From Hargeisa to Bossaso – the Pulse of the Beleaguered Populace Seethes with Rage

[NASSIR]

From Hargeisa to Bossaso – the Pulse of the Beleaguered Populace Seethes with Rage

 

A. Duale Sii'arag

05 Sept, 2007

 

"Beware the leader who bangs the drum of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor. For patriotism is indeed a double- edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind. And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and patriotism, will offer up all of their rights to the leader and gladly so.

Julius Caesar

 

A delegation from Maan hadal led by a famed guru of mafrish denominations in Hargeisa and several of his ardent disciples took a trip to Garowe and Bossaso this week to take stock of the developments taking place in neighbouring state of Puntland – another self-styled entity bedevilled by moribund leadership and political stagnation, where the largely disgruntled population remains hostage to a corrupt and immorally self-indigent unpopular politicians and their sycophants who are oblivious and detached from the mundane realities and excruciating misery so prevalent all around them; where the emerging parvenu coterie are tenaciously clung with superstitious blend of mystic faith in astrology and Sufism, gazing heavenwards in the hope of catching the ultimate cosmic wave of Sufi saints. Another stagnant place where the ordinary people are helplessly bamboozled by Machiavellian politicians who are ruthlessly bent on self-aggrandizement; where people talk too much and think little as their stymied fellow compatriots in Hargeisa.

None of us carried essential travel survival kits, first aid boxes, books, magazines, camping equipment, sleeping bags or a bivvy sack. Instead, we loaded laptops, sat phones, cigarettes and plenty of fresh Awaday into our four-wheel-drive landcruiser – the best off-road vehicle ever. We mounted our rough terrain vehicle and started off at sunrise driving to the east to what seemed like terra incognita. At long last, an opportunity to escape somewhere from the ongoing unhealthy political climate in Hargeisa and the seemingly inescapable political posturing and vicious wrangling on increasingly insignificant issues of the virtually indistinguishable rival political parties, come into being.

 

“A good rider doesn’t forget the horse” goes an old adage. As savvy travellers, we were mindful of the possible scarcity of our daily sustenance in the eastern regions where fresh stocks of Awaday are often unattainable. Awaday is an essentially indispensable travel companion for itinerants driving on the increasingly potholed and dilapidated roads of the largely underdeveloped and ungoverned Horn of Africa region.

 

As the morning dawned bright and warm, wind blown garbage, plastic bags, newspapers, and Qat residuals littered the streets. Owing to the collapse of the municipal order, heaps of decaying and stinking garbage scattered everywhere are threatening the health of the resident population in some parts of Hargeisa. The residents of this rapidly burgeoning city are compelled by circumstances to indicate piles of rubbish as the directional signs to their homes. “Go past three rubbish piles and my house is the third left” is the usual way of directing friends and visitors to one’s residence.

 

At a roadside stall in New Hargeisa, we collected the Saturday editions of Somaliland Times and The Republican newspapers, fresh from the print. “Ethiopia Troops Will Not Deploy In Somaliland” reads a front page headline in the Somaliland Times. The news item states that the “Market talk in the Somaliland capital Hargeisa focused on rumours that President Rayale’s administration might deploy Ethiopian troops to the region if the opposition continues to expand.” We ridiculed the item as a plain whitewash. Already Ethiopia has a full-fledged presence in Hargeisa with unparalleled influence in the political arena.

 

We chatted merrily for a while as the driver sped in blithe disregard for traffic rules. The trip evoked memories from memorable past as we gathered speed. A sudden flashback from the scenes of the Gone with the wind reverberated in my mind.With unnoticed celerity, we were greeted with the blistering heat of the port city of Berbera. Yet respite was virtually at a corner as we began the winding ascent of the Sheikh range of Mountains.

