The World's Most Dangerous Place (32 page)

However robust Alun Michael was in his defence of Hargeisa’s cause, the case for Somaliland sovereignty did not seem to me to be quite as unanswerable as he claimed. For one thing, according to Hassan and the others at the Summertime restaurant, Somaliland’s younger generation were deeply uninterested in the campaign for independence, which Najib described as ‘an old man’s dream’. There had been no referendum on independence since 2001. Since then, they thought, the true locus of Somaliland as a nation had shifted far beyond the former protectorate’s borders. When remittances accounted for a third of all household income, it was clear to them that their nation existed, if it existed at all, somewhere in the international ether. It was not the separatist ambitions of a cabal of ageing revolutionaries that would ensure Somaliland’s future, but the power of the internet harnessed to the economic might of the diaspora.

Silanyo had another problem, which was that his Kulmiye Party was still fundamentally a civil war clan organization – and many of the younger generation were out of patience with that, too. For all the proud rhetoric, Somaliland in some ways was a paranoid, mono-clan police state no different from Puntland, its neighbour and chief regional rival: Isaaqistan versus Darodistan. In Hargeisa, non-Isaaqs were almost automatically suspect. In the street market earlier that day, Hassan confessed that he had deliberately avoided
speaking to anybody for fear that his accent might be identified. As a Hawiye from the Kenyan border town of Mandera, he said, his ‘southern dialect would cause problems’. Silanyo’s predecessor as president until 2010, Riyale Kahin, had been a high-ranking officer in Siad Barre’s feared National Security Service, and hotel guest lists were still rigorously checked every two days by an efficient and well-funded intelligence apparatus on the lookout for any potential enemy of the state.

Hargeisa was not as secure as it seemed. To Silanyo’s great chagrin, some of al-Shabaab’s most senior leaders were Isaaq clansmen, including Ibrahim al-Afghani and Moktar Godane, who was born in the Somaliland capital. Confidence that al-Shabaab would never gain a foothold here was badly shaken in October 2008 when suicide bombers simultaneously attacked the presidential palace, the UNDP office and the Ethiopian consulate, killing twenty-five. The state’s paranoia was perhaps understandable, but there was still much about Somaliland that did not fit with the modern democratic image of itself that it liked to project to the world. Riyale Kahin routinely circumvented the courts via ‘security committees’ that had no basis in the constitution, and which regularly sent common criminals to prison on the basis of little or no evidence. When human rights observers visited Mandhera prison near Hargeisa in 2009, they found that over half of the prisoners had been sentenced by the security committees, not the courts.
⁶

Silanyo had at least abolished the security committees when he became president, but his continuing heavy-handed treatment of the press was hardly the mark of an instinctive democrat. Dissenting journalists were regularly and arbitrarily arrested and held without charge. Ali Ismail Aare, a reporter for the weekly
Waheen
, was detained in 2012 for photographing a service station
and a building belonging to the vice-president. So was Yusuf Abdi Ali of the London-based channel Royal TV, after being accused by a local NGO of making false allegations of corruption.

The most troubling incident came in January 2012 when twenty-five journalists were arrested, and a local TV station, Horn Cable TV, was shut down following a raid by a hundred policemen in seven armoured vehicles. Their crime was to have reported on an unauthorized clan meeting in the province of Sool, which bordered Puntland to the east. Silanyo described their coverage as ‘anti-Somaliland propaganda’; he later called Horn Cable a ‘nation destructor’.
⁷

