The World's Most Dangerous Place (12 page)

If the cabinet room felt under-used, that was partly because the government did much of its real business elsewhere, in Nairobi or Kampala or Addis Ababa. Indeed, it was quite rare to find all eighteen members of the cabinet together in Mogadishu at the same time. The city’s dangers simply made it impractical for regular meetings. UN officials complained that it was difficult to engage with the political process when the country’s top politicians were away all the time. Somalis, however, retorted that UNPOS, the UN’s Political Office for Somalia, had been based in Nairobi for more than sixteen years. The UN’s Special Representative for Somalia, the Tanzanian diplomat Augustine Mahiga, routinely flew into Mogadishu for important meetings – purely to shake hands in front of the cameras, according to his detractors – before returning to the safety of Nairobi the same day.
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Mogadishu, it seemed, was not a place that anyone lingered in longer than they had to.

It was probably significant that the cabinet room hadn’t been decorated since the 1970s, for that was the decade when the
dream of pan-Somali nationalism really died – killed off, perhaps, by Siad Barre’s overweening regional ambitions that culminated in his disastrous invasion of Ethiopia in 1977. In the centre of the conference table was a papier-mâché flowerpot painted in the colours of the national flag – blue, with a white star in the centre – and even this bespoke the sad narrative of Somalia’s failure as a state.

The flag was designed in the 1950s in preparation for independence, an era of hope and optimism and nationalistic fervour – the last time, perhaps, that Somalis could genuinely look forward to the future. The star was a ‘star of unity’, the points of which symbolized the five Somali-inhabited regions that nationalists dreamed would one day come together to form
Somaliweyn
, a Greater Somalia: French, British and Italian Somaliland, plus the Ogaden in Ethiopia and the North Eastern Province of Kenya. The blue background, meanwhile, copied and honoured the flag of the United Nations, under whose ten-year ‘trusteeship’ the colonies were then governed.

But the UN failed in its role of midwife; the infant country it delivered was an unhappy, misshapen thing. British Somaliland – which simply dropped the word ‘British’ to become ‘Somaliland’ – immediately regretted unifying with the former Italian colony to the south, and has been trying to separate from them again almost ever since. French Somaliland went its own way and became Djibouti in 1977. The claim on the Ogaden led to a disastrous war with Ethiopia, which destroyed any appetite there might have been to test Kenya’s commitment to its North Eastern Province.

The UN, guiltily determined to help its malformed progeny, returned for three years as peacekeepers in 1992. ‘UNOSOM’ became the largest UN operation in the world, with 30,000 staff
and a cost of $1.5bn a year, but it was still powerless to prevent Somalia from spinning even further apart. Now, in the twenty-first century, the UN had returned once more, this time as sponsors – some would say puppet-masters – of the African Union and the TFG. The flag, though, is unchanged: an unhappy symbiosis of nationalist white and international blue, and the only one in the world to depict a nation state that has never existed and that almost certainly never will.

The gunfire outside had stopped for a while but now began to pick up again. Yarisow left the room, his fingers jabbing at a mobile phone, then reappeared with the reassuring news that it was all suppressive, outgoing fire. But he also mentioned that the ear-splitting explosion we had heard earlier was caused not by an outgoing shell, as Minister Omaar had suggested, but by a large, incoming one. An 82mm mortar round had exploded in the parade ground right in front of the building’s entrace, a spot that I had crossed less than an hour previously. I wondered if Omaar had known all along. Yarisow didn’t answer when I asked if anyone had been hurt, but remarked mildly it might be best for me to wait until the exchange of fire had calmed down before leaving.

I wasn’t the only one forced to shelter from the metal storm. First came the Minister of Information, Abdulkareem Jama, a clean-cut, bespectacled man with a strong American accent. He turned out to be from Falls Church, Virginia, and used to work as an IT manager for a small commercial publishing firm in Washington. Next to arrive was Mohamed Nur, the speckle-bearded mayor of Mogadishu, a returnee from north London.

I had read about ‘Tarzan’, as he was nicknamed, because his extraordinary career path had attracted the attention of several British journalists recently. From 1993 until his appointment in
2010, he had lived a quiet life in London with his wife and six children. A local business advisor, he had once run an internet café called Easyreach on the Seven Sisters Road. One of the high points of his previous professional life came when he contested the Camden Council seat of Fortune Green on behalf of the Labour Party in 2006, even though he lost.

