     A Refugee Brother | Wednesday, February 28, 2001 - 04:26 am
Ibtisam Yusuf Haibeh, 22, came to Finland as a refugee at the outbreak of the civil war in Somalia. Eight years on, she still longs for the day she will return home.
''Each time people hurl racist insults at me on the street my mind flashes back to Somalia,'' she says. ''I hope to return home one day.''
But prominent Somali scholar, Professor Ahmed I. Samatar has an uneqivocal message for homesick Somalis tired of low grade labour and casual racism: Get used to it. There's no going home.
''I know there are Somalis who are very romantic about going home,'' says Samatar, ''but the evidence is clear, there is very little to go back to. They have to come terms with the fact there is no going back home.''
Samatar, Dean of Faculty of International Studies at Macalester College in Minnesota in the United States, was one of the speakers at a recent conference on Somali studies here. He says Somali state institutions, infrastructure, in fact, all semblance of civic order in Somalia has collapsed beyond repair.
Very little has been achieved in terms of brokering peace among the warring factions still fighting each other in the country. The capital Mogadishu and the strategic town of Baidoa is still being torn by fighting between forces loyal to warlord Hussein
Mohammed Aidid, and other militias.
He advises Somalis in exile to face up to the major challenge of integrating with heir host countries' societies, and make these countries their new homes. More than 20,000 Somali refugees have sought refuge in the Scandinavian countries. Government atte mpts to persuade them to go home have proven unsuccessful, almost farcically so.
Two years ago the Finns sent a delegation over to Somalia to clear the way for the return of its 5,000 Somali refugees. But the security situation was so bad, the team could get no further than Kenya. Plans to send the Somalis back have since been shelve d.
The Swedish authorities made similar attempts this year, according to the account of Finland's Swedish language daily Hufvudstadsbladet.
Somali faction leader Adin Abdullahi Noor was invited to Sweden by the authorities, in the hope he might convince some of the country's 12,000 Somali refugees to return home. But his first public speeches divided the Somali exiles and triggered fighting
in Gothenburg and the capital Stockholm, forcing him to abandon his tour.
To Somalis here, the road to integration is strewn with many obstacles. The main one is high unemployment. In Finland up to 80 percent of Somali youth are out of work. In Sweden, the corresponding figure is said to be up to 90 percent.
If unemployment is a major obstacle to integration, racism is another, says Carl Gustaf Lilius, a writer and active campaigner for minority rights in Finland. ''The Finnish state is very racist. It has a long history of preventing foreign people from com ing to Finland.
''For almost ten years since the Somalis arrived here, people don't still understand them and why they are here.'' says Lilius, a vocal critic of Finland's refugee policy. ''In fact, Finnish people don't even think that they are refugees.''
Several speakers at the weekend conference, organised by the Somali Studies International Association and European Association of Somali Studies, took similar lines.
Asha-Kin Duale, a lawyer with the Somali Professional Association in Britain, says the immigration system in Britain has created a hostile environment that blocks their integration.
Without full refugee status a new arrival cannot get social aid, decent housing, health, or even education. Many of the 60,000 Somalis living in Britain have been denied full refugee status and have been marginalised by mainstream society.
Laws that technically bar corporal punishment of children, routine in Somalia, can distress mothers who do not realise that local authorities can claim the right to take away children who they believe to be at risk from assault, says Duale.
But Samatar insists that whatever obstacles that exiled Somalis face, they must get engaged in the social lives of their communities, and not sit back and wait for handouts.
''If Somalis are to become more than scruffy refugees living on the good will of kind people they should actively participate in the lives of their communities as dignified citizens who have rights and obligations''.
He belives that somewhere between 500,000 and 750,000 Somalis have fled into exile since civil war broke out in 1991. ''That is heavy-duty numbers'' he says.
The challenge therefore confronting Somalis in exile is how to build what Samatar calls 'diasporic communities', in the style of Poles, Italians, Irish and Jewish communities in Europe and the United States.
To do this, says Samatar, ''Somalis must adopt a cosmopolitan identity, a new identity that is Somali but at the same time an identity that is Finnish or Swedish -- or wherever one is''.
Similar advice is given by Carl-Gustaf Lilius. Somalis have lingers too long on the fringes of Finnish society, he claims.
''Stop being silent, stop sitting and waiting. Start something like a Somali press office. Tell the Finnish people who up till now still do not understand what you are and what you want''.
Yours,R.Bro
Thanx |
