June 11, 2015 | Morning Headlines

Main Story

Ahlu-Sunna Withdraws From Adado Conference And Denounces Somali Government

10 June – Source: Goobjoog News – 255 Words

The leader of Somali moderate Islamist group, Ahlu-Sunna Waljama’a, Sheikh Ibrahim Gurre, who was among the signatories to the Somali central State formation conference, said that their delegates will vacate the conference within the next 24 hours. “We shall desert the conference because the meeting is inclusive, Ahlu-Sunna and some clans attending the conference are not satisfied with what is happening in the gathering therefore we are leaving the next twenty hours” he said. Speaking to Goobjoog News, the leader put the blame on Somali minister for internal security, Abdirahman Odawaa. “The internal minister is a naive young boy who is new in the political arena so I have no answer for him” he said.

He added that they do not recognize the government “this government is not representing us.” He highlighted that they will form government in the areas under their control and called for state formation conference. “We will never accept the outcome of the state conference in Adado” he noted This comes a day after Somalia’s Minister of Interior and Federalism, Abdurahman Mohamed Hussein has urged moderate Islamist group Ahlu Sunna Waljama’a leaders to withdraw its militias from strategic town of Dhusamareb. On June 7, the fighters from armed group Ahlu Sunnah Waljama’a has took over Dhusamareb town from government forces that were controlling the town for the past months. The fighters moved in to the city without resistance from the Somali National Army soldiers who later vacated their bases.

Key Headlines

EU Provides “Automated Patient Registration System” For The Hargeisa Group Hospital (Wacaal Media)
Ahlu-Sunna Withdraws From Adado Conference And Denounces Somali Government (Goobjoog News)
Somali Government In Contact with IAEA over Uranium Deposits (Goobjoog News)
IDPs in Hudur Lack Food Shelter (Radio Ergo)
IGAD Set To Discuss Jubbaland State – Federal Parliament Standoff (Wacaal Media)
Federal Government Employees Not Paid For Four Months (Garowe Online)
US Deputy Defense Secretary Hosts Somali Leaders at Pentagon (U.S. Department of Defense)
Government Bars Schools In Mandera From Admitting Foreign Students (Daily Nation)
Chronic Under-Reporting Of Piracy (The Maritime Executive)
Should Kenya Play Peacekeeper In Somalia? Shabab Attacks Raise Doubts (Christian Science Monitor)

NATIONAL MEDIA

EU Provides “Automated Patient Registration System” For The Hargeisa Group Hospital

10 June – Source: Wacaal Media – 186 Words

Today, the European Union and its partners – the Hargeisa Group Hospital, United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS) and Terre Solidali – have launched an Automated Patient Registration System for the Hargeisa Group of Hospitals. The purpose of the project worth EUR 1.5 million is to improve the health status of the catchment population by increasing the efficiency, quality and sustainability of services provided by the Hargeisa Group Hospital (HGH). The use of the new fingerprint recognition system will allow keeping track of the therapeutic pathway (diagnosis, laboratory tests, drugs prescribed) and the utilization of the hospital services by the same individual. Once registered, patients receive a code number to pay the OPD fee, to see the doctor and for any other further steps required, e.g. paying for laboratory tests. The new system is part of the broader EU funded project “Support to Health Services Delivery in Hargeisa Group Hospital” which includes infrastructural interventions, procurement of equipment for the hospital as well as capacity-building in financial and managerial areas.

Somali Government In Contact with IAEA Over Uranium Deposits

10 June – Source: Goobjoog News – 232 Words

Somali Minister of Petroleum and Mineral Resources, Mohamed Muktar Ibrahim has talked about the Somalia’s Mineral Resources saying that they have made contacts with International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on the controlling of minerals that can be use chemical weapons. He noted they are taking measures to prevent raw materials like Uranium to fall into the hands wrong people. In an exclusive interview he gave to Universal TV, the minister highlighted that they also held talks with UNDP which had information on mining depots in the country as it has surveyed on the country’s mineral deposits in the years between 1965 and 1975.

