Rahima, many good patriotic Somalis will be emerging INshallah.

HornAfrique, the 4.5 principle is often a lead to parliamentary consensus, therefore if 1 out of the 4.5 vote against Peace keeping forces, they would be considered minority.

We won't really need a peace keeping force if Mogadisho can establish legitimate security in the city. This agreement was driven by a fear of losing the merits of warlordism once good government is installed and every little messy is cleared up. The biggest fear for these warlords is to live to a functioning government. Hence, their words have no accountability.

thanks Stoic. I will be checking. This story is taking on a Washigton Post high profile _____________________________________________ Below is a rebuff on Islam Online article, the urge of rehiring by Council on American Islamic Relations. Very Funny Islamic Prayer Demanded in US Workplace By Sher Zieve MichNews.com Mar 12, 2005 In a time when all vestiges of Christianity are being attacked by the Left and their legal representative, the ACLU, the Islamic organization CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) is demanding Muslim prayer-time be allowed in the US workplace and that employers must make accommodations for it. CAIR’s Legal Director Arsalan Iftikhar even had the audacity and arrogance to say: “Given sufficient ‘goodwill’ on the part of all those involved, both the employees’ legal right to reasonable religious accommodation and the employer’s right to maintain smooth operations in the workplace can be maintained.†Huh? Christianity, the majority religion in the United States, is not allowed even to be spoken of in the workplace, schools and (increasingly) in any public places. Yet, in public schools it is now required that Islam (as a “religionâ€) be taught and Christianity be denied. Are the Left and the ACLU going to back this additional Islamic lunacy? Will workplace Islamic prayer sessions be required of employers and employees, while Christianity is not only disallowed but, shunned? The latest example of the Islamic movement’s “Muslim prayer at work†occurred at a Dell Computers facility in Nashville, TN. Thirty Muslim workers insisted upon taking Islamic prayer time, during their work shifts and while on the job. The company said “No†as its not legally allowed. The Muslim workers walked off the job and Dell fired them. End of story? Not by a long shot. Using Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which requires an employer to accommodate religious practices unless it causes an “undue hardshipâ€, CAIR legal director Iftikhar sent a letter to Dell’s CEO Kevin B. Rollins advising him that the Muslim workers must be rehired pending resolution of the issues involved. Now, that’s a good trick. If Title VII can be used by the Muslims, why didn’t Christians think of it.? Of course, the answer is that the ACLU rules against Christians virtually each and every time they attempt to exert their religious freedoms. Certainly, another looming question is: “Will the ACLU fight as hard for the Muslims as they did (and do) against the Christians?†Only time will tell. However, if Dell Computers agrees to the Islamic demands, Christians should be fully prepared to have their religious rights “reinstatedâ€. I encourage all Christians to keep close tabs on this situation. It’s imperative that we all vigilantly remain on-watch. Otherwise, we will be waked up one morning in the not-too-distant future, to the strains of a mandatory call to prayer. Copyright by Sher Zieve Mich News

Curiyaha: Maxamed Bashiir Jaamac Inta aanan gelin maansadan waxaan waxyar ka taabanayaa xarafka 4aad ee af soomaaliga oo ah (X). Idinkoo ila arki doona xarafkan waxaa ku badan waxyaalo aan aad loo jeclayn ama qiima weyn lahayn,sida xaasid,xajiin,xumbo ama xunbo,xasarad,xatooyo,xin,xabbad,xisaabtan,xasuuq,xadgudub,xaaraan,iyo kuwa kale oo aanan halkan ku soo koobi karin,oo xabashi ugu dameeyo,oo soomaalidu ay aad u necebtahay. Ma ahi nin aaminsan curaafiska,balse waxaa iga keenay sheekadan nacaybka aan u qabo in askari xabashi ahi soomaaliya dhexdeeda inta la siiyo ogolaansho uuna ka soo qaato soomali uu markaa ku gumaado shacab soomaaliyeed kuna kufsado gabdho soomaaliyeed kuna aar goosto oo kaga dhigo ciil uu qabay iyo caruu kula dhacay. Waxaa is weydiin leh haddii ay xabshida maanta saaxiibo inoo yihiin maxay ku goeen dhalintii soomaaliyeed oo ilaa axmad guray ilaa 1964 ilaa 1977 ku dhimanayey dagaalka xabashida iyo mujaahidiinta maanta weli ka dagaalamaya dhulka somali galbeed. Maansadani waxay ku socotaa xildhibaanada qaranka waxaana taageero uga dhigayaa dhawaaqii ka soo yeeray xildhibaan jinni boqor oo ahaa diidmada xabashida. Ugamana dan lihi ujeeddo siyaasadeed oo gaar ah ee waa mid igaga soo baxday soomalinmo iyo jacayl aan u qabo dalkayga iyo dadkayga qaaliga ah ,ee aan dhaxalka uga helay awoowayaashay. . Waxan idhi: Gabay xoolo kuma dhaqan Xoogsina kamaan rabo Xarafkaan qoraayana Xag allaan ka heliyoo Xulufadii rasuulkiyo Xamsa inaan ku biiraa Meel iigu xidhanoo Xaaraan inaan cuno Aadame xaqiis dhaco Kuma darin xisaabaha Dhulkaygana xumaantiyo Xiisadiyo colaadaha Xagashana kolay tahay Inaan laygu xamanayn Xabaalaha shawacliyo Xingalool tan iyo badhan Xubeeriyo buraan yaro Dhahar xididadeediyo Ilaa xeebta laasqoray Xarar dheere iyo howd Xalin iyo hargeysiyo Xamar iyo kismaayaba Xaafuun agteediyo Xiddaa laga ogsoonyahay. Soomaali xul ahoo Waxan ahay xafiidoo Xubigii dalkaygiyo Xiriirkii dadkaygiyo Xariir baan ku jiifaa. Arartaan xariiqiyo Xogta aan warmayaba Xanuun bayga keenaye Aan soo xayuubshee Soomaalaay bal xaafida X da erayga loo qoro Khayr kuma xiriirsana Xumbo waad taqaaniin Xoor cano ma ahaan Xatooyaduna waa ceeb Xasuuq diid ilaahay Xadro diinta laga saar Xiisuhu ma raagaa? Xin miyaa la jecelyahay? Xaasid waa la necebyahay Idin xiijin maayee X du waa dhib badantoo Wax kastoo xumaanoo Ilaahay xarimay baan Xaaraan ku sheegnaa Xarafkaana kama helo Xisbiyda galbeedkuna Waxay xeer u waayaan Ayeey (X )ku sheegaan. Xaruntaan u jeediyo Xeradii ma tegin weli Nayroobi xaalkii Laba sano xusuustii Lagu soo xisaabshoo Xallintii khilaafkiyo Beelaha xasilintii Barlamaanku xawliga Madaxweyne soo xulay Xibir iyo waraaqiyo Xaalka carabta yuu noqon Xayraan lakal noqon Loo noqon xagaagii. Nimankii xiriirkiyo Xeerkeennu uu go ,ay Nimankii xadoo dhacay Xubno weyn dalkeennii Weli xoog ku haystoo Xad kaleeto sii raba Sidee nabad u xeeraan? Xildhibaanka qarankow Adigaa xilkii sida Adigaa ilaahay Ku xisaabin doonaa Xaashaa lilaahiye Xaruntii dalkeeniyo Xuduntiisii weeyee Xamar waa xabiibee Xabashiga inaga daa. Xildhibaanka qarankow Xabashiga inaga daa Xabashiga inaga daa Xabashiga inaga daa Hadii aadse xulufiyo Doolaar xasilin iyo Xoolaha ad damacdaan Xirfadaa ciyaartaan Maatida xaraashtaan Walaydaan xal gaarayn Walaydaan xiriir wacan Ilaahay la xiranayn Sheydaanna xiisuu Naar kugu xodxodayaa Xaruntii dalkeeniyo Xuduntiisi weeyee Xamar waa xabiibee Xildhibaanka qarankow Xabashiga inaga daa. Midna waa xusuusee Xaaji muuse yalaxow Inuu xamar nabdeeyaa Xaduudaha ka qaadaa Xaq ayeey ku tahayee Isna waa xariiqoo Xayn baa ku raacdaye Bal aan eegno xaalkaa. Xildhibaanka qarankow Xabashiga inaga daa. Dhamaad

