by Simon Reeve
A scheduled flight, with drinks, food and cabin staff, took us as far as Kenya. Then we hopped north before climbing aboard a dodgy propeller cargo aircraft flown by a couple of Ukrainians for the journey across the border into Mogadishu. We were the only passengers on the final flight and just before we started moving I looked forwards to the flight deck. The door was open and I could see the pilot and co-pilot toasting each other with glasses of vodka. In the context of where we were going, this felt completely normal.
Iain and I finally had a chance to chat through our plans on the flight, then we checked the ceramic plates in our flak jackets, adjusted the straps on our ballistic helmets, and Iain cooked up a bean curry on a bench. There was no cabin service.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Mr Big Beard
The wings of the plane slapped from side to side as we made our final approach, then we smacked into the ground and bounced along a dust-blown airstrip just outside Mogadishu.
From the moment we landed we were thrust into the chaos. Another plane nearby was unloading bundles of khat, the local stimulant drug of choice in Somalia. Our local fixer Ajoos, a friendly, smiley man I instantly warmed to, met us at the bottom of the plane steps. Suddenly there was gunfire a few hundred metres away. We ducked, but Ajoos glanced around and told us not to worry.
‘They are not shooting at us,’ he said reassuringly.
We had contacted Ajoos through a guesthouse in Mogadishu that was able to provide us with more than a dozen heavily armed local mercenaries. He introduced us to the men who would be our guards. They were a ragtag group of skinny young men wearing battered clothing, random bits of military gear, flip-flops and faraway gazes. They carried Kalashnikovs and a couple of tripod-mounted machine guns. Several were slung with bandoliers or belts of bullets. They showed us our vehicles. We would be driving around in flatbed pickup trucks with whopping anti-aircraft guns mounted on the back which fired bullets the size of small bottles. The trucks were known as ‘technicals’.
‘Like a poor man’s tank,’ said Ajoos with a faint smile.
We were in a situation where everything around us felt potentially dangerous, even life-threatening, like we were barefoot toddlers in a Dickensian glass factory. We had no real idea whether we could trust Ajoos, let alone our guards. We were in a place where we could be shot at any moment or kidnapped for ransom.
Then our plane turned and flew out, and we were on our own.
We loaded our bags into the trucks and I climbed into the back of one with Iain. There was some joking and joshing with the guards as I tried to fit alongside them, and their gun barrels accidentally slapped into my leg. They laughed, I laughed, and after that we got along just fine. We kept that moment in the programme, just to show they were human, and even in a bonkers situation like Mogadishu there was humour, and light in the shade.
We drove into the city. I was quite calm. To my astonishment, I was about to enter a conflict zone with no real back-up and yet I wasn’t scared; I was filled with a sense of anticipation and adventure. But the entire time I was there I couldn’t get a book out of my mind that I read as a kid. It was a science-fiction story called The Stainless Steel Rat, about a space traveller who arrived on an alien world where everything was ferociously dangerous and everything was out to get him. The plants had evolved to eat people, the insects were deadly. That’s what being in Mogadishu felt like.
I just had to roll with the situation and behave like an amiable Brit. It helped that I didn’t look threatening, and I was with a couple of people who looked equally harmless. All of us were careful to strip out any old military gear from our kit before we flew. A few years earlier some French travellers wearing army surplus clothing in remote North Africa had been shot as spies. Mogadishu was no place to start looking like foreign special forces.
The city was like nowhere I had ever been. It had been destroyed by years of fighting. In some areas almost every building was partially destroyed or at least pock-marked with bullets. Masonry was hanging over streets strewn with debris. It looked like the aftermath of the Battle of Stalingrad, or Grozny. On the streets traffic was light, but there were trucks and other technicals carrying more gangs of young fighters. Ajoos told me corpses were left in the streets for days and locals survived in a state of utter chaos. We passed colonial-era Italian classical buildings, while people scuttled along looking fearful, but also staring at us.
‘This is a city of a million people,’ said Ajoos, ‘and we think you are the only white people here at the moment.’
