Hargeysa, November 3, 2007 (SL Times) – President Dahir Rayale Kahin met Tuesday a delegation from Norway’s oil and gas industry who are said to be looking to invest in Somaliland’s hydro-carbon potentials.
The delegation who arrived from Oslo on Monday consisted of two Norwegian company executives involved in oil and gas exploration, the S/land representative in Norway, Mr Ahmed M Linen and the chair of S/land’s Diaspora in Norway.
The Hague, November 2, 2007 – The International Court of Justice (ICJ) announced today that it will begin public hearings next January in a case between France and Djibouti over whether high-level figures in the African country, including its Head of State, can be summoned as witnesses as part of a French judicial investigation.
In a statement issued from its headquarters in The Hague, the principal judicial organ of the United Nations said the hearings will start on 21 January and a detailed schedule will be published later.
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Nairobi, 30 October, UN Special Representative for Somalia (SRSG), Mr. Ould-Abdallah, welcomes the peaceful conclusion of the crisis within the Transitional Federal Government (TFG).
The SRSG particularly acknowledges the conciliatory tone and spirit of the statements issued by both President Yusuf and Prime Minister Gedi during the official announcement of the latter's resignation.
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4 November 2007 - Somalia's notorious coastline at the Horn of Africa has claimed Filipino seamen as victims on three vessels seized by coastal pirates and militias off the coast in what is considered the world's most dangerous sea-lanes.
The presence of a US-backed, NATO-led task force of more than thirty war ships from all over the world has done little to protect merchant seamen whose vessels, ironically, are often carrying either relief and aid to Somalia, Eritrea, and, Ethiopia.
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Mogadishu 04, Nov.207 - An FM radio comes back to air after closed by the Ethiopian troops at Galdogob district in Mudug region in central Somalia.
The coming back of Hikma FM radio in Galdogob district came after the traditional elders in the district had a crucial talk with the Ethiopian troops on the ground as Abdirahman Warsame an employee of the radio told radio Shabelle.
GENEVA, November 2, 2007 — About 90,000 people have fled the Somali capital Mogadishu over the past week during a resurgence in fighting between Ethiopian troops and insurgents there, the UN refugee agency said Friday.
The office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said the flow had slowed in recent days after the violence subsided.
NAIROBI, Kenya, November 2, 2007 – The U.S. Navy is cracking down on pirates who've been raiding commercial ships off the coast of Somalia.
In the latest episodes, the Navy says warships are working to get pirates off two ships, including a Japanese tanker hijacked Sunday. The tanker was on its way to Europe with a shipment of benzene. Crewmembers are from the Philippines, South Korea and Myanmar.
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Mogadishu, Somalia, November 2, 2007 – Ethiopian troops supporting Somalia's interim government have been involved in fierce battles with insurgents in Somalia's capital, Mogadishu. At least five Ethiopian soldiers and seven civilians have died in fighting in areas close to the stadium.
AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL
London, November 2, 2007 – Amnesty International today urged governments worldwide not to transfer people suspected of crimes during the 1994 genocide to Rwanda for trial.
The organization released a memorandum outlining the criteria national governments and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) should apply when considering transferring people to Rwanda for trial.
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BAIDOA, Somalia Oct 31, 2007 - The Ethiopian foreign affairs minister, Seyoum Mesfin, landed in the southwestern Somali town of Baidoa Wednesday to hold consultations with Somali government officials there.
Foreign Minister Mesfin, leading an Ethiopian delegation, landed unannounced at the Baidoa airstrip under heavy guard and was received at the airport by various officials, including parliament Speaker Adan "Madobe" Mohamed.
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Nairobi, November 01, 2007 – The president of Somalia's transitional government has been meeting with Somali political and clan leaders to settle on a candidate to head the government, following the resignation Monday of interim Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi. Derek Kilner has more from VOA's East Africa Bureau in Nairobi.
