At this present time, a draft resolution on the protection of women human rights defenders (WHRDs) is being debated within the UN General Assembly. Such a resolution, the result of hard fought struggles by activists over many years, from a multitude of countries, serves to enhance and reinforce the scope and necessity of protection of WHRDs who are at the forefront of protecting human rights in their communities.

WHRDs have long been excluded from the human rights arena and often struggled for recognition as actual rights defenders and to establish the issues they stand for as fundamentally human rights issues. Far too often, violence against women and women’s rights as a whole are treated as separate and distinct, whether from peace and security issues, or from mainstream human rights discourses. The truth is that there is no distinction between women’s rights and human rights, except in the breadth, scale and dynamics of abuse. “It is important to realise that WHRDS are among the most instrumental actors with genuine interest in the application of universal human rights hence any recognition by the UN in the form of this resolution is not just valuable, but long overdue” said Hala Alkarib, SIHA’s Regional Director.

Throughout the Horn of Africa, the fragile political context intersects with customary laws, religious militancy and conservative traditions to oppress women and violate their rights. The work of WHRDs, specifically in Sudan, Somalia and Ethiopia, sees them being pushed and cornered, with their work and agendas becoming increasingly trapped between systemic political and societal repression. Unfortunately, WHRDs often find themselves working in isolation having limited access to protection strategies and trainings. Too often, women activists face questions and challenges over their moral standing with many called family breakers, divorced and loose women in a bid to delegitimize their work.

The timing of this resolution for SIHA could not be more apt. Whilst the debate continues in New York, SIHA is actively supporting a female lawyer recently arrested and persecuted on the basis of the human rights work she has been conducting. All too often, SIHA has identified and supported WHRDs persecuted for demanding the realisation and protection of human rights, both for fellow women, and for their broader communities. In Somalia, HRDs who have documented sexual violence have been harassed; women who have sought to speak out against rape have been arrested, in South Sudan, SIHA members have been arrested for speaking out against police brutality.  The list of WHRDs who have suffered at the hands of both state and non-state actors, by community and family members is tragically far too long to detail.

This draft resolution is a strategic means to elevate and recognise the role of WHRDs, not just in the Horn, but globally, in the pursuit of human rights everywhere and for everyone. It builds upon and strengthens international commitments to HRDs that have been made, notably through the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the Convention on the Elimination of All forms of Discrimination Against Women and the Declaration on Human Rights Defenders. Despite these already present mechanisms, the scale of additional risks that women as HRDs face prompted the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights Defenders to dedicate an entire report on the subject (A/HRC/16/44). Such risks include, but are not limited to, arrests, mistreatment, torture, criminalization, wrongful sentencing, stigmatization, attacks, threats, death threats and killings, sexual violence and rape. The Special Rapporteur further reported that family members of WHRDs are also often targeted. SIHA can attest to such abuses through the course of its work and ongoing engagement with WHRDs who have had their daughters raped and husbands arrested.

SIHA calls on all heads of state at the general assembly to not only approve this resolution, but to domesticate and actively apply the contents of it within their state. The realisation of this resolution is essential to the creation of a just and equitable society and the capacity for women to be equal and free actors in the protection of human rights for all.

For more information:
www.sihanet.org
+256-414286263
Sihahornofafrica@gmail.com

Peace is how I talk, unity, love are the fun

My people prospered no longer resort to the gun.

My worst enemies perished the rest humble like a nun.

Tourists lay on my beaches, in the morning sun.

Chaos, tribalism and turbulence are gone.

Women walk in the streets without fearing none.

Parents send to school both daughter and son.

No discrimination, we treat each other just like one.

Cities and villages are rebuilt with the latest designs.

Roads are reconstructed ,  studded with traffic signs.

My  reputation is revived with strength and pride.

I don’t bow to any one, only by my laws I abide.

I  no longer receive aids, I am the one who supplies.

My mission is to save those who still living in lies.

Business booms everywhere no monopoly is exercised.

Economy flourishes , of which no one is deprived.

Waves of foreign investors pour in to my land,

Feel  so fortunate  they set their feet on my sand.

If u knew me as a catapilllar, now  I am the butterfly.

Cherishing my unique glory as it extends to the sky.

My people cuddle each other and carcass just the same.

The year we are in now may be different but Somalia is my name.

