The World's Most Dangerous Place (11 page)

His point, in the end, was a simple one: the keys to Somalia’s future lay in the hands of the country’s immense diaspora.

‘The speaker and the prime minister have put aside the vested
interests of the warlords,’ he said, ‘and for the first time, they have reached out to the diaspora – to our skilled people, our trained people, our
educated
people – with the message that
they
are the ones we need to rebuild our country. There is no shortage of talent out there. The only question is: do we have enough carrots to lure them back?’

The civil war, he explained, had driven perhaps two million of his countrymen abroad, and they had gone to every corner of the globe. An entire generation had since grown up there, absorbing not just foreign educations but different languages, values, ideas. It was not just that the diaspora could, potentially, provide Somalia with all the petro-engineers or investment bankers it needed (although Omaar’s assertion that the London equities desk of Goldman Sachs was filled with Somalis, or that one in six managing directors at Morgan Stanley was Somali, was surely an exaggeration). What he meant was that, through their discovery of a viable alternative to the stultifying clan system that had perpetuated the violence here for so long, those exiles could have a civilizing, almost revolutionary influence on the home country. They represented the best chance of modernizing Somali society since Siad Barre’s experiments with socialism in the 1970s, if only they could be persuaded to come back and impart what they had learned.

Omaar and his ministerial colleagues were not hypocrites in this regard. Almost all of them were returnees from abroad, half of them from America, who had given up good jobs and safe, suburban homes in order to come here. The prime minister, Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed but universally known as Farmaajo,
*
was
entirely typical of the cabinet he appointed: he was from Buffalo, New York, where he had worked for years as a commissioner for equal employment in the state’s Department of Transport.

Unusually in this cabinet, Omaar was from Britain: the brother of Rageh, the well-known television presenter who made his name covering the Iraq invasion for the BBC in 2003. There was only a faint resemblance to the ‘Scud Stud’, as the
Washington Post
once dubbed Rageh. Mohamed’s build was broader and he was considerably older, with a neatly trimmed moustache and hair that had receded to a corona of grey. Their father, a Somaliland businessman and property magnate, moved his children to London in the 1960s in order to educate them. Mohamed duly attended a smart boarding school in Dorset, and went on to graduate from Trinity College, Oxford. I found him an eloquent, civilized, thoughtful man, the complete opposite of the Western warlord stereotype. He spoke fluent English but with a slightly patrician accent that somehow added to his gravitas and plausibility. You could see at once why Farmaajo had chosen him as foreign minister.

‘Somalia’s problems can easily be solved, but only if the West has the political will,’ he said. ‘Sierra Leone is the proof of what direct intervention can achieve. If it worked there, why not in Somalia?’

I thought perhaps he had a point. For almost a decade now, the international community’s strategy had been focused on ‘containing’ Somalia’s problems rather than on helping to solve them. The TFG, formed in 2004 with the backing of the UN, was the country’s fifteenth attempt in twenty years to form a functioning central government. It was by definition a temporary institution, intended to be replaced as soon as possible by an elected
government rather than an appointed one.
*
Yet the transition to a proper federal democracy had been dragging on for seven years now. There had been two presidents since 2004, and Farmaajo was the fourth prime minister. No doubt the international community did need to apply more pressure, although that was never going to solve the country’s problems by itself. Somalis also had to want to help themselves. Sadly, though, not all of them did.

The most pressing political problem was that the TFG’s mandate was due to expire in four months’ time, by when the parliament was supposed to have ratified the new federal constitution necessary for a general election. It was looking highly unlikely, however, that the deadline would be met, because parliament had been paralysed for months by a bitter power struggle between ‘the two Sharifs’, the president, Sheikh Sharif Ahmed, and the powerful speaker of parliament, Sharif Hassan Sheikh Aden.

