The World's Most Dangerous Place (46 page)

Tribalism and the violence it engendered, Matan argued, were not natural to Somalia but were a foreign construct of the nineteenth century, ‘an aid to colonial control’. He explained that at the Berlin Conference of 1884 the imperial powers, having carved up Somalia between them on a map, agreed to keep order in their respective dominions by creating enmities between clans that had previously co-existed in peace.

‘Somalis are the classic victims of divide and rule,’ he said.

The Green Line in Galkacyo was the direct legacy of this manipulation. So was the ongoing border dispute between Puntland and Somaliland. Matan explained that he himself came from an aristocratic Darod Dolbahante family who had once followed the Mad Mullah, and that every one of his great-grandparents had been killed at Taleh in 1920.

‘I used to believe that it was the British with their aircraft who had killed them, but no: it was Isaaq tribesmen, armed by the
British, who followed on. They were responsible for the massacre.’

On a recent visit to Mogadishu – his first time back in Somalia since he had left as a child – Matan was briefly detained and questioned for taking photographs at the airport by jittery South African SKE security men, an experience that explicitly reminded him of the famous foundation myth of the Dervishes, the arrest of the Sayyid in Berbera in 1895.

‘I thought to myself: “I’m Somali: how dare you stop me at my own airport?”’

He had gone to Mogadishu to deliver a consignment of food aid raised through the ATM for famine victims in the city, enough to feed 220 families for three months. At one distribution point, however, his team was surrounded by forty gunmen who demanded dollars and a substantial chunk of the aid consignment, and who underlined their claim by firing their weapons into the air. Matan had not previously appreciated that the graft in Mogadishu could be so crude.

‘It was horrible, shocking, what I witnessed,’ he said.

The gunmen answered to Yusuf Mohamed Siad, a notorious former Islamist warlord known as Inda-Ade (‘White Eyes’), who had briefly served as Minister of Defence in the TFG, although he had resigned over a year previously to start up his own faction. What Matan found most amazing was that Inda-Ade’s men, who were really no more than onshore pirates, were nevertheless still dressed in government army uniforms.

Matan, unsurprisingly, had no more time for the 4.5 clan formula than Ayaan did – ‘I can’t understand it. How can anyone be half a person?’ he joked – while noting, with sudden earnestness, that the TFG’s rules were at present scandalously unfair towards the young.

‘There is a rule at the moment that an MP must be married, must be well known in their constituency, and that they must be over thirty-five. That rule must not remain in the constitution.’

He had written to the TFG urging this and several other constitutional changes, notably for a solid commitment to the principle of One Man, One Vote, although lobbying in this way was only a small part of the ATM’s programme.

Matan was planning to send over 150 diaspora Somalis, all Western-trained, local authority officials like him, to work as unpaid interns in the home country’s various administrations, in order to ‘teach them how to operate, and to show them how corruption is killing Somalia’.

The ATM wanted to send doctors to Mogadishu, and was organizing further famine relief. They had already begun work on a ‘Building of Hope’ on the Green Line in Galkacyo, and were seeking funds from DfID, UNDP, Somali business leaders, local London councils, and the National Lottery to establish a national ‘Peace Day’ across Somalia, an event that would be organized by a ‘liberty leader’ appointed in each of the country’s eighteen regions, and which would coincide with a series of ‘reconciliation sessions’ around the diaspora.

‘When that day comes, we will show the older generation that it is our time now,’ he said.

Some of Matan’s ideas, such as a plan to set up an ‘alternative youth parliament’ in Mogadishu, sounded impossibly ambitious, particularly to older Somalis who remembered the failure of past attempts to eradicate tribalism. But the ATM could not easily be dismissed as naive, because both the American and the British governments took such diaspora youth organizations seriously. There was a belated but growing realization among politicians as
well as Western counter-terrorism officials that it was essential to engage with the younger generation, because it was from them that the threat to Western security principally emanated. This was why, in the run-up to the London Conference on Somalia in February 2012, a major international event attended by senior representatives of forty governments and organizations, Matan was included in a group of diaspora representatives invited to Downing Street for a consultation with the prime minister.

