TFG Leaders Abroad: Who Is Watching the House?

“What is the difference between a vulture and a TFG President?
A TFG President gets Frequent-Flier Mileage”. An Old ‘Amended’ Lawyer Joke
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In the late 1970s, I was an independent student in Cairo preparing for the General Certificate Examination (GCE). I had a great deal of discretionary time and was fortunate enough to have landed a job with the Somali Airlines office in Egypt. One day, the prominent Somali radio broadcaster Yassin Haji Ismail, came to our office along with another man. I asked Mr. Ismail where he was headed. He told me that he and his colleague were the nucleus of a Somali delegation going to Belgrade, Yugoslavia, to attend a conference. I curiously asked him when such a gathering was supposed to commence. “Actually, the conference ended yesterday but we are going there any way,” replied Mr. Ismail. I was baffled by his nonchalant answer but kept quiet because, by this time, I had a fair idea what these government delegations were all about. I saw many government ministers going through Cairo at the time and doing anything but diligently representing their country. I knew of some ministers who were especially fond of belly dancers as well as Cairo’s burgeoning night life.

It was already embarrassing that Somalia had missed that Yugoslav conference but at least Mr. Ismail’s delegation was small and much less cumbersome.

In the span of one week in January 2011, the TFG President, Sheikh Sharif, Prime Minister Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed “Farmajo”, Speaker of the House Sharif Hassan Sheikh Aden, and several other ministers were out of Somalia at the same time. I kept wondering what was left of what was only last week characterized by the UN Special Envoy to Somalia, Ambassador Mahiga, as a “lean” and “technocratic” cabinet. These leaders’ trips covered at least four of the five continents. All these leaders, obviously, would justify their official visits, but I wonder who was actually watching the house during their absence.

President Sheikh Sharif, the Interior Minister, the Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, and a number of parliamentarians arrived in Djibouti on January 16th. The presidential visit was described as a series of consultations with leaders of the host country as well as participating in the launching of police training for 500 Somali recruits that is currently being offered by AMISOM. Then on January 18th, Sheikh Sharif and his entourage left for Egypt to attend an Arab League conference that was supposed to discuss, among other things, the recent upheavals in Tunisia.

That same week, the Speaker of the parliament also attended a conference in the UAE for Muslim parliamentarians.

Perhaps, the most embarrassing conference was the one that took place in Oslo, Norway. Three separate Somali delegations went to that country to participate in a conference that was supposed to tackle Somalia’s security and humanitarian issues. First, the Somali Ambassador to EU and Italy, Nur Adde, and Mogadishu Mayor, Mohamoud Ahmed Nur “Tarzan”, came together; Then the TFG Foreign Minister, Mohamed Abdullahi Omaar, came with his delegation, and finally Deputy Minister in the TFG Prime Minister’s Office, Sahro Mohamed Ali Samatar, came with her own delegation. The conference was organized by the Nordic Union of Somali Peace and Development organizations. All the guests were speaking on behalf of the TFG but each delegation was surprised to see the other. The Norwegian government officials must have been confused by the presence of these Somali officials in their midst.

Can anyone blame the TFG leaders for escaping the claustrophobic environment of Villa Somalia?

At least one TFG Minister, Dr. Abdinur Mohamed, was in Pakistan meeting with Somali students. The Education minister is an old buddy of mine and we both graduated from the same university in Ohio. Although I haven’t seen or talked to Dr. Abdinur since 1986, I wasn’t surprised that his mission to Pakistan seemed productive. Abdinur is a hardworking man with exceptional leadership qualities.

Prime Minister Farmajo went to the U.N, gave a speech there, had a break to visit his family in Buffalo, NY, and then left for Italy to attend a conference there.

Are all of these conferences important enough for such high-ranking Somali officials to attend?
For instance, the Arab League conference in Egypt was attended by a handful of head of states. Many countries were represented by foreign ministers.

I guess there are more questions than answers regarding this phenomenon of frequent-flier mileages.

Sheikh Sharif has more frequent-flier mileage in his two-year tenure as TFG President than Siad Barre had in 21 years of ruling Somalia. But then, Barre did not have to worry about a radical group gunning for him every time he left Villa Somalia. Barre rarely attended UN sessions, OAU gatherings, or Arab League conferences during his tenure.

I hope the TFG leaders will stay in Villa Somalia for the remaining seven months of their term and start working on some of the pressing issues that need to be tackled before launching another flurry of air travel; prompting screams of what Italians would say, “Chi sta badando la casa?” (Who is making sure that the house [is being watched]?).

What Do Somali Men Want?

In early January of this year, about 5,000 red-winged birds fell from the sky over a mile of land near Beebe, Arkansas (USA). The incident generated an intense speculation as to what led to the demise of these birds. Was it a disease that killed the birds? Were they poisoned? It became apparent, though not conclusively, that there was an odd explanation for the puzzle; noise. The Arkansas Game and Fish Commission Spokesman Keith Stephens stated that the birds, most likely, perished as a result of booming noise which could have startled them from their roost and caused them to die from stress.

In my informal talks with Somali men, the issue they complain the most has been what they call ‘too much noise’ emanating from their women. “Our women are boisterous” (Qaylo badan) some of the men quipped. The good news is that no Somali man is in imminent danger of perishing due to the alleged frothing and yelling of Somali women.

This article is in response to my colleague Fathia Absie’s well-articulated and thought-provoking piece, “Enchanting and Reminiscing” that appeared in Wardheernews.com in December 2010. Ms. Absie, in a trip to Ottawa, had the opportunity to get together with ten smart, hard-working, and sensitive women. Among the issues that the group informally discussed was the absence of men in these women’s lives, and to the surprise of Ms. Absie, the women were not married. When she inquired about the absence of men in their lives, the women gave her a litany of legitimate grievances; from dashed hopes, shirking responsibilities, unmet expectations to tendencies to marry young women in Africa. I wanted to know what some of the Somali men were actually complaining about regarding Somali women. I am not here to speak on behalf of Somali men but instead I would like to share with the readers some of the issues that Somali men were talking about.

Four issues have transformed the relationship between Somali men and women. They are, a) modernization, b) civil war, c) exposure to Western societies, and d) the rise of religiosity. The Somali civil war had incalculable psychological effect on many Somalis because it led to traumatic events such as experiencing violence, displacement, and undue trauma. The war disrupted not only the economic power of the country but also the family unit as it led to separation of spouses, loss of spouses, and chronic unemployment.

The arrival of Somali families into Western communities as refugees undermined the traditional role of men being providers to their families. For instance, the American welfare system is set up in a way that empowers women, in the name of protecting the children, but at the same time it indirectly makes husbands irrelevant. The welfare checks are given to the wives and, if husbands want to leave the household, then the better. Why there are so many single mothers on public assistance is a question that can partially be attributed to the diminishing role of husbands and lack of employment opportunities.

Then, there is the element of the rise of religiosity among many Somalis. Many Somali males, unfortunately, have abused the practice of polygamy. Many men have taken multiple wives when they are not in a financial position to even take care of one soul. In certain cases, the wife and the children are sent away to Cairo or Damascus and the husband stays behind in Europe or North America to foot the bill. There was a case of one man who took his family to Cairo, but instead of returning to the USA directly, he stopped by in Syria and got married. Furthermore, the man ceased sending money to his family in Egypt until the wife’s family had to send her, and her children, one-way tickets back to the States. Upon her return, the woman found out that her husband was furious and that he started the process of divorcing her because she had “disobeyed” him and left her “post” without his permission.
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At the risk of oversimplification, Somali men want what Somali women crave for; Love, trust, respect, and emotional support. In addition, Somali men may want to be recognized as the head of their families. Men feel that their role as the sole breadwinner has eroded and, with that, they lost respect from their women. Contrary to popular books that men and women are entirely different (i.e. John Gray’s famous book, Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus), the two sexes, though they may differ in gender, are not from different species. Dr. Christopher Balzina, in his book, The Secret Lives of Men, reiterates that when all is said and done, men, like all humans, want love and emotional closeness. In a Gallup poll commissioned in 2001 by Rutgers University’s National Marriage Project in Piscataway, New Jersey, the majority of the respondents said that they wanted a “psychological companion- someone who shares their aspirations and fits into their life in a spiritual way”. According to the head of the project, “they [respondents] are not just looking for someone to chan ge diapers and do dishes. They want a soul mate”.