Their animosity was exacerbated by the politics of the clumsy 4.5 power-sharing formula, according to which the position of president had always been reserved for a member of the Hawiye clan, and that of speaker for the Rahanweyn. Later that year, at the fortified entrance to the Villa Somalia, four men were killed when a gun battle broke out between the president’s guards and the speaker’s Rahanweyn entourage, who objected to surrendering their weapons as they came in. Political reformers were appalled, although to ordinary Somalis, the shoot-out was no more than a reversion to the national norm – for was not violence the traditional way of resolving a dispute between clans? The TFG’s
problems were certainly huge, and in Mohamed Omaar’s view, unless the UN started knocking heads together, then the TFG’s mandate would run out and the country would soon arrive at yet another morale-sapping, war-prolonging political impasse.

The parliament was singled out by many as the greatest block to progress. I saw the debating chamber for myself, later that summer: a small, hot, low-ceilinged basement, safe from al-Shabaab mortar fire beneath the post-apocalyptic remains of the old Italian-built Parliament House in Wardhiigley. It was empty when I visited, save for a sleepy janitor and several tall piles of blue plastic chairs, and seemed to exude bureaucratic lassitude. An extraordinary 550 MPs were supposed to work here: more, even, than to be found in democracies the size of Nigeria or India.
*
Furthermore, on the rare occasions that it met, this bloated body frequently struggled to reach the quorum necessary to legislate.

Efforts to reform the institution had so far been resisted by the speaker, who effectively controlled it through his large faction of MPs. He treated parliament as his private fiefdom. A former international qat trader, as well as a former finance minister, he was reputed to be a very wealthy man, with a stake in every large government contract going. His nickname was Sheikh Sakiin – Sheikh Razorblade – because you never noticed the pain of the cut he inflicted until afterwards. Nothing got in the way of his business interests. He was even rumoured to have links to fellow Rahanweyn clansmen within the high leadership of al-Shabaab.

Sheikh Razorblade was naturally suspicious of the reform-minded
new prime minister, and tried to block his appointment from the start. Parliamentary business was halted for a fortnight while he and Sheikh Sharif squabbled over whether a parliamentary vote to confirm Farmaajo’s nomination should be done by a show of hands or, as the speaker wanted, by secret ballot. The speaker’s position was absurd: MPs had voted with their hands on this matter for over fifty years. Yet it took the intervention of the Supreme Court to resolve the impasse, along with delegations from the UN, the AU and IGAD, the region’s Intergovernmental Authority on Development. Afterwards, the head of the UN, Ban Ki-Moon himself, was moved to write the Somali leadership a letter of congratulation. It was outrageous, but it seemed that Somalia’s speaker of parliament could hold the world to ransom if he chose.

Considering the obstacles, Farmaajo’s cabinet of technocrats weren’t doing at all badly. They had only been in power for four months but had already instigated some significant reforms. The regulations governing loans from the notoriously leaky central bank had been tightened. A report had been published on the profit and expenditure details of the government’s numerous foreign contracts, an exercise in transparency previously unheard of in Mogadishu. Farmaajo had halved the number of ministerial portfolios, and put a stop to the private jet travel that the previous government enjoyed. In short he was behaving like a public servant rather than a kleptocrat, and that was unusual in Somalia, a country widely considered the most corrupt in the world.
*

Farmaajo’s stand had made him popular in many circles, but it had also created some dangerous enemies in certain others. Omaar was too much of a diplomat to say whether or not he thought the speaker was corrupt. We talked instead about the role of Islam in Somalia’s future. Surprisingly, considering his Westernized background, Omaar envisaged a very substantial one. He had no wish to reverse the process of Islamification that had swept his country since the early 1990s. On the contrary, he regarded Sharia law, properly applied, as an important part of the solution to Somalia’s problems.

‘Sharia only becomes a danger when it is not properly codified through the central intellectual and judicial institutions,’ he said. ‘The Council of Ulema [religious scholars] in this country is a reasonably broad church. Unfortunately, the extremists got a head start when the ICU collapsed. But there was a period of about six months when the ICU successfully imposed law and order – which is what Somalis want and need more than anything.’