...................................... NGOs: The Self-Appointed Altruists 3/11/2005 By Sam Vaknin, Ph.D. Their arrival portends rising local prices and a culture shock. Many of them live in plush apartments, or five star hotels, drive SUV's, sport $3000 laptops and PDA's. They earn a two figure multiple of the local average wage. They are busybodies, preachers, critics, do-gooders, and professional altruists. Always self-appointed, they answer to no constituency. Though unelected and ignorant of local realities, they confront the democratically chosen and those who voted them into office. A few of them are enmeshed in crime and corruption. They are the non-governmental organizations, or NGO's. Some NGO's - like Oxfam, Human Rights Watch, Medecins Sans Frontieres, or Amnesty - genuinely contribute to enhancing welfare, to the mitigation of hunger, the furtherance of human and civil rights, or the curbing of disease. Others - usually in the guise of think tanks and lobby groups - are sometimes ideologically biased, or religiously-committed and, often, at the service of special interests. NGO's - such as the International Crisis Group - have openly interfered on behalf of the opposition in the last parliamentary elections in Macedonia. Other NGO's have done so in Belarus and Ukraine, Zimbabwe and Israel, Nigeria and Thailand, Slovakia and Hungary - and even in Western, rich, countries including the USA, Canada, Germany, and Belgium. The encroachment on state sovereignty of international law - enshrined in numerous treaties and conventions - allows NGO's to get involved in hitherto strictly domestic affairs like corruption, civil rights, the composition of the media, the penal and civil codes, environmental policies, or the allocation of economic resources and of natural endowments, such as land and water. No field of government activity is now exempt from the glare of NGO's. They serve as self-appointed witnesses, judges, jury and executioner rolled into one. Regardless of their persuasion or modus operandi, all NGO's are top heavy with entrenched, well-remunerated, extravagantly-perked bureaucracies. Opacity is typical of NGO's. Amnesty's rules prevent its officials from publicly discussing the inner workings of the organization - proposals, debates, opinions - until they have become officially voted into its Mandate. Thus, dissenting views rarely get an open hearing. Contrary to their teachings, the financing of NGO's is invariably obscure and their sponsors unknown. The bulk of the income of most non-governmental organizations, even the largest ones, comes from - usually foreign - powers. Many NGO's serve as official contractors for governments. NGO's serve as long arms of their sponsoring states - gathering intelligence, burnishing their image, and promoting their interests. There is a revolving door between the staff of NGO's and government bureaucracies the world over. The British Foreign Office finances a host of NGO's - including the fiercely "independent" Global Witness - in troubled spots, such as Angola. Many host governments accuse NGO's of - unwittingly or knowingly - serving as hotbeds of espionage. Very few NGO's derive some of their income from public contributions and donations. The more substantial NGO's spend one tenth of their budget on PR and solicitation of charity. In a desperate bid to attract international attention, so many of them lied about their projects in the Rwanda crisis in 1994, recounts "The Economist", that the Red Cross felt compelled to draw up a ten point mandatory NGO code of ethics. A code of conduct was adopted in 1995. But the phenomenon recurred in Kosovo. All NGO's claim to be not for profit - yet, many of them possess sizable equity portfolios and abuse their position to increase the market share of firms they own. Conflicts of interest and unethical behavior abound. Cafedirect is a British firm committed to "fair trade" coffee. Oxfam, an NGO, embarked, three years ago, on a campaign targeted at Cafedirect's competitors, accusing them of exploiting growers by paying them a tiny fraction of the retail price of the coffee they sell. Yet, Oxfam owns 25% of Cafedirect. Large NGO's resemble multinational corporations in structure and operation. They are hierarchical, maintain large media, government lobbying, and PR departments, head-hunt, invest proceeds in professionally-managed portfolios, compete in government tenders, and own a variety of unrelated businesses. The Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development owns the license for second mobile phone operator in Afghanistan - among other businesses. In this respect, NGO's are more like cults than like civic organizations. Many NGO's promote economic causes - anti-globalization, the banning of child labor, the relaxing of intellectual property rights, or fair payment for agricultural products. Many of these causes are both worthy and sound. Alas, most NGO's lack economic expertise and inflict damage on the alleged recipients of their beneficence. NGO's are at times manipulated by - or collude with - industrial groups and political parties. It is telling that the denizens of many developing countries suspect the West and its NGO's of promoting an agenda of trade protectionism. Stringent - and expensive - labor and environmental provisions in international treaties may well be a ploy to fend off imports based on cheap labor and the competition they wreak on well-ensconced domestic industries and their political stooges. Take child labor - as distinct from the universally condemnable phenomena of child prostitution, child soldiering, or child slavery. Child labor, in many destitute locales, is all that separates the family from all-pervasive, life threatening, poverty. As national income grows, child labor declines. Following the outcry provoked, in 1995, by NGO's against soccer balls stitched by children in Pakistan, both Nike and Reebok relocated their workshops and sacked countless women and 7000 children. The average family income - anyhow meager - fell by 20 percent. This affair elicited the following wry commentary from economists Drusilla Brown, Alan Deardorif, and Robert Stern: "While Baden Sports can quite credibly claim that their soccer balls are not sewn by children, the relocation of their production facility undoubtedly did nothing for their former child workers and their families." This is far from being a unique case. Threatened with legal reprisals and "reputation risks" (being named-and-shamed by overzealous NGO's) - multinationals engage in preemptive sacking. More than 50,000 children in Bangladesh were let go in 1993 by German garment factories in anticipation of the American never-legislated Child Labor Deterrence Act. Former Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich, observed: "Stopping child labor without doing anything else could leave children worse off. If they are working out of necessity, as most are, stopping them could force them into prostitution or other employment with greater personal dangers. The most important thing is that they be in school and receive the education to help them leave poverty." NGO-fostered hype notwithstanding, 70% of all children work within their family unit, in agriculture. Less than 1 percent are employed in mining and another 2 percent in construction. Again contrary to NGO-proffered panaceas, education is not a solution. Millions graduate every year in developing countries - 100,000 in Morocco alone. But unemployment reaches more than one third of the workforce in places such as Macedonia. Children at work may be harshly treated by their supervisors but at least they are kept off the far more menacing streets. Some kids even end up with a skill and are rendered employable. "The Economist" sums up the shortsightedness, inaptitude, ignorance, and self-centeredness of NGO's neatly: "Suppose that in the remorseless search for profit, multinationals pay sweatshop wages to their workers in developing countries. Regulation forcing them to pay higher wages is demanded... The NGOs, the reformed multinationals and enlightened rich-country governments propose tough rules on third-world factory wages, backed up by trade barriers to keep out imports from countries that do not comply. Shoppers in the West pay more - but willingly, because they know it is in a good cause. The NGOs declare another victory. The companies, having shafted their third-world competition and protected their domestic markets, count their bigger profits (higher wage costs notwithstanding). And the third-world workers displaced from locally owned factories explain to their children why the West's new deal for the victims of capitalism requires them to starve." NGO's in places like Sudan, Somalia, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Albania, and Zimbabwe have become the preferred venue for Western aid - both humanitarian and financial - development financing, and emergency relief. According to the Red Cross, more money goes through NGO's than through the World Bank. Their iron grip on food, medicine, and funds rendered them an alternative government - sometimes as venal and graft-stricken as the one they replace. Local businessmen, politicians, academics, and even journalists form NGO's to plug into the avalanche of Western largesse. In the process, they award themselves and their relatives with salaries, perks, and preferred access to Western goods and credits. NGO's have evolved into vast networks of patronage in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. NGO's chase disasters with a relish. More than 200 of them opened shop in the aftermath of the Kosovo refugee crisis in 1999-2000. Another 50 supplanted them during the civil unrest in Macedonia a year later. Floods, elections, earthquakes, wars - constitute the cornucopia that feed the NGO's. NGO's are proponents of Western values - women's lib, human rights, civil rights, the protection of minorities, freedom, equality. Not everyone finds this liberal menu palatable. The arrival of NGO's often provokes social polarization and cultural clashes. Traditionalists in Bangladesh, nationalists in Macedonia, religious zealots in Israel, security forces everywhere, and almost all politicians find NGO's irritating and bothersome. The British government ploughs well over $30 million a year into "Proshika", a Bangladeshi NGO. It started as a women's education outfit and ended up as a restive and aggressive women empowerment political lobby group with budgets to rival many ministries in this impoverished, Moslem and patriarchal country. Other NGO's - fuelled by $300 million of annual foreign infusion - evolved from humble origins to become mighty coalitions of full-time activists. NGO's like the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC) and the Association for Social Advancement mushroomed even as their agendas have been fully implemented and their goals exceeded. It now owns and operates 30,000 schools. This mission creep is not unique to developing countries. As Parkinson discerned, organizations tend to self-perpetuate regardless of their proclaimed charter. Remember NATO? Human rights organizations, like Amnesty, are now attempting to incorporate in their ever-expanding remit "economic and social rights" - such as the rights to food, housing, fair wages, potable water, sanitation, and health provision. How insolvent countries are supposed to provide such munificence is conveniently overlooked. "The Economist" reviewed a few of the more egregious cases of NGO imperialism. Human Rights Watch lately offered this tortured argument in favor of expanding the role of human rights NGO's: "The best way to prevent famine today is to secure the right to free expression - so that misguided government policies can be brought to public attention and corrected before food shortages become acute." It blatantly ignored the fact that respect for human and political rights does not fend off natural disasters and disease. The two countries with the highest incidence of AIDS are Africa's only two true democracies - Botswana and South Africa. The Centre for Economic and Social Rights, an American outfit, "challenges economic injustice as a violation of international human rights law". Oxfam pledges to support the "rights to a sustainable livelihood, and the rights and capacities to participate in societies and make positive changes to people's lives". In a poor attempt at emulation, the WHO published an inanely titled document - "A Human Rights Approach to Tuberculosis". NGO's are becoming not only all-pervasive but more aggressive. In their capacity as "shareholder activists", they disrupt shareholders meetings and act to actively tarnish corporate and individual reputations. Friends of the Earth worked hard four years ago to instigate a consumer boycott against Exxon Mobil - for not investing in renewable energy resources and for ignoring global warming. No one - including other shareholders - understood their demands. But it went down well with the media, with a few celebrities, and with contributors. As "think tanks", NGO's issue partisan and biased reports. The International Crisis Group published a rabid attack on the then incumbent government of Macedonia, days before an election, relegating the rampant corruption of its predecessors - whom it seemed to be tacitly supporting - to a few footnotes. On at least two occasions - in its reports regarding Bosnia and Zimbabwe - ICG has recommended confrontation, the imposition of sanctions, and, if all else fails, the use of force. Though the most vocal and visible, it is far from being the only NGO that advocates "just" wars. The ICG is a repository of former heads of state and has-been politicians and is renowned (and notorious) for its prescriptive - some say meddlesome - philosophy and tactics. "The Economist" remarked sardonically: "To say (that ICG) is 'solving world crises' is to risk underestimating its ambitions, if overestimating its achievements." NGO's have orchestrated the violent showdown during the trade talks in Seattle in 1999 and its repeat performances throughout the world. The World Bank was so intimidated by the riotous invasion of its premises in the NGO-choreographed "Fifty Years is Enough" campaign of 1994, that it now employs dozens of NGO activists and let NGO's determine many of its policies. NGO activists have joined the armed - though mostly peaceful - rebels of the Chiapas region in Mexico. Norwegian NGO's sent members to forcibly board whaling ships. In the USA, anti-abortion activists have murdered doctors. In Britain, animal rights zealots have both assassinated experimental scientists and wrecked property. Birth control NGO's carry out mass sterilizations in poor countries, financed by rich country governments in a bid to stem immigration. NGO's buy slaves in Sudan thus encouraging the practice of slave hunting throughout sub-Saharan Africa. Other NGO's actively collaborate with "rebel" armies - a euphemism for terrorists. NGO's lack a synoptic view and their work often undermines efforts by international organizations such as the UNHCR and by governments. Poorly-paid local officials have to contend with crumbling budgets as the funds are diverted to rich expatriates doing the same job for a multiple of the cost and with inexhaustible hubris. This is not conducive to happy co-existence between foreign do-gooders and indigenous governments. Sometimes NGO's seem to be an ingenious ploy to solve Western unemployment at the expense of down-trodden natives. This is a misperception driven by envy and avarice. But it is still powerful enough to foster resentment and worse. NGO's are on the verge of provoking a ruinous backlash against them in their countries of destination. That would be a pity. Some of them are doing indispensable work. If only they were a wee more sensitive and somewhat less ostentatious. But then they wouldn't be NGO's, would they? Sam Vaknin, Ph.D. is the author of Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain - How the West Lost the East. He served as a columnist for Central Europe Review, PopMatters, Bellaonline, and eBookWeb, a United Press International (UPI) Senior Business Correspondent, and the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in The Open Directory and Suite101. Global Politician

