From: wolda002@umn.edu
Date: Thu Feb 19 2009 - 00:57:34 EST
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=4682&print=1
The Most Dangerous Place in the World
By Jeffrey Gettleman
March/April 2009
Somalia is a state governed only by anarchy. A graveyard of foreign-policy
failures, it has known just six months of peace in the past two decades.
Now, as the country’s endless chaos threatens to engulf an entire region,
the world again simply watches it burn.
Photo by Franco Pagetti
Crooked streets: The government controls just a few city blocks in
Mogadishu, near the presidential palace. The rest -- an estimated 14,000
Ethiopian-trained soldiers -- have deserted with their weapons and
uniforms.
When you land at Mogadishu’s international airport, the first form you
fill out asks for name, address, and caliber of weapon. Believe it or not,
this disaster of a city, the capital of Somalia, still gets a few
commercial flights. Some haven’t fared so well. The wreckage of a Russian
cargo plane shot down in 2007 still lies crumpled at the end of the runway.
Beyond the airport is one of the world’s most stunning monuments to
conflict: block after block, mile after mile, of scorched, gutted-out
buildings. Mogadishu’s Italianate architecture, once a gem along the
Indian Ocean, has been reduced to a pile of machine-gun-chewed bricks.
Somalia has been ripped apart by violence since the central government
imploded in 1991. Eighteen years and 14 failed attempts at a government
later, the killing goes on and on and on—suicide bombs, white phosphorus
bombs, beheadings, medieval-style stonings, teenage troops high on the
local drug called khat blasting away at each other and anything in between.
Even U.S. cruise missiles occasionally slam down from the sky. It’s the
same violent free-for-all on the seas. Somalia’s pirates are threatening
to choke off one of the most strategic waterways in the world, the Gulf of
Aden, which 20,000 ships pass through every year. These heavily armed
buccaneers hijacked more than 40 vessels in 2008, netting as much as $100
million in ransom. It’s the greatest piracy epidemic of modern times.
In more than a dozen trips to Somalia over the past two and a half years,
I’ve come to rewrite my own definition of chaos. I’ve felt the
incandescent fury of the Iraqi insurgency raging in Fallujah. I’ve spent
freezing-cold, eerily quiet nights in an Afghan cave. But nowhere was I
more afraid than in today’s Somalia, where you can get kidnapped or shot
in the head faster than you can wipe the sweat off your brow. From the
thick, ambush-perfect swamps around Kismayo in the south to the lethal
labyrinth of Mogadishu to the pirate den of Boosaaso on the Gulf of Aden,
Somalia is quite simply the most dangerous place in the world.
The whole country has become a breeding ground for warlords, pirates,
kidnappers, bomb makers, fanatical Islamist insurgents, freelance gunmen,
and idle, angry youth with no education and way too many bullets. There is
no Green Zone here, by the way—no fortified place of last resort to run
to if, God forbid, you get hurt or in trouble. In Somalia, you’re on your
own. The local hospitals barely have enough gauze to treat all the wounds.
The mayhem is now spilling across Somalia’s borders, stirring up tensions
and violence in Kenya, Ethiopia, and Eritrea, not to mention Somalia’s
pirate-infested seas. The export of trouble may just be beginning. Islamist
insurgents with al Qaeda connections are sweeping across the country,
turning Somalia into an Afghanistan-like magnet for militant Islam and
drawing in hard-core fighters from around the world. These men will
eventually go home (if they survive) and spread the killer ethos.
Somalia’s transitional government, a U.N.-santioned creation that was
deathly ill from the moment it was born four years ago, is about to
flatline, perhaps spawning yet another doomed international rescue mission.
Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, the old war horse of a president backed by the
United States, finally resigned in December after a long, bitter dispute
with the prime minister, Nur Hassan Hussein. Ostensibly, their conflict was
about a peace deal with the Islamists and a few cabinet posts. In truth, it
may be purely academic. By early this year, the government’s zone of
control was down to a couple of city blocks. The country is nearly as big
as Texas.
