MOGADISHU, Somalia — With men, women and children dancing and singing in the streets, Somalis celebrated the election of their first president in almost a decade with a unity that will be vital if the new head of state is to fulfill his promise of bringing peace.
Hours after Abdiqasim Salad Hassan, a former interior minister, won presidential elections early Saturday, people around the country took to the streets, businesses shut down and restaurants offered free meals in what became a spontaneous national holiday.
"It doesn't matter who is the president, but a government that can tackle the current political, social and economic problem is what we needed," said an elated Mohamed Mohamud Warsameh, the district commissioner of Dhusamareb, 320 miles north of the capital.
In Mogadishu, women wept.
"This will definitely be the end of insecurity in Mogadishu. Business will boom," said a tearful Mariam Mohamed Hassan.
And in a significant move Saturday, representatives of Mogadishu's business community pledged full backing to the new assembly.
"We first congratulate the Somali parliament and then the president. We pledge both our moral and material support to the forthcoming government," businessman Hajji Abukar Omar Addan said after a group meeting.
The support of the business community, in terms of the cash and militias they have been forced to employ for security purposes, is seen as crucial.
Addan is known to employ 400 gunmen and controls a 25-mile stretch of road along the northeastern coast of the capital to the port of El Ma'an.
Somalia has been a byword for chaos and violence and has had no central government since opposition leaders joined forces to oust dictator Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991. Faction leaders then fought with each other, turning the Horn of Africa nation into battling fiefdoms ruled by heavily armed militias.
The election of Hassan, who promised to bring economic recovery and peace to the nation of 7 million, came as a result of a conference that began in Arta, a small town in neighboring Djibouti, on May 2.