Every day you can give
thanks that you don't live in Somalia
The world's No. 1 failed state is crumbling
and crazy-dangerous
By NORMAN WEBSTER, The Gazette September 13, 2009
Whenever one becomes discouraged with life in Ourtown - its potholes
and falling masonry, its war between drivers and cyclists, its
noisome politics and bizarre language quarrels - one can always, at
the end of the day, crack a cold one and sink into the sofa while
murmuring gratefully, "Well, at least this isn't Mogadishu."
This will certainly have occurred to readers of National Geographic.
The September issue has an outstanding piece on the world's No. 1
failed state, Somalia. It is a stunner - especially the photographs
by Pascal Maitre, Paris-based but a five-time visitor to the country
and its crumbling, crazy-dangerous capital.
Older correspondents will shed a tear for the days before religious
war and clan violence tore the place apart. Thirty years ago, when I
visited to report on a refugee crisis, Mogadishu itself was a pretty
safe place featuring elegant buildings left by the former colonial
ruler, Italy.
Today much of the city is rubble, its streets a feral cockpit where
only the unwise venture after dark. Hotels along the Indian Ocean
beachfront are shattered hulks.
That was where the old Anglo-American Beach Club was located.
Foreigners, mostly Italian, would gather there to commiserate about
Somali bureaucrats whose perfection of the 10-second attention span
ensured that nothing, absolutely nothing, ever got done. An official
speaking to you while simultaneously signing his name to documents
would actually halt his pen in mid-signature to discuss a new matter
with a new arrival. It drove the Italians nuts.
The evidence of near-madness was clear at the Beach Club: They were
mixing their gin with Fanta orange.
The decline of Somalia is one of the saddest stories of our time. It
almost makes one pine for dictators. The country was no paradise,
but it did enjoy relative stability under a buck-toothed general
named Mohammed Siad Barre, who took power in a coup in 1969 and held
it until ousted in 1991.
Barre ran a taut ship in which opponents did not prosper. He seems
to have had a nose for the ferocious, deeply-rooted clan politics of
Somali society, as noted in a stark proverb:
Me and my clan against the world;
Me and my family against my clan;
Me and my brother against my family;
Me against my brother.
Since Barre's downfall, there has been almost constant warfare in
the Horn of Africa. Life has been hell for millions - although, it
must be noted, more hellish for the inhabitants of the former
Italian Somalia, in the south, than those of the former British
Somalia in the north. Known, somewhat confusingly, as Somaliland,
this northern territory today is effectively independent and
relatively sane. No one is quite sure why, or how long the blessed
surcease will last.
It is a harsh, arid land, Somalia, burdened by drought, heavy
weapons, brutish leaders, female circumcision and now pirates
(pirates!) openly plying their trade along the coast. Islamic
terrorists are on the rise; security experts warn that Somalia could
become a safe haven for Al-Qa'ida, as happened in Afghanistan in
2001. Foreigners are kidnapped for ransom (including Canadian
freelance journalist Amanda Lindhout, who has been held for 13
months since being abducted together with an Australian colleague on
the same road, and the same day, as National Geographic's reporter
and photographer passed with difficulty).
Here are a few figures. Population: about 9.1 million. Number killed
in civil warfare: about l million. Top 5 ranking in 2009 Failed
States Index issued by the Fund for Peace and Foreign Policy
magazine: Somalia, Zimbabwe, Sudan, Chad, Democratic Republic of the
Congo. Number of Somalis estimated by recent UN report to be in need
of humanitarian assistance: 3.76 million.
It was an earlier crisis that took me to Somalia in 1979. Mohammed
Siad Barre had made a bad mistake by invading Ethiopian territory in
the Ogaden desert, counting on the Americans to aid him against
Ethiopia and its Communist allies, Cuba and the Soviet Union. When
the Americans did not come through, a counter-attack pushed the
Somali army back to its borders.
Then the Ethiopians began a brutal cleansing, driving hundreds of
thousands of ethnic Somalis from their homes in the desert. The
victims told wrenching (and believable) stories of torture, rape and
executions, villages put to the torch, camels slaughtered and, that
most terrible of desert crimes, the poisoning of waterholes.
Meanwhile, the so-called Western Somali Liberation Front was
carrying on a guerrilla campaign in the Ogaden. At its headquarters,
a peeling back room in Mogadishu, the Front's secretary-general
added an unusual item to his charges against the much-hated Cubans.
It seemed that Fidel's boys, missing the delights of home and
Havana, were wont to have, er, unnatural relations with donkeys in
the desert. Chuckles all round.
I took notes gravely. You never know.
Norman Webster is a former editor of The Gazette.
|