Qiiqaan baxaayo dab miyaa? Shisheeyaha ha noo danbeeyo! let us deal with the so called Sokeeye first! His goal is to have the playing field levelled! How the special intersts will respond to it? Yoowsan Beled weyne soo dhaafin! West BW +GC + MTV forces will make sure that he won't cross the BQ crossroads! HW + LB + DYN militias with the reinforcement and backing of ........ u know ...who... will launch the long waited foray into J. Masaakiinta reer Bay iyo Bakool yaan la halaajin lee? Xaabsade is ready! " Nin abeeso koriyoow adiga u aayiye, Axdi ma leh Xabashidu lagu aaminaayee" The Tigre connivers have supplied and delivered a new shipment of arms to his majesty Warlod Xaabsadde! The white-eyed SUPERMAN OF SHABELLE -- is as ready as ever for yet another one of his signatory decisive assaults! Despite of Yeey's deceptive cajoling; JVA is on alert and will carry out its mission! Nin Qeyrkii loo xirrow adna soo qoyso!! The Somalilanders will not be idle bystanders and let Yeey have the benefit of amassing some needed loot & booty from the rich fertile south! AC (S&S) here I (SNM MUJAAHIDIIN) Come! THE SECOND CIVIL WAR IS ON! THANKS TO THE ETHIOPIAN STOOGES. Well, no sweating at all for i know that Yeeys pigeons can't even fight an effective war! their defeat is imminent! in the meantime, let us all do the tigre bidding!

what you guys think? http://www.betarecords.com/artist.php?artist=rahma. to me, personally the lady did a great job! She may need to practice more to precisely replicate and reproduce Magool's superb gusty tone. She also needs to work on learning by heart some of the lyrics.

SOMALI HIGH SEAS FISHING COMPANY (SHIFCO) Posted under General News by Somali Fisheries Society (81.136.130.246) on Thursday February 03 2005 @ 07:48PM CET In 1981 there has been in Somalia the implementation of various development projects following the establishing of an economic cooperation between Somalia and Italy. Among those projects there was a fishery project or a high seas fishing project, which has been on the agenda of public interest for the last 14 years. The idea of the project was firstly concepted by an Italian business man. Yet, the purpose of the project was to help the Somali nation gaining enough foreign exchange to improve its trade balance and create job opportunities for its people, especially the seamen, by exploiting its huge marine resources. It’s well known that Somalia is endowed with a coastal belt which is long more than 3000 km. Therefore, the first stage of the project began in the same year with three fishing vessels namely M/n Cusmaan Geedi Raage, M/n Faarax Omaar, and M/n 21 October instead of two fishing vessels and a mother-ship as previously agreed. The project under the denomination of “Somitfish†was managed by a mixed(Italian-Somali)board of directors under the Ministry of Fishery and Marine Resource. Nevertheless, the project ceased its activities because of mismanagement, which resulted in causing heavy financial losses to the ministry. It was then, inevitable, that the three fishing vessels were anchored in Mogadishu port till further orders after five years of a complete failure. In addition, the Italians who were involved in the mismanagement were expelled from Somalia in 1985 after a Court in Mogadisho had got the proof necessary for their conviction. In August of 1987 the project was transferred to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs then leaded by Mr. Abdurahman Jama Barre, as the rest of the projects which were being financed by the Italian Govern ment at the head of the late Prime Minister Bettino Craxi. At the same year Munye Said Omar was appointed as General Manager of the fishery project under the denomination of “Shifcoâ€.In addition, between 1987 and 1990 Munye was also a member of a mixed committee (Somali-Italian) which had been entrusted the vital task of managing the Italian Aid Fund(FAI) to Somalia, and the President of a newly completed zootehnic project known as Gisoma, although he was then only a newly graduate hydraulic engineer, who had no experience in management. Nor would it be true to say that the above-mentioned appointments were attributable to any special ability or virtue of the engineer. Indeed, he was until 1985 a dependent of an Italian company which won a tender for the construction of the drainage for Mogadishu city. The fact is that historical circumstances favoured him. The regime was in need for people to be employed in the government offices after educated and experienced top government officials left the country in protest of the dictatorship; and Eng. Munye’s brother was a high -ranking military officer whose support to the regime was also motivated by giving assistance to his relative to occupy the vacant positions. In relation to the undertaking, two new fishing vessels of the same sizes of the previous (330 ton each) namely M/n 21 October III and M/n 21 October IV, and a mother-ship (3500 ton) namely M/n 21 October II were added to the already existing three fishing vessels to become the number of the ships available 6 with a cost of construction around 137 million of US dollar. In addition, in 1989 was absorbed the SMP (Somali Marine Products), a fishing industry in Kisimaio in Lower Jubba region re presenting a donation from the Federal Republic of Germany for a further enlargement of the under- taking. All these, virtually, contributed to the expansion of the high seas fishing activity in Somalia in which the Shifco company became the largest fish exporting to Italy. Nevertheless, before the tragic advent of the civil war in that country one thing has been constant throughout the period of time in which both the fleet and the SMP were in full employment: the illegal appropriation of the income of the undertaking. For example, at the end of every fishing campaign which, usually, lasts 75 days, was to be established L/C for US dollar 4 million in favour of Shifco Management concerning the export of fish of various quality. But, unfortunately, the proceeds would not be introduced into the country except a small amount of US dollar ten thousand at maximum and a long list indicating the expenses incurred during the fishing campaign. However, the above-mentioned list was to be prepared by n Italian company known as SEC, which apart to be the constructor of the 6 ships, had signed an agreement of co-management of the Somali fleet with Shifco company in 1987 and ending in 1989. Lately, after the abolishing of such an agree- ment with SEC, there was another Italian company called Malit in replacement of the previous one to sign similar agreement with Shifco company; but nothing has changed. From the entering in force of the new agreement until the end of 1990 the country was deprived of millions of US dollar being the earnings of the undertaking. At the outbreak of the disastrous civil war in 1991 the Somali fishing fleet was far away from the country and was save for miracle. Subsequently, Ali Mahdi who was elected President to office after Djibouti conference for reconciliation, had formed a board of directors, so that to replace Eng. Munye, but failed to achieve the objective; for Omar Arteh who was acting then as Prime Minister behaved in a different manner. As a result, Eng. Munye succeeded in obtaining the confirmation of his position as the Manager of the fleet. From the out break of the Somali civil war until 1992 the Somali fishing fleet which were utilizing the port of Aden under the sponsorship of Ja’far Badar a yemenita born in Somalia after the Malit company ceased to be the co-manager of the Shifco company. In May of 1993, Eng. Munye signed a new agreement with a third Italian company namely Panapesca after he had arrived in Yemen shortly af-ter the broke out of a campaign known as “clean hands†in Italy where he had been residing follow- ing his escape from his homeland. From that date, the Shifco company officially resumed its activity relating to the export of caught fish to Italy, and at the same time Eng. Munye took the necessary step to eliminate all the unfriendly somali personnel and replaced them with Italian ones, in an apparent attempt to take advantage of the revenue of the fleet. Nevertheless, it’s well known that some 12 ton thousand of fish of various quality is to be extracted from the territorial water of Somalia every year for transportation to abroad. Indeed, every three months the 5 fishing vessels are to make the trans-shipment of some 2500-3000 tons through the port of Aden. In addition, there is another quantity of fish known as “African fish†to be exported occasionally to the Golf Countries, especially Saudi Arabia not to mention a portion of this fish to be sold locally. According to reliable source, the earnings of the Shifco Management is approximately some 5-6 mil-lion of US dollar to be gained at the end of every fishing campaign; it was calculated that at the end of every year these earnings rosedto 20-24 million(net) of US dollar excluding the rental earning of the mother-ship for which there are many charterers in Italy after the discharge of the fish at Gaeta port. This huge income which amounting hundred millions of US dollar over the past 14 years of no government authority in Somalia is being received by Eng. Munye without any revisor. Nor would it be true to say that a small portion of this income devoted to assist thousands of somali refugees who live in dire straits in neighbouring countries, especially those residing inYemen whose refugee status is so alarming that it is hard to be indifferent toward such a national tragedy. No wonder, Eng. Munye seemed indifferent also toward the tragedy of the Somali crew on board of the fishing vessels. Indeed it can be argued that unlike the European seaman, the Somali seaman daily works 18 hours from the sunrise till twelve o’clock in the night to gain 250 US dollar monthly and nothing else. In the past, in addition to a good salary, he was eligible as the rest of the crew for insurance (in case of accident of labor), air tickets (go and back), hotel, prize, and other rights due to him at the end of his contract. It is regrettable that to many Somali widows (with many orphans) whose husbands passed away because of wounds they sustained working on board of the fishing vessels were denied the right to get the insurance premium due to them according to the ILO law. Yet, Eng. Munye did not stop treating his fellow natives of Brava in different manner. In December of 1993 the Somali crew on board of the M/n 21 October II made up mostly of Brava natives or close relatives of Munye, taking advantage of a short anchorage of the ship in one of the ports of Ireland for discharge, raised a petition of right to a Court in that country, claiming injustice in regard of the extra hours they were required to work without any compensation. The question cost some 200 thousand of US dollar to Shifco Administration. Those seamen not only benefited of that considerable amount of money, but also seized the opportunity to get asylum in UK. Subsequently, an oppressed group of seamen hijacked a fishing vessel, so that to force Eng. Munye to pay the overdue rightful due to them. Nevertheless, the hijacking of the fishing vessels had been going on throughout 1994 and, ultimately, even armed somali factions became involved. I refer here to the three fishing vessels hijacked by a group of gunmen residing in Puntland and another one hijacked by a group of gunmen residing in Mogadishu. As a result of that continuous hijacking of the Shifco fishing vessels, Eng Munye prevented the vessels from fishing on national territorial water and, in the meantime, signed an agreement with the Minis- try of Fishery and Marine Resources of Yemen concerning the fishing on Yemen territorial water; before signing the agreement Eng. Munye had to fulfill a requirement of the minister, which meant that the Somali fleet in exile should be represented by a board of directors. The agreement which was in force for only six months has been abolished because of incalculable reactions of the officials of the ministry against the system of fishing followed by the captains of the Shifco vessels which was in no way permissible in Yemen. Truly, those captains usually use very large fishing-nets an often they cast into the sea a lot of undesirable fish after a long sorting operation. There were additional reasons for the abolishment of the agreement between Eng. Munye and the Ministry, which were relating to the taste of the fish and the normalized relation between Munye and the Somali faction who won control the Somali territorial water in Puntland. However, by the abolishing that agreement with Yemen, Munye regained his individual control of the fleet by sitting aside the existing board of directors, who were in charge only for a short time. In conclusion, since ever a parliament and a government have been elected for the country after 14 years of civil war and political crises, it seems as if Eng. Munye may face a reckoning for having run the Somali fishing fleet and exploited the country huge marine resources for so long time exclusively for his own interest, although he has succeeded in wining a seat in parliament. Currently, he is troubling himself in responding to the various questions relating to his case to the media under impact of a strong criticism. It’s well known that the entire fleet is not in good condition for depreciation and lack of adequate maintenance while the excessive exploitation of the country marine resources resulted in diminishing some kind of valuable fish in the Somali territorial water. In addition, it seemed that an important part of the of the fishery program, that implies the arrangement of training courses for Somali young people was intentionally neglected. The implementation of such a program was to provide the country with a able national crew, so that to make possible the lowering of the costs of the fishing campaigns as well as to reduce the dependence of the foreign crew in carrying on the affairs of the undertaking. By Dr Abucar Said Abubaker- E-mail: rerhamar@hotmail.com Source: Midnimo.com

