Fourteen Somalis living in Britain have undergone training on dialogue facilitation. Over the past year, three prominent Somalis living in Britain, Osman Jama Ali, Dr Ahmed Sharif Abbas and Abdi Afrah Gure have built a team to work for reconciliation in the diaspora and in Somalia. Though ethnically, religiously and linguistically homogenous, Somalis have deep divisions among clans which have left the country without a government since 1991. Following a Somali IofC gathering in Sweden in 1994, Osman Jama Ali made a public apology for the self-interest which had motivated him as a government minister. After resigning as Deputy Prime Minister of the Transitional National Government in 2004, he and his colleagues began meeting weekly with IofC’s Agenda for Reconciliation team in London.
Last February, they decided to gather 30 senior UK-based Somalis from the main clan groupings. They achieved consensus on the reasons for the failure of the Somali state and of subsequent peace conferences, and on future priorities. Eleven attended a training programme at an IofC conference in Caux, Switzerland, in addition to a group nominated by the Somali Prime Minister. A prominent figure of one community apologised for its aggression towards another. Members of both communities recounted this breakthrough to the Speaker of the Somali Parliament in October at Greencoat Place. Over five weekends in November and December, 14 attended training sessions on dialogue facilitation led by Hope in the Cities.
Such training parallels the thinking of the UN on Somalia, and both Kofi Annan, the Secretary General, and his special representative to Somalia, François Fall, have received briefings. The vision is that this process will continue, with reconciliation meetings and more Somalis receiving training to facilitate dialogues between conflicting groups. They also hope to raise the money to produce the film Freedom (in Somali) and the booklet Which Way Somalia?
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