The World's Most Dangerous Place (17 page)

I had come to Mogadishu to report on the war against al-Shabaab, but with the city now at the centre of a major international news story I had little choice but to switch horses. Over the course of June and July, an estimated 100,000 refugees arrived in the capital, spontaneously setting up camp among the ruins in over a hundred different locations. AMISOM’s rudimentary press facilities were swamped as the A-List media and their camera crews poured in: the stars of CNN and CBS and NBC, along with the chiefs of what seemed like every aid organization in the world.

This famine story wasn’t just as big as the one of 1992, when an estimated 300,000 Somalis died. It had the potential to be another 1984, the year of Bob Geldof, Band Aid and Live Aid, when Westerners focused as never before on the suffering of East Africa. An estimated 900,000 Ethiopians died in that famine. On the other hand, the enormous sums of charity raised are said today to have
saved the lives of 6 million. This once-in-a-generation moment of solidarity between the First and Third Worlds was sparked, famously, by a single news report by the BBC’s Michael Buerk and the Kenyan photojournalist Mo Amin. It was no surprise, therefore, when spare seats in the armoured vehicles became harder than ever to secure, nor that the only places the convoys now seemed to visit were the refugee camps.

The progress of the war was relegated almost to a sideshow, as if it were mere background colour to the new disaster that the world wanted to read and hear about, although in reality they could not be separated in this way. War and famine were two horsemen of the same apocalypse, after all, especially in a country as impoverished as Somalia, where political power has always rested on the control of scant resources.

Al-Shabaab understood this principle absolutely. They also calculated that a famine that only affected parts of Somalia that they controlled was not going to make them look good. Their solution, however, was crazed even by their standards: they simply denied the famine’s existence.

‘To the latest report by the so-called United Nations about the existence of famine in Somalia, we say it is a 100 per cent lie and propaganda,’ Sheikh Rage announced in Mogadishu. ‘Yes, there is drought in Somalia, but not to the extent the infidel UN men put it. That is politically motivated and with an ulterior motive.’
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The militants had expelled the large humanitarian agencies from their territory in 2009 on the grounds that they were ‘anti-Islamic’. Sheikh Rage now made it clear that nothing had changed, and that the ban would remain in place. The international agencies predicted disaster. There was no practical possibility of their ignoring the ban: one of them, the World Food Programme, had
had fourteen employees murdered in the south in the last three years. By late July, according to UNOCHA, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, aid agencies were able to reach just 20 per cent of the millions of people in urgent need of food aid in southern Somalia.

It seemed that many Somalis agreed with the internationals’ assessment, among them my Rahanweyn friend Aden, who came back to see me one day at the AMISOM OPD.

‘Al-Shabaab are 100 per cent responsible for this famine,’ he said.

He wasn’t the only Somali that summer who noted that the al-Shabaab leader Godane was from one of the Isaaq clans of Somaliland, and not therefore predisposed to care what happened to the Rahanweyn peoples of the south.

Aden recalled a visit in 2008 to Wajid in the southern region of Bakool. That small town, he recollected with something like fondness, had in those days played host to all the main relief agencies: Care, World Vision, USAID, WFP. Bakool was now at the very centre of the famine zone, yet not one of the international aid agencies was operating there any more.

‘The foreigners were all driven out and their offices were looted. Al-Shabaab said that anyone who worked for them was a spy and would be killed. They were paranoid. Crazy.’

Al-Shabaab was responsible for the disaster in other ways. Although they could not be blamed for the lack of rainfall, they were rightly accused by the TFG of the long-term mismanagement of water resources in the areas they controlled. In other words, the drought underlying the famine was partly man-made. Al-Shabaab failed to regulate the use of wells, or to maintain the decrepit canal systems that once irrigated swathes of the intra-riverine south. Nor
did they try to repair the damage done during the civil war, when 95 per cent of bore holes were destroyed by rival clans who filled up each other’s wells with rocks.
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Meanwhile, deforestation had accelerated dramatically in their territory, leading to a rapid increase in the spread of desertification. This was another ecological disaster that al-Shabaab were disinclined to try to stem, because their insurgency was funded to a significant degree by the trade in charcoal, a minor local industry that had consequently boomed under their tenure. When interviewed, the Gedo villagers being hunted by lions specifically blamed their plight on ‘drought and deforestation’ in the beasts’ usual savannah hunting grounds.