Perhaps, Dr. Laura Schlesinger, an American psychologist and a talk show host, has been a vocal critic of the disintegration of families. In her controversial book, The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands (2004), Dr. Laura, as she is commonly referred to, lashes at women who fail to grasp the essence of men. To her, there is no complexity involved in what is generically called “men”. She says, “Your basic male is a decent creature with simple desires: to be his wife’s hero, to be his wife’s dream lover, to be the protector and provider for his family, to be respected, admired, and appreciated. Men live to make their women happy”. Dr. Laura advises women not to harangue or mother their husbands because “if a man can’t find peace in his own home, where he should be able to feel relaxed, accepted, loved, and content, he brings hate coming home”. In other words, the more a woman avoids “tearing down a husband’s necessary sense of strength and importance” the better she gets a harmonious marriage. Women have the real power in marriage and can make their husbands happy or miserable depending on the way they dispense-or deprive-what men simply want; acceptance, approval and appreciation.

Many men would find Dr. Laura Schlesinger’s caricature of men as too simplistic. But one writer took upon herself to train her American husband who was annoying her by his disorganization and the way he hovered around her talking about various topics while she cooked, leaving dirty socks and used tissues on the floor, and constantly losing his keys. Amy Sutherland’s piece “What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage” in The New York Times (June 26, 2006) –later published as a book-was an attempt to improve her relationship with her husband. “I wanted-needed- to nudge him closer to perfect, to make him into a mate who might annoy me a little less, who wouldn’t keep me waiting at restaurants, a mate who would be easier to love”, she said. The writer was writing a book about the techniques animal trainers use to make, for instance, dolphins flip or elephants paint. It is a simple strategy: you reward good behavior and ignore the bad one, and the writer found out that “the same goes for the American husband”. Ms. Sutherland realized that animals do tricks not because trainers nag at them but because they are rewarded. Trainers use what is called “less reinforcing syndrome” (L.R.S). When, for example, a dolphin does something wrong, the trainer does not respond in any way; avoids eye contact, and then goes back to work. The idea is, according to Sutherland, “any response, positive or negative, fuels a behavior. If a behavior provokes no response, it typically dies away”.

The techniques helped Ms. Sutherland improve her marriage. If her husband lost his keys and bugged her about finding them, she would simply ignore and would keep doing what she was doing. Instead of allowing her husband to crowd her in the kitchen when she was cooking, she would either ask him to help her cut some of the vegetables or give him a bowl of snack far away from the kitchen so he could munch. But who said men are simple creatures. One day, Ms. Sutherland came home after a visit from her dentist. She was edgy and kept complaining incessantly about her excruciating pain, but her husband was calm and listened to her without uttering a word. Then she realized that her husband was giving her L.R.S silence and was, in fact, training “the American wife”.
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Somali men have mostly complained about the following issues;

1. Yelling. There is a perception among some of the Somali men that Somali women shout a lot. Of course, Somali men have difficulty asking why women yell at them in the first place.

2. Lack of respect. Somali men also mention that they do not get much respect from their

women. The men want to be recognized and treated as the head of their household. In the West, that has been an issue for many women. Some women want that responsibility for themselves whereas others want to equally share responsibilities by having collective leadership.

3. Weddings. I have heard numerous men complain about their women going to weddings. Most of the complaints are about the frequency of these weddings and the lateness they are concluded. But one man told me that he hated his wife going to weddings because “she always dresses nicely for weddings and never for me”.

4. Police. Some women are fast to call on the authorities or throw their husbands out of their homes over arguments. It is great that women have the law on their side but some women go overboard and abuse the system. What is odd is that 90% of the times, the women take back their husbands. I saw a Somali man who was brought to court on domestic violence charge but it turned out that his wife was upset because she thought the man was headed to Africa, not to visit his mother, but to get married.

5. Home Meal Cooking. Some men have brought the issue of home meal cooking because apparently they neither get it nor do they know themselves how to cook. What is strange is that many Somali men are spending a great deal of money dining out without the company of their families, day in and day out. One Somali restaurant owner bragged that most of his patrons were, in fact, married men.

6. Lack of Quality Time for Couples. Some men told me that their wives were so busy with the children and household chores that they were too exhausted to spend quality time with them. One man who went to Africa and got married to a ‘young’ girl allegedly claimed that his wife had lost interest in intimacy.

Some Somali women have given up on Somali men. One woman told me a crude joke;
“What is the difference between Somali men and U.S. Savings Bonds?”
“The bonds mature!”

But there are others who still have faith in Somali men despite the disappointments. A female friend aptly summarized the whole issue of Somali men’s complaints as the following,”; Men want to lead us without being the breadwinners; they want us to respect them and be “Raalliyooyin” (proper traditional wives) yet they do not show us any respect; they do not want to help us with the household chores, and men want their children to listen to them when they do not spend time with them; they have all the time for their friends discussing politics at cafes and no time whatsoever for their wives and children”.

Somalia's Islamic Groups: Assets or Liabilities?

“When an elephant is down, even the frog will kick him.” An Indian Proverb.
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In Bob Woodward’s new book, Obama’s Wars, there is a story cursorily mentioned about a group of Somali militants who were planning to disrupt Obama’s inauguration through use of explosives. There was “a credible intelligence” about the plot to the extent that the White House had “a contingency plans to cancel the inauguration”. Rahm Emmanuel, Obama’s Chief of Staff, is quoted as saying, “We might have to shut this down. We would have to be prepared for that”.

There is no explanation in the book as to why Somali militants would attack the inauguration proceedings of the incoming American president especially when they had not been able to dislodge a weak TFG entity in their very own capital of Mogadishu? There has never been an incident in American in which a presidential inauguration was disrupted. Nevertheless, the people in the White House were not taking a chance about the impending Somali terrorist attack. No one should be surprised when it comes to the chronic failures of America’s intelligence community. It was only a month ago when a story was uncovered about a petty shopkeeper in Quetta, Pakistan, who had deceived the CIA, the Pentagon, Britain’s MI6, and the Afghan government by posing himself as a top Taliban leader. The man was given thousands of dollars and he even met Afghan president Hamid Karzai. The latest episode of intelligence meltdown is the Wikileaks conundrum. An army private, Bradley Manning, who was stationed in Iraq, found, downloaded, and copied hundred thousands of sensitive military and diplomatic documents and gave them to Wikileak group. It is mind-boggling that a petty soldier such as Manning had access to such classified information and would cause diplomatic nightmare for the USA across the globe. To add insult to injury, the United States government spends $53 billion dollars a year on intelligence. Someone must have fed these poor American intelligence officers the wrong information about the alleged Somali militants’ long arm reach.

Yet, such has been the case of Somalis for the last two decades. The country has become the boogeyman for all sorts of characters. It wasn’t very long ago when Yemen’s president Ali Abdullah Saleh told a visiting American delegation, “If you don’t help, this country [Yemen] will become worse than Somalia”. It takes the head of one failed state to recognize another failed-state.

Somalia has not made things any easier for itself. The country has made conflict an art form; no effective central government for the past 20 years, experienced tortuous civil war, sustained forced and voluntary mass exodus, watched part of its territory secede, tarred by brutal religious extremism, invaded by a neighboring country all the way to its capital, and still dabbles with rampant international piracy?

Why is the conflict in Somalia dragging for so long? What are the factors that make peace in Somalia difficult to attain? Why did all the twenty attempts of reconciliation conferences fail? Is Somalia a terror-riddled country? What are the Islamic Groups that are contending for power? Why has the United States’ role in Somalia been pockmarked with failures? What needs to be done to save Somalia from itself? These are questions that the three books discussed here have raised. The focus in this article will be on the Islamic groups that comprise the lion’s share of these books.
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Books Discussed In This Article
Afyare Abdi Elmi, Understanding the Somalia Conflagration: Identity, Political Islam, and Peacebuilding, London: Pluto Press, 2010.
Shaul Shay, Somalia between Jihad and Restoration, New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2011. Bronwyn Bruton, Somalia: A New Approach. New York, Council on Foreign Relations Special Report No. 52, 2010.
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Afyare’s book, Understanding the Somalia Conflagration, is unique because the author provides a new perspective on the Somali quagmire. He brings the Islamists’ viewpoint in the current state of affairs. In the book’s introduction, Afyare makes no qualms whatsoever of placing himself in the research that he has done. He was influenced by two heavyweights in Somalia’s cultural and religious spheres; Poet Mohamed Ibrahim Warsame ‘Hadrawi’ (Habar Jeclo), and Sheikh Mohamed Moalim Hassan (Hawadle). Hadrawi was, and still is, a cultural icon whose resistance to Siad Barre’s regime landed him in prison. Afyare was influenced by Hadrawi’s poems and the poet’s deep commitments to peace, justice, equality, non-violence, and the preservation of the Somali people’s culture. Hadrawi has blamed what he calls “Western colonialism” for causing “all the social ills” that Somalis are suffering from today.

