The World's Most Dangerous Place (49 page)

‘The south of Somalia has a greater mix of clans than anywhere else,’ he said. ‘Azania has Bantu people, Sheekhaal people, Marehan, Hawiye, Biamal . . . All these groups are fighting against al-Shabaab
côte à côte
, with the Kenyans behind. If we can get
peace here, Azania could be a model for the whole country to follow.’

His new government, he added, was ready to start administrating right away. They had divided Azania up into fifteen districts, and even agreed where the capital should be, at Bu’ale on the river in Middle Juba. There was only one obstacle – a considerable one, I thought – which was that Bu’ale was still occupied by al-Shabaab. I wondered why he had picked such an obscure town as his future capital. Did he perhaps have in mind a particular building his government could occupy?

‘No,’ he grinned, ‘there is nothing at Bu’ale. We will use someone’s ordinary house. Or we could meet like the elders, under a tree.’

There were, it seemed to me, many worse models for Somalia to follow. I found Gandhi inspiring: a rare example of an older generation Somali whose rejection of clanism was both sincere and closely reasoned. He insisted, for instance, that the Western stereotype of violent Somalia was unfair. Inter-clan aggression, he thought, was a kind of default position for people with ‘empty’ heads, who were in no way representative of his countrymen.

‘The West interprets clanism as
un fléau
– a scourge, a national curse. But it is not the Somali norm. Clanism is new. It is just the legacy of a terrible civil war.’

His worldview was close to that I had heard from many young diaspora Somalis, and the precise opposite of the likes of Dahir Kadiye in Leyton. Like Ayaan in Ealing, he stoutly refused to reveal his clan lineage when I asked (although it was actually no secret that he was one of the Ogadeni Darod, and therefore among the majority in the Azania region).

He seemed, in fact, to have consciously embraced the West’s
liberal values when he settled in France all those years ago. This was a man, after all, who had married an infidel, a Frenchwoman who had not converted to Islam. After the spaghetti, the First Lady of Azania stayed listening to her husband talk, occasionally interjecting that Somalis were all
foux
, or else commenting on the antics of the family cat, Schubert. She translated the odd difficult French word for her husband, and plied me with the alcoholic speciality of the region, a sherry-like
vin jaune
. Gandhi, teetotal, looked on benignly.

‘I am not a very good Muslim,’ he shrugged, ‘but I am a Muslim nevertheless.’

Their two sons who were present had evidently been raised in the Western tradition, and were still busy forging their own complicated, transnational identities. Rageh, the older boy, came in just before suppertime. He was ostentatiously draped around his defiantly Asian girlfriend, with whom he was about to go out on the town, this being a Saturday evening. The younger son Sami, who was staying in, had long hair tied back in a trendy bun, and wore a T-shirt that read
Citoyen du Monde
.

Gandhi’s stout defence of the Somali national character reminded me strongly of Nuruddin Farah, the novelist, who had taken the same line with me over dinner in Minneapolis. Farah’s friend Shuke, the revered head of the Puntland Development and Research Center in Garowe, and even Mohamed Omaar, the Foreign Minister in Mogadishu, had been equally impatient with my suggestion that the Somalis’ capacity for violence was innate. I was not particularly surprised to discover that Gandhi knew all these men well. They belonged to the same class and generation, and were all prominent in public life. At the same time, the faith they shared in the underlying goodness of their countrymen was
striking, for it was not a view commonly held in Somalia.

The explanation, I assumed, lay in their upbringing. As children born in the 1950s, they were fortunate to have benefitted from Siad Barre’s state-sponsored educational revolution in the 1960s and ’70s. It meant that they were members of the last Somali generation to have received, collectively, any peacetime, university-level training. Gandhi and his peers were thus ageing but unique showcases for their country’s immense potential: impressive and eloquent flag-bearers for the Somalia that might once have been, and perhaps could be again one day.

For now, though, Azania remained a pipedream. Its success was entirely dependent on the continuing support of Kenya, and it was by no means certain that Gandhi could rely on that, for he was not the only regional player with plans for southern Somalia. The KDF, the Kenyan Defence Force, had other local allies, notably the Raskamboni Movement, a militia led by the former governor of Kismayo (and former ally of al-Shabaab), Sheikh Ahmed Madobe; and Nairobi was bound to back whoever looked likeliest to succeed militarily against their enemies.