The continuing ban on the foreign agencies that might have helped Gedo was bad enough. As the summer progressed, however, it became clear that the militants intended to go further: they also forbade starving southerners from travelling beyond al-Shabaab territory to seek help. This was the logical extension of al-Shabaab’s insistence that there was no famine, and they didn’t mean it rhetorically. Reports began to come in that would-be refugees were being stopped on the roads, and ordered to return home with instructions to pray for the rains. Allah would provide if he willed it. Aden regarded this piety as the height of hypocrisy.

‘Al-Shabaab are like children: they don’t want to be left on their own,’ he snorted. ‘They need the people to steal from. A fish can’t live without water.’

Banning drought victims from travelling was a risky strategy. Moving on when the environment can no longer sustain life is the whole point of nomadism. Roaming is considered an absolute right in Somalia not out of high-minded philosophy, but because it is
the only way to survive in an unforgiving land. Nomadism is also a tradition that goes to the heart of the Somali psyche, celebrated for centuries in countless songs and poems. To challenge or remove the right to roam therefore risked alienating millions. I later met an old nomad refugee who had spent all his life in the desert, far from any city. The first time he had even heard of al-Shabaab, he said, was when all his camels died, and a bunch of gunmen in keffiyehs tried to turn back the city-bound truck he had boarded in his quest for help.

‘Who are these young men,’ he wanted to know, ‘that they should treat me so?’

The paradox was that it was not the hated foreigners who were now guilty of ‘anti-Islamic’ behaviour, but al-Shabaab themselves. Even the term ‘Sharia’, the system of law that they were so intent on imposing on the country, literally means, in its secondary sense, ‘the approach to a water hole’.
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It was not the first time that al-Shabaab had ignored the public mood. This time, though, they had created a backlash that even they were struggling to suppress. In Ruun-Nirgood in Middle Shabelle, villagers were in open rebellion after the militants ordered them to hand over at least one son to join their fight against the TFG, or else to contribute two camels to the cause.

‘They asked for the impossible,’ said Yahye Alasow, a 57-year-old grandmother. ‘If you lock a cat in a room and start to
beat her, then in the end she will try to defend herself. We are like that. Al-Shabaab did everything to us, but we will not accept it anymore.’
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Was the war about to turn against the militants? It seemed increasingly likely. In Mogadishu, however, the foreign journalists seemed too fixated on the famine to even ask the question.

The surrounding media circus was nothing if not entertaining. That autumn the UNHCR’s goodwill ambassador, the actress Angelina Jolie, announced at an award ceremony in Geneva that her experiences among Somali refugees had made her ‘a better person, a better mother . . . They’ve inspired me by showing me the unbreakable strength of the human spirit.’
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The same week, the Jolie-Pitt Foundation donated $340,000 to one of the better Somali NGOs working in the camps. Slightly less useful, perhaps, was the contribution of the American rapper Curtis Jackson, better known as 50 Cent, who tweeted: ‘So I just got back from Somalia, it was crazy out there. I have never seen anything like it. I’m going to feed a billion people Street King.’ The reference was to a brand of energy drink he owned, available in two flavours, orange-mango or grape. ‘Fiddy’ was offering to pass on a percentage of his sales to the World Food Programme, under the slogan ‘1 shot = 1 meal for a child’.
⁵

