Mark Bowden: In Somalia, guns of anarchy still reign
Wednesday, Dec. 24, 2008
In 1999, when I was touring the United States to promote my book "Black Hawk Down," the story of an ill-fated U.S. raid against a rebel warlord in the Somali capital of Mogadishu, I was often invited to college campuses, where I was fond of asking audiences whether there were any anarchists among them. Occasionally a scruffy student or two would raise a hand.
"Good news," I'd tell them. "You don't have to wait. Go to Somalia. Check it out."
When I was last there in 1997, Somalia had already been rudderless for six years. Mogadishu lay in rubble, like a city hit by a natural disaster. Every wall was pockmarked with holes from bullets and cannon blasts. Gunmen in pickup trucks terrorized the streets. Unbelievably, in the decade since then, it has only gotten worse.
While the world has largely stood by, the Horn of Africa has served as a laboratory for anarchy -- and the results aren't pretty. Somalia today is teetering on the edge of becoming an Islamist state while harboring terrorists who export its chaos to its neighbors.
"Here we have a country that has been in crisis for nearly 20 years," Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the U.N. special representative for Somalia, said to me by phone from Nairobi. "And we say, 'Well OK, we'll chase down some pirates and send some bags of rice.' It is not enough."
Today 3 million Somalis, half the country's population, rely on food handouts from the United States and Europe, delivered by increasingly harassed humanitarian organizations. Millions who could afford to have fled.
Meanwhile, Islamist terrorist groups train and hatch plots against targets in neighboring countries: The al-Qaida cell that bombed the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in 1998 was and still is based in Somalia. Since then, the same group and another have successfully bombed a Mumbai resort, attempted to shoot down an Israeli passenger jet and carried out a number of assassinations and other killings, including that of an Italian nun in the town of Elwak, near the border with Kenya. Local mullahs enforce horribly brutal penalties for acts that most of the world doesn't even consider criminal.
And now, pirates -- nothing more than the general criminal chaos spilled from land to sea -- ply the waters off Somalia's thousand-mile coastline.
A flimsy "transitional" authority, a coalition of warlords supported by the United Nations, ostensibly governs the country, but it spends most of its time arguing from the safety of neighboring capitals over power it doesn't have.
Back in 1997, few Somalis believed that the world's cold shoulder would endure. People would line up in the street outside the gates of the compound where I stayed while researching my book to see me. Sightings of Americans were then so rare that most people refused to believe that I was just a writer. Many preferred to believe that I was on a secret mission for the United Nations or the United States, that I was laying the groundwork for the return of nation-building, for the restoration of law and order, basic services and sanity.
They are still waiting for that. Meanwhile, because there is no government, there are no public schools, no universities, no courts, no trash collection, no electrical grid (Mogadishu nights are filled with the steady hammering of generators) -- none of the basic services of a civil society.
Owning anything of value in Somalia means having to arm yourself, because someone more powerful will eventually try to take it away. You can tell a person's relative importance by the length of his armed entourage as he moves through the streets. Young men with nothing else to do are lured into these private armies by promises of food, money, shelter and a steady supply of narcotic khat.
When President-elect Barack Obama takes office, he can help greatly simply by putting a stop to U.S. missile attacks on suspected Islamist terrorists. Whatever is gained by eliminating one murderous zealot is lost by turning entire Somali communities against Western aid efforts.
Somalia has a lesson for the rest of the world. It's an old lesson, but one that we have yet to learn: Ignoring a problem does not kill it or contain it. A lawless zone soon enough becomes a danger to more than those trapped in its borders. We will have to engage with whoever comes to power in Somalia next, both for humanitarian reasons and in the best interests of the region and the world.
Mark Bowden is an author and national correspondent for the Atlantic.
Wednesday, Dec. 24, 2008
In 1999, when I was touring the United States to promote my book "Black Hawk Down," the story of an ill-fated U.S. raid against a rebel warlord in the Somali capital of Mogadishu, I was often invited to college campuses, where I was fond of asking audiences whether there were any anarchists among them. Occasionally a scruffy student or two would raise a hand.
"Good news," I'd tell them. "You don't have to wait. Go to Somalia. Check it out."
When I was last there in 1997, Somalia had already been rudderless for six years. Mogadishu lay in rubble, like a city hit by a natural disaster. Every wall was pockmarked with holes from bullets and cannon blasts. Gunmen in pickup trucks terrorized the streets. Unbelievably, in the decade since then, it has only gotten worse.
While the world has largely stood by, the Horn of Africa has served as a laboratory for anarchy -- and the results aren't pretty. Somalia today is teetering on the edge of becoming an Islamist state while harboring terrorists who export its chaos to its neighbors.
"Here we have a country that has been in crisis for nearly 20 years," Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the U.N. special representative for Somalia, said to me by phone from Nairobi. "And we say, 'Well OK, we'll chase down some pirates and send some bags of rice.' It is not enough."
Today 3 million Somalis, half the country's population, rely on food handouts from the United States and Europe, delivered by increasingly harassed humanitarian organizations. Millions who could afford to have fled.
Meanwhile, Islamist terrorist groups train and hatch plots against targets in neighboring countries: The al-Qaida cell that bombed the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in 1998 was and still is based in Somalia. Since then, the same group and another have successfully bombed a Mumbai resort, attempted to shoot down an Israeli passenger jet and carried out a number of assassinations and other killings, including that of an Italian nun in the town of Elwak, near the border with Kenya. Local mullahs enforce horribly brutal penalties for acts that most of the world doesn't even consider criminal.
And now, pirates -- nothing more than the general criminal chaos spilled from land to sea -- ply the waters off Somalia's thousand-mile coastline.
A flimsy "transitional" authority, a coalition of warlords supported by the United Nations, ostensibly governs the country, but it spends most of its time arguing from the safety of neighboring capitals over power it doesn't have.
Back in 1997, few Somalis believed that the world's cold shoulder would endure. People would line up in the street outside the gates of the compound where I stayed while researching my book to see me. Sightings of Americans were then so rare that most people refused to believe that I was just a writer. Many preferred to believe that I was on a secret mission for the United Nations or the United States, that I was laying the groundwork for the return of nation-building, for the restoration of law and order, basic services and sanity.
They are still waiting for that. Meanwhile, because there is no government, there are no public schools, no universities, no courts, no trash collection, no electrical grid (Mogadishu nights are filled with the steady hammering of generators) -- none of the basic services of a civil society.
Owning anything of value in Somalia means having to arm yourself, because someone more powerful will eventually try to take it away. You can tell a person's relative importance by the length of his armed entourage as he moves through the streets. Young men with nothing else to do are lured into these private armies by promises of food, money, shelter and a steady supply of narcotic khat.
When President-elect Barack Obama takes office, he can help greatly simply by putting a stop to U.S. missile attacks on suspected Islamist terrorists. Whatever is gained by eliminating one murderous zealot is lost by turning entire Somali communities against Western aid efforts.
Somalia has a lesson for the rest of the world. It's an old lesson, but one that we have yet to learn: Ignoring a problem does not kill it or contain it. A lawless zone soon enough becomes a danger to more than those trapped in its borders. We will have to engage with whoever comes to power in Somalia next, both for humanitarian reasons and in the best interests of the region and the world.
Mark Bowden is an author and national correspondent for the Atlantic.
