The World's Most Dangerous Place (25 page)

If Alin was bitter about foreigners ignoring him, he was bitterer still about their support for the TFG in Mogadishu, which he accused of abandoning Galmudug, for they had contributed nothing to his fight against the pirates either. I noticed that he was clutching a copy of
The Law of the Somalis
by Michael van Notten, which was not exactly a TFG-friendly polemic. The author, a highly respected Dutch lawyer, argued passionately that xeer, Somalia’s ancient customary law, should be allowed to form the basis of Somalia’s reconstruction, and that the international community had made a critical error when they opted instead to try to create a centralized democratic legislature.

Alin was a former governor of Hobyo, another notorious pirate port on the Galmudug coast, which he announced he was determined to clean up. He said that as soon as the monsoon abated – or by the end of September at the very latest – he intended to move his entire cabinet there.

‘We need to show the people we are still here,’ he explained. ‘We
need to mobilize the business community there. We need to clean house.’

I looked across the floor at the ministers, one or two of whom seemed to shift uncomfortably in their seats. Alin said he wanted Hobyo to recapture its nineteenth-century glory days by becoming a commercial port again, an entrepôt as successful as Bossasso. He intended to take not just his ministers there in the autumn, but a cross-section of religious leaders too, who would drive home the message that piracy was not just unSomali but unIslamic. I said it sounded a bold and interesting experiment and asked if I could accompany him to witness the transformation of his old town.

‘You will be welcome,’ he said.

We were taken, then, to the main police station to see for ourselves how badly Galmudug needed money. The cells, or at least their contents, were suggestive of a society in total meltdown. The division chief, Mohamed Nur Ali, led us into a cell where four young men were shackled together, including a cowed 15-year-old called Fahid.

‘That,’ said the chief, with the righteous pride of an implacable disciplinarian, ‘is my nephew. He was running errands for the pirates. He was well on his way to becoming one of them. I’m locking him up until he sees sense. He needs to listen to his elders and betters.’

He turned on his heel without a second glance at the boy, and led us off to the next cell. Here we found another saved soul, Jamaal, who had been locked up at the request of his father, a friend of the chief. Jamaal, also fifteen, had been inside for five days, awaiting his father’s return from a business trip at the end of the week. The chief said Jamaal had been caught skiving off school and hanging out with ‘bad characters’ who lounged about with
guns, chewing qat. ‘But you won’t do it again, will you, Jamaal?’

‘Nooo!’ said Jamaal, with a furious shake of his head.

I wasn’t sure whether to feel cheered or appalled. The chief had certainly hit upon an effective means of disciplining the young. Like the parents of the teenagers in his jail, he was convinced that disrespect for authority lay at the root of society’s ills, and that the best place to start fixing the problem was within the family. Maybe he was right. It was a sentiment often heard on the lips of politicians back home in Britain, after all, particularly in the wake of the urban riots that broke out across England that August, when the British prime minister himself observed that ‘if we want to have any hope of mending our broken society, family and parenting is where we’ve got to start’.
⁶
The chief saw himself as a rare paragon of order in a world drowning in chaos and violence. There was no arguing with the gruesomely illustrated posters in his office urging children not to play with guns, of which, he said, there were an estimated 14 million in circulation in the country. His stand against the mayhem was not uncourageous, suggesting that society here was perhaps not quite as broken as it was constantly made out to be, and that there was hope after all.

On the other hand, Chief Ali was operating his jail as if it were some kind of private borstal, and this was troubling. Imprisonment was supposed to be an instrument of the state. It made one realize how little due process there must be in Galmudug if the head of the local police could act as judge, jury and executioner – a vigilante, in effect. On the way out I caught sight of another teenager, a beautiful girl this time, who was chained like a dog to a courtyard wall. Her name was Kafiyo, and she was sixteen. She had been brought in by her parents that morning, the chief explained, for starting a family fight in the course of which she had bitten her aunt.

‘You know,’ said the chief, ‘in our culture, it is a very serious thing to bite one of your elders. Particularly an aunt.’

Kafiyo scowled and tossed her mane of long black hair at us as we passed, proud and magnificently unrepentant.

