March 4, 2014 | Daily Monitoring Report.

Main Story

Somali govt warns of political unrest in Baidoa

04 Mar – Source: VOA Somali Service – 140 words

The Minister of Interior of the Somali Federal government, Mr Abdullahi Godax Barre spoke to Radio VOA and warned of the political disruptions and problems in Baidoa. The Minister’s speech came after a conference in Baidoa (among a series of other gatherings) selected Madoobe Nuunow Mohamed to serve as president of the new South-Western 6 region state.

“Madoobe Nuuno is a very good Somali politician and I have no doubt of his capability, but there were reports that he compromised out agreement with the Interim Jubba Administration,” Said the Minister of Interior of the Federal government of Somalia, Abdullahi Godax Barre.

During the conference on state formation for the 6 regions yesterday, Mr Madoobe Nuunow was selected as president of the South-Western state who held various positions in the government including the Interim Jubba Administration in Kismaayo.

Key Headlines

Somali govt. warns of political unrest in Baidoa (VOA Somali Service)
Somali Prime Minister in talks with UAE officials over signed agreement (radio Mogadishu/Dalsan)
Al Shabaab attacks Somali army base in Beledweyne (Radio Bar-kulan)
Madobe Nunow selected president of South-West Somalia (Radio Goobjoog)
Somaliland President forms task force to ran forthcoming voter registration (Somaliland Informer)
UPDF to provide security to United Nations bases in Somalia (Daily Monitor)
Terrorist was once a Dadaab refugee (Daily Nation)
Police find 6 Somali migrants abandoned by people traffickers in Mexico (Fox News)
Fighting female genital mutilation (Irish Times)

PRESS RELEASE

IGAD Statement on the political crisis in Baidoa

03 Mar- Source: IGAD-254 Words

IGAD welcomes and concords with the statement of The Federal Government of Somalia issued today on March 3, 2013 on the situation in Baidoa.

IGAD in Referring to the communiqué of the 21st Extra Ordinary summits of Heads of states and Government paragraph 6; held in Addis Ababa Ethiopia on the 3rd of may 2013 that states the following points on Stabilization and Formation of Regional administrations.

Leadership of the government of the Federal Republic of Somalia in the process;

Respect of the provisional constitution of the Federal Republic of Somalia;

All inclusive consultative process with the peoples of Somalia;

supportive role of IGAD based on the priorities of the Somali government; and

Fighting the al Shabaab as the primary focus of the Somali Federal government; AMISOM; regional and international partners;

And also taking note of the Agreement signed between the Federal Government of Somalia and the Jubba Delegation IGAD as a guarantor in Addis Ababa Ethiopia on August 27, 2013 which recognize the formation of Jubba Interim Administration which Consists of Gedo, Lower Jubba and Middle Jubba.

IGAD would like to stress the formation of any Regional administration should be in line with the Provisional Constitution. IGAD also would like to call upon all stakeholders to respect the Addis Ababa Agreement and to give the leading role of the Formation of States to the Federal Government of Somalia. IGAD will also like to express its concern to the community and the stakeholders to protect the people and the region from any terrorist attacks.

SOMALI MEDIA

Somali govt warns of political unrest in Baidoa

04 Mar – Source: VOA Somali Service – 140 words

Somali Prime Minister in talks with UAE officials over signed agreement

04 Feb- Source: Radio Mogadishu/Dalsan-216 Words

Prime Minister Abdiweli Sheikh Ahmed is in Abu Dhabi on an official three day visit to the United Arab Emirates where he is in talks with UAE officials on strengthening co-operation between Somalia and the UAE and accelerating implementation of last year’s agreement signed between the two countries.

The Prime Minister thanked the UAE for their tireless support to Somalia over the last 22 years. Progress on last year’s agreement aimed at strengthening bilateral relations with emphasis placed on support and development of the political, security, economic and development sectors was discussed with a specific focus on speeding up that support and implementation.

