- Many words cannot fill a pitcher
Human Rights Watch urges Kenya to stop military recruitment of Somali refugees
1, October 27, 2009 — smgbristolHuman Rights Watch presses Kenya to prohibit Somali military recruiters from conscripting refugee men and boys in Dadaab, the straggly refugee camps in Kenya, to fight in their war against Islamist groups.
Read the article below
Rights group urges Kenya to stop military recruitment of refugees
(CNN) — A global human rights group is urging Kenya to stop Somali military recruiters from enlisting displaced men and boys in Kenya’s sprawling Dadaab refugee camps to fight in their war against Islamic militants.
“Recruitment of fighters in refugee camps undermines their very purpose, which is to be a place of refuge from conflict,” said Letta Tayler, a researcher with Human Rights Watch, who spent a week interviewing refugees for the group’s Thursday report about the practice. “The boys and men who are in these camps risked their lives to flee. Now they’re being asked to return to that.”
She said allowing recruiters to enlist young refugees in a new force intended to fight on behalf of Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government is a violation of U.N. regulations that govern refugee camps.
The Kenyan government, however, rejects charges that it is aiding in Somali military recruitment.
“The government will not allow any recruitment of anyone in Kenya for any activity touching on foreign nations. Neither will recruitment of Kenyans for work in Somalia be allowed,” said a statement from government spokesman Alfred Mutua, issued earlier this month.”
The Dadaab camps, built to house 90,000 people about 15 years ago, now serve as home to more than 280,000 refugees, mostly from Somalia, forming the largest concentration of refugees in the world, according to Human Rights Watch.
More than 50,000 people have arrived in the camps since January 2009. Many of the newcomers are fleeing a brutal war between Somalia’s shaky transitional government and armed opposition groups, including the militant Al Shabaab.
Somali and Kenyan officials who support the transitional government, fear the reach of Al Shabaab could easily spread. The group, which the United States classifies as a terrorist organization, controls large parts of southern Somalia and the capital, Mogadishu. In the past, sources have told CNN that Al Shabaab also recruits fighters in Kenyan refugee camps.
Tayler said the recruits are transported in Kenyan military and government trucks to a state facility near the coastal city of Mombasa for military training.
Initially, Tayler traveled to the Dadaab camps to research the situation within Somalia, since it is nearly impossible to operate in that country these days. But when she arrived, she began hearing persistent reports of military recruitment. She began interviewing people and learned that recruitment was occurring openly at tea stalls and market places.
She said recruiters began circulating in the camps in early October and since then, hundreds of people had been lured with promises of money and claims that the United Nations was backing the new army.
“It’s recruitment under false pretenses,” Tayler said. “Recruiters play fast and loose with the facts and it’s very easy for vulnerable people to want to believe this.
“I was very surprised by the extent of the recruitment,” she said.
One 15-year-old boy gave this account to Tayler and her colleagues:
“I had never seen those men around before. They told me they would employ me and give me $600 to be a military man. They told me I would be taken for training inside of Kenya and then taken to Somalia. They said I will be fighting Al Shabaab, who are slaughtering people. I said, ‘No, I do not want to do that, I am a student.’ I told them if I get an education I can help myself and my family instead of being sent to war and dying. But now I am regretting it — my father cannot afford the uniform for school and the teacher always chases me from class.”
An elderly man told Human Rights Watch that his educated son believed he was joining a U.N. army.
“So I gave him my blessing and he has my total support,” the man said.
Tayler said Human Rights Watch wants the Kenyan government and the United Nations to shut down the recruitment efforts.
“We’re not saying the Kenyan government should not fear the seepage [of violence],” she said. “But what we’re saying is: play by the rules.”
Human Rights Watch has documented war crimes and human rights abuses by all sides in the Somali conflict, which has caused thousands of civilian deaths and massive displacement.
Ugandan president refutes Somali Islamists
1, October 24, 2009 — smgbristol
Islamists threatened Uganda after peace keepers shelled in Mogadishu
Read the article below:
Uganda Rebukes Somali Islamists
BBC — Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni has said Somali Islamists will “pay” if they attack Uganda’s capital, Kampala.
