Hiiraan Online
Tuesday, September 29, 2015
NEW YORK (HOL) ---Hundreds of Somali Bantu community rallied in the downtown New York on Monday, protesting against disproportion of power sharing arrangement in the Somali politics and leadership.
The protestors who were carrying placards that read ‘Somali Bantu Speak Up’ have marched through the streets of New York as police patrolled the area, coinciding their march-protest at a time the United Nations’ General Assembly's seventieth session was going on at the UN headquarters in New York.
“We are protesting against injustice, inequality in Somalia’s power sharing scheme,” said Abdi Mude, the spokesman for the Somali Bantu community in the US.
“Our rally is largely focusing on the denial of our supposed power sharing allocation to our community in the Jubba regions’ administration.” He said
Mr. Mude has also complained of an alleged robbery against Bantu farmers in the region which produces large parts of Somalia’s agricultural production.
“We want to meet Somali president who is among dozens of world leaders attending the UN summit to submit our grievances.” He said
Like the rest of Somalis, Somali Bantu, an ethnic minority group in Somalia who primarily reside in the southern part of the country, near the Juba and Shabelle rivers has suffered during Somalia’s decades-old conflict.
During the Somali Civil War, many Bantu were forced from their lands in the lower Juba River valley, as militiamen from various Somali clans took control of the area. Being visible minorities and possessing little in the way of firearms, the Bantu were particularly vulnerable to violence and looting by gun-toting militiamen
In the view of the prosecutions against Somalis Bantu community, the United States has led efforts aimed at giving resettlement for the community and classified them as refugees from Somalia in 1991, offering them a resettlement scheme under an ambitious resettlement plan with thousands of Bantus scheduled for resettlement in America.
In 2003, the first Bantu immigrants began to arrive in U.S. cities, and by 2007, around 13,000 had been resettled to cities throughout the United States with the help of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the U.S. State Department, and refugee resettlement agencies across the country, according to the open content online encyclopaedia site, Wikipedia.