Guardian Weekly
“You are the beginning of hope for the Somali police,” said Bashir Jama, 52, the deputy police commissioner, addressing the cadets.
Hope is a word best used lightly in Somalia, a country not so much fractured as thoroughly broken. Since 1991, when the dictator Mohamed Siad Barre was toppled, there has been no central government. At least 13 attempts at forming one have failed. Outside of Somaliland, which claims independence, there are no state schools, hospitals or social services. More than 400,000 people live in shacks as internal refugees. What control there is comes from warlords exploiting clan divisions for personal gain; what law there is comes from the barrel of an AK-47.
“We have one religion, one ethnicity, so we are one family, really,” said Abdinur Yusuf, 70, a senior policemen who is helping out at Armo. “Our problem is that many people want to be head of that family.”
In the latest attempt at establishing a national government, clan elders elected the 275-member transitional federal government in October 2004. Led by Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, the president, it is filled with most of the warlords who have helped to maintain the state of chaos for 15 years. But it does not control a single large city; it has no ministries and no revenue, and it relies on handouts.
A country that once boasted of having the finest police force in sub-Saharan Africa now has just a few hundred proper officers and no army. The government has no way of securing its own safety, let alone that of the population.
Which is why the establishment of a training academy to help rebuild a police force from scratch was seen as so urgent. Set in the small highway town of Armo, an hour’s drive south of the Red Sea port of Bossaso, the academy was built last year with support from the UN Development Programme (UNDP).
Training at the academy, led by three Ugandan police seconded to the UNDP, has ranged from recording crime in a logbook to the intricacies of the law of evidence. Given that the cadets were not trained with guns, because of an arms embargo since 1992, the “alternative to violence procedures” course may prove the most useful.
The trainers worry about the brevity of the four-month course. But there is little doubting the cadets’ keenness. Andrew Kaweesi, 32, an assistant superintendent in the Ugandan police, said: “The cadets who’ve never been in the militia are the easiest to teach. Some of the militia have bad morals . . . like taking money from people at roadblocks.”
But the recruitment of militia into the police and eventually the army is seen as unavoidable. With tens of thousands of young men working for private militias, the only way to encourage them to lay down their arms will be to offer them something else.
In the next few weeks about 100 of the Armo graduates will be flown to the government’s base at Baidoa in central Somalia. There they will be joined by 200 other police officers who are being trained in Kenya; this will form the basis for what the government hopes will swell to a 12,000-strong force.
In Baidoa the officers will witness the challenges facing them across the country. At least 3,000 freelance militiamen roam the town and tensions are running high. Last month two guards escorting a World Food Programme convoy were killed near the town in a militia ambush. Seven men were killed after an argument over a mobile phone.
But Baidoa might as well be Geneva compared with Mogadishu. Arguably the world’s most dangerous capital for a foreigner, Mogadishu is a no-go zone also for the government. Two heavily armed groups are vying for its control: a group of warlords-cum-government ministers, who rebranded themselves the Anti-Terror Coalition in a brazen attempt to get US support, are pitted against the sharia courts, set up by the clan elders, and there are suspicions that they harbour Islamic extremists responsible for more than 12 assassinations in the past year.
What is certain is that both groups are awash with guns from Yemen and Ethiopia, and both strongly oppose the president’s regime, which is thought likely to threaten their lucrative control of ports, airfields and roadblocks.
“If we sent these policemen there now, they would be killed,” said Garad Nur Adbulle, the deputy head of the Armo academy. “No doubt.”
Source: Guardian, May 5, 2006