The ATM was not the only pioneering, cross-clan Somali-British youth organization. Andy Pring, a coordinator on the government’s Prevent counter-radicalization programme, knew of at least seven comparable groups in London alone, including the one that he was most closely involved with, the south-London-based Elays Network (slogan: ‘Youth empowering their peers for a safer today and a better tomorrow’). I went to meet Pring and a dozen or so young Somalis at the Network’s Battersea Park Road headquarters, a long, thin room on the ground floor of a high-rise block on the enormous Doddington housing estate, in an area of London infamous for muggings and drug-related crime. A Somali, 20-year-old Mahad Mohammed, had been knifed to death on the nearby Winstanley Estate in July 2010.

Pring, who had spent time in Quetta and the West Bank, spoke ‘rusty’ Arabic, and had once briefly considered converting to Islam, explained that Elays did not tackle radicalism directly. It was more about building the self-esteem of young Somalis through sport and other activities, particularly film-making, that took them off the streets and away from crime; although, as the Pakistani London MP Sadiq Khan had remarked to him recently, the progression from there to radicalism was ‘the path well trodden’.
Elays
meant ‘light’ in the sense of
a lighthouse, a beacon to guide travellers on the right path.

The organization was unusual in that it was almost entirely youth-led: another good example of young diaspora Somalis who were willing and had learned to help themselves. There was only one Somali adult involved, a quietly spoken volunteer ‘project manager’ called Mohamed Ali, who thought the risk of radicalization had been badly hyped by the media.

‘I promise you, the last thing on any of these kids’ minds when they come in here is religion,’ he said.

Nevertheless, he ran an evening Koran class that had proved popular with the Network members.

‘Somali Londoners are trying to mix cultures, and there are a lot of crazies out there. We do need to teach kids the real meaning of the Koran, and to correct any wrong impressions they may have about, for instance, the concept of jihad. And I do teach them that Islam doesn’t endorse suicide bombing. But most of all, the Koran is a life guide . . . if you get to the student young enough, it prevents social problems later.’

In the manner of Ayaan or Adam Matan or the Somali Youth Club of the 1940s, he never allowed any discussion of the clans in his classes.

For a small local youth organization, Elays had support in some surprisingly high places. The Battersea Somalis were the darlings of the US embassy, which had encouraged them to set up a public relations campaign under the banner ‘That’s not our Jihad’. Two of their number had travelled to Washington recently to help set up a State Department-funded counter-radicalism website. A larger group, including Andy Pring, had just been asked to the US ambassador’s annual Eid celebration garden party at Winfield House, his official residence in Regent’s Park. And in 2011 when
Elays launched a film – a drama called
Pentagon
, about the racial stereotypes faced by five London Somali brothers – an embassy press attaché was sent down to Battersea to teach them how to write a press release. The Americans’ overt engagement with London Somali youth was the polar opposite of the softly-softly approach through local partnerships advocated by SO15. Elays, however, didn’t seem to mind being associated with the US embassy one bit.

Their unlikely relationship dated from 2008 when Quintan Wiktorowicz, a former professor of international studies at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee, spent several months attached to the London embassy, studying British Islamism and its link to terrorism. He went on to join the White House National Security Council where he was put in charge of the US version of Prevent. Wiktorowicz, who interviewed hundreds of young London Muslims (and who concluded, not uncontroversially, that it was the most religious among them who were the least likely to end up being radicalized), had apparently singled out the Elays Network as one of the best counter-radicalization youth projects in London. To the US, it seemed, the doctrine of ‘early intervention’ meant countering radicalism by whatever means and wherever possible, including abroad if that lessened the chance of terrorism reaching America’s shores. It was hard to imagine the British embassy in Washington taking this level of interest in a Somali youth organization in Ohio or Minnesota.

