The road to peace is justice.

Thank you Turkey. Your prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan visited us in Mogadishu at a time when famine and war peaked high and no leader dared to take the risk of travelling to Somalia due to enormous security hazards. You have opened your Embassy in Mogadishu and your Turkish Airline has begun its first international commercial flight to our war-torn city. You have drilled wells, built schools and hospitals, donated emergency supplies, offered scholarship to our youth and conducted other humanitarian interventions with a far reaching impact on the life of the Somalis. You have hosted one the biggest and most productive Somali conferences in Istanbul in May 2010 and more recently you have committed a 50-million US dollar business project in partnership with Somali business enterprises. Today you are a household name adored by all Somalis everywhere in the World as Somalis lavish you with praises to express their gratitude for your quick response to the Somalia emergency and, more importantly, your long term plans for a sustainable development. Over the past two decades of strife in Somalia, almost all the world has been drawn into the Somali problems and no country has ever earned as much respect and admiration as you did in the short period you were involved in the Somali crisis.

Thank you Turkey. you are a unique player in the Contemporary Somali politics in a way that your intervention and inputs are felt at all levels of social and political spheres contrary to other actors and partners whose contributions trickle so slowly down to the beneficiaries due to the hectic bureaucratic strings attached to it. Thus they are only known at higher political levels while you are famous both at higher and grassroots levels. Not long ago a newly born baby in a Mogadishu camp was given your name "Turkiye" after the visit of the Turkish Prime minister Recep Erdogan to Mogadishu last year. Erdogan visited these displaced parents inside their tattered shacks to show his solidarity with the Somalis on one hand and to comfort the abandoned souls who have long been forgotten by the international community on the other. ( Somali baby named as "Turkey")

I have been following the Turkey story on Somalia for almost a year and have not seen a single item that has any correlation with war or even contains traces of a war-thread woven within the fabrics of the intricate and rather multi-faced Somali conflict. Therefore, in appreciation of Turkey´s role in Somalia and its creative approach to peace, I came up with a short poem to express my feelings over the moral and material support Turkey has accorded to us.

Please open this link: Thank You Turkey (poem) by
Abdi-Noor Haji Mohamed (Eagle Of ...