by Aaron Barlow
My market Somali was better than my Italian.
It was immediately apparent to the officials we met at the Somali Ministry of Justice and Religious Affairs, the Committee on Legal Integration, and the University, that we were not the legal translators they thought they had requested. Like many other Peace Corps Volunteers, we then had to improvise and find meaningful jobs for ourselves where we could at least contribute something.
I ended up as Legal Advisor to the Somali National Police Force, replacing a Ford Foundation lawyer whose assignment was coming to an end. (That attorney went on to become Police Commissioner of New York City. The NYPD, when he was Commissioner, was larger than the entire Somali National Police.)
The Commandant of the Police Force was General Mohamed Abshir Musa. Fresh from memories of the Kennedy Administration, I thought I was working for Ted Sorenson. The General was an intellectual, an idea man with a strong sense of nationalism, and a pragmatist. He had molded the Police Force into a national organization and inculcated a sense of national duty in his officers and men. He had overcome the divisive tribal and clan loyalties that made most other government entities ineffective.
As legal advisor, I drafted entire codes and amendments to existing laws for consideration by Parliament, prepared and revised regulations, assisted the Attorney General in a case before the Somali Supreme Court involving the unjust imprisonment of two Somali policemen, and wrote commentaries on the Criminal Procedure and Penal Codes. I even did some legal translating, with the able assistance of a police lieutenant who had gone to law school in Italy.
I also taught at the Police Academy.
Unlike in the United States, where government attorneys prosecute criminal cases, Somali police officers were the prosecutors (except for major cases, which were handled by the Attorney General’s office). I taught the police officers the elements of criminal offenses and how to prove a case.
For the lower ranks, those in the field who made the arrests, I primarily taught the Criminal Procedure Code.
The Code contained a provision called “the forty-eight hour rule.” Every policeman who arrested a person was required to bring the suspect before a judge within forty-eight hours of arrest. I drummed this into my students. No matter what section of the Criminal Procedure Code I was teaching on a particular day, I wrote the number “48” on the blackboard or flip chart. Before dismissing them, I would ask different policemen the significance of the number and to explain the forty-eight hour rule. I taught at the Academy every week for most of my two years in Somalia until I left in May 1968.
Somalia’s brief democratic experience came to an end on October 21, 1969, when General of the Army Mohamed Siad Barre overthrew the elected government. Peace Corps was expelled by the end of the year, allegedly because the Volunteers were American spies. Somalia entered into a dark period of dictatorship characterized by a national secret police, special military courts and arbitrary imprisonment without charges or trial.
The Siad Barre regime waged war against its own people. It fomented tribal warfare and armed one clan against another. The Army punished those thought to support any opposition, by poisoning wells and shelling and bombing cities and towns.
Two of my closest friends, the Police Commandant and another Police General were held, for several years, in solitary confinement, in underground cells in an East German-built prison. They were imprisoned because of their integrity and commitment to the democratic principles embodied in the Somali Constitution.
This particular Somali nightmare ended in 1991 when Mohamed Siad Barre, the President for Life, was overthrown and ignominiously fled the country. A new catastrophe befell the Somalis as warring factions, based on tribal and clan lines, fought each other for power. The different warlords engaged in wholesale extortion of relief agencies trying to provide food, medicine, and shelter to the hundreds of thousands of displaced civilians.
In November 1992, President Bush initiated Operation Restore Hope. This was a real international coalition. U.S. troops, along with soldiers from Australia, Botswana, France, Nigeria, Pakistan, and other nations, went to Somalia to protect the delivery of humanitarian assistance. President Clinton continued this policy of armed humanitarian intervention, although his Administration never made up its mind whether the Operation also included so-called “nation building.”
In February 1993, I was contacted by someone from the State Department and asked to go to Somalia and advise the U.S. Ambassador and the Special Representative of the U.N. Secretary General on how to rebuild the Somali judiciary and police.
I arrived in Mogadishu in April 1993 and found a city I barely recognized. After three years of unrestricted tribal warfare, Mog was totally destroyed. Buildings were pockmarked with shell and bullet holes. The stone minaret of a fourteenth-century mosque on the road to the beach had been targeted and partially destroyed. Never in the history of Somalia had Moslem religious sites been attacked by Somalis engaged in clan warfare.
The capital looked worse than many European cities that had been battlegrounds in WWII. Any metal that could be sold for scrap in India had been stripped from Mogadishu’s buildings and utility poles—window and door frames, hinges, locks and door knobs, wiring, transformers—all were gone. There was a thriving open-air arms market in the center of the city. If they had the cash, Somalis could buy anything from a simple rifle to an AK-47 to a rocket-propelled grenade launcher.
There was no functioning Somali government. Two warlords, each claiming to be president and each using his own clan-based militias of heavily armed young men, controlled different sections of the city.
Prior to the arrival of troops under Operation Restore Hope, residents on both sides of the dividing line were shelled indiscriminately. The number of civilian casualties had been enormous. Thousands of refugees fled the capital and lived in refugee camps in the countryside, solely dependent on humanitarian relief for food and shelter.