Stoic, when was that incident? I have heard of another incident in Washignton DC whereby a group of Taxi drivers were declined of establishing designated places for their prayers at the DC Airport. It was aired on CNN.

inaa lilaahi wa inaa ileehi raajicuun

what did Aideed achieved except making Mogadisho the most dangerous city in the world? He uprooted milliongs of innocent residents and pillaged their property. Comparing him to the current president is i must say a clear prejudices you hold towards a democractically elected president. If you in good faith are concerned of the state of Somalia today, give the president a chance. Let him finish his tenure and then we will all have ample reasons to evaluate his failures and successes.

Maclimuu, you won't accept if i call Mogadishu leaders for instance the good Abdiqasin as savage, destructive, hateful, rapist, mass murderer, regressive, unhuman, recidivist, loathsome, embezzler, megalomaniac and etc. The fact speak for itself that the many intangible viles of his tenure as TNG president surpassed the less virtues of him. You should reason in a decently manner. Of all you who open this thread, it is apperant your biases for the president..

Rahima> I don’t know what is wrong with Somalis walaahi, it’s almost like their success lies in the hoped failure of others. Why can’t we all succeed? Save us your sarcastic dislike for the president. You always cover your biases in the appeal of patriotism, localism, shared regionalism with those you held in contempt while delibaretely ignoring their good stories and success. Every leader in a society had had shortcomings,but that didn't led them to believe that they were incapable of getting their job done. Our fallibility to errors isn't impervious to criticism or smear campaigns. As Humans endowed with the ability to reason and filter the bad from worse leaves us to take him as the only man who can direct Somalia to good path and the return of law and order in this present Somalia and at this anarchic circumstance. In his years as Puntland president, he is far from being coined humiliation and psychic assault for what he had accomplished though many people would be repellent to such truth.

Nashville probes firing of Dell Muslim workers By Eric Auchard Fri Mar 11, 2005 SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - A local agency in Nashville, Tennessee, is investigating whether 30 Muslim contract workers were unfairly fired by Dell Inc. for taking unscheduled breaks to pray, a city official said on Thursday. A Dell spokesman said no workers had filed complaints in what was a "misunderstanding" and the company had policies to safeguard religious practices. The temporary employees at Dell's logistics facility in Nashville were fired in early February, according to a preliminary investigation by the human relations commission for the metropolitan region surrounding Nashville. The dispute involved the timing of breaks for sunset prayers by the 30, all Somali immigrants, who were employed by staffing agency Spherion Corp. on a temporary basis at Dell, the world's largest personal computer maker. "The workers were told: 'Choose work or choose faith,'" said Kelvin Jones, executive director of the Metro Human Relations Commission for the greater Nashville area. "They didn't see an option: They chose not to work." Dell spokesman David Frink said, "We had some contract workers who left Dell basically on a misunderstanding of our religious (policies)." He added, "Our long practice has been to accommodate religious belief, including time for prayers." Dell aimed to resolve the issue "beneficially" and several workers have since returned to work at Dell, he said. Dell operations include a major production center in Penang, in the majority Muslim nation of Malaysia, and facilities in Singapore and Bangalore, India, each with large Muslim populations. A spokesman at Spherion, a $2 billion-a-year staffing agency, was not available for comment. Several Somali workers fired from a nearby Whirlpool plant lost a trial on a similar issue last September. The jury decided Whirlpool was within its rights to limit workers' break times so as not to disrupt factory production. Nashville has seen an influx of at least 5,000 immigrants from Somalia over the past decade, Jones said.

