- Title: [SW News] (San Jose Mercury News) Somalis get police for peace
- From:[]
- Date :[]1999-12-28 21:50:48
Somalis get police for peace
Time: 1999-12-24 00:18:23
Recovery Zones= Northern Regions (Northwest and Northeast Somalia)++++ Published Tuesday,
December 21, 1999, in the San Jose Mercury News+++ Somalis get police for peace+++
Ex-militia members in northwest Somalia rebuild their lives BY IAN FISHER New York
Times+++ MANDHEERA, Somalia -- The raw material for peace in northwestern Somalia comes in
the unlikely form of men like Suleiman Saxardire Ismail, who admits freely to having
robbed, looted and hijacked cars, including one that contained his aunt. He said it was
even possible that he had killed people along the way. ``I don't know if anyone died,'' he
said, ``but I was firing my gun.'' For six years Ismail, 27, was in one of the Somali
militias -- the very symbol of anarchy, which the world got to know through television
images in the early 1990s of young men with AK-47s prowling the capital, Mogadishu, in
pickup trucks. In southern Somalia the militias remain a problem. But here in the
northwest, in the territory that calls itself the Republic of Somaliland and has declared
itself separate from the rest of Somalia, the militias have been disbanded. Men like
Ismail come to this town for what officials here call ``rehumanization.'' They are trained
to become useful members of society as police officers, just as other former militia
members train to become Somaliland's soldiers and prison guards. That would seem an ideal
solution, and Somaliland is, in fact, peaceful. But the program is viewed here as a
necessary evil at best, as essentially a bribe for peace. The Somaliland government spends
73 percent of its revenue, itself only $20 million a year, on maintaining this huge force
of former militia members, nearly 20,000 people, including 6,000 police officers. ``We
don't need them,'' said Ahmed Muhammad Silanyo, the Somaliland minister of planning and a
former military commander. ``Who are we fighting?'' Successful as it is on one level, the
program is yet another argument that officials in Somaliland use to try to persuade the
outside world to donate more money to help it get beyond peace alone. Other countries,
still holding to the hope that all of Somalia may someday reunite, have been reluctant to
recognize Somaliland as an independent country or to help with money to develop its
economy on its own. But people here argue that with more foreign assistance, they could
use former militia members to better purpose. Shukri Hussein, who heads a group of former
fighters called Sooyaal, which means ``existing,'' said that in the past five years his
group had trained some 3,000 people in woodworking, masonry, metalwork and other crafts.
But the economy is so bad that only half of them have jobs, he said. Without other jobs,
he said, training militia members as police or soldiers is ``the best policy for now but
not for the long run.'' Because the purpose of the initiative is overall peace, and not
necessarily producing crack police officers, many local officials have complaints. In
recent interviews with the Somaliland Center for Peace and Development, a local research
group, officials said some new police officers retained too much allegiance to their
clans, the familial subgroups in Somalia that formed the militias in the first place.
``What we have is not a regular security force,'' one official from the regional capital,
Hargeisa, told the researchers. ``We have an underpaid and undertrained security force.''
Still, given the chaos that reigned in Somaliland before the militias were disarmed, the
complaints are not too loud. The militias were born as self-protection units for the
various clans during Somalia's civil war, which ended in 1991 with the collapse of the
central government. They set up hundreds of roadblocks around the country, hijacked trucks
and often battled each other. Muhammad Warsame, 43, a former militia member now being
trained as police officer, said that at one point he had been on one side of a battle and
his brother-in-law on another. ``It was the worst life,'' he said. ``No system, no
structure, no law and order.'' The past lives of militia members have presented a
challenge for the men who train them at a former police training barracks that was
established in 1953 by the British, who ruled this part of Somaliland, and reopened in
early 1998. ``They were animals at the beginning,'' said Nuhr Ahmed Yussuf, 50, the
commander of the training center, which is funded partly by the U.N. Development Program.
``Before, they even robbed their mothers. They didn't care. ``We make them into humans
again,'' he added. That process takes about four months, in groups of 300 men at a time.
They wake up 4:30 a.m., and half an hour later they begin physical training. After
breakfast they go to class for five hours, in which they are taught the penal code and
standards of justice and human rights. ``The majority of them are willing to turn their
lives back to normal,'' said one of the trainers, Muhammad Hussein Bulaleh, 62, who
graduated as a police officer from this same academy in 1955. ``They were rejected by
normal society, and they became isolated. Now they have no choice but to turn their lives
back to normal.'' He said he was largely impressed by how well the militia members were
turning out at the end of their training. ``They make the best policemen,'' he said.
``They know all the thieves. They know all the tricks.''
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