Under the rules established by the military coalition, Somali police were not allowed to carry any guns except in joint operations with coalition forces. I found the police in Mogadishu investigating crimes, arresting suspects and generally carrying out their duties, armed solely with batons and whistles. This at a time when most young Somali men in the capital openly carried AK-47s.
In order to compile information for my report, I visited as many police stations in the city and around the country as I could. At one station in Mog, the policeman in charge, who was not an officer, welcomed me with a broad smile. He called me Mr. Martin, which was how I had been known during my Peace Corps service. He remembered me from the Academy. He said the police in Mogadishu had a very serious problem, and he needed my advice. I thought he was going to ask for weapons and was already prepared to tell him I had no authority to even pass that request up the military chain of command.
“Mr. Martin,” he said, in an anxious voice, “we have arrested many bad people. We are holding them, but there are no judges to take them before. Under the forty-eight hour rule, do we have to let them go?”
If it hadn’t been so foreign to Somali culture, I would have hugged and kissed him on the spot. After the collapse of the Somali state, and a period of anarchy, lawlessness, absolute chaos, and the indiscriminate violence and wanton murders, this decent, honest Somali policeman was concerned about the legality of holding suspects for more than forty-eight hours. I gave him my opinion that the forty-eight hour rule did not apply if there were no judges before which to bring those arrested. However, as soon as judges were appointed, I told him, the police had forty-eight hours to produce the suspects.
Unfortunately, Somalis have endured much worse since 1993. After the U.S. and the U.N. pulled out in the fall of 1993, Mogadishu descended into a spiral of senseless violence with innocent civilians dying either from being caught between warring factions, disease, or starvation. More than fifteen years later, there i
s still no end to the Somalis’ horrific nightmare. Fighting continues today. Factions based on tribes or clans, or under the guise of Islam, kill in order to control territory and seize power. In Mogadishu, and many other areas of the country, there is no real functioning government. According to the U.N., Somalia is the worst humanitarian crisis in Africa. Yet, the decency and adherence to the law of that single Somali policeman gives me a glimmer of hope that someday, the rule of law will return to Somalia.
The former Police Commandant is alive and well in Minnesota. I testified at his asylum hearing several years ago. The other Police General lives on the West Coast and is a grandfather many times over. We usually see each other at Ramadan when he comes east to visit his daughter’s family. We call each other every Sunday evening.
Although I can’t go back to visit Somalia, like all other RPCVs I continue to enjoy the close and enduring friendships with Somalis I first met almost forty-five years ago. And our children have bonded with the children of our Somali friends. Perhaps together, in the not too distant future, they will be able to return to a peaceful Somalia. Insha’llah—God willing.
Martin Ganzglass served as Legal Advisor to the Somali National Police Force from 1966-68. He taught the Criminal Procedure and Penal Codes to police and drafted legislation. He returned to Somalia in 1993 as Special Advisor to U.S. Ambassador Robert Gossende as part of Operation Restore Hope. He has a large extended Somali family, stemming from friendships established more than forty years ago and seven Somali children consider him their “white” grandfather, a title of which he is especially proud.
Full Circle
Delfi Messinger
Going back, to leave again.
The Peace Corps taught me how to make a difference. Although I was mainly occupied with bonobos for eleven years as a “volunteer” after leaving my Peace Corps assignment in Zaire, I also started a children’s magazine there called Bleu/Blanc, which exists to this day.
In 2000, I traveled back to what is now known as the Democratic Republic of Congo to see what remained of my projects. On the evening of my departure from that country I had a chance to write down my thoughts and reflect on my visit.
Our truck hit a pothole, jarring my reflections. Beside me, passengers were nodding to the slap-slap of the windshield wipers. The sky had lightened and suddenly we broke out of the storm. As the water ran off, fog steamed up from the hot, damp pavement. On the right the sunset was russet and mauve dipping behind the Congo River.
Clever, I mused. Work smarter, not harder. Massala was right; a clever, roundabout way may be the most direct route to change. Then it struck me: The magazine would carry on. Amazingly, the games and puzzles, stories, cartoons, poems—the sparking of minds, the thirst for learning and literacy would be my legacy. On a shoestring, on a whim, and almost unwittingly, I had planted a smelly crop of seeds for the next generation. Those seeds were the real golden grains.
Night falls fast on the equator. Our convoy reached the outskirts of Kinshasa amid pedestrians hurrying home before nightfall. I stared at the sunset’s reflected glow from the river, knowing that this would be the last time. Abruptly, the sun slid into the Congo’s vast waters. The sky turned a streaky silver, and the mamans selling goods along the highway hurried to light their lanterns to lure the evening crowd. Traffic thickened and slowed as we passed the airport and headed into town.
I cracked a window and the clean smell of rain blew in. The palms along the side of the road lifted their lacy feather duster heads against the fading sunset colors. The throng—many still on their way home from work—were hundreds deep at the truck stops and along the dirt paths lined with wooden tables selling grilled turkey tails, soap, cigarettes, and skin-lightening creams.
