"Somalia's Nelson Mandela" And our Next Prime Minister

[Somalian_Boqor]

Unclebin you a loser just go away ninyaho like you have been for awhile now. Make us all happy again.

[Unclebin-]

Boqoraad Your adeer Ina Yey is gone. Azhari will not be elected. He has no power

[Somalian_Boqor]

Somali peacebroker: Yusuf Al-Azhari spent six years in solitary confinement as a political prisoner

For A Change, June-July, 1996 by Michael Smith

Yusuf Al-Azhari was walking between two Somali villages recently when he found a woman lying under a tree with her four children. She had malaria. He laid her head in his lap and she died four hours later. He took the children to the nearest village, a kilometre away, gathered the villagers together and found families to take them in.

Countless other children are not so lucky in a nation still in a state of anarchy following the collapse of its Marxist government in 1991 and an all-out civil war. For the past six years there has been no government or judiciary; schools and hospitals are closed, disease and famine rife; children die of malnutrition; and warlords fight for control of the capital, Mogadishu.

Al-Azhari is one of a network of peacebrokers among the intellectuals, religious leaders, businessmen and the women who are bringing together the warring clans in sustained dialogues for reconciliation. A former diplomat and senior administrator, he now describes himself as a `peacemaker and reconciliation promoter'.

Recently, the reconcilers spent four months bringing together clans that were fighting each other in the southern port of Kismaayo. For 28 days, their leaders sat under a tree `without accusing each other' until they reached an agreement. `We prefer to call the clan leaders "peace lords" in a psychological bid to tranquillize them,' says Al-Azhari. `Now there is no civil war in Kismaayo. What we are trying to do next is to form a reconciliation conference, either in Somalia or outside.'

It is a dangerous task. At one point, 22 peace negotiators were rounded up and shot. Al-Azhari was one of only three who survived. He had two bullets taken out of his thigh; one remains embedded in his leg.

Contrary to world media perception, Al-Azhari says the UN's abortive peacekeeping and humanitarian intervention in Somalia in 1993 was a net benefit to the nation. It ended the worst of the civil war and created a climate in which the warlords, leaders of Somalia's six major clans, were willing to sit down and talk. Where the UN, and the US forces involved, went wrong was in attempting to arrest such warlords as General Aidid, at a time when the nation had no legal framework to bring them to book. Instead, the UN's action merely elevated their status.

In the absence of the UN, much of the drive for peace is coming from the women who have seen their families butchered on an horrific scale. A UNICEF report says that some 40 per cent of Somalia's children are believed to have died or are completely disabled, physically and mentally.

Al-Azhari brings to his work of reconciliation his faith as a devout Muslim, his years of experience in diplomacy, and his personal experience of repression. For six years in the Seventies he was held without trial in solitary confinement.

Yusuf Omar Ahmed Al-Azhari was born in 1940 into a wealthy family. He took his doctorate in political science and international law at Mogadishu University, and married `the best girl in town', Kadija, the daughter of Prime Minister Abdu Rashid Sharmarke, who later became the second president of independent Somalia. Al-Azhari was appointed senior diplomat in Bonn and then Ambassador to the USA.

Somalia, with its strategic access to the Red Sea from the Horn of Africa, became an increasing focus for the cold war between the superpowers. In 1969, Sharmarke was assassinated and five days later General Mohammed Siad Barre came to power in a Soviet-backed coup. His regime was to become one of the world's most oppressive.

Al-Azhari is uncompromising about the part that corruption played in discrediting capitalism and democracy. He cites Western construction companies, brought in to build 30 schools, who offered so many `commissions' to officials that only three schools were built. `The people turned to the socialist-communist system in reaction,' he says.

Summoned home from Washington, he was soon arrested, under `emergency security measures', and imprisoned for four and half months. He was transferred to a military camp to be trained in Marxism for nine months, before being sent to work as a farm labourer.

Passing all these tests, as he puts it, he was appointed Director General at the Ministry of Information and National Guidance. `I was supposed to orientate the public to the principles of scientific socialism,' though he remained suspect to the regime. He held this post for nearly two years, during which he was offered scholarships in the Soviet Union, East Germany, North Korea and Cuba, `all of which I managed somehow to decline'.

In 1974, he became Ambassador to Nigeria, covering seven other West African nations. At a reception in Lagos for a large Soviet delegation, Al-Azhari queried why such a high level delegation had come to a capitalistic country, `when they always tell us that capitalism is evil'. His question may have sealed his fate: within two weeks he was recalled to Mogadishu.

A year later, he was asleep with his wife and four children when soldiers burst in at 3am and seized him. He was handcuffed, blindfolded, thrown into a Land Rover and taken to a prison 350 km outside Mogadishu. It was built by East Germany to Stasi specifications: a cell three metres by four, where Al-Azhari had `no one to talk to, nothing to read, nothing to listen to'. And `to remind me that I was not a tourist in that cell', the guards tortured him daily, both physically and psychologically.

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[Somalian_Boqor]

Boqoraad Your adeer Ina Yey is gone. Azhari will not be elected. He has no power

My adeer is not gone but on vacation bitch and I assure you Azhari will get something big in this administration. We are pushing for Prime Minister but the ambassador to the United States wouldn't be bad either. I would love to work with Dr. Azhari in D.C and make sure the likes of dirty Unclebin stay Majeerteen trash.

[Unclebin-]

Somalia_Boqor

You aren't getting anything. keep dreaming.

[AbdiWahab252]

The Next PM will not be Harti

[Somalian_Boqor]

Somalia_Boqor

You aren't getting anything. keep dreaming.

Horta how is MN?

[Somalian_Boqor]

The Next PM will not be Harti

And who do you think Dr.Yusuf Al-Azhari is?

[Unclebin-]

Somali Boqor

I live in Canada.

[Somalian_Boqor]

Somali Boqor

I live in Canada.

When did you move to Canada last I knew you lived in MN or I thought?

Anyways that explains a lot.

Horta are you still pretending to be reer Mahad? Cause now this Abgaal sub-clan is President and you can surely claim them you little Midgaan.

[Unclebin-]

I am still reer adan Mahad. You afterall are more closely to me the Beer Dofaar and likewise.

But The intelligent reer adan Mahad gene musta died out when it hit you.

[Cawar]

[Somalian_Boqor]

I am still reer adan Mahad. You afterall are more closely to me the Beer Dofaar and likewise.

But The intelligent reer adan Mahad gene musta died out when it hit you.

I see you still sticking to your story line.

I am reer Mohamed Mahad and we changed Somali History.

Unclebin you will forever be a little Midgaan in my book.

[Unclebin-]

No you idiot your reer adan mahad. Ninyahoow I still have your email.

Midgaan are Muslim. If that means I am one then so be it.

[Somalian_Boqor]

No you idiot your reer adan mahad. Ninyahoow I still have your email.

Midgaan are Muslim. If that means I am one then so be it.

Nah I am reer Mohamed Mahad.

There is nothing wrong with Midgaans so you shouldn't be ashamed of what you are.