As for Afyare’s religious influence, it was that of late Sheikh Mohamed Moalim Hassan whose name is not as well-known as Hadrawi’s but whom still had immense influence over many Islamists. Sheikh M. Moalim Hassan was undoubtedly the father of Islamic revivalism in Southern Somalia. He was pivotal in planting the seeds for Somalia’s religio-political movement, before he got arrested in 1975 and then languished in prison for many years thereafter. Afyare, though not a student of Sheikh Mohamed Moallin in the 1970s, was indirectly influenced by the Sheikh through the latter’s disciples.

For starters, Sheikh Mohamed Moalin was a graduate student at Al-Azhar University in Cairo in the 1960s when president Jamal Abdul Nasser of Egypt was cracking down the Muslim Brotherhood (al-Ikhwan al-Muslimoon). When Sheikh Moalim returned to Somalia, he began his famous Tafseer sessions in Abdulkhadir Mosque, better known as Maqaam, in Mogadishu. His students were mostly young and impressionable youth who imbibed his new approach of presenting Islam as a way of life. The predominant mode of thinking at the time was the traditional way Somalis view religion; as a sphere for wadaads (clerics) who do marriages, divorces, healings, etc. Sheikh Moalim was instrumental in showing his students the relevance of Islam as a spiritual, political, social, and economic force. That in itself was quite revolutionary.

The million dollar question is what the fate of the Islamic revivalism would have been had Sheikh Mohamed Moallim not been arrested in 1975 at the time when the young Islamists’ student movement, al- “Al-Ahli”, was gaining momentum The movement was led by Abdulkhadir Sheik Mohamoud (Lel-Kase). Within three years of the Sheikh’s incarceration, the young Islamic movement splintered into two groups. (Afyare is wrong when he says that the two groups were Jama’a Islamiya and Islah). In actuality, the two groups were ‘Takfir Wal-Hijra’, led by Abdulkhadir Sheikh Mohamoud, who at the time was in exile in Makkah, and Jama’ Islamiyah. Mohamoud Isse (Abgaal) was the leader of the Jama’ movement, and it attracted many followers and harnessed new allies. The Wuhdatul Shabab group from the North merged with Jama’ Islamiyah and the union morphed into what became the largest Islamic group in Somalia. The name of the organization became Al-Ittihad al-Islami (AIAI) under the leadership of Sheikh Ali Ismail Warsame (Habar Jeclo).

Afyare’s discussion of the Islamic movements is refreshing and perhaps it is arguably the best part of the book. But his treatment of these groups with kid-gloves exposes the very problem of the researcher being a part of the research. In his book, Afyare argues that Islamists have a national agenda and that they should be included in the peace process. While there is nothing wrong with that view, there is nowhere in the book when one will encounter any kind of critical portrait of the Islamists; past and present. If you want to know how AIAI managed in the Northeast between March 1991 and June 1992, or Luuq afterwards, or how the Al-Shabab and Hizbul Islam have been running the areas they control in Somali South, then you will be disappointed. In passing, Afyare states that AIAI was well-loved by the populace in the Northeast until a certain figure named Abdullahi Yusuf (Majertein) organized a revolt against them by portraying the militants as Hawiye invaders. Afyare’s one-sided analysis of the Islamists, as choir boys, raises questions of his impartiality as a scholar. Here are some of the issues that Afyare discusses that are worth-mentioning;

1. Afyare’s discussion of Islah organization is an attempt to rewrite history. Islah is the branch of the International Muslim Brotherhood in Somalia. There are two types of Muslim Brotherhood organizations in Somalia; the local Ikhwan and the International Ikhwan. While to the layperson all Islamists are “Ikhwan”, these groups in fact come in incalculable varieties and see themselves as distinct ideological groupings. The Islah organization is the branch of Muslim Brotherhood that is a member of the International Muslim Brothers which is based in Cairo. Islah was founded in Saudi Arabia in 1978 by five Somali immigrants/students in the Kingdom. They were Sheikh Mohamed Garyare (Sheekhaal), Ali Sheikh Ahmed (Sheekhaal), Mohamed Yusuf Hassan (Sheekhaal), Abdalla M. Abdalla (Reer Aw-Hassan), and Ahmed Rashid “Hanafi” (Hawadle). The local Ikhwan group is the Tajamuc which at times is referred as “Ala Sheikh” as of Sheikh Mohamed Moallin Hassan. The two groups have a common ideology but, for a while, they also had a common antipathy to one another. Many years ago, one of the founders of Islah told me a preposterous story that Sheikh Mohamed Moalim, who at the time was a political prisoner, was in fact a paid informant for Siad Barre’s government. These days the two groups have established a modicum of cooperation. The Islah group is not a mass movement and the Tajamuc followers are numerically insignificant. The Tajamuc members are likely to align themselves with various Islamic groups but the Islah, which not long ago, was officially known as “Al-Harakah al-Islamiyyah” (The Islamic Movement) has generally eschewed in entangling with political alliances. What Afyare does not challenge is the notion that there was an organized International Brotherhood (Islah) presence in Somalia before the 80s. There was none. The difference between Sheikh Mohamed Moallin and Sheikh Mohamed Garyare was the fact that Sheikh Moallin was very involved, on the grass-roots level, with the youth; both guiding them and critiquing them. Sheikh Garyare, a highly-respected religious figure, was more or less a loner who did not hold religious circles like Sheikh Moallin and Sheikh Ibrahim Suuley (Dir). The Islah group, however, has been very active in the relief and educational sectors and was instrumental in founding and running Mogadishu University campuses, both in the capital and in Bossasso. The movement is seen by some as an elitist group. According to a Crisis Group Report, “Somalia’s Islamists”, _“Al-Islah organization is dominated by highly educated urban elite whose professional, middle class status and expatriate experiences are alien to most Somalis.” Other than succeeding in recruiting former TFG president, Abdiqassim Salat Hassan, the Islah can now boast of having several cabinet ministers in Farmajo’s TFG government. Islah is a moderate Islamic group compared to the Jihadist groups like AIAI, al-Shabab and Hizbul Islam. But its secretive nature and ties to an 82-year old anti-democratic International organization might be problematic. (For two contrasting views on The Muslim Brothers see, The Muslim Brotherhood: Burden of Tradition, by Alison Pargeter and, The New Muslim Brotherhood in the West, by Lorenzo Vidino. Ms. Pargeter, the optimist of the two writers, urges the West to engage in a dialogue with this major movement whereas Vidino of the Rand Corporation sees the Brotherhood as wolves in sheep’s cloths because the movement shares ideas with the very militant groups such as al-Qaeda that the West is fighting against). Given the high level educational background of Islah leaders, the movement has yet to share with the Somali populace what its national program is. It is easy to say, “Islam is the Solution”; a true and noble proclamation. But that slogan does not help one to run a country. In fact, all the Islamic groups in Somalia lack a national program to lead the country out of its abyss. After all, according to Afyare, the Islamists would inevitably rule Somalia.

2. Afyare also sees the now defunct Al-Ittihad Al-Islami as a major Islamic movement that was very popular when it briefly controlled Luuq and Bossasso before the group was defeated by Somali militias such as Somali National Front (Marehan) and Somali Salvation Democratic Front (Majertein), respectively. He argues that the AIAI brought safety and corruption-less rule. There is an anecdote of a young witness testifying in court. The judge asks him what would happen to him if he lied. The Witness says,”Yes, I will go to hell”. Then the Judge asks, “What else?” The witness gets irritated and screams, “Isn’t that enough?!” The question for Afyare is; “What else”? What else did the Islamists do in Luuq and Bossasso other than bring law and order? Perhaps, repression, intolerance, and blatant invasion of people’s privacy. In other words, they brought a world where fear and humiliation became the norm and not the exception. Joseph Stalin ran a complex super power regime by imposing discipline and order but he killed millions and led by reign of terror. The AIAI was welcomed by the Northeastern people with open arms and without residual animosity or ill-feelings regarding their clan makeup. But it did not take long before the AIAI alienated the very people that had received them. It is amazing how many Muslims initially welcome Islamic groups without prejudice and how many of these groups fail to capitalize on the goodwill because they lack the basic political awareness to function properly. The Salafis and the Ikhwan unfortunately share this phenomenon. For instance, Hamas which is a Muslim Brotherhood entity that controls the lives of 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza without any challenge from other Palestinian groups yet it has shown the world how a repressive one-party regime truly works. Yes, there is an economic blockade on Gaza but the militant group missed an opportunity of sharing power with other segments of the society by suppressing freedom of speech and gathering. The Sudanese Brothers under Hassan Turabi did the same after 1989. In fairness, in 1997 the AIAI leaders realized their own disastrous actions and opted for disbanding their organization.

