The World's Most Dangerous Place (18 page)

The AU was supposed to be his continent’s answer to the European Union. It was one of Africa’s most conspicuous symbols of a better future: independent, self-reliant, modern, a world away from the old clichés of post-colonial despotism. AMISOM’s military success against al-Shabaab was arguably its greatest achievement so far, an impressive advertisement of what could be done when African nations spoke and acted in concert. Rawlings’ apparent lack of interest in the institution jarred. On the other hand, he undoubtedly had charisma; and when the armoured cars stopped at Badbaado refugee camp, he at last began to put it to use.

Badbaado, in Dharkenley on the western outskirts of Mogadishu, was the fastest-growing refugee camp in the city, and already the size of a small town. It stood on land that in June had been derelict and empty; by September it would be home to 35,000 people. Dome-shaped tents stretched away from the road as far as the eye could see. In the desert, nomads constructed this traditional shelter, an
aqal soomaali
, by covering a collapsible frame of thorns with woven mats or animal hides. Here they had used anything they could lay their hands on, even bits of old shirt and plastic bags.
The luckier ones had been issued with waterproof orange sheeting, but none of their tents looked like they offered adequate protection from the intense heat.

The camp, we had been briefed, was far from being a safe place to visit. Al-Shabaab were assumed to have infiltrated it thoroughly. The atmosphere here was volatile even without them. A fortnight after our visit, seven people were killed and several wounded following a gunfight that began when a gang of militiamen, possibly members of the TFG army, tried to loot a newly arrived consignment of food aid.
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Rawlings, showily rejecting the body armour he had been offered, strode purposefully towards a feeding centre in the middle of the camp, leaving a trail of aides, journalists and UN officials in his wake, and even his Ugandan security detail cursing and struggling to keep up.

The feeding centre was a shed in a ring of barbed wire, which a sign announced had been set up and paid for by an NGO called Qatar Charity. Sacks of rice and cans of cooking oil from Pakistan had been laid out in neat lines in preparation for the crowds mobbing the entrance. The refugees, many of them sporting empty food bowls on their heads to ward off the sun, were all women and children. Half a dozen men armed with sjambok-style switches stood on sentry before the gate, but at the foreigners’ approach the crowd surged forward, ignoring the flailing guards. Rawlings disappeared in a roiling sea of brightly coloured headscarves, but quickly bobbed to the surface on a pile of rice sacks, his bearded face shining, beatific.

‘I hear you,’ he shouted in a voice both gravelly and trembling with feeling, ‘I have seen your pain! Let me assure you: we, the international community, will never abandon you. Never!’

His eyes glistened as he clenched his fists across his chest in a sign
of pan-African solidarity. This was what he had come to Somalia for.

That evening, back at the AMISOM base, I watched in awe as he wept for the refugees on live television. Since there was no studio on the base, the press office had set up a feed camera in the abandoned garden of a once fabulous seaside villa, a building now filled with goat droppings, even upstairs on the second floor. As the sun went down and bats flitted in and out of the glassless windows, each of four, back-to-back evening news programmes received the benefit of his perfect dramatic timing: Al Jazeera, Channel 4, and two channels of the BBC.

‘It was a truly sorrowful sight in the camps today,’ he intoned, leaning like a rock star on his microphone stand. ‘I’m . . . I’m . . .’ (and here his eyes would well up again, his voice blipping with unsuppressed emotion) ‘I’m not sure how many of them will even be alive in two or three weeks’ time. What we need is a miracle! Not from the Good Lord, but from the governments of countries with money!’

It was a masterclass in manipulation. Even his watching aides, who had seen the show before, were wowed by the performance. It was as if the old man kept an onion in his pocket.

The reality of the Badbaado visit was that we didn’t get a chance to see many truly sorrowful sights. The Rawlings party attracted a lot of attention, and the AMISOM organizers were understandably nervous about staying longer than necessary, which to them meant the time it took to take a photograph. An impromptu visit to a refugee camp a few days later in a ruined residential district of Hawl Wadaag provided an entirely different experience.

I and two other journalists were hiking back from another visit to the front line with a platoon of Ugandans when we
chanced upon a man digging a tiny grave at the edge of the sandy path.

‘My grandson,’ he said expressionlessly, barely looking up from his spadework. ‘He died of diarrhoea this morning.’

