Look and learn
Aidan Hartley
Somalia Iam 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. One pictures checkpoints ahead manned by gunmen who will kidnap you for ransom or the chance to put you in an orange boiler suit so that they can decapitate you on an internet video.
We are here on the edge of the worst fighting Mogadishu has seen in 15 years of chaos. Some 600,000 people have fled the city. Entire districts have been bombed to rubble and now, deserted by civilians, they have become free killing zones full of fanatics and corpses. Those civilians who cling on in the city are starving and rely on soup kitchens set up by the world’s aid agencies. When the mortar and artillery duels boom out through the night, dozens of casualties flood the hospitals where surgeons and nurses work around the clock to save lives and limbs. Blood and body parts and the stench of death are everywhere.
Pirates raid the ships that bring the food aid, and warlords who also call themselves national leaders extort money from relief agencies so they can buy more guns. Journalists are assassinated in broad daylight for reporting what they see. The outside world pretends to be devising fresh reconciliation efforts while planning the deployment of peacekeeping forces that do little if they ever even arrive. Women and children abuse wounded enemy soldiers and drag their mutilated corpses through the streets. Fields in the overpopulated hinterlands have turned to dustbowls suffering perpetual drought. Women are raped, and children are made into slaves. Survivors who escape all this are scattered to the four corners of the earth to be reviled as unwelcome visitors and lead their lives in cold concrete housing estates.
This is Somalia, Kenya’s immediate neighbour and the world’s most spectacular failed state. If Kenya blows it will be worse than Somalia ever was. The region will become a necklace of wars slung across the map of this benighted continent. Nobody will have any reason to believe Africans can rule themselves with anything except brutality, bloodshed and lust. In time, the Kenyans will wake from their nightmare and blame their leaders — but by that time it will all be finished. Kenya’s power-hungry leaders should be forced to come here and see what happened to Somalia. They should never be allowed to escape the suffering they incited just so they could gain power and impunity for their past crimes.
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