A charter for Africa's barefoot entrepreneurs Rosemary Righter March 08, 2005 Economic View TWO decades ago, with famine ravaging the Horn of Africa, I flew from Addis Ababa to Mogadishu. On the airport tarmac I saw a gleaming small cargo plane being speedily unloaded, for cash, into vehicles that made off within seconds. The contrast with the processing of famine relief that I had witnessed at airstrips in the Ogad1nya desert was striking. I turned to congratulate my Somali minder, and got an ironic smile. “That’s not aid, it’s the weekly qat flight,†he said. It was all he needed to say. Qat is a somewhat hallucinogenic stimulant used in Ethiopia, Somalia and Yemen. It is such a profitable cash crop that just then Ethiopian farmers were ripping up their coffee trees to grow the stuff. Qat is also highly perishable. Sold in small bunches of what looks like fresh baby spinach, to be chewed and spat out, in that heat it would be unmarketable within about four hours. Hence the rush. Nothing was going to stop those drivers reaching their customers in time. This business had nothing to learn about supply, demand and distribution — or about getting government off its back. More pertinently, in view of what we are likely to be told this week by Tony Blair’s Commission for Africa about the impossibility of getting African economies moving without massive Western-financed “investments†in infrastructure and training, here in 1984, right in the middle of starvation, civil war and social collapse, were market forces robustly at work. Sure, it was drugs. So what? The point of this tale is that market incentives work in Africa — given half a chance, and even not given half a chance. In the absence of social safety-nets, in the absence of courts for justice in the event of commercial disputes, shrewdness is forced upon them as a matter of survival. The question is how to turn these skills to more productive use. With better access to credit or equity capital and business advice, tiny ventures could expand, generating jobs and, eventually, tax revenues. It is here, at or near the bottom of the economic pyramid, that Africa’s wealth-creating middle classes will come from. Yet a top-down approach is common to the grandiloquently ambitious Sachs report on the UN’s Millennium Development Goals, to the messianic paternalism of Gordon Brown and, I fear, to the Commission for Africa. The talk is about “fundamental breakthroughs†in “delivering†free health, education, water and other “public goodsâ€; about what governments are going to dole out. The big assumption, that economic growth will emerge from huge increases in public spending, ignores the history of a continent strewn with the debris of inappropriate investment programmes. In Africa’s kleptocrat culture, it takes a leap of faith to imagine that misappropriation and corruption will not increase in line with the enhanced opportunities for “rent-seeking†once aid rises to 20-30 per cent of national incomes. At the least, administering these sums will strain dysfunctional bureaucracies. Government-led “solutions†for Africa, if I may adapt a Blair slogan, look Not Forward, But Back. We should be asking, instead, how best to bring capital and skills together to help these anything but passive “masses†to do better what millions of them, considering the circumstances, already do surprisingly well. That is why Enterprise Solutions to Poverty*, the short report by the Shell Foundation, should be required reading in Downing Street. This report makes no claims to originality — indeed, it modestly attributes much of its wisdom to Adam Smith. This is a young foundation, at the beginning of a learning curve. But its thinking is hearteningly original. Think of this report as The Barefoot Entrepreneur’s Charter, and you will get the flavour. It starts with the observation that, if gains from fairer trade and debt relief are to be realised, people need to believe that they will not just be better educated, but better off as a result of that education. Which means jobs, the mightiest weapon in their fight to escape poverty. It asks good questions. How and where to intervene? How best to complement local enterprise solutions to poverty, setting poor people on “the economic ladder to personal bettermentâ€? How can the “nearly invisible markets†operated by the poor become growth centres for wealth creation? And how, to that end, to use the “value-creating assets†of multinationals as catalysts? Firstly, it emphasises not what might be done with foreign expertise and billions of dollars, but how much can be done right now with local brains and local capital to get “pro-poor†business moving. It defines “pro-poor business†as entities that supply goods and services to poor people, employ poor people or are owned by poor people. Kurt Hoffman, the foundation’s director, argues that: “There’s lots of talent; and poor customers have to be pretty sharp too. This is the raw material for making a living out of stuff the poor want and can afford.†Think local, because foreign aid “almost always comes packaged with . . . distant knowledge, foreign skills . . . whose presence for too long can inhibit learning . . . and inhibit growthâ€. Locals are better at the things all successful businesses must do: assess risk, know your market, offer what your customer wants, and find least-cost solutions. This is not as difficult as it sounds. Even in the poorest countries, banks exist. The trouble is that they are not lending to clients who are off their “radar screensâ€. The trick is to help enterprises to set up sound business plans — which is where multinational expertise can come in — and get banks to lend against the plans, not (often nonexistent) collateral. The goal is to get banks to see that there is a return to be made in banking for the poor. Secondly, financial viability must be the primary objective, with income covering costs and providing a rate of return that all can live with. “Enterprises that remain permanently dependent on subsidy help nobodyâ€. (The foundation rarely now goes into partnership with not-for-profit bodies because they “do not take easily to the business way of tackling problemsâ€.) Financial viability is not just about making a profit; it means businesses can start to grow. Donors should invest, not give; expect all involved to share the risk; and require partners in their start-up grants, loans or profit-sharing deals to put the customer in charge, because “customer satisfaction means maximum effort focused on the results that matterâ€. Third, don’t wait to get everything else right before you start. The poor are used to tough environments. They are also perilously accustomed to grand promises that come to nothing. This goes beyond traditional corporate philanthropy. It is seat of very ragged pants stuff. The appeal of applying business thinking to development should be obvious; yet what multinationals are mostly asked for is cash, not this sort of engagement. Is this because bureaucrats fear to involve the people who know most about what makes businesses grow? Or is it that the aid community is hostile to commercialism? Direct lending to small and medium enterprises is less than 10 per cent of private as well as official aid to Africa, and enterprise does not rate a mention in Oxfam’s 24 “Pay the Price†demands for more and better aid. The risk is that market-sensitive approaches, using local money and skills, will be crowded out by the huge new flows of aid. Precious little will find its way to Africa’s barefoot entrepreneurs. *Enterprise Solutions to Poverty: Opportunities and Challenges for the International Development Community and Big Business. www.shellfoundation.org

Hundred migrants feared drowned Bossaso is at the centre of the people-trafficking route from Somalia BBC NEWS Last Updated: Thursday, 10 March, 2005, 13:52 GMT More than 100 migrants from Somalia and Ethiopia, including women and children, may have drowned while trying to reach Yemen, the UN refugee agency says. Migrants on other boats told the UNHCR that a vessel carrying 93 people sank and only the four crew survived. It was one of six boats which set sail from the Somali town of Bossaso. Such incidents are not uncommon in the Gulf of Aden. The UNHCR said it was appalled at this ongoing human tragedy. The crew of another boat reportedly forced their 85 passengers to jump overboard before reaching land last week. Of these, 18 drowned - 17 Somalis and one Ethiopian. Seven bodies have been recovered. Somalis - fleeing anarchy in their homeland - and Ethiopians go to Yemen, before travelling on to Europe. An unknown number of African migrants also drown each year in the Mediterranean Sea, trying to cross to Europe. Some 535 people have arrived in Yemen in the past week. They report that another 1,500 people are waiting in Bossaso to cross over to Yemen. Bossaso is controlled by Puntland, a break-away Somali republic.