3. Afyare ably identifies the important roles of clan identity and Islamic identity among the Somalis. Islam serves Somalis as a unifying force and a rallying point when there is an external threat. Sayyid Mohamed Abdulle Hassan used Islam to fight against British colonialists, and even the leaders of the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC) used Islamic slogans against the invading Ethiopians. The problem is that clan identity and Islamic identity can be fluid and at times it might be difficult to an Islamist, or unpredictable, as which one will emerge the most dominant. During the AIAI battle with Mohamed Farah Aidid, the leaders of that multi-clan organization were reported being divided along clan lines. One former AIAI leader told me some time ago while I was doing research on the Islamic movements, about this paradoxical dichotomy. “Some Hawiye members of the AIAI did not want to fight against Aidid at the Arare Bridge standoff near Kismayo,” said this Islamist who himself is Hawiye with a PhD in Islamic Studies. The AIAI leadership sent an all-Hawiye delegation to Aidid to negotiate with him so the warlord would not attack the armed militia. A member of that delegation told me that Aidid received them well but rejected the AIAI’s offer to withdraw. Aidid told them he wanted to crush Darod forces which were holed in Kismayo and that the AIAI fighters were standing in the way of him accomplishing his goal. He asked the Ittihad militia to lay their arms and go unharmed. It is interesting to note here that Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, the current leader of Hizbul Islam, was part of that AIAI delegation but, in fairness, he was not one of those in favor of accommodating Aidid. To go back to the point of reconciling clan identity and Islamic identity, there is a general perception, or misperception, of Islamisits being a Hawiye phenomenon. Afyare himself states that “the overwhelming majority of Islamists are from the Hawiye sub-clans…While the Islamic identity cuts across all Somali clans, the Hawiye clans’ dominant position within the Islamic movements disproportionally affects Somali politics. Many Somali clans have opposed the domineering Hawiye for the last two decades.”

Overall, Afyare’s book is an important addition to Somali studies. The author has good ideas about conflict resolution and provides practical recommendations that students of Somalia and the country’s leaders will find valuable. Afyare’s discussion on why Somalia’s peace conferences failed is ground-breaking as he identifies key variables that led to the demise of these gatherings.
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Shaul Shay’s Somalia between Jihad and Restoration was first published in 2008, but the first paperback edition, has just come out recently. It is ironic that Shay, an Israeli ‘scholar’ who heads the Israel Defense Forces History Department and is a Fellow Researcher at International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel, has written a polemic. Unlike Afyare’s scholarly book, Shay’s book is a travesty and is replete with so many factual mistakes that would make students of Somalia cringe with indignation. It is obvious that Shay is not interested in Somalia as a complex country but sees the country in the narrow prism of terrorism and counter-terrorism. Shay sees Somalia as a country riddled with Islamic terrorists who are a threat to neighbors and to the West. He likes what he sees in Somaliland in terms of its political and economic developments and argues that it should serve as a model for the lawless South and its Islamic radicals. Shay’s other recommendations are; the strengthening of the TFG, the formation of a national army, sealing the country’s borders “at sea, in the air and on land…in order to prevent the infiltration of Islamic Jihad entities, and to thwart the smuggling of combat means to subversive factors…”. Moreover, Shay urges that the world should recognize Puntland and Somaliland as independent states.

Shay’s book is a collection of materials that he had written about radical Islamic groups such Al-Qaeda and Hezbollah. He has failed to even update the paperback edition which still has outdated information. Professor Saadia Touval was the first Israeli scholar who wrote his Ph.D thesis on Somalia which was later published as a book, Somali Nationalism: International Politics and the drive for Unity in the Horn of Africa (Harvard, 1963). That book is still used by students of Somalia even after four decades of its initial publication. Unfortunately, Shaul Shay’s prosaic and pedestrian book will, at best, be forgotten, because it is does not contribute towards understanding Somalia.

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Bronwyn Bruton’s report, Somalia: A New Approach, is short, concise, well-written and well-argued. Bruton addresses the United States policy to Somalia; what went wrong and how to deal with the current realities. She and Afyare are cognizant of America’s past fumbles regarding Somalia; from neglecting the country several years after Black Hawk Down incident, the arming of Mogadishu warlords in the name of War on Terror; the indirect undermining of the Union of Islamic Courts, the backing of Ethiopia’s invasion and Bush Administration’s single focus on hunting down three al-Qaeda leaders. Bruton recommends what she calls a “Constructive Disengagement’ strategy. This paradoxical oxymoron of a phrase is not what it seems. Bruton recommends that America not waste resources in the weak TFG entity because it is futile. She wants the United States to combat terrorism while at the same time promoting stability and development. It is better for Washington, she argues, not to pick a winner among warring factions vying for power in the country. Instead, if an Islamist authority emerges as the winner, the USA should accept said entity as long as this group a) does not impede humanitarian and relief aid, and b) does not pursue international Jihadi agenda. Meanwhile, the United States should hunt down al-Qaeda and other terrorists in Somalia by whatever means is necessary (drones, cruise missiles, occasional ground military operations by Special Forces, etc). Bruton contends that al-Shabab is “an alliance of convenience and its hold over territory is weaker than it appears”. Therefore, “Under the right conditions, it will fragment”. What is good for Washington may not be good for Mogadishu. When all is said and done, it is obvious that “Constructive Disengagement” is another attempt to meddle in the affairs of Somalia by exploiting what Bruton calls “fissures” among factions and by attacking at will whomever Washington deems as being ‘dangerous’.
***
In a nutshell, Somalia’s Islamic groups can be seen as a double-edged sword. On the one hand, you have the jihadist groups like al-Shabab which enjoy some support among war-weary people in the South who crave for order in an anarchic environment. On the other hand, there are other “less-Jihadist” groups like al-Ictissam (successor of now defunct AIAI), Islah, the Tajamuc, and the Ahlu Sunnah Wal-Jama (ASWJ). The latter is a Sufi-inspired and Ethiopian financed group, and is mostly concentrated in Central Somalia. The militia is a new phenomenon (a fighting Tariqa group with military hardware from Addis Ababa). With the exception of ASWJ, the afore-mentioned groups are not pacifists by nature but they have either opted for a non-violent approach or they are too weak to make a military difference. So far, Islamic groups have done well in the areas of relief and humanitarian aid. These groups have also been crucial in opening and operating schools, and the Islah group, in particular, has done admirable work in the field of higher education. The political development and maturity of these groups leave a lot to be desired. Unfortunately Somalia does not have Islamists with the caliber of, for instance, Turkey’s Justice and Development (AK) Party; an Islamic group that can negotiate easily between Islamic activism and political leadership in a democratic society. If the Islamic alternative is another reincarnation of the Union of Islamic Courts in Somali South, then the country is doomed to experience a perpetual civil war, coupled with constant military intervention from Ethiopia. Yes, it is true that Mogadishu experienced relative peace and order during the six months in 2006 when the city was under the UIC control. But what else? Imposition of an Islamic penal code in a country that has been devastated by war and hunger, intolerance, perpetual marginalization of women, aggressive rhetoric and pronouncements, kidnapping of journalists, assassinating aid workers, censorship, declaring Jihad on Ethiopia before the latter even invaded the country, and most of all seeing a dangerous group like Al-Shabab flourish under the watchful eyes of UIC leaders. Alas, Aden Hashi Ayro (Ayr) was the military commander of the UIC and we all know what happened after the collapse of the UIC; he became the al-Shabab leader. It is time that we refrain from wallowing in nostalgia and stop romanticizing about the UIC’s brief and repressive regime. Just because the UIC was better than Mogadishu warlords does not mean that it was a model entity that should be replicated. Somalis have already seen what many of these groups are capable of; from regulating personal conduct to the core (beards for men, no bras for women, no sports or entertainment, etc) to hiding behind slogans that throb with emptiness. The question that begs itself is; “what else can these groups offer?”

Mogadishu: Whose City is it Anyway?

