Wednesday, March 4, 2009

News Analysis: Islamic Sharia law, panacea for Somalia's woes?

The Somali government, led by the moderate Islamist President Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, has announced this week it would implement the Islamic Sharia law in the country after influential clerics and two major insurgent groups demanded it, but analysts said this may not be enough to appease the opposition Islamist groups bent on unseating the government.

Early in February, a group of prominent clerics met in the capital Mogadishu and issued several recommendations for the government including, among other things, the imposition of the Islamic Sharia law in Somalia and the withdrawal of African Union peacekeepers from the Horn of Africa country torn apart by nearly two decades of civil strife.

"We have not only issued these recommendations for the government but also met the President and asked him to implement Allah's Laws in the country which he accepted," Sheikh Ahmed Abdi Disow, deputy chairman of Somalia's Union of Islamic Scholars, told Xinhua.

The implementation of the Islamic Sharia law is one of the core demands of the armed Islamist groups in Somalia including even the current President's Islamic Courts Union which briefly ruled much of southern and central Somalia in the latter half of 2006 before the movement was driven by allied Ethiopian troops and former Somali government led by Abdulahi Yusuf Ahmed.

"Sharia is not new to the Somali government as it is recognized as the bases for all legislation by the current transitional national charter and the president is only articulating that law when he said that the Sharia law will be implemented in Somalia," presidential spokesman Abdullahi Qadar told Xinhua.

Opposition insurgent groups said the current Somali government is no different from the previous government and does not implement Sharia law in the country.

Muqtar Hersi, an independent Islamic scholar in Mogadishu, said different groups in Somalia advocate different version of the Islamic law: moderate or strict and it seems that the issue of Sharia is far from being resolved.

"With the current Somali government led by the moderate Islamists and the influential Islamic scholars being mainly moderates, it looks the kind of Sharia advanced by the government and the scholars is quite different from that of the armed groups," Hirsi told Xinhua.

Hersi said the recent announcement by the Somali government that it was willing to implement Sharia in the country is far from appeasing the radical groups who demand their version of strict Islamic law be imposed in Somalia, a country of mainly moderate Sunni Muslims.

The opposition groups, such as the hard-line Al-Shabaab movement which already imposes its version of strict Islamic law in the vast areas of south Somalia and the newly formed coalition of insurgent groups known as Hezbul Islam (Islamic Party), maintain that since the current government law is based on the secular charter and includes members of the previous government, it is not the right institution to implement Sharia.

"I do not understand that why we flighted the previous government when we say this one implements Sharia and the other one did not? Both are the same with only a change at the top," Sheikh Muse Arale, spokesman for Hezbul Islam told Xinhua. "The fight will continue as long as true Islamic State is not established in Somalia."

SOURCE: Xinhua

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