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I
am a Hawiye Citizen (Ich
Bin Ein Hawiye)
Posted
By Dr.
Abdishakur Jowhar abdijowhar@yahoo.com
Mogadishu
, the capital of
Somalia
, is a city living a clandestine nightmare that even Dante
could not imagine. But on this day nothing could conceal the
truth as told by dead bodies piling up on its streets. Every
freshly killed body, every dead body thrown into the impromptu
mass graves; every one of these belongs to only one Somali
tribe and no other. Over 1000 bodies of civilians have been
found so far; and every last one of them belong to the same
tribe- the Hawiye. The dead do not lie. And this is the story
they tell; the story of the curse of tribal cleansing yet
again; the story of yet another reenactment of the first phase
of the Tutsi genocide. Words like terrorists and
fundamentalists are nothing but a new version of the old terms
of vermin and cockroaches that have served as a short hand for
mass murder and as a mechanism for making genocide palatable
to an unsuspecting humanity.
This day truth is unveiled by the dead.
We must listen to this truth for tomorrow it will be
too late except for regrets, mutual blame and hand wringing.
Abdi-Noor
Haji Mohamed is playwright, author and a poet who was on the
run with his family in tow, like the estimated 100,000
thousand civilians who were crushed out of their houses just
in the last two months of this year.
Abdi- Noor found himself running to no where. The soft
spoken polite writer does not curse the authors of this
calamity. He merely wonders in his article on Hiiraan Online
“Why do African leaders spend millions of dollars in killing
their own people who were already dying from hunger and
disease”. He sings to his daughter Maria:
“In
the dusty lands of the Horn
they
are fighting a dirty war
But
in the shadows of despair
Their
children are dying from hunger
Are
they leaders of a nation?
Or
are they killers of a nation
Is
politics a shield to hide from reality?
Or
is it a license to kill the innocent?
In
the eyes of fear shock is the sparkle”
There
is good. And there is evil. Today evil erupted with
viciousness and visited carnage upon Abdi-Noor and his family
and the two million people that live with him in this city of
sorrows. The massacre of civilians must not be allowed to
continue. We
must confront evil and call mass murder by its name. We must
banish hatred and revenge once and for all.
On this day the curse of God will descend upon the
living that bear witness and choose to remain silent.
Any citizen, anywhere in the world, who has the moral
courage to stand against genocide must speak out today loud
and clear and repeat the words of solidarity made famous by
President Kennedy “Ich bin ein Berliner ("I am a
'Berliner'")” -
“Ich Bin Ein Hawiye”:
I am a Hawiye citizen.
I am a Hawiye citizen.
The
First Genocide
This
is not the first genocide that has happened in this cursed
city, nor is it the first time that innocent Somalis faced
murder and mayhem in its streets simply because they belonged
to the wrong tribe at the wrong place. The first genocide
unfolded in its ruthless streets in 1991 right after the fall
of the Siyad Barre regime.
In that year Hawiye militia burned, raped and killed
any person of Darood origin regardless of age, regardless of
gender and regardless of their role in the defunct regime. It
was enough to be Darood to be massacred in
Mogadishu
’s first days of infamy. The Darood who has lived in the
city for hundreds of years were totally cleansed out of it,
their property confiscated and their blood spilled. This is a
horrible tragedy of Somali political life that has deeply
wounded the self identity of the broken nation. This first
genocide has become the driving force and the central reason
for the intractable failure of the Somali state. It is not
much spoken about in polite circles but it is the poisonous
undertones of any dialogue between the members of the Hawiye
and Darood tribes. Somalis
who belong to other tribes find it convenient to ignore and
forget this first tragedy because the curse of the blood they
allowed to flow without protest has haunted them all these
years. And because each tribe has its own horror stories to
tell, horror stories that blind them to the blight that has
visited all of them and that could only be confronted
together. The current genocide, the second in this city, is
still going strong. And just like the one before it Somalis
other than the victim tribe members are conveniently oblivious
to it. This one too will haunt the Somali race everywhere for
generations to come. It will be one more nail in the coffin of
a dead nation.
The
Transformed Nature of the
Mogadishu
War
The
rhetoric of the war on terror has no explanatory power of what
is happening in
Mogadishu
today. There are
of course international and regional dimensions to this war.
There is Bush’s global war on terror, and there is Meles
Zenawi’s subcontracted armed intervention in
Somalia
. But that is not why 1000 civilians who are exclusively of
one Somali tribe were murdered in the streets of
Mogadishu
.
There
have been sporadic battles fought between the remnants of the
defeated Union of Islamic Courts (UIC) and the Ethiopian
forces ever since the Union of Islamic Courts was overpowered
and roundly defeated by the Ethiopian Army in January of 2007.
These night attacks of masked men were small and
inconsequential.