Some people say she had information about the Italian military selling guns to the warlords. Some say she had information about the torture and killing of Somali prisoners by Italian soldiers. What I know is this: Forty five minutes after I first met Ilaria Alpi, she was dead, slumped in a puddle of her own blood in the back seat of a white Toyota pickup truck. We had spoken briefly inside the high-walled compound of the Sahafi hotel, the journalists' hotel, in Mogadishu. She told me she was a television correspondent from Italy and had just returned from a town in northern Somalia, a place she heard I knew well. But Ilaria had no need to introduce herself; I already knew of her. She stood out in Mogadishu. She was a small, serious 32-year old Italian reporter who fearlessly stuck her microphone in the faces of UN officials, military commanders and Somali warlords. While a lot of TV reporters spent more time fixing their hair than studying the country, Ilaria made her name by working the streets, using fluent Arabic and stubborn resolve to dig into places that few other journalists saw. Ilaria asked me if I'd have a free moment to talk that evening. She seemed shy, almost apologetic about imposing on my time. I assured her that it was no problem, and that I'd be willing to talk with her whenever she wanted, even immediately if it would help. She couldn't talk right then, she said. There was someplace she needed to be. I collected my crew, the driver and two armed bodyguards who shadowed me every moment I was outside the hotel compound, and we headed off to the northern part of the city. Ilaria and her cameraman, Miran Hrovatin, climbed into their Toyota pickup with a driver and gunman and also drove north. It was a quiet Sunday afternoon in Somalia, just after lunch when a blanket of midday heat keeps the sandy rubble-strewn streets of Mogadishu empty and menacing. I set off on my rounds, trolling for stories and information. To that end I dropped in at the home of a Somali friend, a young former guerrilla fighter who from time to time passed along some valuable intelligence. On this particular day he didn't have much to offer. His sister served us tea in the shade and we were relaxing, talking about nothing of consequence, when we heard the short bursts of gunfire. We kept silent for a moment, listening to hear if the shooting was going to escalate. But nothing more happened, and we didn't give it another thought. It wasn't until early evening when I returned to the Sahafi that I heard the news. "It's Ilaria," my friend Carlos Mavroleon said to me as I walked into the lobby. "They've killed Ilaria." Carlos, who was working as a cameraman for ABC News, had run to the scene as soon as he heard the gunfire. He learned that a Land Rover full of gunmen had cut in front of Ilaria's pickup in North Mogadishu. Someone started shooting. Their driver and bodyguard were unhurt. Carlos took me upstairs to his hotel room and showed me what he had videotaped at the scene. In the video, the bodies are being removed from the pickup truck and placed in a Land Cruiser owned by an Italian resident of Mogadishu, a man who was known to everyone by his first name, Giancarlo. Ilaria is wearing bright orange pants, and Birkenstock sandals. Her loose white shirt is stained with blood, and there is more blood smeared across her forehead and on her blond hair. In the back of the Land Cruiser Ilaria looks like she is sleeping. One of the Somalis who helped move the bodies hands Ilaria's notebook and a pair of two-way radios to Giancarlo. And Giancarlo says simply, that Ilaria and Miran were somewhere they shouldn't have been. I knew what we were going to do later that night. I was used to the ritual by now. We gathered, about ten of us, in someone's hotel room and poured tall glasses of whiskey, the sickened pallor of our faces exaggerated by the wash of fluorescent light reflected off chalky white walls. We sat until morning exchanging bits of information that we hoped would add up to a reason, some determination about why our colleagues were dead. It was important that each of us believe that reasons existed. Ascribing a logic to death meant that measures could be taken to avoid it. We could convince ourselves that hiring the right security guards, driving on the right roads at the right times and saying the right things would keep us safe. But we knew better. There was no mystery to death here. We spent our days with hired bodyguards travelling bombed out streets jammed with technicals - armed vehicles carrying hungry, glassy-eyed teenagers with automatic weapons. Any one of those kids could turn and pop you in a second, as easily as he could spit. Not even the walls of the hotel provided real protection. One reporter was shot in the leg during lunch. Another stepped from the shower just as a round sailed through the concrete outer wall and exploded through the porcelain stall. But that didn't stop us from looking for reasons behind Ilaria's death. There was talk that she may have once fired a bodyguard who had then taken revenge. That sort of thing happened a lot in Mogadishu. There was no faster way to die here than to interfere with someone's livelihood. One of us even suggested that Ilaria could have uncovered some information that threatened one of the warlords or other powerful people. That was a nice thought. Given the choice, any of us would have picked assassination by evil international gunrunners to death at the whim of a bored teenager. I participated in the discussion without ever believing her death was more than really bad luck. Ilaria wasn't the first journalist to die in Somalia and she wouldn't be the last. And after 15 years of covering stories in Africa I had lost what little patience I had for conspiracy theories. All it takes is a few missing pieces of information or inconsistencies in a large and complex story for someone to start talking about the CIA or Mossad or the hand of unnamed international forces. Certainly there were mysteries surrounding Ilaria's death: Several of her notebooks disappeared after her body was loaded on a plane for Rome. A 35mm camera she had with her was also missing. But that alone was no reason to believe in a conspiracy. Things do get misplaced. Every loose end can't be tied up. And, after all, this was Somalia. Somalia had been in a state of anarchy since 1991 when its dictator of two decades, Mohamed Siad Barre, was defeated by rebel armies led by Mohamed Farah Aidid. When Aidid's troops poured into Mogadishu, Barre's armies retreated south and west from Mogadishu toward the Kenya border. As they fled, they destroyed the country's food supply, burning fields and looting grain stores to slow the pursuit of Aidid's rebels. By the time they were done, there wasn't much food left in southern Somalia. The capital, Mogadishu, was reduced to rubble, and the country's grain producing area was overrun by unruly militias. The aid groups who came in from the West couldn't operate, and starvation began to spread. In the summer of 1992, people in Europe and the U.S. began seeing the pictures of starving Somali kids that resulted in Operation Restore Hope and the U.S. Marines landing on the beaches of Mogadishu in December of 1992. By January of 1993, a multinational task force had pretty much put an end to what was left of the famine. But then they found themselves facing a much more difficult problem: the heavily armed and uncompromising militias of Somalia's warlords. A confrontation was inevitable. In June of 1993, the famous and ill-fated hunt for Aidid began. It ended four months later, on October 3, 1993, when 18 Americans were killed and the body of one of them was videotaped as it was hog-tied and dragged through the dusty streets of Mogadishu. By March of 1994 Restore Hope was over. Western peacekeeping troops were packing their bags and leaving the unfinished job in the hands of darker-skinned soldiers from Malaysia, India, and Pakistan. The press came in to cover that retreat. Ilaria Alpi was among them. She was there to report on the withdrawal of Italian troops when she died on March 21, 1994. Over the next few years I thought about Ilaria from time to time. Usually it was during a trip to Mogadishu when I would stop at the place on the road where she was killed. There were many such places scattered throughout Mogadishu, where friends and colleagues had lost their lives: the spot where photographer Dan Eldon was beaten to death by an angry mob; the intersection where Kai Lincoln, a young U.N. worker, was gunned down by bandits. I had only met Ilaria once, and briefly, and yet her death had stuck with me. I pointed out the spot where she died to several people who had never known her. In my mind I would trace the route of her pick-up down the hill. I would see the point where the blue Land Rover cut them off on the road, where the gunmen piled out. I almost thought I could see the tire marks left over when Ilaria's driver slammed the truck into reverse trying to back away. In the Summer of 1997, I saw wire reports about photographs that were published in the Italian magazine Panorama. One photo shows Italian soldiers attaching electrodes to the testicles of a Somali prisoner who is tied to the ground. In another, a Somali woman is being raped with the end of a flare gun. The photos were taken by the Italian soldiers themselves, peacekeepers recording their triumph for posterity. I began following the story. The publication of the photos forced the Italian government to launch an inquiry. And that inquiry led to a diary kept by an Italian policeman stationed in Somalia. (In Italy the police overlap with the military.) The policeman, Francisco Aloi, wrote of spending time with a young television journalist named Ilaria Alpi. He wrote about how Ilaria had discovered some of the abuses and had gone to the Italian commander in Somalia, General Bruno Loi and told him that she would expose the abuses if he didn't do something about it. The general reportedly told Ilaria that it was only a few isolated cases that he would investigate and pursue. Months later, as the last Italian troops were leaving Somalia, the crimes remained uninvestigated and perpetrators remained unpunished. And Ilaria was preparing to do her final report from Somalia. I learned that the controversy about Ilaria's death had never quite died in Italy. In fact, the few loose ends that I was aware of had unraveled into a vast tangle of conspiracy theories. According to various scenarios, Ilaria was murdered because she had information about arms trafficking, toxic waste dumping, or the selling of Somali children into slavery. All of these conspiracy theories contained a common element: While the men who pulled the triggers were Somali, the people who paid them, the ones who wanted Ilaria dead, were Italian. Chief among the conspiracy theorists was Giorgio Alpi, Ilaria's father, a well-known doctor in Rome, and member of Italy's communist party. In the four years since Ilaria's death, he had appeared on Italian television, lobbied journalists, and had done everything he possibly could to keep stories of Ilaria alive. In January of 1998, in an attempt to mollify Giorgio Alpi and close the book on the rampant rumors, a group of Somalis were escorted to Rome to give depositions against soldiers who were accused of torture. And when one of those Somalis - a young man named Hashi Omar Hassan - showed up at the police station he was arrested, charged with Ilaria's murder. It appeared to me that the Italians had taken their two outstanding issues in Somalia and tied them up in one neat package which they were prepared to flush away. The complete saga was reduced to this: The young Somali, Hashi Omar Hassan, had been tortured by Italian troops and then gotten his revenge by participating in the killing an Italian reporter. End of story. But none of that made much sense to me or fit with the facts I had collected right after Ilaria's killing or what I knew about Somalia. It looked very much like a coverup and, as in other well-known cases, the coverup was the most powerful explicit evidence of the existence of the crime. And so I went to Rome to take a closer look at the investigation and several things became clear to me for the first time: Ilaria's death was not an act of random violence on a Mogadishu street. Somebody wanted her dead. And she wasn't killed in midst of a wild gun battle. She was assassinated, killed by a single shot fired from point blank into the back of her head. Part II Conspiracy Theories There are many details about his daughter's death that four years later continue to keep Giorgio Alpi awake at night. There is the fact that no investigation was ever done at the crime scene. And then there was the Italian military's refusal to rush medical assistance to Ilaria after she was shot. And it breaks his heart that incompetent forensic work has required that her body be exhumed, twice. But the thing that angers him most is that he and his wife Luciana never really said goodbye to Ilaria. When her body arrived back in Rome the family was told that during the ambush she had been raked with automatic weapons fire. They decided they didn't want to see her like that. So they never viewed the body of their only child, never had the chance for that important rite of closure. It was only after she was buried that they learned the truth, learned that there was only a single, neat bullet hole in the back of Ilaria's head. Why, her parents want to know, did the Italian government lie to them? There is no satisfactory answer for them other than the obvious one: The government and the military are covering up the real reasons for their daughter's death. Giorgio and Luciana sit side by side on the couch in their apartment on the outskirts of Rome. They hold hands, and smoke cigarettes. Giorgio is a small, wiry 74 year-old with thick bushy eyebrows jet black hair and an intense chiseled face. His lower lip quivers uncontrollably when he starts telling stories about Ilaria. Luciana, 65, has short blonde hair and a solid robust looking about her. Her voice is deep and gravelly. Georgio and Luciana live in the apartment where Ilaria grew up. Her room is more or less as she left it, even though she'd moved out, gone to college, lived in Egypt for two and a half years and then gotten her own apartment in with a friend in Rome after being hired by RAI, the Italian state broadcasting corporation. There are photos of her everywhere. Several show her wearing a red, hooded jacket, her blonde hair tied in a pony tail. She clutches a microphone and peers into the camera. The reports she sent back were saved on videotapes stacked beside the Alpis' television. Her parents admit that they may have been overprotective of Ilaria, who as a child was quiet and fragile. They speculate that Ilaria set out for remote areas of the world in part to get away from their influcence, to proclaim her independence. Giorgio tells about how young Ilaria was too shy to even ask for what she wanted in Rome's coffee bars. "Papa, tell them I want a glass of water," she would say. When she was 13, Ilaria worked on her school newspaper