Welcome to Mogadishu - FT article

[Maaddeey]

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/7b1c7df4-c8df-11e2-acc6-00144feab7de.html#slide0

[Cambuulo iyo bun]

good stuff thanks for sharing Al qaadi Maadey

[Maaddeey]

^^ No worries, mate!.

Did you see where she talks about the former US special forces operative who interrogated Osman Atto?. Ninkaasaa Contractor ah, beledkii Xamar ahaa waa loo yaabaa!.

[Cambuulo iyo bun]

there's a clip too? I only saw the pictures.

[Baashi]

Notice how clean and prestine is the beach. Crystal blue. Beauty!

[Maaddeey]

Visiting Mogadishu brings risks. Beyond the high-security international base at the airport, photographer Petterik Wiggers and I travel in armoured convoys, in bulletproof cars, and, for three of the six days, behind the dark windows of a vehicle escorted by private security. Eight men in camouflage and with Kalashnikovs lead the way in a pick-up truck, fanning out around us whenever we stop and get out. Elements of al-Shabaab remain in Mogadishu – some have infiltrated the security apparatus that is meant to hunt them down. Armed police carry out night patrols in armoured personnel carriers, stopping to make random checks. Before entering a hotel or restaurant, all visitors are patted down and searched with metal detectors. Although it is getting harder to make and plant bombs and smuggle in semi-automatic weapons without detection, hand-grenade and pistol attacks are easier to deploy at short notice, and word of possible targets travels fast. That meant our visits were necessarily brief. Yet there was no disguising the recovery under way.©Petterik Wiggers

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One brightly painted brick at a time, the shelled-out city is coming back to life. Along Mogadishu’s tree-lined drags, shopfronts form a tableau of hope. Outsized poster-paint impressions of burgers, fizzy drink bottles and doughnuts daub walls where bullets once made their mark. Renderings of hairdryers, laptops and pressure pumps advertise the high-tech wares inside. Walls and gates are painted the same bright powder-blue base which matches the sea, the sky and the national flag.

But the revival goes beyond shopkeeping. Scaffolding shapes the skyline, livestock and fish markets are back in action and women plunge into the sea from stunning white sands. Surrounded by the crescent of ruins that cradles the old fishing port, I speak to a young fisherman as he smears the hazel sludge of sea lion liver oil over upturned boats. He says he hopes Somalia’s latest government, formed in 2012 in the most legitimate process in years, will last.

The turnround is so impressive that the new government predicts the economy will soon be growing at 10 per cent, up from 2 per cent last year. Statistics are hardly the strong point of a country that hasn’t had a functioning government for 22 years, but the World Bank estimates that a robust informal economy – led by exports of livestock – contributes to a GDP of close to $3bn. Expatriate remittances, at about $1.6bn a year, have long kept the country going, fuelling a dynamic private sector that has run successful telecoms, energy and construction companies in the absence of state regulation. In the past 18 months, remittances have risen by almost 20 per cent, says Abdirashid Duale, chief executive of Dahabshiil, a Somali money transfer service. “As the security situation improves, more and more people are returning,” he adds.

 

Trade unions talk about a revival in agriculture, hotels and port activity. Their members have battled al-Shabaab threats and imprisonment to turn out regular market data reports, logging the fluctuating prices of camel milk, jerry cans of diesel, goats and imported red rice in Mogadishu’s Bakara market. Today Somalia has more than 52,000 trade union members. One fish processing company, the Somali National Fishing Company, exports to Dubai and Turkey, flying several tonnes at a time. “We plan to export to European, Arab countries,” says Abdirashid Mohamed, standing beside a catch of swordfish lined up on top of deep freezes. “We’ve been speaking with Holland about starting there.”