From
the time of the defeat of the UIC there were active
negotiations between the Hawiye tribes on the one hand and the
Transitional Federal Government of Somalia (TFG) and the
occupying Ethiopian Army on the other. The crucial issue of
disarming the city was on the table. Hawiye elders expressed
fear that they will be left unarmed and at the mercy of
another tribe who may have revenge on its mind. It did not
help at all that the Ethiopian installed Somali president
brought with him to Mogadishu his own militia- a fiercely
loyal, battle hardened and
exclusively from the president tribe, the Darood.
The Hawiye were suspicious to say the least given the
bitter history.
The
new phase of the war started on March 24, 2007 as Abdillahi
Yusuf decided to force the issue and forcibly disarm the
opposing militia. There
was of course a subtext to Yusuf’s grand design- that of
intimidating and terrorizing the unruly population of the city
to submit to his will. The indiscriminate bombing of clearly
civilian areas with Multiple Rocket Launchers fired by the
president’s militia from his palace in villa
Somalia
was no accident. It was a war on the pubic and it is
consistent with Yusuf’s belief that legitimacy is born at
the barrel of the gun; and that fear not consensus is the
necessary ingredient of national stability.
It
is important to note that over the last 4 decades Yusuf has
led an insurgency of one kind or the other. He has shown an
obstinate commitment to taking power by whatever means
necessary. Unfortunately for him the exclusive reliance on
tribal forces and his lust for absolute power rendered him
incompatible with nation building even as a reincarnation of
Siyad Barre (the last dictator of
Somalia
) in a more brutal form. The president’s takeover of Villa
Somalia
is nothing more than a transient home invasion.
On
March 24, 2007 the spokesman of the Hawiye declared that the
tribe will protect itself openly. The battle was joined.
The Spokesman further announced that the tribal militia
would shoot anyone who covers his face in the battles to come
as a coward and as a part of the enemy within. It was a
declaration of tribal war. But it was more. It was a tribal
rejection of the masked men of the UIC. The dynamic of the war
was transformed and the legitimacy of leadership that was
enjoyed previously by the UIC has come fully into the hands of
the Hawiye elders. The tribal elders were now the protectors
of the people and their spokesmen. The UIC already dead was
now buried.
The
two sides of this war will of course use whatever rhetoric
necessary to advance their cause.
Regional and international forces will exploit the
situation to settle their own scores while Somalis provide the
potentially dead and the potentially dismembered. The naked
truth of tribal warfare will remain the essential dynamic of
this war. And when peace comes, and it will have to come one
day, it will be a tribal peace too.
The
Way Forward
No
person of sound mind will dare to predict or prescribe a
solution for the
Somali crisis. This much is clear however.
The solution to the Somali crisis will not be more war,
more hatred or more vengeance. Nor will it about a strong man
massacring his way to a Machiavellian peace based on fear and
intimidation and corrupted “reconciliation conferences”.
The African soil is littered with the carnage caused by
strong men whose main weapon was the creation of inter-tribal
death squads and hatred in search of personal power and
personal glory.
The
solution to the crisis will not cost money. Indeed money
poured from foreign sources will only fuel the crisis as
combatants engage in deadly maneuvers to guarantee their share
on the basis of established reality on the ground. The $100
million dollars generously set aside by the
US
government will essentially pay for the Ethiopian subcontract
on the local version of the war on terror. It will lead to
more Somalis dying not less. It will also lead directly to the
strengthening of remnants of Alqaida elements that will then
have monopoly on the moral high ground of defending women and
children from the massacre of the crusaders, infidels and
their running dog apostates. Tell me if such a language will
not appeal to you if you have just witnessed the murder of
your family and the killer is holding a gun to your head. Is
it not rational to ask why it is necessary to repeat the
policy that lead to the mess in
Iraq
and
Afghanistan
in
Somalia
again. Do we not learn from history?
The
solution to the Somali crisis will not require anything other
than a genuine work of Somalis to broker an end to the cycle
of genocide between the two Somali tribes of Darood and Hawiye.
Like it was the case between the French and Germans in the
European wars of the past, there will be no peace in
Somalia
until there is peace and reconciliation between the Darood and
the Hawiye.
It
is clear in my mind that such reconciliation is unlikely to
take off without disengaging the forces in the battle field,
without preventing Abdillahi Yusuf from massacring his way to
power by devilishly nurturing hatred between the Hawiye and
the Darood. It seems to me that removing Yusuf and his tribal
militia from the city of death is the first step towards
genuine reconciliation. Only free men who are not under the
barrel of a gun can engage in genuine reconciliation.
The
second step of reconciliation is to accept a verifiable just,
democratic and free society as the basic guarantee to safety
from domination and genocide. The same formula has worked for
the breakaway nation of
Somaliland
. There is no reason to assume that it will not work for
Somalia
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