President Abdillahi Yusuf's choice of a new prime minister will have to take into account the country's clan dynamics. Mr. Yusuf is facing increasing opposition from leaders of the Hawiye clan, the country's largest. Former Prime Minister Gedi is a member of the Hawiye, but did not have widespread backing among the group. Mr. Yusuf’s Darod clan is Somalia’s second largest.
NAIROBI, November 01, 2007 – An exiled leader of Somalia's Islamists gave his backing on Wednesday to insurgents fighting in Mogadishu and said the resignation of the country's prime minister would bring no change to his turbulent homeland.
Sheikh Sharif Ahmed, a top official of the Somali Islamic Courts Council who took refuge in Eritrea after Ethiopian forces and Somalia's interim government routed his movement, said the capital's rebels had a duty to liberate their country.
BAIDOA, Somalia Nov 2, 2007 – Somalia's interim president is holding back-to-back meetings and consultations in the southern town of Baidoa in search for a new prime minister.
Prof. Ali Mohamed Gedi, the former Somali premier, resigned last Sunday after pressure from Addis Ababa and Washington, D.C., two of the Somali government's closest allies.
Garowe, October 31, 2007 – Speaking ahead of Puntland's MPs plenary session in the provincial town of Garoowe, Somali ports minister has said Somaliland should not bring any more bloodshed between the people of Sool Region and should withdraw without any preconditions. He added if the situation continued this way, Puntland would launch military operations against Somaliland troops.
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Ambassador Wubishet Demisse |
Hargeysa, 3 November, 2007 (SL Times) – Ethiopia’s Ambassador to Somaliland, Ambassador Wubishet Demisse, denied that his government attempted to get Somaliland and Puntland to the negotiating table in order to resolve their dispute over Sool and parts of Sanag region.
There has been widely circulating rumors and reports in the local press that Somaliland attended Ethiopian held peace talks with Puntland in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, but Somaliland officials had dismissed these reports as false and baseless.
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Police inside Shuronet office complex on 1/11/ 07 |
Hargeysa, November 3, 2007 (SL Times) – On Thursday morning, Somaliland’s government forced the senior staff of Shuronet, a local human rights umbrella group, to hand over the keys to their head office in Hargeysa. Police arrived at the group’s headquarters after receiving instructions from the ministry of Justices 'to prevent the current staff and management team of Shuronet from getting access to the organisation’s premises.”
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Hargeysa, November 3, 2007 (SL Times) – President Dahir Rayale Kahin met Tuesday a delegation from Norway’s oil and gas industry who are said to be looking to invest in Somaliland’s hydro-carbon potentials.
The delegation who arrived from Oslo on Monday consisted of two Norwegian company executives involved in oil and gas exploration, the S/land representative in Norway, Mr Ahmed M Linen and the chair of S/land’s Diaspora in Norway.
Somaliland Avaition minister Mohamed Waran Ade |
Hargeysa, November 3, 2007 (SL Times) – Somaliland Minister of civil aviation Ali Mohamed Waran Ade announced last Saturday that Hargeysa international airport run way will be repaired and extensively rebuilt.
The minister stated that the government will invest $400,000 to enlarge the airport run way, which will allow heavy jet planes to land at Hargeysa airport for the first time.
Ali Mohamed Gedi, Somalia’s prime minister, feuded with the president before quitting. |
SIRTE, Libya, Oct. 29 - Ali Mohamed Gedi, the prime minister of Somalia, resigned Monday after a long feud with the country’s president that was imperiling Somalia’s beleaguered transitional government.
Ali Mohamed Gedi, Somalia’s prime minister, feuded with the president before quitting.
Mr. Gedi, a veterinarian turned politician, announced his resignation in Baidoa, a town where Parliament meets, saying that he was stepping down for the good of the country.
