Somalia: Starting From Scratch

 

Some excerpts from Time Magazine

Issue: January 8, 2001 Vol. 157 NO.1

 

ON THE NORTHERN RECOVERY ZONES

 

  Incredibly, parts of Somalia have avoided the years of chaos. The self-declared state of Somaliland in the northwest has its own government, police force and currency. Together with Puntland in the northeast, it offers its citizens stability and peace. Like the warlords, both ministates boycotted the Djibouti peace conference and challenge the new President's claim to represent the entire country. The government in Mogadishu says it will not force the northerners into the nation but will lure them back by building a federal system that allows each region a measure of autonomy--a kind of political balance they hope will appeal to leaders used to self-determination. "Somaliland will continue but in another form," says Foreign Minister Ismael Mahamoud Hurreh. 

 

 

ON INTERNATIONAL AID

 

Djibouti and a few Arab states helped underwrite the peace conference and provided four-wheel drives for the President and Prime Minister, and a few thousand police uniforms. But big money from Western governments will be harder to come by. During the cold war, Somalia attracted more aid per capita than any other African state, first from the Soviets and then from the U.S. "It's true that we had a dependency," says Mahamoud Mohamed Uluso, a minister in the Barre government. But once the cold war ended, the money dried up. What followed made many donor nations wary of getting involved in Somalia again. A U.N. operation to feed starving Somalis during a prolonged drought ended after continued clan fighting, while the failure of the related U.S.-led intervention force created a one-word rationale for America's reluctance to intervene in far-off trouble spots: Somalia. No Western country recognizes the new government, though both Italy, the former colonial power in the south, and the U.S. say they are "encouraged." Says David Stephen, the U.N. Secretary-General's representative for Somalia: "The outside world is extremely cautious."

 

 

ON THE HEADQUARTERS OF ARTA FACTION

 

Somalia's seat of government is two modest Mogadishu hotels. The Prime Minister and most of the ministers have small, basic offices in the three-story Ramadan, where a coil of barbed wire stretches across the driveway and visitors are frisked for weapons at the door. "I haven't made new business cards yet," says Prime Minister Ali Khalif Galaydh, handing over a card identifying him as the chairman of a telephone company based in Dubai. "We have no furniture, no stationery, no buildings. We have nothing." Parliament met for the first time in a blue-and-orange-tiled hall at the Laf-Weyn (Big Bone) Hotel, a few minutes' drive away. The 245 M.P.s shuffled in, got as comfortable as they could in the white plastic chairs and began discussing the appointment of ministers. A problem arose. Ministers had been sworn in before the parliament had approved them. The process would have to begin again. "We are learning by doing things," says Galaydh, a Harvard fellow who earned his doctorate and taught public administration at Syracuse University. "Nothing I taught prepared me for starting a state from zero."

 

ON MOG TOWN

 

Mogadishu is safer and livelier than it has been in years. But safe is a relative term in Somalia. Visitors must travel in convoys with half a dozen Kalashnikov-toting young men riding shotgun. Power has shifted from the warlords to business leaders, who support and bankroll the new government, and to the Islamic courts. Most Somalis despise the warlords, or faction leaders, as they like to be called, and the militias the warlords feed and arm are increasingly loyal to whoever can pay them, not necessarily their fellow clansmen. Still, the warlords remain strong enough to be spoilers. In a rare display of unity but characteristic defiance of authority, a group of them recently announced they would stop the government from reopening Mogadishu's main seaport. "We will tell them to f___ off. Your boys can't do that," says faction leader Mohamed Qanyare Afrah outside his home northeast of the city. "The gun is loaded." 
 

A decade of fighting has left Mogadishu in ruins. Gangs steal power lines, telephone cables and streetlights. Like vultures picking at the bones of a dead animal, men have dug up the pipelines at the old oil refinery, carrying them away to sell. Electricity now comes from small generators; water comes from household tanks if you are rich or donkey-drawn carts if you are poor. People survive on money sent by relatives abroad. The destruction is not only physical. The whole concept of a state has been distorted. At the airport, militiamen charge landing fees and sell exit visas. Anyone with $30 can buy an official Somali passport in the central Bakara market, though few countries will recognize it. A few stalls away, moneychanger Bashir Moalim Mohamed opens a huge safe packed with $10,000 worth of Somalia shillings. "I am the central bank," he says, pulling out stacks of new notes recently imported by local businessmen from a printing company in Canada. What about protection? Mohamed plucks a rusty M-16 assault rifle from the open safe. "This is my protection. Without this you're a dead man."

 "We have to convince people that things have changed in Somalia, that we have come back from the brink of hell," says Foreign Minister Hurreh. "We can actually say we have seen hell itself." The lights in his hotel bedroom turned office flicker and fail. In the darkness he says, "We'll try."