Several weeks ago, there was a duel on the airwaves between Sheikh Ciise Ahmed Dalabey (Chairman of Guurtida Beelaha Hawiye) and Sheikh Foad Shongolo, one of the top leaders of al-Shabab group. Mr. Dalabeey (Abgaal) started it when he gave a rousing speech before his supporters and demanded, among other things, that the Darod take their ‘man’ (then TFG Prime Minister Omar Abdirashid Sharmarke) from Mogadishu because the capital belonged to the Hawiye. I will summarize key points of Mr. Dalabeey’s speech, which he addressed larger and smaller clans under the 4.5 formula (Hawiye, Darod, Dir, Digil/Mirefle, and the “0.5” smaller clans) as following;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nl5ayzCTo5U

On the Darod: The HARTI group, and especially the Majertein, are asked to take their ‘man’, Omar Abdirashid Sharmarke, away from Mogadishu and to their land –Puntland-because Omar Abdirashid has fleeced the wealth of the nation, failed to defend the land, and remained mum about the continuing deportations of many Somalis by the administration of Puntland. It is unacceptable that Omar Abdirashid would rule the Hawiye in their own land while President Farole of Puntland is forcefully deporting Somalis.

On the Digil and Mirefle: The Digil and Mirefle, and especially the Mirefle, are asked to remove Sheikh Sharif Hassan Sheikh Ahmed from Mogadishu because this politician has been nothing but a nuisance; a figure who relishes on conflicts. He should be brought to court and asked how he had managed the treasury of the country for the year and half that he was the Finance Minister. Our request, if not implemented, will be followed by use of force.

On Dir: The Dir from the North have established their own administration in Hargeisa and the Hawiye will work with them and support them. We will welcome their support too. The Northern Dir people are better off leaving Mogadishu and joining their brethren in Somaliland. The Dir of the South, and especially the Biimaal, would get their rights. The Hawiye inhabit between Hobyo and Kismayo. In many parts of Somalia, we are the majority but there are areas we co-habit with other groups.

On 0.5: There is nothing good to say about the 0.5. These are smaller groups and those who live with us would be respected.

On TFG President: We want the president to implement Islamic courts, create a national army that is run by professional and honest Hawiye officers, and protect Hawiye port, airport, and properties. The Hawiye businessmen have been robbed and they should get their businesses back. In fact, we have all been robbed.

On Al-Shabab Group: The Al-Shabab group should cease the fighting in Hawiye land because the Hawiye know how to fight. We made you who you are; Ayro brought you from nowhere. Sheikh Hassan Dahir and Sheikh Mohamed Dheere are still around and relevant. The Hawiye had fought against Mohamed Abdille Hassan, Ali Yusuf, and Siad Barre. We would defend ourselves. You, Al-Shabab group, only know how to detonate a bomb. We would build fortresses from Mogadishu to Ceel Buur then wait and attack you. Go to Bay and Bakool where defenseless people live and takeover their land.

Fouad Shongolo who was born and raised in Mogadishu but hails from the Awrtoble lineage (Darod) responded to Dalabeey’s speech by denouncing the latter’s claim that Mogadishu belonged to the Hawiye. “Who said that this land belongs to the Hawiye,” bellowed Shongolo. Shongolo said that the Al-Shabab Group came to existence to fight against tribalism. He also urged people whose homes have been taken away from them to seek his assistance in getting their properties back.
http://miisaanka.com/article.php?articleid=2729

Given the current situation of Somalia, the issue of who does Mogadishu belongs to is a diversion to the real story; the story of a country that has become a byword for religious extremism and anarchy.

Ciise Dalabey is a new tribal chieftain in the political landscape who has embraced his role with a convert’s zeal. He is already exhibiting a mania for disputation. A friend of mine, who used to be a high official in the Somali Football Federation and who also belongs to the same sub-clan as Dalabey, chastised me for magnifying the significance of the chieftain. “He is nobody”, my friend said, “but I am sure some people are pleased with what he is saying.” I have to agree with my friend that there are some people who think that Dalabey is making sense and that, perhaps, it is better that we reexamine the tribal land delineation. Can clans claim their own territories, or are the Somalis so intertwined that dividing the land based on clan domination or numerical majority in an area becomes insignificant? Dalabey’s willingness to carve out Somalia into clannish enclaves and his bravado for calling for an open warfare deserve condemnation. His bellicose rhetoric is nothing but a paragon of hate speech. What is equally deplorable is Farole’s arbitrary deportations of many people from Puntland. I will only address the issue of Mogadishu in this particular article.

The history of Mogadishu, before the civil war, is a history of diversity and peaceful co-existence. Once upon a time, no Somali lived in Mogadishu. According to Al-Shaikh al-Imam Shihab al-Din Abi Abdalla Yaqut al-Hamawi al-Rumi al-Baghdadi’s book, Kitab Mu’jam al- Buldan, in 1286 Mogadishu had residents “whose inhabitants were all foreigners and not Black: (Cited in Hersi 1977, P. 103). These foreigners originally came from Arabia and Persia and settled there. Long before the Arabs and Persians made their way to Marka and Barawe, there were travelers such as Ibn Said (died 1286) who visited the Benadir coastline and found Marka the capital of Somali Hawiye clan. The Hawiye were a present force in Benadir in the 12th Century but they were not “the only occupants of the land” (Lulling 2002, P.16). There were other communities such as the Digil/Mirefle, the Biimaal, Bantu, and, according to Lulling, the predecessors of the Eyle, “who in modern times are scattered bands of professional hunters,” who were already settled in these areas. Cassanelli goes even further when he argues that,”The Digil appear to have been among the earliest Somalis to occupy the Benadir, probably in the first Millennium A.D (Cassanelli 1974, P. 6). But Mogadishu was different in its demographic makeup. By the time the renowned Arab traveler, Ibn Battuta, visited Mogadishu in 1331; the city was ruled by a Somali who spoke both Arabic and Somali fluently. The city’s population consisted mainly of the descendants of earlier Arab/Persian communities and whom we call today “Benadiris”. Mogadishu residents were engaged in trade and the city was bustling with merchandise from all over the world. Ibn Battuta also noted that about 200 camels were slaughtered in the city every day and that the residents consumed large quantities of food to the extent that they were corpulent. Mogadishu, to Ibn Battuta, was a prosperous and booming town compared to Zayla, in which the Moroccan traveler had earlier visited and called “the dirtiest, most abominable, and most stinking town in the world”. Zayla residents had plenty of fish and they had a habit of slaughtering camels in the streets. “When we got there [Zayla] we chose to spend the night at sea, in spite of its extreme roughness, rather than in the town, because of its filth”. But Ibn Battuta was impressed with Mogadishu and the hospitality he received as a religious scholar.

The outskirt of Mogadishu was inhabited by nomads who were Hirab or Darandolle. What made Mogadishu special and prosperous was the fact that it was not a self-sustaining town. It was a city that manifested economic interdependence as well as good neighborly existence. Somali pastoralists and the people in the inter river plains had stake in the prosperity of Mogadishu. There was a period during the Ajuran Empire in which Mogadishu was jointly run with the Mudaffar Dynasty. One Ajuran Imam was ruthless to the Darandolle nomads and would not allow them to use certain wells. There were times that the nomads were also not allowed to stay in Mogadishu after sunset. Between 1600 and 1625, the nomads rebelled against the repressive rule of one Mudaffar leader and took control of the city. An Abgal king was installed in Shingani and subsequently became the head of both the Abgal and the city (Cassanelli, 1974, P. 36). Mogadishu’s rule changed hands and by the 18th century it found itself under the joint rule of the Geledi Sultanate and the Arab Sultan of Zanzibar. It was in 1892 when the Sultan of Zanzibar leased the city to the Italians. By 1905, the Italian colonial administration had made Mogadishu the capital of Italian Somaliland.

Mogadishu went through massive transformation in the twentieth century as many people, from the north to the southern tip of the country, made it their home and achieved a degree of harmony. It became the only cosmopolitan city in Somalia that could boast of being diverse and peaceful. Every Somali administration since colonialism made Mogadishu its capital. If there was a census in the city in 1990, I am sure it would have shown a melting pot. Perhaps, to the detriment of the development of other cities, Mogadishu received more attention and aid both from foreign countries and previous governments.