He spoke after a commander of the Somali Islamist group al-Shabab said it would target Uganda and Burundi, which have peacekeepers in Somalia.
The commander said al-Shabab wanted to retaliate after at least 20 civilians were killed as peacekeepers shelled insurgent strongholds in Mogadishu.
A spokesman for the peacekeepers said militants had caused the deaths.
The peacekeepers, who are part of the African Union force Amisom, were responding to an insurgent attack on the airport that occurred as Somalia’s president was leaving for a conference in Uganda.
After heavy shelling left at least 20 dead and more than 50 injured, al-Shabab commander Sheikh Ali Mohamed Hussein said militants would attack Kampala and Bujumbura, the capital of Burundi.
“We shall make their people cry,” he said. “We will move our fighting to those two cities and we shall destroy them.”
Peacekeeper denial
Mr Museveni rebutted the threat.
“Those terrorists, I would advise them to concentrate on solving their problems,” he said.
“If they try to attack Uganda, then they will pay because we know how to attack those who attack us.”
A spokesman for the Amisom peacekeeping force, Maj Barigye Ba-hoku, said peacekeepers were not responsible for Thursday’s civilian casualties, including those in Mogadishu’s main market, Bakara.
“Al-Shabab wants to drag us into their war,” he told Reuters news agency.
“They shell us and then they also shell Bakara, then they tell people there it was Amisom who killed civilians.”
Somalia has been plagued by conflict since 1991.
An estimated 1.5 million Somalis are internally displaced and living in makeshift camps and hundreds of thousands have fled the country.
Islamist militants dominate much of southern and central Somalia, while the UN-backed government of moderate Islamist President Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed runs only parts of the capital.
Thursday’s fighting in Mogadishu began as President Ahmed was leaving for a conference of African heads of state in Kampala.
On Friday, the conference adopted a convention on the rights of displaced people that calls on member states to provide assistance to the displaced and rebuild communities emerging from wars.
Ignorance in America
1, October 3, 2009 — smgbristolBy Prof. John Kozy — Ignorance is pervasive in America; it affects the rich as well as the poor, the powerful and the powerless, the famous as well as the obscure. It’s prevalent in the suites of our nation’s CEOs, the Congress, the military, and even our universities. It defines this nation.
Christiane Amanpour, one of CNN’s stellar correspondents, presented a special in August 2008 titled God’s Muslim Warriors. It mentioned Syyid Qutb’s 1964 book, Milestones, which, she claims, “advocated violent jihad, even against Muslim governments” and inspired generations of Muslim radicals and the creation of the Muslim Brotherhood. She describes Milestones as “a moral indictment of America.”
Qutb, she says, “came to America in 1948 to study. But American culture shocked the scholarly Muslim poet and critic.” She appears to quote (the transcript doesn’t make this clear) Syed Qutb asking, “This great America, what is it worth in the scale of human values? I wish I could find somebody to talk with about human affairs, morality and spirit, not just dollars, movie stars and cars.” She quotes a person named Azzam saying, “He [Qutb] used to express in some of his letters about his feelings that the American society is losing its soul because of its materialism. He said that’s all they think about.” She says, “Qutb wrote that Islamic values are the cure for spiritual emptiness. He urged Muslims to purge the world of Western influence, if necessary, by force.”
She interviewed Fawaz Gerges, a Lebanese born Christian, who holds the Christian A. Johnson Chair in International Affairs and Middle Eastern Studies at Sarah Lawrence College, who says, “Qutb resented the deep philosophical secular roots of American society. He resented the way women and men interact in society. He resented the obsessive nature of America materialism. He believed that America lacks ritualism.” He describes Qutb as “a man who found the country to be a spiritual wasteland,” and says Qutb‘s “views of America are terrifying . . . because they’re narrow. They present America in very simplistic dichotomies.”
