By C. Bryson Hull
Reuters
Friday, July 7, 2006
Baidoa’s cratered main street, the road to the capital Mogadishu, is crammed with businesses from banks to coffee shops and roadside cafes teeming with people, a renaissance driven by the weak interim government’s relocation there since April.
Shouts of “Welcome Baidoa” greet visitors, as do new signs like “Hotel Baidoa” and “Manchester United Drink,” the latter in front of a snack stall adorned with old car transmission parts.
But behind the boom is fear sparked by the rise of an Islamist movement that seized Mogadishu and a strategic swathe of the country last month after routing U.S.-backed warlords.
“I’m seeing the expansion of the Islamists and I have full reason to be worried,” shopkeeper Fatuma Yusuf told Reuters.
The Islamists, who at first said they were only striving to bring peace, now hold strategic towns within striking distance of Baidoa, an old agricultural and trading town stuck in the flat bushlands of south-central Somalia.
The elevation of hard-liner Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys to lead the Islamists is sowing worry the group will try to overrun the government as it moves to impose strict sharia law across the Horn of Africa country of 10 million.
“His rise from oblivion has suddenly created doubt and chaos,” teacher Adan Nunow Ali, 42, said. “We now see them as out to wreck the new government.”
Aweys, who denies an al Qaeda affiliation the United Nations has tagged him with, is worrying both the West and African neighbours with his rejection of foreign peacekeepers the government wants — and superior military strength.
Though Ethiopia and the Somali government deny it, security experts and residents say Addis Ababa has sent soldiers there and will defend President Abdullahi Yusuf — an old Aweys foe — if the Islamists cross a buffer zone near the border.
Yusuf’s government, the 14th attempt to restore central rule to Somalia in the last 15 years, meets in an old warehouse lined with mismatched faux linoleum and mobile phone advertisements.
‘WE LACK THE POWER’
Butcher Ibrahim Osman Ali, tending to camel meat covered with flies at Baidoa’s Isha Market, said business has been good since the government came — after 10 years of violence.
“Any problem that comes to the government, we are going to support them. We believe Aweys is not doing any good for us because he is a terrorist,” he told Reuters.
But even some government officials are not so certain they can fight off the Islamists with the militias they have.
“We lack the equipment, we lack the power. We have the will, that’s all,” new national police commissioner, Brigadier Mohamed Ali Hassan Loyan, told reporters.
“If we have that power, why are we asking for a lifting of the arms embargo, for a foreign deployment?”
Yusuf has asked for foreign peacekeepers and, so they can carry their guns in, a waiver of a 1992 U.N. arms embargo — easily the world’s most violated weapons ban.
Yusuf’s presidential guards, the bulk of the military force in Baidoa, are the most visible proof — all wear new desert camouflage uniforms and many wield AK-47 assault rifles so new they still have the labels they were shipped with.
They patrol Baidoa’s shattered roads and smashed buildings, scenes typical across a country that has been neglected and looted to the ground since warlords ousted dictator Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991 and turned Somalia into a byword for anarchy.
Baidoa’s green plains and rich fruit orchards had once earned it the name “Paradise,” Loyan said.
“It was before, 20 years back,” he said, seated in a courtyard full of trash and plastic tents.
Source: Reuters, July 7, 2006