AUN report released in 1968 shows that Somalia is a hotspot for uranium. Somali government is busy amending some provision in the Mineral Law 1984 and compliance with the current conditions in the country. The minister said that his ministry has opened talks with regional states such Puntland, Interim Jubba Administration, Interim South-West State and had agreed to the establishment of a joint committee to work on ways to deal with wealth distribution among the federal units and the Federal Government. The remarks comes after reports of Kilimanjaro mining company emerged which claimed the company has signed agreement with Somali government to explore Somalia’s uranium deposit in Afgoye and Qoryooley towns, but Somali government distanced itself from the report.

IDPs in Hudur Lack Food, Shelter

10 June – Source: Radio Ergo – 310 Words

Over 3,000 displaced families in Hudur IDP camps are facing difficult living conditions and need humanitarian aid. Issack Iman Ali, leader of Tawakal camp on the outskirts of Hudur, said the IDPs urgently needed food. He asked for aid agencies to airlift food aid to the area, as the town continues to be cut off by road by an Al-Shabab blockade. He said the families came from Moora-gaabey, Kurtun, Doon-dardiid, Abal, Elgaras, Garasweyne, Kulanjareer and other settlements in Bakol. They are both herders and farmers, who left their homes due to insecurity and related hardships. There is an outbreak of measles and diarrhoea in the area, with many children reportedly falling sick every day. There are no health centres serving the camps. Some of the IDPs have no shelters and camp out under the trees. One of them is Kaltumo Maalim Adan from Moora-gaabey village, a mother of 10.

“We sleep in the open air as we don’t have a home to shield us from the scorching sun and the cold in the night. Some of my children are sick. We desperately need some help,” she said. Kaltumo said they went through a lot of difficulties to reach Hudur only to meet the same kind of hardships they had left behind. Fadumo Hussein Ahmed, a mother of nine children from Kulan-jareer village, has been in the camp for six months. She called on the Southwest regional administration to open the roads and end the blockade so that relief agencies could get through to help them. Hassan Nur Ahmed, an elder, said children were the most vulnerable. “The crisis here needs urgent response or people will die,” he warned. Mustaf Adan Hussein, deputy district commissioner of Hudur, called on the government and aid agencies to reach out to the desperate IDPs in the area.

IGAD Set To Discuss Jubbaland State – Federal Parliament Standoff

10 June – Source: Wacaal Media – 111 Words

The regional bloc IGAD is set to discuss the decision by the Federal parliament of Somalia to pass a vote of no confidence on the newly formed parliament of Jubbaland. Sources told Wacaal Media that foreign ministers of the member countries of IGAD will meet soon in a special meeting to discuss ways of resolving the standoff between the Federal government and the Jubbaland state following passage of the motion. We could not immediately establish the date and venue of the meeting. Jubbaland announced that it cut ties with the Federal government after the Federal house passed a motion against Jubbaland.

Federal Government Employees Not Paid For Four Months

10 June – Source: Garowe Online – 118 Words

Despite huge financial backing by international partners and revived domestic revenues from the busy port, Somalia’s Federal Government has not paid its employees for up to four months, Garowe Online has learned. Employees who spoke on condition of anonymity said that with a week left from the fasting month of Ramadan they are languishing without salaries. They complain of the long overdue salaries due to delayed cash aid and shortage of funds by Mogadishu-based Federal Government officials. Food prices often soar during Ramadan as Al-Shabaab ramps up its attacks in the holy month of Ramadan. Mogadishu residents’ hope for stable food prices seem remote, prompting civil servants outcry. At a leadership forum in Puntland capital of Garowe in May, Somalia President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud along with the leaders of Federal Member states called for review of Brussels pledges.

