Somalia: Security Exercise Conducted in Kismayu That Have Resulted in Prosecutions

Security exercise have been conducted in some parts of the city of Kismayu which is located in the lower region of Jubba. During the exercise a lot of people have been arrested following a blast that occurred in the region yesterday noon

The explosion claimed both injury and death casualties. The exercise was conducted by members of the Raskamboni Brigade which controls the city. The operation was a manhunt search for the culprits

During the exercise a lot of people were arrested and were believed to be behind the incident .Officials of the brigade accused the arrested people of having mastermind the explosion

The spokesman of the brigade Abdi Nassir Seerar confirmed with Shabele media that a lot of people have arrested during the exercise. And claimed that the suspects were behind the attack

The city of Kismayu which is located in the lower Jubba region is in the hands of the Amisom troops from Kenya, the federal government forces and forces from the Raskamboni brigade. The city has suffered from such attacks since it fell in the hands of these troops

POSITION PAPER: Dareenka Difaacayaasha Xuquuqda Aadamiga Somaliland ee ku aadan Xadgudubyada Qaramada Midoobay, ku hayso shacbiga dalka Somaliland iyo Siyaasadda Maraykan ee Soomaaliya

‘SFC is on special assignment in Somalia’

Brig. Ondoga in an interview with our reporter. PHOTO by RISDEL KASASIRA  

Security matters. A number of Special Forces Command operatives were sent to Somalia under African Union in Somalia (AMISOM) to join other Ugandan fighters deployed in the war-ravaged country. They have fought fierce battles with al Shabaab since 2007 and the addition of a specialised team under the Command of Maj. Asaph Mweteise Nyakikuru, has breathed new life into Somali nationals. Risdel Kasasira was in Somalia and interviewed the commander of the Ugandan contingent, Brig. Michael Ondoga, on the prevailing situation in Mogadishu and beyond.

How are the operations against al Shabaab going?

The operations are generally going on well. We are almost in charge of the whole of sector one. We are remaining with three towns of Qoryooley, Balawe and Mahaade. Mahade is in the north. These other two, are in the south west. These are the only two towns that are left to be captured and in the second phase, we will be doing domination operations. We will be dominating areas off the road and mobilising wananchi (civilians)so that we work together like we are partnering with local leaders and farmers so that they can tell us the enemy’s whereabouts.

With accurate information, we can go in, and solve the problem. These three areas that are still hanging will soon fall. Al shabaab is still getting supplies through Balawe. They also collect revenue from this coastal town. Mahaade is in the north of Jawhar. Once we are in Mahaade, then we will be at the eastern boundary of this sector. We will stop there. We recently captured new places like Jannale and others.

In Mogadishu, yes, we have problems but it’s mainly police and local leaders. It’s about the population becoming vigilant and working together with Amisom police. We reinforce them whenever there is a big problem. But we have not had occasions when the threat is beyond our capability. That’s how operations are going.

What will follow after you have captured the remaining areas?

Like I said, we captured Afgooye, Marka, Jannale, Buur hakhaba and others. The next phase is going into areas still controlled by al Shabaab. Some of them are hiding in farms and thickets. But we want to partner with farmers and we are already doing it. With this partnership, they will tell us where these bad guys are hiding and then we go for them. If they can be talked to, we shall talk. Those who cannot and still want to fight, then we go for them. Of course, we do this with Somali National Army (SNA). Many small groups have given themselves to us and we handed them over to SNA.

Will you spread to other sectors after you have finished sector one and what will happen after you captured all the sectors?

We are already working with Burundians in sector three. There is still a lot to do. We will train the local security forces. We will continue assisting police to pacify the city here and then dominating the surrounding areas through patrols and also securing our communication lines. Al Shabaab has now resorted to symmetrical warfare. They can still cause some threat along our routes of supply by laying improvised explosive devices. Therefore, we have to secure our routes and make sure they are safe. There is still a lot to do.

Isn’t symmetrical war more dangerous than having a conventional frontline because the attackers make surprise moves?