He went on to describe how, in his native Hargeisa, female money changers were able to operate in perfect safety on the street, even after midnight.

‘And when they go home, they simply lock their money in a metal mesh box, which they leave right there on the street. No one ever steals it!’

Islam, he was convinced, was more than merely popular among Somalis. Over the years, it had become the very basis of civil society.

‘When I am in Hargeisa I like to go for walks in the very early morning. There are mosques everywhere – three of them within five minutes of my house – and each morning, for the
fajr
prayer at 5 a.m., they are always completely full.’

It was far too late, he said, to turn back the clock. Islamification
had happened by a process of what he called ‘force majeure’. The Italian civil code applied by the judiciary in the 1960s had been ‘unpicked’ by the years of socialism in the 1970s and 1980s, before being smashed altogether in the chaos of the 1990s; and only the imams had proved able to fill the void. The West had therefore better learn to work with the grain of Islamic tradition instead of always struggling against it, a message which he had put at the heart of his mission as Minister of Foreign Affairs.

‘The president is regarded with suspicion when he speaks up for Islam, but I am perceived a little differently . . . I spoke on this subject at the UN Security Council in 2009. I think I have sold the idea to the US. We
have
to be practical.’

His notion of practicality did not extend to negotiating with al-Shabaab.

‘The leadership is hard core, and I think there is no cure for them. The educated ulema in America and elsewhere have declared their jihad illegitimate. When they declare every member of the government, from the president down to the humblest cleaning lady, to be an apostate or a
kafir
– how can anyone take that seriously?’

His question was answered by another burst of machinegun fire from outside. As before, Omaar simply ignored it.

‘The threat here is not al-Qaida,’ he went on. ‘Somalis by character are too independent-minded to follow any foreign ideology for long. That is part of the reason for the chaos. Everyone is a prima donna. You can’t get them to agree on bloody anything.’

There was nothing new about this characteristic. Their innate belligerence was not so much described as celebrated in this well-worn Somali proverb:

I against my brother.

I and my brother against the family.

I and my family against the clan.

I and my clan against Somalia.

I and Somalia against the world.

The parliament, although characterized most of the time by inertia, was also the occasional scene of spectacular drama, as arguments between MPs got out of hand. In January 2012, a dispute led to a fist-fight so intense that it had to be broken up by AMISOM troops, and four MPs were taken to hospital with serious head injuries.

Omaar thought that the greatest danger was not Islamism but the country’s ‘statelessness’, which made it susceptible to hijack by warlords and, particularly, pirates.

‘Al-Qaida is a poor, miserable thing, but the piracy is El Dorado. There are 20,000 vessels passing through Somali waters every year, and millions – billions – to be made. The young here are already at great risk. They have never even
seen
a functioning state. And when you add in the temptation of that waterway to a fierce fighting tradition . . . if the West doesn’t get serious about this place, we could end up with a variation of the Columbian narco-state.’

Yarisow, Farmaajo’s head of communications, entered the room then, calling Omaar ‘Excellency’ and whispering in his ear. Omaar politely excused himself – he was deputizing for Farmaajo, who was abroad, and he had to attend to some state business – but asked Yarisow to show me downstairs to wait in the cabinet room. This nerve centre of Somali government turned out to be a large, gloomy, T-shaped space that smelled of damp and dust, and which appeared not to have been decorated since the 1970s. A low-voltage
flicker emanated from a backlit red glass waterfall. Fat, brown leather sofas and armchairs were arranged around the edges of the room, interspersed with shiny reproduction side tables and swirly-patterned rugs. In the centre, beneath a pair of faux-art-deco chandeliers the colour of crème-de-menthe, was an over-varnished, English-style dining table set with eighteen chairs, all empty except at one end where two men sat nattering with their feet up. From the way they scurried out when they saw Yarisow, I suspected they were cleaners on a break.