Somalia: Who calls Somalia’s former NSS ‘Gestapo’?

[Thankful]

Horseednet

 

As Somalis we find it hard to deal with human rights violations committed during military regime (1969-1991) because we seldom pay attention to human rights violations in Somalia after the military regime was ousted in January 1991.

 

We associate human rights violations only with state actors in pre-1991 Somalia. The Center for Justice and Accountability and the Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, LLP, filed case against Colonel Abdi Adan Magan and on behalf of “former law professor and human rights attorney Abukar Hassan Ahmed” Abukar alleges NSS officers arrested [him] “under Magan’s command… and confiscated the copy of an Amnesty International report he was carrying and transported him to the NSS Department of Investigations in the unventilated basement of NSS Headquarters. He was held in solitary confinement in a small, windowless cell and his left wrist was tightly handcuffed to his right leg for twenty-four hours a day, except during interrogations. The NSS officers first accused him of being a writer for Amnesty International and threatened to kill him if he did not confess.”

 

The NSS was notorious for human rights violations but calling it a Gestapo is a slur to the holocaust victims, survivors and their families. The NSS was a security apparatus set up by a military regime that despised Hitler and all he stood for.

 

The case (Ahmed v. Magan) illustrates how some Somalis ignore the ‘forget and forgive’ principle on which all Somali reconciliation conferences are based. In 2000 Djibouti sponsored a reconciliation conference remembered for adding to the Somali political discourse the phrase “Xaq ma doonayno; xal baan doonaynaa” (we are not after compensation/ reparation but we are after solution.”)

 

Abdiqasim Salad Hassan , Interior Minister of the last, pre-1991 Somali government formed in 1990, was elect a president of the Transitional National Government , the outcome of Djibouti-sponsored reconciliation conference in 2000.

 

If any member of the former Somalia’s military regime can be held responsible for human rights violations, then almost all the founders and leaders of Somalia’s opposition forces can be brought to book for human rights violations in post-1990 Somalia: the USC leaders and the members of the USC-installed interim government did not intervene in 1990s when thousands of their compatriots were being massacred in Mogadishu and other southern towns.

 

In a case summary posted on CJA website, Colonel Magan is identified as belonging “to the same favored ******* sub-clan as Si[y]ad Barré.” Not every ******* member on was “ favored” person under a Siyad Barre government. Many ******* sub-clan members were massacred after the military regime was ousted by armed opposition groups for belonging to the same sub-clan as Siyad Barre.

 

If Magan detained and mistreated Mr Abukar in the capacity of an officer in Somalia’s former NSS, why make mention of his sub-clan name and shared genealogy with Siyad Barre? CJA case summary implies that all members of ******* sub-clan perpetrated human rights violations against their compatriots when Siyad Barre ruled Somalia. Some of those who directed and incited clan hatreds that led to massacres after the ouster of Siyad Barre regime now live in Europe and north America and enjoy the principle of forget and forgive to which many clans and sub-clans as the ******* subscribe. Through reconciliation, clans ended hostilities in Somaliland.

 

The Somaliland president Dahir Riyale Kahin , and the Interior Minister Abdirahman Mohamed Irro, were top officers of the National Security Service, so was the head of the Transitional Federal Government’s Office of Immigration and Passports General Cabdullahi Gaafow Maxmuud.

 

Ahmed v. Magan is a human rights case but has all the hallmarks of witch-hunt manifested in associating Somalia’s former National Security Service with Hitler’s Gestapo—Somalia is not a nation of Nazi sympathizers— and the use of a clan name to imply the late Siyad Barre’s sub-clan perpetrated human rights violations.

[Jacaylbaro]

Weligiinba cabaada dheh ..............