Well, the only difference is that with conventional frontline, you have a defined position whereas symmetrical, there is no defined frontline and you are fighting with people who are not clearly identifiable. They dress like civilians and blend in the civilian community. So, it’s not easy. The kind of weapons they carry, weapons that can easily be hidden like grenades, IEDs, vehicles bombs and others - that’s what makes it really complicated but with good intelligence, support from the population, it’s manageable.

Moving away from the frontline, isn’t it demoralising for soldiers who go through this hard life and their allowances are delayed?

I agree with you, there is some delay due to technical reasons because the money has to be processed from African Union and then channelled to the troops’ contributing countries. But these delays are explained to the troops. They know the reasons why sometimes their money delays. It has not affected their morale to the extent of complaining or affecting their work. Therefore, there is no visible effect.

Why do you remove names of soldiers from the payroll when they go home for leave and delay there?

Sometimes it happens. But any entity has got its rules and regulations. According to the rules we are operating in here, if you go home and stay away for 21 days, then you qualify to be disqualified from the mission. We don’t have administrative flights.

We have only logistical flights. Sometimes there is no space to bring in those who go home. This also affects the movement of personnel.

But there are those who go home and they don’t mind calling back to give information back here to explain their delay. Those ones become a problem because we have to account for them.

That’s why I said, you have to inform us. Procedurally, if you inform us, we take care of that. If you don’t inform us, you will be counted absent. But, before we do that, we send a message warning that look here, if you don’t call or return by this time, you will be removed from the payroll. When they don’t, that happens. We normally warn them.

What kind of operations are the Special Forces in Somalia doing and are they deployed at the frontline or they remain behind?

Normal operations are conducted by regular forces. But you may have special scenarios like an enemy hiding somewhere in a narrow place and he can only be dealt with in a special way, say at night by surprising him. These are the kind of special operations we are talking about. Those special scenarios that need night visual equipment and high speed to execute and return. They also carry out night operations in built up areas. They are well trained and have that capability. They can move in quickly and carry out surgical operations and come out.

Somaliland: The scandal surrounding the 1st Round of the World Bank Grants (SBF)

By: Yumoha Pasha

HARGEISA (Somalilandsun) - A large number of our readers have written to us and drew our attention to the way the 1st round of the Somaliland Business Fund was handled by the World Bank and the implementing agency Landell Mills. There has been a considerable disappointment causing negative feeling among the business community in Somaliland as a result of the composition of the list of the successful grantees.

We have received a lot of complaints from people who have applied the grants and feeling that they have denied of the opportunities by corrupt financial analysts and World Bank staff who have mishandled the application process and the selection of the winners. The complaints ranged from the talk of an unfair and biased selection process to accusations of downright favoritism and regionalism from the part of the SBF implementing agency and the supervising World Bank staff in Somaliland. Some of the main complaints related to and verified by Somalilandsun are noted below:

• Lack of proper information regarding the priority sectors of the economy and the preferred areas for funding, this information was given to specific people with the intention to give them an unfair advantage over the rest of the applicants.

• Out of the 59 successful grantees 43 (73%) come from Hargeisa and its surrounding areas. 36 of those 43 grantees (61%) come from the Hargeisa town. The rest of the country got only 16 grantees (27%). This clearly shows that the system was so unfair and heavily biased towards Hargeisa and to a particular clan.

• Among the businesses who are complaining that there a large number of women businesses who believe that they been deliberately bypassed. They say that for example out of the 59 grantees only 11 (18.6%) are women and they see this as unfair and does not represent women in business.

• More assistance and supervision given to specific number of people which enabled them to complete their applications ahead of time and meet all the criteria required for shortlisting and increase their chances to get the grant.

• World Bank staff on the ground Interfered in the process and had a hand in all the decisions from start to finish. In fact there is some evidence that one senior World Bank representative in Somaliland Mr. ...(name withheld) personally benefitted from the grant scandal.