and decided she wanted to be a journalist. Giorgio bought her a present, a small tape recorder. As he tells this story he begins to sob uncontrollably. Luciana's eyes turn red, and she comforts her husband. Shy Ilaria took the tape recorder and went out into the neighborhood interviewing news vendors about their business. It was a pattern that seemed to hold in her adult life. She struck those who met her as sweet and reserved. But as soon as she had a microphone and camera with her she was aggressive, professional, and self assured. "So self assured that she didn't have to be a *****," was how one senior military official compared her to other female reporters. While many television reporters saw themselves as the stars of their shows, Ilaria once complained to her editor in Rome that she wanted to spend less time on camera. "Why should the viewers be looking at me when I could be showing them another ten seconds of Somalia?" Her parents and I watch some video of Ilaria, particularly her last interview with a clan leader named Boqor (King) Musa. Ilaria is interviewing Musa in the town of Bosasso, a relatively peaceful port 1,500 miles north of Mogadishu on the Gulf of Aden. Musa has a thick gray beard and a lazy eye. Everyone knows him affectionately by his nickname, King Kong. Giorgio Alpi turns to me and asks if I know King Kong, and if so, what I think of him. I tell him that the King is a decent fellow who spends his days at a hotel in Bosasso watching CNN. In these days of warlords he doesn't wield a lot of power, but he knows what's going on. Ilaria's discussion with King Kong is fairly mundane. They're talking about development projects and the like. Then she brings up the subject of arms trafficking. King Kong hesitates, and Ilaria tells Miran to shut the camera off. With the camera pointing away, but the sound still rolling you can hear King Kong speak about things that "came from Rome, Brescia, or Torino." Brescia is the arms manufacturing center of Italy. Then you can hear the final words on the tape, from King Kong: "those people have much power, contacts". Giorgio thinks the answer to his daughter's death is in that interview. The one and only time I met Ilaria, she had wanted to talk to me about Bosasso, and about King Kong. Something had disturbed her that day. What was she after? What did she want to know? The truth is, had I talked to Ilaria that night at The Sahafi Hotel, there wouldn't have been much I could tell her. But I might have found it curious that an Italian journalist in Mogadishu to cover the departure of Italian troops would have found an important reason to travel to Bosasso where there weren't any Italians. Ilaria was on her fifth trip to Somalia. Miran was there for the first time. The two of them caught a UN flight to Bosasso, and apparently didn't tell anybody they were going. Several days after they left, Italian journalists began asking the staff of the Sahafi hotel where she was. Even the Italian ambassador to Somalia showed up at the Sahafi wearing a flak jacket and helmet with an armed escort inquiring about her whereabouts. The owner of the Sahafi, Mohamed Jirdeh Hussein, found it curious that the ambassador would risk being in the streets at that time at all. The hotel staff informed the ambassador that Ilaria had gone to Bosasso. She was due to arrive back in Mogadishu on Saturday, March 20. The Italian military actually sent a few men to meet her plane and escort her from the airfield. They were going to advise her to spend the night on the Italian naval vessel, the Garibaldi, which was anchored off of Mogadishu. (I smiled when I first heard this. In a million years, even if we were under bombardment, the U.S. military would never send an escort for a journalist. And most U.S. journalists wouldn't have accepted one. We kept our distance from the military, maintained our independence. But the Italians felt they were all in it together.) Her plane arrived a day late, on Sunday at about 12:30. Though her escorts could easily have found out that the flight had been rescheduled, no one was there to meet her. So she and Miran caught a lift to the Sahafi where they checked in and had lunch. It was just after lunch when she and I spoke. Ilaria then phoned RAI in Rome and asked for some satellite time at around 7:00 p.m. so she could feed some video back. She said she had some good footage. "We can speak about the story of the day later." The producer remembers that Ilaria had something she really wanted to do. "I'm in a hurry," she said. She then phoned her mother one last time. At about 2:45 Ilaria and Miran left the Sahafi, heading across the Green Line into North Mogadishu to the Amana Hotel where some Italian journalists sometimes stayed. During the peacekeeping operation a feud had opened up between the Italian contingent on one side and the U.S. and UN on the other. In short, the Italians felt that they had been dissed in Somalia. This was, after all, their former colony. They had a 100-year relationship with the place. But Operation Restore Hope was at its core an American show. The top UN official was a former U.S. Navy Admiral. The UN headquarters was located in the former U.S. embassy compound south of the Green Line in territory that was controlled by warlord Mohamed Farah Aidid. The Italians sequestered themselves north of the Green Line in the area where the former Italian Embassy was and which was controlled by warlord Ali Mahdi Mohamed. There they pouted and sulked and took more than a little delight in the problems that the Americans later encountered in the ill-fated hunt for Aidid. The Italian peacekeeping strategy in Somalia - as it had been in Lebanon before -was to make friends with everyone and stay out of the line of fire. I recall standing with some Italian soldiers one day by the Green Line, surrounded by rubble and barbed wire. The Italian commander warned me to move on because, he said, there had been a sniper in one of the buildings who was shooting at people. Why aren't you afraid, I asked him. We have an arrangement with him, the commander said. So the Italians made their separate peace with the forces that controlled the North. Part of that dynamic involved the man everyone knew as Giancarlo. Giancarlo Marocchino, an Italian citizen and 50-something trucking magnate from Genoa who had made his home in Mogadishu since 1984 when he went into exile after being indicted for tax evasion. He married a Somali woman from the clan that now controls north Mogadishu, and settled in. If Giancarlo were to set foot in Italy today he would be arrested, but in north Mogadishu he became a good friend to, and important source of intelligence for, the Italian military. The U.S. military, on the other hand, once, briefly, had him thrown out of Somalia. U.S. intelligence was sure that Giancarlo was getting rich selling guns to the warlords. At one point an American intelligence officer suspected that weapons confiscated by the Italian military were sold to Giancarlo who then reconditioned them and sold them back on the streets. During the 1980s, Italy's socialists under Prime Minister Bettino Craxi seemingly turned their entire government apparatus into a huge money laundering operation - and their former colony of Somalia played a huge role in that corruption. Trillions of lire were sent to the impoverished country as "aid" and recycled back into the pockets of Italian government officials and their cronies. (Some of this corruption came to light in 1989 when Mohamed Farah Aidid - not yet a world famous warlord - sued Craxi for 50 million lire that he says he was promised as part of a kickback scheme.) The biggest scam aid projects in Somalia were in the northeast, near Bosasso. One of those projects involved the construction a first-rate highway built through the desert linking Bosasso to Somalia's main road. One of the main beneficiaries of that road, and of the slush fund around the project, was the man who was very active in the area's trucking business, Giancarlo Marocchino. During Operation Restore Hope, Giancarlo became a good friend to the Italian journalists, many of whom stayed in his home and paid for his protection. Giancarlo provided them with meals, cars, drivers, and bodyguards. Several of the Italian journalists, however, refused to stay with him. One of those journalists was Ilaria Alpi. She thought he was a gun-running sleaze bag. So Ilaria and Miran headed north over the Green Line in their white pickup truck. Their driver was named Ali and their bodyguard was a young kid named Mahamoud. In retrospect, it clearly wasn't advisable to be traveling around Mogadishu with only one gunman. At that time I was traveling with two, some days with more. I rode in a sedan and had a pickup truck full of gunners following me. Other journalists did likewise. We realized that the pullout of the Western troops was making Somalis nervous. While the public in Europe and the U.S. saw Operation Restore Hope as a grand charitable gesture, the Somalis saw the thing in terms of money. The UN, the charities and the press were pumping hundreds of thousands of dollars a day, cash, American dollars, into the Mogadishu economy. The foreigners living in Somalia had hired guards and drivers and rented houses and cars for astronomical amounts of money. Each journalist had an entire crew on his payroll. In addition, the presence of the peacekeeping troops meant that Somali businessmen could continue to operate. Somalia under the protection of the UN, but without governmental authority, had become a haven for smugglers. Cigarettes, for example were imported tax free (who was going to collect?) and sent across the borders to Kenya and Ethiopia. And foreign boats came to fish Somalia's waters. Sometimes warlords were able to extract tribute from them. Sometimes they just seized the ships. At the time Ilaria was in Bosasso, the local militia had hijacked several fishing ships that were being held for ransom just off the coast. One ship in particular had attracted some attention at that time. It was a ship that had been donated as Italian aid to the Somalis. It had an Italian captain, two Italian officers and a Somali crew. Kidnapping and hijacking were business as usual in Somalia. With the peacekeepers pulling out Somalis were aware that everything could change. And we were aware that the end of the gravy train might be the beginning of trouble. People who knew Ilaria well said that she might have become too comfortable in Mogadishu. She was well known and popular among the Somali people, especially the women who she spent time with and whose causes she championed. They had given her a nickname (everyone in Somalia had a nickname), which translated to "little smile." One of those causes was female genital mutilation. Somali girls when they reach puberty undergo the rite of infibulation. Their labia are sliced off and their vaginas are sewn up until their wedding night when their husbands will crack the seal that guarantees he's getting a virgin. As horrible as this is, few members of the highly cynical Africa journalists corps thought it worth reporting on. The custom is common enough in Africa and it's not news. It was news to Ilaria, who was outraged and was naive enough, or idealistic enough, to think that journalism could somehow make life better. At about 3 p.m. Ilaria and Miran arrived at the Amana hotel where the correspondent for the Italian news agency (ANSA) was staying even though she knew he wouldn't be there. The Amana is located on a hillside on a quiet street near the former Italian embassy. Ali and Mohamoud turned the truck around so it was pointing back down the hill where they had come from. Across the street from the hotel was tea stall, which was just a few benches in the shade where a woman boiled tea on an open fire. A group of men in a blue Land Rover pulled up, parked, and began drinking tea. They never got to finish it. Only minutes after they went in, Ilaria and Miran walked out of the hotel, climbed into their pickup and started down the hill. The seven men from the Land Rover, quickly put their tea down, piled back into their vehicle and overtook the pickup, cutting them off at the bottom of the hill where the street intersected with a main road. Two men jumped out of the Land Cruiser. And the shooting began. That point is where all agreement about what happened ends and where contradictory stories, some from the same witnesses begin. Part III Coverup Dominico Vulpiani tears a sheet from his memo pad and sketches a map for me. He draws a road and two small rectangles to indicate vehicles. Then he draws little circles in the rectangles to show where everyone was sitting: Miran in the front seat with the driver, Ilaria in the back behind Miran, the bodyguard, Mahamoud standing in the back of the pickup. Vulpiani looks like a goofy Jack Webb. He's got the black buzz cut, a bit of girth that he carries well and slightly crooked teeth. He's the director of D.I.G.O.S. The Division of Investigations and Special Operations of the Questura Di Roma, the Italian police. He has been supervising the police investigations into Ilaria's death for two years. Though he's never been to Mogadishu, and none of his men have ever been to Mogadishu, they have interviewed witnesses who have. It's clear however that Vulpiani and his men have a big problem: Four years after the fact, with no forensic evidence, and no reliable witnesses they can never solve this case. At best, they can make it go away, which is what they seem intent on doing. There are two ways to do an investigation, Vulpiani lectures. You can start off asking why she was killed and then try to figure out who killed her. Or you can just look at the evidence, just the facts, (he actually says, "just the facts") and determine who killed her and then try to figure out why. You can dismiss the parents, he says. They have taken the first approach. His office, he says, has chosen the second. The police, he tells me, have a witness to the shooting. He's a young guy who goes by the name Jelle. Jelle turned up when the Italian government in 1977, under pressure to investigate the torture charges and solve the Ilaria case sent a special envoy, Ambassador Giuseppi Cassini, to Mogadishu. Cassini found Jelle during one of his investigative trips to Mogadishu. On the day Ilaria was killed, Jelle was apparently hanging around outside the Amana hotel looking for work with any journalist who might come by. According to Jelle, once Ilaria's pickup had been cut off, and the two men jumped out of the car, Ilaria's bodyguard Mohamoud started firing while Ali put the car in reverse and eventually backed into a wall because he was keeping his head down and not seeing where he was going. Jelle said that the men in the blue Land Rover fired all of their shots from 20 to 30 meters away. Security guards from the Amana hotel, hearing the shooting, came out, and fired on the attackers driving them away. The attackers then fled. One of them was killed. Ilaria and Miran must have been shot with rounds from an AK 47 from a distance. It was a botched robbery or kidnapping, a case of microcriminality, Vulpiani says. Vulpiani