Ciaran’s Peculier [sic] Blog

The BBC is reporting that the port of Marka or Merka has fallen to Islamic insurgents, specifically the criminal bandits known as Al-Shabab. Marka lies 90 kilometers south-west of Somalia’s capital Muqdishu, and is an important entry point for the food aid upon which so many Somalis depend for survival. The World Food Programme has promised to work with whoever is in charge in Marka, but so far overtures to Al-Shabab have gone unanswered. Al-Shabab is not known for its broad-mindedness. In those areas it has controlled it has routinely killed teachers and anyone it suspects of sympathy with the weak central government. These are also the people who stoned to death a mentally-retarded thirteen-year-old girl last week on a charge of adultery, after she had been brutally raped, possibly by Al-Shabab partisans. These were the people who drove around the port city of Kismaayo where the rape took place proclaiming their heinously unjust sentence from loud-speakers, although they did not allow members of the girl’s family to attend the “trial” or attend the barbarous execution. They have even refused requests to see the body.

Let no-one think that I’m on an anti-Islamic rant here. What happened in Kismaayo last week was a perversion of Islam. The girl who was executed had first gone to the police station with her aunt to report the rape, but had ended up being the criminal. As anyone who has any experience of law enforcement agencies in the UK or Ireland can testify, it is not just in Somalia that the innocent attending police staiions often find themselves transformed into the criminal.