NAIROBI, Kenya – When Iman Elman decided to join the Somali National Army in 2011, the officer donned uniforms, one shirt and two pairs of trousers. Expectedly asked Mrs. Elman about the missing shirt. There was no one, he said. The extra set of pants was provided for her to sew in a skirt.
Ms Elman, who was born into a family of prominent peace and human rights activists in the Somali capital Mogadishu but grew up in Canada, was 19 at the time and wanted to join the frontrunners in the country’s struggle. against the terrorist group Al Shabab. A skirt was impossible to do, she thought, and politely refused the second panty.
The incident, she said, serves as a reminder not only of the challenges that await them in the patriarchal world of the Somali military, but also of the traditional, conservative norms they must overcome.
‘We still have a long way to go,’ Mrs Elman reminded him at the time.
Almost a decade later, she is now lt. Col. Elman, after rising from foot soldier and captain, and is in charge of the army’s planning and strategy – the only female division chief and one of the highest ranking women in the Somali army.
As one of only 900 women in an army of 25,000, she helps push for accountability and efficiency in a force that fights with one of the deadliest terrorist outfits on the African continent. In a country where women remain politically, economically and socially marginalized, Colonel Elman also works to deepen their role and help them relocate beyond the male jobs where many are confined within the military.
For decades, Somalia was plunged into conflict and chaos, revived by clan warlords competing for power and saddled with a series of weak transitional governments. But the journey to Colonel Elman in the army began when the country’s civil war ebbed and a United Nations-backed government took control of the capital.
In 2011, when waves of Somalis from the diaspora returned home, she visited Mogadishu and came up with the idea of joining the army. In conversations with soldiers, however, she was surprised by how quickly the male officers tried to discourage her, saying that they would only get household chores like cooking and cleaning.
Their resistance stole their determination alone. “That was my driving force,” she said in a recent Mogadishu phone call.
“A lot of me felt at that moment the need to prove a point of what a woman can and cannot do,” she said. “Not only do I know I should not be restricted because of my gender, but I feel I can do just as much as no more than one of the men.”
Colonel Elman was born in Mogadishu on December 10, 1991, when Somalia began to disintegrate. Halfway to the hospital for delivery, her mother, Fartuun Adan, and her father, Elman Ali Ahmed, decided it was too dangerous in her neighborhood to leave her two older sisters, Almaas and Ilwad, in the house. They went back and picked up the girls, not knowing they could never come back.
As the war and the dangers intensified, Mrs. Adan and Mr. Elman decided that the wise course was to split: She would seek refuge abroad with her daughters while he stayed behind to continue her humanitarian work.
It was a brave decision, but ultimately a tragic one. On March 9, 1996, Mr. Elman, who popularized the slogan “Drop the gun, pick up the pen” and who had set up an institute to rehabilitate former child soldiers, was fatally shot in Mogadishu.
At that time, Mrs. Adan had been granted refugee status in Canada and was raising her daughters in Ottawa. Colonel Elman said her mother not only reminded her of her roots, but reassured her the idea that her gender should not limit her ambitions.
In 2006, with continued violence in Somalia, Ms. Adan returned to Mogadishu to run the Elman Peace and Human Rights Center, an organization that continues her husband’s rights work. In 2010, she got together with her daughter Ilwad, and the two have focused much of their efforts on women, children and vulnerable members of Somali society.
When Colonel Elman, then a general student of arts at the University of Ottawa, chose to join the Army in 2011, many were surprised that she did not follow in her father’s footsteps. But she did not see a military career as conflicting with her father’s values and aspirations, she said.
“When people look at it, they see the irony,” she said. ‘But the reality is that my father and I both strive for the same thing. We both work for peace. ”
Her sister Ilwad – who was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize for 2019 – agrees, saying that although there is a “deliberate division” between military solutions and civilian approaches, “there is a lot of complementarity. in the work we do. “
Sometimes, when her sister comes back from the front lines, she said, she brings back child soldiers who help the center reintegrate into society.
Last November, the confidence of the Elman family in the reconstruction of Somalia was shocked after Almaas was killed by an unknown attacker. Colonel Elman, who lost close colleagues in the war and survived three bomb blasts on the side and numerous encounters with the Shabab, said they ‘broke’ after the shooting.
But after taking two weeks to mourn, “we realized there was no going back for us,” said Colonel Elman. “We do not have this option because we have already sacrificed so much.”
The sisters said they would be back at their jobs by the end of December.
For now, Colonel Elman is working to establish and strengthen reforms aimed at creating an army that represents the true interests of the state instead of clan allegiances. She also began an effort to train army officers on human rights and sexual assault – something, she said, that was seen as “almost impossible” to implement when she first introduced it to her superiors.
As Army Chief Planner, Colonel Elman also works to improve the conditions of women in the Army by deploying quotas in recruitment and training programs and creating an environment to encourage more women to enlist, including separate laundry facilities and places to change clothes.
Ms Elman said there was still a long way to go to go “in terms of changing the mind-set” of people in Somalia to serve women, or hold key positions in the army.
“You are not exactly sure if the country is ready to have a female general,” she said. But anyway, she said, “I’m very proud of how far we’ve come, and even the little milestones we’ve reached have been pretty important.”
