The Dictatorial Military Regime led by General Barre lasted for twenty-one years in Somalia. The henchmen of this tyranny got away with crimes against humanity after committing indesscrible abuses of power and gross violations of human rights and dignity. Then, came United Somali Congress (USC) banditry of mass-murder, looting, rape and clan cleansing, which made the abuses of preceding tyrannical regime look incomparable in magnitude and scale. USC leaders got away with these heinous crimes. Since then, sense of justice and rule of law have lost any meaning in the country, still technically in civil war as meaningful national reconciliation had never happened. It is now hard to think of establishing public institutions to tackle with the epidemic of lawlessness and cultural impunity for all sorts of crimes, corruption, theft and looting of public resources. That is why many politicians aspire to replace General Barre, trying to acquire absolute power in a city-state thuggery. To prevent the repeat of that dark era in Somali governance, regions had opted for federalism as safe governing system for a country with bitter experience in misrule.
To make things even worse, USC mayhem is followed by religious extremists undeterred by known traditions of Islamic culture and studies. Wanton murder and extortion became the norm and modus operandi of peudo-religious elements of suppression, public intimidation and mass violence with daily bomb-blasts, mostly directed at civilian targets and their private properties and businesses for not paying up protection money.
But, what are the root-causes of this culture of impunity?
To answer this, one would be required to study whether there is an existence of individual guilty or responsibility for crimes committed by persons in Somali society.
Somali tribal laws or customary laws (Xeer) deal with collective responsibilities, not individual accountability. An individual’s wrong-doing is collectively shared by the entire clan in terms of responsibility. The wrong-doer escapes individual responsibility as a member of the collective tribal system. The crime committed by one member is considered as a crime perpetuated by the entire clan family. Consequently, every Somali leader, even a dictator or an abuser in government belongs to that same tribal system that is designed to protect him or her from accountability for wrong-doing.
Based on the native customary laws of this society, the whole exercise for installing a functioning Somali state would continue to be a joke, until that time that all Somalis agree upon guiding principles on inserting individual responsibility into administration of justice, that everyone, alone, is individually responsible for his/her actions – no collective clan responsibilities.
PS. An incident took place in North Galkayo sometime ago. Two students from Southern part of Galkayo were having a good time in Northern part of the city.. They wer4 spotted by a group of men there. suspicious, these men asked the students to identify themselves in terms of their clan names. These students were smart not to identify themselves except in a police station. At police station, they identified themselves in front of the Puntland police commander. The police station instantly became a target of mob seige to take the two students by force from the police custody. Luckily, the school boys were rescued that way. What crime did these boys commit to warant this personal danger? Tribal collective responsibility.
Mark Buchanan is a physicist and science writer based in Europe. June 10, 2021
In April 2020, the Defense Department released videos recorded by infrared cameras on U.S. Navy aircraft that documented the planes’ encounters with a variety of “unidentified aerial phenomena.” Pilots reported seeing objects flying across the sky at hypersonic speeds and changing direction almost instantaneously, capabilities far beyond that of any known aircraft. Support our journalism. Subscribe today.
What were the pilots seeing? Bizarre atmospheric phenomena? Alien spacecraft? Something else? Several branches of the government have been investigating the events, motivated in part by concern that adversaries such as Russia or China might have made some spectacular technological advance, and later this month, the government plans to publish a report revealing what they know. Reportedly, the government will say there’s no proof of extraterrestrial activity, but that the incidents remain unexplained.
Chances are, though, that we should all be grateful that we don’t yet have any evidence of contact with alien civilizations. Attempting to communicate with extraterrestrials, if they do exist, could be extremely dangerous for us. We need to figure out whether it’s wise — or safe — and how to handle such attempts in an organized manner.Story continues below advertisementhttps://6b1937c3389fdfe97bdf148c9b8a80bd.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html
Some scientific circles have already been debating questions around whether to try to contact other civilizations. It’s a topic of profound importance for the entire planet. For 60 years, scientists have been searching with radio telescopes, listening in for possible signals coming from other civilizations on planets orbiting distant stars. These efforts have largely been organized by the SETI institute in California — the acronym stands for Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence — and so far, they’ve had no success. Getting impatient, some other scientists are now pushing for a more active program — METI, for Messaging ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence — that wouldn’t just listen, but actually send out powerful messages toward other stars, seeking to make contact.
The search for aliens has reached a stage of technological sophistication and associated risk that it needs strict regulation at national and international levels. Without oversight, even one person — with access to powerful transmitting technology — could take actions affecting the future of the entire planet.
That’s because any aliens we ultimately encounter will likely be far more technologically advanced than we are, for a simple reason: Most stars in our galaxy are much older than the sun. If civilizations arise fairly frequently on some planets, then there ought to be many civilizations in our galaxy millions of years more advanced than our own. Many of these would likely have taken significant steps to begin exploring and possibly colonizing the galaxy.Story continues below advertisementnull
Hence, it’s a profound mystery — known as the Fermi Paradox, after the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi — why we haven’t yet seen any such aliens. Many resolutions of the paradox have been proposed, among them the suggestion that all civilizations, once reaching sufficient technological capacity, eventually destroy themselves. Or perhaps aliens are so alien and unlike humans that we simply cannot interact with them.
