The 3^rd Annual Somali Conference 2016

Friday 20^th May 2016 (16:00PM –18:40PM) __________________________________________________________________________________

Place: Bergen Resource Center for International Development

Auditorium, Jekteviksbakken 31, 5892 Bergen

Registration is open until 2^nd May 2016.

E-mail: grsf@live.com or batteriet@skbb.no

Mobile: 46643055

On Behalf of the Global Relief Somali Foundation (organizing committee), it is our great honor and pleasure to cordially invite you to attend the 3^rd Annual Somali Conference in Bergen 2016.

This year, the theme of the conference is “Tribal Federalism, the 2016 Political Transition, and the fate of the Somali Republic” and the conference will be held on Friday 20^th May, 2016 at 16.00pm, at the Bergen Resource Center for International Development, Auditorium Jekteviksbakken 31, 5892 Bergen.

The Global Relief Somali Foundation is a non-profit organization, non-religious and non-political organization. It was registered in Norway, on June 5^th, 2010.

We are proud to offer a very exciting programme with focus on discussing the issues and challenges, in our local community and the political situation and Somali Diaspora in Europe and USA.

For you information, Prof. Abdi Ismail Samatar is a Professor and Chair of Department of Geography, Environment and Society at the University of Minnesota and a Research fellow at the University of Pretoria. Prof. Abdi Samatar will be the Keynote Speaker 2016.

If you have any questions or concerns, or if I may be of assistance in any way, so please do join us in this exciting event and do not hesitate to contact me. The provisional title of the presentation is “Tribal Federalism, the 2016 Political Transition, and the fate of the Somali Republic”.

We expect attendance this year to be the highest ever; in the area of 50 delegates and 4 speakers.

I hope you are able to accept this invitation and I look forward to hearing from you.

In this Horn of Africa nation that has been mired in anarchy and war for two decades, nearly all families have been touched by tragedy. Somalia is the one of the worst place on earth to have a mental illness. A 20 year civil-war has increased mental illness numbers and simultaneously destroyed any health care infrastructure. The evidence of this can be found almost everywhere, as most of Somalia's mentally ill are either simply chained the beds or left to roam the streets, leaving with them permanent trauma and physical injuries.

Click here to see the banner (banner will soon be published).

You can also support this project: You can put in GRSF's bank account:

Østre Skostredet 10A, 5017 Bergen, Norway.

Kontonummer: 0539.77.98668 (DNB - Bank, Norway)

Org.nr: 995638525

Tel: +47 - 47950110

For this coming conference, we are still looking for sponsors to cover the logistics of this 3 days conference.

Here is the project plan Project Plan Conference Sept2012:

Since 2006, the country has faced an insurgency led by Al Shabab, one of Africa's most fearsome militant Islamist groups. Al Shabab controls much of southern Somalia and has claimed affiliation with Al Qaeda since 2007.

For the first time in years, the Shabab is receding from several areas at once, handing the Transitional Federal Government an enormous opportunity to finally step outside the capital and begin uniting this fractious country after two decades of war. Instead, a messy, violent, clannish scramble is emerging over who will take control.

This is exactly what the United States and other donors had hoped to avoid by investing millions of dollars in the transitional government, viewing it as the best antidote to Somalia’s chronic instability and a bulwark against Islamic extremism.

But the government is too weak, corrupt, divided and disorganized to mount a claim beyond Mogadishu, the capital, leaving clan warlords, Islamist militias and proxy forces armed by foreign governments to battle it out for the regions the Shabab are losing.

2011 Drought and Famine

In the summer of 2011, the country was hard hit by a famine that extended across much of East Africa. A combination of drought, war, restrictions on aid groups and years of chaos have pushed 4 million Somalis — more than half the population — into “crisis,” according to the United Nations. Agricultural production is just a quarter of what it normally is, and food prices have soared.

The Shabab were blamed for much of the suffering, as it blocked many international relief groups from bringing food to famine victims. The Shabab, which had taken a beating in steady urban fighting against a better-armed, 9,000-strong African Union peacekeeping force, abruptly pulled out of the bullet-ridden capital of Mogadishu, in August 2011, leaving the entire city in the hands of the government for the first time in years.

The situation had only worsened by mid-August, when the United Nations confirmed that a cholera epidemic was sweeping across the country. Hundreds of thousands of Somalis had fled into Kenya, Ethiopia and to camps in Mogadishu, where cholera and measles are preying upon a malnourished and immune-suppressed population.

In September the United Nations announced that Somalia’s famine had spread to a large chunk of the southern third of the country, including parts of Mogadishu and several farming areas, which means food production has been crippled.