Just as controversial, at least in the UK, was a decision by the London
Mail on Sunday
to dispatch their writer Liz Jones to the famine zone. Jones, according to the outraged
Guardian
newspaper, was ‘a narcissistic fashion journalist, a lifelong anorexic, a person who just spent £13,500 on a facelift, and a confessional columnist who charts her obsessions every week in the
Mail on Sunday
’s YOU magazine . . . Could there be anything worse than the simple fact of sending such an inappropriate journalist to cover a famine?’
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In the end, the
Guardian
’s fury was misplaced. Even Liz Jones’s critics acknowledged that the reports she eventually filed were appropriately horror-struck and that she had left her alleged self-obsession at home. The truth was that reporting this story made every Western journalist feel uncomfortable when they stopped to think about it for long enough – particularly if, like me, they happened to be commuting from the famine back to the comforts of the Bancroft Hotel each day. The Bancroft’s owners spent $250,000 a year on diesel, mostly just to power its dozens and dozens of ceaselessly whirring air-conditioners. The canteen, anxious to please all those beefy,
braai
-addicted South African contractors, got through as much as three tons of meat each month. Indeed the diet in the cool, clean dining area was so meat-oriented, chops and steaks and sausages and stews for every meal, that the Europeans actually complained about it, although to no avail. A man-sized fridge in the corner was always full of ice-cold bottled water that anyone could help themselves to at any time. As a pleasant hydrating alternative, blissfully chilled orangeade was available on tap, 24 hours a day. One mentally left Somalia behind at the entrance to the Bancroft, a facility barred, for security reasons, to all ‘indigenous personnel’, as the US Marines called the locals during Operation Restore Hope. With less political correctness, but perhaps more honesty and certainly more accuracy, the Bancroft contractors tended to refer to Somalis as ‘Skinnies’.

There were other reasons to feel cynical as the giant international aid machine rumbled into action. For aid workers, famine was a technical term used when more than 30 per cent of a given population were suffering from acute malnutrition, and when the mortality rate had surpassed two people per 10,000 per day. It was merely another notch on the NGO world’s sliding scale of suffering, a step up from a food ‘emergency’ and two steps up from a
food ‘crisis’. Much of East Africa had been in emergency or crisis for the last two years, teetering on the edge of the present disaster. And yet, during that period, the West had shown no especial sympathy or desire to help the millions in need. UN agencies had received only half of the $1.6bn they said was required for their relief programmes in the region. Oxfam had gone so far as to accuse several European governments of ‘wilful neglect’.
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In a jaded world, it seemed that it took the juju of a full-blown ‘famine’, with all the biblical overtones of that word, to stimulate anything close to the appropriate response.

I spent a day trailing Jerry Rawlings, the African Union’s Special Envoy to Somalia, on his first official visit to Mogadishu. A big, barrel-chested man of sixty-four, and the former speaker of Ghana, Rawlings cut an unorthodox figure in his baggy embroidered shirt and Polaroid sunglasses. Most visiting dignitaries wore suits; this one presented himself as a man of the people. The son of a Scottish chemist father and a Ghanaian mother, he had joined the air force in the 1960s, mutinied at the social injustice he saw in his country, taken power in a coup in 1979 and remained in the top job, off and on, for the next twenty years. This classic African career trajectory had drawn him to the attention of Jean Ping, the Gabonese chairman of the African Union, who thought him ideal for the task of ‘mobilizing the continent’ to assume its responsibilities towards Somalia. This did not prevent Rawlings from considering the African Union a bunch of dilatory bureaucrats.

‘Why aren’t AU governments doing more?’ he growled, during a rare moment of down-time in a Portakabin office on the AMISOM base. ‘I’ll tell you why. Because they are all too busy holding their fucking arses on to their chairs! When I was speaker, I was too busy to sit down!’

And he stood up and crabwalked across the office floor, a white plastic chair comically wedged on to his behind.

Rawlings’ armoured cavalcade took in the force commander’s office, a UN office, the hospital, the parliament. The meetings he was forced to hold in these places were obviously not his forte, and his conversations grew ever more stilted as the day wore on. I wondered if he was out of his depth. At one point I heard him turn to an aide for a reminder of what AMISOM stood for, an admission of ignorance that would have made Jean Ping wince. Rawlings had been the AU’s top Somalia representative for over eight months.