Mogadishu, Somalia

Lives in Conflict

By Alex Strick (Mogadishu)

Mogadishu: a city of fear to those who inhabit it and of layered myths to those who visit.  A relatively secure enclave now exists in the south of the city where government officials and senior security staff live, but it is still subject to periodic attack.  Most government officials we spoke to had survived numerous assassination attempts since US-backed Ethiopian forces invaded and forced out the home-grown Islamic Courts Union in late 2006.

We went on a tour of Shingani district in southern Mogadishu, a ruined wasteland of rubble and concrete stumps and shells of buildings, with its district commissioner, Ibrahim Mohammad Mokhtar.  Walking for kilometers through destroyed houses, banks and hotels I was distinctly reminded of images of Kabul during its own civil war of the 1990s, or Beirut from the 1980s.  The once well-known five-star Europa Hotel is just a structure, each floor shot to bits and containing only rubble from dividing walls.  The empty swimming pool looks out forlornly onto the seaport, a memory of better days before the fall of the Siyyad Barre regime at the beginning of the 1990s.

It is scarcely believable that there are still people living amongst these ruins – enough time has passed since its destruction in the clan feuding of late 1992 that laid ruin to this area for plants to have taken root and in some cases small saplings and bushes in what must have been peoples’ living rooms.  Goats wander freely around through the area, as if an extension of the desert sands surrounding the city.

We see some women working in the rubble making an effort to clean up the area.  They wear fluorescent yellow tops identifying themselves as workers for a local Somali NGO and coyly smile as we pass by.  Promised food in return for their labours, many of these women come from the internal-refugee camps several miles away from the centre of town.  Often, however, they don’t receive any food and are forced to register at the camps’ administrations to receive food aid there.

A massive monument has somehow survived all the fighting – a 40-metre high obelisk erected by Siyyad Barre and still bearing a single Somali star at its base as an ironic gesture towards the country’s unity – but is pocked with bullet holes and the few people walking around in this part of town barely glance up as they pass it by.

A few days later we meet others in Shingani district who have been living in their houses throughout the past 18 years’ conflict.  Hassan Ali Noor, 28, lives in the basement of an old Italian colonial seaside building complex.  A huge pile of sand, rubble and refuse lie in one corner of the dark room that is dimly lit from the jagged holes overlooking the sea.

When asked what had changed for him over the years that he had been living there, he said that things were more or less the same.  Previously his family had owned a gold shop and a shoe shop in the affluent district that was full of banks, hotels and foreigners’ custom, but he lost these in the war.

Hassan now works as a fisherman and supports the 9 people living in the small basement room.  The fish he brings back barely provides for his family (“we are living only for today”).  He ignored my question about what needs to change in Somalia for him to have a better life, asking instead for a new fishing boat and a motor – to hope for anything else was inconceivable.

There are no schools in the area, so his children run around on the streets, sometimes playing football, other times finding amusement in the dark buildings or diving off rotting wooden port structures into the sea.  They will probably join him on the fishing boat when they are older, although he says there aren’t so many fish as before.

“Previously we used to catch a lot of fish, but now there are international trawlers overfishing the waters and even on a good day I’d be lucky to catch 10 or 15 fish,” he said.  Alongside the seaside and on the roof of the uninhabited Italian lighthouse, fishermen returned from a morning’s fishing chew qat, the leafy drug imported from Kenya and Ethiopia, and that sometimes functions as an alternative currency in Somalia.

There is, again surprisingly, a flourishing fish market nearby the lighthouse where hundreds gather in the afternoon to trade and dice up fish caught earlier that morning.  From large to small, crab to lobster, numbered stalls are red with the guts and juice of dismembered fish.  The feeling of insecurity is far away in this part of town, and at least

Nevertheless, most evenings we hear gunfire outside, and when we wake in the morning Somali journalist colleagues living just kilometers away tell of how they ran to the hotel that morning because of an ongoing clash between insurgents and government or Ethiopian forces sandbagged down in their bases.

One morning we hear an explosion, rush up to the roof to see a black smoke rising nearby.  We jump into the car and race to the airport road where there has just been an IED attack on a three-vehicle convoy of African Union troops passing by.  A small crater is the only sign of the attack, which caused no casualties.  Women on the side of the road selling food grudgingly tell us the details of the attack, as if it was too commonplace an occurrence to warrant our inquiries.  Children in a side street continue kicking around a football, also seemingly oblivious.  It doesn’t escape our thoughts that we had driven up and down the same road several times.

On the first afternoon in Mogadishu, we drive south to the camps for internally displaced people and arrived at Hawe ‘Abdi camp, named after the woman who has managed and tended to those resident in the area and who still runs a hospital and various projects there.  It’s difficult to get a sense of the scale of the camps from just one glance because there’s a lot of trees and green bushes growing on the side of the road, but these collections of makeshift huts and shelters made out of twigs and cardboard boxes – most approaching some level of collapse – are everywhere for on both sides of the road for 15 miles as you approach Afgoye.

Food and water is hard to come by for the residents who are forced to rely on food handouts from international relief organisations in the absence of a strong government or any serious employment opportunities.  The few Somalis who manage to secure jobs working with these foreign aid organisations are fiercely protective of their jobs; they are paid regularly, and in US dollars which aren’t subject to the massive devaluing inflation that the Somali shilling currently suffers.

Walking around the camp, there were many who had been living there for 9 months when Mogadishu was engulfed by heavy fighting on a daily basis.  Ahmed Osman and his wife Khadija Yusuf were completely rebuilding their small shelter with branches they had gathered nearby.  “It was almost collapsed anyway, and it will rain soon so we’re trying to rebuild our house even though we can’t afford any plastic sheeting to go on the outside,” Ahmed said.  Khadija works under the hot sun – Somalia is currently in its hottest season and even in shade means to sweat copious amounts – with her child strapped to her back.  She didn’t think they would return to their home in northern Mogadishu any time soon.