At the same time, aid agencies acknowledged there may be yet another problem to reckon with: the wholesale theft of food aid. The United Nations World Food Program said they were investigating allegations that thousands of sacks of grain and other supplies intended for famine victims have been stolen by unscrupulous businessmen and then sold on the open market for a profit.

On Oct. 4, an enormous truck bomb was detonated right outside a highly fortified government compound in one of the few Mogadishu neighborhoods that Somalia’s transitional government actually controls. Dozens of people — many of them students standing around waiting for exam results — were killed, sending the signal that the Shabab may be making a comeback after several months of losing ground.

A Lack of Intervention

Is the world about to watch 750,000 Somalis starve to death? The rains will start pounding down in the fall, but before any crops will grow, disease will bloom. Malaria, cholera, typhoid and measles will sweep through immune-suppressed populations, aid agencies say, killing countless malnourished people.

In a way, this is all déjà vu. In the early 1990s, Somalia was hit by famine, precipitated by drought and similarly callous thugs blocking food aid and producing similarly appalling images of skeletal children dying in the sand. In fact, the famine back then was in the same area of Somalia, the lower third, home to powerless minority clans that often bear the brunt of this country’s chronic troubles.

But in the 1990s, the world was more willing to intervene. The United Nations rallied behind more than 25,000 American troops, who embarked on a multibillion-dollar mission to beat back the gunmen long enough to get food into the mouths of starving people.

But foreign military force, analysts say, has never succeeded in solving Somalia’s problems and it is not going to solve them now. This famine is not just about the Shabab’s blocking food aid. It is about a broken state and the human wreckage it is causing.

Somalia’s politicians have been too busy squabbling with one another to build institutions like a functioning health ministry or a sanitation department that would help drought victims. Some of the informal clusters of people in Mogadishu camped out for aid are already breaking up, and it is not clear where the displaced people are trudging to. Many aid agencies — and Western militaries — are justifiably wary of this environment, and so far the response to the famine has been well short of what is needed to stem the crisis.

In the 1990s, the American-led operation and the attendant relief effort saved around 110,000 lives, while 240,000 were lost to the famine. It is grim math, especially considering how enormous the aid operation was. The Refugee Policy Group study has a graph showing famine casualties, which tend to come in two spikes: one at the onset of the crisis, before the bulk of aid arrives; the other when the rains come. For the current famine, analysts are now bracing for possibly hundreds of thousands of deaths.

Mired in Chaos and Violence

Few experienced aid workers believe that all, or even close to all, of the emergency food in Somalia reaches the people it was intended for. Because much of Somalia has been mired in chaos and violence for the past 20 years, large aid organizations tend not to base their own staff members there and instead appoint local groups to monitor aid deliveries, worth hundreds of millions of dollars each year.

In 2010, United Nations investigators said that a web of corrupt contractors and their cronies were skimming off as much as half of the food aid, though later internal United Nations investigations did not find evidence to support that. Back in 1991 and 1992, during Somalia’s last famine, warlords and their militias were notorious for commandeering food shipments.

One way the United Nations and its local partners are trying to combat the pilfering of food is by serving individual portions of porridge at special centers, as opposed to just handing out sacks of grain. The World Food Program, which has said that it will not cut back on aid deliveries because of the allegations of theft, is also asking contractors to pay them back for any food that was not delivered.

The transitional government promised to do whatever it can to help famine victims and denied that large amounts of aid had recently been diverted.

The GRSF is partnering with the Al-Biri Charitable Foundation to ensure that the contents of the container are delivered to the refugee camp. According to the UNHCR, Somali Refugees continue to arrive in Djibouti in relatively large numbers, although at a lower rate than in Ethiopia and Kenya. It is expected that more than 5000 Somalis will arrive in Djibouti this year, more than double UNHCR's planning figure for 2011.

The container will reach the Djibouti port on the 25th October 2011 and we will give you all the details about the distribution of the medical equipment and clothing, when we receive the information from our partner in Djibouti.

The issues of the Conference was the implications of the catastrophe in Somalia on the people of the Horn of Africa and Norway. The goal of the conference was to addressed and declared on the situation in Somalia today, especially the innocent population who is effected  by lack of food, no clean water, no shelters, drought, and other problems caused by the civil-war. Therefore, this conference focused on social integrations and enlightening the Somali Diaspora living in Norway.

Professor Ahmed Ismail Samatar, James Wallace Professor of International Studies and Founding Dean of the Institute for Global Citizenship was the main speaker at this conference.  His speech focussed on the history and current situation in Somalia and the impact on the East African region.

This was Professor Samatar's first time in Bergen and during his stay he met with the Somali community and he gave a speech to the community about the importance of integration.

The professor enjoyed his visit and the city of Bergen.

In 2012 Professor Samatar is going to work with the Global Relief Somali Foundation to organise a larger conference which is going to be focussing on Somali integration in the US and Europe.