We returned to north Galkacyo for an appointment at the medical centre, where I hoped to find my injured pirate. Abdulcadir Giama, its surgeon-director, was a returnee from Crotone, on the sole of the boot of Italy, where he had practised and prospered as an obstetrics and gynaecology consultant for over thirty years. Vivacious, gossipy and instantly likeable, he had become so thoroughly Italianized in exile that he even spelled his name
Jama
with a ‘Gi’. He described with glee how he had once been obliged to operate on Guirino Iona, a notorious
capobastone
in the ’Ndrangheta, who had come into his surgery late one night with a piece of glass stuck in his head.

‘That was good training for my work here in Galkacyo,’ he laughed, his hands flying as he leaned back in his office chair. ‘Iona? Eh! All of Interpol were after him!’

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the medical centre – the only trauma clinic in Puntland – was that he had personally raised the funds to build it. Over 7,500 patients now passed through his doors each year, many of them internal refugees from far beyond the borders of Puntland. The centre was still expanding, and he was so hungry for funding that he had even sold his house in Italy to help meet the bills.

Giama described piracy as a ‘pollutant’ in Galkacyo, a city that in the last few months had become a magnet for unemployed militiamen from all over the country. Ninety-nine per cent of the pirates, he thought, were ex-military.

‘We are seeing more and more things happening that are alien to
our culture: rape, abductions, drive-by shootings,’ he said. ‘They are always getting into car smashes, or injuring each other in drunken shoot-outs. I get two or three gunshot victims in the hospital every day.’

My hopes rose but were just as quickly dashed when I explained what I was after. The radio report I had heard was wrong: there was no injured pirate boss in the hospital at the moment. But Giama, sensing my disappointment, offered to introduce me instead to a patient of his who was ‘a good friend of the pirates’. I had no idea what this might mean but accepted anyway, and followed him out of his office and through the half-finished hospital to a small, hot ward that smelled of sweat and cheese, just like the wards in Mogadishu.

Propped up in a bed at one end of the room was a tall man with an imperious, pockmarked face. He had one arm in a cast in a grubby grey sling, the result of a car accident. There was a subtle menace in his bloodshot eyes, a repressed violence that one instinctively knew it would be unwise to provoke. From the way the ward’s other patients all looked to him as we entered, it seemed that they knew it too. He gruffly agreed to speak to me so long as I hid his identity with a pseudonym. I suggested Abdi.

‘No,’ he said firmly, ‘I want to be Guled.’

‘OK then. Guled.’

He grunted his satisfaction, but still would not speak until we had gone somewhere private. It was no wonder, because Guled turned out to be more than a playground bully. He was a killer with a past, an Omar Mahmud gun for hire who had once fought Islamic militants for President Yusuf in the Galgala Mountains, before switching sides and fighting for al-Shabaab – although he was now back with the government, working undercover for PIS,
the Puntland Intelligence Service that was supposed to be under the control of President Farole, but which was often alleged to be trained and funded by the CIA.

‘We are under the Americans,’ he confirmed flatly, as if this were of no interest. ‘I saw their trainers in Bossasso. The training programme is continuous.’

Guled had been charged with the extraordinarily dangerous task of infiltrating the pirate gangs in order to establish whether or not they were in league with al-Shabaab. He had begun by infiltrating the main pirate network around Garacad in Puntland, and found that there was no such connection. Al-Shabaab’s presence in that small, Darod-dominated port was minimal.

Then he had proceeded to Harardheere to ask the same questions, an even riskier enterprise considering that Harardheere was under the control of al-Shabaab, the local pirates were all Hawiye Suleiman, and he was a Darod Omar Mahmud. He found what he was looking for, though. In Harardheere, he said, al-Shabaab routinely took a cut of between $200,000 and $300,000 for each pirated ship brought to anchorage there.

‘Are you sure?’ I said, startled. ‘Does the CIA know this?’

‘I suppose so,’ he shrugged with the same supreme indifference as before. ‘I passed the information up the chain.’

The pirate–al-Shabaab relationship, Guled explained, had nothing to do with shared ideology. It was purely a business arrangement, and not a very happy one at that.

‘The Harardheere pirates would normally use a different port rather than pay al-Shabaab, but as Hawiye Suleiman they are forced to use Harardheere. They can’t go to Garacad, and Hobyo is difficult for them now.’

