A British aid worker abducted by masked gunmen in Somalia has spoken publicly about his ordeal for the first time. Zimbabwe-born Frans Barnard, who was working for Save the Children, said he was kidnapped in less then seven minutes as he watched television. He was released on Wednesday after being held for six days and was taken to safety in Nairobi, Kenya. A spokesman for the charity said his release had been secured with the help of clan elders and no money had been involved. Speaking at a press conference in Nairobi, Mr Barnard described being "rudely disturbed" after watching his very first episode of 24. "There was quite a bit of activity - it all actually took place in probably under seven minutes," he said. "But the end of that seven minutes saw me having been taken out of my room, through the window and into a vehicle being driven away at breakneck speed." Of his six-day ordeal in captivity, Mr Barnard said: "There were occasions where things were tense but overall I would say without any hesitation that they viewed me as a commodity and that as a commodity the more unscathed I was and the more undamaged I was the better for them as well." Mr Barnard was taken from a guesthouse compound in Adado, a small town close to the border with Ethiopia, on Thursday night of last week. A Somali national who was also taken from the compound with him was released unharmed within hours. The men were working with the charity as it carried out a feasibility assessment into setting up a programme to help sick and malnourished children and their families in the area. Tensions have been running high in the lawless region, where armed forces include pirate gangs and factions of militias allied to the government. Kidnapping for ransom is not uncommon in the area, though hostages are usually released unharmed. The Press Association

What is your name again ??

........ Jecliyaa warkaaaa

Sunday, first day of the week ......

Hello my sweet luvn sugar coated choco mallow milky shaky honey dipped chiz meltin orange juicy mozzarella pepperoni spicy icy friends, how r yall? ...

Originally posted by The Zack: Duke, I see that you have added Yey on the black list of the Somali history. That is great.

Somaliland looks good next to its restive neighbor and foreign investors are taking notice There is a part of Somalia where foreigners can walk the streets in safety, where the only guns are held by uniformed members of the state security services, where elections are held regularly and democratically, and where the people can dare to hope for a future of continuing peace and desperately-needed prosperity. Somaliland, northwest of Somalia, declared independence in 1991 but has not been recognised by any other country in the world. Yet in the restive Horn of Africa, it is a rare success story that is gradually being accepted by the United States and others. In September, the top U.S. diplomat for Africa announced a new “two track policy” toward Somalia, one that increases the focus on Somaliland and another semi-autonomous northern region called Puntland. “Both of these parts of Somalia have been zones of relative political and civil stability and we think they in fact will be a bulwark of extremism and radicalism that might emerge from the south,” said Johnnie Carson, assistant secretary of state for Africa, in New York last month. Carson stressed that the new diplomatic push did not amount to legal recognition and that Washington would continue to support the U.N.-backed Transitional Federal Government in Mogadishu. For the capital of a country that does not exist, Hargeisa is a cacophonous place. Car engines and horns compete to drown out the call of the muezzin, ambling pedestrians compete with battered vehicles on the dusty streets that are lined with thickets of cactus and drifts of thorny acacia branches. Little wooden stalls sell imported Chinese and Saudi plastic goods. Moneychangers squat behind dirty ramparts of Somaliland shillings. Bales of narcotic khat trucked or flown in from the Ethiopian highlands are sold at little booths, their male customers stumble away in a stoned daze clutching bunches of green stems. Telephone poles are wreathed in tangled wires, like a citywide game of cat’s cradle gone wrong. The anarchic wiring is testament to the recent unregulated growth in telephone services. Clad in skeletons of wooden scaffolding, half-constructed buildings lean woozily as construction workers scurry up and down ladders. These are new hotels, office blocks, banks, apartments and mosques. Hargeisa is a boomtown albeit in a chaotic, Wild West kind of way. The lack of formal economic development is a result of Somaliland’s lack of formal existence. Without international recognition Somaliland cannot benefit from World Bank or International Monetary Fund support and has received only piecemeal bilateral support from a handful of donors. But that is set to change. During a visit to Hargeisa last week the U.N.’s humanitarian coordinator for Somalia, Mark Bowden, said the $100 million that Somaliland now receives from donors each year could double as a result of the increased engagement from foreign countries. That would be a significant boost for a place where the government’s entire budget is only $50 million a year, mostly earned by the busy port at Berbera. Every day creaky wooden galleons from Yemen and elsewhere in the Arabian peninsula unload pallets of fizzy drinks and crates of washing machines, sacks of grain and cargo loads of 4x4s … things that Somaliland cannot produce itself, which means pretty much everything. Once empty, the ships fill up with livestock and head back across the Gulf of Aden. The sheep and goats exported to Arab countries are Somaliland’s biggest foreign earner. In the absence of legal recognition, Somaliland has developed a strange mix of pride and bitterness that was expressed by the Harvard-educated chancellor of the University of Hargeisa. “We have seen the bottom of hell but we have built from the ground up with little support,” Hussein Bulhan said. The campus houses eight faculties and educates 3,500 students. But just 12 years ago it was a refugee camp in the wake of a civil war that all but destroyed Somaliland before its declaration of independence. “My expectation was that the American government would help but I haven’t seen much,” Bulhan said. “Instead, America has supported a recognised government [in Mogadishu] that exists only in the minds of a few. “After 9/11 the focus has been fighting terrorists and too many resources have gone into putting out fires instead of building peace." But the recent U.S. announcement has left Somaliland officials with an excitement they barely suppress. “We welcome direct engagement and we are expecting wide-scale investment in our security, economic growth, health and infrastructure,” Foreign Minister Mohamed Omar said. The aim is to shift the focus of foreign aid from humanitarian assistance to economic development to help get the poor and battered country on track, he said. The new Somaliland government was installed after a much-delayed but ultimately peaceful and democratic election this June. President Ahmed Mohamed Silanyo said he was “very happy” with the promised engagement from Washington. “This country is peaceful and democratic, where the president, parliament and local councils were elected in free and fair elections, where rule of law reigns and where the streets are full of uniformed children with book in hand going to school, not hooded, with guns, going to war,” Silanyo told a gathering of foreign officials in Hargeisa. Source: Minnpost.com

