Amid Chaos, Young Somalis Struggle to Get By

[Castro]

 

 

 

By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

 

MOGADISHU, Somalia, Jan. 18 — A week ago, Yoonis Issay Alin was riding around in the back of a pickup, part of a squad of tough-looking guys with big trucks and big guns.

 

Now he is drooling on a metal cot, shot in the head over a parking spot.

 

All around him at Medina Hospital in Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital, young men writhe in steamy beds, their arms and legs trapped in traction ropes, their gunshot wounds the latest proof of a society out of control. It is hard to imagine there is enough gauze in this broken-down country to keep up.

 

Somalia may be at a turning point, with a potentially viable government for the first time since 1991. But senseless violence is still the norm, as ubiquitous as qat, the plant people here chew and chew as a drug until the ugliness of life fades away, even if just for a moment.

 

Mr. Alin, 22, was one of the thousands of young militiamen who prowl this city. Now his family is on a death watch, with his sisters squeezed around his hospital bed, peering into his open, unregistering eyes, and his creased-faced mother leaning over him, shooing away flies.

 

“In this country,” said his mother, Halima, “nobody cares if you live or die.”

 

His skull is encased in a helmet of white medical tape. He has been drifting in and out of consciousness, and doctors say they have no way to gauge the amount of brain damage.

 

“There are no neurosurgeons here, no M.R.I.’s, no CAT scans, no psychiatrists,” said Sheikhdon Salad Elmi, director of Medina Hospital. “Can you imagine that? In a city where everyone needs therapy, not a single psychiatrist?”

 

Mr. Alin’s journey from a tin shack where he slept on a dirt floor with four brothers and five sisters to the employ of a warlord was typical of so many young Somali men. It was not planned; it just happened, like the bullet that was fired at someone else last Friday but tumbled instead through Mr. Alin’s brain.

 

His father, Issay, an off-again-on-again brick mason, was killed in a robbery in 1993 — two years after Somalia’s central government collapsed and the country spun into anarchy — leaving behind no money, just a crusty trowel that none of his sons knew how to use.

 

His mother supported the family by selling qat in a neighborhood called the Black Sea, bringing in the equivalent of a few dollars a day. It was enough to buy two jerry cans of water from the donkey carts that jangled by every morning and the occasional meal of spaghetti and camel meat, Mr. Alin’s favorite.

 

But it was not enough for school. So Mr. Alin and his brothers spent their days combing the city’s bullet-scarred streets for odd jobs, like pushing a wheelbarrow or hauling fish. In the afternoons they worked out in their yard, curling a 25-pound tank shell found nearby, which by a quick, delicate inspection looked as though it could go off at any time.

 

“I think it’s safe,” said Didi, his 17-year-old brother.

 

Last summer things changed. A grass-roots Islamist movement took over Mogadishu after running the city’s warlords out of town. The young Islamist soldiers wore green skullcaps, eschewed qat and cigarettes and vowed to unite Somalia’s warring clans under the banner of Islam. Many people, including Mr. Alin, were impressed.

 

His friends said he was religious, never missing prayer. A green flag hangs over his sleeping spot — there are no beds in his shack — with the message “There is no god but God, and Muhammad is his Prophet.”

 

But when Mr. Alin tried to join the Islamists he was rejected. They took one look at his teeth, stained brown from qat, and told him to go away. So he went to Baidoa, a city 150 miles away, to find Botan Issay, the warlord of his subclan, the Duduble.

 

Somalia’s warlord issue is complicated. Some people call them thugs, and Mr. Alin’s militia buddies readily admitted that their income came from stickups.

 

“We make what we make from the barrel of the gun,” said Ahmed Muhammad Siad, 25. “That’s how it is. Yoonis usually told us to go easy on people. He was always too nice.”

 

But in a world with no police and no security, the clan warlord was sometimes the only protection.

 

“When it comes down to it,” said Ali Mahdi Muhammad, a clan leader, “you can only count on your clan.”

 

Fearful of the dangers of militia work, Mr. Alin’s family tried to keep him from going to Baidoa. But Baidoa had an irresistible pull. It was the seat of the internationally recognized transitional government of Somalia and the one big town in south central Somalia that the Islamists did not control. For Mr. Alin, that meant all the qat he could chew.

 

“Yoonis was chasing the green grass,” said Muhammad, Mr. Alin’s 25-year-old brother, with a sad shake of the head.

 

But in late December, Somalia was turned upside down again. The Islamists attacked Baidoa, provoking Ethiopia, which labeled the Islamists a regional threat. Within a week Ethiopian-led troops crushed the Islamist army, and American forces helped hunt down its leaders. Mogadishu’s graying warlords rushed back to town, with their militias and their firepower.

 

The clan militias instantly returned to their old ways, setting up checkpoints and shaking down residents. The transitional government pleaded with them to disarm. They refused. On Friday, a disarmament meeting was called at the presidential palace for all of Mogadishu’s top warlords. While Mr. Issay, the Duduble warlord, went inside, Mr. Alin and other Duduble militiamen waited by the palace gates.

 

All of a sudden, witnesses said, soldiers for another warlord, Muhammad Qanyare Afrah, started arguing with palace guards about where to park their armed pickup truck. Someone pulled out a gun. The palace guards opened fire. Several of the Duduble militiamen standing nearby were hit. Eight men were killed and five seriously wounded.

 

Somalia is definitely the wrong place to get a bullet in the brain. It took a half-hour to organize a car to take Mr. Alin to Medina Hospital, and when he arrived the two operating rooms were occupied.

 

Osman Abdullahi, a burly man with a stained smock who performed the surgery on Mr. Alin hours later, called himself “an assistant doctor.”

 

He unwrapped a crumple of white butcher-like paper smeared with blood and showed the bone fragments that he had tweezed from Mr. Alin’s frontal lobe.

 

Mr. Alin is now in the intensive care unit, which looks like every other room in the hospital, with tiles peeling and mosquitoes swarming, except that most of the ceiling fans there still spin.

 

Mr. Abdullahi said that Mr. Alin would probably live but that it was not clear if he would be able to talk.

 

On Thursday, his family got a positive sign. Mr. Alin briefly sat up in bed, looked around and giggled.

NY Times

[Gabbal]

And people advocate for more resistance and violence for selfish reasons.

 

Powerful article.