Friday, July 18, 2003

Lately Arthur Silber has had quite a bit to say on US foreign policy, and particularly Iraq. I recommend reading all of his recent weblog posts. 2:58:42 PM    comment () This was posted to a mailing list I subscribe to: Folks, This is an email from a Kenyan who lives in Canada. Read on.. Chifu wrote: al-Barakaat, The Untold Saga An Investigative Piece by Onyango Oloo in Montreal, July 17, 2003 Cab drivers can be mobile encyclopedias and most of the ones I have encountered are very mentally agile. This last Sunday I found out more about an African business empire while ensconced in the back seat of a taxi moving between the Runnymede/Bloor and the Queensway/Windmere in Toronto's west end. The driver was a young Somali looking man. I say Somali looking because I have learned to my cost, never to jump into conclusions about where people were from based on how they looked. I almost got thrown out of a taxi several years ago when I gleefully fingered my hired chauffeur as an Ethiopian. I only found that I was talking to an irate, thoroughly insulted Eritrean when the vehicle screeched to a halt as they offended driver demanded, "What did you call me?!" So this time around, I decided to play it safe. After the greetings and the normal pleasantries, I offered that I was from Kenya and when he could not speak a word of Kiswahili, I ventured tentatively whether he was a Somali. He answered in the affirmative; he was from Mogadishu; left his place of birth in 1988 and had spent the intervening years in the UK and other parts of Europe before relocating to Ontario. Soon we were in animated chitchat. Somehow we started talking about Al Barakat. I may have asked something about what happened to one of the Ottawa based directors of this operation who at point was being tagged as one of the Al Qaeda money bags in Canada. The taxi driver- let's call him Abdi told me a story that never made it on CNN or CBC. He informed me that he made about $500 every week ( yes, that is in our Canadian pesos, you puffed up American dwellers with your mighty Yankee dollars) doing his driving gig. For the last six years he told me, he had been putting all his money in an Al Barakat account where he had transferred all his money after transferring all his funds from the mainstream banking institutions like the Royal, TD Canada Trust, Bank of Montreal and CIBC. At its peak, he had about $50,000 locked away in Al Barakat. This money helped support his family and was the reservoir he hoped to draw upon later on in life. Abdi informed me that he was not the only one. Tens of thousands, if not hundreds had all followed suit and taken their money out of Western financial institutions into Al Barakat. He told me of dozens of Somali tycoons investing upwards of millions of dollars in the operation. Then one day, just like that, all those savings and funds were gone just like that. Abdi says he lost $50, 000. He says he knows of people who lost $100 million. I can not vouch for the accuracy of these figures except to underscore that the financial loss was devastating. As he dropped me off at my destination, Abdi hinted darkly that even though he was a member of the same clan as American marine turned Mogadishu war lord Hussein Aideed, he would personally volunteer to shoot the war lord dead for the kind of devastation he had caused to countless Somali families around the world. Surprised, I inquired what Aideed Jr. had to do with this. Abdi told me that it was Hussein who suggested to the Americans that al- Barakat may have be linked to the feared terror network as a conduit for transferring Al Qaeda funds around the world. It was a bit bizarre to hear that the son of the man credited for handing the Americans one of their most humiliating defeats could be an accomplice in a paralyzing action against so many of his compatriots. But the taxi driver insisted that the former Marine blathered on to the Yankees about how his father used to hang out with a certain Saudi born millionaire contractor turned ascetic cave-dweller. Over the next five of six hours, as I traveled back to Quebec, my head swam with a zillion notions about al-Barakat, Al Qaeda and the disengagement of Third World people from the global financial system. Initially my own knowledge about al-Barakat was quite vague, limited to the gleanings from the newspaper headlines and sound bites from prime time news to the snatches of conversations from Somali friends and associates in and around Toronto. At first, I thought that al-Barakat was just a large hawala clearing house. For those not in the know, hawala is a system that many of you may have used without even realizing. I remember back in the early nineties many Kenyan immigrants, especially from Mombasa had a sure fire way of getting money from Canada to their folks back home. You would go to the house of this thirtysomething Swahili woman and tell her that you wanted to send say 150 dollars to your father in Kibokoni or Port Reitz, but that you wanted them to receive it in Kenyan shillings. You would give her the money