BREAKING STORY | Somalis in Uganda Face Aftermath of Triple Bombing
Tuesday, July 13, 2010 at 12:23PM 
Radical Islamists recruit supporters. Xingalool, Sanag, Somalia. HELO.
Journey | Farah Mohamed Ali, in Kampala, with additional reporting by Daniel J Gerstle in New York, HELO Magazine, July 13th, 2010
Leaders of the Somali Community Association (SCA) of Uganda gathered in front of the group’s office in Kampala, Uganda, yesterday, expressing deep frustration about the previous night’s World Cup double bombing which killed seventy-four people.
“We are really very sorry about what happened last night here in Kampala,” said Mohamed Hassan, the spokesman of the SCA. “It was heartbreaking for Somali people who are living in Uganda. The fears may increase if Somali militants of al Shabab claim responsibility for these bombings.” Mr. Hassan said that the Community will do its best to collaborate with security agencies.
According to Kampala police, there were at least four bombers in Kampala this weekend. One team, armed with two bombs, entered the tightly packed Kyadondo rugby yard, which had been converted into a screening area for the event with hundreds of white plastic chairs set up on the grass playing field.
A second entered the Ethiopian Village restaurant compound. And a third wore an explosive vest into a disco. At about three minutes to the end of Spain’s win against Holland, the four detonated their bombs. The last device failed to explode; the culprit abandoned the vest and fled the scene.
The Somali-Ugandan Connection
Just weeks earlier, al Shabab, the radical Islamic militia fighting Somali government forces, which are backed by Ugandan and Burundian peacekeepers, as well as Ethiopia and the U.S., had threatened the Ugandan government after peacekeepers allegedly killed twenty Somali civilians with artillery meant for al Shabab.
“We warned Uganda not to deploy troops to Somalia,” Sheik Ali Mohamud Rage, the group’s spokesman said, as quoted in the Washington Post. “We warned them to stop massacring our people, and they ignored that. The explosions in Kampala were only a minor message to them.”
Somalia and Uganda have seen their fates more intertwined as time ticks on. The countries and their people are strikingly different. Somalia is virtually all Muslim, nearly everyone speaks one native language, and the vast majority originate from nomadic camel-herding culture in a semi-arid region where it is extremely difficult to farm.
Meanwhile, Uganda is Christian, Muslim, and animist, with many ethnic groups like the Luganda, Luo, Runyankore, Ateso, Lusoga, Acholi, Tutsi, and others, thriving or competing in a paradise of rich soil. Somalia’s capitol, Mogadishu, is a dry, shattered, coastal town. Uganda’s capitol, Kampala, is a wet, unified and bustling landlocked metropolis.
Yet both suffer from civil wars involving religious extremists whose killings and lack of political plans make them appear more like death cults than theocrats.
In Somalia in 1991, moderate leaders sought to take down the dictator, Siad Barre. He had modernized the country but then launched a disastrous attack on Ethiopia, followed by a paranoid saturation bombing of the northern city of Hargeisa after some residents threatened to secede. Moderate leaders fell into clan-based war, the northwest declared independence, and most of the country’s elite fled. In the power vacuum outside the capitol, Islamic leaders eventually called for radical Islamists to bring back the rule of law.
While some Islamic leaders formed the conservative Union of Islamic Courts to do just that in 2005, the more extreme sought help from al Qaeda and created al Shabab. When some of the Union leaders took a power sharing deal, al Shabab launched its own rebellion, eventually banning not only food aid from the United Nations, but prohibiting music on the radio, television, and football, among other things.
With alleged inspiration from al Qaeda, al Shabab has turned to attacks on civilians as a means of retaliating against and manipulating foreign powers backing the Somali government. Since Ethiopia fought through al Shabab and ferried the transitional federal government of Somalia back into Mogadishu at the end of 2006, African Union peacekeepers from Uganda and Burundi have been barely holding the defenses in frequent shoot outs with al Shabab in the capitol Mogadishu.
