Barrel of a Gun

by Al Venter

  In this regard, Somalia was hardly unique. Journalists in Vietnam, Rhodesia, Lebanon and elsewhere would occasionally arm themselves, but that was a matter of choice. It was certainly not commonplace and inevitably involved a measure of opprobrium from fellow scribes.

  I carried a .45 ACP in the Rhodesian War and thought nothing of it. In some of the attacks against insurgent or government positions in Angola, I was armed, as I was when I went into combat with some of the mercenary groups that I accompanied over the years, particularly in Sierra Leone, where there was a hefty bounty on the heads of any white man involved with the mercenary force.

  Chopper gunship pilot Neall Ellis had evidence that the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels had issued a $5 million reward for either killing him or shooting down his Mi-24. Since I was doing duty and flying with him, I would have been naive to believe the rebels would have treated me any differently from Neall, or other members of his crew, had they forced us down. I’d always argue that you didn’t wave your press card over your head when you had a hyped-up gook coming at you with an AK-47.

  Somalia was a good deal worse. The country had regressed to an obscure medieval fiefdom where only might was right. It was the single example that underscored the age-old premise that even the worst kind of government is better than no government at all. Frankly that’s exactly the way it was: there was no control, no order, no government and no law enforcement.

  Ostensibly the United Nations presence that arrived in Somalia in the early 1990s was there specifically to do something about the situation. On a strictly humanitarian level, it had devolved into one of the biggest human disasters since the end of World War II. It didn’t help to argue that the country appeared to thrive on chaos. Even Cambodia’s Pol Pot regime, inhuman as it was, had a few fundamental systems of control in place. So too, to a lesser extent, had the Congo almost a generation earlier. The Somali people, by contrast, existed in a self-made limbo that might easily have been equated to a vacuum.

  One of the first operations launched in Somalia was a bid to clear weapons off the streets. In principle the idea was commendable, but whoever conceived it from the comfort of his or her desk somewhere in the civilized world had no idea that while it sounded fine, it almost was like asking the average Somali to stop breathing. Nobody told the original planners that in Mogadishu, a man without his AK-47 was not a man. Take his gun away and it is almost as if he’s been emasculated. In hindsight, there was a lot else they weren’t informed of either.

  While some firearms were recovered, usually by coercion, the Somalis seemed to have an endless supply of them, including some of the larger hardware like 12.7mm or 14.5mm heavy machine-guns, which they mounted on the backs of pick-ups and appropriately dubbed ‘technicals’. By early 1994 it had become obvious to just about everybody in the region that in spite of efforts to counter the trend, more arms shipments were reaching the warlords each month than ever before.

  Like today, a good deal of these shipments came from the Yemen, ferried across the Red Sea by small, high-powered boats, the same type of ‘Go-Fors’ used by drug smugglers in the Caribbean. Which begged the question: who was paying for all this largesse which didn’t come cheap? Most of it, we discovered afterwards, came from Iran.

  As a relief operation, the Somali campaign was, as one wag phrased it, ‘an unmitigated calamity’.

  By May 1993, when the main body of the American force had left, conditions deteriorated even further. But then, with all effective control over the aid process having been terminated – the main initial objective was to get food to people who needed it – the country again reverted to anarchy. It wasn’t long before there were more people starving in the interior than there had been before UN soldiers arrived and there was nothing anybody could, or would, do about it.

  Observers who are familiar with the country pointed to several problems which were never properly resolved. The first and most significant was the inability of the UN (or anyone else) to limit the power of Somali faction leaders, One foreign correspondent who was incountry while I was there, said that the only way to bring peace to Somalia was to put all the warlords against a wall and shoot them. Either that, he suggested, or pull the UN out and let them continue fighting among themselves, which happened shortly afterwards anyway. Sadly, little has changed in the almost two-decade interim and the consequences continue to be horrific, especially among those least able to fend for themselves.

  American troops wait on the airport apron at a military base in the interior to be airlifted north by chopper. (Author’s collection)

  Most civilian and military personnel in Mogadishu with whom I spoke knew exactly what was going on in the country. They told their bosses in Europe and America that these tribal leaders were both primitive and excessively brutal, that they’d taken countless lives and so on, but nobody believed them. They do now, but I’m pretty sure there won’t be another Somali rescue mission any time soon.

  A look at the track records of some of these belligerents is instructive. The most obstreperous of the bunch was Mohammed Farrah Aideed who, before he died in a firefight in Mogadishu in mid 1996, was a relatively well-seasoned military tactician. He’d survived scores of firefights where others hadn’t. At the same time, as the UN quickly discovered, he was a seasoned psychopath who was extremely cunning, totally unreliable and not averse to confrontation when the mood took him. Aideed’s father drove the former dictator Siad Barre out of Somalia and ‘ruled’ over parts of Southern Somalia as well as the southern half of Mogadishu for many years before the UN arrived.

  The northern sector of Mogadishu was in the hands of Ali Mahdi Mohammed, a former hotelier who, like Aideed, was also addicted to Qat. That wasn’t unusual; almost every adult Somali chews the leaf, categorized as a drug by UN agencies.