Libaaxsankataabte, I find it hard to swallow when people present accusations without evidence.

According to UNEP, villagers along Somalia's Indian Ocean coast are suffering from unexplained acute respiratory infections, dry heavy coughing, mouth bleeds, abdominal haemorrhages, unusual skin disorders and breathing difficulties. Very sad indeed

Somali men walk past unidentified garbage washed on to the beach in Haafun in north eastern Somalia. Exiled Somali government wants tsunami spread toxic waste probed NAIROBI, March 9 (AFP) Somalia's government in exile on Wednesday demanded an urgent probe into reports that toxic waste washed onto the Somali coast by last year's tsunami is causing illnesses and widespread environmental damage. Environment Minister Mohamed Osman Maye said experts should be sent to Somalia to look into reports that debris the tsunami washed ashore or stirred up from previously dumped waste containers is causing a wide range of unexplained medical problems among coastal villagers. He said the Nairobi-based UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and the international community "must intervene urgently to assist the very needy Somali population that is starving to death on a daily basis as a consquence of actions beyond its defense capability." Experts must be sent immediately "to identify ... the types of dumped hazardous debris and their origins ... in order to save what could be savable in Somalia," Maye told reporters here. According to UNEP, villagers along Somalia's Indian Ocean coast are suffering from unexplained acute respiratory infections, dry heavy coughing, mouth bleeds, abdominal haemorrhages, unusual skin disorders and breathing difficulties. Some of the illnesses have presented symptoms similar to those associated with radiation exposure, UNEP said earlier this month, noting indications that containers full of radioactive and chemical waste dumped on the coast had been damaged by the December 26 tsunami and were leaking. "Most of the waste was simply dumped on the beaches in containers and disposable leaking barrels, which ranged from small to big tanks without regard to the health of the local population and environmentally devastating impacts," UNEP said in a report. Maye said his government, which is located in Nairobi due to security concerns in lawless Somalia, was receiving similar reports of the spread of "new and not yet diagnostically known diseases" that have resulted in increasing number of human and animal deaths. In the late 1980s, European firms dumped toxins such as uranium, lead, cadmium and mercury as well as industrial, hospital and chemical waste in northern Somalia, the United Nations has said. That trend picked up rapidly after the 1991 ouster of strongman Mohammed Siad Barre left Somalia without any functioning central government, according to UN officials. Somalia watchers have said that warlords along Somalia's coast were paid hefty amounts of cash to allow waste to be dumped there. Tribune De Geneve

