On a recent drive in downtown Mogadishu with ten heavily armed bodyguards, I passed the site of the old US embassy, and observed a melancholy scene that Britain and the USA might ponder if they decide to bale out of Iraq early. The embassy has been totally demolished, either out of hatred or because Mogadishu’s benighted inhabitants need bricks with which to build their hovels. The site is now a forest of thorns browsed by camels. Washington has long regarded Somalia as nothing but a nasty backwater populated by ungrateful Africans, but the continuing violence there — much of it directed by Islamic extremists — suggests that the country may become the springboard for an Africa-wide Islamic jihad.
When the Somali government fell in 1991 and civil war broke out, US navy helicopters were diverted from the Gulf to pull out the American diplomats. One Somali who witnessed the evacuation was a friend of mine, Abdulkadir Yahya, who worked at the embassy. As gunmen scaled the walls, Yahya gathered his wife and children to wait to be rescued with the foreigners. Just as the helicopters were about to lift off, the Americans told Yahya that he and his family would have to stay behind. One tossed him the keys to the ambassador’s office and yelled, ‘Here, what’s left of the money and food is all yours!’
I met Yahya a few days after he had been left behind by his American employers and he managed to laugh about it. He was kind, clever and, like many Somalis, he had a stoical sense of humour. Ignored by the world, Somalis were committing what Yahya drily called ‘geno-suicide’. Once, over a plate of lobster in the ruins of the Lido Beach Club — which still served lunch despite the lack of a roof and mortar-bomb holes in the wall — Yahya told me, ‘In Somalia, if you have nothing you starve. If you have something you are attacked. Either way, you get killed.’
In December 1992 George Bush Snr sent troops to Mogadishu. I watched the Marines reoccupy the embassy and hoist Old Glory. A colonel told me it was the very same flag that had been removed from the embassy in Beirut after the 1982 suicide bombing that killed 241 Marines. ‘It feels good to see a flag going up rather than down,’ he said.
Bush’s objective was to end a famine that had killed 300,000. When Clinton took office four months later the troops were still there. He placed them under the command of the United Nations, which promised to rebuild Somalia and hold democratic elections within 18 months. A vast UN base sprouted around the embassy with thousands of troops.
Within months US-led forces were battling warlord Mohamed Farah Aydiid’s militias and, in October 1993, 18 American servicemen — and 1,000 Somalis, most of them civilians — were killed in a firefight in Mogadishu. Hollywood fictionalised what occurred in Black Hawk Down. A computer video game was later released. On the streets of Mogadishu today the hulks of UN armoured vehicles destroyed in that battle still lie rusting. The Somalia mission collapsed two years later and the Stars and Stripes were lowered yet again.
The US-led United Nations intervention in Somalia was disastrously executed. It could have succeeded, though, if the peace-keeping forces had not cut and run. There is a lesson here for the coalition in Iraq. A precipitate departure would make failure certain because Iraq’s government would collapse, the civil war would get worse and Iraq would become a failed state.
Somalia has now been in a state of chaos for 14 years, the longest period any state even in Africa has lacked government since the scramble by the colonial powers in the 19th century. What drives the chaos are virulent clan rivalries fuelled by piles of guns left over from the Cold War. Unlike Iraq, Somalia has no oil. In geopolitical terms, its strategic value is that it sits at the mouth of the Red Sea and is a bridge between Arabia and Africa. Today, however, Mogadishu resembles a scene from The Day of the Triffids, with citizens surviving among overgrown ruins. Perhaps 500,000 Somalis have been wiped out, though nobody can even estimate the population as the last census was conducted 30 years ago.
In Mogadishu a few weeks ago I met real slaves. They are ethnic Bantus, some of them descendants of soldiers from British regiments who were allowed to settle here in colonial times. Lighter-skinned nomadic clans have prevailed in the civil war and pressed groups like the Bantu into forced labour.
The UN had hoped that polio was nearly eradicated worldwide, until an epidemic originated in Mogadishu last month. Rinderpest, which wiped out livestock across Africa in the 1880s, is doing well there. Some years ago I visited a colony of lepers in southern Somalia. Their supply of medicine has since been terminated.
In August the International Maritime Bureau reported that Somalia was second only to Iraq in acts of piracy, recording 21 serious attacks on shipping since March. Not to be outdone by the Iraqis, Somalis hijacked three Taiwanese fishing trawlers poaching in territorial waters. They threatened to behead one hostage per day among the crews unless their ransom demands were met. Pirates who in July hijacked a UN ship bringing relief to local victims of the tsunami finally released the crew this week but tried to steal the cargo intended for starving children.
A flotilla of Western warships and aircraft is policing Somalia’s waters, aiming to disrupt the smuggling of arms and militants between the Middle East and Africa. I joined the Lafayette, a French navy stealth frigate, 60 miles out in the Gulf of Aden. We swooped over shipping in a Panther chopper and boarded and searched an Arab dhow. ‘I have no doubt we are on the frontline in the war on terror,’ the Lafayette’s captain, Fran
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