Shops offer the cheapest phone rates in Africa and airlines compete, a parodox of
this stateless nation.
Somalia
The Indian Ocean seaport keeps thousands of people employed.
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Timeline
1960: The
independent Somali Republic comes into being.
1969: General Mohammed Siad Barre takes power in a coup, suspends the Constitution
and forms a Supreme Revolutionary Council to administer the country along Marxist
lines.
July 1977: Somalia declares war on Ethiopia in the disputed Ogaden region. The
Somali government announces the withdrawal of its forces from the region in 1978.
1991: Barre flees Mogadishu in the face of armed opposition. Civil war breaks
out between rival warlords.
May 1991: Self-styled Somaliland Republic in the north of the country
declares independence.
December 1992-March 1995: A UN force led by the U.S. tries to establish
peace and ensure the supply of aid to victims of drought and war. This intervention
fails and UN troops pull out in 1995.
July 1998: Autonomy is declared for the north-eastern province of Puntland.
March 2000: Reconciliation talks begin in Arta, Djibouti. For the first time,
a wide range of civil society groups are represented. In August, a transitional national
assembly is elected based on clan representation.
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Key
figures
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Population:
9.4 million (1999)
GNP per capita:
n.a. (1999)
GNP per capita
annual growth rate:
n.a. (1990-98)
Life expectancy
at birth:
48 years (1998)
Adult illiteracy rate:
76 % (1998)
Sources:
World Bank, UNDP. |
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How
does a country live without a government for ten years? In the Somali capital, self-made
businessmen with the help of unsparing Islamic courts are trying to prove that they
have more might than the warlords
Flash back ten years,
when dictator Siad Barre fled the Somali capital hidden in a tank: left at the mercy
of rival factions, Mogadishu fell into violence and anarchy. Until the return of
a shaky transitional national government in early 2001, it has endured without the
shadow of a regime, and yet…
It may be a ransacked, ravaged and divided city where few public buildings still
stand, but Mogadishu does not live severed from the rest of the world. Four airline
companies run by local entrepreneurs mainly service Arab countries. More than 15
small Cessna airplanes fly in daily from Kenya, carrying khat, the narcotic leaves
widely chewed in Somalia.
The natural port of El-Ma’an, about 30 kilometres northeast of Mogadishu, employs
more than 4,000 people, while the telecommunications sector has created some 3,000
jobs. Goats, sheep and camels are shipped to Arabian countries, bringing in the hard
currency needed to import rice, sugar, cooking oil and clothes.
Ironically, Bekara market in the city’s business centre is one of the best stocked
in East Africa. Children hawk over 20 newspapers, including half a dozen poorly printed
dailies rarely running more than six pages. Crowds can be seen exchanging currencies,
both international and local. And money seems blind to factional wars: north and
south Mogadishu have their own currencies, as does the breakaway Somaliland Republic,
but all can be exchanged and converted. Transactions are made orally and exchange
rates set according to the imports and exports of the day: when thousands of heads
of livestock are exported against dollars, the green note’s value automatically drops.
Once a thriving Indian Ocean port, Mogadishu has renewed its former vocation to become
a business kingdom unrestrained by any government or regulation, commanding a top-notch
communications network and a one-million-strong diaspora that has proven a lifeline
for a country where a succession of foreign-brokered negotiations has floundered
more than a dozen times in the past decade.
At the height of the civil war in the early 1990s, when armed militia blocked travel
while looting, killing and raping, necessity proved once again to be the mother of
invention. Very high frequency (VHF) radios left behind by the fleeing regime were
seized by enterprising youngsters, who helped inhabitants contact their relatives
elsewhere in the country.
From
gunmen to battle wagons: the price of security
As
famine spread across this nation of pastoralists, they set up the “halawad” remittance
system, permitting money to be transferred at six percent interest from countries
such as Kenya, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Yemen and the United Arab Emirates. In 1995, the
doomed UN Restore Hope operation in Somalia left behind state-of-the-art communication
facilities. Since then, several telecommunication companies have cropped up in the
city, offering dollar-a-minute phone calls–the cheapest rates in Africa–to just about
anywhere in the world, along with fax and e-mail facilities.
While insecurity and regular deadly skirmishes have forced most investors to flee,
local businessmen are doing their best to prove that they can call the shots. In
the early days of the civil war, they hired gunmen from their own clans for protection,
then boosted their forces by creating large militias whom they pay and feed. To travel
across the city’s different zones, each under the control of rival factions, they
jumped over clan barriers by pooling some of their money. They equipped themselves
with battle wagons to carry their commodities from the seaports to the city centre.
And they are just about the only ones who created jobs, reducing the ranks of the
unemployed so readily recruited by roving armed gangs. At the helm of the city’s
three FM radio stations, they also have a hold over information. Each station has
its own political agenda, but all have proven valuable allies to NGOs, who regularly
use airtime to broadcast messages on health and other matters of daily survival.
