The World's Most Dangerous Place (31 page)

However inauspicious its origins, the relationship forged between Somaliland and Britain was a strong one, with a legacy that survives to this day. Local sailors employed by the East India Company settled at the northern end of the trade route in port cities like Bristol and Liverpool, establishing some of the earliest Muslim communities in Britain, which continue to thrive. The first British mosque was established by Somali and Yemeni sailors in 1860 in the Cathays district of Cardiff. Many of their sons and grandsons went on to serve in the merchant navy in both world wars. Hundreds of them gave their lives for Britain on the Atlantic convoys. The maritime flavour of this special relationship was perhaps epitomized by the imam of Cardiff, Sheikh Saeed Ismail, who was born in South Shields in 1930 to an English mother and a Yemeni sailor who was killed when his ship was torpedoed by a U-boat in the Bristol Channel in 1939.
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It was no coincidence that the inaugural meeting in 1981 of the SNM, the exiled Somali National Movement which led Somaliland’s rebellion against Siad Barre, took place in Whitechapel on the edge of east London’s docklands.

Like Somaliland itself, the SNM was dominated by a single clan, the Isaaq, who felt they had been marginalized by Mogadishu almost from the moment in 1960 when the British and Italian Somalilands had unified to form modern Somalia. In 1991, with
Siad Barre ousted and the victorious SNM in control in Hargeisa, Somaliland unilaterally declared independence from the south. Thirty years after its foundation in London, the SNM was defunct, but its successor, the left-of-centre Peace, Unity and Development Party known as Kulmiye, was still the main force in Somaliland politics, and still closely connected to Britain. In 2010, when the SNM’s former chairman, the Manchester University-educated Ahmed Mahamoud Silanyo, was elected Somaliland’s president on behalf of Kulmiye, the British prime minister explicitly congratulated him in the House of Commons – although, like the rest of the international community, he fell far short of recognizing Silanyo’s goal of Somaliland independence.
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As Hassan and I wandered the city streets it became clear what inveterate travellers and traders the Somalilanders were. The foreign influence was obvious in the business names on display: the Miami Hotel, the Obama Restaurant and Café, even a fashion boutique called Posh, with a sign that read, in English, ‘Your elegance is our pleasure.’ Hassan put the number of Somalilanders who knew someone or had family abroad as high as 70 per cent, which was almost double the figure given by the UN for Somalia as a whole. Everyone understood that it was remittances from the diaspora that had paid for Hargeisa’s reconstruction. In fact, all Somalis, not just those in Somaliland, depended on money
transfers to keep the region’s economy afloat. The Mogadishu government estimated that friends and relatives abroad sent back $2bn every year, an astonishing sum for a country with an estimated gross domestic product of just $6bn.
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Thanks to fierce competition between its six mobile phone operators, Somaliland was one of the cheapest places in Africa to make and receive a phone call. Every second shop in the main trading street seemed to be a mobile phone business, an internet café or a hawala office. Dahabshiil, one of the world’s biggest international money transfer businesses, was much in evidence. Founded in the 1970s by a Somalilander, Mohamed Duale, the company now had 24,000 agents in 144 countries, and generated profits of more than $250m a year. ‘Dahabshiil’ was the Somali word for a goldsmith, which Hassan thought very apt for such a fabulous moneyspinner of a firm. The commercial tradition was as strong here as it must once have been in medieval Genoa or Venice, and quite unlike anywhere else in Somalia.

The state had its own currency, the Shilling, yet it had no central bank. There were no automated cash machines, and no one used credit cards. Instead there were sections of town where the pavements were clogged with money-changers who kept their cash in crude metal cages, so confident in the honesty of the citizenry that they could leave their wads of mouldering banknotes unattended whenever they needed to, just as Mohamed Omaar had described to me in Mogadishu. At the same time there was a strong possibility that cash would be replaced altogether one day by mobile telephone banking, a development that would put Somaliland far ahead of the West. The main mobile banking service, Zaad, had accrued 300,000 users since its launch in 2009. It was even possible to buy qat using Zaad.
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As night fell, Hassan took me to an outdoor restaurant called
Summertime, set in a pretty, stepped courtyard where a fountain played beneath soft coloured lights. The tables were buzzing with young families out for their evening meal. The normality of the scene was, once again, startling: a vision, perhaps, of what Mogadishu nightlife must once have been like. The atmosphere here put the Ruqsan Square venture in Garowe to shame. A waiter came over to tell us about the wireless internet available – ‘A hundred per cent free and superfast,’ he said – before producing a menu that listed a dish called Chocolate Fish. (‘Actually, it’s got nothing to do with chocolate,’ he said. ‘We just call it that.’)