 

We stopped for a lunch and refuelling in vibrant, noisy, sprawling, dusty and nondescript Burao, where we gathered the most recent news updates from the frontline where thousands of heavily armed militias are facing each other at Adhi Adeeye flashpoint. The impoverished, misgoverned and politically isolated self-styled regional entities of Somaliland and Puntland have been technically at war since early 2004. Both entities are diverting enormous resources to this increasingly inexplicable and senseless standoff that is only serving the empire-building egos of the power-thirsty politicos at the helm of affairs in Hargeisa and Garowe.

 

Much to our amazement, we were forced to change some green bucks after local vendors in Buroa refused Somaliland shillings. The most favoured currency in recalcitrant Burao was the worn out Siad Barre’s old Somali shillings which obviously outlived their utility and in tatters. In a similar vein, we heard vociferous and virulent criticism towards the Rayaale’s administration from people we met in Buroa. Disgruntlement with Hargeisa was the order of the day in defiant Buroa, the home of the legendary poet and lyricist Mohamed Ibrahim Warsame (Hadrawi).

 

We left Buroa after midday prayers hoping to cross the combat zone before the last light. Seized by the spirit of this momentous trip, we purposely commenced munching the lip-smacking Awaday Qude with earnest. The car stereo played a selection of all time favoured Qarami songs. The ambience was almost immediately animated.

 

Somewhere between Ainabo and Adhi Cadeeye, we were flabbergasted to sight a military helicopter flying low down over the main road. It tracked just above the tress going from north to south and back again before it disappeared in the horizon. It was obvious that the chopper belonged to the ubiquitous Ethiopian defence forces that unabashedly court, arm and train both the warring militias of the antagonistic administrations; a phenomenally mysterious relationship that is yet to be deciphered.

 

We reached the first check-post of the intimidating frontline at Adhi Adeeye just after the sunset. To cross the volatile frontline, we generously greased the palms of several undisciplined, half-crazy, trigger-happy, gun-toting militiamen manning separate checkpoints, on either side of the disputed frontier, with bundles of Awaday and packs of cigarettes and hence managed to wangle our way with ease.

 

We checked in a well-run and comfortable hotel in Las Anod, the nerve-centre of the historical Darwishland. Due to the after-effect of the Awaday or perhaps owing to the travel fatigue, I had a fitful sleep that night. Early next day we headed to Garowe, ending our brief sojourn in Las Anod.

 

In the ensuing three weeks, the Maan hadal delegation had extensively travelled through a large expanse of territory stretching from the scenic Las Anod to the booming, full-blown urbanized port city of Bossaso. Hospitality turned up everywhere as people came to know that we were from Hargeisa. As we countenanced the agonizing reality of Puntland, the lack of difference between this anguished entity and its antagonistic neighbour, Somaliland - apart from the suffix land - confounded our naive minds as we drove deeper into the labyrinths of the legendary land of aromatic frankincense. The analogy was manifestly apparent. From Las Anod to Bossaso, we were greeted with a wind of discontent similar to the widespread resentment and disquiet brewing in places like Hargeisa and Buroa. The misruled, alienated and divided masses are having their rude awakening. Whether in Hargeisa or Garowe, their hearts beat in tune with each other. While the rulers yearn for the perpetuation of their tyrannical regimes and their invidious monkey business, the subject people are trying to redeem themselves as their prayers fall on deaf ears. Feeling the pain of privation and their fundamental rights trampled upon, their patience is running thin.

 

In the rule of the jungle, ‘the survival of the fittest’ has been the conventional wisdom of the survival game – a game favoured by the bullying monsters. Justice and good governance are hard to come by in a country where there is no rule of law and the wretched population are at the mercy of ruthless gangsters. So is in present day Somalia where survival has become the prerogative of a select few who are fleecing the resource-rich lands without having any benefits trickle down to the less fortunate masses. One sad fact is that the problems facing the ordinary people in both Somaliland and Puntland are identical in many ways: lack of functioning governmental institutions, single clan domination, rampant corruption and mismanagement, intimidation of free press and public dissatisfaction with the ruling goons - a mere microcosmic mirror of the malaise that besets the troubled Somali society.