Even with all that Ajoos was telling us, I cannot say I was particularly worried. I felt alert and alive. It was a shocking and horrific place to be. But it felt like we were somewhere important, where stories needed to be told. We had a chance to broadcast the suffering of a place and a people who had been forgotten.
Our first stop was near the main market. Our guards leapt off the back of our vehicles and fanned out around us to form a secure perimeter. I grabbed our ‘trauma kit’, a shoulder bag full of battlefield wound dressings, and we set off along the street towards the site of a disaster that helped to shape world history.
In October 1993, in an operation immortalised in the movie Black Hawk Down, more than 100 elite US special forces and soldiers abseiled out of helicopters into Mogadishu to hunt for two senior warlords fomenting chaos.
The reasons the US got involved had nothing to do with capturing and securing vital oil supplies. They were in Somalia largely from a misguided belief that military power alone could be used to stabilise chaotic regions of the world.
The mission was supposed to take roughly an hour, but everything went wrong when one of the American Black Hawk helicopters was hit by the blast from a simple shoulder-launched rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) fired from the ground. With its tail-rotor severed, it spun in the air and plummeted into a neighbourhood 500 metres north-east of the target zone. Then another Black Hawk was downed. By the next morning, when the group was finally rescued after a ferocious battle, eighteen American soldiers had been killed and more than seventy wounded. At least 500 Somali fighters and civilians were dead and 1,000 injured. It was the longest sustained firefight involving American forces since the Vietnam War.
With Ajoos leading, we passed down streets and narrow alleys where young children peered from behind chipped and broken doors. Then he stopped.
‘Here it is,’ said Ajoos. We had reached what I thought was a pile of rubbish, cactus plants and razor wire next to a group of bullet-ridden buildings. ‘This is one of the American helicopters.’
I felt my whole body chill. The day after the battle in Mogadishu, the corpses of American soldiers were dragged through the streets and paraded in front of television cameras. President Clinton began pulling US forces out of the country and the captured henchmen of warlords were quickly released. The debacle shaped American foreign policy for the rest of the 1990s, making Clinton extremely reluctant to commit US troops to peacekeeping operations and, I was told adamantly while researching my book, to covert operations against bin Laden and al Qaeda. Just one week after the battle in Mogadishu, Clinton ordered US Navy ships to turn back from a peacekeeping mission to Haiti for fear they would be attacked. Within eighteen months the United Nations had packed up and left Somalia. The country was abandoned and left to rot. If those helicopters had not been downed the whole world might have been a different place. Perhaps, even, 9/11 would never have happened. Perhaps Afghanistan, and Iraq, would never have been invaded.
There was still no real government in Somalia, and instead warlords controlled their own territory. Despite the chaos and violence, it was recognised as a functioning country and it had a seat at the United Nations. The suffering of Somalia was horrifying, but the real focus of my journey was Somaliland, to the north, which had split from Somalia. Somaliland was supposed to be relatively stable and secure, but no other nation in the world recognised Somaliland as a proper country.
To illustrate the anarchic situati
on in Somalia we plunged deeper into the main market. Ajoos led from the front, and Iain and I scurried to keep up. As gunmen from other gangs eyed us with bemusement or suspicion, I tried to play the jolly Brit abroad; no threat, no hidden agenda. Ajoos took us down narrow alleys at the side of the market, past ramshackle stalls and shacks, and our group and guards began to spread out. I started to wonder where on earth we were going, and for a moment my trust in Ajoos wavered. Then we arrived at a small building, our guards took up positions outside and Ajoos ushered me inside and introduced me to a man called Mr Big Beard, who had passports to sell.
‘So you’ve decided to become a Somalian,’ Mr Big Beard, who had dyed his hair rusty orange, said with a laugh.
There was no government here; no paperwork; no rules other than those of the street and the gun. But the country was still recognised globally and people still travelled abroad. Instead of a government ministry, anyone with money who needed a passport would go to see men like Mr Big Beard. He had liberated a stack of passports and stamps from the official passport office during the chaos of war. He charged me about £50 and in fifteen minutes I had a genuine Somali diplomatic passport, bearing my own name and photograph. No checks, no birth certificate, of course. I still have the passport, and it remains one of my strangest travel souvenirs.