• There are some "facade companies" who were simply registered for the purpose of getting the grants from the SBF and never had any licenses from the Ministry of Commerce nor had any offices or businesses operating. Each of the financial analysts working in the SBF had one such company and the senior SBF staff member (names withheld) had four for himself.

While a number of Grant applicants alluded to demands for outset payment of kickbacks (between 10% and 20% of the grant value) if their applications were made successful and those who were felt to be "reliable" were then shortlisted for the final list, we have failed to ascertain this fact thus remains an insinuation.

These are serious allegation and while we at Somalilandsun have failed to get a response for official comment from SBF , it is imperative that the World Bank investigate the scandal surrounding the grants disbursement and rectify the situation by bringing in checks and balances in the grant process.

While It is incumbent for the World Bank to be fair and impartial as well as important that it should be seen as such, This is not the first private sector development program undertake by other donors. In fact there are various donors working in Somaliland now such as the USAID/DAI Partnership for Economic Growth, who have attracted positive reaction and dispersed its grants to all regions fairly. There are always some people who might not be happy if they don't get what they wanted but never before has the feeling of the community been so negative about a particular donor than the World Bank.

While there is a growing concern about the way this 1st round was handled based on the above noted complaints and in view of the original noble gesture behind the fund the donor partners should come clean and set the record straight since ignoring these concerns might impinge negatively on the credibility of the World Bank program in future.

Somalilandsun having managed to verify a number of the insinuated misdemeanors after acquiring relevant evidence to back these allegations hopes that the World Bank will heed to people's concerns and expedite necessary investigation to find out what happened and how the World Bank and their implementing agency got it wrong in the 1st round of the SBF.

It is also hoped that the Ministries of Planning and Commerce shall do their own investigations to get to the bottom of the scandal and give guidelines to future rounds of the grant.

• SBF SMALL GRANT AWARDS Rd 1

Voices: Returning Justice to the Fight Against Poverty

Fifteen years ago, the United Nations Millennium Development Goals were set out to help stimulate and coordinate international efforts to eliminate extreme poverty. The Millennium Development Goals have helped foster enormous progress in some areas. But much remains to be done. With the goals set to expire in 2015, the world is again debating its development agenda and how to do things better. One way is to return justice as a key component of development.  

They have recognized that truly sustainable development needs the ability of ordinary citizens to claim their rights and resources peacefully, using the law, and to demand accountability from those who represent them in power.

Justice is a sine qua non for development. And while this was recognized in the Millennium Declaration it was left out of the Millennium goals. About four billion people live without rights and without access to the protections of the law, vulnerable to exploitation and violence, at risk of losing their homes or their land, and at a disadvantage in dealing with the criminal and civil justice systems that should be there to protect them. In order to overcome poverty, people need voice and their voices need to reach people in power; people in positions to do justice.

Access to justice must be returned to the global development agenda. Beginning this weekend in Bali, Indonesia, there will be a meeting of the high level panel set up by United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon to draw up proposals for the post-2015 development framework to replace the Millennium Development Goals.

George Soros, founder and chairman of the Open Society Foundations, will attend to help make the case for including justice as one of the components. Ban Ki Moon’s panel members have recognized the vital role rule of law plays in supporting “sustainable growth with equity.” But this equity does not speak for itself.

The rights to equity embedded in law need to be claimed, including by the very poorest and most vulnerable. This is easily affordable if we make full use of paralegals and other tools. This is not about more work for lawyers, but about the full spectrum of legal empowerment. Indonesia is an appropriate setting for this meeting. It's a country that knows plenty about global development agendas—both the good and the bad. From 1965 to the mid-1990s, under the military backed government of former President Suharto, Indonesia saw significant improvements in public health, education and women’s rights. But this was development delivered by the institutions of a centralized, repressive one­-party state, which would brook no dissent.