Somalia welcomed the UAE’s commitment to rebuild Somalia’s government institutions and infrastructure in order to create an environment that is open for business and attractive to investors from the UAE and the rest of the world.

The UAE also committed to support capacity building through the training of those serving in Somalia’s Judiciary system, government administration and diplomacy.

“My trip is aimed at strengthening the already close relationship between Somalia and the UAE. The UAE is a great friend and supporter of Somalia, taking an active part in rebuilding our government institutions and infrastructure and aiding social and youth development,” said the Prime Minister Abdiweli Sheikh Ahmed.

Al Shabaab attacks Somali army base in Beledweyne

04 Mar – Source: Radio Bar-Kulan – 112 words

Al Shabaab militant group has attacked a Somali National Army base in the outskirt of Beledweyne town, the capital of Hiran province. Colonel Mohamed Amin the Somali national army commander in the area has confirmed the confrontation to the Bar-kulan.

Colonel Amin said that there were no casualties on their side in the less than one hour confrontation with the armed group al Shabaab adding that there were visible losses on the militia side.

The attacks by al Shabaab militant group against important government targets has increased since the administration of President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud has announced a major offensive against the group strong hold in an effort to extend government operation outside the capital.

Mortar shelling in Baidoa town

04 Mar – Source: Radio RBC – 129 words

Mortar shelling hit the town of Baidoa on Monday night, locals told RBC Radio. The mortar seemed to be fired from outside the town has hit an abandoned places near the town’s airport and somewhere inside the town.

No casualties were reported following the overnight mortar attack. Residents feared the explosions as the town has been plunged into political heat up following the two rival conferences which two rival politicians were aiming to form their own federal states.

No group yet claimed the attack, but the al Shabaab militant group has been known for such hit-and-run attacks in the past. The situation has reportedly been calm Tuesday morning.

Madobe Nunow selected president of South-West Somalia

04 Mar – Source: Radio Goobjoog – 108 words

Madoobe Nunoew was selected as the president of South west Somalia in Baidoa after he was declared winner, garning 44 votes followed by Mohamed Adan Ibrahim Frageto with 23 votes. Three candidates including Mr. Nunoow moved to the second round of the vote but Abdifatah Gessey, the former governor of Bay region gave up.
On the other hand the group of elders proposing to establish a regional comprising three regions announced that they will elect the president on Thursday.

The election of Madobe Nunow comes a time when the federal interior ministry said it will support the group of elders proposing to establish a regional state with three regions.

Security operations conducted in Mogadishu suburbs

04 Mar – Source: Radio Bar-kulan – 109 words

Security agencies have conducted operations to improve security in Mogadishu. The residents of Hodan and Wadajir districts in the capital Mogadishu have told Radio Bar-kulan that they saw heavy security presence in the area during the earlier hours of the morning.

According to eyewitness several people were detained and taken away under heavy security forces armored vehicles adding that all major roads entering the area were closed during the security operation exercise.

There is no communication from the government concerning the security operation however this is believed to be an effort to improve the security of the capital following last week Mogadishu presidential palace raid by al Shabaab militant group.

Somaliland President forms task force to ran forthcoming voter registration

04 Mar – Source: Somaliland Informer – 133 words

Somaliland President Ahmed Mohamed Mohamud Silanyo has put into effect the formation of Registration Commission in a presidential decree SL/M/XERM/249-2296/032014 on Monday. The creation of the registration commission will facilitate country’s citizens to be registered and this will pave the way for the country to be held elections which will be free and fair.

Having the president seen the need and the significant that the country’s citizens can vote during elections in order to exercise their constitutional rights. The president has acknowledged the speed up and to hold registering citizens to vote in elections and keeping in mind the importance those elections have for the nation which is based on fair and free elections. The president has created the formation of commission appointed to direct the voter registration.

