Africa
By MOHAMMED IBRAHIM
Published: September 10, 2012
MOGADISHU, Somalia — Hassan Sheik Mohamud, a moderate political activist
and academic, took on one of the world’s most challenging political
posts on Monday after members of Somalia’s newly created Parliament
elected him the country’s next president.
Mr. Mohamud’s election, held in a highly fortified police academy, was
heralded as a significant step forward for a country that has endured
more than two decades of war and political instability. He will head a
fledgling government that replaces the internationally backed
transitional administration that had been trying to get Somalia back on
its feet.
“I hope that the problems of Somalia will come to an end and Somalia
will now turn a new page and that page will be written with good history
rather than bad history,” Mr. Mohamud, 56, said after his victory,
which was marked by celebratory gunfire across the capital from
residents hopeful that he will address the country’s brutal violence,
famine and dire poverty.
Mr. Mohamud, chairman of the Peace and Development Party, came in second
out of 22 candidates in the first round of voting and then defeated
Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed, who is the president of the departing
transitional federal government, 190 to 79, in a head-to-head runoff.
Mogadishu, once a crumbling, war-torn capital, has shown tentative signs
of bouncing back, with reconstructed hospitals, shops and homes. The
Shabab, a militant group, has withdrawn from the city but continues to
hold onto the port town of Kismayo.
Mr. Mohamud, who is from the town of Jalalaqsi in central Somalia, is a
political neophyte but has long worked as a community activist for
various nongovernmental organizations in Somalia, including the Center
of Research and Dialogue, the International Peace Building Alliance and
Unicef. He is expected to name a prime minister, who will form a council
of ministers to begin running the long-broken nation.
Augustine P. Mahiga, a Tanzanian diplomat who has been the United
Nations special Somalia representative of the secretary general for the
past two years, said in a blog post
on the eve of the voting that the new leader’s election would mark “one
of the most important dates in the history of Somali politics.” He
expressed high confidence in the legislative arm of Somalia’s
government, saying its members were “capable of delivering a new Somalia
in the next four years.”
But the country’s challenges are many, and not everybody was confident
that the new leadership would turn Somalia around.
J. Peter Pham, director of the Michael S. Ansari Africa Center at the
Atlantic Council in Washington, sounded glum. “There is perhaps no
better illustration of the hope springing eternal, or delusion,” he
said, “than the notion that the imposition from above of yet another
interim regime pretending to be the government of Somalia — in this
case, the 15th or 16th such entity, depending on how one counts them,
since 1991 — will make one iota of difference to the tragedy of the
world’s most spectacularly failed state or the heartbreaking suffering
of its people.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: September 10, 2012
An earlier version of a Web summary with this article misstated the type of government that Hassan Sheik Mohamud's is replacing. It is the internationally backed transitional administration, not the traditional administration.
Correction: September 10, 2012
An earlier version of a Web summary with this article misstated the type of government that Hassan Sheik Mohamud's is replacing. It is the internationally backed transitional administration, not the traditional administration.
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