impoverished men, whose livelihoods would be threatened if their homes are displaced.

Meanwhile, the UNHCR claims it has not received any official communication from Kenyan authorities but rejects the apparent effort to use the refugees as scapegoats.

“Blanket measures that target people based on nationality or membership of a group will only cause suffering to innocent people and are usually ineffective,” said UNHCR spokesman Adrian Edwards. Three months, he added, is not realistic for such a relocation.

In a prepared speech after the murder of dozens of Kenyans last year, President Uhuru Kenyatta declared a national war on terror. “This is a war against Kenya and Kenyans,” he said. “It is a war that every one of us must fight.”

It was a speech he gave in December after the killing of 36 miners working in a quarry not far from the border with Somalia. They were reportedly slain by members of the terrorist group Al-Shabaab.

Once again, a few days ago, Kenyans reeled in shock, but this time at news of the massacre of at least 147 students – nearly all young Christian males – by a small rebel band filtered through the media.Despite its peaceful appearance, the [Garissa] university college was a known target for the fury of the Somali-based Al-Shabaab group which has been at war with Kenya for many years. The fact that only a small handful of security guards were on duty when the attack began shocked many.

The slaughter began in the dark pre-dawn hours of Apr. 2 while everyone slept until they were awakened by the popping sounds of gunfire. The militants urged students to cooperate. “If you want to survive, come out. If you want to die, stay inside,” they warned the still-groggy students.

“I knew those guys were lying,” said a 23-year-old student Elosy Karimi who described to a reporter how she hid in the ceiling above her bunk bed for over 24 hours.

President Barack Obama, still planning a trip to Kenya, commiserated: “Words cannot adequately condemn the terrorist atrocities that took place at Garissa University College, where innocent men and women were brazenly and brutally massacred. We join the world in mourning them, many of whom were students pursuing an education in the pursuit of a better life for themselves and their loved ones. “

“They represented a brighter future for a region that has seen too much violence for far too long.”

Garissa University College lies northeast of Nairobi, near to the border with Somalia. A small school with a staff of 75, it was recently upgraded to give technical and vocational degrees as part of Moi University. Computer science and information technology were introduced last year. But the bucolic nature of the college, highlighted by a flock of sheep, green leaves and natural springs, was apparent on the school’s website.

Despite its peaceful appearance, the university college was a known target for the fury of the Somali-based Al-Shabaab group which has been at war with Kenya for many years. The fact that only a small handful of security guards were on duty when the attack began shocked many.

It was particularly inexplicable as there had been recent warnings of an Al-Shabaab attack at Garissa and other universities. A travel advisory issued by the British government just days earlier had warned against travel to Garissa.

While some foreign media outlets describe Kenya as “powerless in the face of a ruthless terrorist organisation,” Kenya is a major military power in the region, having one of the highest defence budgets in Africa, thanks to two decades of a steady increase in military spending.

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), an independent research organisation, the country purchased 19.8 billion Kenyan shillings (216 million dollars) worth of advanced weapons in five years between 2010 and 2014, up from 919.4 million Kenyan shillings (10 million dollars) between 2005 and 2009 — marking a huge jump in the period — which is the highest in the East Africa.

Yet four gunmen managed to hold off elite counter-terror police and military units called to the scene while they systematically massacred “hostages.” This is hardly unprecedented,” Patrick Gathara, a security analyst wrote in Al Jazeera news service.

“Much the same happened at Westgate (Mall) where four gunmen supposedly kept hundreds of cops and soldiers at bay for four days, apparently taking time off to pray and relax while the security agents looted the mall.”

“The government responded with a crackdown that targeted the ethnic Somali population within Nairobi – little more than an exercise in scapegoating and extortion,” he recalled. “Similarly, Garissa itself, which is populated mainly by ethnic Somalis, has been the site for ‘security operations’ – another term for collective punishment – for well over half a century.”

Government’s failure to stem the rise in insecurity has not gone unnoticed in the Kenyan community, especially since Kenya’s incursion into Somalia in Operation Linda Nchi in 2011. A reduction of troops was expected in 2014 after complaints by the Somali government.

A Twitter feed titled #GarissaAttack quickly filled up with comments and complaints. Ory Okolloh Mwangi, well-known ‘Kenyan pundit’, wrote: “When you look at the resources poured into winning one single seat in Kajiado Central, and then how we are responding to Garissa. Ai?”

Senator James Orengo pleaded:  “We know very well the consequences of a war of occupation. We must withdraw our troops from Somalia to end this. We must rethink our strategy and have a targeted and principled way of engaging Somalia rather than put our people at risk.”

Questions are forming, wrote Gathara, about whether this disaster is just the latest in a series of preventable terrorist atrocities that have now claimed more than 350 lives in the last two years.

An earlier security operation, a week into the Kenyatta presidency, saw the indiscriminate arrest of over 600 Garissa residents, including newly-elected local leaders, by a security team the government itself had described as “rotten”, wrote Gathara.

“Now, after the latest Garissa atrocity, President Kenyatta has issued another directive of dubious legality,” continued Gathara, namely calling up 10,000 new officers despite a court order freezing police recruitment following a corruption-riddled exercise last year.

“What is Kenya’s plan as far as Somalia is concerned?” asked Abdullahi Boru Halakhe, East Africa researcher with Amnesty International, regarding the Kenya’s troops stationed in Somalia. “What does the exit plan look like? Is it two years? Is it three years”?

Edited by Phil Harris    

Credit: Oxfam/Petterik Weggers

By Lisa Vives
NEW YORK, Feb 24 2015 (IPS)

After twin suicide bombings at a popular Mogadishu hotel last week that killed 25 and wounded 40, news reporters were seen swarming through the city, spotlighting the victims, the assassins, the motives and the official response.

This left actor Barkhad Abdi, who played opposite Tom Hanks in the movie Captain Phillip and was making his first visit to Somalia since age seven, unlikely to have the usual paparazzi following his every move.Ordinary Somalis have been facing life without a lifeline since the shutdown of money transfers that have been key in rebuilding Somali lives.

Yet Abdi, a Goodwill Ambassador for Adeso, a Kenya-based development charity, was there to bring attention to the plight of ordinary Somalis, facing life without a lifeline since the shutdown of money transfers that have been key in rebuilding Somali lives.

The money – over a quarter of a billion dollars from the U.S. alone – comes from families in the diaspora, the charity Oxfam America reports.

“The small amounts of money that members of the Somali diaspora send their loved ones comprise Somalia’s most important source of revenue,” wrote OxfamAmerica on its website. “Remittances to Somalia represent between 25 and 45 percent of its economy and are greater than humanitarian aid, development aid, and foreign direct investment combined.

“Remittances empower women and help give young men alternatives to fighting in armed groups. The money is the country’s lifeline.”

Because Somalia lacks a formal banking system, small companies were established, run by money transfer operators who could safely and legally deliver money to relatives and friends in Somalia. These companies used bank accounts to wire the money but most of those banks have shut down including the California-based Merchants Bank just last month.

According to the banks, around one percent of money transfer firms could not be properly investigated and pass due diligence checks by the federal currency control office. Yet this decision ignored the 99 percent of money transfer businesses which have been operating in this sector for decades.

Most money wired to Somalia originates in the U.S.

The move by Merchants Bank to pull the plug on the money transfer network could force law-abiding U.S.-based Somalis to choose between three options, according to Professor Laura Hammond of the UK School of Oriental and African Studies.

“They can stop sending money to their relatives living in the Horn of Africa. They can try to find alternative legal channels, but as a result are likely to be charged much higher transfer rates, reducing the amount of money their relatives receive. Or they can use unregulated and illegal ways to send money.”

Opinion writer George Monbiot put it more strongly. The U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which triggered the bank closings, is, he charged: “The world’s most powerful terrorist recruiting sergeant… Its decision to cause a humanitarian catastrophe in one of the poorest, most troubled places on Earth could resonate around the world for decades.

“During the 2011 famine in Somalia, British Somalis saved hundreds of thousands of lives by remitting money … reaching family members before aid agencies could mobilise,” he wrote in The Guardian newspaper.

