Dekha Ibrahim Abdi

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Dekha Ibrahim Abdi (* 1964 in Wajir ; † July 14, 2011 in Nairobi ) was a Kenyan peace activist and recipient of the Right Livelihood Award 2007.

Life

Dekha Ibrahim Abdi was in 1964 in the district of Wajir in the majority of Somali inhabited northeastern province of Kenya near the border with Somalia born.

At that time, the “ Shifta War ” (1963–1967) raged in the region between the Kenyan government and Somali rebels who fought to join the province to Greater Somalia . To counter insurgency , the population was resettled in government-controlled villages, and so Dekha Ibrahim Abdi first lived in such a “ kijiji ”, “a village or tent city, where people and cattle were kept in a separate area. This circumstance and the hygienic conditions cost many cattle and many people their lives. ”Until 1990, a state of emergency continued to prevail in Wajir.

Dekha Ibrahim Abdi himself was a Muslim and Somali, but grew up with people of different ethnicities and religions in the neighborhood. In her secondary school, the children were segregated according to ethnicity and religious affiliation, but Dekha cultivated friendships across these borders since childhood. This connection on both sides also helped her in her work as Head Boy. Even then, she gained important experience in placement and mediation .

She last lived in Mombasa . On July 14, 2011, she died in a Nairobier hospital as a result of a car accident in which her husband and the driver of the car she was sitting in were also killed at the scene of the accident a week earlier. The limousine had collided with a truck on a business trip to an event in Nairobi.

Work in peace committees

After the state of emergency was lifted, the security situation deteriorated further in the early 1990s, with conflicts leading to 1,500 deaths and hatred between local clans. In 1992, Dekha Ibrahim Abdi and other women and men started a peace initiative, brought people of different clans and ethnicities together, conducted negotiations between the conflicting parties despite resistance from the clan elders and finally reached a peace agreement. To enforce the agreement, the Wajir Peace Committee was set up, consisting of representatives of the clan, representatives of the state security organs, religious leaders, parliamentarians, NGOs, etc. Dekha Ibrahim Abdi, who had worked on a project for mobile health care for nomads , was elected as the committee's secretary .

The peace committee model was reinstated in 1998 after attacks on Christians in Wajir. The Peace Committee then took action to strengthen dialogue and relationships between Christians and Muslims. This model has since been used in other parts of Kenya, but also in Uganda, Ethiopia, Sudan and South Africa, Dekha Ibrahim Abdi has been to Somalia, Sierra Leone , Sudan, Canada , Cambodia , the Philippines , Ghana , Nigeria , the Netherlands , Zimbabwe and Great Britain active. In 1997 Abdi was one of the founding members of the Coalition of Peace in Africa (COPA). She recently joined the Berghof Foundation's advisory board (as of October 2007) .

According to their own assessment, one of their greatest successes was that, unlike in the past, the Kenyan government sees civil society as an important partner in the peace process, consciously includes it, and that the peace committee model has also been able to prevail in other conflicts. She herself assessed religion as an aid to peace work and not as a cause of conflict. Religion then exacerbates the conflict when it is instrumentalized.

Awards

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. a b Der Standard : Kenyan alternative Nobel Prize winner Ibrahim Abdi died , July 14, 2011
  2. ^ Statement by Abdi at the Inter-Faith Peace Summit in Africa, October 14-19, 2002, Johannesburg, South Africa. (No longer available online.) Africa Faith for Peace, formerly in the original ; Retrieved July 16, 2011 .  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.africa-faithforpeace.org
  3. ^ Statement by Abdi at a press conference on January 20, 2010 in the premises of PRIF
  4. ^ Statement by Abdi at a press conference on January 20, 2010 in the premises of PRIF