by Al Venter
By then about a third of the population was unemployed and in spite of governement military successes, conditions had deteriorated economically. That happens when so much of the army is tied up in guarding static assets, like bridges, electric plants, dams and so on. Consequently, more ordinary people were voting with their feet and taking their money with them. Things couldn’t continue like that much longer.
The rebels, despite heavy losses, remained active till the end. Throughout, they showed remarkable versatility, coupled, in true Castro fashion – the Cuban leader was one of the architects of what was called the ‘People’s Struggle’ – with an utter ruthlessness of purpose.
There are those counter-insurgency pundits who consider the FMLN, in its day, as one of the best unconventional armies of the time. They reckon, even now – and despite having lost the war – that when the guerrillas fought, there were no restrictions. They waged their war in the age-old traditional manner of using every means at their disposal to harm the enemy. There was never a question of its having one arm tied behind its back, and the fact that the international press gave them tacit support counted for an awful lot.
CHAPTER TEN
Somalia: Wars of No Consequence
‘As a trouble spot, Somalia is a familiar name to many people in America. Yet even before the Mogadishu warlord, self- appointed ‘General’ Farrah Aideed had become a real issue, a drama of horrific proportions was in the process of unravelling in this troubled corner of East Africa. It’s a place where violence always appears to have been the norm.’
Al J. Venter, The Chopper Boys1
EVEN BY POST IMPERIAL STANDARDS in Africa, Somalia is in an awful mess. That’s nothing new because the Horn of Africa has been a battleground for as long as it has been inhabited by man. Judging by what’s going on there now, it remains ungovernable. As we go to press, there are more abductions there than ever before, more assassinations than ever make the news, an intrusive al-Qaeda presence and, more recently, an ever-growing list of ships taken by pirates operating almost with impunity from bases on the Somali mainland.
I’d been visiting the place off-and-on from the late 1960s. The first time I landed at Mogadishu was the morning after American astronaut Neal Armstrong took his momentous ‘giant step for mankind’. I returned with my wife Madelon in the mid 1970s. She found it a fascinating, if disturbing, backwater that reflected ominous undertones for the future. She was actually glad to return to Nairobi after a week because the writing was already on the wall that the place meant trouble.
In those days, the few journalists who made the effort to get to Mogadishu from Addis Ababa (usually on their own initiative, having managed to persuade their editors that the country was newsworthy) found themselves in an altogether different environment from that to which they’d been accustomed elsewhere in Africa. Even then, Mogadishu – a city that had once been a quiet little Italian colonial outpost – was extraordinarily remote.
Little had happened in Somalia since the British and the South Africans drove Mussolini’s fascists out in 1941. The people then were just as surly and unkempt as they are today (which might be expected when there is no work), the cars on the road are decrepit – often with 12-year-olds at the wheel – the electricity supply is erratic, plumbing in hotels (if you could find one worthy of the name) is capricious and more often than not, their loos don’t flush.
As the late Lord Bill Deedes once said about the place, it ‘was an uncovenanted mercy’. It is much worse today…
The main post office, when we got there in the 1980s, had a single bulb in its cavernous roof with no doors or windows. It was closed for the day when the official felt like it, or when the regular shipment of Qat arrived by air from the Ethiopian highlands – an unsurprising event since much of the nation is addicted. It had a single public telephone for all communications with the world outside, cemented to a concrete pillar in the middle of the hall. Since satellite phones were still in a development phase, it meant that if my wife wanted to talk to our children, she had to wait in a long line, often well into the night.
Aerial view of Mogadishu taken from the sea. The city was formerly a peaceful colonial haven, a first for the Italians (prior to World War II) and then for the British. However, in the 1970s a series of army mutinies intervened: these were coupled to fierce exchanges between rival groups of Islamic militants which eventually crippled the country and left it without an effective government for decades. (Author’s collection)
Mogadishu, built solidly on a range of white sandstone cliffs that stretch back into the desert behind, was different in other respects. About a quarter of the size of Nairobi, it was remarkably expansive and faced onto a broad lagoon bounded by a reef about half-a-mile out. The place was like one of those tiny colonial blips on the map that we read about at school when Conrad was prescribed. However, it was safe, and it stayed that way, at least until the Jihadis arrived.
In those distant days, as my wife and I discovered, we could sleep securely. Nobody stole anything from our hotel room, such as it was. Twice my wife had to walk some distance to the post office and back after dark to call home. She was never molested or insulted in those mysterious, malodorous streets that reeked of a combination of urine and cardamom.
Before the war levelled the town, the Italian imprint was ubiquitous. There were raffia-clad bottles of Chianti on every dinner table, the chemist’s shop bore the legend Farmacia and was manned by knowledgeable expatriates who had been born in Bari or Palermo and the police wore the same peaked caps issued under the rule of Il Duce.
In the 1960s and until fairly recently, Mogadishu reflected a dilapidated sun-bleached mixture of European, African and Muslim buildings, some with high walls and steel gates that enclosed delightful tropical gardens. It was a bit like parts of the Coté d’Azur, only all the faces were dark and the inhabitants wore the kind of garb that Somalis like – long, easy-flowing robes from which the East African kikoi was adapted long ago.