INTERNATIONAL MEDIA

US Deputy Defense Secretary Hosts Somali Leaders at Pentagon

10 June – Source: U.S. Department of Defense – 232 Words

Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work yesterday hosted the Somali prime minister and defense minister in their first meeting at the Pentagon. In a statement summarizing the meeting, Defense Department officials said Prime Minister Omar Ali Sharmarke and Defense Minister Gen. Abdulkadir Sheikh Ali Dini met with Work to discuss the importance of U.S.-Somali security assistance and counterterrorism operations. Work praised the success of Somali forces in degrading the al-Shabab militant group in the past two years, officials said. The leaders discussed how taking the fight to al-Shabab requires integrating regional militia forces into the Somali National Army deliberately, but without delay, officials said.

The leaders also discussed successes of the Danab companies, which could serve as a good model for the rest of the Somali army, they added. Work underscored the Defense Department’s strong commitment to supporting both the African Union Mission in Somalia and the development of Somali security forces, the statement said. “The deputy secretary noted it is imperative that Somalia completes the state formation process in advance of holding elections next year, in line with the agreed timeline,” the statement said. “Progress on the political front is a necessary foundation for the development of Somali security forces.” The leaders said they look forward to working together well into the future, the statement said.

Government Bars Schools In Mandera From Admitting Foreign Students

10 June – Source: Daily Nation – 394 Words

The government has banned admission of foreign students to schools in insecurity-prone Mandera County. The Ministry of Education announced on Wednesday there would be no more admission of students from neighbouring strife-torn Somalia and from other countries. Addressing the press at his office on Wednesday, Mandera County Director of Education Ismael Barrow said the ban follows a directive from the ministry headquarters. However, foreign students who are already enrolled in schools will be allowed to complete their courses under close watch. “We have collected data in the county which shows there are 890 foreign learners in both our primary and secondary schools but we shall do a follow up to verify the figures,” said Mr Barrow. He questioned the commitment of school head teachers in providing necessary information and numbers of foreign learners to the government.

Mr Barrow said schools along the Kenya-Somalia border had the highest number of foreign learners coming in from Somalia, with a common aim of acquiring Kenyan citizenship through schools. “Most of these learners are in the private schools as the public ones have tight rules of admitting them but since people are in business, private schools don’t care about verifications of one’s nationality,” said Mr Barrow. Mandera County has 202 public primary and 48 secondary schools, with Mandera East (which covers Mandera town) having the highest due to its population. The education official said there are 31 private primary schools in the county with Mandera Town leading with 25 primary and 10 secondary schools. “We have 31 private primary schools and 12 secondary schools but most of these schools are found in Mandera, Lafey and Elwak towns due to their proximity to the Kenya-Somalia border,” said Mr Barrow. An educationist who spoke to the Nation on condition of anonymity said almost 70 per cent of foreign students are in the schools next to the border.

Chronic Under-Reporting of Piracy

10 June – Source: The Maritime Executive – 405 Words

Oceans Beyond Piracy has launched its fifth annual report detailing the economic and human costs of maritime piracy, citing a chronic under-reporting of piracy in the Gulf of Guinea. The region faces a variety of challenges related to chronic under-reporting of incidents and an absence of prosecutions. “We have observed that up to 70 percent of piracy-related incidents in the Gulf of Guinea are never reported, so we currently lack a complete understanding of the problem,” says Pottengal Mukundan, Director of the International Maritime Bureau. “This also makes it difficult to assess the extent of the threats seafarers face in this region.” In the Western Indian Ocean, Oceans Beyond Piracy (OBP) found that while naval mandates recommended industry self-protection practices and the size of the high risk area remain unchanged, the observed commitment of naval assets and use of vessel protection measures such as increased speed and rerouting by merchant vessels continued to decrease, resulting in the total economic cost dropping by 28 percent in 2014.