also tells me that he heard that Ilaria's body guard fired first, turning what might have been a simple robbery into a double murder. I had heard that as well on the night of the killing. According to the first information I had, Mahamoud, Ilaria's bodyguard panicked when the car was cut off and began to fire at the attackers. He only had seven rounds in his rifle and quickly ran out of ammunition. He then jumped out of the truck and fled on foot. Vulpiani seemed delighted to hear this. It fit nicely into the theory that it was a botched robbery. Mahamoud, I knew, was capable extreme panic. Nine months earlier I had been with him when he had panicked and fired first. Perhaps luckily for me, he had fired at American soldiers who were polite enough to aim over our heads when they fired back. But, I continued, it would seem to me that if Mahamoud was firing at the attackers, they would fire back at Mahamoud, not at the unarmed passengers in the car. Vulpiani doesn't have an answer. Ambassador Cassini joins us in Vulpiani's office while we're talking. He's been very helpful to me in Rome, and checks with me constantly to see how the story is coming. Cassini says that Jelle identified Hashi Omar Hassan, they guy who's now imprisoned in Rome, as someone who was in the Land Rover that ambushed Ilaria. According to Jelle, Hashi didn't fire. Jelle also said he later asked Hashi why he and his friends had attacked the journalists. Hashi is said to have replied that it was a robbery attempt. And where is Jelle now? Well, there was a slight problem with Jelle, Vulpiani said. On Christmas eve of 1997 before he was supposed to testify against Hashi, he disappeared. "We believe he's working as a mechanic in Germany." Hashi, on the other hand, was still in jail. I paused after listening to their story. It made so little sense on so many levels. I've seen people hit in the head with a round from AK47 or M-16 assault rifle before. The high velocity bullet enters the skull and the body is snapped like a whip. The entrance wound is small, but the exit wound is another matter. The shell entering the skull flattens and turns and it carves a bulldozer path through the head. The exit wound explodes, spraying skull, hair and brain matter. That's not what Ilaria looked like. It seems to me, I said, that determining what kind of bullet hit her would be the easiest part of this case, certainly more reliable than a witness like Jelle who just might have been looking for a ticket out of Somalia. Incredibly, no autopsy was done on Ilaria immediately after she was shot. Photos were taken of her body by a medical doctor aboard the Garibaldi. But those photos and the medical report, like so other things in this case, have disappeared. The medical officer who wrote the report, told Ilaria's parents that it appeared to him that Ilaria had been assassinated. Ilaria's body was exhumed twice for autopsies. The first one was inconclusive. The most recent, in January of 1998 concluded that Ilaria was shot at close range, that when she was shot, she had curled up in the back seat of the truck and placed her hands over the back of her head, that the bullet took off the small finger of her right hand. The autopsy team consisted of six doctors, three chosen by Ilaria's parents, three by the police. The report is very clear. But the policemen in the room where I was sitting said simply that they didn't believe it, didn't believe the report because it contradicted their witnesses. Perhaps the bullet had slowed down because it went through the windshield, someone offered. That didn't make much sense, either. Though passing through glass and other material might slow a high velocity round it will also make it begin to wobble or tumble. If the bullet had passed through the windshield Ilaria would not have had a clean entry wound. The police would not accept what their own forensic report said. It was a clean shot to the head that didn't pass through anything. [Expert confirmation TK] As for the robbery or kidnapping theories, whoever was close enough to shoot Ilaria would have been close enough to accomplish any of those tasks, which they didn't. Nothing was taken from the car. In Mogadishu, everyone knows everyone, especially when cars are involved. I would drive around town with my crew and Osman, my driver, would know who owned every vehicle on the road. He could tell from 100 feet away when an approaching car was possible trouble. The guys I travelled with could eyeball almost anyone in the city and link him via three or four degrees of separation to someone else who could then be identified as friend or foe. In a city where everyone was armed and loyalties were divided along the lines of extended families, survival depended on that kind of information. It is impossible that no one knew who owned the blue Land Rover, not a common vehicle in Mog. It's not likely that no one could identify any one of the seven gunmen. Ilaria's bodyguard and driver maintained for years that they had no idea who the killers were. Ali, Ilaria's driver, testified as much the first time he was brought to Rome. After Jelle disappeared, Ali was brought back, given asylum in Italy and he suddenly remembered that Hashi had indeed been in the car. My first instinct upon hearing this, however, was that it proved that Hashi had in fact not been in the car. It was always my experience that whenever a crime was committed in Mogadishu, if the people in power wanted to find out who did it, all they had to do was spread the word. The criminals generally turned up. Obviously, no one wanted to solve this one. And since her killers were lolling about at a tea stand in plain view, in front of Ilaria's driver and bodyguard whom they made no effort to kill, driving a vehicle that would have been easily identified, they obviously thought there was no reason to protect themselves. It's very clear that the people who killed Ilaria and Miran had some very powerful connections, and nobody is about to turn them in. The Italian laws governing "institutional secrets" prevented me from speaking with Omar Hashi, but I did speak to his lawyer, Douglas Duale. Duale's is a tall, thin, immaculately dressed ethnic Somali with a tight gray beard. From his office you can see the Basilica of St. Peter's. The walls are covered with reproductions of Italian Renaissance art. Duale emphasizes immediately that he is more Italian than Somali. In fact, he was born in Ethiopia and has spent most of his life in Italy and Europe. The first thing he does is open a bottle of champagne and he will keep my glass full and bubbling for the duration of our four-hour discussion. I'm a bit wary at the beginning our meeting because of what I've been told about him. Both Cassini and Vulpiani described an insane man who made no sense, so I almost expect him to start blubbering madly. After I arrived in Rome I asked Cassini several times for Duale's contact number. But every time he dismissed me saying that I really didn't want to talk to him. Duale, however, though slightly eccentric, seems about as crazy as F. Lee Bailey. His speech is measured and careful. Duale represents both Hashi and Boqor "King Kong" Musa. While Musa is in the port town of Bosasso, he has come under some scrutiny since he was the last person Ilaria interviewed. According to Duale, Hashi was among a group of 19 Somalis detained by Italian soldiers at the old port in North Mogadishu. As Hashi tells it, he and 18 others had hoods placed on their heads, had their hands behind their backs and were thrown into the harbor. Hashi and one other were able to pull a Houdini act and wriggle free, but 17 of the prisoners died. Duale is convinced of the truthfulness of this story from his client. When I respond with skepticism to Hashi's entire story, Duale becomes indignant. During the Operation Restore Hope he tells me, Somalis accused Canadian, Belgian, and Italian Soldiers of committing atrocities. The Canadian special forces tortured a young Somali boy to death. Nobody would have believed the Somalis' claims except that in each case the soldiers took photographs and wrote letters and diaries documenting the atrocities. If it wasn't for the evidence those soldiers provided against themselves, no one would have believed the Somali victims. He has a point - but he hasn't proven one. The upshot of Hashi's version of events is this: In Mogadishu, Cassini, Jelle, and a few other Somalis working with Cassini approached him with a deal. If he went to Rome and testified that he had been abused by Italian soldiers he would be compensated with a lot of money. All he would have to do is then testify that as far as he knew, most of the other abuse complaints on file were false. He would also have to testify that he was in the blue Land Rover, that he didn't actually fire a gun himself, and the motive in attacking Ilaria's car was robbery. We're at the end of the evening and at the end of the champagne. "The killing of Ilaria Alpi was entirely an Italian affair," Duale concludes. "It was a hit." Part IV What the Bogor Said It's late in the evening when I leave Duale's office. A light mist falling on Rome. I'm buzzed from the champagne and everything seems to be glittering. I decide to walk for a bit through the city, but then I recall that at one point during the interview Duale looked at me and said, "these people will kill to stop the truth from coming out." I gaze at the lights on the piazza. This is Rome. Europe. It's not Mogadishu. I decide to take a cab back to my hotel. The headquarters of RAI just outside of Rome has all the charm of a maximum security prison. A series rectangular concrete structures are surrounded by high, electrified, barbed wire fence. Along one of those fences, on the outside, is a street called via Ilaria Alpi. Ilaria worked at RAI-3, in the news division, which is known as Tg3 (Telegiornale 3). It was her dream job. Each of Italy's television stations has a political heritage. Raiuno, Raidue and Raitre, were controlled at one time by the Christian Democrats, the Socialists and the Communists respectively. Raitre was the smallest with the fewest resources. In 1987 a man named Sandro Curzi was put in charge of Tg3. Curzi was a well known leftist commentator in Italy and something of a hero to Ilaria. He wanted to build Tg3 as a more even-handed professional news organization, an organization made up of young aggressive reporters who would do with their legs what the station didn't have the money to do. Curzi told me that he thought most Italian journalists were lazy and cowardly, that they practiced Grand Hotel journalism when they were abroad, and were satisfied to read wire copy when they were home. Ilaria was everything that Curzi wanted in a reporter. He had left Tg3 by the time she went to Somalia, but the new directors of the organization maintained the high opinion they had of Ilaria. Her life and death are still a palpable presence in the halls of Tg3. Her colleagues will drop anything to spend some time talking about her. One of RAI's journalists, Maurizio Torrealta is writing a book about Ilaria's case. Like her parents, he believes that the key is in the final interview with King Kong. And he thinks it has something to do with the fishing boats that were hijacked off the coast of Bosasso. When I met Torrealta he was carrying fat books full of official testimony about the Ilaria Alpi case and the abuse and torture cases. In part of that testimony, General Fiore, Italy's last commander in Somalia says that his staff had plans for a military intervention to recapture the fishing boats. We both agree that this attention to some hijacked boats was strange; boats were hijacked all the time off the Somali coast. The faction leaders who controlled Bosasso had an arrangement with the local militia. In exchange for their "defense" of territorial fishing waters they are allowed to make their own deals and demands with the companies operating the hijacked boats. At the time, King Kong was negotiating the ransom that would be paid for the ship. Torrealta went back to interview King Kong recently and asked him if he was afraid to talk about the situation with the fishing boat. Yes, he answered. "Because I know that in general, those companies involved in the fishing industry are also involved in other activities - especially those with Italian interests," he said. Torrealta asks King Kong if he told Ilaria anything specific. King Kong hesitates; then says "I can't say.....I don't know." Torrealta pressed him harder: Is it possible Ilaria was killed because she knew there were arms aboard that ship? This time King Kong answers, "It is quite possible, because it is evident those ships carried military equipment for different factions involved in the civil war." After Ilaria and Miran's death, some of their colleagues came to the Sahafi Hotel and took her things away. They packed her TV equipment and her notebooks. They took cash out of her duffel to pay the hotel bill. An inventory of her possessions was taken onboard the Italian naval vessel, the Garibaldi. That inventory included all of her notebooks, but not her missing camera. Then her body was helicoptered back to the American morgue in Mogadishu, which had refrigerators. The following morning a brief ceremony took place. The metal caskets were draped with Italian flags; they received the military honors in the presence of the Italian ambassador, the military chaplain, General Fiore and other officers. The bodies were flown on a G-222 transport plane to Luxor. In Luxor the coffins were switched to a DC-9 sent by the Italian government and proceeded to Rome. Sandro Curzi and others who knew Ilaria's work habits said that she was a scrupulous note-taker. Somewhere between Luxor and Rome the notebooks were taken. On board the plane were members of the Italian military, journalists from Tg3, RAI's general manager, Italian secret service, and members of the diplomatic corps. None of those people was ever interrogated. Things, after all, do get lost. The last thing that Giorgio Alpi said to me when I left his apartment was that he now suspected Giancarlo Marocchino was somehow behind his daughter's death. Back home in New York, I watch Carlos' video over and over again of Giancarlo supervising the extraction of Ilaria's and Miran's bodies from the Toyota pickup. He was the first person on the scene, which is not surprising. North Mogadishu was his turf. And it's also not surprising that he looks unruffled. Death was a way of life in Mogadishu. Then Giancarlo says to the camera, "They were somewhere they shouldn't have been." And I wonder if I'm listening to Giancarlo, the protector of Italian journalists commenting that Ilaria should have been using his bodyguards and cars, or if I'm listening to Giancarlo the gunrunner saying that Ilaria shouldn't have been asking questions about fishing boats in Bosasso. Suddenly I'm aware that this particular street in Mogadishu never seemed that dangerous to me. I had driven down it dozens of times before and never given it a second thought. I returned the day after Ilaria's death, and many times after, feeling perfectly safe and in control