At the heart of the city stood a magnificent Roman Catholic cathedral, the biggest, it was said, south of the Mediterranean. Like much else in Mogadishu, it was gutted during the civil war. There was also a fine old Imperial Arch in the Italian tradition, complete with marble columns and enriched with bas-reliefs. It was modelled after the fashion of such things since Caesar’s Rome and ensuing pseudo-Romes.
Il Villaggio Anzilotti was the suburb that boasted the best brothels and lay west of the old harbour that Gaius Plinius Secundus – otherwise known as Pliny the Elder – mentioned in his writings almost 2,000 years ago. The streets were all Via; Via Damasco, Via Roma, Via Congo and so on. It was an ancient place, perhaps the oldest settlement on the east coast of Africa south of the Sudan and was said to have had a Chinese quarter a thousand years ago.
Towards dusk we foreign waifs would drift along ‘sunset strip’ towards a succession of diplomatic beach clubs that stood in dozens of neat rows, each commanding its own few square yards of yellow sand fronting onto the lagoon. The British encampment was next to the Russians, or was it the Poles? Alongside that stood a kind of American ‘home-from-home’, the only place in that staunchly Muslim land where you could get hash browns with your eggs on Sunday morning and female staff could still wear bikinis without having stones thrown at them.
Nearly every night was party night. With the Cold War in full swing (Somalia having thrown out the Russians and embraced the Americans, and let it not be said only for material reasons), we tended to favour Western establishments, while those of the Eastern Bloc remained stiffly aloof from the sometimes raucous goings on a few feet away. We’d wave amicably at each other if we caught an eye.
I made the Italian Club my base: a flimsy shack with a grass and corrugated iron roof and electric fans big enough to make life bearable. There was obviously no air-conditioning since all the doors and windows stood permanently open. Whatever breeze there was, arrived from the sea, usually towards evening, though it could be stifling in the dry season
, which was for eight months of the year.
The real thrash would begin a little before midnight, when first Franco and later Gino – both local boys of Italian parents whose families had settled in Somalia between the wars – looked for volunteers for the regular cheetah shoot. I called it a cheetah slaughter and they didn’t like it. It was of such frequency while I was there that I and my American friends were surprised that there were any of these big cats left along this desolate stretch of the coast.
I’d enjoyed good hunting in Africa in my day, and I might have been tempted; but they were using floodlights and running these beautiful animals down in four-wheel-drive vehicles, like an Australian kangaroo romp.
Towards midnight Somali ladies would appear out of the dark, almost every one of them tall, graceful, stunningly alluring and actually quite modest. Most reflected an air of diffidence, almost as if the world belonged to them, which, I suppose it did. They were strikingly beautiful. They were also incredibly slender in their kikoi skirts, usually with nothing on underneath. Some had the grace of a desert gazelle.
Somali women generally are blessed with high cheek-bones and beautiful soft eyes; any one of those that we encountered along the beachfront on the outskirts of Mogadishu could easily have stepped out of a Pirelli calendar.
Many of the journalistic tribe found them irresistible. Cheap, too; for those inclined it was two dollars for a ‘quickie’, or knee tremblers, we called them. The alternative was ten dollars for a night in a hotel, but then you had to fork out for breakfast as well. Two breakfasts on an expense sheet submitted to your editor invariably raised questions, so it was generally a no-no.
Since all these women were Muslim, they wouldn’t drink in public, which was another attraction, for whisky in Mogadishu was expensive, usually three or four times what it cost in Nairobi. Still, everybody had a party and some scribes with more money than sense would take along two of these ladies at a time. Not surprisingly, they got the clap or worse. Such afflictions could be cured with antibiotics, but that was before AIDS rampaged across the African continent. It was only a matter of time…
Internecine strife put a stop to all the fun. The generals who took over Somalia after they murdered President Abd-ir-Rashid Ali Shermarke in the 1970s were soon squabbling among themselves. Then the killings started and it became almost obsessively brutal. An obscure new kind of artificial ‘nationalism’ was invented – as well as a written language, which looked like something out of Star Wars – and those who ensconced themselves in Mogadishu’s long-defunct parliament laid claim to a lot of territory that belonged to their increasingly unfriendly neighbours.
In particular, they eyed Djibouti, which had been a French colony as part of what they liked to call ‘Greater Somalia’. Then they demanded the ‘return’ of fairly large chunks of land that had been ruled almost forever by a no-nonsense and exceedingly belligerent government in Addis Ababa. They blundered badly when the Somali ruffians who ran the show sent their army into the Ogaden in Ethiopia, and it was Soviet hardware and training that drove them out of that useless strip of desert where nobody lived anyway.
That was the start of it. Subterfuge, insurrections, intrigue by the bucketful and army mutinies have continued ever since. More recently, al-Qaeda got into the act and Mark Bowden gave us a pretty good insight into that mayhem in his classic Black Hawk Down. The book is as accurate a depiction of any I’ve seen of Somalia before or after the American attempt to try to inculcate a bit of sense into a nation that will probably never understand the word. Not in my lifetime, in any event.