Many years ago, I visited Washington D.C, which has predominantly Black residents, and I naively told an African-American cabbie of the city’s uniqueness for being a “Black city”. The cabbie looked at me with disgust and ruefully said, “Sir, Washington is not a Black city. It is an American city and the capital of all Americans”. I was hoping that Sheikh Dalabey would be a purveyor of hope rather than despair; a unifier rather than an agent of schism and belligerence. Any Somali national has the right to settle any part of Somalia without fear and recrimination. One can safely say that non-Hawiye Mogadishu residents suffered tremendously in the Civil War whether it was losing life, limb, or properties. Perhaps, the Darod and the Benadiris were specifically targeted as people and became piñatas for the Mogadishu warlords (Aidid, Ato, Ali Mahdi, Yalahow, etc). Hawiye residents, in turn, also suffered in the hands of Siad Barre’s forces, the TFG governments under Abdullahi Yusuf (remember the Ethiopian invasion) and now under Sheikh Sharif and his AMISOM backers; not mention the ruthless Al-Shabab (Shongolo, Godane, and Robow) and Hizbul Islam (Hassan Dahir Aweys). No one group in Mogadishu can claim to be sole owners of the city and only victims. After all, Mogadishu belongs to all of us and, frankly, we all have been robbed!


Reference
Cassanelli, Lee Vincent, The Benadir Past: Essays in Southern Somali History, Ph.D. thesis; University of Wisconsin, 1973.
Hersi, Ali Abdirahman, The Arab Factor in Somali History, Ph.D. thesis, University of California, Los Angeles, 1977.
Luling, Virginia, Somali Sultanate: The Geledi City-State over 150 years, Transaction Publishers, 2002.

Black Mamba Boy: A Book Review

There are three types of women; those who have little or nothing to say about their fathers; those who revile their fathers and those who lionize them. The American writer/poet Sylvia Plath made it fashionable to excoriate her father in the most corrosive terms. It did not matter that Plath’s father died when she was 8 years old. In her famous poem, “Daddy”, Plath blames her father for almost everything that had gone wrong in her brief but illustrious life; from attempting suicide at an early age, to marrying a fellow poet, Ted Hughes. In her poem, she uses a metaphor of her father as Hitler and her husband as a vampire.

If I have killed one man, I‘ve killed two__
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.

Plath concludes her poem with perhaps a painful departing line; “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through”. Three months after writing her poem, Plath, who suffered from chronic depression, killed herself at age 30.

Nadifa Mohamed’s new novel, Black Mamba Boy, (London: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2010) is an attempt to lionize her father and pay tribute to him. As a child, Nadifa imbibed stories of her father’s early life which, to the pedantic, might seem the saddest poetry. But to Nadifa they were intriguing tales that warranted a book. The term “Griot” is used by West Africans. It refers to someone whose task is to keep an oral history of a clan or a village and then entertain people by using such methods as storytelling, dancing, and songs. Nadifa Mohamed is unabashed about who she is to her father. “I am my father’s griot…This is a hymn to him. I am telling you this story so that I can turn my father’s blood and bones, and whatever magic his mother sewed under his skin, into history,” says the novelist. Nadifa was born in Hargeisa, in 1981 but grew up in England. Her serene and free-from-trauma life is no match to what her father had endured while growing up.

It is 1930s and eleven-year old Jama, the protagonist of the novel, lives with mother in Aden, Yemen; a British colonial outpost. Jama’s mother is a single woman who struggles to eke out a living in a poor and strange land. She is a woman of mercurial moods and you never know what to expect of her. She can be benevolent one minute and hard to get along on the other. Jama’s father has long been gone from their lives as he is rumored to be somewhere in Sudan. Young Jama lacks a sense of purpose and dawdles in the streets of Aden doing nothing. But this early experience in the rough streets of Yemen would later become crucial as he copes with a life rich with irony. His mother suddenly passes away and Jama is left with a meager 100 Rupees. An aunt brings him to Hargeisa, Somaliland, to live with his grandfather. But there is no grandfather in sight and he finds difficulty dealing with his female relatives. In Hargeisa, jama’s father looms imposingly over his life and the lad has a pathological drive to look for him. It becomes a veritable obsession to find his father and Jama leaves Somaliland to undertake a 1000-mile journey by foot, camel, train, and boat that takes him to Djibouti, Eritrea, Sudan, Egypt, Palestine, and Europe.

Jama’s odyssey is mired in difficulty and often warfare. He vacillates from crisis to crisis but he also utilizes a string of clan connections as well as the benevolence of strangers. Jama’s hazardous journey is all too familiar to today’s Somali immigrants who had encountered an array of hurdles, hunger, diseases, imprisonment (or to put it mildly, detention); a cascade of abuse, poverty, menial jobs, and at times, a mood of utter despondence. Jama’s survival skills and his magnificence of spirit save the day. In his journey, Jama meets a woman in Sudan, falls in love with her, and finds that he is unable to cease traveling. Jama, after making safely to London, gets news from his wife and faces the most jarring question in his life.

Nadifa Mohamed’s novel can be summarized as a novel about fatherhood and all that it entails. It is a celebration of fatherhood; the longing for a father, a search for a father, and the profound question of whether a man wants to be an active father or merely a generous sperm donor. Nadifa is a good writer who infuses fact and fiction. Her lacerating wit makes you howl with laughter. There are, at times, tedious historical details in the novel and some phrases that are left not translated to the benefit of non-Somali readers. But overall the novel is an interesting read. I can see Nadifa saying to her father, with an apology to Sylvia Plath, “Daddy, daddy, I am proud of you.” I have heard rumors of Nadifa Mohamed’s exciting novel. For once, the gossips are right.

Glimpses of Somali Diaspora: A Documentary Review

Three decades ago, most of the Somalis in America were students scattered around the country and there was a small number in major cities like Washington and New York that worked. When I first came to the States in 1980, I briefly lived in New York which had small number of former Somali seamen and a dozen diplomats working for the U.N. After four months in New York City, I saw the small money I had dwindling and I decided to move to Ohio to start my college education. I knew no one in Ohio but when I arrived there I was amazed to meet three young women from Northern Somalia who were already attending the university. The three were siblings and they had come to the States at a tender age of 17 with scholarships from the United Arab Emirates that were secured for them by Omar Arteh Ghalib. After several years in Ohio, I moved to a city in Southern California, not far from Los Angeles, for graduate studies. Southern California was different because it had two dozen Somali families who were brought as Ethiopian refugees. The community, though small, was a closely-knit group and we visited each other in the Weekends, ate together, and helped the new arrivals. But in early 1990s and due to the gestation of the Somali Civil War, a new wave of refugees poured in our city that had witnessed the disintegration of Somalia on first-hand and had seen gruesome killings and displacement. The small Somali community that coexisted peacefully and in harmony for years all of sudden became infused with a new blood that saw the world, perhaps, in the prism of clan warfare. Many of the newcomers seemed to be hauling around some legitimate grievances about what was done to them. It did not take long that the early pioneers of the community-some highly educated- to start mangling their roles by gradually gravitating to their clans and then becoming stooges doing their tribe’s bidding. It was a needling reminder, or perhaps a repudiation of conventional wisdom, that the educated class is bereft of the vagaries of clannism. It was like the x-ray-not beautified but stripped down- and beyond the veneer of civility laid individuals with extreme clannish views. I remember two educated good friends, one Ortoble and the other Ogaden, who used to go out every day and drink coffee together all of sudden ceasing to socialize. When I inquired about the reason of their falling out, the Ortoble man said, “Don’t you know what happened in Kismayo? The Ogadens are now claiming Kismayo as their territory”. One Issak fellow used to stand in a major intersection of the city cursing what he called “Dulmiga Daaroodka” (Darod Wrongdoing). A Marehan man mused if his daily prayers, behind a Habar Gidir Sheikh, would ever be accepted. Coming from a non-Hawiye, non-Issak, and non-Darod clan, I was somehow spared from this dysfunctional and acrimonious environment. There were numerous times that I was called to interpret in court cases because the defendants and the victims found a Geledi man either “neutral” or “harmless”. But my short honeymoon was rudely interrupted when one day I walked into a court and an attorney asked me a relevant (ok, dumb) question; “What is you clan?” In a normal conversation, I would have told that lawyer about my clan and, perhaps, would have basked in informing him that the Geledi Sultanate onetime ruled what is now called “Benadir” region but this was a court of law. I refused to state my clan in the pretext that I was a professional, and hence an impartial, interpreter. The attorney pondered for seconds and posed another question that almost made me yell with a hideous laughter. “Okay, do you speak ‘Darod Dialect’? “Who told you that the Darod have their own dialect?” I asked him. The attorney showed me a young woman-who was born and raised in Kenya- and who was a Case Worker for a local clan-based organization as the source of his information.

