MOGADISHU (Reuters) – Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys returned to Somalia on Thursday in his first known trip back to the Horn of Africa nation since being ousted two years ago, an Islamist group said.

Aweys, who is on the U.S. list of terrorism suspects for alleged links to al Qaeda, has been an important opposition lightening rod and is believed to have much {www:influence} over some of the Islamist insurgents battling the Somali government.

“(Aweys) will be staying with us, and we shall be having discussions on the current political situation in Somalia,” said Omar Abubukar, leader of Hizbul Islam.

Aweys landed at a small airstrip 50 km (30 miles) from the capital Mogadishu, witnesses said. Abubukar did not say how long Aweys would stay in Somalia. Hizbul Islam is an umbrella group of four organisations including the one that Aweys heads.

Government officials were not immediately available for comment.

Aweys — who has been living in Eritrea — denies any terrorism links. The cleric heads the Asmara-based Alliance for the Re-Liberation (ARS) of Somalia, which he took over from current Somali president, Sheikh Sharif Ahmed.

Aweys and Ahmed had worked alongside one another in the Islamic Courts Union that ruled Somalia’s capital and much of the south before being forced out by Ethiopia in late 2006.

The two {www:split} after Ahmed, a {www:moderate} Islamist, went to Djibouti for U.N.-backed talks that saw him elected president.

Islamist-led rebels have continued to {www:battle} the interim government, waging hit-and-run attacks on Somali troops and African Union (AU) peacekeepers in fighting that has displaced one million people and killed thousands.

Donors are meeting in Brussels on Thursday to pledge funds to boost Somali forces and say more than $250 million is needed over the next year to improve {www:security} in a state that has been wrecked by civil conflict since 1991. (Writing by Jack Kimball)

SAN DIEGO (San Diego Union-Tribune) – Police detectives on Wednesday arrested a 24-year-old man as a {www:suspect} in an attack Saturday on a 38-year-old woman in Linda Vista.

Detectives from the sex-crimes unit arrested Mulugeta Hagos, an {www:immigrant} from Ethiopia, as he was walking on Fulton Street near Hyatt Street in Linda Vista, said police spokeswoman Monica Muñoz.

Earlier Wednesday, Hagos was identified as the suspect in the assault, Munoz said.

The incident occurred about 6:15 a.m. Saturday as the woman was walking toward a bus bench on Linda Vista Road near Fulton Street. A man got out of his car, grabbed her from behind, aimed a pistol at her head and tried to force her into the vehicle, Muñoz said.

When the woman fought back, the attacker struck her at least once on the head with the gun, Muñoz said. The gun went off during the struggle, but the woman wasn’t hit.

Hagos will be booked into central jail on suspicion of attempted sexual assault, assault with a deadly {www:weapon} and kidnapping for sexual assault, Muñoz said.

The woman was treated for injuries at a hospital Saturday and released.

The Ethiopian Student Association at West Virginia State University will host its third annual “Taste of Ethiopia” from 5 to 8 p.m. Sunday in the Student Union Grand Hall.

Community will have the opportunity to taste injera (Ethiopian bread), doro wat (chicken stew), siga wat (beef stew), teqele gomen (cabbage) and other dishes, while enjoying fashion, music and other elements of Ethiopian culture.

Proceeds from the dinner will assist university students in Ethiopia, and allow the ESA to continue supporting two orphan children in their homeland. This is the ESA’s major fundraising event for the year.

Admission is $15 for adults, $5 for children and $10 for students.

– WV Gazette

By Ishaan Tharoor | Time Magazine

Amid the current media frenzy about Somali pirates, it’s hard not to imagine them as characters in some dystopian Horn of Africa version of Waterworld. We see wily corsairs in ragged clothing swarming out of their elusive mother ships, chewing narcotic khat while thumbing GPS phones and grappling hooks. They are not desperate bandits, experts say, rather savvy opportunists in the most lawless corner of the planet. But the pirates have never been the only ones exploiting the vulnerabilities of this troubled failed state — and are, in part, a product of the rest of the world’s neglect.

