The World's Most Dangerous Place (48 page)

Neither Kadiye nor his role in the release of the Chandlers was quite as reported. The morality of his tale was not black and white as Hollywood and the tabloids liked it, but an ambivalent shade of
grey. Although it was true that he had driven a minicab when he first arrived in London in 1991, and indeed had risen to become a director of a company called Delta Chauffeurs in the Euston Road, Kadiye was more of a wheeler-dealing entrepreneur than a cabbie. He had small-time, family business connections all over Somalia, with interests in the import and export of everything from construction materials to bananas, fish and livestock. He had in any case cashed in his shares in Delta Chauffeurs by 2009, and used the money to set up the Somali branch of Tacforce International, a Dubai-based private security firm that specialized in hostage crisis management. In early 2009, well before the Chandlers’ kidnap, Kadiye had visited Adado, Harardheere and Hobyo to carry out what he called a ‘field assessment’ of the piracy problem. Whatever else it might have been, therefore, helping the Chandlers was also a savvy business move, an opportunity cannily grasped to advertise Tacforce’s services while gaining a foothold in a lucrative but notoriously crowded market sector.

‘In my heart I am a businessman,’ he told me. ‘My dream for the future is for TIS [Tacforce International Somalia] to launch and to operate and to make a profit.’

It was never entirely clear how much ransom money was eventually paid out (although Kadiye said that it totalled $400,000), or, precisely, to whom. Nor was it certain where all the money came from. According to one report – hotly denied by Kadiye – ‘a rich Somali woman living in the Persian Gulf’ had contributed $100,000 to the final ransom pot to ensure that the deal went through.
¹⁷

I asked the Chandlers by telephone in early 2012 – by when they had published a book about their experience and were back in Southampton, preparing for another world cruise on the
Lynn Rival
– but not even they were sure.

None of this meant that Kadiye was insincere about helping the Chandlers. On the contrary, he explained with convincing passion how the couple’s kidnap was ‘to the shame of
all
Somalis; it was maybe the only thing we have all agreed on since 1991’. The British Somali role in the Chandlers’ release had put his community in the best possible light, and he was proud of that, as well as pleased that it had given others something to be proud about.

‘My goal is to help people, and to create a bridge between my two communities,’ he said.

He had approached Waltham Forest Council to help him to go on a lecture tour, although the council, to his disappointment, had declined.

‘The lack of communication: that is our greatest problem,’ he said. ‘My right hand is Somali but my left hand is British. I have to find a bridge . . . There are so many in the Somali community who want to do good, but they don’t have the access.’

His campaign against the pirates was certainly well pitched. Armed with Universal TV footage of demonstrations and the music video from north London, Kadiye spent much of 2010 crisscrossing central Somalia where he met with ‘maybe 80 per cent’ of the Saleban’s clan elders, to whom he argued that releasing the Chandlers was more than just a moral duty – it was also an obligation according to
magan
,
*
a pillar of the traditional, pre-Islamic nomadic honour code.

‘If you walk from Galkacyo to Mogadishu, nomads will feed and shelter you. But the tradition is that you must return the favour whenever you can . . . I explained to the elders that 300,000 Somalis
had been given food and shelter in Britain, and that this was paid for by British taxpayers like the Chandlers. I made them see that we owed them.’

The same point had been made in the lyrics of the music video from Camden:

Our people fled their homes

The host countries did not look at the colour of our skins

We need to show our debt to them,

For it is the donkey who does not acknowledge the debt

Appealing to the Saleban elders’ sense of clan honour was not the only line of Kadiye’s attack.

‘I tried every argument in the book,’ he said. ‘I told them that if they pressurized the pirates, they would benefit directly through an increase in foreign aid – although they have not seen any benefit yet.’