The diaspora experience was a double-edged sword. It could lead Somali youth into a crisis of isolation and despair, and from there towards drugs, criminal gangs, extremism and terrorism. But other young Somalis had understood and exploited what the West had to offer, and emerged from their often difficult childhoods as
rounded, educated, employable citizens who had forged a new kind of identity for themselves. The money they earned and remitted back home dwarfed the sums that the international community was able to muster, and was responsible for small miracles of post-war reconstruction and famine relief. They had learned the technical expertise and taken on board the liberal Western values that their broken country needed if it was ever to be fixed – and a great many of them were impressively, movingly, prepared to go back and apply the lessons they had learned. In fact, the further into the Somali diaspora I travelled, the more certain I became that the salvation of their homeland rested in the hands of the young.

Mohamed ‘Tarzan’ Nur, the Mayor of Mogadishu and a one-time Labour candidate for Camden Council, whom I had met under fire at the Villa Somalia in Mogadishu, was regularly portrayed in the British press as a model returnee: brave, selfless, determined to use his skills to help rebuild his country. Early one summer evening I went to meet Shamis, Tarzan’s wife, and three of their six, twenty-something children, at the family’s council flat on an estate near Queen’s Crescent in Kentish Town, and found them to be no less convincing examples of the new diaspora breed. Shamis was a kindly, effusive woman who fed me hot samosas, cheesecake and raspberry juice, and whose mothering instinct was so strong that before the evening was out she had declared that I was like another son to her.

‘I hate the tribes,’ she said. ‘I never taught my kids their lineage. Somalis are just Somalis.’

‘The 4.5 formula is just a child’s mentality,’ added her 25-year-old daughter, another Ayaan, squashed up on the sofa next to her. ‘Of course ministers should be appointed on merit, not according to clan.’

The flat was small but tidy, with plush leather furniture, gold tassels on the curtains and an Islamic homily in Arabic hanging on one wall, although what the visitor was supposed to notice were the framed photographs of the Nur children, each of them wearing a gown and mortarboard on the day that they graduated. In Mogadishu I had spotted a public information poster with the caption ‘Our best chance for happiness is education’, a slogan that might have been coined in the Siad Barre era. It was a principle that the Nur family had evidently taken to heart. Shamis had worked as a teacher in London for fourteen years. She was also a former community link worker for Sure Start, the government programme dedicated to improving children’s early education.

Her faith in the power of schooling was, perhaps, characteristic of the Somalis. When Gerald Hanley visited Mogadishu in 1962, he found the newly independent populace gripped by a ‘madness about education’, a passion for learning so strong that the captain of the barge that took him ashore complained that ‘they would eat a book if you gave it to them, some of the young men nowadays’. Hanley observed: ‘There cannot be anywhere in Africa with such ready and hungry people, with such swift minds, waiting to read their way out of a thousand years of dependence on the camel, and the spears that had ensured its possession . . . When the education factories start work among them they should surprise Africa, and themselves.’
¹⁰

The education factories, however, were destroyed by the civil war; it was partly in order to find new ones for their children that the Nurs had moved to Britain in the early 1990s. And now Ayaan had a degree in criminology from Middlesex University and was hoping for a job with the police. Abdullah, 21, the youngest, was studying digital media studies at London Metropolitan. His older
sister Mona had a post-graduate qualification in sexual health and was working at the Whittington Hospital in Islington. A third sister, Maryan, was hoping for a university internship in New York.

The family had moved to London so long ago that the younger children had little or no memory of their native country, and considered themselves almost more British than Somali. Both Ayaan and Abdullah spoke fluent estuarine English, their accents coarse and glottal.

‘My Somali is terrible,’ Ayaan confessed. ‘Some of the newer arrivals can’t believe it when they hear me.’

At the same time, the children were close followers of what was happening back in Mogadishu and intensely proud of what their father was doing there, although concerned for his safety.

‘Dheere is out of prison now,’ said Ayaan. ‘We’re worried what he might do to Dad in revenge.’
*

Shamis, although not her children, had been back to Mogadishu briefly in 2010 to visit her husband, and found it deeply dispiriting.