More recently, this new business elite has turned to another force that has filled
the law and order vacuum over the past years: Islamic clerics and courts. According
to one of the capital’s leading businessmen, the cost of maintaining security had
become such that “we had to change our methods.” Militiamen in the service of Islamic
courts have undoubtedly made the capital a safer place, closing down dozens of checkpoints
set up by warring factions, cleaning the roads of garbage and earning the trust of
people traumatized by years of violence. Each family contributes money–and if they
cannot afford to, a son–towards their neighbourhood’s security. Businessmen have
worked on uniting the Islamic courts to create one giant security organization for
the capital. As such, Sharia law, with its merciless treatment of crime, robbery
and adultery (sentences range from executions to stoning and chopping of hands and
legs), has been introduced with little opposition. Only the warlords who feel their
influence undermined have lashed out at the clerics, accusing them of bringing Islamic
fundamentalism into the land.
Security aside, Islamic groups have filled a political and social void, from food
distribution to healthcare. Local organizations funded with money from Islamic countries
such as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait have reopened some 30 schools in the capital following
the same syllabus as in the donor country. The 22 NGOs operating in the city–several
of which are run by women–have also become influential players. These organizations
played a critical role in campaigning for the Djibouti-backed peace talks in 2000
(see box) that led to the election of a president and 245 MPs, including 25 women,
a record number in the country’s political history, at a time when Islamic law holds
sway over growing numbers.
It is one of the many ironies in this city of 1.5 million where business, Islamic
chiefs and NGOs jostle to maintain an extremely fragile order. Will these groups
continue to put their weight behind reconciliation? Will the arrival of the new president
Abdiquassim Salad Hassam, a member of the Hawiye, Mogadishu’s dominant clan, lay
arms to rest? All is far from won. Riots over fake currency notes, fuel shortages
and spiralling price hikes recently rocked the business district. Several new government
representatives have been assassinated. Refugees who have fled drought and war in
other parts of the country are crowded into makeshift huts and shell-pocked government
buildings. Electricity comes from small generators, water from household tanks or
donkey-drawn carts. Although criticized for pillaging the country’s natural resources
and paying little heed to the needy, the business community is anxious to take a
stand. It has already offered to bankroll the demobilization of some 20,000 militia
members–a move that is, of course, good for business.
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Mohamed
Abdi*: “A unique indigenous process is at work”
Somalia is
the archetypal “failed state” in UN speak. Not without reason: it’s the only country
in the world where there has been no national state, even on paper, since 1991. No
national government, no civil servants, central bank or public services–starting
with a police force and a judiciary. Not even nationality in the legal sense, since
a Somali passport, which anyone can buy for $30, isn’t recognized anywhere in the
world.
What’s more, the country is divided into three areas–Somaliland in the northwest,
Puntland in the northeast, and the southern zone, which is still at war. In Mogadishu,
or rather in the part of the city it controls–the new transitional national government
operates from a few hotel rooms paid for by local businessmen. Born in August 2000
at a peace conference in Arta, in neighbouring Djibouti, the government isn’t recognized
by any Western powers, even though many of them have given it “encouragement.” It’s
also opposed by the rulers of Somaliland and Puntland and resisted by those who have
plunged the country into chaos–the warlords and their militias.
Armed battles take a daily toll of victims. Despite recent improvements in the situation,
400,000 Somalis don’t have enough to eat. About 150,000 have been forced from their
homes by floods and a cholera epidemic has broken out.
Yet relative peace and stability have reigned for several years in Somaliland and
Puntland. Mogadishu is also returning to normal. A nation seems to be rebuilding
itself and a new kind of state emerging through a unique process: indigenous, self-sufficient,
from the bottom up, from the local to the national.
A dozen attempts by the Arab League, Egypt and Ethiopia failed to bring reconciliation
and reunification to Somalia because they sought to reimpose a classic state [from
top down] and to reach an agreement between the warlords.
The building blocks of Somali society are clans, divided up into a multitude of sub-clans.
The key institution is the shir, a meeting of clan chiefs, who sometimes have to
confer for months before reaching agreement. It was a series of shirs, gradually
extended to include clan families, that produced an independent authority in Somaliland,
with its own police, army, courts, civil servants, currency and free press.
The economy functions there, with minimal foreign aid, and is buoyed by a new generation
of businessmen that the tiny state relies upon to provide public services. The shirs
managed to neutralize, indeed eliminate the warlords by playing “civilians” off against
“military” people. Most importantly, the government authorities have won acceptance
because their laws are based on common law, and increasingly on Koranic law. They
also never imposed themselves on the clans. Instead, the government stems from them
and strictly respects their power balance.
This approach has been followed elsewhere, notably in Puntland. It was a driving
force at the recent Arta conference, which unlike most international gatherings on
the issue resembled a modernized version of a giant traditional shir. It lasted more
than six months. For the first time, intellectuals, NGO officials and even women–a
first in Somali history–turned up to speak for the “modern” sector of civil society.
Then the elders, the businessmen, religious leaders, traditional chiefs and finally
the warlords joined in. The whole driving force of the conference–which brought together
about 2,800 people–and the elections held during it rested upon balancing the clans.
Does this first attempt at giving Somalia a national government based on the country’s
social structures and, in a broad sense, its culture, have a chance? Haven’t its
sponsors — mainly Djibouti — tried to go too fast, turning their backs on a more
gradual approach that would have involved slowly bringing together or federating
self-governed areas until the whole country was covered, in a type of building-block
process?
It is safe to conclude that the Arta talks will stand as a decisive turning point,
because representatives from across Somali society had a say in the process. The
post-Arta era has begun, and it lies in their hands.
* Anthropologist
at the Paris-based Institute for Development Research (IRD).
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