This was because the implications of Operation Linda Nchi were existential for Kenya, and not just because it was that country’s first ever foreign military venture. The brainchild of the Internal Security Minister, George Saitoti, the invasion followed a spate of al-Shabaab-linked kidnaps and murders of Western aid workers and tourists on Kenyan territory, which Saitoti quickly announced ‘would not be tolerated’. It was certainly true that tourism was, and remains, vital to the Kenyan economy. But it was also true that the murder of tourists provided a welcome justificatory figleaf for an otherwise unprovoked invasion of someone else’s country. The abduction in September 2011 of David and
Judith Tebbutt, a British couple who had been staying at the Kiwayu Safari Village beach resort close to the Somali border, had generated some particularly lurid, and useful, international headlines.
*

As Gandhi now confirmed, Operation Linda Nchi was not spontaneous but had been in preparation for years. Somalia’s unrest had threatened Kenyan security for half a century. Mohamed Omaar, the former Somali Foreign Minister, was not the only one who worried that Kenya’s Muslim Swahili coast was the ‘soft underbelly’ of East Africa, ripe for exploitation by Islamic extremists. But it was not until 2011 that the political establishment in Nairobi felt confident enough to try to deal once and for all with the country’s most troublesome neighbour.

Kenya’s Somali population was estimated in 2009 at 2.3 million, about 6 per cent of the national total. The country’s North Eastern Province, an area the size of England, had long been dominated by ethnic Somalis. Somali nationalists, indeed, historically regarded it as a part of Greater Somalia. In 1963, the year Kenya gained independence from Britain, Somalia fought an unsuccessful campaign to annex the province, the so-called Shifta War, which did not end until 1967. The nationalists may have lost, yet this swathe of sovereign Kenya is still represented on the Somali national flag as one of the five points of the white ‘Star of Unity’.

The North Eastern Province is also home to the world’s largest refugee camp, at Dadaab, which in August 2012 contained more than 450,000 Somali refugees,
¹
making it by some margin the third largest population centre in Kenya after Nairobi and Mombasa.
Dadaab was a permanent source of insecurity for the Kenyan state, an easy place for al-Shabaab both to hide in and to recruit new fighters. No wonder the Kenyans were so keen on a Somali buffer zone, which could only improve security in the border areas, and might even one day encourage Dadaab’s refugees to start returning home. Gandhi said that Nairobi had been conniving at the creation of Azania since 2008 when, at his instigation, the Kenyan government began to arm and train 2,000 Azanian troops.

The strategy carried obvious risks for Kenya, the greatest of which was that the presence of their soldiers in Somalia proper was bound to inflame a section of Somali opinion locally, especially if the KDF lingered for any length of time, and began to resemble an occupying force rather than an expeditionary one. It was also risky for Gandhi, who could easily end up looking like an opportunist puppet of Nairobi rather than the nationalist visionary he claimed to be. This, however, was not the greatest threat to Gandhi’s well-being, for it was common knowledge – and Christine whispered confirmation of the fact when Gandhi went out of the room for something – that the would-be president of Azania had a serious heart condition, and was often extremely unwell. The reason he spent as much time in France as he did – and he had inevitably been criticized for this – was his need to stay close to his cardiologists. The stakes in southern Somalia were as high as they could be, and the rules of the game were rough. Was Gandhi physically up to the challenge of playing it?

‘I worry about him all the time,’ Christine muttered. ‘He’s not a young man any more.’

Like so many Somali politicians, her husband had survived more than one assassination attempt in recent years. He was obliged to travel about with an imposing security detail in Somalia,
and to vary his routine constantly. Even in Nairobi, a radical imam had placed him under a fatwa. He had been forced to change his accommodation there many times as a result, and never took the same route to work if he could help it. Survival required constant vigilance. Although Christine followed Somali politics closely, and understood and supported what her husband was trying to do, it emerged that in all the years she had been with him she had never once been to Somalia, or even to Kenya.

‘It is too dangerous,’ she said. ‘I live a completely separate life here.’