More alarming is the possibility that alien civilizations are remaining out of contact because they know something: that sending out signals is catastrophically risky. Our history on Earth has given us many examples of what can happen when civilizations with unequal technology meet — generally, the technologically more advanced has destroyed or enslaved the other. A cosmic version of this reality might have convinced many alien civilizations to remain silent. Exposing yourself is an invitation to be preyed upon and devoured.
I’ve written about METI in the past, suggesting such activity takes a huge risk for very little gain. But these concerns don’t convince supporters of trying it, who have some counterarguments. Douglas Vakoch of METI International argues that it’s unrealistic to worry about the danger of an alien invasion. We have, after all, been sending radio and television emissions into space for a century, and a civilization far more advanced than our own will probably have already detected these. If they wanted to invade, they already would have.Story continues below advertisementnull
He also argues that, in assessing risks, it’s important not only to consider the risk coming from taking an action, but also from not taking that action. Our world faces a number of potentially existential threats, including global warming and destabilization of the environment, and it’s possible that far more advanced civilizations may have already faced these issues and found solutions. If we don’t send out signals, Vakosh writes, we risk “missing guidance that could enhance our own civilization’s sustainability.” It’s also conceivable, he suggests, that we’re making a spectacular misjudgment — and some super-advanced alien civilization may attack us precisely because we haven’t reached out.
For obvious reasons, much of the thinking about these issues has to be rather speculative. The best way forward, perhaps, is to broaden the discussion. If all of humanity is exposed to the possible consequences trying to contact alien civilizations, then more people should be involved in making decisions about what is wise and what isn’t. It shouldn’t be left to a handful of radio astronomers.
One vocal critic of the idea of reaching out to aliens proactively — astronomer John Gertz of SETI — has developed proposals to move toward more inclusive public consideration of these activities. What we need, he suggests, are laws and international treaties to govern more explicit contact attempts. Without prior broad agreement from some globally representative body, Gertz says, contacting extraterrestrials should be considered “as the reckless endangerment of all mankind, and be absolutely proscribed with criminal consequences, presumably as exercised at the national level, or administered through the International Court of Justice in The Hague.”Story continues below advertisementnull
Currently, no such prohibitions exist. Some informal protocols for interacting with alien civilizations have been adopted by researchers involved in SETI, but these are far from legally binding governmental regulations. That’s mostly because, up to now, talking about meeting or contacting aliens has seemed widely speculative — if not a little deranged — despite the apparent scientific plausibility of such an event.
It’s not easy to weigh the pros and cons of activities around which so much remains unknown. We don’t know if there are any aliens. They might be friendly. They might not be. Given the potential risks involved with trying to make contact, perhaps it would be safer and wiser to just wait — we can always reach out later, and meanwhile, our abilities to do passive listening are rapidly growing more powerful.
In 2015, SETI launched a new 10-year program called Breakthrough Listen, funded by a $100 million donation from Israeli-Russian billionaire Yuri Milner. As a result, SETI is now recording more signals than ever before, over a frequency range some tenfold larger, and bringing more computational power to bear on analyzing the recorded signals. It’s impossible to know how close or far from making a discovery we may be, but Gertz estimates that our chances are at least 100 times greater than they used to be.Story continues below advertisementnull
The search is also benefiting from astronomers’ knowledge of exoplanets — planets in orbit around stars other than the sun. Since the first exoplanet was found in 1992, we’ve identified nearly 5,000 more, and the rate of discovery is accelerating. Each one give SETI researchers new promising targets to scrutinize.
Personally, all of this makes me dead-set against any experimentation with attempting to contact other civilizations. Why take cosmic risks when we may have a far safer pathway to discovering them, if they’re out there? Of course, even listening comes with some potentially fraught governance issues also: If and when someone really identifies an alien signal, we’ll need to decide if we should reply — and if so, how. Surely such an act — putting all of humanity at risk — ought to be the result of some collective decision. But there’s no mechanism to encourage that now. Any individual or nation could take the human response into their own hands.
Both paths — listening for aliens or trying to call them — have reached the stage where they require broader public discussion, with an eye to developing sensible regulation. That’s going to take the efforts of leaders from many nations, presumably coordinated through the United Nations or some similar international body. It should happen now. Or soon. Before it’s too late.
Could you imagine the Government of the United States of America 🇺🇸 breaking diplomatic ties with the Government of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland (Great Britain)? Could they do it successfully? It is the same thing Somalia trying to sever relationships with Djibouti, Kenya or Ethiopia. These relationships have been developing over many centuries in a multi-dimensional fashion, and most importantly, between peoples of these nations. Nairobi is now the irreplaceable Somali business and travel hub. An amateur and naive politician like Farmajo couldn’t simply appear in the scene and try blindly to do away the historically cemented relations without doing much harm to Somalia’s vital national interests and economic havoc in the entire region.
Even a Somali camel man grazing his herds in the country knows full well that cutting ties with Kenya isn’t only practical, but also infeasible and wrong, for he is, at least, aware of his relatives in refugee camps in Kenya. With today’s globalization, he is in constant communication with his kinship in Dhadhaab Refugee Camp, not to talk about others in all urban centres of Kenya.
This is not to say nice things about Kenyan Authorities – they share much of the blame in worsening relationships with Somalia. But, the unwise experiment in this diplomatic fiasco hurt not only many lives and livelihoods, but also did great damage to the national economies of both countries. The losses could be in the billions of dollars. I wonder if any lessons learned from this childish and futile exercise.
Warsame Policy & Media Network (WAPMEN) 
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