Dispatches: Notes From a Failed State (Somalia/Somaliland)

[Ibtisam]

Emily Meehan

HARGEYSA, Somalia—When I first decided to quit my job in New York and head off to Somalia, I went out for drinks with a friend who has an astute command of geopolitics.

 

"Somalia is at war, and nobody cares! Mogadishu sounds crazy!" I told ! Mark.

 

"Nah. Somalia's OK," he replied. "They've got their clans —they can sort it out."

 

This logic was lost on me. What could clans do to solve the war in Mogadishu, and anyway, what's a clan?

 

Six months later, I am in Somaliland, a peaceful breakaway state in the north of Somalia, five hours by air from Mogadishu. I have come to learn the answers to my questions. I have heard that clans did make peace in Somaliland.

 

I see that Somalis don't look the same. Some are as pale as Saudis, others as dark as the blackest African. I meet people from many different clans, but members of the same clan don't necessarily look alike. An ad hoc council of five educated young men tell me there are 13 Somali clans. They warn me not to listen to confused officials who claim otherwise. ******, ******, Rahanweyne, Issa, Gadabursi, Sheikhal, *****, Biyomal, Gaadsan, Yibro, Midgan, Tumal, and Gaboye are the clans. They make up one tribe and speak one language, Somali. The young men tell me that the father's lineage decides their clan. Th! is genealogy isn't written down. It's an oral society. The clans might as well be like tribes—in fact, the people here call them that—and you can go to town with your Rwanda and Kenya comparisons, because warfare between rival clans destroyed south Somalia after 1991.

 

There is a drought in Somaliland, so I go to the desert to interview nomads who are living without water. I find a father outside his home, a structure of sticks and mats of woven grass covered with tin and colorful fabric. Ali Jama Odowa allows me and my team of two soldiers, a guide, and a driver to sleep on the ground outside his family's tent. Before we go to bed, and after everyone has listened to the scratchy shortwave broadcast of the BBC World Service, he tells me his problem: The drought might kill his cows, and they hardly have enough water to bathe with, cook with, and drink. The children look dangerously thin. I ask if he can take his family and move to another region where there's more r! ain. I have heard this is what nomads do.

 

"It's difficult for us to go where our clan doesn't live. We can't," he tells me.

 

"But there might be water there," I say, suggesting that he move into a region where the ****** clan rules. Odowa is from the ***** clan.

 

"There's no problem that would force us to go that far. We haven't seen that kind of a drought yet," he says, flustered. "We can travel inside Ethiopia where our clan lives, and we can wait for Allah to bring rain."

 

My guide and translator, Mohamed Amin Jibril, reminds me that Siad Barre, Somalia's dictator for 22 years, was ******. Somaliland is populated by the ***** clan. Barre killed more than 50,000 Isaaqs in the Somali civil war of the late 1980s. In one incident, his soldiers tied more than 1,000 ***** men and boys to trees with barbed wire, pumped them full of bullets, and then drove over them with tanks, burying them alive. Barre's army bombed and razed Hargeysa, Somaliland's capital.!

 

Isaaqs fled as refugees to Ethiopia or, if they were rich, to the United States, Canada, or Europe. So, to ask Odowa if he would move to a place where ******s live is ridiculous, cruel even.

 

"You have made this man deny that there is even a drought!" my guide says disapprovingly. Odowa would rather die of starvation than travel inside the territory of an enemy clan, however lush.

 

Wandering around some more, we cross the unmarked border with Ethiopia. We run into a small, smiling lady in threadbare clothes; she has a dozen sheep. She and my guide speak in Somali, and I see that she is mentally ill. My guide picks up one of her sheep to joke with her, and she throws a stick at him and runs away, bursting into tears.

 

"It is something from the war. Maybe her parents were murdered in front of her," says Mohamed. "I asked her if she knew she was in Ethiopia, but she doesn't know what Ethiopia is. She does not know her own country even. She only knows h! er clan."

