From: Berhane Habtemariam (Berhane.Habtemariam@gmx.de)
Date: Thu Jul 01 2010 - 18:36:10 EDT
Jeffrey Gettleman: Reporting From Mogadishu
July 1, 2010
Jeffrey Gettleman calls Somalia the "most dangerous place in the world."
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R.Player.Action.PLAY_NOW,%20NPR.Player.Type.STORY,%20'0')> Listen to the
Story
<http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=13> Fresh Air from
WHYY
The East Africa bureau chief for the New York Times tells Fresh Air's Terry
Gross that the country - where violent rebels fight for control and wreak
havoc in villages nationwide - is just as hopeless as it was in 1991, when
the central government collapsed.
"There's no green zone. There's no one part of Somalia that's safe,"
Gettleman says. "That's the problem. In some of these other countries like
Iraq or Afghanistan, where I've worked, there are conflict areas, there are
lawless areas, but there's one part of the country that is somewhat stable,
where if you needed help, you could get it. In Somalia, that doesn't really
exist."
More From Gettleman And The 'Times'
Gettleman has made more than a dozen trips to Somalia. Last year, he
described the country in Foreign Policy as "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."
Gettleman, who recently wrote about
<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/14/world/africa/14somalia.html> the
conscription of child soldiers by Somalia's own transitional government for
the Times, says that despite the safety risks, he plans to continue
reporting on the violence in East Africa.
"In the part of the world where I work, there are fewer and fewer
journalists that have the resources, that have the bigger media
organizations that can back them up, that can spend the money, that can take
these risks and that can report these stories," he says.
"One of the consequences of the child-soldiers story we did was the
government was so outraged ... that they have threatened the local Somali
journalists that helped us report that story. And in some cases, some of the
people who worked with us had to flee the country. And that's just an
example of how difficult it is in many of these countries to illuminate
what's happening."
Interview Highlights
On ideology in African internal conflicts
"What we're seeing across Africa today is many internal conflicts that have
an absence of ideology. They're more criminally driven wars. From the
reading I've done and compared to the liberation wars of yesteryear - in
Eritrea, in Zimbabwe, in Ethiopia, even in Angola - there were causes back
then. And of course there was criminality and violence, and there was
gratuitous bloodshed, but it seemed like these rebel movements actually
stood for something. They had popular support. ... Today it's totally
different. The rebel populations prey upon the people they're supposed to be
liberating. If you look in Congo, there are dozens of so-called rebel
groups, and they have absolutely no popular support. In Somalia, you have
the Shabab rebel group fighting against the government and trying to
overthrow the weak transitional government in Somalia, and these guys are
widely reviled by the Somali population. They're trying to impose a harsh
and alien form of Islam, and the people are chafing under their rule, and
they have very little popular support."
On child soldiers
"As these movements gravitate further and further away from having an
ideological root, from having a real cause, there's basically no adults that
want to join them. There's no reason to join them. They're left with trying
to steal or kidnap or conscript children to fight their wars because no
reasonable adult is going to join."
On why some African militias mutilate people
"I think it's a function of very weak states, that when you have these very
poor countries, these things emerge and they take on an energy of their own.
For example, the [militia group] LRA started out in Uganda in the late '80s,
when the state was very weak. It wasn't very long ago that Idi Amin had
brutalized the whole country. There had been a lot of political turmoil. The
current government was just beginning to get some traction. And there were
large parts of the country that were still chaotic. And [the LRA] was able
to use that as first an excuse to exist and to fight against the government
but then as a way to spread and operate because the government wasn't strong
enough."
On the current state of Somalia
"It's probably the modern world's longest-running example of a chaotic state
with no central government. This is despite billions of dollars, enormous
diplomatic attention, one peace effort after another, and 20 years later,
the place is chaotic and violent and hopeless, in many ways as it was in
1991 when the government collapsed."
On the ideological changes that have taken place in Somalia
"They're fighting each other and they have these cross-clan lines, and you
have this new sort of axis of conflict. But the problem is when you have
these places that remain mired in the state of anarchy for that long, every
day that's like that, it gets harder and harder to reimpose authority. In
Somalia, people adapt. They get used to the fact that there's no central
government. Businessmen start schools. Neighborhoods band together to
provide their own generators. I even saw, during my first visits to
Mogadishu, a privatized mailbox where you buy a stamp from a businessman,
stick it on a letter and stick it in a mailbox and they deliver it for you.
And then you have this young generation in Somalia. These kids who haven't
been in school for their entire lives, if they're 25 years or younger,
basically this is all they know. They don't know what a functioning
government does. They don't know the need for it."
Latest reports from New York Times East Africa Bureau Chief Jeffrey
Gettleman in Mogadishu:
Somalia <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/14/world/africa/14mogadishu.html>
Experiences New Type of Fighting
U.N. <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/17/world/africa/17somalia.html> Voices
Concern on Child Soldiers in Somalia
Rare <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/26/world/africa/26somaliland.html>
Haven of Stability in Somalia Faces a Test
Children <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/14/world/africa/14somalia.html>
Carry Guns for a U.S. Ally, Somalia
Lush Land <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/28/world/africa/28mogadishu.htm>
Winds Through a Ravaged Capital
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