Finding. Funding.Promoting.

Peace Direct is delighted to congratulate Asha on being awarded the Clinton Global Citizen Award. The award, now in its 3rd year, recognizes remarkable individuals for their leadership in improving the lives of people around the globe. Asha was selected for her leadership in civil society, and commended for her work as below:

Asha Hagi Elmi Amin, Chairperson, Save Somali Women and Children
Leadership in Civil Society
Asha Hagi Elmi Amin is co-founder and chairperson of Save Somali Women and Children (SSWC) and a member of the Transitional Federal Government in Somalia. Amin has been deeply involved in the struggle for peace and reconciliation in her war-ravaged country and has worked tirelessly to carve out a role for women in public life. Somali women were sidelined from any peace talks until the “Sixth Clan” was formed by SSWC and other women in 2000. Through the historic Sixth Clan, these daring women convinced the five male-dominated clans to accept a new role for women around the negotiating table. This became the first time that women were represented in a peace process in Somalia, and Amin has participated in talks ever since. Amin was a 2005 Women and Public Policy Fellow at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and a 2008 winner of the Right Livelihood Award.

Read the full story: http://www.clintonglobalinitiative.org/newsmedia/newsmedia_pressreleases_92309c.asp?Section=NewsMedia

Peace Direct has been providing funding to Asha since 2006, helping to cover the running costs of her office, so that she can pursue the goal of peace in Somalia.

As the humanitarian crisis in Somalia worsens by the day, Peace Direct is calling on the international community to remember that no amount of emergency humanitarian aid will compensate for lack of long term peace.
Peace Direct supports the Save Somalia Women & Children (SSWC) project.
“Once again we see how women and children pay the true cost of conflict as they flee the fighting in their thousands to seek refuge under stress with little food or water. Aid agencies have been warning of huge scale human catastrophe and they are doing their best to deal with it but alongside this we must work to resolving the conflict or else innocent Somalians will face the same crisis over and over again.” Warned Tom Gillhespy, Head of International Programmes at Peace Direct.

Oxfam has said the “very dire” humanitarian crisis in Somalia is the worst in Africa for many years. Many of hundreds of thousands of internally-displaced people, the world’s largest such concentration, have little food or shelter. People have been fleeing the capital Mogadishu where there is intense fighting between Islamist guerrillas and pro-government forces.

Click here to find out how you can help SSWC http://www.peacedirect.org/peacebuilders/somalia/

“Dears,

This is to share with you news of the unfortunate renewed cycle of violence in Mogadishu. In the last five days the capital city Mogadishu has been rocked by the heaviest fighting for months as rebels – hardline Islamists, try to topple the government of national unity in place. According to the ministry of information, the fighting has killed at least 113 civilians and around 18,000 have fled the city in fear of their lives – while the effect is getting worse especially on innocent civilians. This may lead into a big humanitarian catastrophe. Concerned international community has shown their full support in favour of the government and the UN Security Council may come up with more concrete steps that may include UN-led peace keeping forces to Somalia in the near future. We remain safe and lobbying for civil society to call for an urgent and unconditional ceasefire and peaceful settlement.

Please pray for us.

Halima M. Hassan, for and on behalf of the SSWC.”

“The road is long but we are not giving up. Yesterday I spoke to the media and told them we were not going to let people hijack and take over the process. Women and children in Somalia deserve a better future and we will not give up on them.

A Prime Minister is to be selected imminently though there are still some spoilers who have demonstrated they will fight again. After the PM has been selected the next step is to transfer Parliament to Mogadishu. I was urged to take a seat in Cabinet but I have decided not to as it would prevent me from criticising government actions when needed. At this critical time voices like mine for peace and reconciliation are very important. I do not want to compromise my relationship and the trust I have with the people.

I was part of a Somali delegation which had a very positive meeting with the Ethiopian President and Foreign Minister. My presence was important as I was openly critical of the Ethiopians. When the public saw me shaking hands with the President it sent a powerful message to them. The meeting was a truly historic moment and the Ethiopians showed a very positive commitment to peace.

Much of my work has been about pushing for women to be included in Parliament. We now know that there are eight women in the Alliance for the Re-liberation of Somalia (ARS). This is really important. Everybody sees them as Islamic extreme fanatics but the inclusion of women shows this is not the case. It has helped boost people’s faith in them not to be radical but inclusive and to work for peace.

The coming times are crucial and it is vital the momentum is not lost. It is possible that the new parliament could go down the wrong path and if that happens it will be extremely hard to bring them back. This is a critical time to make sure the government stays on the right path. The priorities are:

• to mobilise the people through the media and local level meetings to create and ‘alliance for peace’.
• keep discussions and debates going with social and intellectual opinion shapers.

The DfID funding, that Peace Direct secured, has contributed to all of the above – but there is still a lot of potential to go wrong and essential that the momentum is not lost.”

“I am heading off to Djibouti from 15^th to 30^th January. People are vying for the presidency – there had been a plan to have a very limited election in Baidoa but we have fought against this for a much broader process in Djibouti. Under the TFG charter the election should have happened within 10 days, which has long expired. It’s important the process doesn’t get hi-jacked.

People are worried about security on the ground as the Ethiopians withdraw and there seems to be a power struggle developing within the Alliance for the Re-liberation of Somalia (ARS) as well.