He had greater success in Mogadishu, where he was admired by many for his efforts to restore some sense of normality to municipal government.

‘My first objectives here were very basic: to improve security, to clean up the markets, to put some lighting on the main streets. But I didn’t inherit a single tool from my predecessor. Not even a wheelbarrow.’

His budget came entirely from levies on goods arriving at the seaport, money that for years had been paid in cash straight into the pockets of the city’s administrators. Nur made his first, dangerous enemies when he ordered that in future this money should be paid into a traceable bank account. Among the first officials to object was his own deputy. Nur quickly suspended him, but was unable to permanently fire him because he had been appointed, for clan-political reasons, by the president.

‘I told my family when I took this job that death was a real possibility,’ he said. ‘But if I die with my principles intact, that’s OK by me.’

There was no mistaking his sincerity. Nur defined his mission in Mogadishu in almost messianic terms.

‘Ninety per cent of the people here are traumatized without even knowing it,’ he said. ‘They have tremendous mental problems. They have been living for years in a dark cage, with no windows, no toilets, with nothing but the awful sound of fighting in their
ears, so afraid that they soil themselves . . . and they think this is a normal life. Our job is to break the window, to let in the light and show them,
that
is normality.’

Soon after his appointment, and with this light-disseminating mission in mind, Nur decided to hold a cultural festival.

‘I wanted it to be like the market at Camden Lock,’ he told me. ‘My dream was to have the streets filled with people walking around, enjoying themselves.’

Fairs and festivals were once common in Mogadishu, for Somalia’s musical and literary heritage is a particularly rich one, although as Nur pointed out, ‘No one has congregated for pleasure in Mogadishu for over twenty years – only for politics.’ Armed with $15,000 provided by the UN, he set about hiring troupes of folk dancers, musicians, caterers. Poets were specially commissioned to write, and recite, new works for the occasion. Singers from Waaberi, a famous Somali supergroup, were invited to take part: the first time anyone had heard of them since the late 1990s. Word quickly spread among the public. It was the best and most exciting thing to happen in the city for years.

The crowds were dense from the moment the festival opened, at 8.30 a.m. one February morning. Exactly one hour and ten minutes later, the party came to a sudden end when men loyal to one of Nur’s predecessors as mayor, a notorious warlord called Mohamed Dheere, arrived in two armed trucks and opened fire. Four people were killed and sixteen wounded.

‘Dheere is just a thug – a cold man,’ Nur said bitterly. ‘He wants chaos – and he might even get away with it yet.’

Dheere, he explained, had been arrested and imprisoned, and was supposed to be tried by a military court for the attack, but the
trial had been deferred following pressure through his Hawiye Abgaal clan.

‘My impression is that when someone invokes clan loyalty, they are very often working not in that clan’s interests but in their own . . . Dheere has been given special treatment in his cell. He even hired the chief prosecutor’s office to defend him! How is that possible? Don’t talk to me about an independent judiciary. There is none here.’

Warlordism was evidently still a force to be reckoned with in Mogadishu. The warlords used the clan system against the government, and so did the business community, for whom the restoration of civic order meant the reimposition of taxes they had evaded for years.

‘This government is trying to restore a culture of honesty, but it is like trying to swim against the waves of the Indian Ocean.’

Any lack of progress, he added, was not the fault of the government, but of the president: a remark that caused Yarisow, who was listening in to our conversation, to look up sharply. Nur, appointed mayor directly by Sheikh Sharif, was now overtly biting the hand that had fed him. I recalled that the president was a member of the same Hawiye Abgaal clan as Nur’s nemesis, Mohamed Dheere.

‘The leadership is the problem,’ he persisted. ‘Sheikh Sharif has not fulfilled our expectations, or those of the Somali people. He is too indecisive. It takes an age to move a bottle from here to here.’

This diatribe was interrupted by the arrival of a stern-looking man in an unusually tall white kufi cap and a heavily embroidered robe. Yarisow coughed and introduced the Minister for Presidential Affairs, Abdulkadir Moallin Noor.

‘He is also from London,’ Yarisow added, conversationally. ‘He is the head of Ahlu Sunna. He is a very important man.’