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Somali residents of a camp for displaced people gather some of their belongings they were able to salvage when their camp caught fire south of Mogadishu, 01 Nov 2007 |
Mogadishu, 3 November 2007 - Fresh gun battles erupted Saturday in the Somali capital of Mogadishu, but there were no immediate reports of casualties. A roadside bomb exploded in southern Somalia as a convoy of Ethiopian reinforcements passed by on their way to reinforce troops in the capital, Mogadishu.
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Washington DC, October 29, 2007 – Ethiopia has not been able to withdraw from Somalia because the African Union (AU) has not been able to provide the peacekeepers needed to replace its troops, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Wednesday.
"I don't think there's any doubt that the Ethiopians don't want to stay in Somalia. And one of the things that we're trying to do is to work with the African Union to get that security force, the peacekeeping force, ready for Somalia," Rice testified in Congress.
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MOGADISHU, November 2, 2007 - Masked Islamist insurgents on pick-up trucks paraded what they said were the bodies of three Ethiopian soldiers in the streets of Mogadishu Friday, an AFP correspondent reported.
The show of defiance by the Shabab, the radical armed wing of the main Somali Islamist movement, came as a four-day lull was shattered by renewed fighting in the capital's southern neighborhoods.
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Gen. Adde Muse, president of Puntland |
GAROWE, Somalia Oct 31, 2007 – The president of Somalia's semiautonomous state of Puntland, Gen. Mohamud "Adde" Muse, gave the opening address Wednesday at the 19th Session of the Puntland Parliament in the capital, Garowe.
President Muse's speech delved into many subject matters, covering security and development, relations with the federal government in Mogadishu, and he updated lawmakers on his ambitious exploration project.
Somalia's president Abdillahi Yusuf |
MOGADISHU, Somalia, 30 Oct. 2007 - Somalia's president named a caretaker prime minister on Tuesday, a day after the outgoing premier lost a power struggle in the government and resigned.
The U.N. refugee agency said fighting in Mogadishu over the weekend between remnants of an Islamic militia and government forces backed by Ethiopian troops has driven around 36,000 people from their homes, adding to the tens of thousands who fled the capital earlier this year.
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By Michael Savage
Wahhabism is a conservative movement within the Sunni denomination of Islam which was founded by an 18th-century cleric, Mohamed ibn Abdul Wahhab.
The founder's intention was to return Islam to its early roots by stripping it of what he regarded as the alien influences added by the generations of Muslims since the death of Mohamed in 632.
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Report Drafted By: Dr. Michael A. Weinstein
PINR – Report October 31, 2007
With the capture from Puntland of Los Anod, the capital of Somalia's post-independence Sool region, on October 15 by local forces allied with Somaliland, the latter has been drawn inextricably into the tangled web of conflicts in Somalia's south and central regions.
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Hargeysa, November 3, 2007 (SL Times) – A ceremony to mark the 14th anniversary of the formation of the Somaliland Police Force was held on Thursday at the central police headquarters in Hargeysa, Somaliland.
The ceremony was attended by several dignitaries including the Vice-President of Somaliland, Ahmed Yusuf Yasin, the Speaker and deputy Speaker of the Somaliland parliament, several senior Somaliland ministers, senior Somaliland police officers, the Ethiopian representative in Somaliland, members of the UNDP office in Somaliland and members of the general public.
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King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia |
King Abdullah's Saudi regime spends billions of pounds each year promoting Wahhabism, one of fundamentalist Islam's most extreme movements. Much of it funds children's education in British faith schools and mosques. Should we be worried? Paul Vallely investigates
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London, November 2, 2007 – An alleged armed robber who became the subject of an international manhunt after the murder of a policewoman was flown to Britain yesterday after being captured in a remote African village.
Mustafa Jama, 27, was charged last night with the murder of PC Sharon Beshenivsky, who was shot in 2005 outside a travel agency in Bradford. Mr. Jama, who became Britain’s mostwanted man after the killing, was seized by troops this week in a semi-lawless region of northern Somalia, where he is thought to have been hiding for the past two years.
