GALAYDH: Well, you don’t take anything for granted in my neck of the woods, so staying alive is a measure of success, yes.
Two.
The speaker of the Parliament decided to go to his hometown. He went there in consultation with the elders of the town, and they greeted him and they assured him that everything would be fine. But a splinter group from the faction that the speaker belongs to deceived the elders. “We want you elders to bring us together and mediate,” they said. And they came with 10 technicals [gun-mounted trucks], and they started shooting. Unfortunately, about nine of the town’s citizens got killed.
At the moment, it is a number of rooms in a hotel.
Very small, not much. I mean, at least we have computers and fax machines and printers. Even a shredder [laughs]. Next month we’ll be moving to proper offices. There were not very many usable structures in the city, so we had to wait until these were rehabilitated.
Mogadishu is very much under our control. Now, the [warlords] don’t have clan support; they are fish without water. They might throw some bombs here and there; they might assassinate an individual. But we don’t want to engage them. We want to honor this commitment we made to the Somali people to use peaceful means. Individually or as a group, they don’t pose a military threat to us.
Purely for technical reasons. What we are worried about is that the port itself has barges and tugboats that are submerged. The airport is totally mined and nobody has a map of where the mines are.
As far as we’re concerned, that is to be left to the courts. We have nothing to hide. If the human-rights groups will show us evidence of crimes, genocide, whatever, we will definitely take steps.
Somalis have been Muslims for over a thousand years. It is a tolerant Islam. Not only myself but a good number of people in the cabinet are people who studied in the West, in the U.S., in Western Europe. The type of movements people are talking about are threats to a good number of people in the cabinet and in the Parliament.
We have about 6,000 of them in [training] camps. These are young people who are using their guns and weapons to make a living. If they are given hope that they will have gainful employment in the future, they will disband, as they have done. We want to buy the weapons from them. We want to destroy these weapons. We want to give some training to these individuals, as mechanics, electricians, drivers–even to give them computer-literacy programs. Otherwise, these guys have nothing to lose.
We’re worried about that and we are dealing with some, I must say, political thugs who have no reverence for human life. We will do everything possible to work closely with the U.N., its agencies and with the NGOs. We will make sure that we deliver to some of these [warlords] the message that if they do this, they are going to be international criminals and they will be pursued wherever they go in the world.