Internationalizing Somalia, by Awees Osman SOMALI VOICES

UNHAPPY MASSES AND THE CHALLENGE OF POLITICAL ISLAM IN THE HORN OF AFRICA March 9, 2005 I'd like to start, if I may, with a personal confession: my friend and fellow alumnus of Northwestern University , Professor Alessandro Triulzi, has, by flying me across the Atlantic , made a considerable investment in me. Although he surely will not get his money's worth out of me, that fact does not weigh heavily on my mind. More than this, thanks to Bin Laden and Co., the ghost of political Islam has lately drawn academic attention to my professional interests and, in doing so, has turned out to be my premiere meal ticket, a manna from heaven to ensure earthly prosperity. Somalia is once again, as indeed is the Sudan , the object of attention by the West. The once-neglected villages of Somalia are, as we speak, crawling with CIA agents, looking for the elusive specter of Bin Laden hideouts, presumably in the bushes and in the grazing grounds of camel herds. I am loath not to welcome this development, if only for the enormous employment opportunities it has opened up for us, the Somali elite, as well as expatriate fellow travelers. Who needs, from now on, to trouble with the teaching of complacent, overfed, gum-chewing American undergrads when the CIA pays better--and with far less exertion of the mind as of the body. As regards the subject of Islam in Somalia : it could be said that Islam may well have come to the Horn of Africa before the new religion flourished in Arabian soil. Some years before the Prophet Muhammad's (may peace be upon him) flight from Mecca in 622, a party of more than seventy Muslim converts fled fearful persecution in Mecca to seek refuge in the Christian court of the Abyssinian king in Axum(Axum is today in the province of Tigrai in Ethiopia). Astonishingly--and mysteriously--the king promptly gave sanctuary to the fleeing Muslims. The pagan chiefs of Mecca gave chase and demanded the immediate surrender of the Muslim refugees, but the king adamantly refused to hand them over. In doing so, he risked doing an irreparable damage to the cordial relations in trade and goodwill between the two Red Sea neighbors. When the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) returned to Mecca in a triumphal march eight years later, most of the Muslims came back, but the record does not make it clear whether, in fact, they all did return. Might some have remained behind to plant the seed of the new religion in the soil of the Horn? Historians still puzzle over the incredible show of humanity to the persecuted Muslims on the part of the Abyssinian sovereign. In any case, his generosity was not lost on the Prophet who laid it down in a Hadith (the Hadith contains the sayings and deeds of the prophet and, as such, constitutes the second most sacred text of Islam, after the Qur'an) that “ Abyssinia is a land of justice in which nobody is oppressed.†The point was unmistakable: no jihad against Abyssinia , a prophetic injunction that the Muslims seem to have taken to heart. It is a fact, in any case, that in the early energetic centuries of Islam when the empires of the Persians and Byzantines fell like a house of cards before the steady onslaught of victorious Muslim armies, Abyssinia was left alone unmolested. Some historians claim that the forbidding landscape of Abyssinia coupled with the martial spirit of this warrior nation saved it from Muslim invasion. In my view, the Hadithal injunction of no jihad against Abyssinia does more to explain the survival of Abyssinian Christianity in the age of Islamic eruption on the global scene. This was of course to change later, especially in the sixteenth century with the devastating invasions of Abyssinia by the Muslim Ghazi, or holy warrior, Ahmad al-Ghazi, better known by the less flattering Abyssinian appellation of Ahmad Gragne, or the Left-Handed. But even here it is worth to recall that the outbreak of hostility between Muslims and Ethiopian Christianity stemmed from the threat felt by the Muslims of an expansionist, re-energized Christian empire steadily--and inexorably--pushing eastwards towards the Muslim lowlands. Equally interesting to note is the fact that Muhammad was apparently familiar with Ge'ez, the ancient tongue of Abyssinia , and the liturgical language of the Ethiopian Church today, from the appearance in the text of the Qur'an of Ge'ez words like Neguz, or King. As well, the word for God (Waaq) in the Cushitic languages of Oromo and Somali appears in the Qur'an. Was Muhammad familiar with these Cushitic languages, too? Also–-and this Somalis would not be delighted to hear--the word “Somali†shows up, for the first time in written form, in the royal chronicles of the Abyssinian Neguz Yeshaq, as one of the peoples reduced by him in a recent campaign. Whatever the origins of the spread of Islam in the Horn, Somalia was thoroughly Islamized by the fourteenth century, as we learn from the very helpful account of the globe-trotting Muslim scholar, Ibn Battuta. To compare briefly the influence and distribution of Islam in the countries of the Horn of Africa: Professor Paulos Milkias of Concordia University (Montreal, Canada) has recently come up with some startling, if not explosive, revelations showing the Somali population of Ethiopia to constitute the third largest ethnic group in the country, after the Oromo and Amhara. The Woyane(popular name for the Tigreans in power in Ethiopia today) come fourth. If so, Islam may form a numerical majority in Ethiopia , but power and privilege being dominated by the Christians, Muslims remain a sociological minority in the land. Sudan , I take it, is both numerically and sociologically Muslim, while Somalia is almost 100% Islamic. Militant Islam is highly unlikely to cause any political mischief in Somalia , for reasons to be offered shortly. Be that as it may, the overwhelming majority of the Somalis are sunnis, adhering to the Shafi'i school of Islamic jurisprudence, and tenuously belong to Sufi brotherhoods. The religious brotherhoods in Somalia include the Qaadiriya, the earliest and the claimer of the largest number of adherents. The Qaadiriya traces its founding and spiritual efficacy to the twelfth century Baghdadi saint, Abdul-Qadir al-Jilani. Then there is the Ahmadiya, founded by the nineteenth century Moroccan mystic and teacher, Ahmad b. Idris, al-Fassi. Finally, the Saalihiya, an off-shoot of Ahmadiya, established by the Sudanese student of al-Fassi's, Muhammad Salih from Dongola on the Nile . It may be recalled that the Somali poet, mystic and warrior, who led the famous and earth-consuming insurrection against British, Italian and Ethiopian rule, the Sayyid Muhammad Abdullah Hasan, il Mullah Pazzo of the Italians, and the Mad Mullah of British colonial literature, was a follower of Muhammad Salih. At first glance Somalia would appear to be an ideal breeding ground for the rise of a large-scale, grassroots fundamentalist movement: For one thing, Somali Islam is a frontier Islam, hemmed in on all sides by pagan and Christian interlopers. Characteristically, frontier Islam is bellicose, xenophobic and profoundly suspicious of alien influences. This together with the fact that Somalia 's masses are perennially haunted by the specter of famine and anarchy, war, devastation, and other horrors should make it an excellent candidate for a resurgent militant Islam. But the Somalis defy the laws of political science. In spite of the presence of all the conditions that should unleash cataclysmic upheavals in Somalia , nothing of the sort has happened there, or is likely to happen. What explains this bizarre defiance of anthropological theory? Simply put, the patterns of Somali social organization, or disorganization, provide a most satisfactory if disheartening explanation. (Disheartening especially today, it may be added, in light of the terror and trepidations wrought on Somalia by the jackals gyrating back and forth between Nairobi and Mogadishu, who have grown fat on the loot of the broken body politic of this unhappy country, thus perpetuating Somalia's agony for booty.) To return to the point, the Somali polity is shaped by a single, central principle that overrides all others, namely the phenomenon that social anthropologists call “the segmentary lineage system.†Enrico Cerulli, that Olympian Italian scholar to whom all Somalists–and I might say Ethiopianists, too--are forever indebted, has first drawn attention to the salience of segmentation in Somali society. And I. M. Lewis has later constructed a definitive study of the workings of this principle in A Pastoral Democracy , still deservedly judged the classic study of Somali pastoralism. Stripped of the scientific razzle-dazzle with which it is often presented, segmentation may be expressed in the Arab Bedouin saying: “my uterine brother and I against my half brother, my brother and I against my father, my father's household against my uncle's household, our two households (my father's and uncle's) against the rest of the immediate kin, the immediate kin against non-immediate members of my clan, my clan against other clans and, finally, my nation and I against the world! In lineage segmentation one, literally, does not have a permanent enemy or a permanent friend–not even a permanent Muslim friend–but only a permanent attention to the availability of self-improving opportunities. Depending on a given context, a man–or a group of men, or a state, for that matter–may be your friend or foe. Everything is fluid and ever-changing. Moreover, sad to say, experience seems to show the Somalis as utterly lacking the notion, basic to human decency, of fixed loyalty--loyalty to anything high or low, sacred or secular, and that, on the contrary, the principle of greedy, galloping personal gain tends to over-ride all else among us Somalis. Worse still, the concept of personal responsibility or political accountability seems to be thoroughly missing from the Somali weltanschauung, or worldview; and therefore there is no social mechanism in our culture to serve as a check on an individual's—or a group's--rapacious excesses or to restrain malcontents from wreaking havoc on a helpless bovine populace. Thus, yesterday's mass murderers and the day-before-yesterday's thuggish looters of the nation's resources put themselves forward as today's leaders of the Somali people's destiny. And nobody calls them on it because they are protected on all sides by their kin. Furthermore, it is indeed a depressing thought to observe that a Somali crook's kinsmen seldom ask themselves what interest accrue to them collectively from protecting an extortionist thug who ruthlessly exploits them by killing and stealing in their name without even sharing the loot with them! I could name names and cite examples of the above but will refrain from doing so for reasons of charity, perhaps of self-interest—ergo, I, too, being a Somali must utter these remarks with an eye to self-interest! (Remember the venerable Somali aphorism: Shiikh tolkiis kama janna tego!) No wonder we have come to acquire a global reputation as a nation of victims and criminals. Segmentation, in other words, is a social system that results in, and sanctions, institutional instability as a cultural norm. Thus it may be stated as a general rule, without hesitation or heart-searching, that instability as a way of life informs the Somali world! Shaped thus by the weird quirks of lineage segmentation, the Somalis, as a society, are segmental, warlike, schismatic, and extremely addicted to self-based pragmatism, at least as they understand pragmatism. What is in it for me? a Somali is likely to ask on any given issue. In view of the rigorous exigencies of the Somali environment, a Somali is invariably predisposed to look out for numero uno. Therefore the ideology of self-sacrifice essential for the rise of a great grassroots movement is alien to his psyche. No Somali, for example, will ever blow himself up for the cause of al-Islam. A classic Somali adage holds that “ Ilaah iyo ‘Atoosh baa nego degaallamaya, dhankii ‘Atoosh baannuna u liicaynaa: once upon a time, Allah and a warrior chieftain named ‘Atoosh began to wage a terrific fight over us(Somalis), and we forthwith went with the chief against Allah, because the chief could deliver the goods faster than Allah.†That is, a Somali would promptly go against the law of Allah, if doing so turns out to be in his material interest. (I do appreciate that in making these remarks, I am painting my countrymen as a bunch of unprincipled opportunists). Well, the Somali environment does tend to produce a pragmatic worldview! And that pragmatic desert worldview militates against the growth of organized, Islamic militancy or, for that matter, large scale movement of any sort. Arguably, the Sayyid Muhammad, the George Washington of Somali nationalism and the Dante Alighieri of Somali literature, did succeed in leading a rather drawn-out, grassroots resistance against the combined powers of Britain, Italy and Ethiopia(1898-1920). And yet his movement killed an estimated one million Somalis and precious few infidels. As the Italian Consul in Aden, cavalliere Pestalozza, the only European to set eyes on the elusive mullah, reminds us, the Sayyid's movement, having miserably failed to unify Somalis against infidel rule, deteriorated into a destructive civil war. The same headache confronts the hyena-thugs fighting over the decomposed body of the Somali polity today. It is a great misconception to call these free-lance looters warlords, at least in the sense Westerners understand the term. In Western political discourse a warlord is a figure who can bring a unified horde of followers either to the battle field or to the negotiating table. To be sure, a Somali “warlord†may manage to field a hundred men into a concerted action, if the perceived interests of the clan as a whole are threatened, or the prospects of a lucrative booty look good. But as soon as the organizing emergency evaporates, each man goes his merry way, unfettered by any binding loyalty to a transcendent cause. How the Italians managed to impose a semblance of order on the Somalis for eighty years remains a matter for astonishment--no doubt by methods that would be considered extraordinary in this human-rights-sensitive age. Italians, please, do come and re-colonize us again. The long-necked Somali lasses are there, still waiting for you. (Mama mia, come dolce, Khadija!â€) On a serious note: while the British neglected British Somaliland by merely using it as Aden's “butcher shop,â€(a supplier of meat to their Aden garrison), British development energies being spent in nearby Kenya, the Italians, by contrast, made a serious attempt to develop and modernize Italian Somalia. They created the vast banana plantations and varieties of citrus fruits that in time came to constitute Somalia's leading export earner. To this day Somali bananas remain the wonder of culinary connoisseurs. Then why, one should duly ask, does Somaliland republic enjoy a semblance of peace and stability that has eluded Italian Somalia? The answer is as simple as it is discouraging: Ex-Italian Somalia is too changed to leave an effective role for the traditional institutions of elders and shirka, or assembly, debates and too unchanged to accommodate modern methods of governance. She is stuck in a limbo, between the rock of pre-industrial outlook and attitudes on the one hand and the hard place of half-baked modernization on the other. To return to the subject of political Islam in Somalia, segmentation has forbidden the emergence of a creditable Islamic fundamentalist force to make a bid for political power. There was one notable exception: in the early 1990s, the shadowy, toothless entity known as al-Itihaad attempted to seize power in Puntland, with a view to establishing a theocratic regime in that region. Warlord Abdullahi Yuusuf (today's putative president of Somalia), a leathery survivor of innumerable gun fights and therefore not particularly noted for mildness of character, unleashed his militia on the holy warriors in a fearful massacre, driving the mullahs out into the wilderness and mercilessly hunting them down in their mountain hideouts. Inexplicably, the desperate pleas of God's soldiers for divine intervention in the face of Abdullahi's fury was completely ignored by the Almighty who indifferently looked the other way as the self-styled holy men were systematically obliterated. The hapless remnants of al-Itihaad have fled westwards to the region of Luuq Ferrandi on the Somali-Ethiopian border. Their bogey-man presence in that sensitive border area has turned out to be a gift from heaven for the once-beleaguered (but now strengthened , thanks to al-Itihaad) regime of Meles Zennawi in Ethiopia. The wily Zennawi has used (and continues to use) the perceived threat of al-Itihaad as an effective weapon to milk the fundamentalist-paranoid American cash cow. Despite the fact that the Somali social fabric cuts against the growth of a fundamentalist movement, the Pentagon and State Department bureaucrats insist on a Bin Laden presence in Somalia. To settle the matter once and for all, I asked my colleague Sunni Khalid, of the Voice of America, to host an on-the-air panel to discuss the issue. The panelist who represented the American government view, whom I suspected to be a CIA spook, fiercely contended that there were Bin Laden camps in Somalia. And when pressed to name one camp, he began to fudge ambiguously. Finally, the moderator of the panel, a Senegalese journalist, apparently acting on a whisper from him, named Ras Kamboni, south of Kismayu on the Indian Ocean as a Bin Laden stronghold. After the panel ended, perplexed and embarrassed over the possibility that this panelist might know something I did not, I phoned a colleague in the field to check it out. He journeyed to Ras Kamboni and found there a single one-eyed mullah and three Bantu followers! Some stronghold! Bin Laden knows better than to trust his person or that of his lieutenants to the individualistic environment of the Somalis where everything is open and without secrecy, and where opportunism and the numero uno outlook of personal survival form the prevailing traits. Therefore, where Somalia is concerned, the West has nothing to fear with respect to the upsurge of militant Islam. The Islamic history of the Sudan tells a different story. Though I am ill-equipped to speak to Sudanese Islam, the obvious can be stated: the Sudan tends to spawn messianic characters en masse, the great Mahdi near the end of the nineteenth century being the prime example, but there also having flourished a legion of small-time mahdis, Nebbi ‘Issas , Nebbi Khadhar s, Nebbi this, Nebbi that, Nebbi the other. Now I have a theory as to why the Sudan tends to be a breeding ground for messianic figures, which I want to try out on the Sudanese scholars at this conference. My wildly speculative view holds that the Sudan represents a dramatic clash between African Ju-Ju(for those unfamiliar with this term, Ju-Ju is an all-purpose word throughout black Africa for magic, witchcraft, sorcery and related para-normal phenomena) and Semitic mysticism. When the mind of the witch doctor fuses with that of the Sufi, or Muslim mystic, the result can be a powerful mental detonation that ignites into existence a multitude of messiahs. Though Somalia per se is unlikely to serve as a fertile soil for Islamic fundamentalism, it may be caught up in a global Islamic revolutionary upheaval. Muslims are assured in the Qur'an: “you are the noblest community ever raised for mankind.†Yet sober Muslims surely must wonder whether their present-day reality-–downtrodden masses, ignorance, rigid backward looking interpretation of the tenets of their faith, a degrading defeat after defeat at the hands of Christian Westerners and Jews, complete loss of their onced-fabled lead in science and philosophy–justifies their view of themselves as a noble community. In short, Muslims are a people with a magnificent past and a humiliating present. In particular, the last two centuries have not been kind to the ummah, or the Islamic universal community of faith, as the Muslims watched helplessly the steady erosion of their position versus the dynamic, secular resurgent West. No matter how one looks at it, the heart of the Muslim dilemma goes to a problem that the Reformation and the enlightenment movement have permanently solved for Westerners, notably the question of what should be the basis for social and economic development in the community: human reason or revealed faith? Westerners have effectively, and for good, settled that question by the well-known principle of the separation of Church and state. It took Europeans three hundred years of blood and tears to transform themselves from a faith-driven worldview to secularized, reason-driven socio-economic systems. Will Muslims undertake the painful reform of society, and even more painful re-interpretation of their faith to bring Islamic theory and practice in accordance with the dictates of the modern world? Will there ever arise a Muslim Voltaire or a Muslim Ernest Renan to declare war on the body of hidebound conservative Muslim jurists whose narrow, rigid, literalist interpretation of the Qur'an and Hadith, have sunk the Muslim community into the ground? I will offer one remarkable example: everyone at this symposium, whether of Muslim or Christian heritage, takes it as a given of the Muslim's God-given right to take four wives. In fact the scriptural pronouncements on the matter are found in two references in the fourth chapter of the Qur'an entitled, the Women's chapter. In that chapter, the whole range of the rights and obligations of women in the Muslim community are spelled out. The first reference appears in verses 1, 2, and 3: it reads: that Muslim men are allowed to marry two, three or four wives. But Muslim men choose to forget the second part of the Qur'anic injunction, which reads: But if you fear that you cannot administer absolute justice among your wives, then you are commanded to take only one wife; a few paragraphs later, the same chapter lays down that “you, men, with your human short comings, will never, ever, be able to administer justice among your wives.†What inference can be drawn from this? Umistakably, monogamy. Yet, Muslims throughout history have chosen to embrace the first of the Qur'anic instructions and to ignore the second, obviously because Muslim women have never had a say about the interpretation of the Qur'an. In any case, the prophet's permission for his disciples to take four wives stemmed more from a sociological reason than religious. As a warrior community, the Muslims were perennially fighting, and too many married men were falling in battle. As a result, the prophet was confronted with the nightmare of multitudes of young widows with children clamoring for support, whereupon he sensibly cleared the way for plural marriages. In the heart of Islam in Saudi Arabia, no woman is allowed to venture out of the house without the Hijaab, or the notorious black veil. To my knowledge, nowhere do you find the imposition of veils on women in the early Muslim community. All that the Qur'an decrees is for women to dress modestly, as indeed Christian women are also commanded. In fact the practice of covering does not even figure in early Arab culture. Covering as a cultural practice originates as a Persian custom and only becomes a widespread Islamic practice centuries later, with the incorporation of Persia into the Muslim world. What about the issue of dissent based on individual conscience? Again, the Reformation has settled this matter in the West. By contrast, to my knowledge, there is no room for individual disagreement based on one's conscience in the Islamic world. The example of Sheikh M. M. Taha is sadly instructive here. Taha, a Sudanese national, a great Muslim scholar and one of the most original minds of the twentieth century in the Muslim world, was executed in 1983 by Jaafar al-Nimeiry, former dictator of the Sudan, on grounds of religious heresy. Sheikh Taha's sin: he ventured to offer the opinion that it was not necessary to pray 5 times a day, and that the love of God in the heart overrides these anachronistic daily rituals. Rituals were meant, said he, for Bedouin tribes some fourteen centuries ago. For the record, I disagree with Taha, as I firmly hold the opinion that rituals are essential for the endurance of religion. Look at the Catholics and Jews. But was this enough to hang the greatest mind in the land? When was the last Westerner to be executed for religious heresy? I bet none, since Savonarola was burned at the stake by the Borgia Pope, Alexander VI in the fifteenth century. Nimeiry asked Sheikh Taha to recant. Recant? That word vanished from European vocabulary with the Reformation. And Sheikh Taha's passion on the way to the hanging Tower still resonates, every bit as passionately, dramatically and pathetically as that of Christ on the way to Calvary. What about the humane tolerance of peoples of other faiths that was the hallmark of the classical age of Islam? Here, in Rome, the heart of Christianity, Muslims are completely at liberty to construct Mosques and other houses of worship with complete religious freedom. Would the heart of Islam, namely, Saudi Arabia, return the courtesy by allowing Christians to build churches in Mecca and Medina!? Is it not time for Muslims to engage in a painful, collective self-examination? Too often we hear the litany of exhortations calling upon the West to understand Islam. That is putting the question upside down. Westerners need no new understanding of Muslims, they already do understand Islam and Muslims exceptionally well. Every university worthy of the name in Europe and America has a department of Islamic studies. My colleague here, Alessandro, is a leading faculty member of an entire institution that does nothing but specialize in studying Islam and Muslims. Can one locate a single university offering advanced degrees on Western civilization in any Muslim country, perhaps with the possible exception of Turkey and Egypt? So, to put the issue of understanding right side up, it is of pressing urgency for Muslims to understand Europeans and their heritage. In short, blind conservatism has imprisoned the mind of Muslims. Smugly comfortable in our untroubled ignorance, we Muslims want to sleep in complacent indolence. But Westerners would not let us sleep. They keep on kicking us in the backside, in order to give us a rude awakening. Will Muslims do it-–undergo the agonizing pains of reform in order to transform their societies to a competitive level? Here a troubling question obtrudes: why isn't there a single democratic country in the Muslim world? Turkey?–well, a democracy of sorts? Why does democracy work in India, and not in Pakistan? The two countries are about the same level of technical and economic development. In fact, were it not for the religious factor, Pakistan and India would be practically indistinguishable. Then why does democracy work in the one, and not in the other? Is there something about Islamic culture, at least as it is practiced today, that is fundamentally and inherently anti-democratic? All too often Muslims do not ask these questions, and when they do, do not make them actionable. If so–-and in the absence of urgent reforms--Muslims are likely to continue to chafe under the oppressive heel of secularized, highly skilled Western barbarians. And they will fall further and further behind the West in science and technology, and therefore in economic and political well being Then the unhappy, hungry masses of Islam from Nigeria to Indonesia are likely to rise in a massive insurrection, which will no doubt result in cataclysmic social upheavals that are likely to throw up a million Bin Ladens to the forefront. Then the West will see a kind of rage and terror that is bound to make the present disturbances look like a child's play. Prof. Said S. Samatar Goldogob, Somalia.