over here in Canada and she would tell you to phone your people to go and pick up the chapaa from Mzee so and so. Since I personally never used the system, I am not sure if you paid a little fee or if the money you gave her was simply deposited in a Canadian bank account to be used by that home based mfanyibiashara whenever he happened to be in North America. The hawala system was based on trust and a network of people who knew each other. Most of the people I knew who involved with hawala were Waswahili, Wasomali or Wahindi, but of course the practice was quite widespread in the Middle East, the wider Muslim world, and the South Asian communities given the Indian origins (where it is called hundi), but the phenomenon. Of course after 9/11 hawala has been increasingly criminalized. (See the following links: http://www.interpol.int/Public/FinancialCrime/MoneyLaundering/h awala/default.asp http://freedom.orlingrabbe.com/lfetimes/hawala.htm http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=16102001-025648-5774r http://www.time.com/time/world/printout/0,8816,178227,00.html So I thought that Al Barakat had been shut down because it was seen as a sinister hawala operation. But the facts turned out to be much more complex than that. As is my wont before I write any digital essay, I do extensive research. And I found out a few things about al-Barakat. I found out that the key figure in al-Barakat was Sheikh Ahmed Ali Jima'ale who lived in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. A Somali national, Sheikh Jima'ale oversaw a multi-billion conglomerate that operated in 40 countries. The al- Barakat empire included banks, telecommunications companies, internet service providers, travel agencies and construction businesses. Al Barakat was Somalia's largest employer and in country pulverized by civil war, its only financial and communications lifeline. Every year, al-Barakat channeled at least $500 million into Somalia- remittances from the hundreds of thousands of Somalis living in the Gulf, Europe, North America and all over Africa. Abdi the taxi driver explained to me that al-Barakat had ensured that even the most humble camel herds boy had a cell-phone through which he could get confirmation of a money transfer from a relative abroad. The Somali Diaspora, a fiercely patriotic lot, despite the clan driven carnage of the long civil war spontaneously decided to support al-Barakat which they saw as one of their own. Perhaps, people like Abdi and others took very extreme measures by withdrawing totally from the mainstream Western financial system but there is no doubt that they were driven by more than a bit of economic nationalism in supporting a Somali and Muslim run financial operation that was deemed to be less exploitative and alienated from its clients. The Americans alleged that al -Barakat was a" quartermaster of terror" and a "pariah in the civilized world". They accused Sheikh Ahmed Ali Jima'ale of being close to Osama bin Laden and that he was a member of al-Itihaad al-Islamiya, dubbed a terrorist outfit by the United States. A former member of al-Itihaad, Hussein Ali Elmi came forward with claims that he and Sheikh Jima'ale had members of that organization in the 1980s. Sheikh Jima'ale denied all these accusations stating that he had never met Osama bin Laden and citing his solid business contacts in Europe that led for instance, to his close collaboration with the Irish telecommunications firm, Microcellular Systems whose parent InterWave is listed on the Nasdaq in rolling out al-Barakat's GSM mobile network in Somalia at low cost and getting interWave to assume all risks for the venture- something of a feat in one of the places considered among the most lawless on the entire planet. There was a time when the United Nations used to pay its Somali staff through al-Barakat and even used it to transfer money into Somalia- hardly the sort of thing you would expect the world's largest multilateral network to do with a presumably shady terrorist linked hawala outfit. Nevertheless, on November 7, 2001, the Washington based Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism included the following enterprises as falling under President Bush's Executive Order 13224 blocking the assets of organizations and individuals with links to terrorism: al-Barakaat al-Barakaat Bank al-Barakat Bank of Somalia al-Barakat Finance Group al-Barakat Global Telecommunications al-Barakat Group of Companies Somalia Limited al-Barakat International(aka Baraco Co.) al-Barakat Investments al-Barakat Wiring Service Barakaat Boston Barakaat Construction Company Barakaat Enterprise Barakaat Group of Companies Barakaat International Barakaat International Foundation Barakaat North America , Inc. Barakaat Red Sea Telecommunications Barakat Bank and Remittances Barakat Computer Consulting Group(BCG) Barakat Global Telephone Company Barakat International Companies(BICO) Barakat Post Express(BPE) Barakat Refreshment Company Barakat Wire Transfer Company Barakat Telecommunications Company Limited(BTELCO) Red Sea Barakat Company