  Colonel Mohammed Said Hersi Morgan – he called himself General Morgan – had been closely linked to the former President Barre (Morgan was his son-in-law) and controlled Bardera and parts of the region round the port of Kismaiyu, some hundreds of miles south of Mogadishu.

  Morgan’s principal adversary, for a while, was Colonel Omar Jess, the man who dominated most of Kismaiyu. Jess, another militant lunatic, waged war against every one of the 14 warlords at some stage or another, but just then he was allied to General Aideed; at least until he was murdered and replaced by another tyrant. Washington was aware at the time that Aideed and Jess proposed to split the country between them: Aideed would take the north, and Jess the south.

  The list goes on. Few of these self-appointed leaders, megalomaniacs one and all, had any kind of military experience, nor was there anybody in their ranks who might even vaguely have resembled a politician. But, as we now know, they had the hardware and they were ruthless.

  Until the Americans and some of the other coalition forces began to use force to separate the hordes (or at least to deprive them of their arsenals) they tended to regard all foreigners with contempt. Also, they displayed this animosity with great enthusiasm. If they believed they could get away with it, they would fire at every UN patrol that came within range, often using women and children as shields. When the UN retaliated, they would shout foul. However, Somalia has never had a monopoly in this kind of duplicity, since there are other nations to the immediate east of Somalia that have also shown themselves adept at using the ploy.

  The arrival of the American force initially caused a number of changes, many of them for the better. Within the first two months, there were more than a dozen air and ground attacks, mostly lead by US, Belgian and French forces, on known warlord strongpoints all over the country. Quite a few were successful and huge quantities of weapons were seized.

  Elsewhere they failed dismally, mainly because the Americans had a self-defeating habit of dropping leaflets on the towns they intended to attack in an attempt to warn innocent people to keep clear. That, of course, was like telling a criminal that the cops are on the way. The warnings gave clan leaders the time and opportunity to
stow their goods.

  The French, with generations of experience in African conflicts, weren’t prone to such senseless protocol and always went in without prior warning. If there were civilians in the way it was simply bad luck. It’s hugely instructive that of all the forces deployed in Somalia during this critical period, Paris took among the lowest number of casualties. The warlords knew better than to goad the Elyseés Palace into action.

  While the stoning of Coalition Forces and an occasional sniping attack continued unabated in some parts (mostly where the US forces were active, because initially they were not allowed to use live ammunition to retaliate), they rarely happened wherever there were French (and French Foreign Legion) troops on the ground.

  The same, coincidentally, held true for the Turks and the Australians; neither took crap from anybody.

  Looking back on the tragedy that Somalia became – and still is – it was clear from the start that the Americans and the United Nations entered a country that was possibly beyond saving. There was no drinkable water until it was produced by the Coalition. Nor was there any electricity to speak of. The roads throughout the entire country hadn’t been maintained since the early 1970s. Mogadishu, the capital – and other towns along the coast and in the interior – displayed on their walls the consequences of years of barbarous fighting.

  Because the removal of the dead was way down the list of priorities of any of the warring leaders, the danger of epidemics was real enough for Washington to take some extraordinary precautions. That included vaccinations for all personnel on a scale that had never been implemented before, as well as draconian health measures, largely because in some areas where bodies had been buried, the cadavers were barely covered. It wasn’t unusual to find skeletal hands and feet sometimes protruding from the country’s soft, shifting sands after a strong wind.

  Although there were no dogs in Mogadishu (they had all been eaten), jackals, vultures and hyenas dug up many corpses. It would never occur to the average Somali to do something about it, like reburying the dead. That would have meant work…

  P.J. O’Rourke had his own take on these things after a visit to Mogadishu, at about the same time I was there. He said something along the lines of people not dying like flies in Somalia because with all those bodies around, the flies were extremely well fed…

  On a more serious note, there were reports of cholera and other infectious diseases from every aid centre that fielded a presence. There were also huge increases in the incidence of tuberculosis, measles and meningitis in the population, especially among starving children and adults. This was a country that had already been battling to cope with kwashiorkor and rickets for decades.

  Mogadishu, and its environs, was almost totally destroyed by ongoing hostilities. There were broken and abandoned aircraft and garbage that hadn’t been collected for years. Travelling anywhere without a substantial armed escort could be risky. (Author’s collection)

  Malaria had been endemic in Africa since the beginning of time and in Somalia it had become a serious issue by the time the Americans arrived. In the first months there were many reports of the disease among Allied servicemen, some of them critical enough to be relocated to hospitals in Europe. The fact was that almost all anopheline malarial strains along the Indian Ocean coast showed strong resistance to available anti-malarial drugs.

  As a prophylactic, the medical officer at Baledogle gave me antibiotic doxycycline hyclate tablets, which is more generally used to cure light venereal and amoebic infections.

  The result of all this dislocation was that both American and the rest of the UNOSOM command was obliged to take in every single item that they might need for their deployment. That included food, equipment, fuel, power, spares, machinery and all the water necessary for the maintenance of tens of thousands of men and women.