“Government aid agencies then used the same informal banking system – the hawala – to send money to 1.5 million people, saving hundreds of thousands more. Today, roughly 3 million of Somalia’s 7 million people are short of food. Shut off the funds and the results are likely to be terrible.

“Money transfers from abroad also pay for schooling, housing, business start-ups and all the means by which a country can lift itself out of dependency and chaos,” he continued. “Yes, banking has its uses, as well as its abuses. Compare this pointless destruction with the US government’s continued licensing of HSBC.”

Alternative, if more expensive, means of sending money legally, for instance through Western Union, are possible for some but not for people sending money to smaller towns and rural areas in Somalia and other parts of the Horn, where Western Union and smaller companies that still send remittances do not have a presence.

Instead, according to Oxfam, a large proportion of the 200 million dollars sent from the U.S. to Somalia each year will be forced underground. People will send money the way they did before Somali money transfer companies were formed: in cash, stashed in bags and pockets, or in other ways that will be impossible to track.

Meanwhile, as Abdi made a tour of his country of birth to see the impact of the diaspora dollars, he came in for a shock.

“Based on what you hear on the news, I expected to see a shattered country,” Abdi recalled from his visit. “But what I saw instead was a place full of resilience, entrepreneurship and hope.”

Accompanied by his sponsor, the Nairobi-based Adeso service agency, he said he met with young men who were learning how to become electricians to take part of the rebuilding of their country, and with women who were using newly acquired skills to come together and open successful businesses.

“When I was in Somalia I didn’t just see conflict, drought, and hunger,” Abdi said. “I saw people building a better future for themselves. And part of the reason why they’ve been able to do so is because of the remittances they receive from overseas. Let’s not threaten that lifeline and risk reversing all the gains that are being made.”

Hawala is one of Africa’s great success stories, wrote Monbiot. “But it can’t work unless banks in donor nations are permitted to transfer funds to Somalia.”

The report, “Hanging on by a Thread,” by Oxfam, Adeso and the Global Center on Cooperative Security, can be found on the Oxfam website.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

At a time when HIV rates have stabilised or declined elsewhere, the epidemic is still advancing in the Arab world, exacerbated by factors such as political unrest, conflict, poverty and lack of awareness due to social taboos.

According to UNAIDS (the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS), an estimated 270,000 people were living with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in the countries of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region in 2012.

“It is true that the Arab region has a low prevalence of infection, however it has the fastest growing epidemic in the world,“ warns Dr Khadija Moalla, an independent consultant on human rights/gender/civil society/HIV-AIDS.With the exception of Somalia and Djibouti, the [HIV] epidemic is generally concentrated in vulnerable populations at higher risk, such as men-who-have-sex-with-men, female and male sex workers, and injecting drugs users

The United Nations estimates that there were 31,000 new cases and 16,500 new deaths in 2012 alone. “Infections grew by 74 percent between 2001 and 2012 while AIDS-related deaths almost tripled,” says Dr Matta Matta, an infection specialist based at the Bellevue Hospital in Lebanon.

However, both Moalla and Matta explain that figures can be often misleading in the region, due to under-reporting and the absence of consistent and accurate surveys.

With the exception of Somalia and Djibouti, the epidemic is generally concentrated in vulnerable populations at higher risk, such as men-who-have-sex-with-men, female and male sex workers, and injecting drugs users.

In Libya, for example, 90 percent of those in the latter category also live with HIV, notes Matta. Furthermore, adds Moalla, most Arab countries do not have programmes allowing for exchange of syringes.

The legal framework criminalising such activities in most Arab countries means that it is difficult to reach out to specific groups.  With the exception of Tunisia, which recognises legalised sex work, female sex workers who work clandestinely in other countries are not safeguarded by law and thus cannot force their clients to use protection, which allows for the spread of disease.

Lack of awareness, the absence of voluntary testing and of sexual education, social taboos, as well as poverty, are among the factors driving HIV in the region. “Arab governments and societies deny the epidemic and the absence of voluntary testing means that for every infected person we have ten others that we do not know about,” stresses Moalla.

People living with HIV or those at risk face discrimination and stigma.  “More than half of the people living with HIV in Egypt have been denied treatment in healthcare facilities,” explains Matta.

This bleak scenario is compounded by the security challenges prevailing in the region which not only make it difficult to deliver prevention and other programmes, but also restrict access to services by those on treatment and cause displacement and loss of follow-up according to the UNAIDS report.

The war in Iraq that began in 2003, for example, led to the destruction of most of the country’s programmes and facilities under the National AIDS Programme and, according to Moalla, the national aids centre in Libya was recently burnt down.

In addition, in some countries, conflict has significantly increased the vulnerability of women. By 2012, for example, only eight percent of the estimated number of pregnant women living with HIV in the MENA region received appropriate treatment to prevent mother-to-child transmission according to the UNAIDS report.

Meanwhile, only a few governments have worked on effective programmes to fight the epidemic, although there are signs of the emergence of NGOs tackling the problem with people living with HIV and providing them with support.

“North African countries and Lebanon have generally done better than others, while Gulf countries are doing the least,” says Moalla, adding that less than one in five people living with HIV are receiving the medicines they need in the Arab region.

While some efforts have been made with the UNDP HIV Regional Programme pioneering legal reform in several countries, as well as drafting an Arab convention on protection of the rights of people living with HIV in partnership with the League of Arab States, these are not enough.

“The Arab world attitude taking the high moral ground on the issue of HIV is no barrier for the epidemic,” says Matta. “The region’s governments need to address a growing problem that is only worsened by the general upheaval.”

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Among the labyrinth of winding narrow streets just outside a major shopping centre in the Kumkapi neighbourhood of Istanbul is a rundown road, congested with shops and apartments stacked atop one another.

Istanbul’s “Somalia Street” – so called because immigrants from Somalia (and elsewhere in Africa) have adopted it as a staging post during long, rigorous journeys to find permanent homes. Credit: Hannah Tayson

Cars somehow manage to come barrelling down the street as people slowly move to the narrow pavement already full of food carts and clothes strewn out on blankets for sale. Trash lazily rolls past groups of men engaged in conversation while sitting on buckets or leaning against shop windows. The area feels oddly serene.

This street is host to a community of African refugees, with the majority comprising Somali natives, and aptly named “Somalia Street”. Through word of mouth and family ties, Somali refugees seek a temporary home in this nook of Istanbul, in order to find some respite from the political and natural disasters that have devastated Somalia for decades.

Istanbul has become a staging post for Somalis hoping to eventually travel on to Australia, Canada or the United States, migration trend watchers say.  Because of the constant population flux, it is difficult to estimate the number of refugees actually living on the street at any given moment, but street residents say that there are a few hundred Somalis living there.

Dalmar, 30, a Somali refugee, has only been in Istanbul for a month with his brother Amet, 20, and lives in a small apartment with 12 other refugees. This arrangement is very common here. Often, refugees will live in small apartments with 20 or 30 other people.

“Istanbul is very temporary,” said Dalmar. “The living conditions are poor. Istanbul is expensive, and it is very hard to find work here.”

Turkish labour laws require a passport and residence card for employment, neither of which refugees can easily obtain. This has led to much illegal work, usually consisting of manual labour and odd jobs.Through word of mouth and family ties, Somali refugees seek a temporary home in this nook of Istanbul [Somalia Street], in order to find some respite from the political and natural disasters that have devastated Somalia for decades

A refugee who has lived in Turkey for many years, Liban, 31, said he worked in various manual labour jobs when he first arrived in Istanbul. He pointed out that that the language barrier between Arabic and Turkish makes it “difficult to get jobs in the first place.”

Yet inhabitants appear to have established a unique community along the littered, cobblestone street. Most Somalis interviewed said they enjoy life in Istanbul. The community takes care of them as they arrive in droves. Often, refugees will find work with Kurdish shop owners, who seem rather protective of them.

During one interview with a group of refugees, a Kurdish man popped his head of his shop out to make sure they were not being harassed.

The Katip Kasim mosque stands on Somali Street, its low brick wall recently painted white and orange. The mosque is rather unassuming compared to the grandiose and elegant mosques around Istanbul.