A muezzin sounded, and Hassan went off to pray. When he returned, grinning, he was accompanied by three old friends he had bumped into, Mohamed, Najib and Sabah, who sat down with us for dinner. All three of them were returnees from America. Sabah had been educated in Minnesota and spoke with a pronounced Midwestern twang. They were Westernized, sophisticated, and fun.

‘On no account should you touch the chocolate fish,’ said Najib sternly as we looked at our menus.

I asked why not, as it was ages since I had eaten fish, but neither he nor the others would tell me. They shook their heads and sucked their teeth in a unified display of mock horror. We ended up eating bread and shredded camel meat, limes and chilli sauce, all washed down with milky Somali tea. I never did discover what the chocolate fish was about.

The talk ranged happily over local politics (only slightly less corrupt than it used to be, they said), some of the surprising advantages of the clan system (it was a useful substitute for car insurance), the prospects for Somaliland independence (fading), and the increasing popularity of the veil over the last twenty years.
This prompted an anecdote from Najib who, as a young man in his twenties a decade before, had been at home chewing qat late one night when he determined to go out in search of female company.

‘Qat can make you really horny, you know?’ he drawled, ‘and I was flying that night. My eyes were wide and my jaw was going like a piston . . . Man, I needed to get laid.’

It was a wet evening and so he set off in his car, kerb-crawling the streets of East Hargeisa, until in his headlights he spotted the wiggling backsides of what he thought were two young girls in abeyas and scarves, picking their way through the puddles at the side of the road. It was raining hard by then, and he pulled over to offer them a lift, smugly certain that they would accept.

‘But I guess I couldn’t see that well,’ Najib went on. ‘Qat can do things to your eyes sometimes – double vision and stuff, you know? – and it was raining, and the windshield wipers were for shit. And these girls come up and I get the fright of my life, because they’ve got, like, beards! And they dive into my car going, “God bless you, my son.” They weren’t girls at all, they were imams on the way back from the masjid . . . And I’m driving them along, and my knuckles are white from clutching the steering wheel so hard because I’m so high, and I’m trying to kick my qat bag under my seat so they won’t see it. I swear to God, man, I haven’t chewed since.’

It wasn’t only qat users who were confused by Somali women’s steady retreat behind the veil. Everyone around the table had a different theory about why it had happened. The only point of agreement was that the explanation was not simple. Hassan thought that for some women, the veil offered ‘solace’ for the trauma of the war. The imams, he noted, had been the first to rebel against Siad Barre, and had been ‘slaughtered’ in the mosques. The veil was therefore a symbol of resistance against oppression, as well
as peace over violence, order over chaos. Najib, who ran a rape trauma clinic nowadays, knew a good deal about that. The conversation suddenly turned dark as the old stories of cruelty and sadism from the 1990s tumbled out.

He described one infamous checkpoint where travellers were summarily shot if they failed to recite from memory certain passages from the Koran. Another checkpoint near Baidoa was equipped with a pair of scales. The drug-fuelled militiamen in charge decided that anyone weighing more than 60kg had to pay a per-kilo fine, like a budget airline luggage allowance – except that any traveller who could not pay risked having their excess flesh removed, Shylock-style, with a panga. One man who objected was directed to go and negotiate with the checkpoint commander, who the militiamen said was asleep on a camp bed in a nearby hut. When the objector tried to wake this man, he discovered a bloody corpse beneath the sheets.