 

In the closest village, we learn that the woman's fami ly was killed in front of her; only one brother survived. He and their extended family, the ***** subclan called Makahil, take care of her. She knows only what's necessary to survive. In a pinch, clan is more important than state. This may explain why Somalia never unified as a nation-state until 1960 and why Somalia has been a failed state since 1991.

 

Later, my guide explains how his clan protected him one night in Djibouti. He was in the neighboring country on a work assignment, but he had no money, so he slept on the beach. In the middle of the night, Mohamed says he woke to hear three Djiboutian soldiers discussing how they would drop a boulder on his head. Why they wanted to kill him is a mystery, but it isn't surprising in these parts. "I knew I had a relative who owned a guest house in the town, so I went there," Mohamed continues. "I woke him, and I said to him, 'I am your relative, I come from such and such clan, and my uncle is so and so.' " The distant rela! tive was unmoved. "I told him, 'My security is threatened, and I need a place to sleep. I can sleep inside on the floor if you just let me in.' " Finally he agreed, and Mohamed slept safely.

 

I stay for three weeks in Hargeysa. It has been rebuilt since Barre's bombardment and looks a lot like Tucson, Ariz. The garden behind my hotel is the haunt of men with ideas. I meet politicians, poets, activists, and businessmen. They drink tea and converse in the style of many Italians I know. They're merry, grave, or excited, and sometimes arguments flare. Many have just returned to their country after fleeing in the 1980s. These members of the Somali diaspora are invariably progressive, and they don't speak of clans, except to complain.

 

"It's primitive gangsterism," says Ali Hassan Osman, a businessman who settled in Toronto 20 years ago. He met a white Christian woman there and married her. His son doesn't speak Somali. When Osman is annoyed with the slow service, he as! ks the waiters, "What is this, Jamaica?" He doesn't think bloodlines s hould matter anymore.

 

Abokor is the hotel concierge. During my stay, his wife gives birth to their first child, a son. "I have named him Jibril Abokor *****!" he tells me. "People can't believe it, because ***** is really my last name, and it's also the main clan of Somaliland. And Jibril Abokor is a subclan of *****. So his name is after my subclan and my clan!" It's like an American naming his baby Cambridge Boston Ireland.

 

My friend Mark's claim that clans can work out their own problems proves to be correct here. One of the regulars in the hotel tea garden is Somaliland's only psychiatrist, Omar Dihoud. He co-founded one of the rebel groups that ousted Siad Barre in 1991. Dihoud is a natural born storyteller and always has one ready for me when we meet. The best is the tale of how he helped to disarm his subclan after 1991. Somalilanders who had fought against Barre turned against one another once the dictator was gone. They were all members of the ***** clan! but from different subclans. "There were many young people armed with Kalashnikovs," says Dihoud. "They used to shoot each other, and it was very dangerous to travel from place to place. There were more than 30 checkpoints between Berbera and Hargeysa."

 

One day in the middle of this chaos, the elders of Dihoud's subclan invited him to a brainstorming conference. One of their boys had killed three men from another subclan, and the elders from that subclan demanded justice. How would these elders prevent such things in the future, and how could they convince their violent young men to give up their arms? "I am a psychiatrist," Dihoud remembers telling them. "And as I am a psychiatrist, I know we are all paranoid after the war. We are all traumatized. We had blood on our hands. We fought against a dictator, and we killed each other. So everybody is paranoid that somebody is following him. And we think that if we give up the arms, other tribes will attack us. Let us dis! arm ourselves and give the arms to the government."

 

The sultan o f Dihoud's subclan, whose authority could be compared to Native American tribal chiefs, ordered the boys to join the army. Other sultans across the region issued the same orders, and now Somaliland's small government has a huge, unified army. (Click here to hear Dihoud tell this story.)

 

In matters of love, clan elders are less popular judges. One man tells me he was never permitted to marry a Midgan woman because his clan considered Midgans inferior. Somaliland's own Romeo and Juliet is the legend of Hothan and Elmi Boderi. Residents look to the sky with wonder in their eyes when they speak these names, but no one could properly explain the tale to me until, by chance, Hothan's son drove me to the coast. Abdisalam Mohamed Shabeelleh says his mother was a member of a noble clan. About 60 years ago, when the late Hothan was 12 years o! ld, she went into a bakery in her village to buy cookies. There she met the owner, a middle-aged man named Elmi Boderi. It was love at first sight for Elmi, but because of her youth and noble blood, he was not allowed to speak to Hothan. For months he didn't eat or sleep; all he did was recite mad love poems in the streets. And then he died.