We need resources to create a very strong alliance of people who will put Somalia first – this would be a loose grouping, at least to begin with. Resources are needed to facilitate informal and formal discussions, roving advocates etc.”

Asha has won the Right Livelihood Award for… “continuing to lead at great personal risk the female participation in the peace and reconciliation process in her war-ravaged country.”

A time for celebration? Yes, but also a time to avoid repeating the same mistakes in Somalia argues Carolyn Hayman

“Let’s rewind just a couple of years to Ramadan 2006 and Mogadishu, Somalia, was one of the safest places in the Muslim world. The Islamic Courts had imposed order for the first time in sixteen years, opened the port and dismantled roadblocks. Peace came with a cost, but one which the majority of the Somali people seemed prepared to pay.

Then, in one of the most extraordinary decisions of recent years, the UN Security Council sanctioned the invasion of Somalia by Ethiopia, Somalia’s historic enemy. This decision, which the International Crisis Group warned against, licensed armed intervention without any of the accountability mechanisms constraining peacekeeping activity by AU or UN forces.

In the words of Asha Hagi, ‘We felt as though our country was handcuffed and blindfolded and handed over to the very people who we have been at war with for hundreds of years’.

The impact was catastrophic. A threat of Islamic terrorism, which might have put hundreds of lives at risk, was countered by displacing 1.5m people, half of whom are without adequate food, water and shelter. Civilians are being killed indiscriminately, and there is evidence of torture and ethnic cleansing.

With the 15th peace agreement hanging in the balance, it seems as though the mistakes of the past may about to be repeated. But this time, it’s us – the UK who have a major hand in the Djibouti peace processes, so this time we can’t blame America if we repeat the same truly shameful errors.

We have to recognise that the invasion was a totally disproportionate response to an Islamist threat. However many lives might have been at risk from a possible terror attack from people possibly in Somalia, it would have been a fraction of the Somali lives that have now been lost in the full scale conflict. Does this mean that Somali lives are somehow less valuable? After all, there are certainly people planning terrorist attacks in the UK, but no-one is suggesting that random bombings on East London or Bradford constitute an appropriate or effective response. Does it make a difference that Somalia is ‘a far off country of which we know nothing’?

As is so often the case, local people were totally sidelined and the decision was made with no reference to what might be in the best interests of the Somali people. They paid a heavy price but had no influence in the decision which was never going to lead to a peaceful outcome. That has been supported by a recent RAND report suggests that most terror groups end because of operations carried out by local police or intelligence agencies or because they negotiated a settlement with their governments. Military force was rarely the primary reason a terrorist group ended.

By refusing to treat the more moderate Islamists as anything other than ‘the enemy’, we created a situation in which they became just that and now, Ethiopia says it will withdraw its troops by the end of the year raising the very real prospect of a total takeover by Islamist groups.

So, while we celebrate Asha Hagi’s award and her remarkable achievements, we also call on the UK Government to keep focused on Somalia in these critical weeks, to encourage the building of a broad coalition that includes all but the most hardline Islamists,. Anyone on the ground will testify that there are no ‘goodies and baddies’ here – only powerful interests who have to be persuaded to sit down together and give Somalia back the peace it nearly had, and then lost, in 2006.”

Asha has been awarded the ‘Right Livelihood Award’ in recognition of her “outstanding vision and work on behalf of our planet and its people.” Here is an extract from her moving acceptance speech.

“It has been a long journey. My country, Somalia, has been engulfed in Civil War for the past 18 years. In all armed conflicts women and children are the first and last victims of war, though war is neither their desire nor their decision. Women have been killed, raped, tortured and displaced. They have lost their loved ones: brothers, husbands, fathers and children.

I am a living example of those women who paid a huge price. This war was clan-based, and my husband and I are from two different clans. My husband’s clan saw me as a traitor. My clan of birth as an outsider. This caused me much personal pain –being trapped between two different worlds. This moment made me realize that war has nothing to offer women except for death, destruction and devastation.

I had two options. I could allow this anger to drown me, or I could use it as a tool to create something good. I knew there were thousands of women just like me and so I used that pain to create a new identity: the identity of womanhood. “Save Somali Women and Children” (SSWC ) emerged from this. In Somalia, women have no space in the traditional clan structure. We demanded our rightful space by mounting pressure on clan elders, religious leaders, Islamic Scholars and politicians. We have taken women from the periphery to the negotiating table as equal partners and decision-makers. This award recognizes the achievements of all Somali women who take tremendous risks and sacrifices for the quest of peace.

The timing of this award comes at a very precarious time for this nation. Unprecedented and unaccepted crises are taking place. Piracy off the coast of Somalia, never before a part of our culture, has threatened international trade. This award demonstrates that humanity still exists in the desperation that Somalis face. There is courage within the fear.

My involvement for seeking peace and stability by using dialogue has never stopped. The sons and daughters of Somalia have the first responsibility to sort out their differences and think about the fate of their future. We must not wait for solutions offered from outside, but instead offer the civilians the chance to live under a reconciled, peaceful country as dignified citizens. Through this, we can bring Somalia back into the family of nations.

I appeal to the international community. Please continue to respond positively to the ever-growing humanitarian catastrophe in Somalia. The plight of women and children depends on your support.”