The World's Most Dangerous Place (34 page)

Next up to speak was an ancient man with a henna-dyed moustache known as Ahmed Aden Taleexi – ‘Mr Taleh’ – who turned out to be the community memory bank, a village bard who specialized in the myths of the glorious Dervish past.

‘Now then,’ he began, ‘which one of you is the British journalist?’

I rose to my feet, grinning apprehensively, and he stared at me with bloodshot, rheumy eyes.

‘
We
are the ones you fought,’ he said, pointing in an arc at the crowd with his walking stick, which I noticed was particularly elaborately carved. ‘You British with all your technology and bombs destroyed this place. You can see the damage your warplanes caused with your own eyes, but did we ever receive compensation? We received nothing!’

There was a murmur of agreement from the rapt crowd, and an outbreak of ululating from the women’s section.

‘The bombing caused great suffering,’ the old man went on. ‘The British took our young men away to fight in their army – three thousand of them! And we never saw them again. The wounded were left to die of thirst, and their bodies were eaten by hyenas. We wrote to your ambassador in Mogadishu in 1983 demanding recompense, but did we receive a reply? We did not!’

There was more ululating, and I looked at my interpreter in alarm. It was ninety-two years since the RAF had bombed Taleh, but for this old man it was as though it had happened yesterday. Did the younger townspeople share his sense of affront?

‘Don’t worry,’ chuckled the man from Bangor. ‘The people here will ask for anything if they think they can get it.’

It was a relief nevertheless when Mr Taleh stopped his
Brit-bashing, and launched into a long, florid (and historically inaccurate) account of the rise and fall of the Dervish state. The ending of his oration was strangely anticlimactic – a meek repeat of the district commissioner’s plea for UNESCO recognition of the ruins, and a request to tell the British press – and there was no further mention of British compensation once he had finished.
*

Minister Khalif’s speech in reply was, as I expected, a brazen piece of politicking. The Puntland government, he said, would soon be opening ‘many’ offices here. He promised to rebuild the police station, and to put in a phone line. He said he ‘fully’ supported the elders in their bid for UNESCO recognition of the ruins, which his government would recommend be ‘repaired’. This last offer was patently ridiculous – the Silsillat was damaged far beyond any point of repair, even if such a thing was desirable – but it was greeted anyway with cheers and yet more ululation.

Taleh, it occurred to me, was not doing too badly for a community abandoned by government. The townspeople had responded to the delegation from Garowe with energy and discipline, and they clearly knew what they wanted. Somalia might have been the world’s most failed state, yet at this local level it had not failed at all, but appeared in some important ways to be thriving. The drought had greatly inconvenienced them, but they were manifestly not starving. The town was not in a state of anarchy, despite the lack of a police station. All the old social
conventions, including the practical application of xeer, customary law, were intact and functioning. Taleh seemed to have achieved a remarkable level of self-sufficiency, which made me think that the district commissioner ought to be careful what he wished for – because in this community’s case at least, greater involvement with Garowe could easily cause more problems than it solved.

At last we were released to explore the ruins. We spread out across the interior of the Silsillat with a long chaotic trail of people strung out behind: ministers, civic officials, elders, soldiers, secret servicemen, all mixed in with dozens of curious onlookers from the town. The exterior walls were massive things, 14 feet thick in places, and had evidently been constructed with great skill. The identity of the master-masons responsible has never been discovered. In fact it is not certain that the Sayyid, who only moved his capital to Taleh in 1913, even built the Silsillat. Archaeologists once speculated that the original fort was the work of the Himyarites, a pre-Islamic Yemeni civilization, or even of the ancient Egyptians, and that the Sayyid and his followers had merely crept into the ruins and exploited them.

I climbed a steep staircase to a corner tower roof, and gazed out over the shimmering, dun-coloured plain. The Garowe official, Dhollowaa, had told me that when he was a boy, his ancient grandmother had described how the Sayyid once lived at Taleh ‘like a Zulu king’, surrounded by the huts of his warriors for as far as the eye could see. There were tens of thousands of them, a roiling, lawless encampment where feuds were common and fights were settled not with words but by the sudden, late-night thrust of a spear through the heart. But the plain was empty of warriors now; only cloud-shadows chased each other across the desert expanse.

