By Guled Mohamed
Mogadishu – A Somali radio station closed by Islamists for playing local love songs deemed to encourage immorality returned to the airwaves on Monday after pledging to stop broadcasting music.
“We’ve been on air since midday,” Said Haga Afrah, director of Radio Jowhar, told Reuters. “We are powerless so we have to heed their call to stop playing music on air.”
Islamist leaders who control Jowhar, an agricultural town 90km north of Mogadishu, ordered the station closed on Saturday in the latest show of hardline religious tendencies in the movement which has taken over a swathe of southern Somalia.
Local Islamist leader, Sheikh Mohamed Mahamud Abdirahman, went alone to the station to convey the message on Saturday.
“He said the music encourages immorality, we had no option but to close down,” Afrah said, adding that the station would have to adjust its programmes to fill the time.
The powerful Islamist movement – which kicked US-backed warlords out of Mogadishu in June before expanding elsewhere – has also banned video parlours and has been publicly lashing drunks and drug-peddlers, including some women.
The Islamists say they are bringing much-needed order to Somalia, which has been in an anarchic state since warlords toppled former dictator Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991.
Source: Reuters, Sept 12, 2006
