NAIROBI (Reuters) – Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta, who faces charges of crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court, is expected to visit London at Britain’s invitation next week for a conference on Somalia.
It will be his first trip to a Western capital since his election in March. Britain and other countries said before his victory that, if he won, they would only have “essential contacts” with him because of the court case.
“Kenya is a vital partner on Somalia and we judge our contact according to the issue concerned,” a spokesman for Britain’s Foreign Office said.
Kenya was playing a crucial role in stabilising neighbouring Somalia and housing refugees, he added.
A source close to the Kenyan presidency and a diplomat both said Kenyatta was likely to travel to the meeting, which aims to build international support for Somalia, where Kenyan troops have battled Islamist militants.
The move reflected the West’s desire to keep Kenya as a stable ally at the expense of other principles, Kenyan rights activist GeorgeMorara said.
“It is a U-turn in the UK and the Western world’s approach to the whole issue of impunity,” Morara said.
The March election passed off peacefully, a relief to many Kenyans after ethnic violence erupted following the vote five years ago. The charges against Kenyatta’s in The Hague relate to allegations he had a role in orchestrating bloodshed last time.
Western states view Kenya as an ally in their battle against Islamist militancy in the region and it has sent about 5,000 troops to Somalia as part of an African force that has driven back al Shabaab Islamist fighters.
The British spokesman said the decision to invite Kenyatta was taken in part because the president had committed to cooperating with the court in The Hague.
Britain’s high commissioner (ambassador) to Kenya, Christian Turner, whose remarks about essential contacts had angered Kenyatta’s backers in the former British colony, offered the invitation during a meeting with him on Wednesday.
After the election result, Western diplomats had privately indicated that they would take a pragmatic or “flexible” approach in assessing the level of contacts with Kenyatta, 51.
As well as concerns about alienating an ally, Western powers are wary of jeopardising trade ties with east Africa’s biggest economy and worry the diplomatic wrangle could open the way for China and other Asian states to extend their influence.
MOGADISHU (Reuters) – Somalia’s security forces need rebuilding to cement gains made by foreign troops against Islamist militants, but how to pay and arm recruits, tackle corruption and prevent rebels infiltrating their ranks remain hurdles for the cash-strapped government.
Proving the dire state of the Somali forces, when Islamist gunmen attacked a court in Mogadishu in April, police said they couldn’t tell who was friend or foe, while members of the force say a $100-a-month salary is not enough to inspire loyalty.
“Shoe shiners have a better life,” said a junior police officer, who only gave his name as Hussein. “They are not targets and they get a better income.”
Emerging from two decades of anarchy, security gains in the past two years have been made largely thanks to African peacekeepers spearheading the fight against al Qaeda-linked al Shabaab rebels.
Western powers, long worried Somalia is a launch pad for militant Islam in east Africa and beyond, fear the nation could slide back into chaos if local forces cannot cement gains.
How to overhaul its security forces will top the agenda at a May 7 conference in London, where Britain and Somalia will seek more international support at a time al Shabaab are weakened and piracy off the Horn of Africa is at an all-time low.
A threat by Ethiopian troops to withdraw from Somalia has raised questions over how the stretched African Union peacekeeping force, known as AMISOM, would be able to plug the gap and highlighted the need for Somalia to build its own capacities.
“Somali armed forces need building up, their police need expanding,” Britain’s Foreign Secretary William Hague told Reuters when he re-opened Britain’s embassy in Mogadishu.
“There are many huge challenges and dangers that remain and the world mustn’t think that we have solved all the problems or that its help isn’t needed,” he said. Washington and Brussels already help pay African troops and Somalia’s forces.
Hague said Britain’s permanent diplomatic presence signaled London’s confidence, although the makeshift embassy’s four metal cabins lie behind two blast walls within the fortified airport.
Elected in September, Somalia’s President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud said security was “priority number one, two and three”.
PEACEKEEPERS
It is clear why. Mohamud’s government depends on the 18,000 or so African troops to survive, and the poorly armed, poorly paid and ill-disciplined military is in no position to take over.