Muammer Aksoy has worked as Katip Kasim’s imam for 19 years, and has seen the community change significantly. This area of Istanbul has always been a refuge for minority groups in Istanbul, beginning with Kurdish migrants from Turkey’s east. Romanian refugees arrived in the 1980s and 1990s. There has since been an increase in African refugees to the area, the majority arriving within the last five years.

During the holy month of Ramadan, Somalia Street unites. Somalis are very devout Muslims. Once the sun begins to set, the Katip Kasim mosque courtyard fills with people waiting in line to receive their dinner to break the fast, or iftar.

Imam Aksoy began the community iftar dinners eight years ago, after seeing a Somali refugee attempt to break his fast with a small piece of bread, and by drinking soiled water from the fountains used to wash feet before entering the mosque.

“It is my responsibility as the imam to take care of my community,” said Aksoy. “I don’t discriminate between people here. Everyone is welcome.”

The imam has enlisted a different shop owner on the street each evening to provide the iftar dinner for 300 people.

A long-time resident and family friend of the imam, Arzu, has also seen the change in the community. “Refugees come because they heard people take care of them here,” she said proudly.

Turkey and Somalia have an unlikely partnership. According to a 2013 report by the Norwegian Peace Building Centre, Turkey has established networks in Africa, Somalia in particular, to enable peace-building efforts and humanitarian initiatives. In turn, says the report, this “strengthens Turkey’s international image as a global peace actor.”

“The relationship between Somalia and Turkey is very recent. It was just in 2011 that this relationship began,” said Dalmar. “Now there are scholarships and programmes for students.”

Somalia receives more aid from Turkey than any other African nation, with 93 million dollars in 2011, and 1,500 Somali students received scholarships to study at the public Istanbul University in 2013.

Abdifitah, 25, who has been living in the community for one year, was a scholarship recipient. To take advantage of the opportunity, Abdifitah and his family moved together from Somalia. His family cannot find work, but has moved with him in order to support him.

“Istanbul gave me a chance to learn,” said Abdifitah.

Recently, Somali refugees have been moving to Turkey’s capital, Ankara, because work is easier to find, and housing is cheaper than in overcrowded Istanbul.

Liban lives with his family in Ankara, but makes a living as a translator for the local African football league in Istanbul. When asked if he would like to go somewhere else, he shook his head.

“When I was younger, I really wanted to go to America. Now, if someone handed me an American passport, I wouldn’t take it,” said Liban. “I have everything I want here.”

Freelance writer Hannah Tayson was a foreign correspondent intern with the Institute for Education in International Media (ieiMedia) in Istanbul during the summer of 2014. She can be contacted at htayson@scu.edu

Somalis deported from Kenya are greeted by Minister for Transport and Air Travel Said Jama Qorshel (blue shirt), State Minister for Foreign Affairs Buri Mohamed Hamza (shaking hands with deportee) and the director of Somali Immigration Department, General Abdullahi Gafow Mohamud (black shirt). It is estimated that some 500 Somalis have been deported, while a further 4,000 are detained in Kenya. Credit: Abdirahman Omar Abdi/IPS

By Muhyadin Ahmed Roble
NAIROBI, May 27 2014 (IPS)

Somalia’s State Minister for Interior and Federalism Affairs Mohamud Moalim Yahye has told IPS that the hasty repatriation and mass deportation of its citizens by Kenya could compromise recent, critical security improvements made by regional governments against the Islamic extremist group, Al-Shabaab.

“The unplanned and uncoordinated deportation of people, especially the youth, will create chaos and anarchy as there are no resources to support and create jobs for them,” Yahye told IPS by phone from Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital.

The Somali government has asked that Kenya suspend the current mass deportation of its citizens, which began early April, until the Tripartite agreement for repatriation of Somali refugees is implemented.

The agreement, which was signed last year by the two governments and the United Nations Refugees Agency, aims to send refugees back to Somalia over the next three years. However, the agreement only outlines the voluntary and organised repatriation of refugees to Somalia.

Yahye said that Somalia, where the unemployment rate for youth aged 14 to 29 is one of the highest in the world at 67 percent, did not have the capacity to receive and integrate large numbers of returning refugees and deportees.

As a result, security experts, government officials and politicians in Mogadishu and Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, have raised concerns that deportees and returnees could be vulnerable to recruitment by Al-Shabaab, which desperately needs new blood.

“These young men, if they join the militants, will be an asset that could help the group wreak havoc not only Somalia and Kenya, but the greater region of East Africa,” Zakariye Yusuf, an analyst with the International Crisis Group, told IPS.

Kenya is home to more than one million Somali refugees, half of whom are unregistered migrants, according to Kenya’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Trade.

Kenya’s Usalama Watch — which resulted in over 4,000 people, all most of all of them Somali refugees and migrants, being taken into custody — has resulted in the repatriation of about 500 people to Somalia.

Hundreds are awaiting deportation, according to the Somali Embassy in Kenya. Airline and travel agencies officials say a further 7,000 people — half of them youth — fled Nairobi to Mogadishu after the operation was launched.

Thousands of others are believed to have crossed the Kenyan border and returned to Somalia.

Because of their knowledge of the Swahili language and the culture of the region, Yusuf said these Somali youth could be assigned by Al-Shabaab to return to Kenya, and possibly other East Africa countries, to carry out terrorist activities.

“It will be easy for them to hide, infiltrate the society and run safe houses while coordinating operations than other members who haven’t lived in Kenya,” he added.

Al-Shabaab has been suffering from a lack of financial constrains after losing its foothold on Mogadishu and the port town of Kismayo. The group has also experienced a shortage of foot soldiers over the past three years. Hundreds of its fighters have either been killed, sneaked out of the country, or deserted over to the government, which is promised them amnesty, protection and a better future.

“These young men used to run small scale business or work as shop-sellers in Nairobi, but their life is being interrupted by the crackdown and the deportation,” Abdiwahab Sheikh Abdisamad, a Horn of Africa specialist at Kenyatta University in Kenya, told IPS.

“They are now hopeless back in their country and desperate for doing whatever could help them to make a living. That’s the type of recruits Al-Shabaab is looking for,” he said.

He added that the group, which claimed responsibility for September’s four-day terror siege on Kenya’s Westgate Shopping Mall that resulted in the death of about 67 people, was a dying horse.

“Sending or deporting people, especially young men back to Somalia, is simply giving a lifeline to Al-Shabaab, which has a history of forced recruitment of youth, at crucial moment,” said Abdisamad.

He explained that the deportees and returnees could join the militants either to earn a wage to support their families or for revenge because they feel humiliated and abused by Kenya.

He said the deportations created a situation where Al-Shabaab had an opportunity to recruit energetic and cheap foot soldiers.

“When you mishandle the issue of terrorism, it has a lot of repercussions and that’s what the militants wanted and waited for years for. As a result, nothing has improved in terms of security since the operation was launched,” Abdisamad noted.

Indeed, a senior Al-Shabaab commander Fuad Mohamed Khalaf said last week that his group would be shifting its war to neighbouring Kenya, and threatened to send teenage suicide bombers to Nairobi.

Khalaf urged Muslims in Kenya to fight against their government for the retaliation of their “Muslim brothers” killed in Kenya and Somalia.

Abdisamad pointed out that the operation, which has been marred by lack of clear counter-terrorism strategy,  abuses and harassment, has been counter-productive and serves as a perfect conduit for the Al-Qaeda-linked group’s recruitment.

11-year-old Hassan Abdullahi Duale works 12-hour shifts at a car-repair shop in Somalia’s capital Mogadishu. Credit:Alinoor Salad/IPS

By Muhyadin Ahmed Roble
NAIROBI/MOGADISHU, May 17 2014 (IPS)

Twelve-year-old Halima Mohamed Ali wakes up every morning at five am, but unlike her peers she does not go to school. Instead, she begins her duties as a nanny for five children, the oldest of whom is just two years younger than she is.

She starts off by making breakfast, then wakes the children and washes and dresses them in time for school or madrassa, institutions of religious instruction.

