MOGADISHU (dpa) – With Osama bin Laden yet to be found in Afghanistan and the United States determined to find out where he might seek shelter, increasingly the focus is on Somalia.
This is a country battered by a decade of civil war, whose fledgling government controls only a portion of the capital, a land that has been virtually a no-go zone for foreigners since 1995.What better hideout for a terrorist?But throughout this city, Somalis deny they would harbour the world’s most wanted man and urge the U.S. not to launch attacks on their already war-weary country.“The Somali people are not the people to hide terrorists,” said Mogadishu’s police chief, Abdi Hassan Awaale, a member of the government’s recently established anti-terrorism task force. “When they see foreigners, they get curious.”But if the official comments from Washington in recent weeks are any indication, Somalis may wish to brace themselves for some sort of U.S. intervention in 2002.Somalia’s chaos makes the country “ripe for misuse,” U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said in an interview with the Washington Post.“That’s why we’re really looking at Somalia – not to go after Somalia as a nation or a government, but to be especially sensitive to the fact where Somalia could be a place where people suddenly find haven,” he said.“The possibility of there being terrorist cells in Somalia is real,” Powell’s Africa deputy, Walter Kansteiner, said recently in Johannesburg. He said a Somali group, Al Ittihad Al Islamiya (Islamic Unity) has been connected to al-Qaeda and added, “We’re looking to close off the connection.”The U.S. deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz said observers are mentioning Somalia as a possible target “for obvious reasons. It’s a country virtually without a government, a country that has a certain al-Qaeda presence already”.U.S. officials – possibly intelligence operatives – have reportedly travelled to Hargeisa in the north and Baidoa in the south to find out what local authorities know about the alleged terrorist presence.Kenya had been asked to provide a launching pad to Somalia for special forces from the U.K., according to British news reports. And Somali media claim that U.S. warships have been sighted patrolling the coast.Whether there is already a significant terrorist presence in Somalia remains in doubt. U.S. officials found no evidence of Al Qaeda training camps or other targets requiring a major military response, according to a recent report in the Wall Street Journal.Britain’s Daily Telegraph quoted military officials as describing any al-Qaeda presence in Somalia as “relatively small and unsophisticated”.Diplomats in the region say the Somali people may be far less hospitable toward al-Qaeda than might be expected of a uniformly Moslem country.The lure of a $25 million reward for bin Laden would be too great, says a Western diplomat. “The only reason he’d go (to Somalia) is if he had absolutely nowhere else to go. He’d be sold out in five minutes.”