Around the corner we came across a large
zareba
of newly cut acacia thorns protecting hundreds of tents fashioned from white plastic sheeting marked with the logo of the Danish Refugee Council. This detail aside, I could have been standing at the gates of any desert encampment in Somalia. It was a remarkable sight here in urban Hawl Wadaag, less than half a mile from the national parliament, in a part of the city that until very recently had been a no-man’s-land raked by mortars and machinegun fire.

We were greeted by the district commissioner, Jaffar, who was passing by in a Toyota Landcruiser. He told us that 2,000 refugees had arrived in this part of Hawl Wadaag in the last four days, most of them from Bakool and Lower Shabelle.

‘It has been twenty years since this district had so many residents,’ Jaffar observed wryly, ‘and now we don’t have enough to feed our guests. The Turks brought some food this morning, and the Kuwaitis are promising more. But I do not think they will bring enough.’

I began to work my way around the camp and soon saw what he meant. The children didn’t run up to beg here but sat about in listless heaps, showing their hunger by stroking an index finger up and down their throats. The signs of malnutrition were all around: the skeletal limbs, the huge staring eyes, the orange hair falling out in clumps. The stifling interiors of the
aqals
smelled of ripe cheese. In each one I put my head into there seemed to be another motionless child or two, their eyes white against the darkness, fixed on the ceiling, seeing nothing. They had heads like footballs and sticks for
arms, too weak to move and beyond caring anyway about the filth and the flies.

I picked my way over to a party of around thirty women and children who were squatting together along a partially destroyed wall, a classic African tableau in their brightly coloured saris and flower-print shawls. They gazed back at me with the punctured look of the utterly exhausted, and explained that they were Rahanweyn herders who had just arrived from a village near Bardere, 300 kilometres to the west in Gedo. The drought, they said, had killed all their cattle, forcing them to move. Travelling sometimes by truck, sometimes on foot, avoiding the main roads wherever possible and always at night, it had taken them four difficult days to reach Mogadishu. Among their number when they left their village was a sick three-month-old girl, who hadn’t survived the journey. Someone pointed out the mother, a young woman crouching silently at the back of the group, who had buried her infant at the side of the desert road. I shook my head in commiseration, which she acknowledged with the faintest of nods, although her expression was inscrutable.

The group had made two attempts to flee. At first they had set out for the Kenyan border, 100 kilometres to the west and much nearer than Mogadishu, but they had been turned back by al-Shabaab at a checkpoint on the road.

‘They ordered us to go back to wait for the rains, but there is no food where we lived,’ said one woman, Fatima Mohamed. ‘Everything is finished. We explained that to go back was to die, but they said, “It’s better to die than to accept the help of the gaalo.” Al-Shabaab just wanted us to die. They are godless. They have no heart. They were worse than the drought.’

As elsewhere in the camp, there were hardly any men among
them: just one old-timer with no teeth. Fatima explained that they had left their young men behind, partly to trick al-Shabaab into thinking they weren’t leaving while the women and children slipped out the back, but mainly for fear of the press gangs who would surely have abducted them on the long journey to Mogadishu. There was no doubt in their minds that the militants were directly killing them all with their agenda.

‘We are the fortunate ones,’ Fatima went on. ‘There was another group from Bardere behind us but they were stopped by al-Shabaab, even though many of their children were dying. They are not being Muslims. There is not one Muslim among them. They are only there to mislead us, to lie.’

There were worse horrors in another compound, a hundred yards up the lane. In the shadow of a shot-up minaret, a white-coated doctor and two orderlies, all Somalis, stood Canute-like in a tide of despairing humanity. Starvation, diarrhoea and dehydration were the commonest causes of death in a famine but by no means the only ones. The medics, who were all wearing surgical masks, had seen cases of typhoid, cholera, malaria and dengue fever. Measles was also spreading fast. The doctor explained that the appearance of this disease, a respiratory virus of little consequence in the developed world but a frequent killer when the patient’s immune system is weakened by malnutrition, was also partly the fault of al-Shabaab, who for almost three years had rebuffed all vaccination programmes in the territory they controlled.

The southerners dealt with the symptoms of measles in the traditional way, by trying to burn them out with a firebrand. The doctor led me to his tented field clinic where I photographed a tiny boy with two lines of deep, coin-sized wounds scored across his
chest, like the number-six face of a dice. The most recent of these wounds was still open and glistening; my camera caught a fly busying itself at its ragged wet edge like some beast drinking from a water hole.