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October 29, 2007
In a testimony to the House Judiciary Committee on Middle East Policy US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice provided a disingenuous and misleading testimony in her reply to a question from Congressman Payne regarding the Eritrea Ethiopia conflict.
Congressman Payne asked; “the Ethiopia-Eritrean situation, and bottoming the demarcation of the borders had not been accepted by Ethiopia, our big ally in Africa … And I wonder if our administration is urging.
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All indications are that there is not going to be any let up in Somaliland government’s determination to dispossess its citizens of their most basic rights. We all know the sequence: the jailing of Haatuf reporters, the imprisonment of Qaran leaders, and the president’s lies to the mediation committee that was composed of some of Somaliland’s most respected individuals. In each of these instances, the government has shown its disregard not only for the constraints imposed by traditional Somali codes of conduct but also to Somaliland’s laws.
In the last couple of weeks, the government added two more items to the rapidly expanding list of abuse heaped on citizens as well as foreign guests: the expulsion of a UN human rights specialist and the takeover of Shuro Net the biggest civil society organization in the country. This week, the government completed its takeover of Shuro Net when the deputy commander of Somaliland Police, Muhamed Shil Dhidar, forced the board of Shuro Net to hand-over to him their office keys.
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In November 2005, the Centre for Human Rights began investigating the possibility of a third destination for the LLM field trip. The reasons for increasing the number of field trip destinations to include Somaliland include the following:
Somaliland is a state in the making; it would be ideal for students on the programme to have a first hand experience of this.
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By Idris A. Ibrahim
An Open Letter to the Board of Trustees, the Director General, the Africa Department Editor and Any other Influential Figure in the British Broadcasting Service (BBC)
After, the ringing sounds of Big Ben, London Calling used to be an opening statement by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) since it began broadcasting to the outside world though; one rarely hears it these days.
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By Mohamud Tani
When President Rayale won the presidential contest in Somaliland in 2003, the people of Somaliland had given him a mandate of five years and he and his UDUB team had to complete a set number of goals and bench-marks. They were handed a home work. Now that we are at the end of Rayale’s first term, and the five years are almost done, let me examine what these bench marks were. Let me try to judge on what has been completed or not completed of these tasks. Let me also rate the performance of the Government on each and everyone of the assignments given to them at the time of their election five years ago.
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Somali-Week Festival
By Rhoda A. Rageh
There was the cheering of young upcoming poets who have found courage to stand on the wings of other poets
A week long Somali festival took place at Oxford House in East London in commemoration of the Black History Month. The festival which brought together some of the best Somali poets and the young Somalis in the Diaspora was facilitated by the patient Martin Orwin, a professor of Linguistics at SOAS who has not only published works by one of the poets into a book but who has translated some of the poetry into English thus helped the young Somalis in Britain appreciate their culture for the first time.
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Somaliland: Our Nation’s Hidden Treasure
By Axmed Ibrahim Kadleye
Few months ago, 6 prominent Somaliland elders and intellectuals included Hadrawi and Gariye formed a committee (known guddigii dhexdhexaadinta) to solve the long-standing crisis between the Government the parliament the two opposition parties and the house of Elders. This committee had immediately solved most of those issues except one.
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UDUB And KULMIYE: Bilking Their Creditor (SL Public)
By Sharmarke Ali , Virginia, USA
Politics is a struggle between opposing ideas. It is an art of the possible. Usually it is aimed at interpreting society inspirations for development and progress. Politicians may differ in the means of achieving political goals but presumptively genuine political leaders maintain same goals as to the wishes of the society that they intended to lead. In Africa it is the parody and not the art of real politics that reigns in most of its countries.
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By Abdirizak Ahmed Toor
The fact is that very little positive community development is known to occur without Good governance.
We regard “good governance” as such that should help to achieve self-reliance development and social justice.