But Ms Amanpour makes it appear as though Qutb wrote a book that contained merely two sentences: “America and the Western world have a moral problem because they look at the human being only from a materialistic point of view”—a statement that many Americans would agree with—and “Islamic values are the cure for spiritual emptiness.” How those two sentences could have inspired a jihadist movement and the emergence of the Muslim Brotherhood is difficult to discern. Ms Amanpour tells us what happened because of the publication of Milestones but by reducing the book’s content to two sound-bite sentences, she leaves us completely ignorant of why happened. Such cavalier treatment of Milestones is a symptom of the value placed on books by Americans, and I recently realized just how curious the status of books in American society is.
Having passed the midpoint in my seventieth year of life, my wife and I decided that it was time to downsize, so we started looking at smaller houses. Over those seventy plus years, I had accumulated an extensive library—more than two, perhaps more than three, thousand volumes. So as we looked at houses, my eye always looked for places where books could be shelved. But not one house we were shown had been designed to accommodate the shelving of books. Apparently American architects, developers, and builders do not consider books to be something they need to make accommodations for in American homes. Their houses have kitchens, bedrooms, bathrooms, dining rooms, family rooms, entertainment and game rooms, but no book rooms, making it clear that books are not an integral part of American culture.
Books, however, are repositories of knowledge. People become educated by reading books. If homes lack books, the means to education are lacking. If a child finds that books are not valued in his home, why would he value them in school? If reading is not encouraged at home, how can teachers convince students of the usefulness of reading? If his family believes that what they learn from watching television is enough, why would any child believe differently? And the nation’s dropout rate provides strong anecdotal evidence that learning is not important to many Americans.
America has never been very good at educating its people. (Athletes receive scholarships; scholars do not.) Of yes, America has its marvelous, prestigious universities, but they don’t produce highly educated Americans. Most advanced degrees awarded by U.S. universities in science, technology, engineering and mathematics go to foreign nationals.
[http://www.uschamber.com/international/agenda/immigration_policies.htm].
Our controversial reliance on H1B visas is well known. America takes credit for building the atomic bomb, but much of the science was developed in Europe and many of the scientists involved were Europeans who were educated there. The president, in his “Yes, we can!” oratory says “We put a man on the moon in ten years.” Yes, we did, but not without help from German scientists and engineers who many believe should have been tried as war criminals in Nuremburg at the end of World War II. The English built the first modern computer (secretly) and invented radar. A German designed the first operational turbojet engine. American colleges and universities do not graduate enough schoolteachers, nurses, or primary care physicians (many of which we now import from that intellectual giant named India). Even our nation’s financiers relied on a Chinese mathematician’s theorem to evaluate risk. (I have never heard anyone say that we lack enough MBAs.) When the nation’s financiers decided to use David X. Li’s Gaussian copula function to access risk, they led the world down a road to perdition. Li himself said of his own model: “The most dangerous part is when people believe everything coming out of it.” Such belief results from mathematical ignorance.
Although we have educated a few very well, we have not made education an integral part of our society. Not only have we taken to importing the products we sell, we have for decades imported the brains we use. Now we have even been reduced to having to import our own money. We have almost become an entirely dependent nation.
The American educational system won’t be improved by producing more teachers, building more classrooms to reduce class size, or creating programs such as head start and no child left behind. It can only be improved by a fundamental change in our cultural values.
Imagine what American athletics would be like if bats and balls of all types and the broadcast of athletic events were as rare in American homes as books. Americans need to recognize that no nation was ever made great by its entertainers, athletes, and shopkeepers; yet a nation of entertainers, athletes, and shopkeepers is what America has become. None of these is an intellectual pursuit.
America’s ruling oligarchs may believe that the public can be kept ignorant while they and their children can be learned, but they’re wrong. Ignorance is pervasive; it affects the rich as well as the poor, the powerful and the powerless, the famous as well as the obscure. It’s prevalent in the suites of our nation’s CEOs, the Congress, the military, and even our universities. It defines this nation.
