The World's Most Dangerous Place (8 page)

Somalia’s independence in 1960, which came after ten years of administration by the UN and the unification of the former British protectorate and Italian colony, was at least a relatively bloodless affair. But a military coup in 1969 brought General Siad Barre to power, along with a flood of Russian weaponry from his Communist sponsors. Henry Kissinger accused Somalia of hiding missiles in its minarets.
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In 1977, Barre invaded Ethiopia, hoping to annex its Somali-inhabited eastern region, the Ogaden. Moscow, however, sided with Ethiopia’s Communist Derg regime – as did Fidel Castro, who agreed to send 5,000 of his troops to stiffen the resistance. When Siad Barre’s troops were repulsed, he switched his allegiance from Moscow to Washington, turning his country into one of the hottest fronts of the Cold War. Between 1979 and 1980, the US spent $35m upgrading the former Soviet naval facility and airstrip at the Somaliland port of Berbera. With Washington’s help, Siad Barre set about expanding and modernizing his army until it was the largest in Africa, a force he didn’t hesitate to unleash on
Somaliland when the former protectorate rebelled against his regime a decade later. Two-thirds of the Somaliland capital, Hargeisa, were flattened in an aerial bombardment that killed tens of thousands of its inhabitants.

Siad Barre was ousted in 1991 by clan-based opposition groups backed, once again, by foreigners: Ethiopia and even, this time, Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi. By then Somalia was super-saturated with weaponry. When the clans fell out with each other (as the clans always did), the stage was already set for one of the longest and cruellest civil wars of modern times – and it was all made possible by the machinations of foreigners over the preceding century.

The gaalo, furthermore, are still supplying the country with weapons. Al-Shabaab and their allies obtained at least some of their guns from jihadist sympathizers in Yemen and the Gulf states, or from rogue states like Eritrea which was intent on destabilizing their arch-enemy, Ethiopia. AMISOM’s weapons were also paid for by foreigners. In 2011, the US granted Uganda and Burundi $45m in military aid. In December of that year even Beijing joined in, when the Chinese defence minister, General Liang Guanglie, pledged $2.3m to the Ugandan military. It is small wonder that so many Somalis blame outsiders for their country’s ills. If Afghanistan is the ‘Cockpit of Asia’, as the Viceroy of India Lord Curzon once said, then Somalia is Africa’s unfortunate equivalent, a nation strategically located at the crossroads of competing powers and ideologies, whose fate it is to be endlessly fought over by foreigners.

4

Aden’s story

AMISOM HQ, March 2011

I was fortunate, up at the OPD one morning, to meet a young man called Aden Ibrahim who had come in complaining that he felt ‘dizzy’. The cause was never diagnosed, although I suspected that straightforward hunger had much to do with it. Aden’s cheekbones were protuberant even for a Somali; his black trousers and spotless white shirt hung off him in folds. He spoke a little English, but at first seemed so shy of using it that I gave up, and moved off to find someone else to interview. But he came after me and tugged on my sleeve, murmuring with a backward glance that he did want to speak to me, but in private, not here by the reception area where there was no telling who might be watching from the crowd. And so, with some misgivings, I led him back towards the Gate of Hope, and sat him down beneath the gaze of the AMISOM sentries among some sandbags in a half-built machinegun nest.

The story of what had happened to him and his family turned
out to be so engrossing that we didn’t stand up again for two hours. He was only twenty, yet almost every terrible thing that can happen in a person’s life seemed already to have done so. He was a walking epitome of the Somali catastrophe.

Aden was born in Tieglow near Baidoa in the south-central region, the son of a poor sorghum farmer. His parents, two sisters and a brother lived together in a three-roomed mud hut built by his grandfather. They belonged to an obscure sub-clan of the southern Rahanweyn people, a background that came to determine the family’s fate.
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The Rahanweyn, who account for perhaps 20 per cent of all Somalis, have long been marginalized by the other clans. They are marked out by the ‘Mai Terreh’ Somali they speak, a dialect quite different to the standard ‘Maxaa Tiri’ Somali used everywhere else. Like many Rahanweyn, moreover, Aden’s clan were settled farmers, who have always been looked down upon by the nomads, the country’s ‘aristocracy’, even though all the farmers had done, over the centuries, was to adapt to their environment. As inhabitants of the south, a fertile region irrigated by Somalia’s only two significant rivers, the Shabelle and the Juba, why would they be
nomads? But in the nomads’ eyes, the settled life was an easier life that had softened the Rahanweyn farmer clans, and that made them degenerate.