By; Abdifatah Sheik Ibrahim( Ina Aw daldale)

 Torrential Flooding in Puntland

Warsaw, Poland 13-11-2013: Nothing testifies of the vulnerability of the African people, especially the pastoralists to climate change impacts than the death of over 100 Somalis after a tropical cyclone hit the autonomous Puntland State in northeastern Somalia over the weekend at a time when national delegates were assembling in Warsaw, Poland for the 19th Conference of Parties of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
The cyclone, known as 03A, hit the Eyl, Beyla, Dangorayo and Hafun districts along the eastern coast before moving across to Alula at the tip of the Horn of Africa.
Hundreds of people are reportedly missing, with thousands of livestock lost and fishing boats swept away and forced the government of Abdirahman Farole to declare the state of emergency.
Eyl, about 1,300 km north-east of Mogadishu, was the worst affected area.
“Both the fishing communities and nomadic pastoralists were badly affected,” President Farole told the media at a briefing on Monday, announcing that the Puntland Disaster Management and Rescue Committee was set to respond to the natural disaster.
Henry Neondo, Coordinator, African Alliance of Rangeland Management and Development (AARMD) said the world has reacted to this crisis in a typical manner: sending in relief teams driving four-wheels troopers.
But with the reported jammed emergency trucks, Neondo said nature itself appears to reject this usual manner of solving its fury in the way the global community is mismanaging the environment.
Neondo urged the global leaders assembled in Warsaw to proactively come up with key steps that would solve such occurrences as happened in Puntland and Philippines for good.
He said climate change poses considerable challenges for pastoralists and other economic activity on the Africa’s rangelands.
An extreme weather condition in the form of cyclones, storms, icy rains and flash floods have been experienced in high frequency and is hitting the pastoralists hard.
Global climate modelling suggests that by 2080, average temperatures will have increased by some 3°C and rainfall decreased by 5% to 20%.
The results suggest that gradual change in climate over the next 70 years will see the potential value of livestock income halved and that of tourism income reduced by one quarter.
AARMD urges that active interventions and the means in terms of funds to make rangeland use less rigid and more able to change and adapt be forthcoming from such meetings currently taking place in Warsaw, Poland. “The rich nations must commit to reduce emissions as well as release needed funds to stem climate change impacts,” said Neondo.
END Item
About US
The African Alliance for Rangeland Management and Development (AARMD) is a continental movement of organizations in Africa, brought together to shape the opinions and advocate for effective policies that will protect rangelands in the light of climate change, drought, desertification and land degradation.
Membership is open to Non-governmental organizations, research institutions, Foundations, Trusts, Community-based organizations, faith-based networks, national coalitions and regional networks in Africa; AARMD aims to fuse efforts on climate change, drought, desertification and land degradation advocacy and coordination in Africa as it impacts rangelands, pastoralists and nomads.
For further information

P.O. BOX 2141, 00100, NAIROBI, KENYA
TEL: +2540202051330
Email: info@aarmd.org Twitter: @aarmd1
Website: www.aarmd.org

The Storm Path

BOSASSO, Somalia – At least 100 people were killed over the weekend when a tropical cyclone hit Somalia’s semi-autonomous Puntland region, President Abdirahman Mohamud Farole said on Monday, appealing for help from aid agencies.

“A heavy storm hit Bandarbeyle and Eyl towns on Saturday and Sunday. About a hundred people died. Hundreds of houses and livestock were swept by the floods into the ocean,” Farole told reporters in the capital Garowe.

“We urge United Nations aid agencies to assist the victims. As Puntland, we have established a committee to investigate the loss and damage. Electricity, communication and fishing boats were all destroyed.”

The government of Puntland said in a statement that hundreds of people remained unaccounted for and declared a natural disaster emergency.

Massive Flooding caused by the Storm

Puntland spans the relatively calm north of Somalia and has largely escaped the worst of Somalia’s upheaval of the last 20 years. Foreign powers advocating a loose federal political system in Somalia have held it up as a possible model.

The area is rich in energy resources and is being sized up by oil explorers. However, Puntland’s authorities have said insecurity is growing, and blame the Islamist al Shabaab militia, which has been driven out of many regions that it used to control in the remainder of Somalia.