The issues many of the Somali refugees faced in the 1990s were the same many refugees face when placed in a new country; language barrier, lack of employment, and growing youth delinquencies. More Somalis kept coming to the States under the Family Unification Act until the American government amended the law in late 1990s. Then there was the tragedy of 9/11 in 2001 which almost put future Somali emigration to America to a complete halt. It was sometime after 2002, when a new wave of Somali refugees came but this time they were overwhelmingly Bantu. The Bantu encountered major difficulties in their resettlement in America because many of them came from small farming towns. Moreover, the Bantu refugees were a protected group because of the legacy of slavery and discrimination in Somalia.
****
The Letter: An American Town and the Somali Invasion; Written, Produced, and Directed by Ziad Hamzeh; Arab Film Production, 2003.

What were Somali refugees doing in Lewiston, Maine, in 2003?

Maine is the second “Whitest State’ in America (after Vermont) and Lewiston the second largest city in that state. According to U.S Census of 2000, Lewiston had a 97.3% White population. The Somalis were not resettled in Lewiston as refugees but instead went there in a wave of secondary migration. Most of them came from cities like Atlanta and were placed in dangerous neighborhoods that were infested with drugs, gangs, and high rate crime. Fearing for their lives, some of these refugees sent a “Sahan” to look for a safer place to settle. Somali nomads normally send “Sahan”-someone who does exploratory expedition- to look for water and lush grazing for their livestock before they make a move. That is how Lewiston, Maine, was discovered by Somalis. Gradually, more Somali families kept moving there until the Mayor of Lewiston, Larry Raymond, wrote a public letter asking the 1,100 Somali refugees already in that city to tell their friends and relatives in other parts of the USA not to come to Lewiston because of the city’s constrained resources. To the Somalis, Lewiston became their new home and getaway. “Compared to where we came from,” said a Somali resident, “Lewiston is heaven.” Lewiston residents were evidently baffled by the new Somali ‘invasion’ to their town. Somalia, after all, is the same country in which American soldiers were killed and their corpses dragged in the streets of Mogadishu. The fact that the popular movie “Black Hawk Down” –in which the above incident was based-was released during the time of the controversy added insult to injury. Moreover, a young Army Ranger, Sergeant Thomas J. Field from Lisbon, Maine; a town next to Lewiston, was killed in Somalia at that time and a local highway was named after him. White Supremacists discovered a fertile ground in exploiting the ‘Somali invasion’ to a pristine White city to rally people against black refugees and immigrants. Poor Whites seemed vulnerable for fear that the Somalis would compete with them with the limited resources. During rallies some of these White folks reiterated unfounded statements that Somalis were “given free rent, free food, free cars, and never had to pay taxes”. One woman aptly put it, “We are sick of Somalis. They get everything and we get nothing.” The mayor rationalized the writing of his infamous letter by declaring that Somalis were “without skills. No language skills. No working skills. [They] Do not pay taxes”. In short, Mayor Raymond retorted that he was “asking a moral issue; give us a break”.

The Somalis, confronted by an outside threat, came together and showed a monolithic front. They started defending themselves against the vicious attacks of White Supremacists and the Mayor. The Somali community did open businesses in Lewiston to revitalize the sagging economy of the city. Community elders explained to the media that the Somalis were hardworking people, multi-lingual, honest, and peaceful. They articulated that they were being singled out for their “color” and “religion”. In fairness, some of the White residents of Lewiston came out in support of the Somalis and against the White Supremacists who had called for a massive rally to demonstrate against the Somali presence in Lewiston. The racists supported Mayor Raymond’s letter and vowed to separate races. The controversy grew out of proportion and there was media frenzy across the United States about Maine and the Somali influx there. Maine’s leading politicians from Governor John Baldacci- a grandson of a Lebanese immigrant-to the State’s famous US Senators (Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins) condemned the rally organized by the World Church of the Creator –a racist group headed by Mathew Hail- and assured the Somali refugees that they were welcome to live and work in Maine.

Seven years after the ‘Somali Invasion’, Karen Jacobsen, Director of Forced Migration Program at Tufts University, said that the refugees in Lewiston in general and Somalis in particular had revitalized that city’s economy. “They [Somalis] have a very good network [with strong] trading links and [bring] new economic activities.” (“The Refugees Who Saved Lewiston”, Newsweek, January 17, 2009).

The Letter is a documentary that captures the reactions, views, and fears of the people who were touched by the Somali influx to Lewiston. Ziad Hamzeh is a master filmmaker who gives a chance all the parties involved in this controversy to express their views, sentiments, and concerns without any interference. This documentary, moreover, raises many issues that are still engulfing the United States today; To what extent America is ready to accept new breed of immigrants that are non-Europeans in its midst. The documentary is the story of a group of immigrants in pursuit of economic independence and better life and the reaction they generate. It is the interplay between racism and tolerance on one hand and the slow process of remaking and deconstructing American society.

Rain in a Dry Land; Written, Produced, and Directed by Anne Makepeace. Anne Makepeace Productions, 2007.

In March 10, 2003, filmmaker Anne Makepeace was reading an article in the New York Times about 12,000 Somali Bantu refugees being resettled in fifty cities in the USA after a year when she had an epiphany. She would make a documentary about these refugees which the article referred as descendants of ex-slaves who were expelled from their homes, endured an odyssey that took them to Kenya where they were languishing in refugee camps. What intrigued Ms. Makepeace was the fact that the Bantu refugees had no urban background and had never seen “indoor plumbing” “a staircase” and “a building taller than one story”. She wondered how these upcoming refugees would cope in a complex and advanced industrial society like America. She went to Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya and decided to follow two Bantu families for a period of 18 months that covered from these families’ preparation/orientation to come to America to their settlement in Springfield, Massachusetts, and Atlanta, Georgia, respectively. One family had a husband, a wife, and children and the other was led by a single mother. These two families have stories to tell about their relatively peaceful life in Somalia, before the Somali Civil War, to the traumatic period they went through when family members were killed, beaten, and displaced.

Rain in a Dry Land is a documentary that tells the story of refugee families as they face culture shock while at the same time bracing for a new life in an alien country. It is the story of struggle, survival, and resiliency. The Bantu refugees encounter the typical challenges many of the refugees face like limited English proficiency, scarce employment opportunities, and making sense of their new environment. The filmmaker’s unique ‘tell-it-like it is’ approach is both endearing and painful. The youngsters are perhaps the ones who have the most difficult time as they attempt to navigate between their new lives in America and their attempts to preserve their cultural identity.

The story of Somali refugees presented in The Latter and Rain in a Dry Land is still a story whose ending is still being written. Thirty years ago, many Americans were not aware of where Somalia was located. Today, Somalia is in the news. In the USA, many Somali refugees have found safety and the opportunity to start a new chapter in their lives. Perhaps, the rosy picture of America being ‘a paradise’ that many of these refugees were imbibed during orientation classes in the refugee camps is far from the truth. With opportunity, indeed, comes adversity.

Hamarweyne, Mon Amour

In the 1980s, I spent the first part of the decade in a small college town in Ohio with little or no interaction with Somali-speaking people. Then in late 1988 I went to Albany, New York, to visit my cousin and her husband. While in Albany, I was introduced to a young Yemeni college student. After conversing with him in Arabic for a while, I learned that he was actually born in Berbera and spent some time there before moving to Yemen. We switched speaking in Somali and I was amazed how fluently he spoke the language after many years of absence from Somalia. I have never felt so nostalgic to my native language the way I did that day; it was as if I went back home. I felt invigorated and rejuvenated. I remembered an incident in 1970s at the old Soccer Stadium in Mogadishu at Campo Amaharo (later re-named Abdul-Aziz) when a Chinese official visited there and gave a short speech during the half-time. The official spoke in Chinese but he had a Chinese embassy officer who interpreted for him in Somali. Every time the interpreter spoke, the entire audience ruptured and applauded loudly in unison. The Somali audience was marveling at the interpreter‘s mastery of Somali language and seemed to care less about what the Chinese official was saying about Beijing-Mogadishu bilateral relations. That particular day, my nostalgia mainly stemmed from a neighborhood in Mogadishu that I haven’t seen for sometime. I grew up in Isku-Raran which had undergone a massive transformation while I was still a child and hence lost its original make-up.

