By Declan Walsh, Globe Correspondent | June 12, 2004
NAIROBI -- The desert border between Kenya and its northern neighbor, Somalia, is hot, tough, and unforgiving -- a little like relations between the two countries at the moment.
A diplomatic spat has sparked a stream of ill-tempered exchanges across the dusty frontier. There have been angry words, tit-for-tat expulsions, and logjams at border posts. At the heart of the dispute is the small green-covered Somali passport.
The argument stretches back to the collapse of the Somali state in 1991, when the dictator Mohamed Siad Barre was toppled. Since then, the country has been controlled by warlords, each of whom rules his "turf" with a private army of well-armed militiamen. (The two exceptions are the breakaway provinces of Somaliland and Puntland in northern Somalia, which are pushing for recognition as independent countries.)
This institutionalized chaos makes life very difficult for ordinary Somalis. Apart from the dangers of getting caught in the crossfire between rival clans, there is no authority to provide such services as health care, education, or social welfare. Neither is there any way of getting official papers, such as birth certificates, identification papers -- or passports.
The result is a thriving market in "semiofficial" papers. Many passports are issued in Mogadishu's Bakara Market, a notorious corner of the capital where money buys everything from spices to smuggled televisions to rockets powerful enough to down an airplane. The "passport office" is a small shop where for $25 and a passport photo anyone -- even a visiting foreigner -- can become a Somali citizen in a matter of minutes.
The documents are frauds, of course, but not forgeries. As Siad Barre was being ousted in 1991, boxes of blank passports were stolen from government stores and found their way to Bakara. As it became clear that no legitimate government was going to emerge, traders started to hawk the passports. Somali citizens, desperate to travel abroad, were a willing market.
Formalities are kept to a minimum. For double the $25 fee, one can apply for a red-covered diplomatic passport. The procedure takes about five minutes.
For visitors to Somalia, like this reporter, the passports make a unique souvenir in a country with no tourist attractions. But for Somalis, they are the only available travel documents. And in the past few months, they sparked the argument with Kenya.
Since the beginning of May, Kenya has refused to accept Somali passports, saying they are too easily obtained by dangerous people -- like the suspected Al Qaeda operatives who bombed a tourist hotel on the Kenyan coast in November 2002, killing at least 13 people. United Nations investigators say the extremists may have used such fake documents to slip through Kenya's lax border posts.
The final straw was when authorities discovered the passports were on sale in Eastleigh, an immigrant quarter of Nairobi where many Somali refugees live.
The United States may have had a hand in the ban. Since the Mombasa bombings, Washington has pressured Kenya to tighten its porous borders. .
For ordinary Somalis, the passport ban is the latest in a long line of body blows. The chaotic country, although it hardly seems possible, is going from bad to worse. A cease-fire signed in October 2002 has become a national joke. Almost 50 people died in a surge of fighting last month.
Foreign aid workers are regularly kidnapped for ransom.
Peace is not in the interest of the warlords, who are unlikely to fare well in any democracy. Meanwhile, foreign extremists may be continuing to profit from the chaos. Recently aid workers leftDinsor, a sleepy southern town, after discovering a freshly planted land mine on the local airstrip. Worried UN officials say the sophistication of the device suggest it was placed there by an external force -- possibly Al Qaeda or its local sympathizers.
Otherwise, Western countries have largely lost interest in Somalia's downward spiral. A decade after leading a peace mission that ended in ignominious retreat, the United States has committed just $350,000 to the peace process. Instead, it spends its cash on military maneuvers and covert operations -- including paying Somali warlords to hand over Al Qaeda suspects, UN sources say.
The passport ban has struck a nerve among the famously proud Somalis. The president of the largely powerless transitional government, Abdiqassim Salad Hassan, recently announced he would refuse to attend the peace talks until his passport was recognized.
Ordinary Somalis, meanwhile, say they feel more forgotten by the outside world than ever. Desperate parents pay human traffickers thousands of dollars to smuggle their children into the West.
As one Somali emigrant in London recently wrote in a despairing e-mail: "This ban [will] push Somalia further into the void."
© Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.