by Simon Reeve
Visiting Somaliland was a humbling lesson in survival and self-determination. Hargeisa was being rebuilt with little outside help, and refugees were returning from camps in Ethiopia. The streets bustled with activity, but I was trying to spot something small and understandable that I could point out to the camera, and by extension the viewers, which would illustrate in one moment the differences between chaotic Somalia and ordered, stable Somaliland. And then I spotted the symbol I had been seeking.
I asked Iain if he would follow me with the camera, and we hopped out of our car to film . . . at some traffic lights. Hardly the most surprising thing in cities around the world, but a shock to see in the Horn of Africa. In Mogadishu people had talked almost lovingly about the bright colours of traffic lights, which had all been destroyed long ago in fighting. Somalis told us that farmers and villagers would even trek into the centre of Mogadishu to see the traffic lights because they were so novel, and such a marvel. Their absence in Mogadishu was just a tiny example of the chaos of the city. Their presence in Hargeisa, and the fact drivers all obeyed them and stopped dutifully on red, was a contrasting sign of order. The reality of the whole state boiled down to a set of traffic lights at a particularly busy intersection. I felt they were totemic.
Our driver had been a little too good at obeying the traffic regulations and vanished when the lights turned green, so I followed Yusuf as we walked a short distance across the city to where a Somali MiG jet which had bombed the city sat atop a poignant war memorial.
Yusuf explained that lack of recognition was hitting Somaliland hard. It meant the self-declared state was having trouble securing any investment or foreign aid to help with a terrible drought. Tens of thousands of people were at risk of starvation. He took me to see Edna Adan Ismail, the extraordinary head of the maternity hospital in Hargeisa. She explained that even medical supplies could not be delivered because Somaliland had no international recognition.
‘I really struggle to get international help here,’ she said wearily. ‘I have had volunteers from abroad, doctors, who want to come and help to train our nurses, but they can’t even get insurance to come because the world says that we are part of Somalia.’ As she gave me a tour, there was a shrill scream from another room, and Edna dashed off to help a mother giving birth.
Edna was a completely inspiring and amazing woman. She was a nurse and midwife, but she was also the dynamic Foreign Minister of the country, and she took me to the President’s office and walked me straight into a full cabinet meeting.
I backed out, we waited in our car for a while, and then had a meeting with the President, who was wearing an ill-fitting suit and said he was running the country on just a few million pounds a year, or ‘whatever we can get’. Because nobody would recognise his government it could not get loans, which at least meant Somaliland was not burdened by foreign debt repayments.
The Somaliland Minister for Tourism saw us filming at the cabinet meeting and was elated he finally had a rare foreign visitor he could take to see his country’s national treasures.
‘Don’t worry!’ said the enthusiastic minister, as I reluctantly agreed to accompany him to some rock etchings recently discovered at Laas Ga’al outside Hargeisa. ‘The drawings are beautiful, and it will just be a small detour from the road!’
We headed out on a dirt road bordered by low scrub and spreading acacia trees, then turned off into the bush. After bumping along a parched and pot-holed goat track for long enough for my bones to separate, I started to think my scepticism was justified. But we crested a hill, dodged wiry bushes on a wide plain, and finally scrambled over vast boulders to find exquisite rock paintings dating back thousands of years.
Even under the scorching sun, the paintings had strong, vibrant colours and stark outlines, showing the ancient inhabitants of the area worshipping long-horned cattle and venerating a pregnant cow. In a low cave further up the hill I found human figures dancing along the rock. There are paintings of dogs, camels, a giraffe, and the ancient herders of the region, presumably the people who painted the images. The whole site is an absolute treat. Laas Ga’al is probably the most significant Neolithic rock painting site in the whole of Africa. The rock art has been dated to 9000–3000 BC, but still looks as though it was painted last week.
For a brief moment I felt like an explorer finding hidden treasures, at a time when the entire world seems easy to reach on package holidays. Somaliland is proof there are still areas of the world off the beaten track which can excite and amaze. The territory does not feature on many tourist maps. In fact, it does not feature on many maps at all. According to the international community, Somaliland does not even exist.
Yusuf took us deeper into the mountains and then on to the port of Berbera. ‘There are tracks along the coast west from here towards Djibouti, and mangroves, gorgeous islands and coral reef,’ said Yusuf. ‘If only you had a few more weeks we could head out along the coast. But let’s go to the airport instead.’
It sounded like a poor alternative. We stopped at an old, dust-blown, abandoned airfield, driving in through a wonky, creaking gate and past a small hand-painted sign: ‘Wellcome to Berbera International Air Port’. A set of passenger steps lay baking in the sun, covered in sand and muck. Yusuf took me up into the dilapidated control tower, and we wiped the windows so we could see outside. It didn’t look like much, but then Yusuf explained that at more than 4.5 kilometres, the runway was actually one of the longest in the world. I was stunned.