Reuters

The executive committee of Wagosha Movement of Somalia has rejected and opposed the outcome of the recent Jubba reconciliation talks held in Mogadishu.

A spokesman with the group Hamadi Chivalla in Kismayo said the Mogadishu conference was unfair and intended to be a platform to continue the persecution of the people in Jubbaland.

The chairman of Wagosha Movement, Eng Yarow Sharif Aden, told Wagoshanews that warlord Ahmed Madobe, who is a refugee from Ethiopia’s Zone Five cannot represent the people of Jubba regions.

“The Somali government has committed an absolute mistake by trying to force the people of Jubba regions to support the illegal and one clan dominated system of warlord Ahmed Madobe, and this will never be accepted by our people”, he said.

Mr Hussein Mohamud Musa (Bantu), a parliamentarian from Jubba regions, said the government is forcing the people to allow the unacceptable plans of Ahmed Madobe, and this is putting the government in a position that it can lose the confidence of Jubba residents.

He said, though he was part of the delegation of President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s recent visit to Kismayo, he did not support the wrong approach of the government towards Jubba reconciliation.

The leader of Wagosha Movement Eng Yarow Sharif Aden, said the shameful process in Mogadishu and the unfair distribution of the delegates of the participants, was a clear sign that the government and warlord Madobe are calling for fresh bloodshed and hostility in Kismayo and the entire Jubba regions.

“The government distributed the delegates in a very weird way, as done by Ahmed Madobe and his clan minded allies. This was not right and it will just  fuel more violence, since the innocent people have run out of tolerance’, said Eng Yarow.

The chairman has also called for a free and fair process to end the Jubba crisis by inviting all clans at a table, so that each clan will clarify the areas it inhabits in Jubba, instead of the current situation, where clans from outside the regions are claiming to be the owners of the region.

Mr Yarow has also confirmed that the Wagosha Movement of Somalia has made contacts with the Mombasa Republican Council in Kenya, (a group that stands for the rights of the Mijikenda Swahili people in Kenya’s coastal areas).

He said the two groups share a lot since they belong to one community of Mijikenda, that created the famous Shungwaya empire in Kismayo areas, before the colonial powers divided the community in two parts, one living in Kenya and one in Somalia.

He insisted that the two groups share the idea of achieving their goals in peaceful and diplomatic channels.

Mombasa Republican Council has been is struggling to achieve their rights in peaceful manner, and has been in legal loggerheads with the Kenya’s government, led President Uhuru Kenyatta, who is indicted by the International Criminal Court ICC over 2007-2008 election violence.

The leader of Wagosha Movement, Eng Yarow and officials in the central committee of the group are currently visiting some European countries and North America, to lobby for the rights of Wagosha people, who are the majority in Jubba regions.

Wagosha News Desk

Kismayo, Somalia

Somalia’s president has asked the prime minister to resign, in a blow to the rare political stability Somalia has experienced for the past year.

Sources within the Somali government said that President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud asked Prime Minister Abdi Farah Shirdon to resign on Friday, on the grounds that Shirdon has been ineffective in his job.

The sources said the situation was unresolved as of Monday.

The president and prime minister came to power a little more than 12 months ago as part of a U.N.-backed process to give Somalia a stable central government after more than two decades of chaos and conflict.

Shirdon was a political newcomer at the time, having previously worked as a businessman in Kenya.

The country has enjoyed relative peace and a budding prosperity since then, though militant group al-Shabab continues to carry out periodic attacks in the capital, Mogadishu.

If Shirdoon were to resign, it would be the first major shakeup in the government since Somalia’s parliament elected Mohamud as president.

Previous Somali governments often fell apart because of infighting – a situation that hampered the governments’ ability to defeat insurgents and exert authority.

Al-Shabab was pushed out of major cities mainly by African Union troops.

Even now, the Mohamud government has found it hard to settle power struggles within Somalia, where many towns are under the effective control of various clans, militia groups or al-Shabab.

 Source: VOA

By Marion Kanari

Over five hundred thousand Somali refugees will be repatriated back into the their country after the United Nation High commission for refugees and the Kenyan and Somali governments signed a tripartite agreement for a voluntary repatriation and reintegration exercise.

Deputy President Willam Ruto who presided over the signing of the agreement called on the Somalia government to expedite the reintegration exercise as a way of rebuilding the horn of Africa nation.