Limited Somali Internet Company Somali Network AB In addition, several Somali figures, including Sheikh Ahmed Nur Ali Jima'ale had their personal assets seized and frozen. On Sunday, November 13th, Arabic News.Com quoted Somali President Abdul Qasem Salad Hassan as stating that al-Barakaat was innocent of accusations linking it to al-Qaida. He further denied rumours of al-Qaida's training camps in Somalia. Apart from the direct and heavy hits the investors of these al-Barakaat ventures took, the impact was far greater among ordinary Somalis. I have already cited the testimony of "Abdi" the Toronto taxi driver who lost the $50,000 he had toiled for six years in saving. On the first anniversary of the September 11 attacks, the London based Guardian newspaper published an account from Adam Hassan, a Somali refugee worker in London who fled the civil war in the east African country. Here is an excerpt from his piece: " As a Muslim and a human being, I cannot condone what happened in America. There is no doubt that it was a horrific attack. There is no doubt also that the implications from that attack have had long lasting ramifications for people everywhere. It affected my Somali community because some Somalis have been associated with the attack. There was a bank used by Somalis to send remittances to their relatives and loved ones, mainly for maintenance of people who have nothing. That bank was closed down because of accusations it was involved with transferring money for al-Qaida. I was among many Somalis- hundreds of thousands of Somalis in the Diaspora-who used the bank to transfer money. For the first couple of months, the closure created confusion as money people sent through al-Barakat didn't go there, and I know people whose relatives are still waiting for that money. People have lost their savings because the money was frozen- it is still sitting somewhere. Imagine, a lot of people depended on that maintenance for their schooling, health, education, medication, their food, their rent- there are people who have been kicked out of rented houses, there are people who are bankrupt. For an already disrupted and dislocated people like the Somalis, on the breadline, the impact has to be enormous.. As far as I'm concerned, they had no evidence linking al-Barakat to al-Qaida. But there is no one in Somalia who can say: `Show us the evidence or leave the bank alone.' So it gets frozen. Bush doesn't care about Somalia, or whether tons of thousands of Somalis who worked for the bank lose their jobs or others die. All he cares about is him, and that is what is causing a lot resentment." Many people have echoed the sentiments expressed by Adam Hassan, especially the questions about the lack of evidence linking al-Barakat to al-Qaida. Was it just because the two organization's names are preceded with the al- prefix? A Somali born, Ottawa based Canadian citizen, Leiban Hussein was briefly incarcerated on suspicion of Al-Qaida ties based on his status as the Chairman of the now defunct al-Barakat North America Foundation. The charges against him were later dropped and he was cleared. To my mind, there is an element of terrorist link with the al-Barakat story, but not from a source you would think of straight away. To my mind, there has been a clear case of terrorist activity involved in the al-Barakat case. But this is terrorism AGAINST al-Barakat, against Somalis, against Africans and against Muslims. This terrorism is not coming from an obscure cave in Afghanistan. Rather it emanates from one of the shadowy federal buildings of the United States government. I charge the United States government with conducting state terrorism against legitimate African and Muslim owned businesses and their peaceful and law abiding owners. When some of us talk of imperialism, we are not just using tired stock phrases from yesteryear. Imperialism has a very specific meaning in political and economic terms. It means the unfettered rule of international finance capital. In our era, this has to qualified to emphasize that is dominated by American corporate interests trying to elbow everyone out of the way to claim global supremacy. Apart from the obvious and overt racist and vengeful act of shutting down the largest Somali owned company in the world as payback for the 1993 debacle in Mogadishu(which inspired the revisionist Black Hawk Down horror/action flick) one must see the move against al-Barakat in its very naked economic and financial manifestations. Surely, some corporate competitor would have loved to get their hands in that lucrative pie in supposedly devastated Somalia. On the 30th of April 2002, the BBC announced on its website that " a new Somali telecoms company has bought out al-Barakat... The new company, Hormud Telecom Somalia, has spent $ 2 million buying the equipment and premises of al-Barakat Telecommunications, said shareholder Abdikarim Ali Mohammed...The company said it had no links with al-Barakat, which had more than 40,000 subscribers..." Who owns Hormud? I am still trying to find out. What is even more galling is