‘These are tough desert people,’ the doctor said. ‘They are used to going for days without water. Imagine how bad it must be for them to have to come here.’

He said that two dozen children had died in the camp in the last three days, nine of them under the age of five.

As we were speaking a small saloon car arrived, bumping to a halt in a cloud of dust, and a stocky man stepped out, wearing a delicately embroidered kufi cap and an expensive-looking diving watch. He turned out to be Osman Ibrahim, the recently fired Deputy Minister of Health. Known as Libah, or Lion, he was a well-known figure in Mogadishu, whose business interests, principally in shipping, were said to have thrived during the civil war. I watched as he retrieved two bottles of Dettol from the boot of his car. Then he marched across to the blue-painted latrine block that stood in the centre of the compound and began to douse the structure, inside and out, with both bottles at once, like an enthusiastic arsonist spreading petrol.

‘At least he’s doing something,’ said the doctor approvingly. ‘He is a good man. He probably paid for that Dettol himself.’

Libah was a member of one of the minority Jerer tribes, the negroid Bantu people historically discriminated against by the Arab-descended majority, and whose traditional homeland was in precisely those areas now afflicted by famine. Was he acting out of clan loyalty, or was his altruism blind? As so often in Somalia, it was difficult to tell. Perhaps he was driven by some confused mixture of the two. But whatever Libah’s motive, splashing some
Dettol around was no substitute for a proper government strategy for dealing with this crisis.

Al-Shabaab’s shortcomings represented a unique opportunity for the TFG, a chance to show southern Somalia what a well-organized central government could do for them. A convincing demonstration of administrative efficiency could deal a deathblow to the insurgency. Yet here in Hawl Wadaag, away from the showboating ambassadors and the set-piece press visits, the authorities were very evidently struggling to cope. Libah’s gesture seemed even more futile when, five minutes later and 50 yards away, I observed a woman with a chest like a washboard trying to buy a heap of offal from a rickety butcher’s stall, where the wares were so covered with flies that you could barely see the colour of the meat. It was food for thought as we returned for our own surreal banquet of a lunch at the Bancroft Hotel.

The AMISOM base was a good place from which to monitor the increasing pace of the international relief effort. The aid flights had been pouring in for weeks, many of them carrying tons of ‘Plumpysup’, the sweet, French-invented, peanut-butter-based substance the relief agencies used in food emergencies. I’d also seen a couple of tons of rice rations at Badbaado. But was enough of it getting through to where it was needed – and where was all the Plumpysup going?

According to one UN estimate, up to half of all food aid delivered in 2010 was still being diverted to corrupt contractors, or even directly to al-Shabaab.
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One of the South African employees of SKA, the Dubai-based logistics firm that ran Mogadishu’s ports on behalf of the TFG, told me that 20 per cent of the Plumpysup landed by ship went missing before it was delivered to the city’s emergency feeding centres – a distance in some cases of less than
two kilometres. The trucks that were supposed to deliver the rations were operated by local contractors, who naturally had all the usual clan connections. The thieves hardly bothered to conceal this racket. The SKA man recalled how he once caught a dock-worker on his lunch break eating some Plumpy he had spent the morning unloading. When challenged, the worker explained that he had bought it in a local shop.

‘I don’t understand why they don’t just get SKA to deliver the goods to the distribution centres,’ the logistics man said.

Matters were not as bad as in the early 1990s, when up to 80 per cent of international relief aid was stolen. Regaining control of the aid supply chain was one of the main justifications for the US-led military intervention of 1993. There was no suggestion that the US Army were about to return, but it was nonetheless clear that the lawlessness of that era, when arriving aircraft were sometimes looted before the pilots had switched off their engines, had yet to be eradicated. The concern was that responsibility for the delivery of aid ultimately rested with the government. The hoods who ran the trucking contracts could not operate without top-level TFG protection. Was Sheikh Sharif going to let the political opportunity the famine represented slip through his fingers after all? Senior UN officials were privately worried that he might. At a time of deep national crisis, the worst drought for sixty years, almost none of the new cabinet had any experience of government. In retrospect, the timing of Sheikh Sharif’s decision to replace Farmaajo and his ministers could hardly have been worse.