Beledweyne hospital runs out of drugs

03 Mar- Source: Radio Ergo-331 Words

The general hospital in Beletweyne, regional capital of Hiran, has been hit by a medicine shortage at a time when patients suffering from waterborne diseases are increasingly being admitted. The hospital director, Ahmed Mohamed Khalif said their supplies have been dwindling over the past seven months, following the suspension of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) operations in the country.

“MSF left behind enough medicine for three months when they withdrew from Somalia in August,” Khalif told Radio Ergo’s local reporter in Beletweyne. He said the hospital, which is the biggest in the central part of the country, used to receive about 300 patients a day from Galgadud, Middle Shabelle, Bakool, Hiran and even Ethiopia’s Somali region of Ogaden.

“The hospital was able to provide free healthcare to these patients due to the financial and medical support we used to receive from MSF,” Khalif said. Radio Ergo’s reporter said the hospital now sees around 200 patients a day, including 50 patients in the hospital’s emergency department.

Shamso Ali Gorsar travelled with her daughter, who is suffering birth complications, from Bulobarde some 80 km south of Belatweyne. She told Radio Ergo that her daughter had received medical advice and a bed in the hospital but no medicines were available.“They told us that they could get no medicines, so we are paying for medicine from private clinics which are very expensive,” Gorsar said.

The hospital director said three tonnes of medicines sent from by International Medical Corps from Nairobi Office had been seized by Ethiopian troops from Bakool region’s Yeed town on the border with Ethiopia, because the Ethiopians thought the supply was destined for al-Shabaab.

He said they had been communicating with Ethiopia through the local administration in Hiran, the ministry of health, and AMISOM for three months, trying to get the medicines delivered to the hospital, but so far in vain. He called for financial support from the Somali government, business community and aid agencies in order to continue services for the people.

REGIONAL MEDIA

UPDF to provide security to United Nations bases in Somalia

04 Mar – Source: Daily Monitor – 175 words

Uganda is to provide a team to guard UN operation bases in Somalia. The force, which will be called United Nations Guard Unit (UNGU), is expected to deploy at the end of March and will source 410 soldiers from the UPDF. They will then operate under a special mandate, guarding the various UN operation bases around Somalia.

Maj Gen Silver M Kayemba, the defence advisor for Uganda’s permanent mission to the United Nations, led a team of army officials for a reconnaissance visit and shed light on the formation of the special unit.

“The decision was reached in New York that UN operation bases in Somalia should have their own guard unit. This is a new mandate,” he said.

Until this development, security for UN entities in the war-torn country has been provided by AMISOM forces that have been stationed in the country since 2007 and have so far reached 22,000 soldiers contributed from six countries. UPDF has 7,000 soldiers on the ground, making Uganda the country with the largest contingent in Somalia.

Terrorist was once a Dadaab refugee

04 Mar – Source: Daily Nation – 265 words

One of the terrorists in the Westgate Shopping mall attack operated between Kampala and Nairobi from June 2013 to the day of the attack, a Nairobi court was told Monday. The September 21, 2013, shooting left 67 people dead and more than 200 injured. The attacker was also a pupil at a primary school in the country in 2010 before he “disappeared” and resurfaced 2013. And, a day before the attack, he made calls from Busia and later travelled to Eastleigh in Nairobi, an investigator told the court.

Mr Mohammed Abdi Noor’s details were obtained from a cell-phone data transcript and at the school where he learnt up to Class Five, as a refugee in Dadaab in 2010 before his mother took him away to Somalia. Noor is believed to have led the Westgate assailants and died in the rescue operation that followed, a witness testifying in a case where four people are charged with helping the terrorists carry out the attack said.

The attackers, the court heard, left behind five Sim card holders that helped form clues. “I retrieved Sim card holders from the car that ferried the terrorists to Westgate, and an analysis indicated four phone numbers had been in use,” Inspector Newton Mwiti of Anti-terrorism Police Unit said.