When Ethiopia grumbled AMISOM was not doing enough to take over places its troops had secured and withdrew in a huff from Hudur, near Ethiopia’s border, al Shabaab retook the dusty town.
That signaled how swiftly al Shabaab, now largely confined to rural areas, could regroup if any vacuum is left. Diplomats do not expect Ethiopia to leave the African troops stranded.
“It is not in Addis Ababa or anyone’s interest to see al Shabaab move back in. Ethiopia clearly understands that,” a senior Western diplomat said. “But now we have to tie up what AMISOM is doing and what the Somali National Army is doing.”
More a collection of rival militias than a cohesive fighting force, the army lacks sophisticated command structures and has been dogged by soldiers selling off their guns and uniforms.
Frequently that gear ends up in Mogadishu’s markets, or in the hands of al Shabaab. More worrying, security officials say, is the number of militants infiltrating the armed forces.
In the April attack on the capital’s law courts, the attackers were disguised in official military fatigues.
During the chaotic gun battle, a Reuters photographer saw one group of soldiers point their guns at another group, also in uniform. “Hey stop, who are you? Go back!” They too raised their rifles and replied “We are security forces, and who are you?”
“EAT YOUR BULLETS”
Mistrust is not limited to those in Somalia’s forces. Somalia’s allies are also wary. The United Nations has partially lifted an arms embargo, allowing in light weapons to help Somali forces, but has maintained a ban on heavy arms.
“They have to visibly demonstrate they can control what they buy and receive before we go further,” said a Western official.
President Mohamud and foreign powers say security sector reform must extend beyond the military to the police force which officially numbers around 6,000, nearly all of whom are in Mogadishu – reflecting the government’s limited reach.
Plans to add 4,000 more would still leave the national force less than a third the size of New York city’s police department.
A government-approved strategic plan for the police force acknowledged some officers have never received any training while others learned their trade as militia loyal to warlords.
One diplomat said foreign assistance to the police force amounted to “life support”. More generosity may be required to make it a more professional security operation.
“If only we could get $500 a month, al Shabaab would be extinct,” said a second officer who identified himself as Omar. “We would stand in the alleyways day and night and pick them off like ripe bananas.”
Al Shabaab terrorists operating in Somalia have been “defeated as a fighting force” after decades of creating havoc, according to the country’s president.
But President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud has warned that the extremists are an international network with links to al Qaeda and they still have the ability to mount attacks both inside Somalia and abroad.
The president is travelling to England next week to jointly chair an international conference with the British Prime Minister on Somalia’s future.
He will be trying to convince backers like Britain and America that, despite more than two decades of financial support, their help is not only still needed but as crucial as ever.
“Somalia is so close to coming out of the quagmire,” he told Sky News in his only television interview ahead of the conference.
“I say, please bear with us and stretch your patience just a little bit and you will get the kind of Somalia you have been dreaming of for 22 years.”
The president is the first elected leader in more than two decades and is heading up the first permanent government in that time.
He has only been in his job for eight months but with United Nations support there finally seems to be some progress in a country known as being the world’s most fragile state.
International money along with the 18,000 African Union peacekeepers in the country has meant tentative stability in a nation more used to war.
The extremists have mostly been driven out of the capital Mogadishu and the joint Somali and African Union troops continue to take territory once held by the Islamists.
Many Somalis who once fled to safety in exile are now returning from their bolt holes around the world to set up businesses and live once again in their homeland.
There are big efforts to train the newly bolstered national army and police force, and the first permanent government is widely seen as legitimate and progressive.
But the terrorists’ capacity to wreak havoc was demonstrated just a few weeks ago when al Shabaab extremists stormed the capital’s court buildings, firing guns and setting off explosions.
The attack triggered a gunfight between the terrorists and the Somali security forces and at least 20 people were killed.
And over the past few days the capital has been virtually locked down due to fears of another attack.
But there is still a definite feeling of confidence among the Somali forces and the African Union peacekeepers that progress is being made bit by bit.
