When the Sun ran a story saying that a council in London’s East End will investigate whether a Somali immigrant, Dahir Kadiye, scammed on his housing benefits, the point did not seem particularly newsworthy. That this was the same immigrant who had helped secure the release of Paul and Rachel Chandler after 388 days of being held hostage by pirates in Somalia — now that certainly strikes me as news.
Britain’s 300,000 or so Somalis are a particularly unpopular Muslim community. Somalis are often seen as a drain on the state. They form the hardest inner-city gangs. They mistreat their women. They chew the drug qat. Two of those who attempted to bomb London on 21 July 2005 were ethnic Somalis, and together with the Yemenis they are seen as shaping up to be a new generation of al-Qa’eda bombers. Only this month the Home Secretary, Theresa May, warned that British extremists ‘trained and hardened on the streets of Mogadishu’ might return to commit mass murder on London’s streets.
But what if the Somalis were, contrary to this picture, decent British citizens — perhaps even uncommonly good ones?
Last October, a boatload of pirates, an offshoot of a gang led by a ruthless godfather known as Afeweyne, or ‘Big Mouth’, hijacked the Chandlers’ yacht in the Indian Ocean. As the Somalis took the couple back to their lair on the wild shores north of Mogadishu, the crew of a Royal Navy ship patrolling the area — for whatever reason — did nothing. No attempts were made to liberate the couple, despite the fact that SAS teams are regularly deployed to the region.
For more than a year, Britain refused to negotiate with the pirates or respond to their ransom demands.
The Chandlers were not the only British hostages held in Somalia. Armed men seized British aid worker Murray Watson in southern Somalia in early 2008. I know Murray, and he’s a tough man. But forgotten by Britain — and now forgotten by the world — he’s been left to rot in captivity for nearly three years. At this point nobody knows whether he is even still alive.
Western nations including the USA, France, Canada and Australia have had citizens taken hostage in Somalia in recent years. But no country has done so little as Britain to free its people.
After their release from Somalia this week, Paul and Rachel flew to Nairobi, where they were put on show for the international press in front of the British High Commissioner’s residence. Watching this, a correspondent friend of mine observed, ‘What are they here for, since Britain did absolutely nothing for them?’ Meanwhile, back home in London, Leicester and Birmingham, British Somalis have campaigned for the Chandlers’ release since soon after they were snatched.
On Valentine’s Day of this year, about 1,000 British Somalis met at the Campden Centre in central London to launch a fundraising campaign called Somali UK Solidarity for Mr and Mrs Chandler. Knowing their countrymen, Somalis realised that a ransom of some sort would have to be paid. The most generous contributions came from the Suleiman, the Somali clan to which the pirate Big Mouth and his renegade family members holding the Chandlers belonged.
Dahir Kadiye, the pirate negotiator the Sun reports is being investigated over his housing benefits, is a Suleiman clansmen — as well as being a wealthy businessman who sold his London taxi cab business a couple of years ago.
But many other British Somalis also contributed to the ransom. I asked my friend Gutale, whom I can only describe as a model British citizen, why his people felt they had to act in this way. ‘Everybody felt it was shameful that elderly, ordinary and innocent people like Paul and Rachel should be held in this way,’ he told me. ‘We felt responsible. They are British. So are we.’
At this point another side of the Somali character came to the fore — the love of music and poetry.
Abdi Shire, an interpreter in the courts who in his free time sings in a family musical band called Qaylodhaan, composed a song calling for the Chandlers’ release and to help raise funds to meet the pirates’ escalating demands.
I was touched when I listened to the song, which in Somali describes the effects of Somalia’s terrible war — one of the most catastrophic conflicts of modern times: ‘Our people fled their homes… And landed in foreign lands./ They did not look at the colour of our skins/ They took care of us/ Helped us repair our broken lives…’
The song goes on to praise the humanity of the British people for allowing Somalis to practise their ‘mighty religion’, Islam.
How could we repay those wonderful people,
By destroying their buildings,
Refuse to be their neighbours and call them bad names?
Let me pray to you,
There is a longstanding debt we owe the British people,
Please release the couple.
It’s not clear how much the pirates were paid, or how much of the ransom was contributed by British Somalis, but Abdi Shire’s song reportedly raised £150,000.
‘I feel privileged to be in this civilised society,’ Abdi Shire told me this week. ‘And we did this to show that we are also decent, civilised people. We have done it to show the British it is a moral duty of ours to pay our debt back to society.’
Mohamed Hussein Abukar, an influential figure among Britain’s moderate Somali Muslim sect of Sufis, also contributed to the campaign to free the Chandlers. He told me, ‘The greatest thing about the British is their connection to foreign people. When you go to the mosque you find it is between the church and the synagogue. I have never felt foreign in Britain. I am proud to be a British citizen. I am proud to be Somali too.’
___
Spectator News