 

Romance may not have changed with the times. I ask Abokor, the new father, whether his family cared what clan his wife belonged to. "If I bring to my family [someone from] some other clan as a wife, they will not bother me," he says. "Although my wife and I are in the same clan."

 

[Ibtisam]

She's got 5 articles up on Somalia and Somaliland.

 

NAIROBI, Kenya—If you search for "Somalia parliament chair fight" on YouTube, you will find a shocking video. In the clip, old men in suits shout and beat each other with chairs. In one astonishing sequence, two men observe the fracas, turn to look at each other, pick up chairs in unison, and start slamming another man on the head.

 

The way you react to this video is likely the way you would feel if you met Mohamed Qanyare Afrah. He's a former warlord and a member of Somalia's transitional parliament. He ran for president in 2004 and came in third. He plans to run again next year when the current transitional charter runs out.

 

We meet on the patio of Nairobi's Grand Regency hotel. Qanyare—graying, jocular, handsome in a navy-blue suit and red-and-white tie—remembers the day with a smile. "I was in there!" he boasts. Qanyare says the fight was over President Abdullahi Yusuf's decision to invite Ethiopian troo! ps to overthrow the Islamic Courts Union in Mogadishu, Somalia's capital. Qanyare lives in Nairobi because the Islamists overthrew the warlords two years ago, and he fled. But he's not satisfied with the Ethiopian troops that then broke up the Islamist government, and like most Somalis, he wants the Ethiopians to leave. As far as Mohamed Qanyare is concerned, the only acceptable leader of Somalia is Mohamed Qanyare. Until he gets the job, he will contribute nothing to Somalia's nominal government. "It's not functioning. It's nothing," he says of the parliament. The European Union doesn't pay MPs enough, he adds, only $1,100 a month. The parliament is supposed to be meeting in Baidoa, Somalia, when Qanyare and I are talking in Nairobi.

 

Very few people know what a warlord is. Qanyare doesn't call himself one; his preferred term is faction leader. His faction was Murusade, a family, or subclan, of south Somalia's powerful ****** clan. With a lucrative transporta! tion business that moves cargo across Africa, the 67-year-old is also a wealthy businessman. He launched the company in the 1970s while living in exile from Siad Barre's regime.

 

The "war" in warlord was Qanyare's competition with other armed faction leaders for control of Mogadishu. Their rivalry was born in the power vacuum after Barre's deposition in 1991. The anarchy that resulted from this competition prevented Somalia from becoming a functioning state for 15 years. From the mid-1990s until 2006, Qanyare led a militia of about 2,000 young Murusade men. He controlled an airstrip that aid agencies and khat dealers used to import their material from Kenya. He controlled an area of Mogadishu. He had a lot of weapons, makeshift tanks, and money.

 

"It was not a cool atmosphere politically, but that was between me and the other faction leaders. Anyone who tells you my militia was killing innocent people or making roadblocks, they must be cheating you," says Qanyare defiantl! y. Like feudal lords, warlords in Africa are known for taxing people living in their zones, and their soldiers, usually teenagers, are known for setting up roadblocks and charging people to pass. "I only defended myself," says Qanyare. He was also defending his airport, which brought in $100,000 a month, he says. His fundamental objective? "Ever since I returned to Somalia in 1991, I have been a political man," he says over a fourth cup of chai tea. "I used to be a businessman, now I have only one goal." That goal is to be president.

 

"I am the man who told the United States there was al-Qaida in Somalia," says Qanyare. "They could not believe!" Eventually, they did believe. After 9/11, the CIA recruited Qanyare and other warlords to hunt down radical clerics and send them off for interrogation at a U.S. base in Djibouti. As an aspiring president, Qanyare had his own reasons for resisting Islamist revolution. In 2006, the warlords announced that they had forged an alli! ance: the CIA-funded Alliance for Restoration of Peace and Counter-Ter rorism. The irony of warlords running a peace alliance was not lost on Somalis.

