Thursday, April 22, 2004
Somali Muslim clerics protest Christian conversions
Reuters Mogadishu, April 21
Islamic clerics have accused Western aid workers of trying to convert children in a southern Somali town to Christianity, an initiative they say risks adding religious strife to the country's many problems.
The Umbrella Group of Religious Teachers, an association of conservative clerics, said people in southern Merca town took offence at Western aid packages distributed to schools that contained gifts commemorating the Christian Easter festival.
"If these groups don't stop, the Somalia people have a right to jihad (struggle)," the politically influential group based in the capital Mogadishu said in a statement issued on Tuesday.
The condemnation is a potentially important development for Western aid workers in southern Somalia, the most dangerous region of the overwhelmingly Muslim nation of seven million.
Few international aid workers are based permanently in the Horn of Africa country, fearing kidnap by factions competing for power in a country that collapsed into anarchy 13 years ago.
Somalis adhere to a form of Islam that is generally more relaxed than the austere brand practiced in the Gulf.
But conservative clerics trained in Saudi Arabia have gained ground politically in the past decade, often by operating Islamic courts that provide the only universally accepted form of justice in a fragmented and traumatised society.
"Church non-governmental groups are 'Christianising' our children," Mogadishu cleric Sheikh Nur Barud said in a media briefing on the situation in Merca, a port 100 km (60 miles) to the south that has a history of militant Islamist violence.
He said the gifts included Christian crosses, Bibles and pictures bearing Christian slogans like 'Smile and Christ will love you' and 'Christ is the saviour of the world'.
Swiss aid workers, long prominent among the few Western relief groups in Merca, denied trying to convert anyone.
Magda Frei, a senior Swiss aid worker, told a radio station relief groups had handed out 360 sealed packages of gifts from donors in Germany, Finland, the Netherlands, France and the United States to more than 3,000 students in 11 Merca schools.
She said children cheered when they found entertainment and reading material in the parcels. She said there were no Bibles.
Some Muslim preachers in Merca dismissed the Mogadishu clerics' complaint as religious fanaticism.
"I helped distribute the packages and I saw what was inside -- useful moral and educational items," said Sayid Sheikh Aba Ali Maye, headmaster of Merca's Abu Baker Sadiiq high school.
The town has a history of violence involving aid workers. In February 2002, Verena Karrer, a 70-year-old Swiss humanitarian worker, was shot dead by unidentified gunmen. The United Nations evacuated two UN security officers from Merca in September 2000 after they were attacked by armed Islamic fundamentalists.
© Hindustan Times Ltd. 2004.