Sool, along with two neighbouring provinces, Sanaag and Cayn, had been causing Hargeisa a headache for years. Although originally a part of the British protectorate, their inhabitants were not Isaaq but Darod. Garowe had always considered them natural citizens of Puntland, therefore. But in 2007, Somaliland re-staked its claim by sending its troops to occupy the region. A bad-tempered dispute had been rumbling between the two states ever since. To make things even more complicated, a local secessionist movement called the HBM-SSC –
Hoggaanka Badbaadada iyo Mideynta
, the ‘United Defence League’ of Sool, Sanaag and Cayn – had been gaining ground recently. The territory it claimed for itself accounted for perhaps a third of all Somaliland, and included three sizeable towns. The possibility of significant oil reserves being discovered in the region, as well as reports in early 2012 that al-Shabaab elements were infiltrating northwards, made this region even more inflammable. No wonder Silanyo was nervous. The dispute to his east did indeed have the potential to ‘destruct’ his nascent clan-nation, even before he had achieved the international recognition for it that he so craved.

*
Sheikh Saeed died in March 2011, aged 81.

*
‘This is an area of the world of enormous importance for our own security . . . [I welcome] the peaceful and credible elections in Somaliland. These are an example of genuine democracy in an area of the world not noted for it, and the UK provided funding for election supervision. We are keen to engage with the new government, and I believe the key . . . is to prevent terrorist groups establishing their foothold in Somaliland as they have in Somalia. This is vital, and yes, the government will continue to engage.’ David Cameron, House of Commons, 8 July 2010.

*
As this book went to press, the APPG’s name had still not been updated on the chairman’s own website,
www.alunmichael.com
.

11

How to start a border war

Taleh, Sool, June 2011

There was, of course, nothing new about the combustibility of the Somaliland border region, as the British discovered in 1898 when Islamist rebels occupied their protectorate’s second city, Burao. The rebels were led by a charismatic religious scholar, Muhammad Abdullah Hassan, still known to Somalis as the Sayyid (‘Master’), but better known to the British as ‘the Mad Mullah’. The nickname, according to legend, dated from 1895 when he arrived back in Berbera from the Hajj and was stopped by a British customs officer who wanted to charge him import duty on his luggage. The Sayyid angrily refused: by what right did this foreigner prevent him entering his own country? Some travellers nearby told the officer to pay no attention to the man: he was just a mad old mullah.

Sayyid Hassan went on to become the focus of resistance against foreign oppressors throughout Somalia. It took the British twenty years and four separate military campaigns to suppress him. Noted for his poetry as much as for his fighting prowess, he is still
Somalia’s greatest national hero, in a country that has always worshipped its poets. Siad Barre knew what he was doing when he erected a statue of him, mounted on his warhorse on an immense tiled plinth outside the parliament in Mogadishu. (The statue was subsequently destroyed in the civil war, although the plinth remains.)

The Sayyid’s story had many curious twenty-first-century parallels. As a fomenter of jihad he was the Osama bin Laden of his time. Both men managed to unify rival clans and tribes by appealing to their common faith, and exploited that and their own charismas to stir up a powerful rebellion against the infidel oppressors.

‘I warn you of this,’ the Sayyid once wrote in a letter to the British. ‘I wish to fight with you. I like war, but you do not.’

As the
Newsweek
journalist Jeffrey Bartholet pointed out, the sentiment would be echoed almost a century later in bin Laden’s 1996 declaration of war against the US: ‘These [Muslim] youths love death as you love life.’
¹

The Sayyid, like bin Laden, adapted his revolt to suit the conditions on the ground and the mores of the times. His army wore white turbans and called themselves the Daraawiish (‘Dervishes’), a deliberate evocation of a Sufi ascetic tradition dating from at least the twelfth century (and a term that retains semi-mythic connotations in modern Somalia: Puntland’s state militia are still collectively known as Daraawiish). The Sayyid may have modelled his movement on that of the Mahdi Army in Sudan in the 1880s, a Sufi-inspired revolt against colonialism that the British themselves characterized as ‘Dervish’.
*

The Sayyid took Dervishism further than any historical predecessor when he founded a full-blown Dervish state in north-central Somalia in the 1890s. The state was formally recognized by both Germany and the Ottoman empire – a foreshadowing, perhaps, of the Islamic caliphate that al-Qaida theoretically still hopes to establish. Throughout World War One, the Dervish state was the only independent Muslim state on the African continent. It finally came to an end in 1920 when the recently formed Royal Air Force, acting on the orders of the then Minister for War and Air, Winston Churchill, bombed the Sayyid’s capital at Taleh. It was the first time in history that Western airpower was used to dislodge an Islamic militant. In the year that bin Laden was trapped and killed in Pakistan by foreign soldiers swooping from the sky, this was another parallel with the present that was impossible to miss.