That regime ultimately collapsed, many of its leaders mired in corruption. Successive democratic governments in Jakarta have rejected that top-down, dictatorial approach, which focused on development delivered by institutions, largely indifferent to voices from the ground. They have recognized that truly sustainable development needs the ability of ordinary citizens to claim their rights and resources peacefully, using the law, and to demand accountability from those who represent them in power.

The government of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono launched a comprehensive national strategy on access to justice in 2009, which now shapes policy across all aspects of government. It has reviewed local regulations to remove any bias against women and improved the process for obtaining compensation by victims of labor abuse and violence. The new national legal aid law that took effect in 2011 endorsed state support for community paralegals, who provide legal support to the poorest members of society.

These are the building blocks of equitable development. Poor farmers must be able to turn to the law to resist attempted illegal land grabs. Market traders must be able to turn to the law to fend off demands for bribes from the local police. Slum dwellers must be able to turn to the justice system to hold to account companies that pollute their water supply. The work of the Open Society Foundations is rooted in the principles of human rights.

But over the past two decades, more and more of our work has involved trying to make those rights real for ordinary people. We, and the groups that we work with all around the world, have increasingly found that realizing rights requires strengthening the ability of people to use the law to gain access to fundamental necessities of life, including education, healthcare, food and fresh water, and housing. Some governments, usually the less democratic ones, are cautious about this notion. They fear that aid money will be directed toward small non-governmental groups and organizations and away from the state institutions. But this is a false dichotomy.

Access to justice works best in partnership with government, if the government creates the space needed for local groups to voice their needs. Strengthening the rights of citizens makes funding coming from abroad more effective. It means that efforts to eliminate poverty will actually yield benefits for those people who need them most. Development and justice are bound together and their union must be continually reinforced.

source: http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/voices/returning-justice-fight-against-poverty?utm_source=justice_B&utm_medium=email&utm_content=text_link2&utm_campaign=justice_B_032413

Who is Mir Hazar Khan Khoso? the man chosen as the caretaker Prime Minister to conduct the May 11 general elections in Pakistan

Mir Hazar Khan Khoso, a retired judge with a strong reputation for honesty, was today chosen as the caretaker Prime Minister to conduct the May 11 general elections in Pakistan.

Khoso, 84, was appointed by the Election Commission after the Prime Minister and Leader of Opposition and a bipartisan parliamentary committee were unable to choose a caretaker premier after six days of deliberations.

The matter was then sent to the five-member Election Commission on Friday night. Following two days of discussions, Chief Election Commissioner Fakhruddin G Ebrahim announced this afternoon that the poll panel had chosen Khoso for the slot.

Soon after his appointment, Khoso said the elections would be held on time though the law and order situation in the country is bad.

"I will meet with representatives of all political parties and assure that elections will be fair. God willing, everything will be right.

Elections will be on time. Law and order position is bad but it is the responsibilities of the provinces. We will coordinate with provincial governments to ensure law and order is maintained," he said.

Khoso belongs to Goth Azam Khan Khosa in Jaffarabad district of Balochistan province and earlier served as Chief Justice of both the Balochistan High Court and the Federal Shariah Court.

Ebrahim said one member of the panel had given a dissenting vote. The member from Punjab province, nominated by the main opposition PML-N, opposed Khoso's candidature.

The PML-N had earlier expressed its reservations about Khoso, saying he was considered to be close to the Pakistan People's Party, which led the outgoing government.

Khoso was among four candidates for the post of caretaker premier.

While the PPP and its allies nominated Khoso and banker Ishrat Hussain, the PML-N proposed retired judge Nasir Aslam Zahid and Sindhi politician Rasool Baksh Palejo.

Chief Election Commissioner Ebrahim told reporters: "We discussed the candidates at length and slowly because it is a very important issue. This gentleman is going to hold free and fair elections along with us."

A law graduate from Karachi University, Khoso was appointed as a judge of the Balochistan High Court in 1977. He went on to serve as Chief Justice of the High Court during 1990-1991 and as Chief Justice of the Federal Shariah Court in 1994.

Khoso's first political appointment was as Acting Governor of Balochistan.