- Good governance can therefore be understood as comprising the concepts of people being the stake holders, and governmental mechanisms that operate most effectively and efficiently.
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By Addis
The horn of Africa has endured some of the biggest wars in Africa. The region is one of the most unstable in the world. Somalia, Kenya and Ethiopia are historically the principal states shaping the region’s politics and due to the Greater Somalia (GS) ideology Somali children know how to shoot machine guns more than they know how to use a pencil. Because of the GS, Somalia has been the only country in the world without a government the last 16 years. And these irredentism ambitions of Greater Somalia will bring more wars in the region since satisfying Greater Somalia means destroying the boundaries of Ethiopia, Kenya and Djibouti.
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Dear colleagues and SHURO-Net
It may not be easy to comment on certain things in SHURO-Net especially when writing from afar. The widely supplied documents on the legalities of the Human Rights network elections goes with great concern for people who would have love to support the Network.
The people whose task is to advocate for human rights in Somaliland may be perceived negatively not knowing that such conflicts can be positive at times but also bring about a sad look and reputation of a seemingly good organization. It happens that the fight for legitimacy comes from either sides, the current Board and the proposed coming board, the rule of law and use of constitutionalism would be the best way to pursue democracy in a country like Somaliland.
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A New Approach to Genuine Peace & Reconciliation
By Ahmed M.I. Egal
The Warlord Government Era
The time for wishful thinking and fantasy solutions to the crisis in Somalia is finally over. The slow motion disintegration of Abdillahi Yusuf’s TFG, the latest fiction purporting to be a government of Somalia cobbled together by the international community, is the final chapter of this sad and sorry saga of foreign powers seeking to establish a client regime in Somalia.
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By Bashir Goth
First published in 2005
The following article is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Annalena Tonelli, 60, humanitarian worker and founder of hospital and school for the deaf in Borama, Richard Eyeington, 62, headmaster of the Sheikh Secondary School, and his wife Enid, 61, who were all slain in cold blood in Somaliland.
Recently, I came across news reports on the activities of a group of clerics calling themselves “the Authority for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice” trying to impose draconian moral codes on Somaliland citizens in general and residents of the capital Hargeysa, in particular
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By Buzu Mengistu
October 30, 2007
I was taking that the so-called “Dr.” Megalomatis is a real personality based on his resume on every entry of his article with his picture. Now I realized that it is fallacious.
As it has been indicated in part two of this article, it is really better to unveil himself and come out clearly with political agenda on Ethiopia rather than writing unfounded information by the name of history.
King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz |
By Malise Ruthven
30 October 2007
King Abdullah's complaint that British authorities ignored Saudi warnings of an imminent attack on the UK before the atrocities of 7 July 2005 might be more convincing if they came from the ruler of a country less sympathetic to the Islamist agenda.
Since the 1970s, when rising oil revenues enabled the Saudis to export the Wahhabi brand of fundamentalist Sunni Islam, Saudi Arabia has been a major exporter of ideas and values that differ from those espoused by Osama bin Laden and his followers on issues of strategy, but not on the broader perspectives.
Somaliland Are Seeing A Huge Increase In Hyena Attacks On People
By Chester Moore (Editor)
October 29, 2007 – A few days ago we looked at some of the world’s scariest animals and the response was great, so I thought it would be fun to look at some more creatures that inspire goosebumps.
Spotted hyena ---Hyenas have a reputation of being sort of a “funny” animal with their strange, “laughing” vocalizations. In reality, however, hyenas are dangerous predators that will gather in packs and taken on animals as large as lions and will attack people.
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By Yassin Ismail, UK
Puntland communities in the Diaspora stepped up massive awareness and fundraising campaigns to support their government’s bid to recapture the beleaguered town of Las Anod in the eastern province of Somaliland. The town was recently taken over by the Somaliland military following a decisive military victory in which Somaliland troops have ousted the Majeertenia militia who previously occupied the town.
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