Look and learn | 26 January 2008

Somalia

I am in a refugee camp of 200,000 war victims on the outskirts of Mogadishu. The muezzin call to prayer drifts across a sea of plastic tents set among coconut palms and banana groves along the banks of the Shebelle River. Miles from here Ethiopian and Islamist insurgents are fighting in the streets and bombarding civilian districts with rockets and mortar fire.

Yet it was almost a relief to fly into Somalia after Kenya, just to take a break from the horrific sight of my home country committing a kind of national suicide this last month. I found it hard to leave the family at home, but apart from that I felt a huge burden of depression lifting as we got away from Nairobi.

As I sat in the refugee camp, beneath a grapevine planted by Italian settlers long vanished from destroyed Somalia, I began thinking. If only we could bring the men who claim leadership of Kenya — Mwai Kibaki and Raila Odinga — here to Somalia. Having unleashed the tribal savagery now tearing Kenya apart, they deserve to come here to see the possible future.

I am with an English cameraman called Jim. We have been interviewing civilians who fled Mogadishu after watching their relatives and neighbours blown to pieces in artillery bombardments. Famine is rife. The civilians we meet own nothing but the clothes on their backs. They shelter in huts made of twigs and plastic. The camps reek of dried shit.

Outside the camps are the twisted remains of vehicles exploded in suicide car-bomb attacks or debris from remote-detonated roadside bombs. As we zoom down potholed tracks with an escort of heavily armed guards, I try to squeeze myself into as small a space in the back of the seat as possible, praying a bomb will not go off, wondering if a hail of bullets will smack into the windscreen or the door of the soft-skinned vehicle.