Somalia's top cop faces anarchic Mogadishu

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Somalia's top cop faces anarchic Mogadishu

 

 

By C. Bryson Hull

 

MUNDUL SHAREY, Somalia (Reuters) - Bespectacled and gentle-mannered, Somalia's police chief cuts an almost reluctant figure.

 

In a nation synonymous with guns and anarchy, Brig-Gen Ali Mohamed Hassan Loyan does not carry a pistol, just a swagger stick. Until now, his government has had only one city under its control and even there he has been shot at.

 

Yet having defeated a Mogadishu-based Islamist movement bent on ruling Somalia through Islamic law, his government has at last set foot in the traditional capital for the first time since it was set up with U.N. backing in late 2004.

 

Speaking as he journeyed to the city with Prime Minister Ali Mohamad Gedi and other officials, Loyan, known as "Madobe", had no illusions about the challenge ahead.

 

"If we handle it perfectly, control it in the right way, then we can handle the rest of the country," he told Reuters in an interview deep in the Somali bush.

 

"I think our success or failure depends on Mogadishu."

 

With just 1,000 newly minted officers at his command, Madobe admits he faces a daunting task bringing law and order to a nation that has long resisted it.

 

Asked if he had the world's toughest job, a grin spreads under his salt-and- pepper moustache: "It is very hard when you want to mend something that has been destroyed completely."

 

And he knows what he is talking about when it comes to crime in Somalia.

 

Clan militiamen opened fire on him when he went to the airport at the government's base in Baidoa to make sure his officers took over security as agreed with the clan leaders.

 

UNARMED POLICE

 

As for any cop -- brigadier-general or not -- bureaucracy is also an enemy, this time in the form of a reluctance by foreign donors to break a 1992 United Nations arms embargo on the volatile Horn of Africa nation.

 

The weapons ban, the world's most ignored, prevents Madobe from legally getting his men and women the guns they need in a country awash in them.

 

This week's deployment of 40 police officers to secure the town of Buur Hakaba, a former Islamist forward base near Baidoa, was a case in point, he said.

 

"They don't have weapons. If we could get 10 or 20 guns, maybe it would work. But we can't send them to protect people if they can't protect themselves, the place where they stay."

 

The same restrictions apply to four-wheel-drive vehicles, police radios and a host of other supplies. "They say 'No, you can use this for a military purpose'," he said.

 

A sliver of hope is the December 7 waiver by the U.N. Security Council on the arms ban for military purposes, which Madobe is lobbying to be applied to his forces as well.

 

After that he will concentrate on training another 1,000 to 2,000 officers who were supposed to have been schooled by now, but were not because of a lack of money, he said.

 

Asked why he took such a challenging job, Madobe said his 19-year-old daughter's brush with racism in The Netherlands, where the family had moved to escape the turmoil in Somalia, spurred him back into uniform to give her a chance to grow up in a place she hardly knew.

 

A classmate had told her 'Go home black chocolate', Madobe said. "Then I said I better go home."