There was one argument that he did not try, however, and that was old-fashioned moral censure. He was, in truth, in no position to condemn the kidnappers on those grounds, because as the Saleban clan elders well knew, some of Kadiye’s own extended family were in the piracy business too – a detail that might have caused the
Sun
to report his story rather differently had they known of it. And yet Kadiye himself was disconcertingly open about it. He explained how a cousin, a respected elder who lived in Hobyo, had six sons. This family, he said, were relatively well-to-do, with a flock of a hundred sheep and goats, although none of the sons had ever worked as a herdsman. The two eldest sons were in fact dead: killed in clan fighting after joining the local militia. Of the remaining four, two had gone to sea to try their luck
as pirates, where the youngest two would soon be joining them.

The family had been forced into piracy, Kadiye explained, by simple economics.

‘A five-year-old sheep is worth $48: enough money to feed the family for three weeks. But there is no market for the sheep, because the nearest port is 600 kilometres away at Bossasso – and there is no possibility of reaching Bossasso because of clan problems. The family could kill and eat the sheep, which would feed them for 24 hours, but if they did that the herd would be gone in three months, and the family would be destitute. Now, my cousin says to me: “If one of my sons goes to sea, and survives, we get a million dollars, and no one ever has to be a pirate again” . . . Tell me, what else can they do?’

‘Have they tried fishing?’ I suggested. But Kadiye, increasingly agitated, shook his head.

‘If a boy does that he ends up being stopped by your navy and put in jail. And they have no boats, no freezers, no training, no healthcare. Meanwhile the West spends $2 billion a year on anti-piracy patrols . . . It’s crazy! We
have
to make a better life for these people. Sometimes it makes me cry.’

I looked up to find that Kadiye’s face had crumpled and that he was, indeed, sniffing back tears.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said when he had regained his composure, ‘but my people are dying very easily.’

Dahir Kadiye’s story in some ways epitomized Somalia’s tragedy. I thought he was essentially a good man, not a bad or callous one, who knew that piracy was cruel and wrong. And yet he refused entirely to condemn it, because in his eyes the crime could be justified by the imperative of survival. The complexity of this moral conundrum was enough to make anyone cry.

The paradox was that he understood very well what lay at the root of Somalia’s troubles: the unending clan violence that had killed his cousin’s two eldest sons and prevented the rest from trading or travelling, thus forcing the family into piracy and robbing them all of the chance of a decent life. Clanism had almost destroyed Somalia and was ultimately responsible for the death and displacement of millions of his countrymen, including Kadiye himself. And yet, even after twenty years in Britain, he was unable – or stubbornly unwilling – to consider any alternative.

In Kadiye’s view, it was not clanism that was to blame for Somalia’s troubles but that amorphous entity ‘the West’ for failing to intervene as they should have done. The West was also culpable for the misbehaviour of the diaspora young, because they had failed to understand the importance of the parental discipline inherent to a traditional Somali upbringing. He typified an older, conservative kind of Somali whose faith in the old ways of doing things was unshakeable.

‘We Somalis had our own culture when we arrived here in London in 1991,’ he said, ‘but the West forced us to follow their culture, and it was too strong for us. Fathers have lost control of their sons because they are not allowed to beat or shout at them. The government has to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the parents, otherwise the Somalis will become the worst people in the world!’

In the spring of 2012 I had begun to prepare for another trip to East Africa, where the battle for the soul of Somali youth had entered a dangerous new phase. Although the war appeared to be over in Mogadishu, al-Shabaab’s campaign of terror there decidedly was not. The conventional fighting, meanwhile, had shifted away as the insurgents retreated on their stronghold, the far
southern port of Kismayo. And it was to the troubled south that I was hoping to go, for it was here that the future of Islamism in East Africa would surely be decided.

‘Al-Shabaab?’ said Kadiye when I mentioned this. ‘They are not proper Muslims. I think some of them are Christians, even . . . It’s just business for the leadership. I know some of them. My wife is Marehan, the same as al-Shabaab’s Commanding Officer in Kismayo. In fact, I called Kismayo last night.’

For some Somalis, it seemed, the bonds of clan would never truly be broken, even by an ideology as dangerous as al-Shabaab’s.

*
For an explanation, see Chapter 5, page 94–5.

