The death toll from clashes between rival militia rose to 53 yesterday, with more than 60 wounded, medical sources said. More than 200 families were evacuated from the southwestern town of Bulo Hawo, bordering Kenya, when fighting began on Tuesday morning between militia loyal to Mohamud Sayid Aden and those belonging to his former ally Yusuf Cante.
On Tuesday witnesses reported 25 people had been killed. By yesterday that toll had more than doubled, to 53.
Many Bulo Hawo residents escaped to Mandera on the Kenya side of the border, where police confiscated AK-47 assault rifles from fleeing clansmen.
Fighting around a port near Mogadishu and in southern Somalia has killed more than 100 people in the past three weeks.
Officials in the port town of Kismayo said militia had released a vessel they captured six days ago.
Nuruddin Farah Hassan, a prominent Somali writer who is also a contender for this year’s Nobel Prize in literature, has a Chandigarh connection, The Indian Express said yesterday.
It was on the campus of Government College for Men in this north Indian city that he embarked on his literary journey. Old magazines of the college hint at an African bursting with promise, the paper said. In 1968, Hassan read out his first short story, To Rinse a Baby’s Napkin, to a college literary forum.
Hassan’s name is a hazy scrawl in the dusty Panjab University registers dating back to 1966. Principal Balwinder Singh said there were quite a number of African students at Panjab University and its affiliated colleges during the 1970s.
Hassan, who has published nine novels and one non-fiction on the Somali diaspora, is widely regarded as one of the top African writers. His latest work, Links, paints a Somali perspective of the American military presence in the country in the early 1990s and the turmoil in the capital Mogadishu. Hassan, who has repeatedly focused on the negative fallout of African dictatorships, was awarded the 1998 Neustadt International Prize for Literature.
Exiled from Somalia in 1976 after his novel Sweet and Sour Milk, Hassan, who now lives in Nigeria, has been continuously writing about Somalia and its upheavals.
Kenyan Ambassador to Somalia, Mohammed Affey, has stated that his government wanted all Kenyans in Somalia to immediately register with the embassy, the East African Standard said on Tuesday. Thousands of Kenyans work in Somalia, most of them with aid agencies operating in the country’s troubled regions.
Affey said Kenyans, who were working in the country without the knowledge of their government, would be required in future to register and provide their particulars to the embassy before joining work. He said Kenyans seeking employment in Somalia without registering with the embassy had made it difficult for the country to identify and assist its nationals in emergency situations.
UN relief coordinator for Somalia Maxwell Gaylard has said that if rains fail in the next two weeks drought in northern Somalia could worsen.
“Although there are about two weeks left of the rainy season, all the signs indicate that the communities of large parts of northern Somalia are experiencing yet another season of inadequate rainfall. This situation could develop into full-blown disaster in the next couple of months,” Gaylard said in a statement.
Four years of below-normal rainfall have decimated livestock in the northern regions of Somaliland, Puntland and some areas of Galgaduud region. Aid agencies estimate that only 20 percent of the area has had enough rain to allow pasture to grow.