Just when things seem as though they can’t get any worse in Somalia, they
do. Beyond the political crisis, all the elements for a full-blown
famine—war, displacement, drought, skyrocketing food prices, and an
exodus of aid workers—are lining up again, just as they did in the early
1990s when hundreds of thousands of Somalis starved to death. Last May, I
stood in the doorway of a hut in the bone-dry central part of the country
watching a sick little boy curl up next to his dying mother. Her clothes
were damp. Her breaths were shallow. She hadn’t eaten for days. “She
will most likely die,’’ an elder told me and walked away.
It’s crunch time for Somalia, but the world is like me, standing in the
doorway, looking in at two decades of unbridled anarchy, unsure what to do.
Past interventions have been so cursed that no one wants to get burned
again. The United States has been among the worst of the meddlers: U.S.
forces fought predacious warlords at the wrong time, backed some of the
same predacious warlords at the wrong time, and consistently failed to
appreciate the twin pulls of clan and religion. As a result, Somalia has
become a graveyard of foreign-policy blunders that have radicalized the
population, deepened insecurity, and pushed millions to the brink of
starvation.
***
Somalia is a political paradox—unified on the surface, poisonously
divided beneath. It is one of the world’s most homogeneous nation-states,
with nearly all of its estimated 9 to 10 million people sharing the same
language (Somali), the same religion (Sunni Islam), the same culture, and
the same ethnicity. But in Somalia, it’s all about clan. Somalis divide
themselves into a dizzying number of clans, subclans, sub-subclans, and so
on, with shifting allegiances and knotty backstories that have bedeviled
outsiders for years.
At the end of the 19th century, the Italians and the British divvied up
most of Somalia, but their efforts to impose Western laws never really
worked. Disputes tended to be resolved by clan elders. Deterrence was key:
“Kill me and you will suffer the wrath of my entire clan.” The places
where the local ways were disturbed the least, such as British-ruled
Somaliland, seem to have done better in the long run than those where the
Italian colonial administration supplanted the role of clan elders, as in
Mogadishu.
Somalia won independence in 1960, but it quickly became a Cold War pawn,
prized for its strategic location in the Horn of Africa, where Africa and
Asia nearly touch. First it was the Soviets who pumped in weapons, then the
United States. A poor, mostly illiterate, mainly nomadic country became a
towering ammunition dump primed to explode. The central government was
hardly able to hold the place together. Even in the 1980s, Maj. Gen.
Mohamed Siad Barre, the capricious dictator who ruled from 1969 to 1991,
was derisively referred to as “the mayor of Mogadishu” because so much
of the country had already spun out of his control.
When clan warlords finally ousted him in 1991, it wasn’t much of a
surprise what happened next. The warlords unleashed all that military-grade
weaponry on each other, and every port, airstrip, fishing pier, telephone
pole—anything that could turn a profit—was fought over. People were
killed for a few pennies. Women were raped with impunity. The chaos gave
rise to a new class of parasitic war profiteers—gunrunners, drug
smugglers, importers of expired (and often sickening) baby formula—people
with a vested interest in the chaos continuing. Somalia became the modern
world’s closest approximation of Hobbes’s state of nature, where life
was indeed nasty, brutish, and short. To call it even a failed state was
generous. The Democratic Republic of the Congo is a failed state. So is
Zimbabwe. But those places at least have national armies and national
bureaucracies, however corrupt. Since 1991, Somalia has not been a state so
much as a lawless, ungoverned space on the map between its neighbors and
the sea.
In 1992, U.S. President George H.W. Bush tried to help, sending in
thousands of Marines to protect shipments of food. It was the beginning of
the post-Cold War “new world order,” when many believed that the United
States, without a rival superpower, could steer world events in a new and
morally righteous way. Somalia proved to be a very bad start. President
Bush and his advisors misread the clan landscape and didn’t understand
how fiercely loyal Somalis could be to their clan leaders. Somali society
often divides and subdivides when faced with internal disputes, but it
quickly bands together when confronted by an external enemy. The United
States learned this the hard way when its forces tried to apprehend the
warlord of the day, Mohammed Farah Aidid. The result was the infamous
“Black Hawk Down” episode in October 1993. Thousands of Somali
militiamen poured into the streets, carrying rocket-propelled grenades and
wearing flip-flops. They shot down two American Black Hawk helicopters,
killing 18 U.S. soldiers and dragging the corpses triumphantly through the
streets. This would be Strike One for the United States in Somalia.