We looked into the tallest tomb-tower, a beehive-shaped
mausoleum to the Sayyid’s Ogadeni father, Sheikh Abdille. The chamber inside was dark and damp and cool beneath a high plastered ceiling that echoed with the chirruping of diving swallows. The Sheikh, I learned, married several Dolbahante women. The Sayyid, born of the first of these, Timiro, was the eldest of thirty children.

‘That is why so many of us here are kin to the Sayyid,’ the Bangor graduate explained. ‘Many of our grandparents were killed in this fort by the British.’

It seemed, however, that there was little ancestor worship in Taleh these days. The raised stone slab covering the Sheikh’s grave had been smashed in long ago, leaving a rectangular heap of broken-edged rubble. Bending down to peer through a small opening in the side, I found myself face to face with the eyeless skull of a goat that some joker had placed amid the dust and debris.

We trailed out of the Silsillat to the outlying fort that had once been the Sayyid’s private residence: ‘Like the White House,’ said the Bangor man. The Sayyid began to live up to his reputation for madness as he grew older, a power-crazed monomaniac who eventually became so fat that, according to one envoy prostrated trembling before him, he was unable to cross his legs, and was obliged to sit with them extended straight out in front of him. His subjects believed he had supernatural powers, and that he was protected by an amulet given to him when a lizard whose life he had spared turned out to be a
djinn
in disguise. He kept a semblance of order at Taleh through old-fashioned terror. His chief executioner boasted that he could not sleep at night unless he had achieved at least twenty mutilations and deaths in the course of the day; a sentry who went AWOL was viciously whipped before being burned alive.
¹⁰

The Sayyid’s palace was surrounded by a secondary curtain wall built of rocks noticeably bigger than those used for the Silsillat. The front of this stout edifice had nevertheless been blown off, and the roof had caved in. This was the work not of the RAF, as Mr Taleh claimed, but of a camel-borne party of British sappers who followed up the air raids in February 1920. The 20-pound and 2-pound bombs carried by the RAF’s Havilland DH9A biplanes were far too puny to dent these walls. As the British well knew, the value of their aircraft was primarily psychological: the Shock and Awe campaign of its day.

The dozen biplanes of the RAF’s ‘Z Force’ had been unloaded in the utmost secrecy in packing cases at Berbera, with their pilots and crews masquerading as a party of oil prospectors. The ruse worked, for the surprise of the attack when it came was total. Not only had the Dervishes never seen an aircraft before: the Sayyid himself had no conception of aviation. So when the first plane appeared over the horizon he anxiously inquired of his advisers what it might be.

‘A few guessed the truth, but hesitated to communicate their guess for fear of the death that was the recognized punishment for the bearer of evil tidings,’ recorded Douglas Jardine. ‘Some, with the Oriental’s native penchant for flattery, suggested that they were the chariots of Allah come to take the Mullah up to heaven.’

The Sayyid, concluding that the occupants of the strange machines must at the very least want to talk to him, ‘hastily donned his finest apparel. Leaning on the arm of Amir, his uncle and chief councillor, he sallied forth from his house and took up his position under the white canopy used on state occasions, to await the coming of the strange messengers. Then the first bomb fell. Amir was killed outright and the Mullah’s garments were singed. Thus the first shot all but ended the campaign.’

The operation to oust the Sayyid actually lasted three weeks. As he and his forces fell back on the Silsillat, Z Force switched from bombs to incendiary rounds and strafing attacks on the Sayyid’s livestock, tactics that damaged Dervish morale just as much as the high explosives. The British expected their opponent to make a stand at Taleh, but he fled as the camel corps approached. The Sayyid’s caravan was chased and surrounded. Six of his sons were killed in the fight that followed, and six more were captured, although the Sayyid himself, protected no doubt by his magic amulet, managed to slip the net.

The Z Force raids were the toast of London, where they were credited with solving the ‘21-year-old Dervish problem in Somaliland’, although as Jardine pointed out, the achievement was not the RAF’s alone.

