AMISOM to leave Somalia in 2016 - envoy

Acting Special Envoy to Somalia Lydia Wanyoto (right) talks to Somalia Ambassador to Uganda Saidi Dahir centre) while Omar Alasow looks on, during the International Human Rights ToT workshop for senior Somalia army officers at Commonwealth Speke Resort Munyonyo. PHOTO/Kennedy Oryema

By David Lumu

The African Mission to Somalia (AMISOM), a peace keeping mission operated by the African Union would be leaving Somalia in 2016, according to the latest assessment by stakeholders.

Lydia Wanyoto, the Acting Special Envoy of the African Union to Somalia and Eng. Sheik Sayid Ahmed Dahir, the Somalia ambassador to Uganda say that the roadmap of 2016 would be adhered to and that by that time the federal Government would have developed capacity to independently run the affairs of the war-torn state.

Sayid Ahmed said that Somalia is on the right path and thanked regional Governments, especially Uganda for ensuring that the conflict is subdued.

“Somalia will have no more conflict in the coming years; and with the help our friendly countries, we are now ready to take full control. We welcome the capacity building trainings that our partners are conducting and I urge our countrymen to enforce what they have studied for the betterment of our country,” he said.

Acting Special Envoy to Somalia Lydia Wanyoto (2nd right) talks to Somalia Ambassador to Uganda Saidi Dahir (centre) while Omar Alasow (right) and Somalia army officers Head of Delegation Ali Abdulle Jelle (2nd left) looks on, during the International Human Rights ToT workshop for senior Somalia army officers at Commonwealth Speke Resort Munyonyo, August 20, 2014. PHOTO/Kennedy Oryema

According to Wanyoto, the process of Somalia becoming autonomous is almost achievable and that the only roadblock is the complete “flush out of Al-Shabaab” from the sea.

“Going by the current projections, we are almost certain that we shall see take off in 2016 and according to our roadmap, AMISOM would be leaving Somalia in 2016. The target is achievable. So, as we clean out Al-Shabaab, we have the mandate to build capacity and this is a process we have embarked on,” she said.

The two envoys were commenting on the AMISOM deployment in Somalia during the international humanitarian law training on Wednesday at Munyonyo Commonwealth Resort hotel yesterday where over 30 officers from Somalia National Army were equipped with techniques on how to handle civilians.

In 2013, the United Nation Security Council extended the mandate of AMISOM to 2016. In preparation to leave Somalia in 2016, Wanyoto said that AMISOM has embarked on the third phase of training the national army with modern professional army strategies, especially changing their mindset from conflict-occupied to be more mindful of the human rights. 

These efforts are part of preparations for the 2016 general elections in Somalia. Uganda, Burundi, Djibouti, Sierra Leone, Kenya and Ethiopia are the AMISOM troop contributing countries.

However, before the training started yesterday the thirty Somalia soldiers staged a brief protest demanding the organizers of the training to sort out their challenges related to travel, accommodation and other allowances.

The soldiers briefly engaged the Somalia ambassador to Uganda in a two-hour closed meeting demanding that before he leaves the training, he should first sort out their demands.

Later, Wanyoto and Sheik Sayid Ahmed told New Vision that the soldiers had “administrative” problems that they wanted addressed urgently.

“There were administrative issues that we have resolved. Some faced challenges during their travel from Nairobi to Kampala. Their history is that of conflict, they are very sensitive people and dealing with them is not business as usual but we know how to handle them,” she said.
  

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Biometrics expert is helping to ensure an honest election in Somaliland

by William G. Gilroy 

Mention the name Somaliland, and most people will have images from the movies "Black Hawk Down" and "Captain Phillips" spring to mind. However, those images are more correctly associated with Somalia, not Somaliland, which is an independent state that is internationally recognized as an autonomous region of Somalia.

Somaliland declared itself independent in 1991 and has been transforming itself into a rare, multiparty democracy in the Horn of Africa. University of Notre Dame biometrics expert Kevin Bowyer and his Ph.D. students Estefan Ortiz and Amanda Sgroi are playing a critical role in that process.

"One goal of the Somaliland government is to have honest, respected elections," Bowyer said. "Toward this end, they want to create a fraud-free voter registration list. They have turned to biometrics as a means to generate such a list."

