President Mohamed Farmaajo of Somalia is obsessed with deposing Jubbaland President Ahmed Madobe who was resoundingly elected by prefecture’s clan representatives. The effort to depose President Sheikh Ahmed Madobe of Jubaland state will test the limits of federalism and will likely touch off clan warfare. To achieve his objectives, the cheesy oaf has doubled up use of ethnic appropriation to foment irredentism which often orchestrates violent clan and Federal Member States exclusion in the beleaguered horn country. The outcome, historically, is a catastrophe that destabilizes the entire Horn of Africa and causes insecurity in East Africa.
- After arresting and jailing Gedo region administrators, Marehan tribesmen rightfully executing their mandate, the president deployed 700 poorly armed and organized army troops to occupy the peaceful province and intimidate clan leaders, members of their families, and local residents.
- These Somali Army troops are accused of looting food kiosks, cloth stores, and abusing women in the town of Beled Hawo, Doloow, and Luuq, a typical war time strategy to coerce members of the target community to assimilate the government ideology and outbid the Madobe administration. These are crimes against humanity.
In Somalia, clan and inter-regional tensions between Darod clans (particularly Marehan and Ogaden) remain a salient sociopolitical weapon with either clan countering the dominance of the other, often violently. The Jubaland Federal State leadership conflict with the SFG is primarily a struggle between Hawiye (the patrons and stalwarts of Farmaajo’s SFG) and Darod clan elites while the secondary factors are geopolitical, largely port business and oil exploration by foreign actors. Farmaajo’s has manufactured confusion and military obfuscation to win political windfall across board (locally and internationally), concrete acts of extraction and profit-seeking by turning dominated Marehan’s into instruments of gain.
Farmaajo’s hapless SFG has perfected the art of genocide, they have opted cultural genocide as the perfect weapon. Conveniently, there is no such concept under international law, and it thus whitewashes Farmaajo’s government reputation for what it really is: a state guilty of genocide. “Cultural genocide” avoids that problem, and is useful for evading any talk of UN sanctions and Security Council resolutions. With the distortion of Marehan’s indigenous principles of exchange and sharing into capitalist principles, President Farmaajo’s patrons are colonizing the Marehan and with their culture turned into exclusive federal zones that forbid alleged anti-Farmaajo sociopolitical engagements, social political domination makes them victims of a genocide.
There is evidence of genocide at its early stages. Displacement of families due to fear, probably members of clan leaders allied to President Madobe and Mr Janan, the security minister who has shown the sabre rattling oaf the middle finger.
The Marehan Have Had Enough of Farmaajo
Despite being a Marehan tribesman, Farmaajo is willing to play the Hawiye card for political survival. The irredentist has espoused a socialist ideology and discouraged clannism, but it has backfired and his dictatorial SFG regime is getting increasingly challenged. The Marehan no-longer support him, and if they do, it is split along the clan lines. The Hawiye patrons insist he must destroy those opposing SFG and its policy, Federal Member States (FMS) Presidents and clan elders. The systemic killing of these leaders is happening. Gradually, the numbers of those persecuted will rise. Clan leaders have had enough of it and are grouping to chart an equally brutal counter path.
Touching off a clan conflict to up his ratings seems top of Farmaajo’s priority. He is forgetting any form of persecution, including serious mental harm, displacement, and deliberately inflicting conditions on members of the Marehan tribe is genocide. A Systemic forcible sociopolitical transfer of the clan’s leadership, that itself is a crime against humanity.
Farmaajo thinks the world is blind and deaf, that he can have his way without censorship and action by both regional players and the international community. He committed crimes against humanity in South West State, leading to deaths of innocent people: A Clearer indicator of his appetite for genocide.
Farmaajo’s ethnic appropriation and irredentism misdirects attention from politics, trying to stall people from realizing that they are being “schooled,” as adults, by large and impersonal institutions staffed by self-appointed experts, that’s not a democracy nor a means to build on Federalism. The goal is to keep the Marehan ignorant of the dangers to which they have been exposed by the regime’s disastrous policy.
“You cant colonize the Marehan. Farmaajo is a traitor. He has sold his tribesmen for political windfall and he shall be remembered for gross ineptitude in pursuit of useless power.”
Farmaajo’s desired end state is a Federal order ruled by censorship, a collection of individuals, rendered mute, detached, and sterile to appease his Hawiye patrons whose maximum distrust for the masses and their choice leaders, their fear of the Gedo and entire Jubbaland Marehan is piously fiendish. The United Nations, IGAD, and other players mustn’t pay lip service to these events, the specter of genocide has been raised and they should not let the systemic stoking of clan conflicts by Mohamed Farmaajo to threaten the fragile Somalia and the region again.
