Somalia: On the front lines of a failed state
After 14 years of conflict, the people of this African country lurch along, doing their best with what they can get their hands on, STEPHANIE NOLEN writes
By STEPHANIE NOLEN
Saturday, July 23, 2005
XUDDUR, SOMALIA -- He has no anesthetic. No bags of blood to transfuse. No ventilator, no chest tube, no suction. No lights, no running water. Nothing, in fact, but a scalpel, some gauze and a firm conviction that he can manage without the fancy stuff.
Ahmed Ali Omar, known as Kadareh, is the surgeon for two entire provinces in western Somalia, home to an estimated 300,000 people. He digs the Kalashnikov bullets out of the war wounded, stitches up the boys stabbed in clan feuds, removes the dead fetuses from teenage nomad women who were in labour for a week. He does it all in a primitive hospital run by Médecins sans frontières (Doctors Without Borders). And he has astonishing survival rates, given the conditions.
"You'd be surprised," he said with a sigh. "The only thing we have is our experience. We deal with what is possible. As humanity, we do our best."
His Somali nickname translates as "He gets right in there." He earned it as an aggressive player in childhood games of soccer, but it is equally applicable now, as the 44-year-old medic plunges into the care of the gunshot victims who are carried in by lurching donkey cart. "The bullet went in here, came out there," he muttered, poking at the innocent little holes. ". . . We'll do traction, no problems."
Kadareh qualified as a nurse in the 1970s, and worked in public hospitals in Mogadishu when the country was ruled by major-general Mohammed Siad Barre. In 1988, he received permission from the authorities to study to be a surgeon. He had only 18 months of his training left when the civil war broke out on Dec. 30, 1990 -- and after all these years of waiting, there has never been peace long enough for him to finish.
This has not, however, stopped Kadareh from doing a great deal of surgery. "In 1991 I had never done a gunshot -- it was very rare. There was control of arms then. Now, every camel man has a gun." These days, he digs a bullet out of a lucky survivor every two or three days.
And in Kadareh's story there is a metaphor for his whole benighted country: suddenly cut off when the war broke out 14 years ago, then forgotten by the world after the disastrous United Nations intervention in the early 1990s and left to its own savagely violent anarchy -- but still, somehow, lurching along, a nation of people doing the best they can with what they can get their hands on.
After all these years of war, Somalia is today, nominally, a country in a peace process, with a brand new government -- the result of years of tortured negotiations in Kenya, where, in essence, the parliamentary spoils were divvied up between the heads of the country's major clans and its warlords.
There have been 14 previous peace efforts, the last of which had focused on getting the intelligentsia into government, but those men could never face down the warlords. This new deal was seen as a pragmatic alternative that might keep enough peace in the country to move to a true democratic transition.
But the new parliament (which includes 12 Somalis who are Canadian citizens) never even made it out of Nairobi before an argument degenerated into a fist fight. The new President, Abdullahi Yusuf, said he wanted provisional capitals in the second city of Baidoa and in Jowhar, 100 kilometres northwest of Mogadishu. One hundred of the 275 MPs went to Mogadishu and denounced the government; one militia seized Baidoa and said Mr. Yusuf wasn't welcome there either.
Then Mr. Yusuf called for an international peacekeeping force to support him, which was widely interpreted as an effort to bring in troops from Ethiopia, in particular, which has long played a deliberately destabilizing role in Somalia's affairs. He is currently in Galkayo to the north, trying to muster a sufficient militia of to take Jowhar, then Baidoa, and having cut off Mogadishu, to march on the capital.
"Everybody was investing their hopes in this peace which now, after moments of exhilaration, looks hugely disappointing," said Jim Wall, Canada's high commissioner in Nairobi who is also ambassador to Somalia's government. "None of the warlords seems to be rising to the historical occasion."
A solid half of the estimated 10 million people in this country are children under 15, For their entire lives the country has had no schools, no health care, no police, no courts -- in fact, their births have never even been registered. There is only the rule of warlords and the endless feuding between clans.
There is still trade -- not even anarchy can crush the fierce entrepreneurship for which Somalis are known in Africa -- but people grow steadily poorer with each year. Banditry on the roads (where roads exist) makes every journey a peril, and even in the towns that are relatively calm, there is a constant risk of invasion by a militia whose chief hungers for control of whatever small business springs up or what resources there might be.
Huge numbers of Somalis are living outside the country in refugee camps or have emigrated to other countries (including an estimated 250,000 who have moved to Canada). At the same time, others have come in. "Some leading members of al-Qaeda's East African network continue to hide in Somalia," said a recent report from the Brussels's based watchdog International Crisis Group. "[And] since 2003, Somalia has witnessed the rise of a new, ruthless, independent jihadi network with links to al-Qaeda based in lawless Mogadishu and led by a young militia leader trained in Afghanistan."
If the international community has any interest in Somalia it extends only as far as the risks of this lawlessness.
The sole exceptions to the litany of misery are two regions in the north, Somaliland and Puntland, which have declared themselves independent. Somaliland, in particular, has managed to maintain stability and establish a quasi-democratic government, and to do considerable rebuilding in the past few years.
What does it look like, anarchy? When a rare aid flight arrives at Xuddur, the regional capital home to 30,000, MSF deploys two of the handful of vehicles in town to drive up and down chasing goats and camels off the dirt air strip.