Copyright © 1993 The Washington Post January 24, 1993, Sunday, Final Edition The Italian Connection: How Rome Helped Ruin Somalia By Wolfgang Achtner DATELINE: ROME The agony of Somalia has its roots in the endemic political corruption of Italy. Throughout the 1980s, Italian politicians and businessmen used the country, once a colony of Italy's, as a playground for huge construction projects that either did little to help the local population or actually disrupted and damaged Somalian society. "Italy is definitely responsible for the tribal warfare and the genocide in Somalia," says Francesco Rutelli, a congressman for the environmentalist Green Party, which has played a leading role in exposing what has become a scandal in Italy. The United States, while not deeply involved in Somalia, was well aware of what was going on. Two U.S. ambassadors to Rome, Maxwell Rabb III and Peter Secchia, relayed Washington's approval of Italian policy in the Horn of Africa in the late 1980s, according to Western diplomats and Italian officials. The reality of Italy's cynical role in Somalia is clear from documents made available to Parliament by the Italian Foreign Ministry. They show that Italy sponsored 114 projects in Somalia between 1981 and 1990, spending more than a billion dollars. With few exceptions (such as a vaccination program carried out by non-government organizations), the Italian ventures were absurd and wasteful. Approximately $ 250 million was spent on the Garoe-Bosaso road that stretches 450 kilometers across barren desert, crossed only by nomads on foot. More than $ 40 million was spent to build a brand new hospital equipped with sophisticated machinery and operating rooms, in Corioley, south of Mogadishu. Since the Somalis were unable to run it, the hospital was allowed to fall to pieces. The Italian government paid about $ 95 million for a fertilizer plant in Mogadishu that never became operational. The Italians even established a University of Somalia -- despite the fact that 98 percent of the population is illiterate. The Italian professors received salaries between $ 16,000 and $ 20,000 per month. "If you consider that from 1981 to 1990 Italian aid to Somalia was almost equal to 50 percent of the country's [somalia's] GNP and that for years Italy was the major donor of aid to Somalia," says Rutelli, "it's easy to see what a negative influence we had and just how great our reponsibilities are." Piero Ugolini, a Florentine agronomist who worked for the technical cooperation unit of the Italian Embassy in Mogadishu from 1986 to 1990, says that a majority of Italian cooperation projects were carried out without considering their effects on the local populations. The result, he says, were increasing social tensions that led to the civil war. In February 1988, for example, Italy donated more than $ 4 million to set up a joint venture company that would buy cattle and sheep from the pastoral populations. The animals were fattened and exported to provide the Somali government with a source of hard currency. One year later, Siad Barre sold 3,500 head of cattle to the Yemeni army, in exchange for weapons used to fight his rivals, according to Ugolini. "The Italian aid program was used to exploit the pastoral populations and to support a regime that did nothing to promote internal development and was responsible for the death of many of its own people," Ugolini says. Ugolini points out that the Italian authorities failed to discourage the use of what he calls "the modern equivalent of slavery" at the former "Duca degli Abruzzi" farm in Johar. More than 3,000 people were employed every year at the farm; most of them came from a prison located in the midst of the sugar plantation. Other workers were "hired" after lists were drawn up during meetings between the director of the farm, the political police, the leaders of nearby villages and the unions. The average pay was between 500 and 700 lira per day, about 50 cents. Behind these misbegotten projects lay old-fashioned corruption. The Italian construction and engineering companies who were awarded lucrative contracts for the projects provided kickbacks to the political class in Rome and local politicians. The Italian taxpayer footed the bill. Control over the aid and development projects was shared by all the political parties in exactly the same way that all jobs in the vast public and semi-public sector were divided up. Ethiopia, another former Italian colony in the Horn of Africa, was awarded to the Christian Democrats. The Socialist party got Somalia. The Socialists' long affair with Siad Barre had its roots in the early 1970s, when the future dictator had embraced socialism and vowed to carry out a revolutionary transformation of the Somali pastoral society. At first, Barre was embraced by the Italian Communist Party. Party officials, leftist intellectuals and sympathetic businessmen all frequented Somalia. But this flirtation ended abruptly in the first months of 1978, after Barre attempted to grab the ****** region from Ethiopia. The Somali invasion ended in defeat and humiliation. Barre broke off with Moscow and renounced "scientific Socialism." In October 1978, the Italy-Somali Chamber of Commerce opened in Milan, the first act of a new political alliance between the Somali Socialist Revolutionary Party and the Italian Socialist Party. The party's new leader, Bettino Craxi, was seeking to make the Socialists a force to be reckoned with. His brother-in-law, Paolo Pillitteri, was the president of the Chamber. Many of the Italian-sponsored construction projects in Somalia in the 1980s were brokered by the Chamber. Kickbacks became a routine part of doing business through the Chamber, according to a lawsuit filed against Craxi and Pillitteri in the spring of 1989. Gen. Mohamed Farah Aidid, a former aide to Siad Barre, alleged in the suit that the Socialists had promised him and another Somali official a "50-50 split" of the 10 percent commission on all deals settled through the Chamber. The two Somalis claimed they were owed billions of lira. A civil court in Milan dismissed the case, ruling that it was impossible to confirm the existence of an agreement to split the kickbacks without any written evidence. Aidid, whose name means "he who doesn't tolerate insults," is one of the two most powerful warlords in Somalia. Not surprisingly, he protested loudly when Italian troops returned to Somalia last December as part of Operation Restore Hope. The corrupt relationship between the Italians and Barre, which began in 1978, flourished after 1983 when Craxi became prime minister. The Socialists flooded Somalia with millions of dollars in aid. Siad Barre obtained arms, military advisers and trainers for his armed forces. In September 1985, Craxi became the first Italian prime minister to make an official visit to Somalia, and he promised Siad Barre aid worth approximately $ 450 million over the next two years. Barre returned the visit and twice came to Rome, where he was received with all honors in 1986 and 1987. When Italian President Francesco Cossiga received the Somali dictator at the presidential palace in 1987, he congratulated Siad Barre, who had just been "re-elected" president with over 99 percent of the vote. On the Somali side, all the money was allegedly handled by Barre's eldest son, 48-year-old colonel Hassan Mohammed Siad, who had an apartment in the Hotel Raphael in Rome -- the same hotel where Craxi had his permanent residence in the Italian capital. During these years, many members of the Barre family (the dictator had five wives and at least 30 children) acquired property and bank accounts in Switzerland. On the Italian side, the list of beneficiaries reads like a who's who of major construction, engineering and communications firms. By the late 1980s, the Italian government had lost touch with reality in Somalia. "We obviously had no idea of what was going on in Somalia and until the very last moment we tried to save Siad Barre," says Francesco Rutelli. In May 1988, rising dissatisfaction with Siad Barre's regime led to rebellion in northern Somalia. The dictator crushed the revolt by destroying three cities; 15,000 people died. Back in Rome, opposition politicians demanded an end to the cooperation with Somalia and were rebuffed. Detailed reports of tortures and atrocities committed by the Barre government, released by Amnesty International, had no effect on the Italian government. Rome maintained cordial relations with Siad Barre after the assassination of the bishop of Mogadishu, Salvatore Colombo, in July 1989, and even after an Italian biologist was beaten to death in the headquarters of the Somali secret services in June 1990. When members of the opposition complained in Parliament that Italy was supporting dictatorships, Socialist Foreign Minister Gianni De Michelis answered: "If we were to abandon all those states run by dictators in Africa there would be no one left to cooperate with." Italy lost its final chance to win back some friends in Somalia when, just before Siad Barre was forced to flee Mogadishu in January 1991, Foreign Minister De Michelis tried to convince representatives of the rebel movements in Rome that a new political scenario must include the former dictator. The tragedy of Italian involvement in Somalia, according to Rutelli and others, is that Italy was in a position thoughout the 1980s to put enormous pressure on Siad Barre and force him to change his ways. But every time he and the Greens called on the government to link the concession of Italian aid in Somalia to human rights and reforms, they were rebuffed by the powerful interests around Craxi. Now Craxi and Pillitteri are at the center of a huge corruption scandal in Milan. Investigating magistrates claim that the Socialist Party in Milan orchestrated a huge web of corruption and kickbacks paid to local officials, belonging to almost all the political parties, in exchange for lucrative public contracts. The magistrates have asked Parliament to lift the Socialist leader's immunity from prosecution. More than 90 politicians and businessmen, many of them with close personal ties to Craxi, have been arrested, and a number of major construction companies like Cogefar and Lodigiani, which carried out some of the biggest jobs in Somalia, have also been implicated. In Somalia, the total breakdown of civil order after Siad Barre's departure forced humanitarian agencies to withdraw and prompted the United Nations to call for U.S. intervention. When the U.S troops arrived via boat in the harbor of Mogadishu, they unknowingly passed by the rotting remains of three boats that had been paid for by an Italian government program to develop the fishing industry. The boats had never been used. Wolfgang Achtner is a journalist in Rome.