  Drinking water became an immediate factor after the landing and it needed urgent attention. Most of it, in plastic bottles, was shipped or, initially, flown in from the Gulf or from Kenya, and sometimes from Europe.

  From the start most European contingents supplied their personnel with bottles of water from home. The Italians and the French were immovable; they would drink nothing else and ultimately they were proved right.

  Bottled water that arrived from Saudi Arabia was found by chemists attached to US forces to be contaminated by faecal matter. Mountains of water pallets, some 50 feet high and stacked near Mogadishu Airport, were destroyed. That operation ended costing the US taxpayer millions of dollars because so much of it had been airlifted.

  That was when Americans took a few alternative steps. Accompanying their force was a ship specially built for desalinating seawater. It took a little while, but the engineers onboard eventually made a connection to a shore station with a flexible hose. Within a month they had established two more desalination plants on shore, each capable of producing almost a quarter of a million gallons of fresh drinking water a day. Even so, it was rationed.

  Up-country, in places like Baledogle, Bardera or Kismaiyu on the coast to the south, the solution was not quite so simple. Some local water sources were purified for washing and bathing. All potable water, almost for the duration, was still ferried in by road or air.

  During my time at Baledogle in the interior I counted several C-130s landing or taking off each day, many of them hauling loads of drinking water packed on pallets.

  Postscript

  At the time that the United Nations withdrew its forces from Somalia in the early 1990s, there was hardly anybody who believed that this chronically afflicted, dyspeptic nation – then said to be in the final throes of a self-induced death rattle – could ever be a threat to anyone. They were wrong. After the Americans moved on, Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda cohorts discreetly moved in. Their cadres set about establishing a series of powerful Jihadi cells in Mogadishu.

  In some respects, conditions in this vast country then began to resemble what had been taking place in Afghanistan prior to 2003. Once American and European intelligence agencies started to focus on the Horn of Africa, it was discovered that Somalia’s revolution, like a miasmic virus, had infected an entire region, all the way down the Indian Ocean coastline of Africa.

  The Russians had originally built a sophisticated air base at Baledogle, intended to play a strategic role in the Indian Ocean and adjoining Red Sea areas as the Cold War progressed. However, when they abruptly departed in the 1980s, the locals moved in and stripped the place of everything except the bricks and mortar. (Author’s collection)

  As we’ve already seen, the destruction of two American embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in 1998 with hundreds of fatalities was an almost immediate consequence. That was followed in November 2002 by another group of Islamists who tried to destroy an Israeli-owned Boeing 757 passenger jet with 261 passengers and ten crew on board at Mombasa, one of the largest harbours in East Africa. Incompetence coupled to bad judgement caused both rockets to go wide, but a suicide bomber did ram a truck loaded with explosives into one of that city’s Israeli-owned seaside complexes later that morning. A dozen tourists and staff were killed.

  Gradually, there were issues linked to Somalia that began to unravel. For instance, US Embassy officials in Nairobi were able to demonstrate that al-Qaeda had been moving into other East African countries in the region and used mainly Saudi money to buy the allegiance of poor Muslims. More of bin Laden’s operatives passed themselves off as simple men looking for a quiet place to lead a devout life. They continue to do so because the East African coastline is historically Islamic, preponderantly so, in fact.

  ‘These people put large amounts of money on the table, and sometimes marry local girls with the idea of establishing a bloodline. In this way they forge a formidable network throughout East Africa’, I was told.

  What also emerged were the identities of the people who were involved in some of the East African attacks, the majority with Somali connections. For years, Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, mastermind of two Kenyan b
ombings, together with his co-conspirator Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, sought out like-minded compatriots in the thousand or so mosques that dot this remote coastline. Fazul, a national of the Comores Archipelago, even financed a soccer team in the Kenyan coastal village of his choice and, in a brash moment, called it the al-Qaeda team.

  By all accounts, says a UN report published by All Africa Global Media, Fazul remains in hiding in the Somali capital, though he slipped back into Mombasa for a short while, prompting terror alerts from Britain and the US. Like some of his co-conspirators, Fazul survives on cash allowances provided by an al-Qaeda financial controller living in Sudan.

  Following the uncovering of caches of al-Qaeda documents in Afghanistan, several Somali sites – including bases at Las Anod in the north and El Wak near the Kenyan and Ethiopian frontiers – have been pinpointed as two of the most important al-Qaeda training bases in Africa. It has been common knowledge in Nairobi for some time now that another al-Qaeda staging post was south of the port of Kismaiyu, not far from the Kenyan border. Explosives used in the American Embassy attacks came from there before being sent by road to Kenya and Tanzania. Each time, according to US diplomatic sources, there were Somali couriers in charge.

  The suicide bomb attack on the USS Cole in Aden harbour on 12 October 2000, had Mogadishu connections. A Somali woman was identified as the paymaster; she acquired all the vehicles needed for the operation.

  An important consequence of these developments is that American defence planners have established several sites in the Horn of Africa for expanding a military presence in the region, including one or two on Somali soil. Though Washington is not saying exactly where they are, they are close enough for some of the warlords in Mogadishu to move their place of residence on a regular basis.