The World's Most Dangerous Place (20 page)

Puntland is named after the fabled Land of Punt, or Pwenet, an ancient Egyptian trading partner known even in the twenty-fifth century BC for its production of gold, frankincense and myrrh. In
modern political terms, though, it is Darodistan, the principal homeland of the powerful Darod tribe, one of the big four in Somalia. The clan has produced two presidents and three prime ministers since 1960; and under the 4.5 clan formula, the Darod have been allocated the post of prime minister in the TFG in Mogadishu since 2004.

The Darod claim to be descended from an Arab nobleman named Darud Jabarti, who was supposedly shipwrecked on Puntland’s coast in the tenth or eleventh century, although some of the clan’s rivals tell the story rather differently. According to them, Jabarti was no nobleman but ‘a Galla slave’, exiled from Arabia for stealing the slippers of the Prophet himself, who ‘dismissed [him] with the words, Inna-
tarad
-na-hu (‘Verily we have rejected him’): hence his name Tarud or Darud, ‘the Rejected’.
³
The folk tale shows there is nothing new about this region’s reputation for old-fashioned thievery.

Farole and most of his ministers were not just Darod but Darod Majeerteen, one of the four main branches of the tribe.
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Following the failed invasion of Ethiopia in 1977, disaffected Majeerteen officers of the Somali national army mounted a coup against Siad Barre. This also failed, leading to terrible reprisals in the northeast. The Majeerteen became the first clan formally to renounce the regime in 1979, when the army deserter Colonel Abdullahi Yusuf formed the SSDF, the Somali Salvation Democratic Front. Yusuf went on to become the first president of Puntland, the first raison d’etre of which was to promote and protect the Majeerteen from the depredations of their chief rivals to the south, the Hawiye, as well as rival Darod clans such as Siad Barre’s own Marehan. The
statelet had experienced internal unrest in the past, and struggled all the time to maintain law and order throughout the vast territory it claimed to govern. Indeed,
yusuf yusuf
– in dark acknowledgement of the violent legacy of Puntland’s first founder – remained a common term for a gunfight, an onomatopoeic description of whistling bullets.

And yet, compared to the south, Puntland was a haven of peace and prosperity. There was drought here in the north, but no actual famine, despite the great hardship. Garowe, in fact, had proved a magnet for southern refugees, with new tent villages sprouting along the banks of the dried-out river to the east of town almost as fast as in Mogadishu. Al-Shabaab, meanwhile, had so far failed to exploit the divisions within the Darod sub-clans to establish any meaningful foothold here. This was partly because Puntlanders saw themselves as the country’s only reliable bulwark against Islamic extremism, a view succinctly expressed by Osman, a local driver for the UN, who told me: ‘Al-Shabaab? They are very very fucking people. We hate them. Yes. Thank you.’

The Majeerteen were an independent, aristocratic people who saw themselves as the quintessence of nomad culture, far superior to any other clan. ‘The pride the Majeerteen tribes take in being of the Majeerteen, the most barren of all the Somali deserts, is as if that territory was the garden of Eden itself,’ observed Gerald Hanley. ‘Down south, on the Juba where the trees drip bananas, lemons, pawpaw . . . where the small, fat, black men can eat chicken, eggs, beef and have never been without a drink of water, I have heard Majeerteen askaris sneering at all this, and telling the local “slave people” that until they see the Majeerteen they do not know what living is. And in the Majeerteen you would have to kneel down and pray to a single
blade of grass to come up, and cry on it every day to help it live.’
⁴

The Majeerteen hero Yusuf’s instigating role in Siad Barre’s overthrow tended to confirm their view of themselves as lynchpins of the nation’s destiny, integral in every way to a better future for Somalia. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Puntland was ruled as a sultanate known as Migiurtinia. Critics of President Farole sometimes accused him of trying to revive the sultanate’s late-nineteenth-century golden age, and of wielding power like a
boqor
, or king. He was said, often, to have personal designs on Sheikh Sharif’s job in Mogadishu. Even the state’s motto, Star of the North, was heavy with the clan’s sense of its own importance.