The international community and both Kenya and Somalia have pledged their support for the action plan.

A tripartite commission will also be set up to expedite the reintegration process and find lasting solutions to the refugee problem.

Deputy President William Ruto while pledging the country’s support for a voluntary repatriation exercise called on the refugees to use skills and capital gained to contribute in rebuilding their nation.

The country has been a major host of mainly Somalia refugees in the horn of Africa a situation that has led to a humanitarian crisis and challenges of terrorism, banditry and organized crime.

Kakuma and Daadab refugee camps presently host over a million documented and undocumented refugees half of whom are Somalia refugees.

In the wake of the Westgate terrorist attack, members of parliament increased calls for the closure of the refugee camps as terrorists were said to be using the camps as training grounds.

UNHCR representative to Kenya  Rauof Mazou and Somalia foreign affairs minister Yusuf Adam have also pledged their support for the  repatriation roadmap.

Source : KBC

Police in Somalia say a suspected car bomb has exploded outside a hotel in Mogadishu, killing at least six people.

Witnesses say a suicide bomber drove a car packed with explosives Friday to the gate of the hotel, which is popular with Somali officials, in central Mogadishu.

A government spokesman told VOA’s Somali service that at least 15 people were wounded, including a member of the Somali parliament Soyan Abdi Warsame.

Reports say another explosion was heard in the same area shortly before the hotel attack.

Somali Prime Minister Abdi Farah Shirdon condemned the violence and said it will not derail the progress toward peace in Somalia.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the blasts, but al-Shabab militants periodically carry out bomb attacks in Mogadishu.

Al-Shabab once controlled most of the Somali capital, but the group was driven out of Mogadishu and other major Somali cities by an African Union-led peacekeeping force.

The al-Qaida-linked group is still considered a threat. In September, al-Shabab claimed responsibility for an assault on a shopping mall in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, that killed more than 60 people.

Source: VOA

By Magnus Taylor, 8 November 2013

Book Review

 James Ferguson’s ‘The World’s Most Dangerous Place: inside the outlaw state of Somalia’ is a good book with a bad title – lending itself too much to the kind of one dimensional Dantean portrayal of the country which the author has most definitely not produced.

However, I can forgive the publisher for this attempt to reach a wider audience than the usual band of analysts, aid workers and academics who hoover-up Somali-focused fare.

This is also easily the most enjoyable non-fiction book on Somalia I have come across. In fact, it may be the only read-it-for-pleasure book on Somalia I know of.

The country is, afterall, a place that generally spawns academic tomes which attempt to explain the complexity of state collapse eg Stig Hansen’s ‘Al Shabaab in Somalia‘ or revisionist histories which pointedly try to ‘problematise’ headline views of the country showing it as nothing more than a haven for warlords, pirates and Al Qaeda eg Mary Harper’s ‘Getting Somalia Wrong‘.

Ferguson, through exhaustive research and a flair for a certain sharp-eyed journalistic reportage, demonstrates that whilst warlords, pirates and terrorists all inhabit the country, they are part of a much bigger (and more creative) economy of warfare that has developed over the last 20 years.

The book starts in Mogadishu with the Ugandan and Burundian soldiers of AMISOM, fighting what Ferguson terms “a forgotten campaign in the Global War on Terror” against Al Shabaab (now pushed out of the city).

Back in 2011, however, AMISOM was engaging in “a giant game of whack-a-mole” against the insurgents. Mogadishu had become, in Ferguson’s words, “an African Stalingrad”, with house-to-house fighting and a sophisticated network of supply trenches criss-crossing the city.

Ferguson also does well to include some description of the weird collection of western ‘security consultants’ and soldiers of fortune who collect in a place like this, following the action and the money. He reports that amongst them are 4 US military advisors to the then Transitional Federal Government (TFG) – the US “publicly distancing itself from the conflict whilst keeping a hand in the game.”

And whilst many others may not be directly employed by the US, their cheques are certainly being signed by an international coalition of donors, making the dividing line between military assistance and proxy war vanishingly small.

 In Mogadishu, Ferguson comments on the difficulty of actually finding Somalis to talk to for his research.

But those he does pin down, and not just the interviews with the country’s political elite, demonstrate the human cost of a society where “at the level of the street, normality had been replaced by a kind of mad children’s crusade where chaos and sadism ruled. It was like Lord of the flies with automatic weapons.”