Colonel Kassim Roble is one of the returning diaspora, lured back to his motherland after becoming convinced Somalia has turned the corner.
He had spent the previous eight years in Leicester before deciding to return home last year.
“Security is getting better every day, every month, every hour,” he told Sky from the newly renovated Ministry of Defence in the capital. “We are in charge of 85% to 90% of the city (of Mogadishu).”
He put much of the change down to a fresh focus by the country’s new president who has insisted funds be used to improve conditions for the troops with better salaries, better food and better training.
“The morale is now very good,” said the colonel.
His words were echoed by peacekeepers from the African Union who are involved in helping secure areas but also mentoring and training the Somali security forces.
“Peace is coming back to Somalia,” one Nigerian commander said. “The people are out on the streets, doing business again. The danger is not so much now. There’s is a lot of difference even since a few months ago.”
But the insecurity is never far away and there are concerns that without international community help, the fragile stability will shatter and be reversed.
“Al Shabaab is an international operation. They are operating inside Somalia but they are part of an international terror network,” the president told Sky News.
“Somalia is just a small country, ill-equipped and ill-trained. Shabaab is defeated as a fighting force. Soon there will be no front line or no place they are in control of.
“But when they are defeated militarily, the way they work is they go into the society – so the suicide bombers and roadside bombings and grenade-throwing will go on for some time.
“But they will be defeated. They are about to be defeated and they are on the run.”
Nairobi, May 2 (IANS) Having kept the Danish coaster — M/V Leopard — in their custody for two years, Somali pirates have released it along with six crew members, a Kenyan maritime official said Wednesday.
The vessel which was captured in January 2011 was released Tuesday with the crew, reported Xinhua citing Seafarers’ Union of Kenya secretary general Andrew Mwangura.
“The two Danish and the four Philippine sea men have very recently been released off the Somali coast and are now in safe surroundings,” Mwangura said.
The Danish owned vessel was attacked by pirates while underway Jan 12, 2011.
During the attack two Danish sailors and four Filipino crew members of the vessel were kidnapped from the ship and taken ashore in Somalia.
Not yet named but much loved by watchful parents, a newly born baby boy is a small symbol of change: a birth, not a death for Somalia’s key war hospital.
After more than two decades of bloody civil war, Somalia remains a very dangerous place, but security has slowly improved, with Islamist fighters linked to Al-Qaeda on the back foot despite launching a deadly bombing campaign.
For the surgeons of Medina hospital, whose specialised war wound operating theatres were set up shortly after the collapse of the government in 1991, that gradual reduction has meant they can start to focus on more everyday health problems for the first time, and not just bomb blasts or bullet wounds.
“Medina… is the thermometer of the temperature of the security in the city,” said hospital director Mohamed Yusuf Hassan.
Surgeons now are tackling elective surgeries — scheduled operations, not emergencies — and the decrease in war wounds the Mogadishu hospital treats shows how the “situation has improved”, he added.
While the war wounded last year made up almost all of the hospital’s cases — 95 percent, Hassan estimates — that has now eased to around three-quarters.
“Step by step security is improving,” Hassan said, adding he hoped that in the year ahead elective surgeries could rise to as many as half the hospital’s cases.
In Somalia, however, improvements are relative.
In the emergency ward, a government soldier rests by the bedside of a colleague, shot in the belly last week.
Beds crowd even the corridor, with more than a dozen people all shot or wounded in recent attacks by Shebab Islamist extremists, or clashes between rival groups within the often violent city awash with guns.
But in the obstetrics ward, Shurkri Abdi recovers from a Caesarean section performed to deliver her seventh baby — and her first child born inside a hospital.
“I was living in the bush and I didn’t expect to come to the hospital,” Abdi said, her still unnamed child sleeping in a cot beside her. “But I fell down and my baby was in danger so they took me here.”
For Nimo Abdi Hassan, the doctor who delivered the child, such cases signal a shift in Somalia’s fortunes.
“War-wounded patients only used to be received here,” she said. But since the number of cases involving gunshot wounds or shell injuries has fallen, staff are treating a greater variety of cases, she explained.
