Somali journalists count the sacrifices

Thu 6 Sep 2007, 10:25 GMT

 By Andrew Cawthorne

NAIROBI, Sept 6 (Reuters) - His business partner has just been assassinated with a bomb. One of his star presenters was shot dead on the same day. And his offices still show the signs of a pounding by shells earlier in the year.

Ahmed Abdisalam Adan -- co-founder and manager of Somalia's influential HornAfrik media house -- could easily give up and go back to the safety of Canada tomorrow.

But instead, he's about to fly back to Mogadishu.

"Others will continue to be targeted or die, but have you ever seen a country develop without sacrifices?" the 47-year-old businessman and father-of-two said on a visit to Kenya. "I feel proud to be part of the process, however difficult it is."

Adan left his chosen exile in Canada in 1999 to found HornAfrik, hoping to use journalism and free speech as a means to find a way out of endemic war in the Horn of Africa nation.

With eight radio stations, a TV channel, a Web site, and 105 staff, HornAfrik is now the biggest media network in Somalia.

But have the sacrifices been worth it?

HornAfrik has lost five staff over the years to Somalia's never-ending violence. Others have been injured.

The media group has been periodically closed and constantly criticised -- by the Islamic Courts movement that ran Mogadishu for six months last year, then by the Ethiopian-backed interim Somali government that marched in at the New Year.

Seven shells slammed into its buildings during fighting between Ethiopian troops and Islamist rebels in April. Then two prominent HornAfrik figures died in targeted killings in August.

Popular talk show host Mahad Ahmed Elmi was shot four times in the head at close range reaching the door of his office for work one morning. Then Adan's close friend and fellow manager of HornAfrik, Ali Iman Sharmarke, was blown up in his car returning from Elmi's funeral.

"For the past eight years, not two days have passed without us talking," Adan said. "It is still beyond my imagination."

"NO TURNING BACK"

Adan's wife was in the car with Sharmarke when he died.

She did not get out, for fear of being picked off herself, but quickly reached her husband by phone before dawn in Toronto.

"I have no remorse about what we have achieved and are still trying to achieve. The large number of people touched by Ali's death has confirmed that to me," he said.

"We always knew it was going to be risky." The Aug. 11 murders of Sharmarke and Elmi sent shockwaves among colleagues. Used to being caught in random violence, Somali journalists have this year been increasingly targeted.

Seven have been killed in 2007. No one has faced justice. And militants on both sides of the conflict are variously blamed, depending on who you speak to.

A dozen or so journalists have fled Mogadishu in recent weeks. But many remain, courting extreme danger to report a conflict few foreign correspondents are now prepared, or allowed by their employers, to take the risk of seeing for themselves.

"There is no turning back, if for no other reason than to keep alive the memory of Ali and all who have died," Adan said, pledging that HornAfrik would not let up in its operations.

The only solution, he says, is peace. And for that, the government must reach out to its opponents. It should also re-consider a ban on weapons that has meant journalists going onto the streets unprotected by bodyguards, Adan argues.

"The government took away guns, but didn't replace them with security. You're at the mercy of a kid with a pistol," he said.

"But it is not only journalists. Most of the prominent civil society and business groups, have left. Anyone trying to do something meaningful is a target."

 wararkii Hore