How anyone can believe that America can continue to prosper in this state of ignorant dependency is a conundrum of Gordian-knot proportions. I believe it was Dean Baker (sorry, I lost the reference) who wrote, “We need to remember what happened to the British Empire. Having originated with the overseas colonies and trading posts established by England in the 17th century, by 1922, it held sway over one-quarter of the world’s population on whom ‘the sun never set.’ Yet by 1914 it had become a ‘nation of shopkeepers’ which could not then nor again in 1939 defend itself against much smaller Continental powers.” Those in power in America are ignorant of history, too.
In a remote corner of China lies a tiny patch of Muslim freedom
1, October 3, 2009 — smgbristolI find a brace of outrageously polite children learning the Koran(Independent UK) Some of the Arabic is misspelled. The “F” has sometimes been written as “R”, the gravestones occasionally carrying adjectives in the wrong place. But it’s Muslim, no doubt about it. There are enough half-moons on the cracked concrete to tell you that this little corner of a foreign field owes its existence to a prophet in a far distant land – a desert so far away that when I asked a Chinese security guard for the nearest mosque, he directed me to a Sikh temple. Welcome to Hong Kong, People’s Republic of China, home to almost a quarter of a million Muslims.
Yes, we know about the Uighurs – though there are precious few in Hong Kong – and this little democratic bit of the great communist nation boasts a hidden cathedral, an ancient pagoda and the skin of the last wild tiger shot on the island – a black ratty bit of fur, all that’s left of the handiwork of Indian policeman Rur Singh who shot the 240lb, 73-inch long, 3ft-high beast after it padded up to the Stanley Police Station, under Japanese occupation in 1942.
But somehow the Muslims of Hong Kong remain even more alien to this unique place than the Brit financiers and brokers and the memorials to a lost empire. And when I ask to see the chief imam of Hong Kong – a title to reflect upon – he turns out to be a Pakistani from Multan, busy arranging residence cards for his flock, happy to extol the delights of his temporary multibillion-dollar homeland. “We are free,” he announces. “We are independent. We have a good relationship with the police.” When non-locals praise local policemen, I always look at them askance. But Mufti Mohamed Arshad – trained at Al-Azhar University in Cairo, frequenter of Lebanon, Syria and Qatar – insists there are several Muslims in the Hong Kong police force, though they have to speak Chinese.
The first Muslims to reach Hong Kong reportedly from Malaya arrived well over a century and a half ago – fishermen and traders who turned up for a few days and decided to stay, men for the most part whose families originally came from Yemen. After the British arrived on the “barren rock” – this was Palmerston’s phrase – in 1841, they brought in their Indian regiments, which contained thousands of Muslims. The first mosque was built in 1896 near the Kowloon barracks.
Haj Mohamed has his own military background; he was religious affairs education officer in the Pakistan air force, serving in Islamabad and Quetta before arriving in Hong Kong in 2001. Indeed, Pakistani pilots used to travel to the People’s Republic for training. So Mufti Mohamed is a safe pair of hands. No wonder he gets on with the security forces. But there are good relations between all religions – the mufti holds interfaith meetings – and when demonstrations were held on the island to protest at Israel’s ferocious bombardment of Gaza almost 12 months ago, Muslims were outnumbered by non-Muslims. A non-Chinese Jewish businessman told me that many Chinese businessmen knew little about the Middle East “except for five minutes on CNN”. He was very, very wrong.
About 100,000 of Hong Kong’s Muslims have the right to work and hold residence papers; the same number are domestic helpers and there are a few hundred asylum-seekers from Somalia, Pakistan and other Muslim countries. Thirty thousand are Chinese Muslims, refugees from the mainland during British days or born in Hong Kong to refugee parents. There’s a Chinese Muslim imam at the Osman Ramju Sadick Islamic Centre, where I find a brace of outrageously polite children learning the Koran, reciting the “sura” while sitting on a high-pile rug, a weirdly Chinese script from the Koran – a mixture of Arabic characters with Chinese squiggles in the middle – on the wall above them.
“Mosque” doesn’t really translate into Mandarin or Cantonese and the best version I got was “qing zhen si”, or “pure truth temple” – I guess that’s why I got misdirected to the Sikh temple in the first place. “Allah” comes out in translation from Chinese as “True God”, “Islam” as “Pure Truth”. As Imam Sulieman Wang pointed out to me, “When there are no words in Chinese for ‘Koran’ or ‘Hadith’, it was difficult for most Chinese to understand what we believed in.”