“If peace continues, we could transfer from an emergency hospital to a general hospital for all cases,” she said.
Always busy, overstretched surgeons rarely had time for cases that emergency rooms in less-violent cities would tackle, meaning many doctors simply had to drop procedures that are routine in other parts of the world.
Now, as the cases of war wounds diminish, doctors in Somalia are for the first time able to start tackling common conditions like appendicitis, ovarian cysts or hernias.
“We need training… but in terms of the actual surgical skills, well we have that,” Hassan said, adding his doctors are hugely experienced, even if they are not necessarily up to date with the latest techniques or know little but basic operating wards.
“They have surgeon’s hands… completing surgery after surgery with so much experience,” he added.
The World Health Organisation is supporting efforts to train doctors like them in Somalia in the skills needed to treat these everyday health problems often ignored during the years of conflict.
But there is still a long way to go. Even as the hospital director speaks, the sharp rattle of multiple rounds of rifle fire echoes close by.
Shortly after, a man with gunshot wounds is rushed into the hospital for the surgeons to try to patch up.
“Before, when there was fighting close by, stray bullets would even injure people inside the hospital, bullets coming through the roof,” Hassan said, on a rare break from his work, resting in the shade of a tree in the grounds of the sprawling hospital compound.
“It’s better now, but still, I don’t know how long it will take to become a normal city.”
Still, those improvements in security have also meant people can reach the hospital more easily, meaning the doctors in Mogadishu are busier than ever.
In 2011, heavily fortified trenches and sandbag walls cut the city in two, marking the slow street-by-street progress of the African Union (AU) and Somali government troops creeping forward to wrest territory from the Shebab.
Today, those frontlines are gone, after the overnight pullout of fixed positions by the Shebab in August 2011.
Student doctors once filled the medical school at Mogadishu University, but the compound is now overgrown with thick bushes, the buildings in ruins or inhabited by displaced people, and the main grounds occupied by sandbagged positions of Burundian troops from the AU force.
“So much was destroyed in this city during the years of fighting, it will take a long time to return to what Somalia once was,” said Abdi Shuib, a former history lecturer at the university, now working as a translator for the Burundians.
In the school’s place, AU military doctors provide a clinic for locals in need of healthcare.
“Things have changed in Somalia, but I still dream of the university opening again, and training returning,” Shuib said, on a break between translating for Somalis receiving medical support in a basic army tent.
MOGADISHU (Reuters) – Al Qaeda-linked Somali militants who have dug into parts of the northern Puntland province pledged vengeance after authorities in the autonomous region executed 13 suspected Islamist rebels.
Puntland long avoided being caught up in successive Islamist insurgencies that have shattered Somalia but has slowly been infiltrated by al Shabaab rebels squeezed out of former south-central urban redoubts in the Horn of Africa state.
Puntland officials say many of the insurgents have taken up positions in the mountains west of the port city of Bosasso.
“Puntland massacred innocent Muslims,” al Shabaab spokesman Sheikh Ali Mohamud Rage said in an audio recording posted late on Tuesday on www.somalimemo.net, a website linked to the rebel group. “We shall avenge them. All those who spied, bore false witness, judged, and shot them will face a tough punishment.”
Wary of a reprisal attack, Puntland security forces later deployed heavily in Bosasso’s dusty streets. The suspected insurgents were shot dead early on Tuesday outside Bosasso.
A military court official in Puntland said they had confessed to being militants. Al Shabaab denied that any of its fighters were in detention in Puntland.
Rage said the deaths resembled a string of apparent extrajudicial killings in Mogadishu in March, when residents said government security forces had killed at least 10 pardoned al Shabaab fighters and dumped their bodies in the streets.
The Mogadishu government has promised to investigate those killings. They followed the murder of two senior security officials, for which al Shabaab claimed responsibility.
Somalia is trying to emerge from two decades of civil war that has left it without an effective central administration.
Security has improved in Mogadishu and the government sees bolstering the rule of law and reforming the judiciary as crucial to restoring normality.