War and famine in Somalia have forced Halima, and thousands of others like herself, to abandon the dream of education and become workers instead. UNICEF statistics from 2011, the last time such data was collected, show that half of all children between the ages of five and 14 hailing from the country’s central and southern regions are employed.

In Puntland and Somaliland, which have been more stable than other parts of Somalia for the past two decades, more than a quarter of all children work for a living.

The grueling jobs for which they are hired – mostly manual and domestic labour – pay little but demand a lot.

Halima says she works from “sunrise to sunrise”, cooking, ironing, washing floors, bathing the children, and finally putting them to bed before calling it a day. “It is a very stressful job,” confessed the girl, who has never set foot in a classroom.

She’d love to shirk her duties and bury her nose in a book, but her 50-dollar monthly salary is a lifeline for her family of five, who have no other breadwinner.

Surrounded by her mother and young sisters on one of her rare half-days off, Ali told IPS, “If I miss even a single day of work, my family will go to bed hungry.”

It is a tremendous burden for a child, but compared to the hardships the Ali family has endured, sending young Halima off to work is not the end of the world.

Originally hailing from the Dinsor district in Somalia’s southern Bay region, located about 266 km from the capital Mogadishu, the family fled the deadly famine in 2011, narrowly missing becoming statistics along with the nearly quarter of a million pastoralists who starved to death as a fierce drought consumed the countryside and resulted in hundreds of thousands of livestock deaths.

When they finally reached Mogadishu, the family took shelter in a makeshift camp called Badbaado, which means ‘salvation’ in Somali, along with 50,000 others refugees.

At first, the camp’s occupants received food rations, shelter and medical assistance, Ali said, but when the United Nations declared an end to the famine in February 2012, the flow of aid slowed to a trickle. Few of the displaced have been able to find work – lacking formal education and possessing no skills beyond the ability to farm or rear livestock, they have turned to the only option open to them: sending the children out to make a living however they can.

Though Halima is exhausted at the end of her 17-hour workday, she is glad of the chance to provide for her family.

Her story echoes those of countless others in the East African nation, according to Mohamed Abdi, programme manager of Somali Peace Line, an organisation that promotes and protects the rights of children.

“Hundreds of girls are brought to Mogadishu from rural areas where there is [extreme] poverty and famine conditions … to work as domestic servants in middle-class homes. They work long hours for food, lodging and low wages, which they send back to their families,” Abdi told IPS over the phone from the capital.

“Lucky ones” like Ali get paid on a regular basis, Abdi said; many others have their meagre salaries withheld for months, are cut off from their families, abused and treated like slaves.

He strongly believes that the on-going violence across Somalia, caused by the outbreak of civil war in 1991, will ensure a steady stream of child labourers, as desperate families lose jobs, and hope.

“When we try to convince parents not to send their children to work, they ask us for alternative sources of income, which we cannot provide,” he admitted.

Citing a human development report released in 2012 by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Abdi said more than 70 percent of the population of 10.2 million are classified as “low-income”, with 73 percent of all Somalis living on less than two dollars a day.

The unemployment rate is one of the highest in the world, with 54 percent of all Somalis between the ages of 15 and 64 out of work.

Little Hands, Low Wages

In addition to being vulnerable to informal labour conditions such as long hours, children like 11-year-old Hassan Abdullahi Duale also receive lower wages than their adult counterparts, even when they perform all the same functions.

When his father was killed in a suicide bomb blast in Mogadishu two years ago, Duale – the only boy in the family – left school and took a job in a car-repair centre where he works 12-hour days to support his mother and two young sisters.

Dressed in his ‘uniform’ of an oil-soaked Arsenal T-shirt and matching shorts, Duale tells IPS that his uncle got him this job so his family would be able to eat. Though he is tempted to quit and go back to school, he feels responsible for his family.

With the idea of formal education a distant memory, his only hope is to make a career as a mechanic. For now, however, he is paid far less than his co-workers, and is sometimes even forced to do their jobs without earning a single extra coin for his efforts.

“On a good day, when there are lots of cars to fix, I earn 50 Somali shillings (about 2.5 dollars) a day. On bad days, I am just given my lunch and sent home with nothing,” said Duale, sweat dripping down his face.

“The adults earn about 150 shillings (roughly 7.5 dollars) each day, and sometimes they take my earnings by force. There’s nothing I can do and no-one to complain to, so I just wait for the next working day,” he added.

The director-general of Somalia’s ministry of human development and public services, Aweys Sheikh Haddad, said his country’s constitution bans child labour, adding that the government recently ratified an International Labour Organization (ILO) convention forbidding the worst forms of child labour.

But challenges in law enforcement mean these commitments on paper have not amounted to much in practice. Various studies and reports have found children as young as five years old engaged in virtually every industry, from construction to agriculture.

In addition to their exploitation for military purposes – operating checkpoints, becoming suicide bombers or taking up arms, for instance – children all across southern Somalia can also be seen working on the streets, washing cars, shining shoes and selling khat, a plant that contains an amphetamine-like stimulant.

“The government believes that making education more accessible to the children can help to eliminate child labour and we are in the process of [implementing] such programmes aimed to bring more children back to school,” Haddad told IPS.

“We have launched the ‘Go-2-School’ initiative, which aims to provide one million children with free education,” he added. However, these plans have yet to bear fruit: according to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), only 710,860 youth out of 1.7 million primary school-aged children are enrolled in any kind of education.

Without a drastic interruption of the vicious cycles that perpetuate child labour, the future looks bleak for Somalia’s youth.

Kisenyi slum, in Uganda’s capital, Kampala is believed to be home to a large portion of the country’s almost 12,000 Somali immigrants. Credit: Amy Fallon/IPS

By Amy Fallon
KAMPALA, Mar 31 2014 (IPS)

On a Friday afternoon men wearing kamis — long white traditional robes — climb the steps to Somcity Travel, a small family business and travel agency in Kisenyi slum, in Uganda’s capital, Kampala. The agency boasts that they “fly all over the world” but to one destination in particular — Somalia.

“In a day we may have up to five customers – four of them will usually be Somali,” says Mohamed Abdullahi, 25, the manager of Somcity Travel. The travel agency is situated opposite the the Al-Baraka cosmetic store and the Cadaysay shop, which provides mobile money transfer services and sells mobile phones and phone accessories.

“Some of them go [back] for holidays to Somalia. But they always come back. The business is kind of booming. We are booking a lot of tickets,” he tells IPS.

Kisenyi, informally known as Little Mogadishu, has been the heartbeat of the Somalia community in this East African country since the 1990s, according to Abdullahi.

But it was only in 2002 that businesses here started to take off. Today, Kisenyi’s streets are dotted with travel agencies, hotels, restaurants, petrol stations, supermarkets and other businesses — all of which are Somali-owned. And there is also a mosque.

“We are very tough when it comes to business, sometimes we can even challenge Indians,” Abdul Kadir Farah Guled, Charge De Affairs at the Somali embassy in Kampala, who came to Uganda around 1974, tells IPS.

“But our problem is our hot tempers. Sometimes we don’t like each other because of tribal conflicts. But at the end of the day, we support each other.”

Official statistics are hard to come by, but he estimates there could be up to 12,000 Somalis scattered throughout Uganda and that about 85 percent of Kisenyi’s population is Somali, with a large number of them being refugees and Ugandans of Somali-origin. It is believed that the slum could be home to over 4,000 Somali refugees.

The area is a place of transition for many — a stepping stone to a better life for many residents and workers.

“Somalis get respect from Ugandans and the government also supports Somalis,” says Abdullahi. Above his desk, a framed portrait of Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni stares down at him. On the wall alongside it is a Brussels Airlines poster declaring “Africa, all wrapped up for you.”

Abdullahi used to live in Towfiq in the Somali capital, Mogadishu. In 2007, he left the Horn of Africa nation, along with relatives and friends, aged just 17.

“I came here to get an education and live a life [that is] different from [the one I lived] in that place where there is civil war,” he says.

Militants belonging to terrorist network Al-Shabaab were flushed out of Mogadishu in 2011 but still control many rural areas of the country today.

