Obituary: Dekha Ibrahim Abdi (1964 in Wajir – 14 July 2011 in Nairobi)
With great sadness we announce that our dear friend and member of the Advisory Board of Berghof Peace Support, Dekha Ibrahim Abdi, has died following severe injuries sustained in a car accident in Kenya, in which her husband and their driver were immediately killed. Our heartfelt condolences go to the couple’s four children, and the many colleagues who are left behind.
We mourn the loss of an outstanding woman who enriched and inspired the peacebuilding field for over two decades with her ideas, initiative, wisdom, creativity and persistence. Born into a Muslim Somali family in the Northeast of Kenya, she encountered early on the challenges of ethnic and religious conflicts. She became a key leader of the Wajir peace initiative and ensured its future viability by helping to establish the Wajir Peace Committee. This model of a sustained, inclusive and comprehensive effort to transform the dangers of unleashed tribalism became the starting point for many similar initiatives, in Africa and beyond. Dekha herself became an inspiring model of an “Insider Mediator”, combining the wisdom of African conflict resolution with her knowledge and insights from many peacebuilding engagements around the world.
What inspired many of us particularly in peace research as well as in the peacebuilding community was her soft, humble, imaginative and nonetheless determined approach to take our field of work forward. We will miss her dearly.