African Union military intervention has done much to dislodge al Shabaab from its southern and central strongholds, setting back their bid to impose their strict brand of sharia (Islamic law) on Somalia.
But an attack on Mogadishu’s law courts in April that killed 30 people showed al Shabaab can still launch strikes in government-held areas despite its decline as a fighting force.
New York, April 30, 2013–The Committee to Protect Journalists will release its 2013 Impunity Index, a global tally of countries with the highest number of unsolved press murders, on May 2, 2013. The index, which calculates unsolved journalist murders as a percentage of each country’s population, shows that authorities are often unwilling or unable to pursue justice in journalist killings. Since 1992, more than 650 journalists have been murdered in direct relation to their work, a disturbing trend that sends a chilling message to those reporting uncomfortable truths.
WHAT: 2013 Impunity Index: Getting Away with Murder, a special CPJ report
NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — The 2011 Somali famine killed an estimated 260,000 people, half of them age 5 and under, according to a new report to be published this week that more than doubles previous death toll estimates, officials told The Associated Press.
The aid community believes that tens of thousands of people died needlessly because the international community was slow to respond to early signs of approaching hunger in East Africa in late 2010 and early 2011.
The toll was also exacerbated by extremist militants from al-Shabab who banned food aid deliveries to the areas of south-centralSomalia that they controlled. Those same militants have also made the task of figuring out an accurate death toll extremely difficult.
A Western official briefed on the new report — the most authoritative to date — told AP that it says 260,000 people died, and that half the victims were 5 and under. Two other international officials briefed on the report confirmed that the toll was in the quarter-million range. All three insisted they not be identified because they were not authorized to share the report’s contents before it is officially released.
The report is being made public Thursday by FEWSNET, a famine early warning system funded by the U.S. government’s aid arm USAID, and by the Food Security and Nutrition Analysis Unit – Somalia, which is funded by the U.S. and Britain.
A previous estimate by the U.K. government said between 50,000 and 100,000 people died in the famine. The new report used research conducted by specialists experienced in estimating death tolls in emergencies and disasters. Those researchers relied on food and mortality data compiled by the Food Security and Nutrition Analysis Unit.
Because of the imprecise nature of the data available, the toll remains only an estimate.
When asked about the report, Somalia Health Minister Maryan Qasim Ahmed said she didn’t want to comment until she read it because of questions she had about the accuracy of the figures.
Sikander Khan, the head of UNICEF in Somalia, also said he needed to look at the report’s methodology before commenting specifically. But he said generally that the response to the famine was problematic because it depended on political dynamics. He said the international community needs to change the way it classifies famines.
“You lose children by the time people realize it’s met the established definition of famine,” he said.
Marthe Everard, the World Health Organization’s country director for Somalia, said she has not yet seen the report but would not be surprised by such a high death toll.
“The Somalis themselves were shocked about the number of women and children dying,” she said, adding later: “It should give us lessons learned, but what do we do with it? How do we correct it for next time?”
Much of the aid response came after pictures of weak and dying children were publicized by international media outlets around the time the U.N. declared a famine in July 2011.
“By then you are too late,” Everard said.
A report last year by the aid groups Oxfam and Save the Children found that rich donor nations waited until the crisis was in full swing before donating a substantial amount of money. The report also said aid agencies were slow to respond.
Quicker action wouldn’t have prevented the deaths in areas controlled by al-Shabab. The militant group prevented many men from leaving the famine-hit region and allowed no emergency food aid in.
Thousands of Somalis walked dozens or hundreds of miles to reach camps in Kenya and Ethiopia. Countless numbers of families lost children or elderly members along routes that became known as roads of death.
MOGADISHU (Reuters) – Islamist militants killed Somalia’s deputy chief prosecutor and will target more judiciary staff while the government tries to reform the courts, a militant spokesman said on Friday.
The al Shabaab rebel group, which is linked to al Qaeda, has fought for six years to impose its strict interpretation of Islamic law, or sharia, on Somalia.
The shooting of Ahmed Sheikh Nur Maalin, Somalia’s deputy national prosecutor, on Thursday followed a wave of suicide bombings and shootings earlier this month in which 30 people were killed.