When Abdullahi came to Uganda, where his uncle, Ahmed, had resettled in 2003, he couldn’t speak English. In Somalia the official tongue is Arabic. But today Abdullahi converses impeccably in English and has completed both his O and A levels. Now he works six days a week at Somcity Travel, earning about 200 dollars a month.

“It’s getting better in Somalia but there are still some problems, like homes are bombed. There’s a problem walking at night.”

For most Somali’s coming to Uganda for the first time, the language barrier is a big problem says Shukri Islow, 28, the founder of NGO Somali Youth Action For Change. She founded the organisation to help empower Somalis here and bridge the gap between the two communities.

“When you know the language you feel a sense of belonging,” says Islow, who was born in Somalia and left the country when she was eight. She has lived in Sweden, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, before settling in Uganda in 2009.

“We give them that inspiration, motivation and empower them that they can do it it’s never too late, even if you’re 20.”

Today Islow, who graduated in November from Uganda’s Cavendish University with a bachelor’s degree in international relations and diplomacy, is the face of the Somali youth community in Uganda.

She also counsels  Ugandan African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) soldiers who are deployed to her homeland on how different Somalia is and what to expect when they get there.

Uganda was the first country to deploy troops under AMISOM to Somalia in 2007. A 22,000-strong AU force operates there under a United Nations mandate. Uganda leads the force, with 6,223 troops, but in early March said they would send up to 410 extra to guard U.N. facilities.

The last time Islow was in Somalia was in 2002 when the situation was “much, much better”.

“Right now you don’t know who’s going to kill you tomorrow, and you don’t know the reason. You’re being attacked for your lifestyle or ideology,” she tells IPS.

She’s aware that even if she returns home for a holiday she will be a target.

“I’m more at risk [from Al-Shabaab] if I go there because I’m all over social media and my pictures with Ugandan soldiers are [online],” says Islow.

She has relatives still living in Somalia and, eventually, she would like to return home permanently.

“Of course I’d like to go back because you go east and west, home is the best,” she says.

For the time being she will continue to live elsewhere and hopes to further her studies in Melbourne, Australia.

Abdullahi also hopes to do the same. He has an uncle in Australia and has enrolled in a management course that starts in July at a Sydney college.

“I want to continue with my education and at the same time work and have a new life, a better life, get married and have kids,” he says.

In January, the Somali Embassy in Uganda held its first-ever engagement with the Somali diaspora here to discuss the ongoing stabilisation and peace process in the Horn of Africa nation. Officials hope that educated youth, like Abdullahi and Islow, will return to help rebuild the country.

Already the diaspora has contributed much to Somalia. A 2011 report by the U.N. Development Programme estimates that the Somali diaspora is between one to 1.5 million people. The report stated that Somalis abroad provided much-needed humanitarian assistance back home through remittances – estimated between 1.3 to two billion dollars a year.

Last July, Air Uganda started direct flights from the country’s Entebbe International Airport to Mogadishu.

Abdullahi hasn’t returned to Somalia since he left. And if he does, like many of his clients, it may not be on a one-way ticket.

“Now I’ve adapted to this life of living abroad and some things are not favourable in Somalia so I can’t live there for good,” says Abdullahi.

Somali Army soldiers patrolling a street in the capital Mogadishu on Feb. 23, 2014. Concern grows as hundreds of soldiers who were fired from the army in a restructuring drive protested against their termination of service. Credit: Ahmed Osman/IPS

By Ahmed Osman
MOGADISHU, Feb 27 2014 (IPS)

Residents of Mogadishu have raised concerns about their safety after the Somali army recently fired hundreds of disgruntled soldiers, many of whom are believed to still be in possession of their arms.

Somali military officials said early in February that 700 army soldiers were “relieved of their duties” following the restructuring of the army to make it a more professional force.

Somali National Army (SNA) chief General Dahir Khalif Elmi said that the sacked military personnel were unfit for service as they include elderly and disabled soldiers but added that they would be taken care of by the government.  “This is without a doubt adding to the insecurity in the city and other places because these soldiers do not have any other source of income and that is unsettling for all of us.” -- Mogadishu resident Hawa Ali

However, shortly after their sacking, hundreds of armed soldiers took to the streets in the Somali capital, Mogadishu, to protest against the decision.

“Releasing an army of 700 soldiers complete with their weapons into the city is not only dangerous to people’s security but outright irresponsible,” Ahmed Ahmed, a Somali lawmaker, told IPS.

Ahmed said that the soldiers could be potential recruits for the radical Islamist group, Al-Shabaab. The sacking of the soldiers comes just as the government and the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) announced that plans were under way to launch a military campaign against the extremist group Al-Shabaab.

Barre Farah, a retired Somali army officer, said that the decision to “retire” the army personnel was necessary to “modernise and professionalise” the Somali army but expressed doubt about the timing of the move.

“One cannot get why the army decided about it at this time and in this manner, which clearly can harm the security and possibly give ammunition to our enemy,” Farah told IPS in Mogadishu.

Farah said that there was a possibility that the sacked soldiers could join the insurgency as a last resort, thus making it difficult to remove Al-Shabaab from its strongholds in central and southern Somalia.

He, however, said he did not believe recent reports that claimed some of the fired soldiers and army officers had already joined the extremist group.

Soon after the soldiers’ dismissal, residents of Mogadishu, who are already weary of the growing insecurity and attacks on the capital, voiced concern that the soldiers could further destabilise the country.

“This is without a doubt adding to the insecurity in the city and other places because these soldiers do not have any other source of income and that is unsettling for all of us,” Mogadishu resident Hawa Ali told IPS.

Somali government soldiers have been accused of setting up illegal checkpoints in and outside Mogadishu and along thoroughfares that connect Mogadishu with south and central Somali in order to extort money from people. Many fear that the fired officers will now start doing the same.

Mohamed Ugaas, a teacher in Mogadishu, said that allowing the soldiers to leave the army with their weapons was a “recipe for disaster”.

The army remains tight-lipped about the weapons and it is not clear why they were allowed to take them home.

However, one sacked army officer, who asked for anonymity for fear of reprisals, said that although most of the soldiers still had their weapons, they are not a threat to the security of Mogadishu.

He added that none of the 700 soldiers have joined the militants and called the reports baseless.

“We are angry about how we were dealt with by the army chief but that has never made any one of us contemplate joining a terrorist group we fought against for years. That is impossible,” the ex-army officer told IPS.

He said he hoped the international community would intervene and help them integrate into civilian life for which they are “not prepared”.

“We need those of us unable to work because of age or disability to be given a decent pension and care. And those willing and able to work need to be retrained to get civilian work or given financial support to start a business,” the former officer said.

However, Somali government military officer, Commander Yasin Jaylani, explained that the sacked soldiers would be taken care of and that new agency would soon be set up to facilitate this.

“You don’t expect the army to simply fire soldiers at random and not have plan to care for them. That is not the case and will never be the case in the future. We are modernising our army to better serve the country,” Jaylani told IPS.

He declined to comment on the allegation that the army did not disarm the fired soldiers saying that will be “looked into”.

Somalis have been unable to use the internet on their mobile phones after Islamist group Al-Shabaab banned the biggest telecom company from providing the service to its customers. Credit: Ahmed Osman/IPS

By Ahmed Osman
MOGADISHU, Feb 16 2014 (IPS)

Osman Ali, the owner of an electronics shop in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, has been hard-hit since Al-Shabaab forced the biggest telecoms company to switch off its mobile internet service in this Horn of Africa nation.

“I don’t understand why the government has not done anything to deal with the situation. It could at least try and find an alternative for the people. This has thrown the country into darkness. We are left behind,” Ali told IPS from his shop, explaining that his sales had dropped dramatically since the shutdown.

In January, Al-Shabaab issued a 15-day ultimatum for local giant, Hormuud Telecom, to stop providing mobile internet and fibre optic services because it said they were used by Western spy agencies to collect information on Muslims.Hormuud officials said company staff were forced “at gun point” by Al-Shabaab fighters to switch off the mobile internet service.