As the civil mayhem of the 1990s took hold, the farmers were at first persecuted and then pillaged by the mainstream clans. This is one of the reasons that a disproportionate number of Rahanweyn, the great losers of Somali society, later came to support al-Shabaab, a movement whose back-to-basics Salafism theoretically transcends the clan system. The south, in fact, was al-Shabaab’s heartland from the start. In 2011, an estimated 30 per cent of the movement’s foot soldiery, over 4,000 fighting men, were Rahanweyn, with another 1,000 classified as ‘students and farmers’ from southern minority clans.
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Despite the dangers of belonging to a Rahanweyn farming family as the civil war ignited, Aden remembered his childhood in Tieglow with fondness. Although his district was tribally mixed, it managed to escape the worst depredations of the clan militias. Many of his family’s relations lived close by, providing a sense of security and community. Aden’s father had brought his children up in the gentle old Sufi tradition, where food and work were shared equally, and neighbourly relations were governed by a culture of mutual respect: ‘The complete opposite,’ Aden remarked bitterly, ‘of the clan system in Mogadishu.’

In a good harvest year his father’s farm produced twenty sacks of sorghum, almost double what the family needed. But the rains were uncertain throughout the 1990s, and when the sorghum failed, life became much harder. In one year, Aden remembered, the family went without a proper meal for three months. But the drought of 2000–1 proved too much even for these hardy survivors, and the family were forced to shut up the house and trek
east to Mogadishu to find an alternative living. The move was supposed to be temporary, but when the time came to return to Tieglow, the family refused to go. Mogadishu offered a far better chance of survival than the drought-stricken region they had left behind.

The city was kind to them at first. His parents opened a small shop on the edge of the Bakara Market, selling combs, mirrors, pens and other bric-a-brac. They made enough money to send the children to school, which Aden loved. His mates called him Ateera (‘Body Slam’), a typical Somali joke nickname, since his skinny build was the exact opposite of a wrestler’s. He recalled playing football as a young teenager inside the roofless wreck of the old parliament building, where he said a journalist from the
New York Times
had once interviewed him, a memory that I guessed had prompted him to ask to talk to me.

These were years of genuine hope for many Somalis. A Transitional National Government was formed in 2000, ostensibly offering the country its best chance of peace in a decade. But ultimately neither the TNG, nor the Transitional Federal Government which succeeded it in 2004, was able to secure a lasting political settlement. Both were fatally weakened by corruption and the vested clan interests that had dragged the country into civil war in the first place.

From their outset, the fledgling government institutions were challenged by the Islamic judiciary who thought, perhaps understandably, that they could do a better job of running the country. The collapse of Barre’s dictatorship had left a vacuum that had to be filled by something, and since 1991, starting in the south of the country, a system of government by judges had evolved – a historically rare example of a ‘krytocracy’ – under which local
courts offered not only Sharia justice but, eventually, police services, education and even healthcare. In April 1999 they took control of the Bakara Market, the commercial heart of Mogadishu. Five years later, in 2004, the courts had formally amalgamated into the Islamic Courts Union, or ICU.

By Somali standards, the ICU’s administration was not a bad one. Civil society functioned without the corruption that plagued daily life in the areas supposedly controlled by the TFG. The streets were policed by officials wearing distinctly Arab-looking
thobes
and
keffiyehs
. Serious crimes such as rape and murder were sometimes punishable by stoning. The strict Salafist doctrine that the ICU judges imposed was in fact imported from Arabia, and was almost the antithesis, within Islam, of the liberal, hymn-singing Sufism traditionally practised in Somalia. The movement was not popular with everyone, therefore. Richard Burton wrote that ‘though superstitious, the Somal are not bigoted like the Arabs, with the exception of those who, wishing to become learned, visit Yemen or El Hejaz, and catch the complaint. Nominal Mohammedans, El Islam hangs so lightly upon them, that apparently they care little for making it binding upon others.’