‘It was built during the Cold War by the Soviet Union,’ he told me. ‘Moscow based heavy bombers here in Berbera, until the Soviets switched allegiance from Somalia to Ethiopia in the 1970s, and we asked the Soviets to leave.’
In their place the Americans arrived, and NASA decided to use the airfield as an emergency landing strip for the space shuttle, apparently paying something like £30 million per year in rent. Yusuf could see that I looked completely disbelieving.
‘It’s true!’ he said with a smile. ‘It was just in case the shuttle had trouble on re-entry and couldn’t make it around the planet and back to the US. You see, we have more surprises to share with you, Simon.’
We left and drove further into Berbera in our four-wheel-drive vehicles through the bush, when Yusuf suddenly stopped the car again and leapt out, motioning for me to join him.
‘Quick, quick,’ he said. ‘Have a look at this beauty.’
I followed him for a short distance over to a colossal termite mound standing like a monolith at least six metres tall.
‘These wonders were our friends when we were fighting in the bush for more than ten years,’ he said, his eyes shining. ‘When I was a guerrilla commander we could hide behind them and even rocket-propelled grenades could not get at us. One time we were attacked by the forces loyal to the Somali dictator Siad Barre in helicopter gunships and most of us were able to find protection behind the mounds.’
He slapped the side. ‘Feel it, they’re like solid concrete.’
Termite mounds are astonishing eco-systems with ventilation and natural air-conditioning systems. What you see above ground is just a fraction of what lies below the surface. They are like solid desert icebergs.
Yusuf was a softly spoken, unshockable man who I gradually realised had seen far too much horror. We paused a few hours further up the road, still in the bush, and prepared some food. I dug out a round of food ration packs for all of us and began heating them up. A heating element is put into a bag containing another sealed bag of stew or curry and then a small sachet of water is poured on top. The water causes a chemical reaction in the element that then heats the food.
Yusuf stood watching me as I prepared our meals. He wasn’t an easy man to impress, but he couldn’t contain himself.
‘That is completely incredible,’ he said. ‘Incredible . . . incredible . . . How does it work? Oh, if only we had those with us when we were out in the bush, they would have made life so much more bearable. The food was one of the worst things abo
ut being a guerrilla fighter.’
We sat on the ground and had a picnic, with Yusuf still shaking his head and smiling as he ate each mouthful of the magic stew.
Somaliland made a huge impact on me. The place, unrecognised or not, was a revelation, with stability, democracy, a minister for tourism, women in parliament, a police force, and traffic lights. But it was the Somalilanders themselves who I found most impressive. They are still to this day determined and completely inspiring. Largely ignored by the world, they are building an independent state from scratch.
Sadly, it is still possible that war between Somalia and Somaliland could erupt again. But there is also a much more optimistic future for the country. Perhaps one day Somaliland will have its own seat at the United Nations, and tourists will flock to the rock paintings at Laas Ga’al, and to its stunning beaches to swim at the mouth of the Red Sea.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Fishing with the President
I was genuinely gloomy about leaving Somaliland. We headed back home and I quickly repacked for the next trip to an unrecognised country on the edge of Europe. Transnistria, a sliver of a place between the former Soviet republics of Ukraine and Moldova, was an unofficial nation thought to be home to 400,000–700,000 people, depending on who was doing the counting.
After the Soviet Union collapsed two thirds of the people in the country that became Moldova were of Romanian descent and wanted to have closer ties with Romania and the West. The remaining third of the population wanted to keep their ties with Russia and Ukraine. There was a short but ferocious war and the land east of the Dniestr River became the unrecognised state of Transnistria.
The little state’s campaign for recognition was not going well when I visited. The United Nations and the rest of the world said Transnistria was officially and legally part of Moldova. Only three other states had chosen to recognise Transnistria, and they were also unrecognised, so hardly counted. To get to the breakaway statelet I had to travel through Moldova, the mother country from which it had split, and I headed there with Shahida and Will Daws.
My first impression of Moldova as we drove out into the countryside was that it was clearly staggeringly poor. I had a guidebook with me that talked about ‘unspoilt landscapes’, ‘rural pastures’, ‘charming backwater’, which I think translated as something like: ‘grinding poverty’, ‘high unemployment’, ‘no development’, ‘most people have left’.
The statistics showed that many people in Moldova were earning less than £2 a day. I confess I had no idea such abject poverty could exist right on the doorstep of the European Union. We drove through the Moldovan countryside on roads of mud, passing villages so poor that buildings were barely standing. Most of the countryside was empty of people except for young children and the grandparents who looked after them.
Moldova was officially the poorest country in Europe. I was stunned by the conditions people were enduring. I have travelled through rural regions of Romania and Hungary, but they don’t even get close to Moldova for poverty. I saw an elderly woman trying to pull a small wooden plough across a field like a two-legged donkey. We drove to one village that was in such poor repair, with roads pitted with rocks and potholes, that we had to get out of our rugged four-wheel drive and walk. People who remained in some communities were so utterly impoverished they had resorted to the most desperate methods possible to earn money.