Isku-Raran was notorious for its density and crowdedness. The houses were poorly constructed and were made of bricks and woods or “Baraako” as the Somalis call them. The land mapping, if there was such a thing, was haphazardly drawn and there were many alleys. As a child, I used to seek solace and comfort in a not-so distant neighborhood called Hamarweyne. Unlike my neighborhood, where the tallest building was three-floor height and was owned by SIIDOW (Geledi), Hamarweyne had hundreds of tall buildings which were neatly arrayed. I was drawn to Hamarweyne not because of its tall buildings but to its God-given and priceless feature: the Indian Ocean. I would go to Secondo Lido, not to swim, but to watch and enjoy the beautiful scenery. The section I used to hang around was close to what was later known as Hotel Uruba. There were always some youngsters at the ocean, a small number of Reer Hamar fishermen and some who, like me, were drawn to the ocean for its aesthetics.

If there was any neighborhood in Mogadishu that was unique and fascinating, it was Hamarweyne. The residents of Hamarweyne, considered Arab or Persian descent, are called the Reer Hamar, or “Cad Cad” (light-skinned) as one of my northern friends calls them, are some of the most industrious, creative, and skilled people in Somali Peninsula. They are mostly merchants, tailors, and technicians. The Madhiban and Tumal are also very skilled people as a group despite the age-long and heinous discrimination that has been meted against them throughout Somali history. The Reer Hamar, unlike other Somalis, were mostly concentrated in one part of Mogadishu and perhaps were saved from the internecine clan wars that other parts of Somalia experienced in the 19th century and beyond. During the colonial period, some of the Reer Hamar and in general Benadiri people were in the forefront in the struggle for independence and leaders like Dheere Hajji Dheere, Hajji Mohamed Hussein Maxaad and Mohamed Ali Nuur were among the 13 Somali Youth League (SYL) founders. The Reer Hamar people are a close-knit group, family-oriented, and they generally inter-marry. Once you come to know a Reer Hamar family you are a friend for life. In 1960s, I had a classmate at Moalim Jama School called Jeilani. Sometime in 1970s, my sister came to know a Reer Hamar official, Mohamed Osman, who was the head of the Protocol at the Foreign Ministry one time and who later became the Somali ambassador to Iran and Sudan respectively. Mr. Osman happened to be the father of Jeilani. My sister did a minor favor for Mr. Osman, who was posted abroad at the time, which was delivering a parcel to his family in Mogadishu. At the time, my family was living in Hamar Jab Jab and so was the family of Mohamed Osman. Every week, the Osman family made cake and Halwo for my family even after my sister was posted abroad. The family’s loyalty and kindness was amazing.


Hamarweyne had string of shops that sold many different goods. The day before Eid, my mother would take me to Hamarweyne in order to get me some new clothes and shoes. Long before drinking smoothies became fashionable in the West, there were stores in Hamarweyne that specialized in all kinds of juices. After shopping, my mother and I used to get tall glasses of cool papaya drinks. Hamarweyne Market was the biggest and cleanest market in Mogadishu and natives were not the only ones that shopped there, foreigners would shop at Hamarweyne market as well. Across the market, one would find dozen of men sitting behind wooden tables and typing letters in old typewriters. These men helped people in writing letters and applications. Before I could get my first passport in 1978, I had to go to one of these typists and get a letter typed on my behalf requesting the travel document.

Hamarweyne was unique in a way because it had attracted many diverse groups in its midst. There were Reer Baraawe owned-stores and businesses run by other Somalis. Hamarweyne also had Indians, Arabs, Pakistanis, Persians, and other foreign nationals who operated businesses there. The famous Zulfikar Ali stores across the old parliament were owned evidently by a Pakistani family. So was NISF ADEN store which was owned by the Bin Naafic family. Some of the gold smiths in Afar Irdoodka were Indians. As a child, my uncle used to take me to an Italian pastry shop behind Café Nazionale and Cinema Hamar called “Mariottini” which was owned by a Somali woman who was half Italian. Afterwards, my uncle and I used to stop by at Croce Del Sud café where we would drink cappuccino.

Unlike the Reer Hamar who eschewed tribal political involvement, some Somali-Arab “Carab Soomaali”, were unwittingly recruited by Daarood politicians on their side as the Daarood had claimed of being descendants of Arabs. The Hawiye in Mogadishu saw that as an “unholy alliance” and protested against the Darood (it was mostly Majertein) and burned down the latter’s shops . On one occasion, the rioters were mainly Abgaal and they kept chanting;

Dalxiin Dalxiin Dalkissa Geeya
Dariiq walbay Dukaan Dhigteen
“Send Dalxiin Dalxiin (an Arabic word for ‘Now’ but as reference to Darood) to their country
They have placed stores in every street”.

I knew an elderly Yemeni merchant named Faraj Ba-Dahir who was a family friend. Faraj used to live in Hamarweyne with his wife and his children. His youngest daughter, Fatma, was my age. Faraj also owned a store in Hamarweyne that I used to stop by on my way to the beach. Faraj and Fatma used to visit our family from time to time and my sister and I would join them to go to Afgoi for an outing. Faraj was short and stocky man. He was health conscious and would, on rare occasions; walk from Hamarweyne to Afgoi for exercise. As a child, Faraj encouraged me to read newspapers. He would give me ½ Somali Shilling and would ask me to buy “Najmat Oktobar” (Xiddigta Oktoobar”; the official news paper of the country and the mouth piece of the government. The paper was only available at Hamarweyne and in limited edition. Faraj would tell me that it was my responsibility to educate myself about current affairs. However, there was one problem. I could read Arabic well but could barely understand it and when I would share my concern with Faraj, he would quip, “That does not matter. Keep reading”. At any rate, one day I went to Faraj’s store in Hamarweyne and he, as usual, reprimanded me for not reading the newspaper and keeping up-to-date with current affairs. He gave me ½ Shillings and demanded that I purchased the paper on my way home. I did what I was asked, but when I got close to Ceel Gaab Square, I was stopped by a young man who used to hang in our neighborhood but who lived elsewhere. This man had graduated from Jamal Abdinassir School and had won scholarship to study in Egypt. He did not know my name but he saw me with a copy of the paper. He stopped me, started paginating the newspaper, and then gave me ½ Shillings and left. I was stunned because the young man thought I was a paper boy but, frankly, I did not protest because I felt relieved that I did not have to read the paper that day and pocketed the money.

As I got older, I saw less of Faraj. He sent his daughter Fatma to Yemen for early marriage. Then, one day, I went to his store and was met by Basharow, a Reer Hamar merchant, who informed me that Faraj had passed away. My visits to Hamarweyne became more focused on seeing the ocean.

It was sometime in 1977, when I started going to the historic Arbaca Rukun Mosque. A young Reer Hamar Sheikh named Muridi Hajji Sufi (Shaanshi) used to give daily Tafseer lesson there. Muridi was one of the disciples of the late Sheikh Mohamed Moalim. His Tafseer was widely attended by youth across Mogadishu. The government was not pleased with the fact that hundreds of youth were attending a religious circle even though it was a peaceful and not a radical gathering. Sheikh Mohamed Guled (Tumal), who was the Director of Religious Affairs of the Ministry of Justice and Religion, attempted numerous times, on behalf of the government, to stop the Tafseer. Sheikh Muridi was an ally of an equally popular preacher named Sheikh Mohamed Imankey (Shaanshi). Imankey, perhaps, was one of the most eloquent and witty preachers I have ever seen. He was widely loved and respected by the youngsters at Arbaca Rukun because he was courageous, and to the delight of many, politically-oriented. Every time Sheikh Muridi was summoned to the Ministry of Justice and Religion, he would take along Sheikh Imankey who was friendly with Sheikh Mohamed Guled.

Hamarweyne had historical mosques but on occasions I used to go to Marwas. The mosque had a Reer Baraawe (Hatimi) Imam who was fluent in Arabic and had a beautiful voice. There was also the Hadith circle (Riyaadhul Salixiin) taught by the late Sheikh Ibrahim Suuley (Dir) a knowledgeable and pious scholar.

After I attended Arbaca Rukun, I would stop by at some of the stores to satisfy my sweet tooth. The “mac-macaan” (Sweets) in Hamarweyne was irresistible. The contribution of the Reer Hamar to the rest of Somalia, from cultural artifacts to literary works, cannot be enumerated here but I will only mention one thing; pastries. Nomadic Somalis can boast about introducing “OODKAC” to a country that does not have a distinctive traditional meal. The food Somalis eat is borrowed from other cultures such as spaghetti from Italy, Rice from Arabia, Injera from Ethiopia, Sabaayad and Samboosa from India, etc. But “Halwo” is purely a Somali invention, thanks to Reer Hamar. What would Somalis do with out halwo? The Halwo is served during weddings and many other occasions.