‘Such a legend is dangerous in the extreme,’ he wrote, ‘leading, as it has done, to a belief in some quarters that the savage peoples of Africa and Asia can be controlled from the air, and that the troops and police on whom we have relied in the past should be replaced in whole or in part by aircraft.’

Jardine’s note of caution still resonates in an age when many military tacticians argue that the terrorist hotspots of the world can be policed by unmanned aerial drones in place of ground troops. It was not aircraft or any other British weaponry that finally carried off the 64-year-old Sayyid, but a dose of Spanish influenza contracted while in hiding in the Ogaden later that year.

Our visit to Taleh was not without consequences, for there are few secrets in Somalia, and it wasn’t long before the government in Hargeisa found out about it. A week later, another delegation set out to visit Taleh. This one comprised several local Somaliland officials, and was led by a Hargeisa MP. Before they could get to
Taleh, however, their convoy was intercepted in the desert by Puntland Defence Forces. A shoot-out ensued in which a Sool province education official was killed.

Nineteen others were arrested and taken back to Garowe, where Ahmed Ali Askar, the formerly mild-mannered Information and Heritage Minister from Woolwich, issued a combative press release that blamed Somaliland’s ‘provocation’ squarely on his opposite number in Hargeisa, Ahmed Abdi Habsade. This individual, he alleged, was a ‘known political opportunist’ who was ‘intending to create insecurity and instability’ in the area. ‘Recently, he has been busy creating confrontation and continuous crises,’ the press release continued. ‘Puntland Government believes that the reason behind this provocation is due to last week’s visit to Taleh by Puntland Government officials accompanied by UNDP officers and international journalists.’

Was I indirectly responsible for the Sool official’s death? An investigation by the UN’s security division later concluded that the Somaliland delegation’s presence near Taleh was a coincidence, and unconnected to our visit, whatever Minister Askar said. But I still did not feel entirely comfortable, and nor did Nick Beresford.

‘With hindsight it was not a good move,’ he told me in an email. ‘But it’s an unpredictable place: easy for some to be wise after the event.’

Garowe, amazingly, felt that it had still not made its point. A fortnight after the shoot-out, Puntland’s chief magistrate found eight of the captured Somalilanders guilty of an ‘illegal’ incursion that had ‘undermined the sovereignty of Puntland’, and sentenced them to prison for five to ten years each. This was heavy-handed even by the standards of their fierce border dispute, and three
months later the prisoners were granted an amnesty by President Farole and released.

This was not quite the end of the affair. That December near Taleh, unidentified gunmen assassinated Jama Ali Shire, the brother of Puntland’s vice-president. Five days later a Puntland finance official was murdered, also by persons unknown, as he left a Taleh restaurant. The region was entering another cycle of the violence that seemed always to have blighted it. These latest killings weren’t necessarily the work of Hargeisa, though – because in January 2012, Dolbahante clan elders from three contiguous border provinces, Sool, Sanaag and Cayn, sat down beneath Taleh’s acacia tree, and boldly proclaimed a new autonomous state, to be called Khatumo, with Taleh as its capital. The spirit of independence and self-sufficiency I had seen there was real, not imagined. Both Somaliland and Puntland were out of favour. The descendants of the Sayyid had just rejected rule by anyone but themselves. It was news of this momentous decision that Silanyo was so desperate to suppress when he arrested twenty-five journalists in Hargeisa. Abdisaman Keyse, a correspondent for the London-based channel Universal TV, was detained for his ‘hyperbolic reporting’ of the Taleh meeting a full four months after it had taken place.
¹¹

Khatumo, geographically, was a recreation of the Dervish state. Some locals even called it Darwiishland, although its leadership this time was rather less charismatic: an ageing ex-prime minister of Somalia, Ali Khalif Galaydh, in allegiance with an exile from Columbus, Ohio known as Xagla-Toosiye (‘Hip Straightener’). The new state’s parliament was a wall around a tree. Its capital had no telecommunications, no hospital, no road or water or sewerage management, and a police station with no roof. It did, however,
have a new state flag. This was the same as the Somali national flag, but with the addition of a white horse rearing to the left of the five-pointed star, saddled but riderless: a clear reference to the mighty Dervish cavalry, or even to the Master himself.