to witness the United States moves its massive might to crush a flourishing African business on the basis of racist innuendo and unproven hearsay is the blatant double standards. ENRON, by now a by word for corporate sleaze bilked billions from its clients and the American taxpayers. Yet most of its key figures like Ken Lay are walking around scot free, thanks to their election campaign contributions and personal and business ties with George Bush and company. For more on ENRON check out: http://multinationalmonitor.org/enron/enronindex.html http://www.ratical.org/corporations/mm10worst01.html http://www.corpwatch.org/issues/PII.jsp?topicid=145 http://www.thedailyenron.com/ http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/business/1998430 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/business/specials/ener gy/enron/ The al-Barakaat saga tells us several things. It underscores the reality of global capital and what it will do to stifle any burgeoning national bourgeoisie in the Third World seen to be inimical to pose a long term regional threat, no matter how minor. It illustrates the continuing demonization of all things Muslim by tarring it with terrorist links. It exposes the hypocrisy of the United States which sheds crocodile tears while decrying African poverty when it does not bat an eyelid to crush one of Africa's biggest employers and success stories. It is also a foretaste at the coming imperialist incursion in East Africa and the Horn of Africa region as the United States and her allies move in to safeguard their security, economic, ideological and geo-political strategic interests. As Kenyans we must stand in solidarity with our neighbours the Somalis who have such close cultural and historical ties with the Kenyan people- an entire region of our country is home to Kenyans from various Somali ethnic groups and clans. As Kenyans we must call on our government to bring forth the question of al-Barakaat at the continental African Union meetings, and the international UN and Non-Aligned Movement gatherings. The key demand is to unfreeze the assets of the al-Barakaat conglomerate and to share the results of any investigations linking al-Barakaat to al-Qaida, as well as supporting any legal actions taken by al-Barakaat and its supporters seeking judicial redress because the gross injustices they have suffered since the fall of 2001. And we should not rush to cheer the next time our government bans flights to Somalia. Onyango Oloo Montreal Thursday, July 17, 2003 --- End forwarded message --- 12:45:42 PM    comment () "Progressive Governance". It seems that Blair kinda likes the notion of military intervention against "failing states" everywhere. (Surprise, surprise.) I suppose if any state anywhere produces those, you know, negative externalities, the great leaders 'round the world are bound by moral laws... [LewRockwell.com Blog] 10:36:27 AM    comment () Too Old, or Too Criminal?. In the wake of yesterday's horrific car-on-pedestrian accident in Santa Monica, in which 86-year-old driver Russell Weller killed 10 people and injured a score more at a weekday farmer's market, debate has understandably focused on which regulations should or should not be considered to determine if people are too old to drive. But a friend of mine witnessed the prelude to and the beginning of the carnage, and suggests an alternative explanation to the "he was too old and stepped on the wrong pedal" thesis floated by the Santa Monica cops. Weller, according to my friend, was involved in another car accident just before the rampage, bumping into a Mercedes at a nearby intersection. From there, after coming to either a complete or near stop, he then tore off without talking to the other driver, swerving to the left around the Mercedes, jamming on the accelerator, and then crashing into produce tents and human bodies, according to this account. (The only other mention of the Mercedes I've seen was an eyewitness quote at SurfSantaMonica.com.) The investigation is ongoing, obviously. Meanwhile, some California legislators are talking of reviving Tom Hayden's failed 2000 proposal that would have required every driver over 75 to take a road test. [Hit & Run] I certainly don't know what happened--but I am reminded of a few cases where somebody shot at someone and then claimed it wasn't their fault because the gun "just went off." 10:07:31 AM    comment () A White House Smear. Did senior Bush officials blow the cover of a US intelligence officer working covertly in a field of vital importance to national security--and break the law--in order to strike at a Bush administration critic and intimidate others? It sure looks that way, if conservative journalist Bob Novak can be trusted. (link) Have you ever noticed that the cover-up gets politicians in more trouble than the original lie itself? [Al-Muhajabah's Islamic Blogs] Especially when the original lie was so unconvincing that nobody who didn't already want to believe it was fooled. 9:59:17 AM    comment ()

© Copyright 2006 Ken Hagler. Last update: 2/15/2006; 1:55:42 PM.