This was naked flattery, dressed up as an explanation to a clueless gaalo. There were political undercurrents at work here, internal rivalries to do with clan and religion that I, as an outsider, was in no way equipped to detect. As the presidential gatekeeper and the leader of the ASWJ, the government’s most important local military ally, the new arrival obviously was an important man. At the same time, he was patently not a member of Farmaajo’s club of technocrats. He didn’t just dress differently, but spoke differently too. The atmosphere in the room had perceptibly cooled.

‘You are British,’ he observed, through narrowed eyes.

‘Yes. Where did you live in London?’

‘Battersea,’ he said, in a tone that did not invite further inquiry.

He took me by an elbow then and, leading me to one side, launched into a low, fast monologue, a kind of justificatory introduction to himself that he must have delivered often before.

‘I am the Khalifa,’ he began. ‘It means “the Successor”. My father was a big spiritual leader of Ahlu Sunna and I took over from him when he died two years ago. Ahlu Sunna is a peace-loving organization: a 100 per cent Sufi organization, with followers all over the world. When I fly to London, two hundred people turn out to meet me at Heathrow. With
flags
. My father started over a thousand madrassahs, and built forty-six mosques in Mogadishu alone. We used to be a simple aid organization: we ran food camps that fed five hundred or six hundred people at a time. But when al-Shabaab began to desecrate our graves, we were forced to fight. See?’

I saw; although, privately, I was wondering about the Khalifa’s relationship with the enigmatic president. Who was really in charge here?

Earlier that day at AMISOM headquarters, I had heard a
rumour that Sheikh Sharif had recently
sold
a truckload of weapons to one of the clan militias fighting for the TFG army – which was supposed to be the nucleus of an essential institution of the state. This was the sort of behaviour Somalis had come to expect of warlords, not of the God-fearing former leader of the Islamic Courts Union. Was Sheikh Sharif merely monetarily corrupt? Or was he, as I thought more likely, another kind of victim, a leader somehow ensnared by the competing vested interests of clan and creed that seemed to dominate all political discourse in this country? If the stories about him were even half true, Sheikh Sharif had surely lost sight of what was best for Somalia.

The gunfire outside had subsided. Yarisow materialized again, a mobile phone still clamped to his ear, informing me that an AMISOM convoy was waiting outside, and that I needed to move fast if I wanted to get back to the base before nightfall. I humped on my soggy flak jacket again, while extracting business cards and promises of another invitation to the Villa Somalia. And then I was running through the gates to the back of a Casspir, which lurched away in a cloud of diesel smoke before the rear doors were fully closed, the top-gunner in his turret crouched and unusually alert.

I didn’t know it then, but Farmaajo’s promising new administration was already doomed, with less than four more months in office before them. They were the sacrificial victims of the power struggle between the president and the speaker. In June 2011, in Kampala, the two Sharifs agreed to extend their own mandates and postpone a general election for another year. The parliament had earlier unilaterally extended its mandate by three years; the speaker’s price for getting parliament to agree to an earlier election date was the dismissal of Farmaajo.

The public was outraged by the so-called Kampala Accord.
Sheikh Sharif was clearly taken aback by the strength of public feeling it generated. Thousands of demonstrators took to the streets not just in towns across Somalia but in nine capitals around the world.

‘What they have a problem with,’ Mayor Nur told the Toronto
Star
, ‘is that two people go and decide the fate of this government without considering the feelings of this population.’

Or, for that matter, the feelings of Farmaajo’s cabinet – for it was no small risk these officials had taken when they came back to serve their country. In June 2011, just days before the government fell, the Interior Minister, Abdishakur Sheikh Hassan Farah, was killed in his home by a suicide bomber. He was the sixth TFG minister to be murdered by the militants.

What made Farah’s death particularly chilling was that the suicide bomber was his own niece, a bright university student called Haboon Qaaf, whose tuition fees he had been paying. According to a family friend I later interviewed,
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Haboon had complained about being frisked each time she came to see her uncle, who ordered his guards to make an exception for her. She took advantage of this soft-heartedness on her very next visit. No one had any idea when or how she had been recruited by al-Shabaab, and could only guess at what had driven her to an act of such nihilism. Just weeks before the attack, according to the friend, Haboon had spoken cheerfully about qualifying one day as a doctor; her studies suggested an investment in the future that did not begin to fit with the mindset necessary to commit suicide.