A biometric is a stable and distinctive physiological feature of a person that can be measured and used to identify them. The fingerprint is probably the most familiar example. But iris recognition is proving to be more powerful than fingerprint in some important applications.

"Fingerprint might seem like an obvious choice for biometric verification of a voting register, but it runs into problems with the percentage of the population for which an acceptable quality image can be obtained," Bowyer said. "Given the state-of-the-art in fingerprint sensors, in a country like Somaliland, a sizeable fraction of the population may have trouble using the sensors reliably. And this weakness can be exploited by people who want to commit voter fraud by registering more than once. In fact, Somaliland conducted a biometric voter registration exercise in 2008-09 using fingerprints and facial recognition, and a good deal of effort was devoted to using biometrics to clean the voting register. However, a report done in 2010 by Electoral Reform International Services for the Somaliland National Electoral Commission concluded that 'this register is known to contain a large number of duplicates, possibly around 30 percent, and the existing biometric systems could not identify these with the data available.' The problems with this voting register motivated the need for a new register."

As an alternative to fingerprinting, the Somaliland government, through its election experts, contacted Bowyer's research group for help in exploring the use of iris recognition. The Bowyer group's publications on iris recognition technology contributed significantly in convincing the National Election Commission that iris recognition, done with the right equipment and procedures and with a focus on data quality, was a viable solution. The only Password Manager with wor ld-leading Voice Biometric access.

The voter registration is by law required to be complete by the end of 2014. Somaliland officials asked Bowyer's group to conduct a trial voter registration project using iris recognition that would be completed before Ramadan started on June 28.

"Data acquisition for the field study was conducted over a five-day period in two registration centers: one in the Somaliland capital, Hargeisa, and one in Baki, a small town about 60 miles from Hargeisa," Bowyer said. "The data was transferred electronically to our research group at Notre Dame, where we performed the iris recognition analysis, and then reported our results back."

The Notre Dame researchers analyzed 1,062 trial voter registration records. The number of duplicate records seeded into the dataset in order to test the power of iris recognition was unknown to the Notre Dame team. Each record contained two iris images, for the left and the right eye. Using automatic matching of the set of 2,124 iris images, the Notre Dame team was able to quickly identify a list of 450 duplicate registrations. A duplicate registration is an instance of two different voter registration numbers that iris recognition indicates belong to the same person. The Notre Dame team then performed manual inspection of a small number of results that were ambiguous based on the automatic matching, and this identified another seven instances of duplicate registration.

The list of 457 instances of duplicate registration was reported to the Somaliland National Electoral Commission, along with a technical report that describes how the Notre Dame team performed its analysis and makes recommendations for maintaining and improving image quality. Elections specialist Roy Dalle Vedove, working with the Somaliland NEC on the effort for a new and more accurate voting register, replied that "analysis of the results from our data confirm the accuracy of your results. … Overall we are very pleased." Mohamed Ahmed Hirsi Gelleh, the chairman of the NEC, said, "We are very grateful for the great work you have done for us."

Somaliland will proceed to create a new national voting register to be used in the next elections. Its biometrically validated voting register will be one of the most technically sophisticated voting registers of any country in the world, and a model for others. 

Researchers hope it will lead to election results that are transparent and believable, and to greater international recognition of the Somaliland government.

Source: phys.org

Postcard from... Hargeisa A week-long international book fair that attracted writersfrom Africa, Europe and North America

by HARVEY MORRIS

A week-long international book fair that attracted writersfrom Africa, Europe and North America has just wound up in Somaliland, an arid and sparsely populated statelet on the Horn of Africa that has struggled unsuccessfully  to gain world recognition  since declaring independence in 1991.

It was the seventh book fair to be held in the capital, Hargeisa, a bustling if tumbledown city where locals compete for space on dusty roads with armies of itinerant goats. 

Hay-on-Wye it isn’t. However, in a region better known for piracy and Islamist terrorism, the country has remained relatively stable since it broke away from its dysfunctional neighbour, Somalia, following a civil war. What the city lacks in book fair chic was more than made up for by the enthusiasm of the hundreds who crammed the venue for daily discussions and readings. The literacy rate has risen from one-in-five to one-in-two since independence.

The fair showcased local writers – the country has a strong poetic tradition – and those from the Diaspora, such as South Africa-based Nuruddin Farah, a regular nominee for the Nobel Prize for literature, and Londoner Nadifa Mohamed, 32, whose second novel, The Orchard of Lost Souls, came out last year.