Humiliated, the Americans pulled out and Somalia was left to its own
dystopian devices. For the next decade, the Western world mostly stayed
away. But Arab organizations, many from Saudi Arabia and followers of the
strict Wahhabi branch of Sunni Islam, quietly stepped in. They built
mosques, Koranic schools, and social service organizations, encouraging an
Islamic revival. By the early 2000s, Mogadishu’s clan elders set up a
loose network of neighborhood-based courts to deliver a modicum of order in
a city desperate for it. They rounded up thieves and killers, put them in
iron cages, and held trials. Islamic law, or sharia, was the one set of
principles that different clans could agree on; the Somali elders called
their network the Islamic Courts Union.
Mogadishu’s business community spotted an opportunity. In Mogadishu,
there are warlords and moneylords. While the warlords were ripping the
country apart, the moneylords, Somalia’s big-business owners, were
holding the place together, delivering many of the same services—for a
tidy profit, of course—that a government usually provides, such as
healthcare, schools, power plants, and even privatized mail. The moneylords
went as far as helping to regulate Somalia’s monetary policy, and the
Somali shilling was more stable in the 1990s—without a functioning
central bank—than in the 1980s when there was a government. But with
their profits came very high risks, such as chronic insecurity and
extortion. The Islamists were a solution. They provided security without
taxes, administration without a government. The moneylords began buying
them guns.
By 2005, the CIA saw what was happening, and again misread the cues. This
ended up being Strike Two.
In a post-September 11 world, Somalia had become a major terrorism worry.
The fear was that Somalia could blossom into a jihad factory like
Afghanistan, where al Qaeda in the 1990s plotted its global war on the
West. It didn’t seem to matter that at this point there was scant
evidence to justify this fear. Some Western military analysts told
policymakers that Somalia was too chaotic for even al Qaeda, because it was
impossible for anyone—including terrorists—to know whom to trust.
Nonetheless, the administration of George W. Bush devised a strategy to
stamp out the Islamists on the cheap. CIA agents deputized the warlords,
the same thugs who had been preying upon Somalia’s population for years,
to fight the Islamists. According to one Somali warlord I spoke with in
March 2008, an American agent named James and another one named David
showed up in Mogadishu with briefcases stuffed with cash. Use this to buy
guns, the agents said. Drop us an e-mail if you have any questions. The
warlord showed me the address: no_email_today@yahoo.com.
The plan backfired. Somalis like to talk; the country, ironically, has some
of the best and cheapest cellular phone service in Africa. Word quickly
spread that the same warlords no one liked anymore were now doing the
Americans’ bidding, which just made the Islamists even more popular. By
June 2006, the Islamists had run the last warlords out of Mogadishu. Then
something unbelievable happened: The Islamists seemed to tame the place.
I saw it with my own eyes. I flew into Mogadishu in September 2006 and saw
work crews picking up trash and kids swimming at the beach. For the first
time in years, no gunshots rang out at night. Under the banner of Islam,
the Islamists had united rival clans and disarmed much of the populace,
with clan support of course. They even cracked down on piracy by using
their clan connections to dissuade coastal towns from supporting the
pirates. When that didn’t work, the Islamists stormed hijacked ships.
According to the International Maritime Bureau in London, there were 10
pirate attacks off Somalia’s coast in 2006, which is tied for the lowest
number of attacks this decade.
The Islamists’ brief reign of peace was to be the only six months of calm
Somalia has tasted since 1991. But it was one thing to rally together to
overthrow the warlords and another to decide what to do next. A rift
quickly opened between the moderate Islamists and the extremists, who were
bent on waging jihad. One of the most radical factions has been the Shabab,
a multiclan military wing with a strict Wahhabi interpretation of Islam.
The Shabab drove around Mogadishu in big, black pickup trucks and beat
women whose ankles were showing. Even the other Islamist gunmen were scared
of them. By December 2006, some of the population began to chafe against
the Shabab for taking away their beloved khat, the mildly stimulating leaf
that Somalis chew like bubble gum. Shabab leaders were widely rumored to be
working with foreign jihadists, including wanted al Qaeda terrorists, and
the U.S. State Department later designated the Shabab a terrorist
organization. American officials have said that the Shabab are sheltering
men who masterminded the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and
Tanzania in 1998.
