by Abdi-Noor Mohamed
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
I sometimes wonder if we have a civil society in Somalia-- a society which is civic by nature and has a deep patriotic feeling for the motherland. In the 1999 Arta reconciliation talks presided by President Guelle of Djibouti the Somali civil society has had a great representation in the talks but in the end we saw everyone jumped in the tribe wagon to win a seat in the parliament or vie for a post in the government. What happened to the civil society? Why have they melted away when it was time to stand by their commitments as genuine civil society organizations? Four years later another conference was convened in Mbgathi, Kenya to manufacture a government for Somalia by nations dubbed as “Frontline States”. Though the forum has been dominated by warlords and clan chauvinists, the civil society has found a foothold in the talks and tried to exert influence and pressure upon the conference moderators who were so lenient to the side of the warlords.
Unfortunately the conference has created an ugly power-sharing scenario based on a most injustice way of 4.5. Instead of boycotting the conference the Somali civil society representatives simply changed jackets and joined hand in hand with their clan masters to get a seat in the parliament. No one in today’s´ TFG is representing the interests of the Somali civil society. They are all defending the interests of their clans using politics as a cover. On the other hand, we hear about civil society meetings only when an existing administration starts to crumble with the hope the next reconciliation conference would allow them to slip in this time.
Worse still when civil society groups (too many of them exist today) try to criticize the TFG they accuse its leaders of squandering money as if money matters in a situation where everything is rotting in the base and where the political power-sharing is based on 4.5, leaving no space for civil society or non-tribe actors. Is Somali civil society a springboard to reach the summit of a political injustice which in the end frustrates the civil society itself?
Though resigned from my post as a coordinator of a civil society institution created by a coalition of organizations in Mogadishu in 1996 I have closely been following its developmental stages, the challenges it was facing and its transformations from time to time. It is really sad to mention that the role of civil socieity ends at the peak of the somali reconciliation talks when conference facilitators propose that the power will be shared on tribal basis of 4.5. Here we can say that the Somali reconciliation talks act as the dark holes where the bubble of the civil society movements are finally bursted. But on the mirror of Time we see images of reality reflected on the walls of history. The fact that civil socieity role ended somewhere in the conference proceedings shows that we still lack a strong civil society which could not be broken, divided, undermined or otherwise crashed by the turning tides of the tribal wave. With an effective civil society, a nation’s destiny cannot be decided by warlords, political bigots and religious terrorists who brain-wash our youth with unfounded Spiritual Puritanism.
We have to build Somalia. But we cannot rebuild it with the very tools we employed to destroy it: tribalism. New Somalia can only be reinstituted outside the tribal box and we cannot hope to put Somalia back to its former position of glory unless we get a committed civil society for Somalia - a civil society that views the problems from different perspectives and puts the nation before its own personal or group interests.
Please share this poem with me:
Somalia is a victim of its geographic location
It lies on a spot of immense strategic interest
Nations scramble for control of its waterways
They are devouring on it like hungry foxes
Civil society could be a hope for Somalia
But do we have a civil society in Somalia?
Somalia is a victim of its natural resources
It has long been coveted by virtue of its luck
Companies compete for exploiting its fortune
They want Somalia to remain their milk cow
Civil society could be a hope for Somalia
But do we have a civil society in Somalia?
Somalia is a victim of its neighbors
They have a historic score to settle
Its strength is a repetition of the past
They want to swallow it before the tide turns
Civil society could be a hope for Somalia
But do we have a civil society in Somalia?
Somalia is a victim of its own people
They want to exterminate it with wars
Tribe and terrorism are their weapons
Devil is directing them to depths of hell
Civil society could be a hope for Somalia
But do we have a civil society in Somalia?
Somalia is in a state of chaos
Strife is the order of the day
People are fleeing from conflict
But they have nowhere to flee
Civil society could be a hope for Somalia
But do we have a civil society in Somalia?
Jihadists are bombing them up
They want to invest in their blood
TFG is butchering them mercilessly
They want to kill more they to stay longer
Civil society could be a hope for Somalia
But do we have a civil society in Somalia?
Amisom is slamming them with mortars
They want their cash flow to go steady
They recycle carcasses into dollar notes
Civil society could be a hope for Somalia
But do we have a civil society in Somalia?
Abdi-Noor Mohamed
Writer and filmmaker
Växjö University
[email protected]