Nairobi (HAN) June 28, 2005-   A 17-member delegationof senior officials from nine African ruling parties were fascinated by Chinese culture on their study-and-inspection tour around east China's Shandong Province. 

"It's just like coming into a world of ancient Chinese culture," said Bayingana from Rwanda while looking at a private collectionof more than 10,000 ancient Buddhist sculptures in Zhucheng, a city in the southeast of Shandong Province. 

Piling up in two company storehouses, the vivid, life-like sculptures, dating back from the Northern and Southern Dynasties (420-589 AD) to the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), ranged widely in height, from only 0.3 meters to four or five meters. Only one tenth of them were marked with years and dates, said Dou Baorong, the owner of the collection and also the directing manager of a local industrial and trade company. 

The 10,000 pieces of sculptures were inherited from ancestors and the rest were collected during the past four decades after the1960s, said Dou, who is the eighth descendant of a renowned court scholar named Dou Guangnai in the imperial Qing Dynasty. 

"I have seen China's magnificent civilizations from the Buddhist sculptures," said Abdillahi Adaweh Mireh, a senior official from the Popular Rally for Progress of Djibouti and who is also a professor of philosophy in his country. 

On hearing that a special art museum will be set up soon by the government and the collector to protect these priceless cultural relics, Habibou, the head of the delegation, expressed his appreciation. 

"When everything is gone, only the culture still remains and will remain forever, " said Habibou, adding that it is always important for both China and African countries to protect their culture. 

The African party officials arrived at Zhucheng Wednesday afternoon when they finished their tour in Qingdao. They also visited the Laoshan Mountain, a scenic spot renowned for Taoism inQingdao in the morning and a dinosaur park in Zhucheng in the afternoon. 

The delegation is here as guest of the International Departmentof the Communist Party of China Central Committee. Shandong, a coastal province in east China, is the third leg of their 16-day tour in China. 

The 17 members of the delegation are from ruling parties in Cameroon, Djibouti, Equatorial Guinea, Guinea, Madagascar, Niger, Rwanda, Seychelles and Togo. sources: HUCHENG(Shandong), Xinhuane

Pakistan Internet and Djibouti mobile services cut off by submarine cable 

Nairobi (HAN) June 28, 2005-  The complex repair work may require a complete shutdown, potentially causing disruption in India, the United Arab Emirates, Djibouti and Oman

According to officials and Internet service providers, it will take at least two weeks to repair the fibre-optic link beneath the Arabian Sea, 35 km south of Karachi. 

The rupture was detected late Monday.

The complex repair work may require a complete shutdown, potentially causing disruption in India, the United Arab Emirates, Djibouti and Oman, which are also linked to the damaged cable, officials said

Many Somalis Hope to Go Home

Nairobi (HAN) June 28, 2005-  Before she fled her homeland in 1991, Raho Warsame was a nurse researching mosquito eradication to help control malaria. 

Somalia had slipped into civil war during the 1980s and by 1991 had no government at all. Warsame was home with her children when armed thugs shot up her home, killing her daughter and wounding her son. 

Warsame escaped to Kenya with her surviving children. She made it to Minnesota in 1995 and was reunited with her mother. But she has never been reunited with her husband, who is stranded in Saudi Arabia. 

They all long to go home. And they're hopeful that Somalia soon might be safe enough for them to return. 

The most promising effort in 14 years to create a Somali government is reaching a critical stage. A new government has been formed, though it is not yet functioning and is currently snagged over whether it should locate in Mogadishu, the Somali capital, or operate from the towns of Jowhar and Baidoa, about 155 miles away. 

The developments are stirring excitement around the Twin Cities area, the de facto capital of Somalis in America. According to one recent survey, thousands of Somalis who live in Minnesota would like to go home if it becomes safe to do so. 

As local Somalis follow the prospects for political change in their country, factional differences sometimes flare up. 

This past spring, a public meeting about whether Ethiopian troops should come into Somalia to protect the new government had to be broken up by Minneapolis police. 

Two weeks ago, dozens of Somalis waited up all night at a restaurant hoping that a ceremony in Kenya -- in which Somalia's president-elect was feted and ushered off to assume his duties -- would be broadcast on a new Somali satellite TV service. Technical difficulties prevented the live broadcast. 

President Abdullahi Yusuf of the Transitional Federal Government of Somali has resisted going to the capital. He apparently doesn't trust some of the Mogadishu-based warlords and plans to go to Jowhar, where the prime minister and cabinet are setting up headquarters. 

Across the political spectrum, Minnesota Somalis say they want the transitional government to succeed, because as Warsame put it, "At this point, a bad government is better than no government." 

The current reconciliation effort has taken shape over more than two years. The U.S. government supports it but has played little part. 

Hopes are high because almost all factions that control territory and militias are participating. A 275-member parliament has been chosen, although without a popular vote. A constitution has been adopted. A prime minister and a cabinet have been named. 

The speaker of the parliament, Sharif Hassan, has deep connections to Minnesota. His wife and children live in Columbia Heights. Hassan is pushing for the parliament, the cabinet and the president to come to the capital. Last week, Hassan and Yusuf met in Yemen, but news accounts indicate that they failed to resolve their differences. 

After Yusuf lost confidence in the security situation in Mogadishu earlier this year, he asked for troops from other African countries to protect him. 

The prospect that many troops would come from Ethiopia, Somalia's historic enemy, caused a backlash that reached all the way to Minnesota. A group of Minnesota Somalis organized a meeting in March to oppose Ethiopian troops. Another group that supported Yusuf's proposal then arrived. 

Police were called and broke up the meeting, apparently before it became violent. 

Omar Jamal, executive director of the St. Paul-based Somali Justice Advocacy Center and a Yusuf supporter, said Ethiopian troops could play a helpful role and that it is time for Somalis to look past their historic enmity with Ethiopia. He charges that those who oppose Ethiopian troops are in league with Muslim extremists. 

One meeting organizer was Ali Khalif Galaydh, a prime minister in one of the previous efforts to form a new government who now teaches at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs. 

Galaydh rejects the description of his group as in league with extremists. He blamed Jamal for disrupting the meeting and said that it reflects a dictatorial tendency of Yusuf and his local supporters. 

Jamal was at the meeting, but says he did not organize or approve of the disruption. 

Warsame was not there. She said she is not a Yusuf admirer and does not think Ethiopian troops in Somalia are a good idea. But she worries that the disputes will wreck Somalia's best chance for finally forming a real government. 

At one meeting, she spoke in favor of compromise. Afterward, someone in the audience told her she would be a good candidate for a position in the new government. 

She said she replied, "I just want to go home and kill mosquitoes." 

HAN Bulletin is your independent, online intelligence resource edited and published by the regional political historian, veteran newsman and founder of www.geeskaafrika.com (Geeska Afrika Online 1985). Each week he taps his vast network of international intelligence sources to bring you credible insights into geo-political and geo-strategic developments for the Horn of Africa.  Contact at  nurkafi@geeskaafrika.com  (Managing Editor/Publisher)