Somalia may indeed have sheltered a few unsavory characters, but the
country was far from the terrorist hotbed many worry it has now become. In
2006, there was a narrow window of opportunity to peel off the moderate
Islamists from the likes of the Shabab, and some U.S. officials, such as
Democratic Rep. Donald M. Payne, the chairman of the House subcommittee on
Africa, were trying to do exactly that. Payne and others met with the
moderate Islamists and encouraged them to negotiate a power-sharing deal
with the transitional government.
But the Bush administration again reached for the gunpowder. The United
States would not do much of the fighting itself, since sending large
numbers of ground troops into Somalia with Iraq and Afghanistan raging
would have been deemed insane. Instead, the United States anointed a proxy:
the Ethiopian Army. This move would be Strike Three.
***
Ethiopia is one of the United States’ best friends in Africa, its
government having carefully cultivated an image as a Christian bulwark in a
region seething with Islamist extremism. The Ethiopian leadership savvily
told the Bush administration what it wanted to hear: The Islamists were
terrorists and, unchecked, they would threaten the entire region and maybe
even attack American safari-goers in Kenya next door.
Of course, the Ethiopians had their own agenda. Ethiopia is a country with
a mostly Christian leadership but a population that is nearly half Muslim.
It seems only a matter of time before there is an Islamic awakening in
Ethiopia. On top of that, the Ethiopian government is fighting several
rebel groups, including a powerful one that is ethnically Somali. The
government feared that an Islamist Somalia could become a rebel beachhead
next door. The Ethiopians were also scared that Somalia’s Islamists would
team up with Eritrea, Ethiopia’s archenemy, which is exactly what ended
up happening.
Not everyone in Washington swallowed the Ethiopian line. The country has a
horrendous human rights record, and the Ethiopian military (which receives
aid for human rights training from the United States) is widely accused of
brutalizing its own people. But in December 2006, the Bush administration
shared prized intelligence with the Ethiopians and gave them the green
light to invade Somalia. Thousands of Ethiopian troops rolled across the
border (many had secretly been in the country for months), and they routed
the Islamist troops within a week. There were even some U.S. Special Forces
with the Ethiopian units. The United States also launched several
airstrikes in an attempt to take out Islamist leaders, and it continued
with intermittent cruise missiles targeting suspected terrorists. Most have
failed, killing civilians and adding to the boiling anti-American
sentiment.
***
The Islamists went underground, and the transitional government arrived in
Mogadishu. There was some cheering, a lot of jeering, and the insurgency
revved up within days. The transitional government was widely reviled as a
coterie of ex-warlords, which it mostly was. It was the 14th attempt since
1991 to stand up a central government. None of the previous attempts had
worked. True, some detractors have simply been war profiteers hell-bent on
derailing any government. But a lot of blame falls on what this
transitional government has done—or not done. From the start, leaders
seemed much more interested in who got what post than living up to the
corresponding job descriptions. The government quickly lost the support of
key clans in Mogadishu by its harsh (and unsuccessful) tactics in trying to
wipe out the insurgents, and by its reliance on Ethiopian troops. Ethiopia
and Somalia have fought several wars against each other over the contested
Ogaden region that Ethiopia now claims. That region is mostly ethnically
Somali, so teaming up with Ethiopia was seen as tantamount to treason.
The Islamists tapped into this sentiment, positioning themselves as the
true Somali nationalists, and gaining widespread support again. The results
were intense street battles between Islamist insurgents and Ethiopian
troops in which thousands of civilians have been killed. Ethiopian forces
have indiscriminately shelled entire neighborhoods (which precipitated a
European Union investigation into war crimes), and have even used white
phosphorous bombs that literally melt people, according to the United
Nations. Hundreds of thousands of people have emptied out of Mogadishu and
settled in camps that have become breeding grounds for disease and
resentment. Death comes more frequently and randomly than ever before. I
met one man in Mogadishu who was chatting with his wife on her cellphone
when she was cut in half by a stray mortar shell. Another man I spoke to
went out for a walk, got shot in the leg during a crossfire, and had to
spend seven days eating grass before the fighting ended and he could crawl
away.
It’s incredibly dangerous for us journalists, too. Few foreign
journalists travel to Somalia anymore. Kidnapping is the threat du jour.