But every cloud has a dark, black lining. Another Chinese Muslim – a regular visitor to the mainland – realises how lucky he is to live in Hong Kong. “There, an imam cannot even address the people of a mosque in which he is not the preacher. Chinese Muslims wanted to hold demonstrations over Gaza, but this was not allowed by the state. We say we are very angry but we can do nothing. We can’t demonstrate in China.” The Chinese system of education, the man complained, meant that a lot of mainland Muslims did not understand their religion. The bitter protests among the Uighur population was ethnic rather than religious.
As he spoke, a flock of Chinese military helicopters moved up the waters off the island, preparations for the great 60th anniversary of Mao’s enormous, economically miraculous and – historically – sometimes Stalinistically vicious nation. A few of the local papers have been questioning the great famine, the silent suffering of millions that followed the 1949 communist victory. They are lucky to have this freedom. In fact, just about anybody in Hong Kong is lucky. So are the Muslims. Save for Lebanon and Malaysia, I can’t imagine a Muslim land where they would be freer. Which either tells you something about Hong Kong. Or rather too much about the Muslim world.
Chaos feared as Somaliland cancels elections
1, September 13, 2009 — smgbristol
Riyale, the president
Somaliland is facing the ugly prospect of election -related violence akin to that which occurred in Kenya after the 2007 general election.
A self-declared independent state, Somaliland was set to hold its much-awaited presidential election on September 27.
Last week, the election commission indefinitely postponed the elections, citing the deteriorating political environment. The president later forcibly closed the breakaway republic’s parliament after it began debating impeachment charges against him.
Silanyo, the opposition leader
The campaigns were marked by escalating tensions between the government and opposition parties, some of which were pushing for an election boycott. The presidential election has previously been postponed twice.
A group of researchers from Oxford University who recently carried out a comparative analysis between Somaliland and Kenya, also warn that Somaliland could explode into violence should the standoff between the government and the opposition continue.
Should violence erupt in Somaliland, then the entire former Somali republic will be engulfed in violence, given the continued war in Mogadishu between the Transitional Federal Government and Al-Shabaab.
Though not internationally recognised, Somaliland — which unilaterally declared its independence in 1991 following the collapse of Siad Bare’s government — held successful multiparty presidential elections in 2003 and parliamentary elections in 2005.
The presidential election was postponed in 2007 and again in 2008 due to what officials called technical problems, including inadequate voter registration. It was then set to be held before April 6, this year, following a civil registration process.
But Dr Nicole Stremlau, the co-ordinator of the Programme in Comparative Media Law and Policy at Oxford University, told The EastAfrican that their comparative analysis of the Kenyan situation and that of Somaliland indicates the latter is likely to explode in violence.
The fear of conflict springs from the fact that the tenure of Dahir Riyale Kahin has been extended several times, while the voter registration process is yet to be completed to the satisfaction of all parties, raising fear of election malpractices.
In 2003, a mere 80 votes separated President Riyale from his challenger, Ahmed Silanyo, leader of the opposition Kulmiye Party. Just like in the Kenyan scenario, the final vote count in 2003 was delayed for three days, during which some senior Kulmiye leaders rallied supporters to unilaterally declare an opposition victory.
Mr Silanyo conceded defeat following intense mediation, and after the Supreme Court ruled in Riyale’s favour, stating that he did not want to plunge Somaliland into a civil war. Anxiety that the elections would not be held after all, given the threat by the opposition to boycott, only served to raise tensions even before the polls were cancelled.
Constitutionally, Riyale’s term in office was set to end on May 15, 2008, but come April of the same year, parliament passed a motion extending the president’s term because of lack of preparedness for elections. The decision prompted a series of protests.
The most recent agreement endorsed the resolution of the Somaliland House of Elders to delay the presidential election for one year, until September 27, and to extend the incumbent’s term in office until October 29. This further provoked frustration and anger in the opposition.