That night we took shelter in a guesthouse compound that was guarded around the clock by our gunmen. It had its own armoury and was built around a central courtyard. Rooms that backed onto the surrounding streets had furniture piled at one end as rudimentary protection against RPG attacks.
But even in the rooms we weren’t safe. I pulled a plug out of a ruined socket and accidentally touched the wires. The electrocution blew me backwards across the room. I felt like my arm had been put into a tight vice, and the grip extended round and stopped just before my heart. I felt shaky and nauseous, and my arm was sore for several days. I had a sleepless night, wondering what on earth I was doing in this place, where even a simple plug tries to kill you.
The next morning our gunmen took us to buy their drugs. Everything else in Mogadishu was in chaos, but roadside stalls were still selling fresh bundles of khat, or qat, an amphetamine-like stimulant that gives chewers a small high. It was also an appetite suppressant, useful when food was scarce, according to Ajoos.
The khat is wrapped into a small bundle and chewed. It’s legal in the Horn of Africa but there is a serious downside to the drug. At the very least it is psychologically addictive, and regular use can lead to insomnia and anxiety. Often it can make people feel more irritable, and even violent. I spoke to people in Somalia who thought the fact it was chewed by millions of people was holding them and the country back. So Iain, Shahida and I were in a bit of a moral quandary when the men told us we had to pay for their bundle.
‘It’s something they expect,’ said Ajoos, who didn’t chew. ‘It’s part of the contract with them. And you really don’t want a group of gunmen looking after you who are grumpy and missing their fix.’
It was a winning argument. No doubt some armchair critics and BBC-haters would have a fit. But on the ground we had no choice. We paid for their drugs. What were we supposed to do? We were in Mogadishu, for goodness’ sake. In any situation like that you have to make the rules up as you go along.
After a few days we were friendly with and fond of our guards. They were tough guys, but some of them were also lads just out of their teens. After we finished filming one day I presented a couple of them with BBC pens. They were just cheap rollerballs, but they had ‘BBC’ printed on the side, and the men were completely and totally charmed. It was as if they had never been given a present before.
One of them took his pen and wrote ‘2Pac’, his nickname, on the front of his red beany hat, put the pen proudly into his breast pocket and turned it so the BBC sign faced out (where it remained for the rest of our stay), then laughed to Ajoos.
‘He said he’s been wanting to write his name on the hat for a year,’ said Ajoos. ‘I think you’re in trouble now, Simon, they want to give you a special present.’
I scrambled to say I didn’t want anything in return and that it was just a tiny gift. But it was too late. 2Pac presented me with a loaded Kalashnikov which he put over my shoulder.
‘Mind the gap,’ said Shahida dryly. She had grown up in the former Soviet Union and knew how to handle an AK47. When the safety catch is off there’s a clear gap to indicate danger.
‘Good point, Shazz,’ I said.
I flicked the lever to safety. We politely took a couple of photos and then I went to hand the gun back.
‘I don’t think you understand, Simon,’ said Ajoos earnestly. ‘This is an ancient custom. You have given a gift, and now you must receive a gift in return. You would cause terrible offence if you gave it back. You will have to take the Kalashnikov with you to London.’
I blanched.
‘Ajoos . . . seriously . . . I can’t . . .’ I said. Then I paused. ‘Hang on, you’re taking the piss, aren’t you?’
Ajoos’s straight face crumbled. ‘Yes, don’t worry,’ he laughed. ‘Give it to me and I’ll hide it back in the armoury. They’ll never notice.’
The next day we were out again, driving north of Mogadishu to where local businessmen were trying to operate a rudimentary port away from warlords. As we drove through the outskirts of the city I had my helmet on my lap and my flak jacket propped up against the side of the vehicle as some protection against small-arms fire. We had decided against wearing the heavy jackets out on the streets for several reasons, but we kept them close at hand in case shooting broke out. Ajoos told us body armour was hard to get hold of in the city and thus extremely valuable to wealthy warlords. ‘They will attack us and kill you just to get it,’ he said.