Friends of mine who work for the United Nations in Kenya told me I had
about a 100 percent chance of being stuffed into the back of a Toyota or
shot (or both) if I didn’t hire a private militia. Nowadays, as soon as I
land, I take 10 gunmen under my employ.
By late January, the only territory the transitional government controlled
was a shrinking federal enclave in Mogadishu guarded by a small contingent
of African Union peacekeepers. As soon as the Ethiopians pulled out of the
capital, vicious fighting broke out between the various Islamist factions
scrambling to fill the power gap. It took only days for the Islamists to
recapture the third-largest town, Baidoa, from the government and install
sharia law. The Shabab are not wildly popular, but they are formidable; for
the time being they have a motivated, disciplined militia with hundreds of
hard-core fighters and probably thousands of gunmen allied with them. The
violence has shown no signs of halting, even with the election of a new,
moderate Islamist president—one who had, ironically, been a leader of the
Islamic Courts Union in 2006.
If the Shabab do seize control of the country, they might not stop there.
They could send their battle-hardened fighters in battered four-wheel-drive
pickup trucks into Ethiopia, Kenya, and maybe even Djibouti to try to
snatch back the Somali-speaking parts of those countries. This scenario has
long been part of an ethereal pan-Somali dream. Pursuit of that goal would
internationalize the conflict and surely drag in neighboring countries and
their allies.
The Shabab could also wage an asymmetric war, unleashing terrorists on
Somalia’s secular neighbors and their secular backers—most prominently,
the United States. This would upend an already combustible dynamic in the
Horn of Africa, catalyzing other conflicts. For instance, Ethiopia and
Eritrea fought a nasty border war in the late 1990s, which killed as many
as 100,000 people, and both countries are still heavily militarized along
the border. If the Shabab, which boasts Eritrean support, took over
Somalia, we might indeed see round two of Ethiopia versus Eritrea. The
worst-case scenario could mean millions of people displaced across the
entire region, crippled food production, and violence-induced breaches in
the aid pipeline. In short, a famine in one of the most perennially needy
parts of the world—again.
The hardest challenge of all might be simply preventing the worst-case
scenario. Among the best suggestions I’ve heard is to play to Somalia’s
strengths as a fluid, decentralized society with local mechanisms to
resolve conflicts. The foundation of order would be clan-based governments
in villages, towns, and neighborhoods. These tiny fiefdoms could stack
together to form district and regional governments. The last step would be
uniting the regional governments in a loose national federation that
coordinated, say, currency issues or antipiracy efforts, but did not
sideline local leaders.
Western powers should do whatever they can to bring moderate Islamists into
the transitional government while the transitional government still exists.
Whether people like it or not, many Somalis see Islamic law as the answer.
Maybe they’re not fond of the harsh form imposed by the Shabab, who have,
on at least one occasion, stoned to death a teenage girl who had been raped
(an Islamic court found her guilty of adultery). Still, there is an
appetite for a certain degree of Islamic governance. That desire should not
be confused with support for terrorism.
A more radical idea is to have the United Nations take over the government
and administer Somalia with an East Timor-style mandate. Because Somalia
has already been an independent country, this option might be too much for
Somalis to stomach. To make it work, the United Nations would need to
delegate authority to clan leaders who have measurable clout on the ground.
Either way, the diplomats should be working with the moneylords more and
the warlords less.
But the problem with Somalia is that after 18 years of chaos, with so many
people killed, with so many gun-toting men rising up and then getting cut
down, it is exceedingly difficult to identify who the country’s real
leaders are, if they exist at all. It’s not just Mogadishu’s wasteland
of blown-up buildings that must be reconstructed; it’s the entire
national psyche. The whole country is suffering from an acute case of
post-traumatic stress disorder. Somalis will have to move beyond the narrow
interests of clans, where they have withdrawn for protection, and embrace
the idea of a Somali nation.
If that happens, the work will just be beginning. Nearly an entire
generation of Somalis has absolutely no idea what a government is or how it
functions. I’ve seen this glassy-eyed generation all across the country,
lounging on bullet-pocked street corners and spaced out in the back of
pickup trucks, Kalashnikovs in their hands and nowhere to go. To them, law
and order are thoroughly abstract concepts. To them, the only law in the
land is the business end of a machine gun.
Jeffrey Gettleman is East Africa bureau chief for the New York Times.