Just four months ago, Hussein Abdi Dualeh was an engineer with the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Metro), managing maintenance contracts and living a comfortable life with his wife and three sons. Today, he's helping run a self-proclaimed - although internationally unrecognized - nation in the Horn of Africa. Dualeh, 54, is typical of the highly-educated diaspora politicians who have returned to Somaliland - a breakaway state in the north-west of war-torn Somalia - to serve in the new government of President Ahmed Mohamed Silanyo. 'I came for the inauguration and they told me: `You`re not leaving,`' says the erudite and articulate Dualeh, who heads up the Ministry of Mining, Energy and Water Resources. He's only half-joking. Silanyo, elected in late June, slashed the size of his government and looked to the diaspora to fill key posts in his 20-member cabinet. As well as the energy docket, the information, planning, foreign affairs and fisheries ministries are in the hands of Somalilanders who have just returned after decades in the United States, Britain and Canada. 'They promised to have an effective government and to have qualified people in the right positions,' says Dualeh. 'The president realized he would have to look elsewhere and tapped up quite a few people from overseas.' Dualeh, like many of his peers, left a Somalia languishing under the brutal reign of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre, who seized power in 1969 and oversaw 21 years characterized by repression and civil war. While Somaliland was struggling to reclaim the independence it gave up in 1960 - when the former British protectorate joined with Italian Somaliland to form the Somalia of today - Dualeh was pursuing his education and career abroad. He graduated with a degree in petroleum engineering from the University of Oklahoma in 1983 and worked at Chevron for five years. In 1989, two years before Siad Barre was finally ousted and Somaliland declared its independence, Dualeh joined Metro. Somaliland set about quietly rebuilding as the rest of Somalia descended into the failed state it has become today. The stability and democratic credentials of Somaliland are a stark contrast to the rest of the Horn of Africa nation. The ineffective Western-backed government in Mogadishu is hemmed in by Islamist insurgents who control much of south and central Somalia, and pirates based in the breakaway region of Puntland terrorize international shipping in the Gulf of Aden. The international community is showing increasing signs of backing Somaliland with aid, if not recognition, viewing it as a buttress against al-Qaeda-linked militant Islamist group al-Shabaab. But the freshly arrived ministers, still reeling from culture shock, still have a big job on their hands. Somaliland`s annual government budget is 50 million dollars - half of the value of the contracts Dualeh managed for Metro. The self-proclaimed state is drought-prone and poverty-stricken, with poor infrastructure and high unemployment. Its 3.5 million residents are heavily reliant on livestock - although there is real innovation and growth in the telecommunications and money-transfer industries. The capital Hargeisa is a dust bowl, where goats pick through rubbish littering the side of the bumpy dirt roads and makeshift huts housing displaced people far outnumber the few big houses erected by the diaspora. It's a far cry from Los Angeles. 'It's a sacrifice. I was making a six-figure salary and drove a Merc, but dropped it all to come here,' says Dualeh, who has left his family behind in California. 'I want to see if I can help the country of my birth.' While the personal sacrifice is tempered by the fact Dualeh has given up a job as an anonymous middle-manager to become a important man, he and the other diaspora ministers appear to have a genuine desire to help Somaliland fulfill its potential. Not everyone is happy with the appointment of people who have lived the high life abroad to such exalted positions, however. Ahmed Hassan Ahmed, who lived in India, the US and Canada over the last 30 years, returned to become the Director of Awareness in the Ministry of Information. Ahmed - who ironically has the remit of educating the returning diaspora on Somaliland`s culture - admits there is resentment among the locals. 'The biggest complaint is that there are so many expats (in the government), but it`s my country too,' he says. Despite the grumbles, many others believe the diaspora brings back valuable skills and experience, and Dualeh says Somaliland was always in the hearts of those who left. 'Even though we were never here, we lived it,' he says.