The theme of the 1 August parade was, naturally, Puntland itself: a none-too-subtle showcase of the splendid social progress that had been made since 1998. As I made my way towards the head of the cavalcade, half a mile ahead, I overtook a company of recent law graduates from the new Puntland State University, another of freshly recruited customs officers, a third of policewomen with uniforms that were pressed and gleaming. The local football team, Daljir FC, was marching in black and claret tracksuits. The mechanics of the Nugal Electric Company sported green boiler suits and yellow helmets. Every aspect of civil society seemed covered, right down to a women’s jute-weaving collective, whose members wore light brown jilbabs, and who carried before them the untidy beginnings of a large hessian carpet. It seemed that the spirit of ‘scientific socialism’ that underpinned Siad Barre’s revolution was alive and well in Puntland. The Somali word for socialism,
hantiwadaag
, means ‘the sharing of livestock’, and although there were no camels on parade, the nomad herdsmen were well represented. I watched a posse of them go by on horseback, fierce, dark men with pale turbans and richly hennaed
beards. Their horses were small and wiry, and wore no saddles; the riders leaned unnaturally far back, and beat their mounts across the withers with long thin canes, goading them into a quick, uncomfortable-looking trot for the appreciative crowds.

It was a greater relief than I had expected to escape the fear and claustrophobia of Mogadishu, 800 kilometres and a world away to the south. In Garowe it was possible, at least at times like this, to mix with ordinary Somalis without wearing body armour. Many of the people here were, extraordinarily, smiling. Their costumes were so clean and brightly coloured that they seemed to shine against the dun-coloured, sand-blasted setting of their town. As I walked, I was overtaken by a Toyota containing one of the organizers, the Puntland Youth and Sports Minister Abdiweli Hersi, who stopped to give me a lift.

‘What do you think? What do you think?’ he said, waving proudly at the crowds through the window.

He dropped me off at the town’s main square where a podium had been set up for the president and his entourage. I took up position behind one of the militiamen lining the route – he was wearing standard military camouflage except for the hat, a smart tweed cap that might have been sold in Jermyn Street – and waited for Garowe’s elite to arrive.

The presidential entrance was heralded by the arrival of more soldiers – a lot more. Two technicals, their machineguns swivelling menacingly, lurched to a halt in a cloud of dust and disgorged Farole’s Special Protection Unit, a platoon of paramilitaries in mirror sunglasses and bright red berets, whose chests gleamed with ammunition hung in unnecessarily long belts. Farole himself was a dark, squat man in a suit, surrounded by three tall bodyguards, also in suits, whose breast pockets bulged as they scanned
the crowds for trouble. They looked as Mafioso as their boss’s name sounded: Farole was a nickname that meant ‘Missing Finger’.
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Their appearance made a sort of sense. Farole, who was born in 1945 and educated in Mogadishu during the UN trusteeship, belonged to that generation of Somalis who still spoke fluent Italian.

On the outskirts of this circus, the president’s pencil-moustached son beetled about, harsh and serious as he barked his marshal’s orders into a walkie-talkie. He was just as thickset as his father, though more casually dressed in a black polo shirt, chinos and Crocs. This was because the Faroles were diaspora Somalis, from Australia. Mohamed junior had largely been brought up in a suburb of Melbourne.

His father was said to spend two-thirds of his state’s income on his own security, and from my vantage point next to the podium I could see it might easily be true. Most of the marchers I had seen so far were civilians, but behind them were hundreds of soldiers, wearing a surprising variety of uniforms. There were also squadrons of police cars and convoys of artillery trucks. Farole took the salute as his troops passed by with their hands on their belts and their knees raised high. He was like Castro in Havana, the Kims in Pyongyang, Brezhnev in Red Square.

Puntland could not well afford this emphasis on the military. Civil society had not yet developed to the point where its citizens actually paid taxes. The state’s annual revenue, derived almost entirely from duty on goods passing through the northern port of Bossasso, came to just $26m. For all the pomp of the day’s
celebrations, Garowe was a small place, with a population of no more than 60,000. The Faroles sometimes jokingly referred to their capital as ‘Brasilia’ – which meant that Bossasso, with a population of perhaps half a million, was Puntland’s São Paulo – although I doubted whether Garowe would ever be more than a raggedy desert road-town. Like a faded staging post on a western US interstate, its heart would always be the highway itself. The road the Puntlanders were parading upon was part of the old Italian-built network centred on Mussolini’s
Strada Imperiale
that once connected Mogadishu with Addis Ababa. Eighty years after its construction it was still the country’s only metalled road of any consequence. The Faroles were touchy about it, but the truth was that their writ didn’t run very far beyond the tarmac.