As we drove along I was in the back of the lead technical chatting with Ajoos and piping ‘Mr Brightside’ by the Killers through the car radio, loudly, from a transmitter on my iPod. 2Pac, who was in the back manning the mounted machine gun, banged on the roof and shouted to Ajoos, laughing.
‘He says he wants to hear some Tupac or at least Eminem,’ said Ajoos.
We slowed for a crossroads in a bombed-out area of the city, just as another gang in two technicals came to the junction down another road at the same moment. The other gang started screaming at our guys, and both groups locked and loaded their weapons and turned machine guns and anti-aircraft guns on each other.
For what seemed like an age the world stood still. The anti-aircraft gun on the other technical was pointing right at me. My body armour against the door would not have been the slightest protection. Rounds from an anti-aircraft gun would have shredded the armour, me and the vehicle.
The strangest sensation came over me. A sense of calm descended that I would never have expected. I told myself very quietly and very genuinely there was nothing I could do. Anything I did or said would almost certainly make things worse. It was a moment of acceptance. So I just sat there. Rock still. And I waited, to see if I would live or die.
Wise heads prevailed. The other gang drove off first. We sat there for just a second, as if bound by a spell. Ajoos spoke first.
‘Well, let’s go on then, shall we?’ he said with a casual smile.
A day later we left Somalia on a cargo flight that took us north towards Somaliland. I felt a huge sense of relief when our plane was safely up in the air. It seemed we had been lucky. Other foreigners visiting Mogadishu around the same time were kidnapped. Tragically just a few months after we left, a brave and much-loved BBC producer called Kate Peyton was shot in the back while standing outside a guesthouse in Mogadishu, only hours after arriving in Somalia. She died from internal bleeding after being taken to a local hospital.
Landing in Somaliland everything felt different to Somalia. A smartly dressed immigration official stamped our passports. His presence and uniform were an immediate sign of order. Although rarely found on maps, Somaliland is home to roughly 4 million people. It borders the Gulf of Aden
and sits next to Djibouti to the north-west and Ethiopia to the south and the west. Britain is the former colonial power and Somalilanders went to Britain’s aid during the Second World War. Somalilanders still feel a strong attachment to the UK, and many struggle to understand why the government in London has not recognised their country.
The international status of many unrecognised states is tied up with geopolitics. One of the problems for Somaliland is that African states have collectively decided that, for better or worse, they will keep to colonial-era borders to avoid sparking wars across the continent as potentially dozens of minorities battle for their own states. The UK, I was told by a British diplomat, will not recognise Somaliland if no African state will recognise it first, to avoid accusations London behaves like a colonial power.
Somaliland faces an added complication because it has a potential port which could become a supply route for cargo to the Horn of Africa if the country was a full member of the UN. But neighbouring Djibouti already makes a fortune from its own deep-water port, so has a vested interest in blocking the recognition of Somaliland and preventing companies from trading with a potential rival.
As we drove into the sweltering capital Hargeisa, I chatted about the issue of recognition with Yusuf Abdi Gabobe, my local guide. He explained that Somaliland voluntarily joined with Somalia after independence from Britain in 1960, but when the relationship soured in the 1980s Somalilanders began campaigning and then battling for independence. Conflict erupted, and at least 50,000 men, women and children are thought to have died in Hargeisa alone as Somali forces and jets tried to quash the independence movement and bomb the city into submission. Up to 90 per cent of the city was destroyed by artillery and aerial bombing by aircraft flown by Zimbabwean mercenaries working for the Somali dictator Siad Barre. But in 1991 it was the Somali dictatorship that collapsed, plunging much of Somalia into decades of chaos. Somaliland then officially declared independence from Mogadishu and set up borders in line with what had previously been called British Somaliland. Yusuf, a towering figure of a man, had been a rebel leader fighting for Somaliland independence during the bitter conflict with Somalia.