Battle Wounds bye Reporter

[Dhoodimeer]

Battle wounds

 

- By M.J. Akbar reports from Somalia

 

 

 

Mogadishu (Somalia), Jan. 11: Where do you find war? In a graveyard or a hospital. There are no stories in a graveyard. A hospital, on the other hand, has too many.

 

The director of Medina Hospital was in Mecca. It seemed the appropriate place for Sheikh Don to be. He had left for Dubai en route to Haj by the south city airport on a Russian Antonov: an extremely enterprising private airline now ferries those who can afford the minimum fare of $250. There is even an occasional flight to Paris. Where there is a will there is a way. The south city airport, unlike its poor cousin in the north, is protected by anti-aircraft guns.

 

Medina Hospital was built by the Germans for the local police and has proper buildings, lovely trees in the spacious compounds, a high water reservoir and space for 500 beds. About 65 — always add a few for battle casualties — function now.

 

Our guide is Dr Ali the White, a jovial Somali who refuses to get depressed by his difficulties. Instead, he breaks into song when he learns that I am an Indian. Thankfully, it is not Mera joota hai Japani... but the rather surprising Meri muhabbat jawan rahegi, sada rahi hai sada rahegi. May I add that he got the tune right.

 

I am not brave enough to face another’s pain and the visit to the wards was acutely discomforting. The relatives around each bed looked stoic as they fanned their loved child, or simply waited. There are few old men or women in hospital. That is the meaning of war.

 

The most important doctor is the chief surgeon, which tells the story. Dr Hassan Osman is legitimately proud that one of the techniques he has devised for immediate operations is now quoted in medical journals. The wounded come from as far away at Diinsoor, which is 500 km away. That is reputation in a war zone.

 

The police disappeared from Medina in 1991, when the remnants of government crumbled. It was partially reopened in 1992 with the help of Medicins Sans Frontiers (Doctors Without Borders). Patients were treated under trees. There was no water or power. A hospital is perhaps the only thing that brings clans together in wartime. The elders got together and contacted the Red Cross in 1999, which stepped into desolation. In 2000 a generator arrived, which purrs quietly in a large shed and turns Medina into an island unrecognisable from its environs: a full drug store, surgical equipment, doctors who are taken to one annual conference, nurses and, perhaps most important, community involvement. It was the community that paid for the new tiles in one ward and painted the buildings.

 

If Medina is a marvel then Keysaney is a miracle. This hospital in the north was a prison outside the city, on the shore, making it, as someone wryly observed, the "most secure hospital in the world". When the Siad Barre regime collapsed the prison emptied.

 

Compared to Medina, the facilities are rudimentary, the facilities minimal. The strength of Dr Ahmed Muhammad Ahmed, a devout young man who prays five times a day, and his colleagues is inspiring. This is the only hospital for he north, and has treated more than 55,000 patients in over a decade. Add more than 100,000 outpatients. That is the meaning of war. The Red Cross turned this prison into a hospital in November 1991. There are four wards, including one for VIPs, which means it has curtains. Dr Ahmed showed me with shy pride the apparatus he had set up to recycle a bullet victim’s blood back into the patient.

 

The one thing you can’t get in a bloodstained country is blood.

 

The main hall at Keysaney doubles up as an English classroom for the staff in the evenings, thanks to Dr Ahmed. The sentences chalked on the blackboard are instructive in more ways than one. ‘A: Do you think you can get me to Victoria by half-past? B: We should be OK if the lights are with us. A: You’ve still got five minutes to spare. A: Pounds 6.40 please.’ The last sentence was: ‘I go to a private institute which is called Oxford.’

 

You find both war and aspiration in Dr Ahmed’s fly-blown hospital.

 

The unsentimental fortitude of doctors is remarkable. Dr Ahmed takes nothing for granted, and everything in his stride. Dr C. Oscar Avogadri has just joined the Red Cross team for Somalia. He is an Italian who spent some time in Nepal but, much to his relief, did not understand cricket — otherwise he might have spent eight hours on a weekend watching the game instead of doing something better. Pascal Hundt, head of the Somalia division, is Swiss, imperturbable, practical and measures a day by how much he has got done, whether stocking medical supplies or injecting capital into the rural economy by financing 5,000 goats, or telling impoverished representatives of a betrayed people that he cannot change the rules. He is already planning for a famine that looms ahead.

 

The price of war is poverty. Somalis do not have the individual or collective resources to fight a famine. The destitution is utter. Clothes are old, slippers tattered, food basic. There are no shops, apart from the occasional medical (what else?) store, or a utility outlet. There is no state, and therefore no state service. Water and electricity must be purchased from entrepreneurs; travel rights from the gun-toting militias. The thin elite owns generators. For visitors with foreign exchange and a hotel room there is excellent fruit juice and lobster from the Indian Ocean. For the nomad, or the citizen, life hovers at subsistence level. Measure incomes on a simple scale. The best paid are top-of-the-line gunmen, who get a hundred dollars a month. Fifty dollars will fetch you a bullet-sprayer (a bullet costs 30 cents). Most of the gunmen don’t have shoes either.

 

There may be no money for food, but there is always enough money for war.

 

My friend remembers this fact with a hint of awe: the only time the price of food collapsed was in 1991, when the Americans came, leading an international effort to fight famine and starvation, restore governance and leave behind a semblance of civil society. A 50-kg bag of rice that cost $450 during famine was available for nine dollars. (The current price is $50.)

 

So what was the mistake that the world’s most powerful country made in the world’s weakest country?

 

Cultural insensitivity is too boring an accusation. A diplomat who was in and out of Somalia at that time, and lives in Nairobi, has more relevant analysis. The Americans were not interested in peacekeeping; they wanted something that they called peace-building. They wanted an architecture that would stabilise the country around a democratic polity. It was another honourable intent, that came unglued when it hit warlords. Every warlord was convinced that only he could become President of the Somali Republic. In a bid to challenge the lords, American soldiers raided the home of the most powerful, Aideed. That was the end of both peacekeeping and peace-building. The American position on the country is: Somalia missed the bus a decade ago; it will not be given another chance.

 

There are others ready to take a chance, or provide one. The last spot on our tour of Medina Hospital was the newly-painted canteen for families of patients, another stray sign of normalcy in an abnormal world. The doctors left me alone: clearly no one senior ever ventured into a public canteen. If they wanted coffee outside office they sat on benches in the shade of trees. Even Dr Ali the White left me. I wandered in. The painting was fresh; the walls sparkled with schoolchild paintings of the usual variety, animals, scenery et al. To my right, in a panel, were two highrise buildings. On top of one was a legend: New York. A similar masthead on the other was filled with black. Two airplanes were exploding against the upper stories of both buildings. In the space between the towers, in small lettering, was a phrase. Since I can read Arabic, I knew what it said. Al Qaeda.

 

Perhaps someone reading this will get into a pother, and that painting, done by someone doing community service for the hospital in a canteen the senior staff did not enter, will be erased. That is not the point. The point is what is happening to the community in Mogadishu, living on the deserted, rubble-strewn streets around Medina.

 

I could not resist the question as I said goodbye to Dr Ali the White. Surely that could not be his real name. No. His name was Dr Ali Muallim. Then...? "Oh," he said with a big grin, "white because I am so black. Just reverse!" Just reverse. It seems a good metaphor for Mogadishu.