For all his piety and poetry, the Sayyid was not a kind or gentle man. Clans who resisted the expansion of his state in the 1900s were cut down without mercy, which made him a highly ambivalent sort of hero for modern Somalis, and a tainted symbol of liberty.

‘No one dares portray him negatively, yet he killed so many people,’ said Isse Dhollowaa, one of President Farole’s inner circle, whose father was born in Taleh.
*
‘Anyone even vaguely associated with the British was skinned alive. Children were slaughtered. Pregnant women were disembowelled. It was exactly like al-Shabaab today.’

His notorious livestock raids had not been forgotten in Garowe. On one occasion he sent 5,000 men against the Sultan of
Majeerteen, who advanced ‘like locusts’, destroying and pillaging everything in their path, and eventually drove off over 25,000 camels.

His most famous poem, a work once rote-learned by every Somali schoolchild, was a characteristically gloating account of the killing of Richard Corfield, the dashing but foolhardy colonel-commandant of the British camel constabulary, at the Battle of Dul Madoba in 1913. In the poem, the Sayyid instructs the ‘hell-destined’ Corfield to explain how he died to the guardians of heaven:

Say to them: ‘From that day to this the Dervishes never ceased their assaults upon us.

The British were broken, the noise of battle engulfed us’;

Say: ‘In fury they fell upon us.’

Report how savagely their swords tore you,

Show these past generations in how many places the daggers were plunged.

Say:‘“Friend,” I called, “have compassion and spare me!”’

Say: ‘As I looked fearfully from side to side my heart was plucked from its sheath.’

Say: ‘My eyes stiffened as I watched with horror;

The mercy I implored was not granted.’

Say: ‘Striking with spear-butts at my mouth they silenced my soft words;

My ears, straining for deliverance, found nothing;

The risk I took, the mistake I made, cost my life.’

Say: ‘When pain racked me everywhere

Men lay sleepless at my shrieks.’
²

The author went on to describe how Corfield’s body was eaten by hyenas, and his veins and tendons plucked out by crows. He had, however, deployed poetic licence in his account of what happened at Dul Madoba – or else it was wishful thinking. In reality, according to Douglas Jardine, the British Administration Secretary of the day, Corfield was killed instantly by a bullet to his pith-helmeted head while trying to unblock a jammed Maxim gun, and his body was recovered and buried. The British, furthermore, were not quite as ‘broken’ as the Sayyid claimed. His dervishes, marching line abreast towards the enemy line shouting their ‘weird, monotonous war-song, “Mohamed Salih”’, outnumbered the camel constabulary by twenty to one, and yet four hundred of them were killed to just thirty-five of the British. When news of the engagement reached London, the press denounced it as a HORRIBLE DISASTER TO OUR TROOPS IN SOMALILAND, yet the Dervish name for their supposed victory told a different story: it was known forever after as Ruga, ‘the smashing or grinding of bones’.
³

The Sayyid, of course, was concerned not with historical accuracy but with firing up a rebellion, and for that, his poem was perfect. The ‘no mercy to infidels’ message of
The Death of Richard Corfield
was as useful as ever in the 1990s, when militiamen resisting the US military distributed pamphlets of the poem in Mogadishu.
⁴
It was certainly tempting to make a connection between the Sayyid’s imagined version of what happened to Corfield, and the actual treatment of the US helicopter crewmen whose lynched and semi-naked bodies were dragged through Mogadishu’s streets.