Donkeys amble down the main street, which has a few shops selling everything from Chinese batteries to plastic pots to cooking oil, all of it carried in small bundles from Mogadishu. Water comes on donkey carts, sold by the boys who jostle and shout as they pull up buckets at the big wells at the edge of town.
There are two pharmacies, two bare-bones "hotels," five mosques. There is an Internet café, and two phone shops were Somalis can call family living in Denmark or Ottawa. Women in bright print jalaba (loose head-to-toe wraps) buy and sell in the market in the daytime. Come the softer light of late afternoon, the men, wearing sarongs and carrying walking sticks, walk hand in hand up the street or gather over tea and heated games of cards.
Many of the men carry automatic rifles over their shoulders. In the narrow, twisting side streets there are single-room houses of twig and mud, surrounded by low fences made of enmeshed balls of thorn-tree branches. A blanket of trash covers everything -- no one has collected garbage in 15 years. At night, there are occasional gunshots in the velvet dark, but this is known as a rare peaceful place.
People want desperately to believe that the peace process will produce security, some change, to this surreal stasis. But there is deepening doubt here. "I don't think the government will succeed in setting up here -- the way they are behaving, I don't think they can stabilize the country," said Mohammed Adam Abdulrahman, 40, who earns $40 a month welding and doing small repairs at a metal shop. "Before they even left Nairobi, they were fighting."
The result, he said, is a grim future for his three young children. He got to Grade 5. Looking at his two-year-old twins, he said he doubted they would ever go to school. "They can only grow up to be gunmen and become part of those who disturb people now."
And Mr. Abdulrahman expressed the not uncommon fear that the anarchic status quo was preferable to this latest stab at governance. "It was better for us before [the deal] -- then we were only under the control of the clans who live here, and now there is foreign involvement," he said.
Many Somalis are, in fact, desperate for a certain kind of foreign intervention: a neutral force of blue-helmeted United Nations peacekeepers. Largely sealed off from the outside world, they have no perception of what a blot the last UN mission was in the annals of intervention. The UN came in that time to protect and supervise food aid distribution after the collapse of the government; it left five years later, bloodied and expertly manipulated by the warlords. There is, Ambassador Jim Wall noted, very little appetite to repeat the experiment.
Ask who is to blame for the current state of things, and Somalis will point to rival clans, rival warlords, their self-interested politicians.
Ubha Yusuf has a more particular answer. At 29, she is one of the few people in the region who is prospering. She started a small pharmacy after the civil war broke out and the health system collapsed.
Yet business is a fraught affair. Sometimes, she travels to Mogadishu to buy goods, although she starts each journey wondering if she will make it back alive with her notebooks and pens. When she can't face the trip, she uses Somalia's vast international, informal money-transfer network to pay for supplies in Mogadishu, but then she never knows if the truck will be hijacked, or her goods stolen by the bandits who plague the roads.
"Who causes the problems, the interclan conflict?" she asked. "It's my husband or my brother or my son -- and the burden falls on me." Somalia's women pay the price, she said. This country has the highest maternal mortality rate in the world -- a woman has a one-in-seven chance of dying in childbirth, and the average woman has six children -- the result of the almost total lack of health care and the universal practice of radical infibulation of young girls, which frequently causes obstructed labour and hemorrhage.
"The problem is men: the warlords are men; the fighting is men; the clan conflict is men. We have to get the voice of women in there. It is women who are looking for their daily bread while their men are chewing mirrah [the narcotic leaf also known as qat]. The men chew up what their families need to survive."
She gave the example of the MSF hospital, which was almost forced to close last year when a clan dispute got ugly and two staff members were killed. Stubborn men bicker over who will get what job or claim a $100 bribe, she said, and they don't care if that costs the whole community their sole source of health care.
David Michalski, a Toronto native who heads the MSF mission here, says he can understand such behaviour. "The root of most of the problems is resources -- there is less and less international attention, there is regular drought. And as those resources have declined over the 15 years, what there is becomes more valuable and so people scramble for it, for their family or their clan. Fifteen years has created a lot of pretty primal survival instinct, especially among young people growing up who don't know anything else."
His job is a constant struggle to placate the militias and the strongmen, balance between the clans and still keep an independent hospital running. Mr. Michalski believes it is crucial that MSF stay in the region. "This place has been really forgotten and it's a pretty bleak existence for a lot of people who are trapped in that circumstance and not necessarily contributing to it. They're not militia; they're just trying to have a normal life in some pretty vicious circumstances."
The clinic wards tell the story. One day last week, a woman came in with a partial miscarriage. Lacking the usual equipment to do a proper dilation and curettage, Kadareh cleaned out her uterus with his finger.
And there is a four-year-old with a belly swollen like a woman in the last days of pregnancy. Six months ago, Hussein Ali Sofa had persistent diarrhea and his anus partially prolapsed. His parents turned to the local remedy -- a traditional healer burned away the dropped part of his anus. That healed, but scar tissue has clearly taken hold further up in his digestive tract because he has not defecated in all these six months. He is in the last days of his life, but he smiles gingerly as he moves, trying to wield the enormous mass on his front.
Kadareh watches dispassionately as the boy struggles to sit up -- he is hardened to such sights. "Inshallah [God willing], when we have rules and regulations, police, courts -- when they collect those weapons, it will calm down," he said. "When we have a government, this will be the best country."
link
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20050723/SOMALIA23/TPInternational/Africa