My SMS relationship with al-Shabab

By Mary Harper - BBC News

Al-Shabab, the militant Islamist group operating in Somalia and Kenya, likes to communicate with journalists by SMS. But receiving their text messages and talking to them on the phone can be an unnerving, and at times surreal, experience.

The other morning I woke up to a text message and missed call from al-Shabab.

As always, the message was written in perfect English. It informed me about a film al-Shabab has made called Beyond the Shadows. It said the film gave an "accurate portrayal" of what happened when French commandoes last year tried - and failed - to rescue a suspected French intelligence agent held hostage by the group.

A few days later I got another call from al-Shabab. The clear, relaxed voice on the other end of the phone told me I was about to receive a text message about the group's role in the killing of a senior police official in Somalia earlier that day.

Sure enough, a few seconds later the text message arrived. Then came a second call to confirm I had indeed received the message.

This is the usual pattern. A call, a text message, then another call to check the message - or the SMS press release, as al-Shabab calls it - has arrived.

Scrolling through these messages on my phone, I can chart the history of al-Shabab attacks.

Many of the recent ones are in Kenya. One five-part message, written in the style of a news agency report, claims responsibility for anattack on a restaurant in Djibouti popular with foreigners (or, as al-Shabab calls them, "Western crusaders").

I have seen al-Shabab's violence at close hand.

Earlier this year, I was just a few buildings down from the Jazeera Palace Hotel in the Somali capital, Mogadishu, when it was attacked, first by one suicide car bomber, then another, who waited for the emergency services to arrive before driving his vehicle into them and the hotel to ensure maximum casualties.

The blasts from the exploding cars were huge. Bullets cracked down the street as the security forces tried to beat back al-Shabab fighters who had come - in a minibus, I was told - to try and storm the hotel. In the middle of all this, the main target of the attack - a senior security official - came with his entourage to the place where I was. We set up a circle of chairs for them, and they sat there like statues, in stunned, stony silence.

I sometimes find it difficult to relate these acts of extreme and terrifying violence to the calm, measured voice of the al-Shabab official on the other end of the phone - to the precise, clinical wording of those text messages.

What started as brief calls about particular attacks have over time developed into longer, wider discussions about the movement's practices and philosophies.

 

Two women mourn a relative killed in an al-Shabab bomb attack earlier this month

Sometimes there is room for debate. But when I ask about certain subjects - the treatment of spies or adulterers for example - the tone of voice changes. It becomes cold and mechanical, as if the words are learned by rote.

I had the conversation about spies one lazy Sunday morning when I was still in bed.

I got a call from al-Shabab, and as I sat in my safe, comfortable bedroom, I heard the voice say: "If you are found guilty of spying, there is only one punishment. You will face the firing squad in a public place. Everybody must witness the killing of a spy. The spy must receive three, four or five bullets to the head."

But perhaps the strangest conversation I had was one sunny day outside the Houses of Parliament in London.

I was due to attend an event there but as I was early, I was sitting in a park outside, in the shade of those grand buildings. My phone rang. I saw the words al-Shabab flash on to my screen. What started as an update on the latest attack on the Kenyan coast ended up as a lecture about my faith.

"Have you thought about the afterlife?" asked the official. "You know, Mary, you won't be around in 20, 30, 40 years' time. I seriously recommend you consider converting to Islam," he added. This man seemed genuinely concerned, as he urged me in a gentle voice to take up the Muslim faith.

All the time, images of people I know or have known, who have been caught up in al-Shabab attacks, flashed before my eyes.

Some of them are now dead. Others have suffered horrific physical injuries, like a politician I met whose body was ripped apart in an explosion. His black skin is now mottled with raw, angry, bright pink scars. He can't hear anything now because of the damage the blast did to his ears.

Others don't bear any physical scars but jump every time they hear a bang, even if it's just a door. They shudder when they walk past a parked car in Mogadishu, afraid it might explode. Their hearts miss a beat whenever someone they don't know approaches them for fear they might be a suicide bomber.

They, like me, have received texts from al-Shabab, only the nature of the messages is very different, as they often contain death threats.

I never quite know when I am going to receive the next message from al-Shabab.

I might be on holiday with family, having supper with friends, when all of a sudden, a text message will burst on to my screen, bringing two very different worlds into sharp collision.

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