Qorshe Sir ah oo ay Wada Galeen Cabdullaahi Yuusuf, Dawladaha Yemen iyo Itoobiya July 4, 2005 Warkaan oo aan ka helnay SULDAN HURRE HUMAN RIGHTS GROUP (SHHRG) oo ka soo xigtay ilo qarsoodi ah, ayaan waxaan u aragnaa in ay waajib nagu tahay in aan soo ban dhigno si loola socdo khatarta colaadeed ee uu wado Cabdullaahi Yuusuf. Warkii naloo soo gudbiyey wuxuu ku bilowday: Waxaa noo soo gudbiyey sirtaan goobjooge waxaana ka cudur daaranaynaa inaan soo gudbino magaca qofka noo soo diray sirtan, arrimo nabadgelyadiisa la xiriira awgeed. Waxaa naloo xaqiijiyey in dawladda Yeman iyo Itoobiya la galeen Col.C/Yusuf heshiisyo. Heshiisyadan ayaa Col. C/Yusuf loogu balan qaaday inay labadan dawladood siinayaan wixii taageero milatariya ee uu u baahdo. Waxaa kaloo heshiisku qorayaa in labadan dawladood u soo dirayaan Col.C/Yusuf saraakiil dhan 140 oo siiya tababar ciidamada uu diyaarsanayo si uu ugu weeraro gobolada Muqdisho iyo Baydhabo. Waxaa naloo xaqiijiyey in saraakiisha ka kala socota Yeman iyo Itoobiya bixinayana tababarada ay kala hogaaminayaan Capt. Osman Saalah Jaabir oo Yemani ah iyo Capt. Girma Yerid oo Itoobiyaan ah. Waxaa naloo xaqiijiyey in dawlada Yeman iyo Itoobiya ay ugu deeqeen Col. C/Yusuf 4 diyaaradood oo kuwa ciidamada qaada ah. Waxaa naloo xaqiijiyey inay u tababarayaan 12 baylood. Waxaa naloo xaqiijiyey in 90 gawaarida qoryaha tiknikada la saaro uga soo degeen dekedda Boosaaso Col.C/Yusuf. Waxaa gawaaridan soo gaday Cabdulaahi Cumar Bootaan oo ku nool dalka Imaaraadka. Waxaa naloo xaqiijiyey in 4 doonyood oo hub iyo saanad milarati ah, kana yimid dalka Yeman ku soo fool leeyihiin dekedda Boosaaso. Waxaana loo xilsaaray Cabdirashiid Aadan Seed (Qoor) iyo Injineer Ismaaciil Xaaji Warsame wixii huba ee uga yimaada Col.C/Yusuf dhanka Yeman. Waxaa naloo xaqiiyey in Col. C/Yusuf u saxiixay Dawladda Itoobiya inay ka qodo Ceelal Gaas ah oo laga helay Gobolka War-dheer oo ah dhulka Soomaalida ee ay Itoobiyo gumaysato. Waxaa naloo xaqiijiyey in ceelashan ay qodayso ama maal gelinayso shirkad ka socota dalka China. Waxaa naloo xaqiijiyey in shikadani ka dalbatay Dawladda Itoobiya inay lagama maar maan tahay in Soomaaliya aysan ka hor imaanayn qodida ceelashan ama soo weerarayn. Waxaa naloo xaqiijiyey in Col. C/Yusuf u saxiixay Dawladda Yeman inay ilaaliso badda Soomaaliya 25 sano. Waxaa naloo xaqiijiyey in Col. Yusuf u saxiixay Dawladda Yeman inay ka kaluumaysato Badda Soomaaliya 25 sano. Heshiikan ayaa bilaamaya 2005-2030. Waxaa naloo xaqiijiyey in Col.C/Yusuf samaynayo Ciidanka Sirdoonka Soomaaliyeed (CSS). Ciidankan ayaa naloo xaqiijiey in ay ka koobnaanayaan 1500. Waxaana madax looga dhigay Axmed Cabdulaahi Yusuf oo ah wiil uu dhalay Col.C/Yusuf. Waxaa naloo xaqiijiyey in ciidankan lagu soo tababarayo magaalada Makeli ee kiilka 1aad ee dalka Itoobiya. Waxaa naloo xaqiijiyey in 130 ka mida ciidankan ay noqonayaan haween. Waxaa naloo xaqiijiyey in wixii laga bilaabo 1.08.2005 in dakhliga dekadda Boosaaso ka soo baxa 85% lagu bixinayo abaabulka ciidan ee Col.C/Yusuf wado. Waxaa naloo xaqiijiyey in Col.C/Yusuf samaynayo 4 xarumood oo lagu tababaro ciidamada: Xarunta 1aad oo ah 54-aad Garoowe, oo lagu xeraynayo malayshiyooyinka laga soo aruuriyo, Nugaal, Laascaano, bariga Ceerigaabo. Waxaana xarunta 1aad ka madaxa Col.Cabdulaahi Mire Careys iyo Capt. Siciid Axmed Xirsi (Siciid-dheere). Xarunta 2aad Baliga Ab-qaale ee degmada Xarfo, oo lagu xeraynayo malayshiyooyinka laga soo aruuriyo, Mudug, War-dheer, Caado, Qaloocan, Maaneed iyo Mirafadle. Waxaana xarunta 2aad madax ka noqonaya Cawil Dhiig-sokeeye iyo Col.Cabsirisaaq Af-guduud. Xarunta 3aad Feer-Feer, oo lagu xeraynayo malayshiyooyinka laga soo aruuriyo, Jawhar, Hiiraan, Godey, Dhagax-buur iyo nawaaxiga Afgooye. Waxaana xarunta 3aad madax ka noqonaya G/sare Nuur-salaad Muuse Cali iyo Maxamed Aadan Bidaar. Xarunta 4aad Xudur oo lagu xeraynayo malayshiyooyinka laga soo aruuriyo, Kismaayo, Af-madow, Dhoobley iyo Bu’aale. Waxaana xarunta 4aad madax ka noqonaya G/ Sare Jaamaca Geyre iyo Col.Maxamuud Isaan Waxaa naloo xaqiijiyey in Col. C/Yusuf qorshaynayo in loo samaynayo qof kasta oo Soomaaliya Teesare lagu qorayo beesha uu ka dhashay iyo gobalka uu degan yahayn. Waxaana loo xilsaaray inuu diyaariyo Teesarayaashaas Injineer Cali Yaasiin Faarax oo degan dalka Imaaraadka. Anagoo ah (SHHRG) waxaan aad iyo aad uga xunahay dagaalka iyo colaada cusub uu Col.C/Yusuf dalka Soomaaliyeed dib uga abuurayo. Waxaana kula talinaynaa in wixii khilaafa oo jira wada hadal lagu dhameeyo. Waxaa naxdin leh in dad badan oo Soomaaliyeed ay ku fekerayaan in Col.C/Yusuf uu dagaal ku qaadayo beelaha ****** iyo D&M oo kaliya marka inaan waxba ka qusayn arinkan. Waxaan xasuusinaynaa dadka fikirkaas qaba in Col. C/Yusuf uu dagaalka iyo colaada ka soo bilaabay goboladda Puntland, ilaa uu diley dad biri-magaadho ah sida (Suldaan Axmed Hurre iyo Faarax Dheere). Waxaan kaloo xasuusinaynaa in fikirkani yahay mid qaldan xaga diinta Islaamka iyo bini’aadanimadaba. Ka dib fadhi degdeg ah oo uu yeeshay Ururka(HAG) wuxuu go’aan ku gaaray in aan u jeedino: Digniin: Ururka HAG wuxuu uga digaayaa C/laahi Yuusuf hurinta colaadda sokeeye oo dhalin karta dhibaato waarta. Waxaan la socodsiineynaa Adduunweynaha in arrintan ay noqon doonto mid sii fogeysa nabad iyo xal laga gaaro arrimaha Soomaaliya iyo geeska Afrika. Codsi: Waxaan Qaramada Midoobay ka codsaneynaa in ay ka dhabeeyaan cunaqabateyntii xagga hubka ee la saaray Soomaaliya oo ay tillaabo ka qaadaan waddamada mar kasta ku xad gudba xeerkan, sida dawladaha Itoobiya iyo Yemen. Baaq: Waxaan ugu baaqeynaa Baarlamaanka Ummadda Soomaaliyeed in ay si degdeg ah xilka uga qaadaan, maxkamad Qarana u soo hor taagaan kuwa ku hawlan khayaamada Qaran oo uu ugu horreeyo Col. Cabdullaahi Yuusuf. Talo: Waxaan Ummadda Soomaaliyeed kula talineynaa in ay diyaar u noqdaan difaacidda dadkooda iyo dalkooda, oo ay gumeysteyaal iyo kuwo uu ku adeegto ay doonayaan in ay dulli geliyaan.