Kenyan president due in Ethiopia for talks on Somalia, region Wednesday March 9th, 2005 00:16. NAIROBI, March 8 (AFP) -- Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki is to visit Ethiopia this week for talks with top Ethiopian and African Union officials amid controversy over the AU-authorized deployment of regional peacekeepers to lawless Somalia, officials said Tuesday. The three-day visit, which begins on Wednesday, also comes as tensions have risen along the Kenya-Ethiopia border where several dozen gunmen believed to be Ethiopian rebels ambushed a Kenyan security patrol on Saturday, killing one and seriously wounding four. In talks with Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, the Kenyan president will "seek ways of ensuring safety on the expansive common border, discuss the possibility of Ethiopia using the (Kenyan) port of Mombasa and ways of guaranteeing regional stability," Kibaki's office said. While in Addis Ababa, Kibaki will also address the AU Commission, which last month authorized the seven-member east African Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD) to deploy peacekeepers to Somalia to support the relocation from exile there of the country's transitional government. Senior IGAD defense officials are currently planning the proposed mission whose prospects have been complicated by vehement opposition to the force from some Somali warlords. IGAD comprises Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, Sudan and Uganda and many in Somalia are opposed to the inclusion in the force of troops from Ethiopia, Djibouti and Kenya which they believe have ulterior motives in contributing.