INTERNATIONAL MEDIA

Police find 6 Somali migrants abandoned by people traffickers in Mexico

04 Mar – Source: Fox News – 125 words

Police found six Somali migrants who were abandoned in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas by the people traffickers they hired to smuggle them into the United States, officials said. The men had been lost for eight days, the Chiapas Attorney General’s Office said in a statement.

The Africans were found near the border with Guatemala and were dehydrated, the AG’s office said. The migrants were provided with medical assistance, food and legal assistance.

Police spotted the men on the Palenque-Benemerito de las Americas highway near the Ejido Busilja crossing on Chiapas’s border with Guatemala.

“After being rescued, the migrants said they were abandoned upon entering Mexican territory by the traffickers who claimed to be taking them to the United States,” the AG’s office said.

Fighting female genital mutilation

04 Feb- Source: Irish Times-883 Words

Ifrah Ahmed will go home to Somalia next month for the first time since she left there as a refugee seven years ago. Then 17, she has achieved a huge amount in the relatively short time she has been in Ireland. Without a word of English when she arrived, she now speaks fluently and knowledgeably about the issue which he has done so much to highlight in her adopted country – female genital mutilation (FGM).

FGM was something not many ordinary Irish people or even medical personnel would have heard of a decade ago, but it is now banned under legislation passed in 2012, thanks in no small part to her relentless campaigning on the issue. “I visited Joe Costello on Saturdays and he would say, ‘oh, you again’,” she says with a smile.

It is estimated that some 3,170 women in Ireland have been victims of FGM. The process may be banned here, but it is still possible for girls to be subjected to the procedure in their own countries.

Despite police swoops, few Somali refugees in Kenyan camp ready to return home

03 Mar- Source: Trust/Reuters-469 Words

Fewer than one in a hundred Somali refugees living in the world’s largest refugee camp, Dadaab in northern Kenya, are interested in returning home, despite a push for them to do so, the United Nations said.

Half a million Somali refugees living in Kenya are due to return home over the next three years after the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR) signed an agreement with the governments of both countries on Nov. 10.

Somali refugees number some 1.1 million, the third largest refugee population after those who have fled Afghanistan and Syria. About half of the displaced from Somalia live in squalid, overcrowded camps in Kenya’s arid north. Only 0.7 percent of Somali refugees, or 2,500 people, expressed an interest in returning home by registering at UNHCR help desks within Dadaab, the U.N. said.

“Main reasons for return include: family re-unification, improved security, opportunities for self-employment and secure employment in areas of return,” the U.N. said.

SOCIAL MEDIA

CULTURE / OPINION / EDITORIAL / ANALYSIS / BLOGS/ DISCUSSION BOARDS

“Much of the money is used to pay for basic needs and maintain a very basic standard of living. If younger diaspora migrants do not feel as compelled as their parents to send money and the Somali state is not able to shift away from being heavily reliant on remittances – who will provide the millions of families with basic incomes to support themselves?”

Will I send as much money home to Somalia as my Mum does?

04 Mar- Source: CP-Africa-800 Words

In a podcast of the LSE public lecture featuring University of Oxford’s Paul Collier discussing the mass exodus and the effects of migration from the poor south to the rich north in response to extreme global inequality, he examined both the challenges and possibilities for societies of origin and host countries. However he did not go as far as testing his view against the challenge of time. For my Masters dissertation, I researched the effects on motivation for migrants to send money back – in my case – within the Somali diaspora.

My central premise was whether or how origin-destination relationships will be sustained inter-generationally with regards to sending money back home. Remittances play in key role in the development of many countries, and may even represent a significant proportion of some nations’ GDP. The levels of remittances sent to Somalia greatly outweigh that of international donor aid. Between US$750 million and US$1 billion enters Somalia each year “making it the fourth most remittance dependent country in the world, contributing between 20% and 50% of the country’s GDP”.
Somalis are traditionally nomadic people, travelling with herds of camels or cattle in search of grazing land. In contemporary history, we have witnessed wider migration due to domestic turmoil and upheaval. The diaspora community here in London includes the oldest and newest migrants to have left Somalia (the earliest dating back to seamen in the merchant navy, and most recently, relatives brought back together as part of family reunification programmes). It is estimated that between 1 and 1.5 million Somalis live outside their country of origin.