The Shabab bombing of Kampala was not their first attack against foreign governments, only the first one known to occur outside of Somalia’s recognized borders. In October 2008, the group is widely assumed to have launched a five-point bombing of not only Somali government targets in the northern cities of Bosaso and Hargeisa but also of the United Nations compoundand Ethiopian Embassy in Hargeisa.
Throughout the last two decades of civil war in Somalia, an estimated 12,000 Somalis fled or migrated to Uganda. Many integrated into the Kisenyi neighborhood of Kampala, but most resettled in the Nakivale refugee settlement southwest of the city. In 2010, the United States agreed to resettle as many as 5,000 to places like Minneapolis, Columbus, and Buffalo on refugee visas, to unburden Uganda which already had its own crisis with families displaced by war.
Uganda’s Political Knot
Uganda, in a somewhat parallel but distinct scroll of history, also emerged from a polar dictator, fell into civil war, and continues to suffer a violent extremist rebel group, but one that calls itself Christian. After Tanzania invaded Uganda in the late 1970s to topple the genocidal regime of Idi Amin, a series of rebel battles eventually landed current President Yoweri Museveni in power. Northern minority groups argued that his government actively discriminated against them. In this context, a self-proclaimed prophet, Joseph Kony, created a force primarily fighting for the Acholi ethnic group called, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA).
With every battle, both the LRA and Museveni’s forces caused thousands of families to flee their homes, many remain in displacement settlements. But the LRA thrived by pillaging the villages of other ethnic groups, kidnapping children to enslave to fight or serve as wives, and convincing its followers that they are agents of the divine. Eventually, the LRA moved into neighboring Sudan, Congo, and the Central African Republic. Recent sources, including U.S. congressmen, claim that the Sudanese government of Omar al Bashir may have subcontracted the LRA to destabilize Darfur rebel groups and the Central African government.
With this mess, one wonders why Uganda would bother getting involved in Somalia. The United States government believes that preventing radical terrorism in Somalia is as important as preventing the LRA from wrecking havoc across central Africa. Uganda’s intention to play a major role in the African Union requires sacrifice. Museveni is likely wagering that a sacrifice for Somalia may earn more allies in the quest to stop the LRA.
Kampala’s Somali Community Braces for Change
“We are sending our deepest condolence to the families and friends of those who lost their lives last nights tragedy,” said Khadija Said Gurhan, the chairperson of the Somali Initiative for Peace and Development (SIPED). “Our thoughts and prayers are with them. Every one of the Somali community in Uganda is shocked.”
Despite weariness and fear, the Somalis in Uganda say they believe that the good relationship between the Ugandan government and Somali refugees will not come to an end. Many of those interviewed provided similar answers.
“Al Shabab’s members are not the only Somalis. There are so many people from different continents and different nations who are supporting this terrorist organization,” not only Somalis, they said.
“Ugandans welcomed us very compassionately and I believe that I am in my second home now,” said Ahmed Ali, who has resided in Uganda for five years, “because the hospitably of Uganda’s Government and the people of Uganda. Many thanks to them, indeed. It is phenomenal.”
Though al Shabab claimed responsibility for the attack, the situation of Somali refugees in Kampala’s central neighborhood of Kisenyi, as well as in the Nakivale refugee settlement, is normal, but shops, supermarkets, petrol stations, restaurants, internet shops and all Somali business centers in Kisenyi were closed at 6pm very early Monday evening, the day after the triple bombing, due to the security alert.
On Friday, the Somali refugee community in Uganda plan to organize a massive demonstration, their first one waged specifically against al Shabab.
Many questions remain unanswered for the Somalis of Uganda. While many will look forward to the tough but attractive possibility of resettling to the West, others will likely wonder whether the international community now has the motivation to provide greater support to the Somali government in its fight against al Shabab or perhaps less stomach for such a challenge. For its part, Uganda, and neighbor Burundi, brace for the possibility of further threats.
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To reach the author, fmcblue@hotmail.com or helo@helo-magazine.com.