Focus
Stark reality in a Somali community
By Hu Yinan (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-12-06 07:13
 |
Large Medium Small |
|
|
Rapid infiltration
The majority of Somali elites are based in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, where people such as Mohamed Qanyare Afrah, once a powerful warlord in Mogadishu and now a Somali Member of Parliament aiming for presidency, can be spotted sipping coffee in a downtown cafe on a casual Sunday afternoon.
Somali refugees and immigrants who have lived in Kenya for generations, however, find themselves in a profoundly more hostile environment.
Kenya's Somali population was around 800,000 at the turn of the century but has since soared to 2.4 million. Many reside in North Eastern Province or Eastleigh, a predominantly Somali-inhabited district known as "Little Mogadishu".
Somali rights groups accuse Kenyan policymakers of marginalizing Somalis out of fears about Al-Shabaab's rapid infiltration into the country. Others, mostly young, optimistic men like Feisal, are making constant bus rides around Somali communities looking for jobs, only to return empty handed every time.
Among the thousands luck has failed is Mohamed Amin, 19. After spending an entire year unsuccessfully trying to find work in Eastleigh, he turned to the Internet for solace and amassed 500 friends from across the globe on Facebook.
Today, Mohamed proudly sees himself as "sort of a celebrity" in the cyber world, although financial troubles are never a part of the Somali-Kenyan's online conversations. He said: "If you tell friends your problems, you will lower yourself."
Unemployment is a key threat to Somali communities in Kenya, said Muhyadin Ahmed Roble, a Nairobi-based Somali journalist.
"Outside the communities, it's hard to find a job if you're a Somali ... but Al-Shabaab has lots of money," he said. "They give money and cell phones to children and recruit people."
The Islamist group also funds and has de facto control over a rising number of Muslim schools in southern Somalia and parts of Kenya, where youngsters and women are systematically trained to be jihadists, according to Muhyadin.
"Education changes everything. We teach people to behave. If not, they ... you know," said Hassan Faliir, manager at the COMPIT Training Center, Eastleigh's leading educational institution with a student population of 2,800, many of them Somalis.
Classrooms in the center's headquarters on the second floor of the Sunrise shopping mall are each equipped only with a few rows of crumbling wooden desks and chairs. On one classroom door is part of a verse from the Quran in English that has been printed with a blue-ink ballpoint pen. It reads: "Surely Allah does not change the condition of a people until they change their own."
COMPIT, which offers primary and secondary school education and aims to open a college in two years, relies on students' tuition fees to operate and is in dire need of donations and outside funding, said Hassan.
Similar institutions have even fewer financial means to compete with Al-Shabaab, which exploits Somali-Kenyan residents' collective frustration and experiences of alienation with promises of offering them a clear purpose of being.
Racial backlash
Although many in East Africa join Al-Shabaab for the money, in August, Fatuma Noor, an investigative reporter with the Nairobi Star newspaper, revealed a series of shocking accounts of Western-educated, faith-driven Somalis who had willingly returned home to fight for the group.
The stories were of young men who all claimed to have suffered discrimination in the West. One of them, US citizen Abikar Mohamed, reportedly recalled that despite being among the top five students in his high school in Minnesota, he was denied a scholarship without "any real reason".
Aside from a backlash against racial prejudice and a collective search for identity in a crisis-torn country, Muhyadin, who was born and raised in Mogadishu's Wardhigley neighborhood where two US Army Black Hawks crashed in 1993, also attributes Al-Shabaab's growing influence to global stakeholders, who he said are too often turning a blind eye.
"The world is not serious about Al-Shabaab," he said.
Most media coverage on Somalia focuses on sea piracy and its effect on regional stability and trade routes.
Somalia's 3,300-kilometer coastline is Africa's longest and forms much of the Horn of Africa. It sits at the entrance to the Gulf of Aden, which leads to the Red Sea and Suez Canal, one of the world's most important shipping channels, used by roughly 22,000 ships annually.
An international naval presence off the Somali coast to protect vessels since 2008 appears to have resulted in a strong backlash from local communities and, consequently, a rising number of ships being hijacked in seas further from Somali waters - and way beyond the reach of patrolling foreign navies.
Pirates have already commandeered 40 ships and kidnapped 790 crewmen and women so far this year, although the number may soon surpass the 47 ships and 867 people taken in 2009. (According to ECOTERRA International, an NGO monitoring high seas piracy, at least 34 vessels and 627 people are still being held.)
The Navy of the People's Liberation Army of China sent its seventh escort fleet in two years to the Gulf of Aden on Nov 2, including 780 crew members on two missile frigates, one supply ship and two ship-borne helicopters. So far, Chinese fleets have "successfully escorted more than 2,800 ships from China and other countries since the end of 2008", according to a report by Xinhua News Agency.
On Nov 12, just 10 days after the deployment, Somali pirates hijacked a Panama-flagged cargo ship with 29 Chinese crew members onboard in the Arabian Sea near India.
Andrew Mwangura, coordinator of the Seafarers' Assistance Program, said the global "obsession" in combating piracy through naval intervention fails to address the root causes of the crisis, and will therefore only help sustain and perpetuate it over time.
"People are focusing on the smaller issues because they either don't want it (resolved), don't know, know but keep quiet or gain from the conflict," Mwangura told China Daily in an exclusive interview in the Kenyan port city of Mombasa.
A lifelong seaman, Mwangura, 48, maintains unparalleled contact with both pirates and mariners held hostage. In most instances, he is the first person the global media come to in attempts to confirm the hijacking or release of a vessel in Somali waters and beyond.
Somali communities, reporters, scholars and activists have long tried to raise public awareness over the impact of decades of foreign exploitation of local fishing resources - often referred to as "pirate fishing" by the region's inhabitants - and massive nuclear and toxic waste dumping from western countries.
They believe it was these illegal activities - coming at a time when Somalia was falling into chaos and the government had no means to protect its waters and people - that gave rise to piracy in the first place.
The World Commission on Protected Areas' High Seas Taskforce, which was set up by various countries' fisheries ministers and global NGOs, estimates that illegal foreign fleets take more than $450 million worth of fish out of Somalia every year.
Research led by Abdi Ismail Samater, a geography professor at the University of Minnesota, suggests illegal fishing ships that "directly steal Somali seafood" come from European and Asian countries.