Zam Zam Abdi fled Mogadishu after being threatened with death by the hardline Islamist militia — the Shabab. The message from the armed group once allied to the Union of Islamic Courts, the coalition that briefly seized power in 2006, was simple: If she continued working for her women’s rights organization in the Somali capital, she would be killed.
The warning was posted on her office gates. But it is what happened to a friend and colleague, working for another organization, that persuaded her to escape. He was shot dead and the same note left on his body.
“Most of us had to leave,” she said. “We had e-mails and phone calls telling us to stop working. They used an expression famous in Somalia: Falka aad ku jirtid maka baxeeysa. May ama haa? It means — ‘Stop what you are doing or we will act. Yes or no?’ Then someone spoke on the radio — a local leader called Sheikh Mahmoud — delivering the same warning.”
Zam Zam, 28, separates the chaos and violence that has pervaded her country since the overthrow of Somalian president Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991 into “ordinary Mogadishu” and “not ordinary.”
“Ordinary,” in Zam Zam’s definition, describes her country’s persistent clan warfare, even the heavy fighting in the city that drove her to leave before with her daughter when Ethiopian troops — supporting the internationally recognized government — shelled her neighborhood in 2006 to drive the Islamic Courts out after six months in power.
In the ordinary violence and chaos, Zam Zam and her colleagues could still work, negotiating with the clan warlords. In common with the UN, Zam Zam believes that what is happening now is something else. Something terrible, exceeding perhaps even the bloodsoaked chaotic days of the early 1990s when Somalia was last plunged into anarchy.
It is Mogadishu that symbolizes what is happening. A large proportion of its population — already jobless, hungry and surviving on aid — has fled the fighting in the city between the Shabab and the forces of the country’s weak and rapidly imploding government, backed by its Ethiopian allies. The streets are stalked by assassins, kidnappers and suicide bombers. And the Shabab is threatening to overrun the country’s south and center.
If what is happening is a disaster, it is a disaster hardly noticed by the world. Yet it has not only been human rights workers who have been attacked. Government officials, politicians and journalists, anyone who does not fit in with the Shabab’s world view, have been threatened and killed, mostly for being tainted by Western ideas.
“When the leadership of the Islamic Courts fled in 2006, the Shabab became more independent,” Zam Zam said. “When the US hit Shabab hideouts they started seeing us as being spies of the West. If people were kidnapped they would ask to see our laptops before releasing us to see what information we held on them.”
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