The latter is thanks to the upsurge in commercial flights. In little over a year, the number of aircraft landing a day has risen from three to 12, says Ahmed Ibrahim Iman, a 29-year-old airport manager. Dubai and Turkey both run commercial airlines into the beachside city, and import fish, fruit and meat from Somalia. But it is a costly tale of recovery. Ahmed’s father, Ibrahim Iman Halane, was airport manager before him and was assassinated last year. “He was killed in town – he went to pray and when he left, two al-Shabaab attacked with pistols,” says Ahmed, explaining that his father’s job made him a target. The revival of the airport is, like the functioning courthouse, among the most telling symbols of Mogadishu’s recovery. “Al-Shabaab say it’s about religion but it’s not – it’s politics.”

Now Ahmed drives to work with only blacked-out windows for protection. “Maybe Shabaab will attack me,” he says. “I can’t accept to sit at home so I’m working – I’m ready to die like my father.”

. . .

[Maaddeey]

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/e0c521b4-c8bd-11e2-acc6-00144feab7de.html#slide0

[Maaddeey]

The last thing I had expected on my first visit to Mogadishu was to step back into one of the most infamous chapters from the early years of the civil war. In 1993, an American attempt to capture a notorious Somali warlord, Mohamed Farah Aideed, went disastrously wrong when US helicopters were shot down by Somali militia, and images of US corpses being dragged through the streets were beamed across the world. Hundreds of Somalis were killed in the subsequent battle, and Mogadishu’s shot-up landmarks were at the centre of the 2001 Ridley Scott film of the event, Black Hawk Down. The US was forced to withdraw from Somalia; its interventions since have nearly always been at arm’s length, pumping money into its proxy, Ethiopia, and flying drones overhead.

Two decades on, I find myself having a drink in the international airport base with a contractor – one of hundreds tasked with rebuilding the country. He is more familiar with Somalia’s destruction than most, telling me that he spent 1993 in Mogadishu. “Yeah, I was here,” he says. “It was an interesting time.”

The contractor turns out to be a former US special forces operative. Back then, he tells me, his job was to track down information that might lead to the arrest of General Aideed. Twelve days before the US helicopters were gunned down, the US had captured Osman Ali Atto, a gun runner and financier, and Aideed’s number two. (Atto later became one of the warlords fighting for control of Mogadishu.) He was taken to an island off Somalia’s south coast, held in isolation for four months, and the man I am sitting next to tells me it was his job to interrogate him.

 

On his return to Mogadishu last year, the contractor was eager to look up his old foe, and intermediaries put them in touch. Atto rang to arrange lunch and the most surreal of reunions took place. The contractor says they greeted each other as friends and posed for photos. “Well, for Atto, that was five wars ago,” says his one-time interrogator with a laugh. When he shows me his before and after pictures the American is clearly recognisable from the earlier ones: the facial hair and eyes are the same, only the lines have grown in. He says they avoided talking about the interrogation but still reminisced – about captured warlords, narrow escapes, and what chance al-Shabaab has of retaking control of Mogadishu.

I also watch several videos that the contractor made on his mobile phone. I can hardly believe these exist, but they show the unlikely duo touring Bakara market, visiting the helicopter crash site and Atto’s garage. In one video, Atto explains how he had evaded previous attempts at US capture and both men chuckle at the subterfuge.

“There is a shared bond of respect when you share that kind of experience; fight that hard, take that much risk. It never goes away,” the American says.

This unlikely friendship illustrates some aspects of a deeply held honour code, which may determine Somalia’s future as much as its past. Shared battle*ground experiences and shifting alliances of convenience and kin are writ large throughout the country. Despite the efforts of academics to map complicated clan ties, loyalties constantly shift as they suit. “Somalis are not clan-based, in the sense they are the most individualistic people I know,” says Nuruddin Farah. “Somalis do every possible lawless activity that will get them an extra penny … you cheat institutions but you keep your trust with persons, with individuals,” he says. That’s one reason why personal bonds shape politics.

waa kaas Cambuulo

[Cambuulo iyo bun]

Lool damn,,thanks Maadeey!!