Indeed Nasiib Buundo was a great Somali Hero! Thanks MMA for sharing this with us. What a coincidence!, my mom's pple used to live around a street named after him ....in Boondheere!

It is official: Within next two weeks; there will be a parliamentary coup d'etat in Mogadishu: Ali Khaliif Galayr is in Xamar. He is being groomed as the next Somali president. Ing.Eenow with the blessing of Abuukar Cadaani and Ghedi's clansmen will be appointed to replace the inexpereinced Ghedi as the NEW PM. The Somali divine comedy is not over yet!

here is case study by some one at American University about this toxic dumping in Somalia. http://gurukul.ucc.american.edu/ted/somalia.htm

Haddad, as I previously posted, the Italian magazine L'espresso's interview with one anonymous dragnet boss named all the individuals involved in this environmental crime. the warlords in question here are their excellencies Ali Mahdi ( ex- president), Yeey ( current one) and the shadowy Munye ( a MP ). These tree stooges should be brought to court. http://www.espressonline.it/eol/free/jsp/detail.jsp?m1s=null&m2s=a&idCategory=4791&idContent=971132

Rahima, well, I am hardened man and I don't give damn about a Somali unity no more. It is a deception that I can't afford anymore. I do have three nationalities and I wholeheartedly support the brothers in the north and their insistence to do away with the south? Do you have any idea why they do mistrust us in the south? It is not that they hate us....they just have come to a deeper philosophical understanding about the hypocrisy of some camps and their nostalgic yearning to dominate others. If we let these clannish parasites to govern again, they will make the things even worse and Somalia as we may know will cease to exist. we will have then little clannish enclaves and fiefdoms. If you really sincere and serious about a lasting peace in Somalia, present me another alternative argument other than Yeey is our elected president and the flimsy “bad government is better than no government†line of reasoning. i am not happy with a government of warlods, for the warlords, by the warlords. No it is not sinking in at all, so save the pleas! I don’t believe in governments at all and I don’t appreciate a dominant one. I want an effective, competent, decentralized one, not the inflated and cumbersome kind envisioned by Ghedi. ( 92 ministers? for what? 8 million people from one of the poorest nation in the whole universe? contrast that with Bush's cabinet of 25, representing 300 million people and the most powerful, only super power on planet earth...give me a break!!) Why is it all of sudden Yeey’s advisors and close trustees are recruited from his immediate clansmen? That is just a sign of how illusory and myopic these folks are. They have shown us their clannish design while in exile before they could even establish themselves and set foot in the country. What do you expect when they are instilled in the presidential palace and extended to a red carpet reception? they will appopriate all the nation's patrimony and engage in a nepotistic cronyism, before you know, it is another dejavu all over again ...another inta madaxa madoow and Siyaadist weltanschauung!! I am for a peaceful broadminded co-existence and free-for-all egalitarianism but not wishy-washy clan ownership. Sister, I was once so accommodating and so carefree that I was willing to accept and embrace whatever the outcome of the Embaghathi sham was. I did strive my best to put aside my antipathy for Yeey but after witnessing the blind support and fanfare in unison from his immediate clansmen, I have came to the conclusion, that no matter what we do, these provincial nomadic folks will never ever give up their clannish aspirations and will never ever put the interest of the nation before that of their clan. One more thing, don’t tell me about suffering and pain for I had my share of it at the hands of the warlords from all sides, from bari to galbeed, from waqooyi to koonfur. Just don't transgress and don't make mockery of the anguish of the powerless! I don’t know why you have to align me with warlords specially the ones in Mogadishu.? is it i am from there? or call these men adeer and abti ....again, you just being a typical Somali using thr clan association formula. I am an individual and as Somali as any other person. I am determined to see that these cold-blooded men’s clout dwindle and vanish, until then I will have no other choice but to work with them patiently to make sure that my city of birth becomes free of gangs, violence and mayhem. however for the moment, i will susbscribe to the "lesser of the two evils" principle!

Well, I am neither elevating nor dethroning any warlord’s stature. Warlords come and go. We may have dirty dozens today but tomorrow there could emerge a countless number of warlords and other opportunists. So why not better embrace the few we got now and rehabilitate them in order to prevent a later upsurge of other thugs. I think some of you pragmatists oppose a preemptive war on Jowhar to root out Yeey's implicit nuisance is that its outcome, even though predictable may worsen the already fragile attempt to pacify the whole country and reconcile clans. Some of you may also worry that the cost of starting a war outweighs the open-ended reimbursement of winning it and ask who will be paying such preliminary cost and who will be reaping its benefits? As a very prudent realist, I could contend that clans are not the enemy and neither Ghedi not Yeey represent any clan interest other than Ethiopia’s say-so of keeping Somalia perpetually a conflict-ridden weak state. Subsequently, I could justify my argument that going with an offensive to settle this stalemate for good, may actually strengthen Somalia’s hope of restoring its governance once again. This is a legitimate approach and it can be popularized among all partisan cohorts. The benefit, as I alluded, is that we will have no more Melez stooges in Somali’s predisposed political affairs. What more could one ask for?

Rahima, the uncle Qanyare reference in my preceding post was just a figurative speech. ( the fitting label should have been Abti Sudi or Abkoow Ato, but then, it would have been taken out of context yet again.) You take things literally and I empathize with your emotional lecturing and preaching. I do care about the innocent poor masses and I do abhor all warlords regardless of what clan or canton they hail from. As a matter of fact, I do belong to a non-governmental charity that feeds the internally displaced and repatriates them to their villages and if you have been to Xamar, you must have came across the so many conscious and generous individuals sacrificing all their time and energy to pro-actively change things from the grassroots. None of the warlords is a saint but all of sudden the most ruthless and the worst of them is elevated and canonized to high stature of eminence by hypocrites because of clan affiliation. Well that kind of hypocrisy impairs my benevolent judgment. In spite of everything I do subscribe to the stubborn and dejected pessimists and realists who see a second civil war as a necessary evil as long as we have clannish pretenders.(chicken-heart and lily-liver punks who can't even fight back) Why did I come to this gloomy conclusion? Simple! The same unqualified clannish hordes are now at the forerunner to lead and are once again envisaging another round of nepotism and national blunder. The same folks who failed us miserably for 45 years, are now hypnotized by Yeey premature edge over other warlords? Well, every blockhead can see that Yeey, albeit being an ailing octogenarian, is on a mission to hatch up another gory strife in Mogadishu. It would be futile and witless to wait the looming disaster in Xamar. The rival warlords and other vested interests should be proactive and launch a clean sweep offensive on Jowhar and have to be ferociously decisive before it is too late. The urgency to annihilate all these Ethiopian puppets is now more important than stabilizing Mogadishu and its surroundings. it is as simple as that. it takes a lifetime campaign to eradicate clan-ism. one more thing, the clan concordance applies only to Puntland and Somaliland ( because of the small populace and monlithic outlook of the few dominant clans living there) and not Mogadishu for it is more complicated than that. Mogadishu is as a cosmopolitan city populated by people of disparate interests. hopefully when it is feasible, we wil have a national demographic census to dispell myths.

First, I am not cheerleading for any warlord and I don't belong to any Somali clan. Miss Rahima. I am one-eight Somali, so, I don’t see myself advocating for certain clan or embarrassing anyone. I just do have such a passionate abhorrence for Yeey and his backward clannish policies and for that reason alone, I am willing to sacrifice my rationale. As long as the regionalist folks in this forum are so clannish and so blatant about it, I will be a volunteer cheerleader for any Xamar thug. My untamable and unrepentant adversary is much worse than these ruthless characters for time being. I also despise people with provincial mindset. Our good will and liberal tendency has given these Ethiopian villains some illusive political expectation and instead of being obliged they just rewarded us by putting on display their hideous clannish performance. I am ready for a decisive second civil war to get rid of the stooges and to keep these provincial folks at bay for good. I am very confident that Adeer Qanyare could defeat the buffoons in Jowhar in a day if an all out war breaks up tomorrow. I find such a radical mutiny overpowering and revolutionary. Well, there will be some collateral but the ultimate objective of such assault is to keep the defeatists’ camp’s grandiose wicked ambition fruitless. Mogadishu is the Somali capital and we oppose Ethiopia and its stooges. the other thing is i do have vested personal interest in Somalia and specialy Xamar and I will not let Yeey and his clique come close to it. My brother was imprisoned and killed in Boosaaso and his business apropriated by some corrupt officials. Once these same officials get some influence, they will commit the same agression. How could my family survive in a very lawless city for 15 years and lose everything in a day in a allegedly peaceful province?

because of the treacherous conspiratorial nature of Yeey and the blatant idiocy and short-sightedness of the useful tools in Jowhar, because of the likes of the buffoon of Jowhar and his latest tirade and accusation against the powerful vested interests of certain Mogadishu clan, coupled with the fictitious Eritrean government, Oromo and western Somali Liberation movements, and Indha Cadde’s most recent response to Mohammed Dheere and his meeting with the JVA representative, I predict an evitable warfare in the south and this time it will be a very decisive and destructive one. I am sure Ghedi and Mohammed Dhere are counting on militias from Beledweyne and Puntland. Their strategy is to isolate Galgaduud and southern Mudugh. Their immediate plan is to wreak havoc in Guriceel & matabaan. But they will fail within minutes and may even lose Beledwyne. The religious courts and their powerful militias will get involved and it will be another Jihad. Western Somali liberation movements will join the battle and also expected to join will be forces from other regions of Galgaduud and souther Mudugh. Xaabsade’s RRA side, Indhacadde’s Lower Shabelle faction and JVA will be engaged in Jubba and Bay theatre by Ethiopian forces and Shatigaduud’s RRA side. there will be winners in this one. Indha-Cadde's domain of influence will widen. Well, the powerful Qanyare and Sudi militias will be attacking Jowhar and Caato will back up his brethren in Mudugh. again no immediate winners, just a senseless blood letting. it could have some effects in Mogadishu and its vibrant commercial affluence will be interrupted for good. there could probably be some skirmishes in the the disputed area of Sool and Sanaag regions between Bari and Waqooyi forces. It is a new civil war all over again. at the end, the outcome, more destruction, more killings, somali's ultimate demise. by this time Yeey has given up the ghost!