According to Internet World Stats, more than 125,000 of the country’s 10 million people use the internet in Somalia. Tens of thousands of people who relied on Hormuud’s services have been unable to access the internet on their mobile phones from Feb. 6. However, fixed broadband services are still available.

The Mayor of Mogadishu, Mohamed Nur Tarzan, told the media that Hormuud officials had said company staff were forced “at gunpoint” by Al-Shabaab fighters to switch off the mobile internet service.

Hormuud, which claims to be the market leader in south and central Somalia “with over 60 percent of market share in both mobile and broadband services”, has not officially commented on the ban.

However, a Hormuud official told IPS on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to speak to the media, that they had no option but to comply.

“I don’t think we had another alternative … we are just business people and cannot confront an armed group’s orders. We tried our best to convince them [Al-Shabaab] that our services do not harm the public in any way, but that was in vain,” the official said.

The company has switched off the service not only to areas controlled by Al-Shabaab but across the centre of the country and in Mogadishu. However, the ban has not affected the northeastern regions of Puntland and the northwestern province of Somaliland where separate mobile networks operate.

Although officials have condemned the move, the government has faced widespread criticism for its “inaction”.

However, following the news of the group’s ultimatum, in a statement on Jan. 11, the then interior minister Abdikarim Hussein Guled condemned the ban and cautioned companies against cooperating with the militants.

But local social media has been awash with criticism of the government, saying that if it had at least provided enough security to local companies it would have had the authority to order the continuation of their services.

Maryan Ali, a 20-year-old student in Mogadishu has not been able to access the internet on her smartphone for nearly a week now.

“I used to follow news and information about the world with my mobile and communicate with family and friends but that is no more,” she told IPS.

Al-Shabaab said in a statement  that mobile internet services were the cause of air strikes that they said were carried out by “the enemy” in areas under their control and “led to the killing and hunting of Jihadists.”

Mohamed Yusuf, an academic in Mogadishu, said that the extremist group’s actions to ban mobile internet services in southern and central Somalia were triggered by the Edward Snowden revelations of widespread U.S. government surveillance programmes it maintained in and outside the country.

In 2013, Snowden, a former technical contractor for the National Security Agency, released secret documents showing how the U.S. government was tapping global internet and phone systems on a massive scale.

“Al-Shabaab has not hidden the fact that their move was prompted by the Snowden revelations and that they feared they could also be a key target for U.S. government spying,” Yusuf told IPS in Mogadishu.

Yusuf also said that the major reason for the group’s decision was the possibility that mobile internet connections could be used to track the leaders and commanders of Al-Shabaab, which the U.S. government considers a terrorist entity and a legitimate target for its drone attacks.

But Mustaf Jama says his mobile internet connection was his sole source of information for his university studies, but now he is unable to access information online from just anywhere and is forced to use internet cafes.

“It was convenient to use the mobile internet to check facts and information as well as news but that is all gone. We are going back a quarter of a century and are being left behind. We don’t know why we are being punished this way,” Jama told IPS.

Former Al-Shabaab combatants who handed themselves over to the Somali government. Credit: Abdurrahman Warsameh/IPS

By Muhyadin Ahmed Roble
NAIROBI, Oct 22 2013 (IPS)

For years the Islamist extremist group Al-Shabaab was seen as the most cohesive, united and powerful force in the failed state of Somalia. But it is now disintegrating like a house of cards because of internal divisions and power struggles within its leadership, according to Abdiwahab Sheikh Abdisamad, a history and political science professor at Kenya’s Kenyatta University.

“They [the militants] are transforming into warring mini-groups, hunting each other due to their deteriorating ideological differences, and of course [the group is] on the brink of civil war within itself,” Abdisamad told IPS in Nairobi.

Al-Shabaab claimed responsibility for September’s four-day terror siege on Kenya’s Westgate Shopping Mall that resulted in the death of more than 70 people, and for the Oct. 13 bombing in Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Abba, which killed two Somali nationals who were believed to be suspects.

But the militant group, which formally linked with Al-Qaeda in 2012, has been in a leadership and strategy dispute that has divided it into two factions – global jihadists and local nationalists.

Abdisamad sees the militants’ internal divisions as a golden opportunity for the Somali government to bring less extremist and nationalist-minded elements on board.

“Initially, Al-Shabaab came together by default, not by design,” he said, adding that if the Somali government did not capitalise on the rift and reach out to the nationalist faction, the global jihadists would win and become stronger.

“And then, the future of Somalia will be uncertain, the stability of the region will be in question and no doubt the stability of the whole world will be in question too,” Abdisamad said.

He explained that the moment that turned the group’s internal war into an open and public battle was when Al-Shabaab’s two co-founders and top leaders, Ibrahim Haji and Moalim Burhan, were killed by members of the group in June.

Jama, who was better known by his moniker “Al-Afghani” due to his Al-Qaeda training in Afghanistan, had a five million dollar U.S. bounty on his head.

But Al-Shabaab spokesman Sheikh Abdiaziz Abu Musab denied a split within the group and had said that Jama and Burhan were intentionally killed in a shoot-out when they rejected an arrest warrant from a Sharia court.

Two foreign jihadists, the American-born Omar Hammami known as Abu Mansoor Al-Amriki, who was on the FBI’s most wanted list with a five million dollar reward for his capture, and Osama al-Britani, a British citizen of Pakistani descent, were also killed by Al-Shabaab last month.

Al-Amriki was perhaps the most well-known Al-Shabaab propagandist because of his English jihadi rap videos. In 2012 he was the first member of the group to reveal its split through a short online video clip in which he said his life was in danger.

He was on the run and survived several assassination attempts by the Amniyat unit, an intelligence division of Al-Shabaab led by Ahmed Abdi Godane, who is also known as Sheikh Mukhtar Abu Zubeyr, and is the group’s supreme leader. Al-Amriki was eventually killed in September.

Abdisamad explained that Godane is a supporter of global jihad who believes that Somalia belongs to all Muslims across the world. “[Godane’s] global jihadist faction has an agenda beyond Somalia and wants to spread Islam from China to Chile, from Cape Town to Canada,” Abdisamad said.

Another member of the group who was aligned to the nationalist-minded faction to which Jama belonged, Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, escaped from Al-Shabaab’s largest remaining base in Barawe, which is located some 180 km south of Mogadishu.

He surrendered to the Somali government following the murder of Jama and Burhan. According to Abdisamad, Aweys and his faction are considered to be less extremist as their intention is to establish an Islamic state within Somalia borders and not bother neighbouring countries.

“The religious nationalism faction is against globalising the conflict in Somalia, indiscriminate assassinations and the killing of clerics, scholars and everyone who seem to have not favoured the militants. For years they campaigned to replace Godane, which they failed [to do],” Abdisamad said.

The group’s internal division is believed to have contributed to their loss of strategic towns in southern and central Somalia, including part of the capital, Mogadishu.

The Bakara market in the capital city was their main source of funding as the group used to generate millions of dollars from there through taxation and by extortions from telecommunication companies and the business community at large. Al-Shabaab was ousted from Mogadishu in 2011 by Somali forces and African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) troops.

Exactly a year later, the group lost its last remaining and greatest revenue source – the stronghold of Kismayo, a port city in southern Somalia.

According to a United Nations report, Al-Shabaab used to generate between 35 to 50 million dollars annually from the southern seaports of Kismayo and Marko. Both ports are now under the control of Somali forces and AMISOM troops.

“Such a loss of economic sources and internal divisions have led hundreds of Al-Shabaab fighters to defect to the government,” Somali journalist, Mohamed Abdi, told IPS. The group, he said, failed to keep paying their fighters regularly “as they used to do” before the financial constraints emerged.

Abdi said that the financial constraints and the open rift within the group’s leadership have largely demolished the morale, loyalty and capability of the group’s foot soldiers. It has lead to hundreds of them deserting to the government or fleeing the organisation and going into hiding in Somalia or in neighbouring countries.

But Abdisamad Moalim Mohamud, Somalia’s former minister for the interior and national security and a current member of parliament, told IPS that the group remains a threat not only to Somalia, but also to regional and global security.