In the heart of one village we walked up a steep muddy track, past broken fences until we came to a green metal fence with a small house, beyond which scrawny chickens were penned and dogs barked incessantly. My guide, local journalist Liliana Vitu, introduced me to three of the remaining men in the village who had sold one of their kidneys to foreign buyers desperate for a transplant.
They sold a kidney.
For an example of the reality of poverty, in its most basic form, it was utterly shocking. And on the edge of Europe? I was stunned.
The men showed me scars that ran from the base of their ribs almost to their armpits. Most had been paid less than £2,000. One man had used the money to buy a washing machine and some clothes for his children, another bought a cow and redecorated his house. As I spoke to them, I couldn’t quite believe this was happening in the twenty-first century.
These poor, desperate people had done something extreme in a vain attempt to survive, in a country with no economy to speak of, and had then squandered the money they had been paid. All the men said they were experiencing sickness and weakness.
Walking through their village I started to wonder how Moldova could ever build a functioning economy. Huge areas of the country were the preserve of kids, grandparents, the sick and the weak. They were empty of young adults.
Around a million Moldovans were thought to have travelled abroad. There were only 3 million people remaining. Across much of the country there was almost no one left of working age. Most had fled in a desperate search for work in Europe or Russia.
For me it was a stark illustration of an aspect of the migration debate in Europe I had never previously considered. People inside the borders of the EU often discuss the pros and cons of migration into Europe based on a relatively selfish idea of what is good or bad for Europe. ‘What do immigrants do for us?’ is often the tone of the debate.
Very rarely does anybody talk about the consequences for less-developed countries of seeing their ablest and fittest leaving in search of work. In ghost communities in Moldova I saw the effects. Moldova had lost an entire generation, and society was reeling and listless as a result.
I have since been in many other countries which have lost millions of people to migration, from the Philippines to Mexico, from Bangladesh to sub-Saharan Africa. Many of those left behind complain their brightest and best are being poached by the West through complicated immigration quotas, often so they can work as taxi drivers and pizza chefs, rather than staying at home to develop their own businesses and the national economy.
Take healthcare workers. The International Organisation on Migration (IOM) has concluded there are more Ethiopian doctors working in Chicago than in the whole of Ethiopia. One study found that an astonishing 77 per cent of physicians trained in Liberia were actually working in the US. More than half the doctors born in Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Mozambique, Angola and Liberia are now working in wealthy Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries.
In the UK more than a quarter of doctors received their primary training outside of Europe, and the main countries providing doctors to the UK from outside the EU include India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Egypt, Sri Lanka, Iraq and Sudan.
The money the UK saves by recruiting Ghanaian health workers may well exceed the money Britain gives Ghana in aid for health. African and East Asian states in particular spend a fortune on the education and training of nurses and doctors only to see European countries actively recruit them, often straight out of college. It is just one of a hundred ways poorer countries continue to subsidise wealthier nations. The NHS is especially dependent on migrant healthcare workers. The government Office for Budget Responsibility admits that without them the NHS would be in ‘dire straits’. We should be paying more to the countries that train our doctors and nurses, compensating them for fixing our own skills shortage.
Consider what happens when your nation is drained of the young, able, middle-class professionals and the educated. In several countries in the Caribbean 70 per cent of people educated above high-school level have fled or left their countries for opportunities elsewhere. By one estimate Jamaica has lost 85 per cent of university educated workers. It is infinitely more difficult to run a state without a middle class and the tax revenue they generate. They help to pay for schooling, welfare and medical care. If they are absent the country is crippled.
I can understand why individuals leave, of course. But collectively the consequences can be a state that never stands on its own two feet.
Some economists say that increasing ‘immigration flows’, as they call them
, could have enormous economic benefits. If the developed world took in enough immigrants to enlarge their workforce by just 1 per cent, they claim, the additional value created could be worth more to those migrants than all of the foreign aid payments in the world combined. I have no doubt that could well be true.
But a benefit to the relatively small number of people from developing countries who have migrated abroad does not necessarily mean benefit to the hundreds of millions left behind.
Other supporters of migration – large corporations, for example – say that countries like Moldova or Bangladesh receive huge sums in ‘remittances’, the sums sent home by migrants. But those remittances do not help to create communities; they often become what Australian Aboriginals call ‘sit-down money’, a welfare cheque received without any requirement to find work. Often they can help to entrench poverty by encouraging people in remote communities empty of employment to do little but drink, fester and wait for the next handout from their relative abroad.
I am not completely opposed to migration. I am not saying immigration is always a bad thing. I just think the debate in Western countries concentrates on the effect it has on us. We are selfish. There should be more discussion about the effects on the poorer, developing countries and communities that people are leaving. Because on the ground in rural Moldova, and in dozens of other places I have visited in the years since, the consequences are often tragic.