Tribalist/clannish men from nomadic background suddenly became the elite leaders of the new nascent nation. These men had no skills, no concept of governance and most of all, they were semi literates with mediocre intellectual conditioning to begin with?. .Geel jire maxuu heysan karaa? What this lead to? Corruption, nepotism, authoritarianism, political exclusion, private exploitation of the public wealth. They thrived on that system and have single-handedly succeeded in weaving clan animosities into the fabric of our society. Because of that, today, there is no Somali over the age of 20 who is immune of this clan plague. We still have the remnant of these folks and they are the ones who keeping alive and perpetuating the same evil clan distrust and its destructive past policies. There is no one capable of challenging their interest and hold them accountable of their past crimes. These men have no concept of what it means to form a viable modern government with market democracy, with functioning economy, tax systems, banking, parties, electoral process, informed constituents, participatory politics, governmental institutions, courts, police, and penal system. I am sure these are concept that alien to Yeey and his clique.

being emotionally subjective is another confessed forte for the humbugs that worship Yeey and follow his clannish creed. let me re-think! isn't Indha-Cadde the governor of lower Shabeele? what he has to do with the capital.? or he is the shot caller in the Bay/Bakool region ? I remember now...he is the one who backed Xaabsade and prevented the SRRC retards conquering Baidoa for yeey? or is he the one who defeated Morgan and convinced him to give up his unrealizable pursuit of ever taking back Chismaio? what a let down!! Indha- Cadde is the man in the mirror now!! he must be the so called bogeyman of yeey's cheerleaders! or is it the BBC garaad you have beef with now? or A/Qasim? or Mogdishu residents? or Burco? or is it riyaale? damn the Snm mujaahidiin are going to attack us? yeey's plan failed and did not materialize, so let us blame everyone!! good escapist tactic!! loving such a desperation! What is the difference between Indha-Cadde and Mohammed Dheere? both are governors who are on the opposing side? right? one is allied with yeey now and then, the other is solid in his contempt for the warlords of Bari? what is the difference between Yeey and Sudi? sudi's prophecy is now being fullfilled? sorry, i can't understand why we are distinguishing warlords and favoring one from the other! this is so damn puzzling! i don't think so? I am really entitled to be jesting and to be sarcastic sometimes, it is fun to abuse retards and dispell myths.... isn't this a government of the warlords, for the worlords, by the warlords, .....or ...yeey has suddenly became an honorable statesman with a nation building vision and mission? amazing!!! As Sudi said " the shoes don't fit" so must n't we acquit yeey ? yeah his demise is imminent .... i guess there is no one to blame here other than his defeatist policy ! now the ball is on the Meles court! let see what he is cooking! whether you like it or not, the warlords in the capital command a great influence. without them, nothing will work. Ethiopia cannot force people to become loyal subjects of another dictator/warlord...... Yeey is done and gone! who is next? ha la is daba dhaboolaqo dhugtaa ha ina moodo inaan dhulka dalxiis ku nahay!

Fiefdom From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Under the system of feudalism, a fiefdom, fief, feud or fee, consisted of heritable lands or revenue-producing property granted by a liege lord in return for a vassal knight's service— usually fealty, military service, or security. Fiefdom usually required the vassal to obey conditions of customary and specified homage and fealty. In theory, a fief would provide revenue to equip and support the vassal knight to serve the liege lord. The fief was granted to the vassal, but remained in the ownership of the liege lord. The lord did not have the right to withdraw the fief (unless the vassal broke his obligation) or to increase the dues for a fief. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiefdom

A puppet government is a government that, though notionally of the same culture as the governed people, owes its existence (or other major debt) to being installed, supported or controlled by a more powerful entity, typically a foreign power. Such a government is known as a puppet régime. [...] Failed state is a controversial term intended to mean a weak state in which the central government has little practical control over much of its territory. [...] In recent years various political commentators have labelled many countries as failed states, including Afghanistan (under the Taliban), Somalia, Yemen, and Georgia. [...] http://en.wikipedia.org/

Xiin, just to educate you more on the camp that supports the Shariif are from all walks of life and don't have any hidden clan agendas unlikr yeeys cheerleaders who are as porven all from his clansmen. The supporters of the speaker consist of intellectuals (mostly in the Diaspora), The business community in Dubai and Mogadishu ( close to dozens of influential Somali millionaires have already pledged a large sum of money to cover all parliamentarians' expenses and salary while in Mogadishu). their aim is not to score some political goals or outmanouver the other camp(Melse Stooges). That is the last thing in their mind. Their main target is to restore somali people's hopes, reconcile them and to oppose the ethiopian policy of creating clan fiefdoms in Somalia. We have been patient with this long stalmate and we knew the whole Embagathi conference was a sham and another false start but we just want to work around things. We can't have peace until we have the likes of warlords Yeey and others Ethiopian stooges. We need to get rid of them by any means necessary and we are working on that. Just watch out as things progress in this critical juncture. then, we will find out who will be in festive mood.

Xoogsade, no body in their right mind would advocate another senseless civil war. only these Yeey cheerleaders who are now living some kind of outlandish illusion. They are counting on Ethiopian troops marching into Mogadishu and hoping coronations of Yeey as the De facto ruler of Somalia. Every rational Somali have already written off Yeey as you said. People are now re-thinking of other alternative ways to solve this clannish warlordism and its inevitable continous stalemate. we need to empower civil societies and form progressive organizations free of the clan politics and alliance. how long we have to wait warlords and illiterate clan imposters for solution? thier time is up. Yeey is the epitome of all that is wrong with clan politics and warlordism. Thanks to Allah that his days in this world are numbered. It is us, the young generation who have to come up with initiatives that are in tune with the modern civilised world. Qabiil Qaran ma lagu dhisi karo!

Yeey is another warlord and worst of all, he is a clan minded misleader and Ethiopian stooge. He is surrounded by a circle of clannish charlatans from his immediate family who have this whimsy unreality that they (clan XYZ) are privileged to lead Somali people.they regretablly have mediocre plot to start some sort of conflict among the Mogadishu populace in order to have their desired hegemonic despotism come to fruition. when will these primitive imbeciles learn that times have changed and somali people are more savvy and progressivly have reached a political maturity. it is still them who are caught behind the clan animosities of yester years and it seems all the members of the clique ( including the Cheerleaders and Dukes) still whole heartedly believe this fatalistic fantasy of clan supremacy. It was "Habeeb" an MP and minister in the Ghedi's TFG inflated cabinet who put this clan presidential ownership on the spotlight in a very diplomatic and unprovoking way, while addressing Minnesota audiance last week. We should get rid of this ailing octogenarian as soon as possible and his ineffective boy toy. they are not even free to pursue their agendas without the blessing of MELES ZENAWI. Yeey's suggestion to be consulted with his Tigre boss before he could compromise even taken aback the Yemeni president, Salah, who had to ring Addis to lend a hand of the botched attempt to reconcile these warring Somali loonies. The speaker has shown in a very dignified manner that he will not become a sell out and would stand for his patriotic principles no matter. he left San'aa with a victory and a conviction that the Tigre clique are just reactionary minions that could be igonored and put aside for the moment. let yeey rot in his exile adventurism. Once again, the task ahead is to continue the efforts of bringing some of the North Mogadishu big heads into the patriotic fold and to pressure the warlords to continue their dismantling of the roadblocks. we could pacify Mogadishu and make it gun-free and militia-proof within a month. We already have the quorum in Mogadishu; the speaker of the parliament should convene an extraordinary session to oust him. Yeey has no influence beyond Garoowe. The United States of America and The European Union government only recognize a government functioning in Mogadishu. They do aggressively oppose the foreign troops notion and the Ethiopian meddling of the Somali peace process.

I don't have an account set up yet but i am going to check this with other guys involved in raising funds but i guess you could do and organize locally and then contact the phone numbers given at that site. Lexus, I did post this picture for humanitarian reason and to show how urgent this little poor baby needs some help. She has to be brought outside of Somalia where she could get medical attention. ---- no need to be so immature and so judgemental. please think and act before it is too late. ----- I know it is kind unethical to post a picture of such pain here but my ultimate goal is for you guys to look deep down into your heart and do something for this poor baby.( 2 yrs old )

Her name is Halima Hirre Husein, 2 years old, from a destitute poor family from Godey in Ethiopia. She has a huge tumor in her genitalia. link below,descretion required, if you could stomach looking at such picture) Her father brought her to Mogadishu, Somalia in search of medical help. Mogadisho is a war torn city lacking basic medical facilities. Doctors there said they can't help her at all and she needs to be taken to overseas. They said they are unable to do any kind of medical operation to remove the tumor. She is at Banadir Hospital in Mogadisho and the doctor who is taking care of her is Dr. Abdi Ibrahim Jiya. He can be reached at telephone#: 2521270362 or 2521-501155. I am doing a fund raising for her through friends and I have already $350 US dollars but that is not enough. I did write to 5 international charities for help. Please do your part and let us all help this little baby before it is too late. Here is the link of her picture which shows her painful situation. http://www.dayniile.com/Juun/Gabaryar.htm http://www.dayniile.com/sawirda/cunug1.JPG PS: She is not arelative of mine and I don't even know her family.( I know we Somalis are sick with Qabiil and it has impaired us so badly, that we have became heartless people ) I just came across this painful sitaution through Dayniile and it really touched me. Please I am appealing to your humanity and kindness, help this little baby before it is too late.

Yes, Stoic, this is an environmental catastrophe that will have an unimaginable consequences on people’s life but I am shocked of your naiveté here.....what government you want to investigate this? Isn’t the current Somali government led by the same warlords, who were paid by the Mafia, to provide the dumping ground for the nuclear waste?