Just had lunch with the Director General ,,,,,

Another game is on ..........

Stuff & Nonsense ,,,,,,,,,,,,

Is the wolf what i think it is ??

Originally posted by Mad_Mullah: Isn't JB the one that makes fun of Puntland and calls it Pirateland? No, I call them Bugland ,,,

Waar qashinkaan xabsiguu ka soo baxay iyo meeshuu ka yimid baan sugayaa inta la inoo sheegayo ,,,

^ ^

Tattle: For Juan Williams, one opinion too many for NPR IT'S ALWAYS troublesome when someone who gets paid for speaking his mind gets fired for speaking his mind, so it's especially troublesome that NPR chose to fire longtime commentator Juan Williams. Yes, Williams' comment that he gets nervous every time he sees a Muslim on a plane was bigoted - and the fact that millions of Americans may agree with him doesn't make it less so - but NPR has chosen to employ him for 10 years because it seemingly valued his opinions. That it doesn't like one of his opinions shouldn't negate all the others. By firing Williams for a burst of being too honest, NPR plays into the hands of the right-wing anti-NPR forces who would correctly claim that as long as Williams espoused NPR's opinion, he was cool, but once he deviated from the all-inclusive "Kumbaya" line, he was out. On the other hand, those who claim that NPR is being closed-minded and showing its liberal bias are missing part of the point of NPR. Between one million and seven million taxpaying Muslims are living in America (depending on which survey numbers you choose to believe), none of whom have blown up any planes and are merely trying to get through the economic slowdown just like American Hindus, Buddhists, Zoroastrians, Wiccans, Jews and Christians, and National Public Radio is also supposed to represent them. It's national and public. If a host on Racist Whitey 109.5 FM ("The Klan") claimed he got nervous every time he saw a black dude on the street, chances are nothing would happen to him (unless his advertisers went ballistic). But if someone on a publicly funded radio station said the same thing, he'd probably be escorted off the premises before the first phone call. Instead of firing Williams - who knew NPR's knee could jerk so quickly - wouldn't it have been better (and far more illuminating) for NPR to address his very real issue with legitimate reporting and discussion? As we near an election in which so many votes are going to be cast on the basis of anger and fear (on both sides and on essentially every issue), NPR should have used Williams to confront the nation's fear of Muslims and analyzed whether it's a rational fear (yes, Mr. O'Reilly, Muslims did blow up planes on 9/11) or an irrational one (estimating that there are about 30 million commercial flights per year worldwide, your odds of being blown up by a Muslim in flight are pretty darn slim).