Alarmingly, the perceived reduction in the piracy threat has also resulted in more foreign fishing vessels returning to areas close to the coast of Somalia. Alan Cole, Head of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime’s Global Maritime Crime Programme notes, “These provocations are similar to those that triggered piracy off the coast of Somalia in the first place. We are already seeing an upturn in regional piracy incidents since the beginning of the year.” OBP’s analysis of pirate attacks in Southeast Asia documents a clear and reemerging threat to seafarers. The study found that more than 90 percent of the reported attacks resulted in pirates successfully boarding target vessels, and 800 seafarers were involved in incidents in South East Asia where violence or the threat of violence was specifically documented. Finally, the report recognizes that seafarers across the globe are the primary victims of piracy and armed robbery at sea. A chilling example is the 26 high-risk hostages from the Naham 3 who remain in pirate captivity in Somalia today, more than three years after the initial hijacking of their ship.

OPINION, ANALYSIS, AND CULTURE

“Kenya’s role in an African-led military mission in Somalia goes against the practice of not using troops from neighboring countries for such campaigns. And with good reason: the uptick of retaliatory attacks by Al Shabab has made Kenya’s fight personal.”

Should Kenya Play Peacekeeper In Somalia? Shabab Attacks Raise Doubts

10 June – Christian Science Monitor – 1, 424 Words

As the town stirred from its overnight curfew the morning of April 4, the last students of Garissa University boarded buses at the military airstrip under the watchful eye of Kenyan soldiers. Rolling down the sole tarmac road that connects the northeast town to the rest of the country, the students chanted “Bye, bye Garissa!”, relieved to leave behind the violence-ravaged region along the Somali border. They had lost scores of classmates two days earlier, when Al Shabab militants rampaged through their campus and killed 148 people, mostly university students who embodied the hopes of a rising generation. Now those who had survived were leaving for hometowns hundreds of miles away to attend funerals, grieve, and regroup.

The attack on Garissa highlighted Al Shabab’s deadly reach in Kenya, which has deployed peacekeepers to help pacify Somalia. And it revived a national debate over the wisdom of that participation amid a steady uptick in terrorist attacks on Kenyan soil. Four years ago, 4,700 Kenyan troops entered Somalia, part of a 22,000-strong African Union peacekeeping mission to restore authority after more than 20 years of chaos. The mission, known as AMISOM, aimed to retake territory from Al Shabab, which espouses an extremist form of Islamist rule. The mission also planned to help expand the powers of the Western-backed central government in Mogadishu. Kenya had another goal in Somalia: to make its territory safer after a spate of border incursions by Al Shabab and the kidnappings of aid workers and tourists. Yet this intervention has led to bloody reprisals, from a high-profile attack on a Nairobi mall in 2013 to a slew of killings of Kenyans on buses, in schools, and at mining camps. Critics call it blowback, and blame Kenya’s government for wading into a war it can’t win. Previous missions in Somalia, like the initial effort in 2006 led by the Intergovernmental Authority of Development in Eastern Africa, had refrained from using neighbors’ troops in its mission. When AMISOM took over eight years ago, its reliance on troops from Somalia’s neighbors turned on its head the traditional international peacekeeping practice of drawing on troops from afar – Filipinos in Lebanon, Pakistanis in Congo.

The practice was based on worries about neighbors having their own interest in the outcome of a conflict. But terrorist groups like Al Shabab, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, or Boko Haram in West Africa are showing that when peacekeeping forces come from neighbors with poorly policed borders, the war can quickly spill over to the homeland. “You don’t, in any other mission, see the opposing group carrying out reprisal attacks in the troop-contributing countries because you’re not, in most peacekeeping operations, fighting a terrorist entity with cross-border goals,” says Adam Smith, director of the center for peace operations at the International Peace Institute. Country-led operations, as seen with the fights against Boko Haram or ISIS, are a different story. But the ongoing threats have taken too great a toll for Kenya to sit back, say observers. Most recently, Al Shabab made at least two more incursions into Garissa, reportedly infiltrating the village of Yumbis long enough to hoist its flag and a few days later ambushing a group of Kenyan police.