“It was part of our operation against courts and their men,” Sheikh Abdiasis Abu Musab, spokesman for al Shabaab’s military operation, told Reuters. “We shall also kill the remaining one by one.”
The attacks were launched at a time when security in Mogadishu had been improving after two decades of civil war.
The government believes strengthening the rule of law and reforming the judiciary is vital but al Shabaab is determined to prevent it.
Donor countries are working with Somalia’s new government to reform the judiciary, the police and the army.
Britain will host an international conference in London on May 7 on ways to bolster security, impose the rule of law and rebuild the nation. So far there has been slow progress on all three areas.
NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — A most-wanted American jihadi inSomaliasaid Friday that the leader of Islamic extremist rebels in Somali was starting a civil war, just hours after anassassination attemptleft the Alabama native with a neck wound.
Omar Hammamiposted on Twitter about what he labeled an assassination attempt late Thursday as he was sitting in a tea shop. He posted four pictures, one of which shows his face with blood on his neck and a dark blood-stained t-shirt.
Hammami, one of the two most notorious Americans in overseas jihadi groups, moved from Alabama to Somalia and joinedal-Shababin about 2006. He fought alongside the al-Qaida-linked group for years while gaining fame for posting YouTube videos of jihadi rap songs.
But Hammami had a falling out with al-Shabab and has engaged in a public fight with the group over the last year amid signs of increasing tension between Somalis and foreign fighters in the group. He first expressed fear for his life in an extraordinary web video in March 2012 that publicized his rift with al-Shabab. He said he received another death threat earlier this year that was not carried out.
“Just been shot in neck by shabab assassin. not critical yet,” Hammami tweeted late Thursday. On Friday he wrote that the leader of al-Shabab was sending in forces from multiple directions. “we are few but we might get back up. abu zubayr has gone mad. he’s starting a civil war,” Hammami posted.
Hammami has been a thorn in the side of al-Shabab after accusing the group’s leaders of living extravagant lifestyles with the taxes fighters collect from Somali residents. Another Hammami grievance is that the Somali militant leaders sideline foreign militants inside al-Shabab and are concerned only about fighting in Somalia, not globally. Hammami’s Friday comment about a civil war could refer to violence between those two groups.
Al-Shabab slapped Hammami publicly in a December Internet statement, saying his video releases are the result of personal grievances that stem from a “narcissistic pursuit of fame.” The statement said al-Shabab was morally obligated to stamp out his “obstinacy.”
Hammami has enemies on all sides. The U.S. named Hammami to its Most Wanted terrorist list in March and is offering a $5 million reward for information leading to his capture. Al-Shabab fighters are not eligible for the reward.
Along with Adam Gadahn in Pakistan — a former Osama bin Laden spokesman — Hammami is one of the two most notorious Americans in jihad groups. He grew up in Daphne, Alabama, a bedroom community of 20,000 outside Mobile. He is the son of a Christian mother and a Syrian-born Muslim father.
Hammami regularly chats on Twitter with a group of American terrorism experts, conversations that are so colloquial and so infused with Americana that many in the counter-terror field have formed a type of digital bond with Hammami.
After Hammami publicized the assassination attempt, one of his Twitter followers, a counter-terrorism expert from Canada, wrote that Hammami had nine lives. Hammami responded with an apparent reference to the movie The Blues Brothers. “‘I’m on a mission from God.’ minus the blues music,” Hammami wrote.
After the shooting, American terrorism expert J.M. Berger, who has a long-running Twitter relationship with Hammami, posted that it looks like Hammami came within a quarter-inch of death. “Perhaps it’s time to come in now,” Berger tweeted.
Terrorism expert Clint Watts wrote on his blog, Selectedwisdom.com, that the attack proves that Hammami should fear for his life. Watts said Hammami’s anti-Shabab social rants were annoying the militant group and he predicted conflict between Somali militants and foreign fighters.
“If there is going to be a war inside Shabaab, I’m guessing it will happen soon,” Watts wrote.