On the other hand, I had spent enough time in Garowe to appreciate that however obsessive the regime’s concern with its own security might have been, it was not paranoid. On my first visit, four months previously, a well-regarded official called Mohamed Yasin Isse, better known as Ilka-ase (‘Red Tooth’), had been killed when his Toyota was ambushed by two gunmen, in broad daylight in the middle of the town. His assassination had nothing to do with Islamic militancy. Red Tooth belonged to a Majeerteen sub-clan called the Omar Mahmud; his killers were thought to be from another Majeerteen sub-clan, the Mahmud Issa. It was a straightforward revenge hit for the shooting two months previously of a Mahmud Issa policeman in Burtinle, a dusty settlement a few miles south of Garowe.

I went with a UN security officer to inspect the aftermath of the killing. Red Tooth had died instantly at the wheel of his speeding car, which had careered on into a street café, killing an unlucky young woman sitting at a table there. The bullet-riddled rear of the
vehicle was still visible, poking out from the rubble of the shop. Meanwhile, Farole’s secret servicemen, members of the feared Puntland Intelligence Service, had sealed off the town and were engaged in a furious house-to-house search for the culprits. According to the UN man, tit-for-tat clan killings of this kind were still common in Puntland. It made one realize how fragile Puntland’s peace was, and that Farole perhaps had no choice but to rule with an iron grip. There was only one road in or out of Garowe, yet Red Tooth’s killers were never caught.

The parade became increasingly surreal as it unfurled. The middle section was led by a group of ululating women decked out in green, white and blue, the colours of the new national flag, carrying a banner that read
Xoogsatada
(‘the Proletariat’). An absurdly tootling brass band marked the time, led by a baton-twirling drum major with red pompoms for shoulder flashes, groovy rectangular sunglasses, and a bus conductor’s cap. The women’s jute-weaving collective reappeared, unsmiling now, and marching with a disturbing, East European-style goosestep. Next came a green, white and blue giant, carrying an orange basketball: the tallest man in Puntland. He waved like an excited child as he loped past the podium, a small state flag held delicately between the forefinger and thumb of an outsized hand. In the same outfit next to him, like a distorted reflection in a funfair hall of mirrors, bustled a dwarf.

That evening, as a guest of the UN, I was invited with an assortment of aid officials to the formal ‘Puntland Establishment Day party’ at the presidential compound in the centre of town. The middle of it had been strewn with hay, and the surrounding buildings were strung about with coloured light bulbs, a bit like the set of a Christmas nativity play. The foreign guests were ushered to the
VIP seats to Farole’s front and left, where we were each issued with a small Puntland flag to wave. Behind as well as opposite us sat row upon row of Garowe’s political and business elite. In this exposed position there was, unfortunately, no escape from the floorshow that ensued. The songs, poems and sketches had but one theme – the wonderfulness of the Farole administration in all its forms – and the performers kept it up for over three hours. The comic material was particularly dire.

‘I have been so happy these last four weeks!’ declared an actor in one sketch.

‘Why?’ inquired another.

‘Because parliament finally approved the law for the new electoral commission!’

This punchline was followed by a Vaudeville-style roll of drums and a cymbal crash. It was truly leaden entertainment. The only real distraction came when we were passed a large wooden bowl of raisin-like nuggets of mutton jerky, called
oodkuc
. This was followed by another nomad delicacy, a communal bowl of camel’s milk,
caano geel
, a pleasantly salty, smoky drink I thought I could get used to.
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Farole, who had changed into a loose embroidered shirt and a kufi cap beautifully worked with Arabic script, sat through it all with an impassive expression, speaking little. The audience, who were just as much on parade as the marchers of the morning, sat with stiff backs and fixed grins, smiling and clapping demurely.
The evening was being filmed by at least three local film crews, who zoomed in on the foreign guests for the ritual sharing of the caano geel. It was clear enough that we were being used in the crudest way to legitimize the regime. White-skinned foreigners were a relative rarity in Puntland. Our presence as guests lent the party, and its hosts, a certain international respectability. The press here were not independent. The main local media organization, Garowe Online, was run by the president’s son.