“Abdi and his family moved to Minneapolis in 1999, settling in the large community of Somalis that reside there. After adjusting to America in high school and struggling to find his place, Abdi attended college and found simple jobs before acting took hold. Abdi worked as a disc jockey inside his brother’s mobile phone store, and his most recent job before the Captain Phillips role was working as a limo driver at a relative’s company.”

Barkhad Abdi’s Amazing Journey From Somalia To The Oscars

03 Mar- Source: Atlanta Daily World-490 Words

Barkhad Abdi (pictured) has been riding an amazing wave of increasing notoriety and fame, this after snagging a coveted Academy Award nomination for his role as a Somalian pirate in the film Captain Phillips. Although Abdi has never acted before his role as the menacing real-life criminal Abduwali Muse, he has captured the attention of the Hollywood elite despite coming from rather humble beginnings.

Abdi, who has been nominated for 28 acting awards, didn’t win the Oscar last night for Best Supporting Actor, losing to Jared Leto, who won for his role in the Dallas Buyers Club. Abdi did win the same award at the BAFTA and London Film Critics’ Circle, cementing his arrival on the acting scene.
Abdi was born in Somalia on April 10, 1985. Now 28, Abdi loved living in his country of birth until civil war and unrest broke out in 1991 when he was just six years of age. He recently spoke in detail about the horrors he saw as a child.

“I am Mohamed Habeb, son of Habeb. When I was a child, I used to keep birds. One day my father came and took two of my birds. I was very upset. He took them to market and sold them for a dollar each. With those two dollars, he paid an artist to paint the name ‘Habeb Hospital’ above one room. That is how he started the hospital.”

Mental health in Mogadishu

03 Mar- Source: Mary Harper Blog-1014 Words

In January this year I visited the Habeb mental hospital in Mogadishu. I reported on it for the BBC. Here is the script for my piece which was broadcast on From Our Own Correspondent – you can listen to it here (Radio 4 version) or here (World Service version). I took the photos during my visit to the hospital.

Somalia has one of the highest rates of mental illness in the world, with one in three people suffering from some form of mental health problem, according to the World Health Organisation. This is perhaps not surprising given that the country has been in conflict for two and a half decades, and has come top of the list of the world’s most failed states for six years in a row. Mental illness is a taboo is Somalia. Many mentally sick people are chained, some are even put into cages with hyenas as this is believed to cure them. One man has dedicated his life to helping Somalia’s mentally ill, and to getting them out of their chains. Mary Harper visited him in Mogadishu:

“That must be it” I say, pointing at a yellow wall painted with a picture of a large blue human brain. “The Habeb Mental Hospital.”

Top tweets

@katymigiro Less than 1% of #Somalia #refugees in world’s largest camp, #Dadaab willing to leave despite police swoops http://bit.ly/1c pQJe7

@tres_HOA If 400 more non-AU #Uganda troops are needed to secure UN in #Mogadishu, is AMISOM # adequate for Shabaab offensive? http://reut.rs/1h Bxg9Q

@faoinsomalia “Despite slight improvements needs remain vast.” The latest Humanitarian Bulletin from OCHA Somalia gives a good… http://fb.me/2RCk 0Wvtn

@engyarisow The new Russian Ambassador to Somalia H.E. Valery Orlov visits Mogadishu and meets H.E. Hassan Sheikh Mohamud. pic.twitter.com/lx6iiUGhjg

@Soma lia111 #Baidoa All leaders should ensure peace, inclusive dialogue & respect for Fed Constitution. Agreements matter. Reconciliation needed

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Image of the day Caption competition: Russia’s new Ambassador to #Somalia Valery Orlov, right, hands in his credentials to President #Mohamud. Photo: @harunmaruf