*
Magan
is similar to the Afghan Pashtun custom of
nanawatai
, the obligation to grant sanctuary to anyone who asks for it, even an enemy; and is closely related to the Bedouin tradition of offering hospitality to travellers known as
diyafa
.

15

Operation Linda Nchi: The end for al-Shabaab?

Besançon to Nairobi, March–June 2012

The civil war had scattered Somalis to some unlikely places around the world, although few were stranger than where Mohamed Mohamed Abdi had ended up. For almost thirty years this former Minister of Defence, who at sixty-three was still a senior MP in the Mogadishu parliament, had lived in the suburbs of Besançon, the capital of Franche-Compté, a sub-Alpine region of eastern France world-renowned for its cheese.

It was early March 2012, and snow was piled high on either side of the road from Geneva airport. The two-hour drive to Besançon was skiddy and mountainous, and I wondered briefly if the effort was worth it. Mohamed Abdi was interesting, though, for he was no ordinary Somali politician in exile. A holder of PhDs in geology and anthropology, and the author of eight books that dealt with such subjects as the importance of phallic symbolism in the Horn of Africa’s prehistoric stelae, he was universally known as Gandhi
because, as he liked to explain, he was ‘against violence’.

A year previously, Professor Gandhi had announced the establishment of a large new semi-autonomous region in Somalia, with himself as its president. This federal statelet, he said, would comprise the three southern provinces abutting Kenya: Gedo and Lower and Middle Juba, an area inhabited by 1.3 million people. His project did not look likely to succeed at first, for these areas were still firmly under the control of al-Shabaab in 2011. Many Somalis rolled their eyes at what they perceived as Gandhi’s overweening ambition. This was the tenth region to declare semi-autonomy in the last seven years. But Gandhi was supported from the outset by Kenya, who liked the idea of a stable buffer state along their lawless and porous eastern border; and in October 2011, when Kenyan troops suddenly invaded Somalia in an operation codenamed Linda Nchi (‘Protect the Country’ in Swahili), everything changed for Gandhi.

I was greeted at the door of his house by his wife Christine, who turned out to be a former industrial chemist from northern France. The couple had met at Besançon University, where she was studying and he had been sent on a scholarship by the Somali Ministry of Education. They eventually married and settled where their relationship started, and now had three student-age children of their own. With his round, bald head and eyes that twinkled behind glasses, Gandhi did faintly resemble his Indian namesake, although tonight he was not wearing the homespun cloth favoured by Mahatma but a comfy-looking black and white jumper. He led me through to the dining area while Christine prepared supper in the kitchen – spaghetti Bolognese, still the
de facto
national dish of Somalia – and, in a mixture of French and English, began to explain his semi-autonomizing plans.

His new polity, fantastically, was to be called Azania. The name turned out to have nothing to do with the fictional nation in Evelyn Waugh’s 1930s comic novel,
Black Mischief
, of which Gandhi had never heard. Azania, he explained with the enthusiasm of a true anthropologist, was what the Romans had called this part of the East African coast, a place mentioned by both Pliny and Ptolemy in the first century. The boundaries of ancient Azania were unclear – some scholars thought it extended as far south as Tanzania – although what mattered to Gandhi was his belief that the word derived from
ajam
, the Arabic word for a non-Arab, a foreigner.

‘I wanted something that would reflect the Somali identity,’ he explained. ‘We are not Arabs, as some people say. Azania means “the country of non-Arabs”. This is very important to us in the south.’

Gandhi explained how, at a conference at Limuru near Nairobi in March 2010, over four hundred regional delegates had agreed on a draft constitution for Azania, drawn up with reference to all three of Somalia’s legal traditions: the secular law once applied by the Italians, Sharia law, and xeer. The delegates had agreed on a bi-cameral parliament in which all thirty-seven sub-clans living in the region would be represented. The 4.5 clan formula adhered to elsewhere was specifically rejected. Azania’s clan-inclusiveness, Gandhi insisted, would make his statelet quite unlike the other autonomous or semi-autonomous regions, all of which were fundamentally mono-clan entities.