There were other, less dramatic aberrations, but the final crunch for the people of Mogadishu came when some idiot allowed a local businessman to build a slaughterhouse just outside the town and dump several tons of camel guts into the lagoon every day. Soon every other shark in the Indian Ocean seemed to have assembled off the Somali coast and attacks on humans became so frequent that foreign embassies forbade their staff and their nationals to swim in the sea.
Horror stories followed. Boats coming through the cut in the reef would overturn if the weather suddenly turned nasty and everyone on board would be taken by the sharks, sometimes within minutes. Children sitting on boats with their feet in the water sometimes lost them. On ‘sunset strip’ the rule was that kids on the beach were not even to wet their toes. The Italians paid two million dollars for steel shark nets, but by the time the politicians had siphoned off their percentages, there was hardly enough left for a tennis court.
I went back to Somalia early in 1993, not long after the first American soldiers landed on Mogadishu beach in a spectacular show of force: their faces blackened, flak-jackets in place and M16s at high port. They were astonished to be greeted by dozens of television crews who had been watching this pantomime from the shore. Among those awaiting them was my old pal Mohammed Amin.
By the time the Americans arrived in Somalia at the start of Operation Restore Hope, there wasn’t a window pane intact in Mogadishu’s International Airport. Not much worked either, though the US Army presence was manifest. (Author’s collection)
It was planned as an amphibious invasion and though it was exactly that, the whole caboodle ended in farce. While some officers were expecting trouble, there was none. It stayed passive until a group of GIs started banging Somali heads together as they fanned out across the airport. The trouble was, the Somalis they encountered happened to be legitimate: almost all of those already at the airport were in the employ of the United Nations units in the country. Some sharp words were exchanged between the UN commander and the American officer in charge before these Rambo wannabees were curtailed.
American participation in Somalia, Operation Restore Hope, could hardly be rated as a war, at least not until events got out of hand and several US helicopters were brought down by dissidents in the main part of Mogadishu. There were 22 nations directly involved, many of them Western – including France and Italy – as well as quite a few others such as Turkey, Egypt, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Zimbabwe, Pakistan and Botswana. The trouble was, very few of these soldiers had ever heard a shot fired in anger, much less fought in a war.
Altogether 30,000 strong, they faced a mixed bag of Somali warlords who were always at each others’ throats, including a crafty rogue and former US Marine by the name of Mohammed Farah Aideed, who, with his equally duplicitous father, had done much to cripple the country. For years this totally unscrupulous executioner had been stealing food intended to feed Somalia’s starving millions. At one stage he was even exporting it to neighbouring states for profit.
Meanwhile, all these tribal padroni had acquired a formidable arsenal of modern weapons from many different countries. They included British and Russian mines (the former from World War II, mostly taken out of the Libyan desert); Russian small arms and rocketpropelled grenades; Italian, Spanish, Brazilian, Chinese, Portuguese and American rifles and a miscellany of heavier weapons from South Africa, Germany, Iran, Syria, North Korea, France and elsewhere. If it could kill or cripple, the ferocious rabble in the streets of Mogadishu wanted more of it.
The foreign troops in Somalia were more of a rescue mission than a fighting force. However, it didn’t take them long to forget that it was the plight of a million or so starving children that had brought them there in the first place. As soon as things turned nasty, most of those countries couldn’t wait to get their soldiers out of there. They argued that since the killings had become rampant, the Somalis could settle their own differences as they pleased. It was their pigeon anyway, and I suppose, they were right.
The aircraft ‘graveyard’ at Mogadishu Airport included scores of more recent Soviet fighter aircraft as well as several British Canberra bombers and bits and pieces from several transport aircraft. In Somalia’s dry climate, the place holds a trove of perfectly useable spare parts which ongoing hostilities have prevented anybody from exploiting. (Author’s collection)
As it happened, the Americans led the retreat. In spite of the loss
of life that Mark Bowden wrote about, it was quite a commendable effort, even if it cost more lives than it should have. Washington’s role amounted to a brief footnote in contemporary African history.
Remarkably, my own visit at that time was not prompted by any wish to experience another war, or to join hordes of journalists already packed into the few hotels that were still open for business. I had nearly finished my latest book, The Chopper Boys, which deals with helicopter warfare in Africa and I wanted something unusual to take it right into the 1990s. What better place than a troubled corner of Africa where Washington had deployed 100 modern and well-equipped American helicopters. The choppers were responsible for most of the communications, supplies and air combat roles in which the UN had become engaged.
My first impressions after landing at Mogadishu Airport were instructive. I hadn’t expected to find dozens of wrecked aircraft lining the runway. There were Chinese and Russian MiGs, Sukhois, British-built Canberra bombers and what was left of American C-47s lying at the far end of the runway. The place was an aircraft junkyard and curiously, most of it was salvageable, even if the Somalis didn’t yet know it.
The airport looked as if it had been repeatedly bombed and nobody had bothered to repair it. In fact, each time anybody tried to fix something, more mortars or RPG-7 rockets would come shuddering in.
I recall that the words ‘Welcome to Mogadishu Airport’ were still legible, with a few of the letters missing on the terminal building. I also remember writing that not a single pane of glass was intact.