Foreign companies loot and dump toxic wastes in Somali seas in the full glare of the EU and NATO naval forces that patrol the Somali coastal lines, a Somali professor at the University of Minnesota has said. Abdi Ismail Samater, a professor of Geography at the University of Minnesota claims foreign companies poach and dump toxic waste in Somali waters. He said foreign interests seized the opportunity to begin looting the country’s seafood after the collapse of the Somali government in 1991. “Between 700 up to 800 illegal fishing ships directly steal Somali seafood. They took any kind of fish including nest eggs in the deep waters”, he told AfricaNews in an exclusive interview. He added that foreign ships use prohibited fishing equipment, including nets with very small mesh sizes and sophisticated underwater lighting systems, to lure fish to their traps. Somalia waters have huge numbers of commercial fish species, including the prized yellow fin tuna. The illegal fishing ships come from Italy, Egypt, India, South Korea, Kenya, Tanzania, and Spain, according to a research that is yet to be published by Prof. Abdi Ismail Samater and his colleagues at University of Minnesota. The research also indicates that illegal fishing companies from Japan, China, Denmark and Holland are also part of the lootings process in Somalia. “The illegal fishing companies poach an estimated between $250 up to$350 million in seafood from Somali waters annually”, Prof. Samater said. The foreign companies steal an invaluable protein source from one of the world’s poorest nations, where half of its population needs food aids. One in six Somali children is acutely malnourished – a total of some 240,000 children – the highest acute malnutrition rates anywhere in the world. In south and central Somalia these rates are even higher, reaching one in every five children, According to WFP. The UN estimates it will need $689 million to provide aid in 2010 to the Somali population, of which 43 per cent live on less than a dollar a day. Professor Abdi accused foreign companies for ruin the livelihoods of legitimate fishermen. He claimed NATO and EU force in Somali waters don not stop or even speak out illegal fishing in the coast. “NATO and EU forces are aware of the ongoing poaching in Somali sea but they are focusing on pursuing only their economic and security interest”, he said. But Lieutenant Colonel Per Klingvall, spokesperson for EU NAVFOR said his force is contributing in monitoring fishing activity off the coast of Somalia. “We are mandated to monitor and report illegal activities off the coast of Somalia. We have no information about illegal fishing in Somalia”, Per Klingvall said. “European fishing vessels pass their location to us daily, they have not been in Somali waters since they started passing EU NAV FOR their details. As far as we can monitor the European fishing fleets are outside the, by Somali, declared 200 NM Economic exclusive zone.” Prof Abdi Ismail Samater said foreign warships came to the Gulf of Aden to protect only their interests and the increasing insurance costs. But the spokesperson for EU NAVFOR said that their main objective is to escort World Food Programme (WFP) ships so they can deliver humanitarian aid to the Somali people. “Since we started Dec 2008 we have escorted more than 80 ships who have delivered more than 410 000 metric tons. That feeds 1 300 000 people every day”, he told AfricaNews. ‘Other missions are to escort AMISOM logistic ships and other vulnerable ships. We are also mandated to disrupt and deter acts of piracy and armed robbery off the Somali coast”. Somali pirates are causing havoc in the Gulf of Aden, one of the world's busiest shipping routes connecting Europe to Asia and the Middle East. “There are stories that piracy probably started as a reaction to foreign illegal fishing over 10 years ago. However, the pirates are no longer motivated by good causes - all of the recent attacks off the East coast of Somalia have been hundreds of miles from Somali waters and have been for financial gain only”, said Per Klingvall. In sharp contrast to the EU Naval force for Somalia, Professor Samatar says a number of pirate are out to make money, some are patriots who are out to defend the waters against looting. “All power full states are just pushing only their interests. Somali pirates took only $35 million each year while foreign companies loot $350 m seafood annually. No-one is addressing looting but World bodies are busy discussing pirates”, he said. Prof Samater says western nations are only focused to fight pirates since it is a threat to their economy. “No one is listening to a weak person who is crying and saying “please don’t take my fish”. No nation is serious for Somali issue. They are all busy for their interests”. Warships from the United States, Britain, Japan, France and other countries have been trying to stop Somali pirates, but have been unable to uproot the problem of piracy. The international community has been focused on training Somali ground forces--military and police--to defend Somali government from Islamist rebels but EUNAVFOR spokesperson said they have no mandate to train Somali Naval Force.

muxuu ahaa kaasina ???

Was too years ago ,,,, yaa xasuusta dee

True story of a South African guy named Andrew who won R3.5M in lotto. Here is his letter of resignation:

Ali Mohamed Ali, the director-general of Somaliland's Education Ministry: Somaliland allow Somalis from south-central Somalia access to public services, despite considering them as refugees