Al-Shabaab, in other words, was extorting cash from the pirates.
This was not the same thing or as dangerous as a merger between the groups, as postulated in Elmore Leonard’s novel
Djibouti
. Nevertheless, it sounded as though Western insurance money was finding its way into the pockets of designated terrorists: one of the piracy ‘game-changers’ muttered about at Northwood. If Guled’s findings were provable, they were important.

He had little respect for the pirates, although not because their immoral behaviour was tearing at the fabric of society, but because they were so foolish with their money.

‘They flash their money around. The price of everything goes up when the ransoms come in. Even the dollar exchange rate goes up, but they still spend everything. They buy cars from Dubai, alcohol from Ethiopia, qat from Kenya, beautiful girls from Djibouti. They will drop $40,000 on a new car, no problem. It’s all fun, fun, fun.’

The solution he proposed was predictable: he wanted them all put down by military force.

‘The marines would close them down,’ he drawled. ‘If the marines had enough weapons, they could go wherever they liked.’

Like so many among his damaged generation, Guled had known nothing but violence in his life, in the course of which he seemed to have developed a frightening indifference to pain and suffering. I doubted whether he had lost his moral bearings. He struck me rather as someone who had never had such a compass in the first place. He was an ugly, feral, dangerous man, and thus, I supposed, well suited to the job of infiltrating the pirate boss underworld. I wasn’t sorry when, as though suddenly bored, he cut our conversation short and sloped off back to his ward.

Dr Giama, who never passed up a fundraising opportunity if he could help it, wanted Nick and me to watch a new PowerPoint
presentation he had prepared, an explanation of the work of his hospital. It sounded dull. But this was Somalia, and the frank, before-and-after surgery photographs he had taken turned out to be some of the most riveting I had ever seen, as well as some of the most horrific.

Only a few of the images were to do with war, such as the eight-year-old boy who had been brought in with both hands reduced to bloody stumps by an IED. Most of the operations Giama performed were on congenital or cancerous deformities that, like so many evils in Somalia, had been allowed to fester for far too long. His slide show was thus the starkest illustration imaginable of the human cost of the state’s twenty-year failure to provide basic healthcare or education. The projector whirred through close-ups of every kind of tumour, a Victorian freak show of suffering: an advanced sarcoma, a huge angioma, an inoperable mesenteric carcinoma.

‘Just look at that myoma,’ said Giama at one point, in amazement still at the obscenely glistening mound of matter that he had chopped out of some poor woman’s uterus, ‘How big is
that
?!’

The horrors grew worse: a baby with a malignant, football-sized growth on its backside; two still-born Siamese twins, a starburst of misdirected eyes and hands and limbs, spatch-cocked on a mortuary slab; and a calcified ectopic pregnancy, a creature from the scariest science-fiction film, removed from its mother after six years of mummification.

‘In Europe you would just never see such things,’ Giama murmured.

I looked away, and saw Nick sitting ramrod straight with a hand over his eyes, peeping out through a slit between his fingers. It seemed that he hadn’t been prepared for this, either.

But Giama wasn’t finished yet. As a gynaecologist he had a fascinated hatred for Somalia’s continuing adherence to the old African practice known to the World Health Organization as FGM, or Female Genital Mutilation. I had read a great deal about this infamous cultural oddity, which Giama called Somalia’s ‘silent tragedy’. But actually seeing the surgical reality of FGM, especially in such lurid, explicit close-up, was an experience that soon had me peeping through my fingers too.

Giama explained, in his mesmerizingly soft and sing-song voice, how Somalis favoured the most extreme, ‘Pharaonic’ form of genital modification technically known as infibulation, in which both inner and outer labia as well as the clitoris are removed, usually when their owner is between six and twelve years old. Then the labia majora is sewn back on across the top of the vaginal opening, where it eventually heals to form a wall of scar tissue, leaving nothing but a matchstick-sized hole below. This procedure, he said, was almost always carried out at home, on a kitchen table, without much antiseptic and never with any anaesthetic. The thread used was often the same as the kind used to make sacking. There were, inevitably, many complications, physical, psychological and social.