Ever since a civil war brought down Somalia’s last functional government in 1991, the country’s 3,330 km (2,000 miles) of coastline — the longest in continental Africa — has been pillaged by foreign vessels. A United Nations report in 2006 said that, in the absence of the country’s at one time serviceable coastguard, Somali waters have become the site of an international “free for all,” with fishing fleets from around the world illegally plundering Somali stocks and freezing out the country’s own rudimentarily-equipped fishermen. According to another U.N. report, an estimated $300 million worth of seafood is stolen from the country’s coastline each year. “In any context,” says Gustavo Carvalho, a London-based researcher with Global Witness, an environmental NGO, “that is a staggering sum.”

In the face of this, impoverished Somalis living by the sea have been forced over the years to defend their own fishing expeditions out of ports such as Eyl, Kismayo and Harardhere — all now considered to be pirate dens. Somali fishermen, whose industry was always small-scale, lacked the advanced boats and technologies of their interloping competitors, and also complained of being shot at by foreign fishermen with water cannons and firearms. “The first pirate gangs emerged in the ’90s to protect against foreign trawlers,” says Peter Lehr, lecturer in terrorism studies at Scotland’s University of St. Andrews and editor of Violence at Sea: Piracy in the Age of Global Terrorism. The names of existing pirate fleets, such as the National Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia or Somali Marines, are testament to the pirates’ initial motivations.

The waters they sought to protect, says Lehr, were “an El Dorado for fishing fleets of many nations.” A 2006 study published in the journal Science predicted that the current rate of commercial fishing would virtually empty the world’s oceanic stocks by 2050. Yet, Somalia’s seas still offer a particularly fertile patch for tuna, sardines and mackerel, and other lucrative species of seafood, including lobsters and sharks. In other parts of the Indian Ocean region, such as the Persian Gulf, fishermen resort to dynamite and other extreme measures to pull in the kinds of catches that are still in abundance off the Horn of Africa.

High-seas trawlers from countries as far flung as South Korea, Japan and Spain have operated down the Somali coast, often illegally and without licenses, for the better part of two decades, the U.N. says. They often fly flags of convenience from sea-faring friendly nations like Belize and Bahrain, which further helps the ships skirt international regulations and evade censure from their home countries. Tsuma Charo of the Nairobi-based East African Seafarers Assistance Programme, which monitors Somali pirate attacks and liaises with the hostage takers and the captured crews, says “illegal trawling has fed the piracy problem.” In the early days of Somali piracy, those who seized trawlers without licenses could count on a quick ransom payment, since the boat owners and companies backing those vessels didn’t want to draw attention to their violation of international maritime law. This, Charo reckons, allowed the pirates to build up their tactical networks and whetted their appetite for bigger spoils.

Beyond illegal fishing, foreign ships have also long been accused by local fishermen of dumping toxic and nuclear waste off Somalia’s shores. A 2005 United Nations Environmental Program report cited uranium radioactive and other hazardous deposits leading to a rash of respiratory ailments and skin diseases breaking out in villages along the Somali coast. According to the U.N., at the time of the report, it cost $2.50 per ton for a European company to dump these types of materials off the Horn of Africa, as opposed to $250 per ton to dispose of them cleanly in Europe.

Monitoring and combating any of these misdeeds is next to impossible — Somalia’s current government can barely find its feet in the wake of the 2006 U.S.-backed Ethiopian invasion. And many Somalis, along with outside observers, suspect local officials in Mogadishu and in ports in semi-autonomous Puntland further north of accepting bribes from foreign fishermen as well as from pirate elders. U.N. monitors in 2005 and 2006 suggested an embargo on fish taken from Somali waters, but their proposals were shot down by members of the Security Council.

In the meantime, Somali piracy has metastasized into the country’s only boom industry. Most of the pirates, observers say, are not former fishermen, but just poor folk seeking their fortune. Right now, they hold 18 cargo ships and some 300 sailors hostage — the work of a sophisticated and well-funded operation. A few pirates have offered testimony to the international press — a headline in Thursday’s Times of London read, “They stole our lobsters: A Somali pirate tells his side of the story” — but Lehr and other Somali experts express their doubts. “Nowadays,” Lehr says, “this sort of thing is just a cheap excuse.” The legacy of nearly twenty years of inaction and abuse, though, is far more costly.