It was another three months before I made it back to Nairobi, where I hoped to meet up with Gandhi and travel up to southern Somalia with him on an inspection tour of the war. By June 2012, al-Shabaab had their backs to the sea. The Kenyans were no longer alone in their incursion: at the beginning of 2012, and for the second time since 2006, Ethiopian troops had also crossed into Somalia. By February they had ousted al-Shabaab from the symbolically crucial town of Baidoa, and now they, the Kenyans, AMISOM and the TFG, were all closing in for the kill. When another key al-Shabaab town, Afmadow, fell to the Kenyans in late May, the head of the KDF, General Julius Karangi, was prompted to announce that the insurgency’s last stronghold, the port of Kismayo, would be in Kenyan hands by August.

‘It will not be difficult to capture Kismayo,’ boasted Sheikh Madobe, leader of the Raskamboni Movement. ‘Al-Shabaab’s fighters are on the run, morale is low and it is only a matter of time before they are completely expelled from southern Somalia.’
²

There was no doubt that Kismayo was a game-changer. The port lay close to the mouth of the river Juba, the only permanent
river in Somalia. As the commercial centre of the nation’s breadbasket, Kismayo had been the key to control of the south since medieval times. These days there were also thought to be large reserves of oil just offshore, which only added to the port’s allure and legendary richesse. Al-Shabaab’s dependence on it as a source of revenue was almost total. Without it, the alternative administration they claimed to provide was doomed.

Yet for all the triumphalist talk, and despite the Kenyans’ lengthy period of preparation, there were concerns in some foreign quarters that the KDF lacked the experience to handle such a complex campaign. Their advance in 2012 was snail-like, and their efforts to consolidate captured ground less than convincing. Eight months into Operation Linda Nchi, the KDF’s eastbound supply convoys were still being ambushed on an almost daily basis, even on the Kenyan side of the border. The generals chose to launch their invasion in October, in the middle of the lush Juba valley’s main rainy season when many roads become impassable. Foreign military advisors had warned them to delay the start of the campaign, but the advice was ignored and, as predicted, the KDF’s heavy vehicles almost immediately became bogged down. Kenya’s generals might profitably have paid more attention to the name of the Somali border town, Dhobley, that they had earmarked as their forward base of operations. Dhobley derived from the Somali word for mud.

The KDF’s amateurism was soon exposed again by the clumsiness of their propaganda operation. An army spokesman, Major Emmanuel Chirchir, made an international fool of himself when he posted on Twitter a photograph of a man being stoned to death, claiming that the victim was from Nairobi and that the picture had been taken the previous day in Kismayo. (See page
three, picture section two.) A war of words then erupted which the major decisively lost. A disturbingly Anglophone spokesman for al-Shabaab pointed out that the stoning had taken place in 2009, that the victim wasn’t Kenyan, that it hadn’t taken place in Kismayo, and that it wasn’t al-Shabaab who perpetrated it. The photograph had in fact been doing the rounds on the internet for so long – ever since the set of pictures it was taken from was sold to the news agency Associated Press – that even I had seen it before.

‘KDF must employ a new PR strategy to save face,’ tweeted @HSMPress, al-Shabaab’s impressively tech-savvy press office. ‘@MajorEChirchir’s half-witted Twitter Psyops have made him a laughing stock.’

‘I strongly disagree!’ responded a tweeter in America. ‘He’s looking for a new job: official KDF comedian. He aims to make all and sundry laugh.’

The KDF ran regular supply flights up to Dhobley, but securing a place on one of them proved much harder than I expected. My plan to exploit Gandhi’s influence with the Kenyans was thwarted by the discovery that he was unwell again, and had gone back to Besançon almost as I arrived in Nairobi. Left to approach the KDF alone, however, I was quickly stymied by officialdom. I spent an entire fortnight lobbying three colonels, each of whom insisted that it was not they but only one of their colleagues who could authorize my visit, without ever revealing which. It obviously did not help that the Internal Security Minister George Saitoti, the ‘architect’ of Operation Linda Nchi, had just been killed in a mysterious helicopter crash, an event that al-Shabaab called ‘a droplet of justice’, and which led to the temporary grounding of all official aircraft. Yet even this did not quite explain the colonels’ strange inertia.