“They have lost more of their foot soldiers and can’t counter Somali and AMISOM forces directly any more. But they are more capable of conducting effective guerrilla-style warfare such as suicide attacks and storming places like Westgate Mall in Nairobi and the U.N. compound in Mogadishu,” Mohamud said by phone from Mogadishu.

He said that regional intelligence sharing and developing joint monitoring platforms and common anti-terror strategies within regional governments could be used to prevent such a threat. But he disagreed that their internal division had something to do with nationalism.

“Their rift has a lot to do with the leadership change of Al-Qaeda than local politics and it is more about pursuing hegemony over the command and control of the group,” Mohamud said.

Police tape marks the compound where a bomb explosion killed two men on Sunday, Oct. 13, 2013 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Credit: Jacey Fortin/IPS

By Jacey Fortin
ADDIS ABABA, Oct 21 2013 (IPS)

The explosion went off at 2:40 on a Sunday afternoon, on a tree-lined side street in Ethiopia’s capital city of Addis Ababa. The area was a quiet one – home to foreign diplomats, domestic civil servants and several embassies – and the blast was strong enough to kill two men, startle the neighbours, and demolish a small home.

But if the government’s current theory is correct, the carnage could have been much worse.

Sunday, Oct. 13, was the day of a big football match – a rare shot at the World Cup playoffs for Ethiopia, which ultimately lost against Nigeria in Addis Ababa. Given the debris found at the site of the explosion, including suicide belts and an Ethiopian team jersey, investigators think the men may have been planning to detonate near the football stadium in central Addis, where thousands of fans and security workers had gathered.

But something went wrong, and the two suspects – Somali nationals, according to the government – never made it out of the house before their explosives went off.

Al-Shabaab, a militant group based in Somalia, claimed responsibility for the attack on its Twitter account, but its details were off. “We Claim Responsibility for Today’s Bomb Blast in #AddisAbaba, #Ethiopia, that Left Nearly 10 Kuffar [disbelievers] Dead,” said the Monday tweet, which greatly exaggerated the number of casualties and was not posted until the day after the actual explosion.

“It is a plausible assumption that Al-Shabaab may be connected to the crime,” Kjetil Tronvoll, an Ethiopia expert and senior partner at the International Law and Policy Institute, told IPS, noting that Al-Shabaab has repeatedly denounced Ethiopia and threatened to carry out attacks.

“Ethiopia has a standing high-alert security vis-a-vis Somalia,” he added. “[The recent explosion] gives justification to such alertness.”

The Ethiopian government is adamant about clamping down on extremism in all its forms, said Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn at a press conference this month. “Extremism often degenerates into terrorism, so we have to fight extremism as much as we can, and that has no compromise at all.” This approach has garnered criticism from some Ethiopian Muslims – including ethnic Somalis – who claim their communities are unfairly targeted.

“The terrorist incident, if connected to Al-Shabaab, may sadly contribute to a possible stigmatisation of the Somali population at large in Ethiopia,” said Tronvoll.

The Ethiopian government said it would not change its approach to national security on its own soil, and would focus instead on its borders, since the two suspects in the Sunday explosion arrived illegally.

“We will not make any changes to domestic security – that situation is already intact,” government spokesman Redwan Hussein told IPS. “We will only make sure we are more secure when it comes to people getting into the country in the first place.”

In Somalia, Al-Shabaab has positioned itself as a bulwark against Ethiopian and Western influence ever since its inception as the military wing of the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), an Islamist governing body that rose to power in Somalia in early 2006. In its early days, it garnered some public support as a counterweight to the Ethiopian troops that effectively ousted the ICU from Mogadishu in late 2006 with backing from the United States.

Over the next few years, Al-Shabaab set up a governing system based on Shariah, or Islamic law. Its territory expanded across most of southern Somalia and the group forged closer bonds with Al-Qaeda, formally linking with it in 2012. But that process wrought some discord between those Al-Shabaab leaders who envisioned a global Islamist movement and those who sought to focus on domestic issues first and foremost.

The cracks began to show after 2011, when Ethiopian and Kenyan troops moved in to bolster troops from the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM). At the same time, Al-Shabaab’s refusal of humanitarian aid during a devastating famine was already eroding its public support. In the two years since, Al-Shabaab has been pushed out of its former strongholds in the capital city of Mogadishu and the port city of Kismayo, and vicious leadership scuffles have become a threat to cohesion. More and more, the organisation has struggled to conscript voluntary fighters, relying instead on forced recruitment.

Some analysts see the attacks Al-Shabaab has taken credit for – including the Addis Ababa bomb this week and the massacre that killed 67 at a Nairobi mall last month – as last gasps rather than shows of power. The organisation remains a very real threat, but it no longer enjoys the level of support it once did.

“There might be some fringe elements here and there on both sides, who could use [the Addis Ababa attack] to air some grievances,” Alula Alex Iyasu, an Ethiopia-based analyst at the Institute for Peace and Security Studies, told IPS.

“But Muslims and Christians have been living side-by-side in Ethiopia, and in Somalia the vast majority despise Al-Shabaab and affiliated groups. So I’d imagine they’d condemn the Addis bomb wholeheartedly just as if it had happened on their own soil.”

Somalia has lately been making strides in its effort to end two decades of failed statehood. A new constitution and federal government were established last year, with President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud at the helm.

The international community has pledged billions of dollars to rebuild the war-torn country, and the United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called this week for AMISOM to bolster its troops in Somalia, already numbering about 18,000, with another 4,400.

As Somalia struggles toward order, peace reigns around the explosion site on Rwanda Street in Addis Ababa’s Bole neighbourhood, where a high concentration of ethnic Somalis live side-by-side with Ethiopians, and where children of both ethnicities used to play together in the very compound where the perpetrators of Sunday’s bomb lived and died.

In the days following the blast, police tape was stretched across the gate and a few federal policemen guarded the site. But other than that, life along the leafy street was progressing largely as normal, with ethnic Somali and Ethiopian residents mingling at small shops and stopping to chat on street corners.

If the perpetrators hoped to stir up divisions between Somalis and Ethiopians, as Al-Shabaab once did to rally support for its cause, it would appear they missed the mark — and lost their lives into the process. The Ethiopian national security apparatus, meanwhile, has gained one more reason to keep up its controversial tactics.

“Ethiopia takes these kinds of threats seriously,” said Iyasu. “Somalia has been in this precarious situation for the past 20 years, so in a way this is nothing new for the Ethiopian government.”

A trader in Mandera Town, North Eastern Province, Kenya. After the attack on the Westgate Shopping Mall in Nairobi by the Somali Islamist militant group Al-Shabaab, suspicions towards the Somali community in North Eastern Province are growing. Credit: Miriam Gathigah/IPS

By Miriam Gathigah
NAIROBI, Oct 8 2013 (IPS)

Somali militia groups are beginning to operate in Kenya’s remote and arid North Eastern Province, an area that borders southern Somalia – a former stronghold of the extremist group Al-Shabaab.

“There is a growing number of Kenyan Somalis who are sympathisers of Al-Shabaab and they are setting up their own small militia groups to send a message to the [Kenyan] national government,” Elwak Abdi, an expert on peace and security from Liboi, a border town in Kenya’s North Eastern Province some 18 km from the Somali border, told IPS.

He added that “a significant number of the Somali community is armed.”

“In areas such as Wajir, Isiolo and Mandera [counties in North Eastern Province] there is constant armed conflict. This is forcing residents to move from one place to another due to the fear of the unknown. Even worse is the [fact that] small militia groups have to be paid to provide protection,” Abdi said.

There has been an ongoing dispute between the two East African nations over their border since 2011 when the Kenya Defence Forces (KDF) waged a military offence against Al-Shabaab in southern Somalia. The KDF took control of certain southern Somali regions as well as some Kenyan regions including Ijara, Garissa and Liboi.

In 2012, tensions between the neighbours escalated as gas and oil deposits were discovered offshore. Both countries claim ownership of waters where the deposits have been discovered.

As Kenya recovers from the Sep. 21 attack on the Westgate Shopping Mall in Nairobi by the Somali Islamist militant group Al-Shabaab, suspicions towards the Somali community in North Eastern Province are growing. Many were afraid to speak to IPS for fear that the Kenyan government is illegally tapping their mobile phones.

