Writes Leo Odera Omolo In Kisumu City
AS the Al-Shabaab intensifies its onslaught on Mogadishu all week, it paraded to the dismayed residents, four teenagers in a public square, whom it announced would suffer cross amputation –right hand and left foot cut off-in accordance with Sharia law.
The plight of the four teenagers, who were accused of stealing a pistol and three mobile cell phone handsets, signaled the continuing struggle between the militant Islamist insurgents and the transitional Somalia government they want to overthrow over the scope and severity of the sharia law the former have vowed to implement.
When in February this year newly elected President Sheikh Shariff Ahmed [himself a moderate Islamist} caved in to rebel demands for Islamic law, he desperately needed to blunt the edge off the Islamist insurgents, whose campaigns of law and order were striking a popular chord, especially in Southern Somalia.
The Islamists other loud objection to Africa Union peacekeepers being deployed from non-Islamic countries –Uganda and Burundi- had also considerably boxed in President Ahmed.
Sheikh Ahmed tactical concession has won him no respite as it has increasingly become clear that his government and the insurgents have radically different interpretation of the sharia law.
Though on paper, the beleaguered transitional government acceded to the pressure for Islamic law, it has in practice been reluctant to implement a strict Taliban-style version, such as forbidding girls from schooling, decreeing mandatory veils for women, or banning music and television.
But in the months Al-Shabaab and Hezbull-Islam allies have been running southern Somalia, the insurgents have demonstrated that their interpretation of Islamic law is far more extreme. In the Southern town of Kismayu, not far away from the common Somalia-Kenya border, there was also a reported case early in the year of a couple stoned for alleged adultery offence.
The latest decision on the four Mogadishu teenagers, which major international human rights organization such as Amnesty International have unreservedly condemned, has sent a chilling message on what awaits those perceived as wrongdoers in the besieged capital, where the daily death rates now stands at between 20 and 30 people a day.
“The fight for legitimacy is no longer just about who will win the military battle, but whose interpretation of sharia law will carry the day”, an independent minded Islamic scholar in Mogadishu Mr Muqtar Hersi told the EASTAFRICAN weekly last week.
Al-Shabaab terrorists have staked their campaign not only just on Islamic purity, but also strict law and order. And compared to lawless Mogadishu, the order they have imposed in places they control like Kismayu has made many weary Somalis give them the benefit of the doubt.
Still the likelihood of a popular backlash is high. Somalis are by tradition Sunni moderates. The former Islamic Courts Union{ICU} had also briefly introduced sharia in some parts of the capital, Mogadishu and the southern region before they got ousted by invading Ethiopian troops in 2006.
But there was soon an uproar against the harsher tenets of the law, the last straw being the ICU’s banning of khat{Miraa}.It also did not help matters that the ICU chose to ban TV during the month the 2006 World Cup was being played in Germany.
President Mwai Kibaki is in Kirte town in Libya, where he and other African heads of state and government are attending this year’s AU summit, and diplomatic sources in Nairobi have hinted that the Kenyan leader would table a detailed account of the Somalia predicament to his colleague not on behalf of Kenya alone but also as the current chairman of the IGAD He will also sought for help from other presidents to bail out Somalia from its precarious political quagmire.
Kenya has good reasons to worry about Somalia because it is hosting close to 3500,000 Somali refugees while more are still coming in their hundreds on a daily basis. This is a heavy burden on Kenya, a relatively poor country, which has no minerals but depending mainly on its buoyant agricultural products such as coffee, tea, fish and horticultural exports.
Ends
leoderaomolo@yahoo.com
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Date: Wed, 1 Jul 2009 01:27:34 -0700 (PDT)
From: Leo Odera Omolo
Subject: THE TRANSISTIONAL SOMALI GOVERNMENT IN MOGADISHU UNDER PRESSURE AND THREATS BY ISLAMISTS TO ACCEPT THE ISLAMIC SHARIA LAW.