 

Qanyare says the CIA didn't pay him. Somali journalists say he was vastly enriched with cash deliveries. The counterterrorism tactic was controversial, and U.S. diplomat Michael Zorick was transferred from his post in Nairobi as a punishment for speaking out against it. Zorick later won a "constructive dissent" prize from the American Foreign Service Organization. Somalis were horrified by the alliance, and many now consider the United States their No. 2 enemy after Ethiopia. "One thing people know is the warlords are the worst people in Somalia, and the Americans are helping the worst people," Somali politician Mohamud Uluso told me.

 

Ask ordinary Somalis about Qanyare, and without fail, the first thing anyone who lived in Mogadishu back then will say is that he kidnapped innocent Muslim clerics to make money from the CIA. "Warlords were all kidnapping Muslim scholars and flying them! out of Somalia systematically, and Mohamed Qanyare had his airport," says Hassan Mohamed, a 29-year-old who grew up in Qanyare's Mogadishu territory.

 

Qanyare says he wasn't very successful at catching terrorists, and his militia caught only one, by accident. He says the man he caught and flew out to Djibouti killed two British schoolteachers in Somaliland. Somaliland's former interior minister, Ismael Adam Osman, says the man who killed Richard and Enid Eyeington in 2003 was caught in Mogadishu and handed over to the CIA in Djibouti, but Osman doesn't know how he was caught. Mohamed Ali Isey currently awaits the death penalty in a Somaliland prison.

 

Qanyare's cooperation with the United States was a symptom of his unusual American bias. "Some people, they believe all roads lead to Rome," he says of elders who worshipped Italy, Somalia's former colonizer. "Me? I think all roads ! lead to Washington." On the topic of Islamist governance, he looks dis gusted. "I'm a secularist," he says. "I'm not the person sent from God to regulate the peoples' religions. We must have a multiparty democracy." Qanyare is a Muslim. He wakes up every morning at 5 a.m. to pray—and to watch CNN.

 

Since 2006, Qanyare's relationship with the United States seems to have deteriorated, and he's angry that Washington accepts the Ethiopian occupation arranged by President Yusuf. "America is the sick person," he says, referring to 9/11 and the U.S. Embassy bombings. "They wanted to see the physician, and they are using a witch doctor—Yusuf and Ethiopia. I used to give my advice to the CIA. But I think nobody cares about American taxpayers. Now everything is bad there [in Somalia]." The people fighting Ethiopians in Somalia have a right to do so, says Qanyare, expressing a sentiment echoed by most Somalis. "They have a right to jihad with Ethiopia, because Ethiopia invaded a sovereign country."

 

Our meeting is wrapping up, and several d! emure Somali ladies are waiting for Qanyare in the hotel lobby. "Is one of those women your wife?" I ask him. "I don't know those ladies—I think they want my money," he says, dismissing them with a harassed wave.

 

If Qanyare is elected president, he will move back to Mogadishu. It's not in the state it was when he left in 2006. That was anarchy. Today it's compared to Baghdad.

 

Is he scared to go back? "My dear," says Qanyare, "I only fear God."

Source:

http://www.slate.com/id/2197706/

[ilax]

Is this writer telling us that the break away 'Northen Somalia province has lessons to learn for other parties of the country such us south in order to bring back the lost statehood of Somalia Republic?

 

Where northern province of Somalia or the so call Somali-land stands in the regional politics?

[Geel_jire]

Six months later, I am in Somaliland, a peaceful breakaway state in the north of Somalia, five hours by air from Mogadishu.

it is roughly a 2 hour flight between Muqdisho and hargeisa not 5 hours ... her geography is off ... no i havent read the rest i will later

[cabdi-casse]

I see that Somalis don't look the same. Some are as pale as Saudis,

others as dark as the blackest African

.

Well I guess that one would be me then