On the other hand, the ICU did bring security to the areas under their control – and to a people weary of war, that could easily overcome any ideological misgivings. In this respect, the ICU’s support was comparable to that enjoyed by the Taliban when they took over Kabul in 1997. Those Afghans’ brand of Islam (and the harshness with which they sometimes enforced it) was not always popular either. But they did restore order to a city that had suffered years of brutal civil war, and that, to Kabulis, was worth almost any sacrifice. For a while, Mogadishu’s Bakara Market became one of the safest places in the whole country, as well as the
obvious choice of destination for a family of refugees like Aden’s.

In 2005, however, a group of clan warlords, jealous of the ICU’s grip on the Bakara Market and its revenue-raising possibilities, stopped fighting each other and agreed to turn their guns on the Islamists. Crucially, the ‘Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism’ – some of whose members were also ministers in the TFG government – was supported by the US, who were concerned that the ICU was a front for, or at least sheltering members of, al-Qaida. This was precisely the same concern they had had about the Taliban, who sheltered Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan in the years before 2001. The CIA, who reportedly funnelled $150,000 a month to the anti-ICU Alliance, was particularly interested in Comoros-born Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, an al-Qaida leader implicated in the cataclysmic US embassy bombings in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi in 1998, which killed 223 and injured more than 4,000.
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The ICU may have harboured extremists, but it was not an extremist organization per se. It actually encompassed quite a wide range of Islamist doctrine, from Sufi moderates to Salafist hardliners, which meant, among other things, that its ideological direction was never very fixed. Even in 2006, the UN secretary-general Kofi Annan was unable to say if the ICU was a good or bad thing for Somalia.

‘I don’t know much about the Islamic Court group,’ he told a reporter. ‘What I can say is that the people of Somalia are totally fed up with the warlords, that I suspect that most Somalis, except those with vested interests, will say good riddance.’
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After the outrage of 9/11, however, the Bush administration was in no mood to pay attention to such nuances. Any friend of their enemy was their enemy.

‘We certainly want to work with people in Somalia who are interested in combatting terrorism,’ said Sean McCormack, a spokesman for the State Department. ‘We do have concerns about the presence of al-Qaida.’
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Kofi Annan, using remarkably frank language for a secretary-general of the UN, said it was unequivocally ‘wrong’ of the US to support warlords, but even that criticism was ignored. The US decision to take sides against the ICU was to have profound unforeseen consequences – for Aden’s family, for Somalia, and for the world.

The showdown came in May 2006, when street fighting for control of the Bakara Market blew up into a full-scale battle in which more than three hundred people died. Cowering behind the shutters of their little market shop as the fighting raged outside, Aden’s parents and older sister were all killed instantly when a TFG mortar shell plunged through the roof. Aden, his brother and his other sister only survived because they happened to have gone to visit some neighbours that day, and had taken shelter there as the firefight intensified.

‘We all have to submit to Allah’s will,’ said Aden tonelessly.

Allah hadn’t finished with the family yet. In June 2006, the TFG was driven into exile in the western town of Baidoa by the Islamists, who took control first of Mogadishu and then the entire south of the country. This greatly alarmed Christian Ethiopia, Somalia’s historical rival in the region. Backed by the US, President Zeles Menawi ordered an invasion in support of the TFG. The ICU people’s militias were no match for Ethiopia’s well-equipped military, who advanced until they occupied Mogadishu, an occupation that was to last until 2008.

The ICU was now in crisis. Some of the moderates among them,
led by Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, a former secondary school teacher and the movement’s one-time commander-in-chief, favoured negotiating with the newly reinstated government. Sheikh Sharif eventually signed a peace deal with the TFG, in Djibouti in 2008; he was rewarded with the presidency of Somalia the following year. The hardliners, however, refused to have anything to do with the TFG. They were led by Sheikh Sharif’s great friend and mentor, Sheikh Hassan Aweys, a former army colonel who had been decorated for bravery during Siad Barre’s Ogaden War.