by Yusuf-bile Abdi Mohamed
Friday, January 01, 2010
Everyone of us has bad times as well as good that record in his diary or kept in his memories. I as a person from Mogadishu, grown up and studied in it, found the equilibrium of bad and good in my diary and memories is sloping to the bad. Of course, I have tried to disk-clean up bad cages in my memory as I am now in The Netherland, in a peaceful environment where you are not walking on potholed land-mined streets, mortars do not land on the roof of your room, and you are not looking back over your shoulders for fear when you are walking in the alleys. While I was in a good healing process and started writing some good memories in my diary to shift the bad inclinations to good, I have heard the most shocking event I have ever heard so far.
As usual, I have tried to record this shocking event in my diary, but remembered some bad memories I though they were the worst to happen in Mogadishu.
Dear reader, I do not mind to share them with you, may be, you are like me, or you are a victim, or else who wants to read behind the lines. Below are some of what I have thought were the worst that had happened when I recorded:
I thought it was the worst: When I have seen human bodies at the first time in my life in Mogadishu streets in 1991 on my way to Jamal Abdi Nasser secondary school. When public properties looted and destroyed; when innocent people were killed in the pretext of tribe and then people died in hunger due to famine and drought caused by the civil war.
When people were kidnapped, tortured, and ransom demanded; then sold as a they are slaves. When the personal interests of religion-lords conflicted with the interest of the warlords; then everything were dirty politicized and wrongly religionized.
When that unfortunate evening an armed conflict between religion-lords and warlords suddenly erupted in our neighbourhood, and for the consequence, I paid the highest price to Mogadishu insecurity after I could not able to take my wife to a hospital to give birth to our firstborn baby-boy at 1 O’clock after midnight and then the baby died at home after short hours due to breathing complications. And after 2 years, again mortars fell on our neighbourhood and I saw my wife running at high speed towards a concrete building of our neighbour while holding our two months old second-born baby boy in her arms!
When Ethiopian jet fighter bombed at Mogadishu Airport, and then Ethiopian military helicopter downed in Mogadishu. When armed men surrounded our neighbourhood around 11pm ordering people to remain standstill until they finish their mission of firing mortars towards Villa Somalia. Of course, they left immediately with their minibus running from the replying rockets of the Ethiopians (locally known as FOORIYE) firing from Villa Somalia and other military bases in Mogadishu. Indeed, the rockets were fired and the victims were innocent sleeping civilians including children. When students’ minibus was fired at and students died for the consequence. When musicians and singers could not perform their performances even in the graduation ceremonies to play the national anthem and entertain the audiences with education related tunes and songs being afraid of flogging or execution.
When I am really forced to hide my emotions of showing sympathy to a man executed in the middle of crowded street in Bakara market, and then his blood drained in the street on that rainy noon for about 300metres. Of course, I felt afraid as a human being; and guess, the guys are around chanting with “God is great!” piercing their eyes at every person while pointing their pistols at everywhere as they are hunting another prey in the crowd; who knows who is the next to be hunted. That innocent man was executed on mob justice and hatred because he had sold his service to the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) to earn a daily bread to his family. Likewise, when a young crazy-like boys snatched a mobile from the owner and start shooting it immediately after the praying because the mobile beeped unnecessarily in a mosque during the Salah.
When I witnessed the TFG soldiers planned to hunt people praying in a mosque to arrest, and surely, they arrested innocent people who only enter the mosque to bow to their God. Again, a TFG soldier fired at a university lecturer while delivering his lecture in a university in Mogadishu making the lecturer run to the far-corner of the class behind the students being terrified, and then guess what happened: solders started grapping mobile phones from the students.
At that time, I thought all the above incidents and many more else in my diary that stamped in my memory were the worst but I really SHOCKED when I heard the tragic Shamo massacre that I wanted to record in my diary. No doubt that they killed many, many peaceful innocent people, including a graduate friend and his classmates who has been studying 7 years in one of the most anarchic environment in the earth we know to earn a degree; Indeed, they endured all the above miseries to enrich their brains with knowledge hoping to help their poor families and their country at large. For sure, dreams had been shattered there.
I had once questioned in my article of Riding the Rollercoaster of Somali Politics ‘where the opposition gunmen are leading the country to?’ In that article I mentioned that they may lead the country to Afghanistan like Arena but some people ruled that idea out and judged it as a bad prophecy. Now, I wonder what is next? No body know; but take one thing for granted: unless good miracles happen EXPECT THE UNEXPECTED from Mogadishu because heartless heads have still the power, roaring louder, and remember there is still boiling under the ashes!
Yusuf-bile Abdi Mohamed
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