 

One does not need to be possessing Socratic sagacity to decipher into the ubiquity of economic and social injustices dotted about in this part of the world. The streets in Bossaso present the spectacle of diametrically opposed lifestyles where a fleet of expensive cars speeds past the paupers leaving them in a cloud of dust for hours. The struggle between the less equal and the more equal is glaringly upfront, and it appears that institutionalized corruption is the hallmark and effective measures are underway to further impoverish the poor already caught in the cobweb of skyrocketing inflation with lesser income generating opportunities. With the absence of responsible, benevolent government; adequate legislative mechanism, corporate watchdog to regulate and minimize systemic risks, and owing to endemic corruption and mismanagement, the situation is exacerbating day in day out.

 

A very outspoken intellectual we met in Bossaso has characterized Adde Muse’s administration as a "den of the cannibals". As a politician with insatiable passion for cupidity, Adde Muse is living in hermetically sealed chamber where banal criticism, political or ethical debate, and humorous newspaper caricatures are forbidden much in the vein of other despotic rulers in the neighbourhood. He is surrounded by cruel and crafty coterie of likeminded self-seeking politicians who are adept at soft-pedalling of the prevailing grim situation. The Puntland administration of Adde Muse is widely believed to be milking from the economically devastating scam of minting the Somali shillings, defrauding the unsuspecting populace and hence generating severe inflation rates necessitating skyrocketing of the consumer goods prices that has further reduced the purchasing power of the impoverished masses. In a voracious fortune hunting spree, Adde Muse has been wooing unscrupulous oil companies, clandestinely signing shadowy deals whose terms had never been disclosed. As a plethora of evidence suggest, Adde and his kitchen clique must have pocketed generous kickbacks from these illegitimate deals.

 

Nobody in Adde’s government is humane enough to take cognizance of the booming slave trade or grisly human trafficking, which is causing attrition to the population on the one hand and increasing the weight of traffickers’ kitty. Thousands of internally displaced and dispossessed people, economic migrants and “boatpeople” are flocking in droves to the shores of Bossaso. The prevailing relative business boom in this sprawling city of clan hodgepodge is adversely serving as a pull-factor for thousands of disadvantaged, underprivileged and needy people from southern Somalia and the Somali region of Ethiopia. Thousands of Somalis and migrant Ethiopians are risking their lives every year on overcrowded fishing boats with the hope of finding sanctuary in the oil-rich arid Arabian Peninsula, from grinding poverty, instability and state-orchestrated ethnic cleansing. International aid agencies and the UN have repeatedly tried to draw the attention of the Puntland authorities to the flourishing deplorable human trafficking but all in vain, for these human traffic fodders hail from a land where life does not have any value but death sometimes has in high seas when the children of this universe are plunged at gunpoint into fathomless seas whose waves have now become brackish with their cadavers. Like that line from Macbeth, “. . . life’s fitful fever . . .”

 

There are times in the history of every society when ideas germinate and revolution becomes an imperative necessity, when it heralds itself as inevitable.In Greek mythology, it is believed that whom the gods want to destroy, they first turn him mad. With these [new] states failing to forge ahead “with vision of development that included broad social benefits” (Hussein Adam, From Tyranny to Anarchy: The Somali Experience 2007), but only capable to re-enforce social injustices and “autocratic rule” by elites, the two regions are on the verge of social upheavals. The recent violent demonstrations in Garowe and this weeks protests in Hargeisa and Buroa are precursors to something terrible, and a time would come when even the silent majority would fraternize with them and would storm the streets, lay siege to the palaces and the land of the gallant Somalis would be liberated from the clutches of callous gangsters. Maan hadal foresees a mellowed wave of reawakening among the harassed masses and galvanization of people’s power for the restoration of their usurped rights and dignity. No power, big or small, can stop a revolution whose time has come!

 

A. Duale Sii'arag

E-Mail:baxaal@yahoo.com

WardheerNews Contributor at Large