Abdi-Noor Haji Mohamed Writer and film-Maker Mogadishu, Somalia
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Ethiopian military who arrived Mogadishu in December last year after giving a chase to the Islamic courts have stayed with us longer than expected probably on request from the TFG. But unknown militia who are mainly suspected to be groups of mixed interests including remnants of the Islamic courts attacked them in their bases which forced the Ethiopians to return fire in a more disproportionate way, killing innocent civilians.
With the arrival of the first batch of African Union peacekeepers from Uganda, do we anticipate the dawn of a new era of peace in Somalia or we predict a much more violent nation in the heart of the Horn?
Knowing nothing about the behavior of the Ugandan contingent we judged them by the standards of the Ethiopians who disproportionately fired back if militia attacked them. So we thought it was highly likely to receive retaliation from the Ugandans.
In an effort to bottle up all means of negligence, most of the people have deserted the streets and retreated to houses and buildings that had concrete roofing or stayed with their families hoping that the mortar will not land on them while at the same time contemplating with the possibility of media staff reporting a story about their family buried under the rubble.
But barely the Ugandan forces finished their second day in Mogadishu when militia of unknown identity attacked them. And in response to the attack they fired at everybody without knowing who was the culprit and who was not.
A bomb has exploded inside the Al-Fatxi Bar in K4 where I frequently have my morning coffee and chat with friends there. It is right in front of the dilapidated Statue of the great Somali hero, Ahmed Gurey in the area of Cinema Equatore.
Early this morning I rushed to the Fatxi Bar to find out if someone I knew had been killed in the blast. In fact I feel deeply sympathetic to all Somalis dying in these senseless attacks but the pain would run deeper if someone you knew was among the victims.
What I saw was a real horror. There were pieces of dead bodies scattered here and there, which were unidentifiable as which piece belonged to which body. Here I have a poem to plead with the Ugandan peacekeepers to have some mercy and here it is:
UGANDA HAVE MERCY PLEASE
Drowned in anarchy
Suffocated in war
Somalia is thawing
Gasping for a breath
To bid us farewell
And to exit in chaos
Uganda have mercy please
You are a sister of Somalia
You stepped to help a sister
To save your bleeding sister
To help TFG quell violence
You are a sister of difference
Your name is sister Uganda
Uganda peacekeepers please
Please don’t lump us together
We are innocent and an unarmed
We are poor and displaced people
We are Somali women and children
We are living in obliterated camps
We are students in their classes
We are people in the market place
Struggling for our daily survival
Eking for a bread to live a day
Or facing unbearable challenges
To find a bed for the night
Shoot only those who provoke you
Shoot not us indiscriminately Boys
Find a better solution instead
Find out those behind the attacks
Write history with the ink of peace
To let the words shine like a sun
Write it not with the blod oif the innocent
Lest you create a future of conflict and revenge
Abdi-Noor
Mogadishu