Innocent people could easily be killed out of boredom in these deranged times, or simply on the off-chance that they had a little money on them, a class of murder so common that it was known as a
nesibso
or ‘try-your-luck’ killing. There was also, unsurprisingly, a great deal of casual sexual violence. Najib recalled how one fearful elder invited a group of local militia leaders to dinner, hoping to tame their excesses with traditional hospitality. He ended up being forced to watch the gang rape of his wife and teenage daughters. In another notorious episode, a woman was stripped, raped and murdered by checkpoint militiamen who then threw her body into a nearby ditch with several batteries shoved up her vagina. When asked why, the men explained with a giggle that they had turned the corpse into a radio ‘in order to listen to the BBC’. The disregard for human life that Najib described was breathtaking, yet that, somehow, was not the
worst aspect of the story. Callous evil was not new in the world, after all. What really shocked was the killers’ prankish, snickering humour, and the enjoyment they appeared to take in their depravity.

The others around the table fell silent when Najib had finished. They were all in their thirties, which meant that all of their childhoods had been disrupted by the war – and who among their generation didn’t have a tale of suffering to tell? It was as though the stories of evil perpetrated by their countrymen offered glimpses of the dark side of their own Somali souls. The serenity of this balmy evening, the good food and company around the restaurant table, no longer seemed banal but, briefly, priceless. The Somaliland urge to cut itself off permanently from the old source of so much horror was clarified for me. The state had cleansed itself of the taint of civil war, and would do anything to avoid recontamination. Peace was a privilege to be treasured and defended at any cost.

This attitude had made Somaliland one of the darlings of the West. Hargeisa’s embrace of democracy was one of the developments that led the US to adopt, in 2010, a new ‘twin-track’ approach to Somalia, which meant supporting both the autonomy-seeking stable regions like Somaliland and the centralizing mission of the government in Mogadishu. The policy amounted to a kind of Plan B in the event of the TFG’s failure, for there were many who argued that Somaliland’s constitution could provide a model for the rest of the country. Ignatius Takawira, a Zimbabwean UN official who helped monitor the 2010 presidential elections, called Somaliland’s election laws ‘unique and rather brilliant’. The constitution limited to three the number of political parties allowed to contest the presidency, and all political campaigning was banned until just three weeks before the election.

‘The flags go up, the flags come down, and then they vote,’ said
Takawira. ‘That’s clever, because it avoids a prolonged fight – and I saw it working. At election time in Zimbabwe, my people just kill each other.’

Somaliland’s political elite was unusually well supported in Britain, where a small group of politicians with Somalilander constituencies, led by Alun Michael, the Labour MP for Cardiff South and Penarth, lobbied vociferously on their behalf. London’s official Horn of Africa policy was to back the TFG in Mogadishu, which obviously precluded the recognition of Somaliland sovereignty. But this did not prevent Alun Michael from demanding greater ‘respect’ for the Hargeisa government and its functions. Modern Somaliland, he argued, was ‘a beacon of democracy’ that deserved to be acknowledged as a ‘distinct entity from the rest of Somalia’.
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When I went to meet him in Westminster, the MP went further, arguing that the case for Somaliland’s independence was ‘clear and unanswerable’ – although he also insisted that it was for Somalis, not him, to assert that case.

Such advocacy irritated many Somalis outside Somaliland. Puntland, which still regarded the SNM’s unilateral declaration of secession in 1991 as ‘high treason’, was particularly touchy about London’s perceived doublespeak. In Garowe, President Farole had grumbled about Whitehall’s blatant favouritism towards Hargeisa, especially when it came to the distribution of aid. A handful of ‘MPs and Welsh lords’, he told me, were ‘obsessed’ with Somaliland. He perhaps had a point. In 2006, the Welsh National Assembly officially invited the Hargeisa government (but not the Garowe one, and certainly not the TFG in Mogadishu) to attend the royal opening of the Senedd in Cardiff. And it was only in 2011 that the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Somaliland, chaired by Alun Michael, had changed its name to include the words ‘and Somalia’. Michael
explained that Somalia’s government had not been elected, unlike the Hargeisa one, and that the whole point of the APPG system was to promote dialogue between democratic parliaments. He was technically correct, although to the Farole government in Garowe, the omission still felt like a slight to Puntland.
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