Ibrahim Ahmed, executive director of the Kenya Somali Consortium that seeks to address conflict arising from the disputed border, said that all was not well in the expansive arid North Eastern Province. He said that the Kenyan government had done little to “make people aware that not all Somalis are terrorists. This may compromise the fight against terror.”

Because of the largely porous 700-km Kenya-Somali border, the number of Somalis entering into Kenya is growing by the day. Government statistics show that at least 630,000 Somalis live in Kenya. The increased migration has also brought with it an apparent increase in arms smuggling.

Residents in the North Eastern Province claim that some groups of Somalis are bringing arms easily into the country. Kenya’s ministry of internal security estimates that up to 680,000 illegal firearms are in the hands of civilians nationwide. However, there are no exact figures about arms smuggled across the Kenya-Somali border.

The easy availability of small arms has increased inter-clan tensions and violent conflict among the Kenyan Somalis in North Eastern Province and compromised national security. Abdi said “even the World Food Programme is unable to travel to places such as Wajir [in North Eastern Province] to offer humanitarian assistance for fear of abduction and death.”

“Somalis in North Eastern Province identify with their counterparts in Somalia. Although Kenya has been stable for five decades, North Eastern Province is still a hardship area, and since the government has done little to pacify the residents, they seem determined to make the region ungovernable, just like the Somalis have done in Somalia,” Ahmed told IPS.

However, he added that the “increase of small arms and light weapons across the country should not be attributed to the porous Kenya-Somalia border alone, and not just Somalis are involved.

“I am involved in disarmament in northern Kenya and am aware that most weapon smugglers are foreigners, particularly Russians and Ukrainians. Ships dock in Somalia with arms where they are also stored to be transported across East Africa.

“Why is it that no one is talking about the border issues along Kenya and Ethiopia, Sudan and even Uganda, which are also conduits for dangerous weapons coming all the way from abroad through Somalia?” Ahmed asked.

Since the attack on the Westgate Shopping Mall there have been calls to send Somali refugees back to Somalia. But Hussein Ali, a resident of Garissa town, told IPS that this “is enlarging the rift between Kenyan Somalis and the government.”

“How can the government tell Kenyan Somalis that we are one, and solicit their help to fight Al-Shabaab when they still haven’t provided them with the same privileges that other Kenyans enjoy?” said Ali, referring to the Somalis living in the disputed border area in Kenya’s North Eastern Province and the lack of investment in the region.

According to Ahmed, North Eastern Province is without proper infrastructure and there is poor health care, no access to running water, and pupils mostly study under trees because of a lack of proper infrastructure.

“Kenyan Somalis will always identify themselves more with their Somalia counterparts and ought to be given the autonomy that the Somalis in Ethiopia enjoy,” Ahmed said.

Islamic studies curriculum in Somalia’s schools is a radical form of Islam that analysts say is contributing to the growing militancy of the country’s youth. Credit: Ahmed Osman/IPS

By Ahmed Osman
MOGADISHU, Oct 4 2013 (IPS)

Mukhatar Jama has been teaching at a secondary school in Mogadishu for the past decade. Religious education is part and parcel of the curriculum of all schools in Somalia, but he says most parents are unaware of exactly what their children are being taught – a radical form of Islam.

“The Islamic studies curriculum you hear is the pure Wahhabism, exported from Saudi Arabia, that teaches children that all those who are not Wahhabi are non-believers, including the children’s parents, and that it is ok to kill non-Muslims,” Jama told IPS.

While there are no statistics on how many schools there are in Somalia, most here follow the Saudi curriculum, which advocates and inculcates Wahhabism. This is a far more radical interpretation of Islam than the moderate Sufi school that older generation of Somalis follows.

The radicalisation of Somalia’s youth has already started spilling over the war-torn country’s borders to its neighbours, influencing the region’s fragile security situation."Al-Shabaab, which means youth in Arabic, has realised the potential of Somalia’s young and are working to capitalise on it in our schools." -- analyst Omar Yusuf

It has taken root not only in Somalia and Kenya, but in the whole sub-region, Omar Yusuf, an analyst in the Somali capital, Mogadishu, told IPS.

“The event of Westgate is perhaps one of many wake-up calls for governments in the region to tackle the growing radicalisation and the logical next step of deadly militancy in the youth of the region,” Yusuf said.

The Sep. 21 attack on the Westgate Shopping Mall in Nairobi by the Somali Islamist militant group Al-Shabaab left more than 70 dead and dozens injured.

The Al-Qaeda-linked Al-Shabaab had repeatedly vowed to target Kenya after the country’s troops crossed over the border into Somalia in 2011 and ousted the radical group’s fighters from key areas in southern Somalia, including Kismayo.

Al-Shabaab advocates the establishment of an Islamic State not only in Somalia, but in East Africa. It adheres to the fundamentalist Wahhabi school of Islam. The extremist group’s ideology seems to be gaining ground in Somalia due to a number of factors.

“Think about it, schools in Somalia provide Al-Shabaab with the radical ideological teaching for the youth and when they graduate what they just need is to give [them] military training and there you have a qualified Al-Shabaab fighter,” Yusuf said.

Both teachers and parents seem divided over what is being taught at Somali schools, with some accepting it as part of the children’s religious education, and others expressing concern that their children are being indoctrinated to be Wahhabists without their consent.

“I came to know that my son gets indoctrinated with extremist views at school. He had to change schools a number of times but all schools in Mogadishu use the same Wahhabi books that we took from Saudi Arabia. The whole country will covert to Wahhabism in no time,” one parent, who sought anonymity for fear of reprisals, told IPS.

Another parent, Omar Kulmiye, disagreed that his children were being radicalised by this teaching. “I don’t [know] much about religion but I think since they are learning Islam it is ok with me and I have not sensed anything different in my children since they started school five years ago,” he told IPS.

Hussen said three factors have contributed to radicalisation and militancy among Somali youths. Lack of political participation, and of employment and education opportunities draws youth to militant groups, she said.

“The search for a ‘second family’ and a sense of belonging offered by militant groups…has attracted many youths,” Hussen said. “Young recruits are offered a group to belong to, a job with salary as well as marriage – things that are otherwise hard for them to obtain in Somali society.”

The unemployment rate for youth aged 14 to 29 is 67 percent — one of the highest in the world. According to the United Nations Development Programme’s “Somalia Human Development Report 2012”, 70 percent of Somalia’s 10.2 million people are under the age of 30.

The attack on the Westgate Shopping Mall comes as no surprise as Al-Shabaab has been spreading its radicalising tentacles in the region, local security expert Muhumed Abdi told IPS.

“This was a crisis that has been simmering for years because the radical groups have found not only Somalia but neighbouring countries fertile ground to grow and recruit, with governments in the region seemingly unprepared,” Abdi said.

However, the Somali government, along with the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and international partners, is currently trying to implement an ambitious initiative to put one million children to school. Through this Go 2 School Initiative the government has also proposed changes to the curriculum in the hope that this will help fight radicalism. According to UNICEF, enrolment rates here are among the lowest in the world with only four out of every 10 children attending school.

But the government faces huge resistance from private school administrators and parents who fear the changes would make education devoid of religious moral teaching for the young.

Islamist groups have condemned the campaign as an attempt by the government to westernise Somali education and sideline religious studies.

Numerous calls by IPS to Somalia’s ministry of education remained unanswered while one official declined to comment on the allegations that schools are used as breeding grounds for militancy in Somalia.

But Hussen said the Somali government recognised that youth are the “future of Somalia” and need empowerment.

“However, the government has not been very forthcoming in the implementation of this … as youth are still very much marginalised from the political arena,” she explained.

Yusuf agreed, but said the approach needs to be far more radical and start with a critical look at the kind of education Somali children receive in school during their formative years.

“There is a need for holistic approach to youth problems in Somalia because Al-Shabaab, which means youth in Arabic, has realised the potential of Somalia’s young and are working to capitalise on it in our schools. We need to change that,” Yusuf said.