The author’s focus on youth, particularly that of Shabaab recruits, is particularly illuminating. He visits a group of young Al-Shabaab deserters now cared for by the government, and finds them “spirited, unruly and for the most part instantly likeable.”

He raises the idea (from research by a French criminologist, Daniel LaDouceur) that Al Shabaab is “a super gang” and that current attempts to control violence through clan elders are ineffective because the elders “have lost control of their young men”.

Ferguson makes much play of the general incompetence and self-destructive disregard for the Somali population exhibited by Al-Shabaab. This is most clear in its attitude towards the 2011 famine – a product of both war and drought – which it refused to accept existed. This was, besides being profoundly immoral, a tactical error of judgment from its leaders who, in the face of this human disaster, were “faceless [and] pathetic.”

One of the limiting factors in Ferguson’s book is the difficulty of getting a truly national perspective on Somalia. For example, he was unable to travel south to Kismayo due to continuing insecurity in the country’s most important southern city, recently under occupation by Kenyan troops.

However, this means he does spend an extended period in “the court of King Farole” in Puntland – a more stable federal state squeezed between the self-declared independent Somaliland and the more volatile southern rump of the Somali Republic.

Puntland may be a relative success story, but Fergusons still views it as something of a ‘Darodistan’ – “a mono-clan police state where bad things would, and sometimes did happen to people, with the wrong tribal affiliation.”

Puntland is better known in the wider world as the place where the pirates comes from. And Ferguson covers this topic in detail, even meeting a crew of recently released Burmese hostages, the leader of whom later stated that “we were so lucky to be Burmese from a shit poor country like our Burma” – the pirates realising that there was no real prospect of anyone paying a ransom for them.

In this regard, Ferguson argues that the insurance industry, in readily paying out in hijack situations, “effectively colluded with the pirates’ mission of self-enrichment.”

In Puntland, the author interviews a Somali government spy (Guled) who had been tasked with infiltrating the pirate gangs.

Whilst Ferguson is unafraid to display his distaste for Guled – “an ugly, feral, dangerous man” – he does provide him with the potential scoop (assuming it’s true) that Al Shabaab gets a $200,000 – $300,000 cut from each ship captured and kept at the port of Harardheere (purely a business relationship and not one of shared ideology).

As with his statements about Guled, Ferguson is not afraid to criticise Somali society, despite being an outsider. For example, the “continuing reluctance to raise women above the status of a chattel.”

This is revealed in darkly humorous detail with a visit to the practice of Somali-Italian returnee Dr Giama, who shows Ferguson a slideshow of the medical consequences of a collapsed health system, including “a calcified ectopic pregnancy, a creature from the scariest science-fiction film” and a series of images the result of continuing ‘cultural adherence’ to the practice of Female Genital Mutilation. “It is remarkable what you can find under an abaya,” says the Doctor.

Logically, given the vast numbers of Somalis who have left the country in the last 20 years, Ferguson spends a decent section of the book considering the diaspora.

For this he goes to both the US, where Minneapolis is, perhaps surprisingly, at the centre of the Somali community, and London.

In Minneapolis he investigates the phenomenon of young Somali men and women being recruited to the movement back ‘home’, concluding that it’s a very “peer to peer process” probably with no real mastermind.

In London, the focus is more on how ordinary Somalis have integrated into British society and some of the challenges a generally poor and often traumatised population present to the mantra of British ‘multiculturalism’.

The capacity of Somali gangs, through startling violence, to chase competing groups off their turf is commented on by a Special Branch officer, and a South London teacher says that in her school “the behaviour of some of the Somalis is so impossible that the system just can’t hope … I’d have fewer of them in my school if I had a chance” – a disquieting, but credible, statement from one so close to the action.

Ferguson is entirely unsentimental about his extended experience in the international Somali milieu. He doesn’t falsely represent the positives in a country and society where clearly something has gone badly wrong.

As for being ‘The Most Dangerous Place on Earth’, this really depends in which part of it you are standing – thinking of Somalia as much more than the cartographic expression of the failed post-colonial state is clearly something of a pointless exercise and we need to address each part of it on its own terms.

Magnus Taylor is Editor of African Arguments.