God, I was homesick for this place! This vile, gorgeous, snarly, exhilarating, insane, deep, and terrible place. For two years now, I had been dreaming of this Congo and in a few days I would be leaving forever. Through tear-lashed eyes, I remembered the birds—the kingfishers that splashed in my water barrel and the nightingale that sang every evening around eight. I thought of the flocks of mousebirds that hung like long-tailed ornaments in the trees, and the grass finches that eluded our rat-trap cat. I remembered the cattle egrets overhead that gave me courage under fire.
Zaire, Zaire, I’d loved you so! And, oh, how I’d hated you. You taught me a lifetime of lessons that I would never have learned in any other way—you gave me the human side of myself. I’d been close to tears all day and maudlin thoughts floated to the surface of my mind. No flowers, I thought. Why hadn’t I thought to buy flowers for Tamibu? (One of my workers who died of AIDS in the brief time that I had been visiting.)
It was dark in the car and I wiped my face clear of tears. Don’t be so harsh, I thought. Instead of stuff, you gave yourself and that was worth way more. I straightened in my seat. As the clouds drifted away and the stars came out, I saw more clearly. I knew that I could leave the Congo behind, even though a part of me—the part that held the future—would always remain.
Delfi Messinger is the author of Grains of Golden Sand. She served in Zaire from 1984-87. Her website is delfisgrainsofgoldensand-bonobos.blogspot.com.
A Promise Kept
Beth Duff-Brown
Going back again raises questions, retrieves expectations, and reminds one of promises. It is never easy and, in many places, spans tragedy and loss.
I sat in a back pew, lightly swaying to the bamboo xylophones. Buttery light streamed across the white altar from the stained-glass cross carved into the red brick church. I pretended to pray, to find a private moment, to close my eyes and reflect on what I had seen in the week since returning to this village where I had lived a lifetime ago.
As the Catholic sermon was ending and the hymns grew louder, I waved bye-bye to the bare-bottomed baby who had been making faces with me and attempted to slip unnoticed out the side door.
A vicar caught me and pulled me before the congregation, where I had stood ten years earlier, and fifteen before that. Weather-beaten eyes smiled in encouragement; several women ululated and called out “Miss Elizabeth” before a stern glance from behind me silenced them.
“I just wanted to thank you again,” I said with embarrassing simplicity, as my eyes began to sting and I fumbled with the sleeves of my white cotton blouse. “Thank you for taking care of me when I was just a girl, for your prayers, for my child.”
Before I could finish, I stood there in tears, unable to move, unable to speak, humiliated at my public display of emotion. I cried for having kept my promise to come back again. I cried for a young woman who lay dying alone, no longer able to walk to church. I cried for once again having built up false hopes with my return, for not having done more to help those tired faces now looking up at me.
They woke to church bells every dawn, ambled from the same mud huts in which I had sat twenty-five years ago, gathered to sweep the aisle, polish the pews and adjust the same curled posters of the Stations of the Cross in broken frames, tacked to the crumbling brick walls.
And I cried because the one man I had been looking for was not out there, looking back.
Truth be told, I also cried for my lost youth, the freckle-faced California girl who had arrived on their mud-hut doorsteps in 1979 as a Peace Corps Volunteer, so idealistic, brave and full of life.
This village in Central Africa was where I had come into my own. It’s where I felt that first heady rush that comes from teaching a great class. It’s where I overcame aching isolation and discovered the simple pleasure of just sitting alone.
Kamponde is where I prayed for rain so I could wash my long hair; where I danced around fires, learned to play a better guitar with a Peace Corps boyfriend who visited from time to time; where I walked behind mothers carrying babies to their graves.
The Democratic Republic of Congo—known then as Zaire—was where I wrote for hours by candleligh
t, preparing me to go on to write as a foreign correspondent from points around the globe.
I left Kamponde in 1981, the last Volunteer, pulled out as corruption overran the Institute Untu, where I taught English for two years with the conviction I was truly doing something good.
My job with The Associated Press allowed me to return to Kamponde in 1996, to renew my ties with the villagers and write about who we had all become over the years.
I had told the villagers then that if their prayers for me to have the child Chris and I had longed for were finally heard, I would somehow let them know. But I knew it was unlikely my letters—filled with photos of the blue-eyed baby girl with whom we were blessed only a year after that visit—would arrive by Congo’s pitiful postal system.
Now I wanted to thank them for those prayers.
The civil war breaking out during that first return in 1996 went on to devastate the Congo. It wasn’t a war over ideology or religion or tribal hatred, but about which warlord would win the battle to exploit the country’s vast mineral wealth. Though far surpassing the ongoing conflict in Sudan, Congo’s neighbor to the northeast, the war here has largely been ignored, as its complexity eludes easy definition. There has been no Mia Farrow or George Clooney to shine that brilliant celebrity light upon the humanitarian heartbreak of Congo.
Though it officially ended in 2002, the conflict’s resulting disease and starvation has gone on to claim nearly 5.4 million lives, according to the International Rescue Committee. I had followed the statistics, wondering how many of the nameless 45,000 Congolese who still die every month from the strains of that war might be from among Kamponde’s 5,000 villagers.
By the time I left for my trip in the summer of 2006, with a sense of dread, I wondered if the people of Kamponde would know they had survived the deadliest conflict since World War II.