A Somali politician living in Berlin has a simple plan for his country: He wants German construction aid to build a small harbor complex in Somalia’s Galmudug region that he says could help stimulate the local economy and lift people out of poverty. With civil war, Islamist gunmen and pirates, however, that is easier said than done.
Mohamed Sahal Gerlach, like about one-fifth of all Somalis, lives abroad. He’s a Deputy Minister of Trade for Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government, but he serves from a distance, without a salary. In fact, he has lived in Berlin since the 1970s.
“That was my best time,” he says of Somalia’s heady postcolonial days, when he was a student at Berlin’s Free University. “We’d party all night and then come to class, and you know …,” he jokingly imitates falling asleep. “But I regret nothing.”
He’s a tall man with a white-flecked mustache and a pot belly, an earnest and sometimes angry expression, but a tendency to be frank and direct. He wears khaki slacks and a blazer without a tie. He’d like to help his nation, and he has a business plan to build up central Somalia so people would no longer go hungry.
“There is no reason for people to starve in my country,” he says, sitting in a gloomy African-expat café one late-summer day in Berlin. “It should be illegal.”
Sahal’s ancestral home is the Galmudug region of central Somalia, between Puntland to the north and the Islamist-dominated regions around Mogadishu to the south. “It is the narrowest part of Somalia,” he says. “One clan controls most of it, from east to west. It is relatively stable. And if we could build a small harbor complex, just a pier where ships and dhows could bring goods to the beach — we could connect Ethiopia to the ocean. It would have a number of good effects.”
There must be dozens of Somalis around the world with similar dreams. The idea itself is heartbreakingly simple, but the obstacles are a thumbnail of the Somali tragedy.
Sahal has brought his idea to a member of the German parliament. He wants German construction aid — not cash, but help from German companies with the expertise and machines to build a pier. Frank Heinrich, a lawmaker with Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats, who works on the committee for human rights and humanitarian aid, has asked for more detailed information from Sahal.
“It’s on my radar screen,” he says, “and I’m still talking to my colleagues about what we can do about the catastrophe in Somalia. But at the moment,” with Sahal’s idea, “I have more questions than answers.”
Categories: Human Rights, Somalia