Despite the desperate situation many of the camp residents find themselves in, the administration is quite strong.  Each area has someone assigned to monitor new arrivals and to ensure for the provision for those under his control.  When people arrive newly from Mogadishu – as they were doing when we visited – they often initially stay with relatives or friends in their shelters while a space is assigned to them.

We walked through a large patch of desert with one or two of the green and prickly Qara’a trees so common in this area of Somalia under each of which a family was sat.  This area, the area commissioner explained, had been allocated for new arrivals but they hadn’t finalized exactly who would be placed where yet so the families hadn’t begun to construct their makeshift houses yet.

We had heard lots about the two Red Cross-funded hospitals in Mogadishu and wanted to visit both – one in the north, one in the south – but only managed to get to Medina hospital, near our hotel and in the relative safety of the south, on account of security concerns.

The largest hospital in Mogadishu (one of two major Red Cross-funded hospitals) is a community-based facility that serves residents from all over the city.  Fighting near to the north-south divide in Mogadishu means that those injured or caught up in battles are often brought here rather than the more distant Kaysani hospital in the north.

Figures for the wounded treated at these two hospitals tell a tale of civilians caught up in the conflict.  In 2007, they received over four thousand weapon-wounded.  In 2008 so far they have treated 1112 weapon wounded.  Of these, one-third are women and children (under 15 years old).

When we visited Medina hospital, we found that most of the patients had been accidentally caught up in the conflict in this way.  Dark unventilated wards were languidly hot in the afternoon sun.  Operating under capacity on account of a lull in the fighting, those recovering under the tending care of family members had almost all been caught up in Mogadishu’s haphazard violence.  The hospital is relatively well stocked and provided for by international aid money, although still lacks some basic scanning and diagnostic equipment.

There are separate buildings for the different hospital functions – Intensive Care, x-ray scans etc – and surgeons are among the most qualified in the world, some of whom have over 15 years of combat surgery experience and have pioneered new techniques – borne out of a lack of supplies – that have gone on to be adopted by international military surgeons.

In the intensive care unit there are 8-10 patients per room, most of whom have a crowd of relatives sitting alongside.  In two of the four wards, most of those receiving treatment were injured in a bus accident cum insurgent ambush.  13km south of Mogadishu, a bus was returning on the road from Afgoye towards Mogadishu when the car behind them – an African Union armoured vehicle – was ambushed.  At the same time, the minibus crashed into an oncoming car while trying to overtake the charcoal lorry in front.

Abdul Wahab Daghawe, the minibus driver, said that these kinds of attacks and ambushes were common on the road.  He sits near the window on his hospital bed, both feet exposed in front.  His right foot is heavily bandaged and was shot through with a bullet in the attack, while his left foot is smeared with white cream to ease the risk of infection from injuries sustained when his bus crashed.  We talk to at least 6 other passengers who were on the bus who have sustained injuries ranging from bullet wounds to less severe crash traumas.

Most of those in the intensive care wing are indeed there because of gunshot wounds of some sort or another.  Abdullahi Serdayi, a tall and clearly strong fit man, lies back weakly in his bed recovering from two gunshot wounds to his chest that he suffered three days previously when an attack in K4 area (in the south, and near to our hotel) materialized about him while he was sitting on the pavement.  Caught in the crossfire, he only realized he was injured when he stood up and saw his blood on the ground.  Previously a refugee in Sweden, he had recently returned to Somalia on the request of his father, but he said he was hoping to leave again soon after this incident.

On our last day we visit a feeding centre funded by international relief organisations but administered by the local NGO Saa’id (‘Help’).  We arrive a little before they start work and walk through a bombed-out structure where thousands of Somalis from the surrounding areas squat on the floor waiting to be allowed their turn to collect cooked food from the huge industrial-size vats of hot cooked Sorghum and tomato sauce with floating green peppers.

Some 8000 people are fed every day at this station, and as there is no registration implemented by the administrators, there are lots of people who come even from the IDP camps far away.  When they started little over 5 months ago there were only 5000 who came each day, but as word leaked out that cooked food was being offered here the numbers continue to increase each day.  This has had an impact on how much food they can give each recipient.  At the beginning, four heaped scoops/ladles of Sorghum was the standard amount, but now they have reduced that to two, and they expect soon they will have to switch to just one on account of the increased demand.

Once they have started, NGO staff wielding long flexible twigs administer the flow and move people along.  Scuffles break out among the women – from the very young to the very old – over half-wedges of lime that they are handing out.  Those collecting the food – in all manner of pots, pans, jugs and receptacles (even plastic bags and old cement sacks) – are mostly women and children.  I am told this is because the men consider it shameful to do this themselves, but throughout the week we are in Mogadishu we see women often taking the brunt of the workload.  When we ask them where their husbands are, they chuckle and say that the men ‘do nothing’.

Ali Mohammad Dabani, the district commissioner in the area and one of the board members of Saa’id, arrives a short while after we do and tells us he is there to make sure of our safety.  He brings his own uniformed armed guards who loiter around and even get involved in a fight during the feeding.  Crowds gathering at the exit ‘gate’ (a gap in a flimsy wooden fence) are occasionally beaten back by NGO staff.

The situation for Somalis in and around Mogadishu seems unlikely to change in the near future.  A renewed and violent campaign by the insurgency looks set to increase numbers of those who flee and make it likely that those who now live in makeshift shelters will be there for the foreseeable future.