I have these questions Why are you insensitive to the Somali objectionable words whereas you appear sensitive to the English objectionable words? Savage is considered objectionable and maybe deleted but when someone uses, Doofaar or dameer, moderators show leniency.

More News from Kampala (AFP) Borneo Bulletin

Mbabazi Defends Somalia Mission The Monitor (Kampala) March 9, 2005 Posted to the web March 8, 2005 Frank Nyakairu Entebbe The Defence Minister, Mr Amama Mbabazi, has defended UPDF's planned deployment in Somalia saying Uganda has the capacity to handle the assignment. Mbabazi told BBC on Tuesday morning that UPDF would not be overstretched - even in the face of the 19-year northern insurgency if it contributes to the planned 60,000 man strong contingent to the lawless Somalia. "We have handled situations in Rwanda, in DR Congo and if there is a call for service elsewhere, why not? We have enough resources to perform," Mbabazi said. Senior East African military officials began talks at Entebbe on Monday to conclude details of deploying a regional peacekeeping mission to Somalia. Yesterday the UPDF Army Commander, Lt Gen. Aronda Nyakairima, opened the seven-day conference calling for concerted efforts to end the Somali crisis. "In Uganda we believe that helping our neighbours is a time-honoured tradition. We shall do our part to see peace return to Somalia," Aronda said at the conference. He said the meeting would deliberate "on troop contributing countries, mandate, size of the mission, funding and logistics." Between today and Friday army chiefs of staff and ministers will meet to map the final strategy for war torn Somalia. UPDF is preparing itself to operate in Somalia's harsh conditions after at least 3,000 people demonstrated three weeks ago against the deployment of foreign troops. The AU has authorised the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (Igad) countries: Uganda, Kenya, Somalia, Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Djibouti to send an interim force to Mogadishu to help Somalia's transitional government relocate in the country. The transitional government is based in Kenya. Somalia plunged into chaos after the fall of President Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991. Since last October, Somalia has adopted political institutions which include the presidency, government, and parliament but the latter remain in Nairobi for security reasons.

Security Council notes need to expand UN presence in Somalia U.N NEWS CENTRE

Someone posted this piece of history in Somalinet! I thought i should share it with you. MAKHIR COAST From the Journal "Quarterly Notes" and by Henry Swanzy synopsizes the economic development of regions in Africa. Below is an example of Makhir Coast region and vicinities. Excerpts from "Enclopaedia Britinnica" From their connection with the Ethiopian hinterland, their proximity to Arabia, and their export of precious gums, ostrich feathers, ghee (clarified butter), and other animal produce as well as slaves from farther inland, the northern and eastern Somali coasts have for centuries been open to the outside world. This area probably formed part of Punt, “the land of aromatics and incense,†mentioned in ancient Egyptian writings. Between the 7th and 10th centuries, immigrant Muslim Arabs and Persians developed a series of trading posts along the Gulf of Aden and Indian Ocean coasts. Many of the early Arab geographers mentioned these trading posts and the sultanates that grew out of them, but they rarely described the interior of the country in detail. Intensive exploration really began only after the occupation of Aden by the British in 1839 and the ensuing scramble for Somali possessions by Britain, France, and Italy (see below The imperial partition). In 1854, while Richard Burton was exploring the country to the northwest in the course of his famous journey from Berbera to Harer, his colleague John Hanning Speke was making his way along the Makhir Coast in the northeast. This region had previously been visited by Charles Guillain, captain of the brig Ducouedid, between 1846 and 1848. News of the Somaliland comes from Berbera and Makhir coast than Mogadishu. Thus, the Protectorate Council had draft legislation placed before it for the first time this summer, in preparation for Legislative Council. The new governor, Pike, has already clashed with Somali Youth League, which protested against Agricultural schemes in the Medishe Valley. There is little economic news beyond a bad locust season, and bad season for the Makhir coast, where a dearth of tunny has caused the Elaya cunning factory to close down for a time. Somaliland's expenditure amounts to 1,199,000 pound, of which only 493,000 comes from its own resources. There is little news of economic discoveries, beyond a little columbite, beryl and gypsum found round Berbera, rutile round Elayu, and Mangenese near Sheikh. On the Makhir coast, 7 hoori coast have been distributed by the Fisheries officer, and a dhow is to be equipped with diesel engine, while fish farms are being built at Mandera prison where the convicts have been thought to make nets and prepare shark-liver oil.