Faith Fills Vacuum in Land of Clans

MOGADISHU, 17 January 2006 — Fear is rational. As long as one is anonymous death can only be an accident. It is superfluous to fear an accident in a minefield: The mine has nothing personal against you. It became different when my friend said, while we were dining on the terrace of the Shamo Hotel and Residence Plaza, a heavenly breeze blowing from the Indian Ocean, the stars of the Southern Hemisphere dominated by Mars to my left and the Orion belt to the right of my occasional gaze: “This is an oral society.”

We were at the hotel where a few months ago Kate Peyton of the BBC had been shot dead. So far, I felt far more protected by anonymity than the “technicals”. The Red Cross does not advertise its travel plans. Unlike the United Nations (when it is around, and it disappeared from Somalia in March 1995), which believes in the power of the press release, the Red Cross appreciates the virtues of silence.

But by now word would have spread that a journalist was in tow: this is an oral society. A big boy might want to know why he had not been lined up for an interview. Press coverage is good for the self-esteem of a warlord trying very hard to look like a peacelord.

Kate Peyton made a number of mistakes. The crucial one was that she walked out of the single entrance-exit, across the compound and out of the gate to get into a car that was meant to take her to the Sahafi Hotel (Journalists’ Hotel, so named in honor of the media flock that constituted its last crowd during the battles of 1993). Unlucky. A single shot, which is rarely fatal, got her. She was rushed to Medina Hospital, but her moment had come.

Our “technicals”, as well as our Land Cruiser, is inside the compound. Everyone sleeps behind walls. Zakaria, the young waiter, speaks excellent English. The only other guest is a Chinese resident who is often on his cell phone: mobile phones are the most successful business in Somalia and any international call costs only 30 cents since there are no license fees and very little advertising. A young and fair Arab is with him, perhaps his partner. In an adjoining room a radio sparkles to life, and a tall waiter begins to dance with abandon, his tray twirling on his fingertips.

From the roof, Mogadishu is peaceful, quiet and patchily lit. There are no mosquitoes. The ocean breeze has driven them away. The moon is seven nights old, and stars unaffected by the gauze of industrial pollution.

I switch on television in my room after dinner, and am pleasantly surprised by B4Music. And so to bed listening to Rabbi in Mogadishu, and up with Dev Anand and Hare Rama Hare Krishna and Ishq tera garam masala. Dawn always, and illogically, seems so much safer than night.

Ten warlords are the principal arbiters of Mogadishu, but they do not control the only guns on the street. The nippiest guns now belong to the Shariah courts, possibly because they are the youngest, perhaps because they are motivated by more than money.

The south of the city has twice the life of the north, which means what it means. The old fish market is still dead. The office buildings are still stark, wounded and empty. A donkey cart stands at the entrance of a lane, selling water.

A battered Fiat, looking as old as Mussolini, chugs by: it is the first personal civilian vehicle I see and has no number plates. A choking and lonely jeep is sign of some public transport. Then appears the first traffic jam: a truck and two donkey carts struggling to negotiate the rubble in front of a vegetable market just after the mosque.

There is a loudspeaker on the minaret of the Sheikh Al-Sufi mosque. As the name suggests, Islam was spread by Sufi mendicants and dervishes in Somalia. There is no hard line on Somali sand. Women, their heads covered in bright cloth, are a normal part of public life, and show as little hesitation as men when they spread a cardboard sheet or cloth and offer namaz at the call of the muezzin.

A sign outside the mosque shows the way to a madrasa, the largest in the city. A little later we are overtaken by a Toyota with three young men at the back. They race ahead, oblivious of the rubble or carts or even a “technical” like ours. “Shariah police,” explains my friend.

Their sense of power is evident in their speed, and the slight adolescent jeer in their eyes. They are too young to care. Older gunmen in “technicals”, with bullet belts slung across the shoulder coursing down expanding bellies, take care to travel in large bands.

They have something to care about: their salaried lives. Fifty dollars a month gets you a “technical” or a fake passport, probably Ugandan.

Col. Abdullahi Yusuf, president of the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) since October 14, 2004, has often said that he is going to destroy “Islamic terrorists” in Somalia. Col. Yusuf was part of the problem for so long that he has, by the consensus of neighbors and grudging acceptance of nominated members of Parliament, been made part of the solution in the hope that there will be one.

But it took him five months to enter Somalia after he became president, and then relocate the capital to Jowhar. His prime minister, Ali Muhammad Gedi, was greeted with bomb blasts that almost killed him when he tried to address a public rally in Mogadishu last May. He returned to Nairobi a trifle hastily.

Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys’ henna-streaked beard is familiar to anyone in Mogadishu, as are his calm, softly-delivered sermons. He lives near his mosque and was the most prominent leader of the Ittehad Islamiya. Ever since Washington put this organization on its terror list after 9/11, everyone prefers to be known as a former leader. His security includes a truck with an anti-aircraft gun but I doubt if that would be sufficient protection if the CIA decided to pick him up.

America has no official presence in Somalia, but an anti-terrorist task force of 2,000 is based in Djibouti, a Somali region in the north that was given separate independence because it was under French rule. (A parallel event in India would have made Pondicherry a separate nation.) Sheikh Aweys makes no effort to hide his conviction that Somalia can only be saved by a conversion into an Islamic state, that America has launched a war against Muslims all over the world, and that the CIA has Somali warlords on its payroll who pass on information as well as kidnap any suspect on America’s wanted list.

It is popular belief that CIA agents regularly visit their employees in Mogadishu, arriving by secret aircraft. Sheikh Aweys believes that Col. Yusuf makes the noises he does in order to get Western support for his notional government.

The Islamic movement in Somalia predates the current troubles, said Dr. Ahmed Mohammad Hassan, president of the Somali Red Crescent Society and old enough to have seen it all. We met in Nairobi, where he lives. The clergy was the first, he pointed out, to protest against the “scientific socialism” of the pro-Soviet Siad Barre, in January 1975. Barre publicly executed 11 respected clerics in revenge.

The clans, principally an alliance between Ali Mahdi and Mohammad Aidid (who, incidentally, served as ambassador to New Delhi for five years), drove out Barre in January 1991 and then spent the next year killing each other in thousands in the battle of succession. That was when famine devastated hundreds of thousands of Somalis who wanted a government rather than a civil war.

Who fills the gaps left by a withered state?

The Muslim Brotherhood came to a famished people in 1991 through effective relief work across the length of a long country in places like Merca, Kismayo, Dobley, Lugh, Berbera and of course Mogadishu. In June 1992, they, along with Ittehad Islamiya, instigated an insurgency in Puntland, eventually defeated by the Yusuf clan. In mid-1994, a council for the implementation of Shariah law was created with Sheikh Sharif Muhidin as its chairman, in Mogadishu North. It was the first experience of law in a country that had become lawless and helpless, and established a positive image of the clergy.

A clan’s power over people emerges from its role as a provider of essential necessities of life: security (in times of crisis, even food security), kinship, justice, and an economic net without too many holes. What happens when the credibility of such a powerful, traditional institution is savaged?

Over the last fifteen years, this essential fact of Somali society has indulged in spectacular self-destruction. The mosque is perhaps the only institution that provides a community net, education, justice that is implemented and a growing revenue system that can create a safety net.

The mosque was always the sole source of salvation in the afterlife for a deeply religious people. It has now become the predominant source of salvation in this life as well.

The future of both the clans and the mosque began when Siad Barre fled in January 1991. Only one of the two will find the horizon.

M.J. Akbar, mjakbar@asianage.com

Somalia | Society | | arabnews.com