Maqaal: I have a great respect for Raqia Omar, though the timing of her article, after Mr. Rayaale was a Vice-President for close to a decade, and only after he had a verbal clash with my friend Musa Bihi, who happens to be a relative of her,she came to point a finger at President Rayaale.
However, I will take it as an honest opinion of a great Human Righs activist, but the facts I have got are diametrically opposed to the conclusions that she is reaching here.
Raqia was very away from the country, but in the seventies and eighties public life in politics and in military was always a two edged sword for who was bearing it. Ahmed Siilanyo was a Minister of Siad Barre's Government when the most dirty crimes were being done by the dictator. Yet, no sensible person in the country would make Siilanyo responsible for the murder of Gen. Ainanshe and Ismael Nero and Col, Ashur and Jibril Amin And my quranic teacher Sheikh Ahmed Sheikh Mohamed Osman.
Simply because Siilanyo despite the fact that he was the Minister of the dictator when all that was happening, everybody knows that he did not agree with these crimes. I am sure that Mr. Siilanyo has prevented more crimes than those that he witnessed during his tenure with the dictator, and that is why he was rewarded to be elected into the SNM leadership. Dahir Rayaale was a junoir officer in the NSS. He is a relative and a friend of mine.
When I was working in the Hargeisa Hospital, he was the head of the immigration office. I am the first witness to the fact that Mr Rayaale used his position to help people rather than abuse people as some would have done.
It is worth noting that his immediate superior, the head of all NSS in the north at the time, was a man well-known to have been a positive security officer who has done more than any body else to prevent the harmful effects of the dictatorship while he was in Hargeisa. NO sensible person would ever propose that late Abdirahman barnbaro was a criminal. And Mr Rayaale is much the same way. The same would be true of Hamza Gadaweineh, who by the way now is a senior member of the Kulmiye Party.
Raqia Omar has cited Berbera in her article. Well, I Know Abdifatah and the jireh family and I was a family physician for them, and I saw him twice here in Canada, I never heard anything like that from him, from his family, from his beers and from his friends.What I heard which is substancially different I heard from General Yusuf Tallan who is famous for the act of stopping civilian atrocities to a halt in Berbera.
General Tallan shot several of his officers for the atrocities they did to the civilian populations of Berbera. He told me in 1991 while he was a Governor of the Somaliland Government in Borama, That when he was transferred to Berbera in late 1988 it was Mr. Rayalle who told him about the crimes that are going in the area, and how as a junior officer he is incapable of doing anything material about it other than hiding some people. Gen.Tallan told me that without Mr. Rayaale's help and informations he could not have stopped the atrocities that were continuing under his nose. Secondly, it is well known that some of those people that Mr Rayaale saved are the very people that introduced him to the late president Egal and started the relationship that developed into MrEgal endorsing him for Vice-President and we know the rest of the story.
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