the most dangerous place in the world

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The Most Dangerous Place in The WorldAuthor(s): Jeffrey GettlemanSource: Foreign Policy, No. 171 (March/April 2009), pp. 60-69Published by: Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, LLCStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20684851 .

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AXIS OF UPHEAVAL

SOMALIA

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Somalia is a state governed only by anarchy. A graveyard of foreign-policy failures,

* it has known ust six months of peace in th pst two decades. Now, as the country's

na &endlesahaos threatens to engulf an

&&

entirei region, the world again simply & T watches it burn. I By Jeffrey Gettleman

& Photography by Franco Pagetti / VII



The Axis of Upheaval: Somalia

hen you land at Mogadishu's international airport, the

first form you fill out asks for name, address, and

caliber of weapon. Believe it or not, this disaster of a city, the capital of Somalia, still

gets a few commercial

flights. Some haven't fared so well. The wreckage of a

Russian cargo plane shot down in 2007 still lies crumpled at the end of the runway.

Beyond the airport is one of the world's most stunning monuments to conflict: block after block, mile after mile, of scorched, gutted-out buildings. Mogadishu's Italianate

architecture, once a gem along the Indian Ocean, has

been reduced to a pile of machine-gun-chewed bricks. Somalia has been ripped apart by violence since the cen

tral government imploded in 1991. Eighteen years and 14 failed attempts at a government later, the killing goes on and on and on-suicide bombs, white phosphorus bombs, beheadings, medieval-style stonings, teenage

troops high on the local drug called khat blasting away at each other and anything in between. Even U.S. cruise

missiles occasionally slam down from the sky. It's the same violent free-for-all on the seas. Somalia's pirates are

threatening to choke off one of the most strategic water

ways in the world, the Gulf of Aden, which 20,000 ships pass through every year. These heavily armed buccaneers

hijacked more than 40 vessels in 2008, netting as much as $100 million in ransom. It's the greatest piracy epi demic of modern times.

In more than a dozen trips to Somalia over the past two and a half years, I've come to rewrite my own def

inition of chaos. I've felt the incandescent fury of the

Iraqi insurgency raging in Fallujah. I've spent freezing cold, eerily quiet nights in an Afghan cave. But nowhere was I more afraid than in today's Somalia, where you can get kidnapped or shot in the head faster than you can wipe the sweat off your brow. From the thick,

ambush-perfect swamps around Kismayo in the south to the lethal labyrinth of Mogadishu to the pirate den of Boosaaso on the Gulf of Aden, Somalia is quite sim

ply the most dangerous place in the world. The whole country has become a breeding ground for

warlords, pirates, kidnappers, bomb makers, fanatical Islamist insurgents, freelance gunmen, and idle, angry

youth with no education and way too many bullets. There is no Green Zone here, by the way-no fortified place of last resort to run to if, God forbid, you get hurt or in trou ble. In Somalia, you're on your own. The local hospitals barely have enough gauze to treat all the wounds.

The mayhem is now spilling across Somalia's bor ders, stirring up tensions and violence in Kenya,

Ethiopia, and Eritrea, not to mention Somalia's pirate

infested seas. The export of trouble may just be begin ning. Islamist insurgents with al Qaeda connections are

sweeping across the country, turning Somalia into an

Afghanistan-like magnet for militant Islam and draw

ing in hard-core fighters from around the world. These men will eventually go home (if they survive) and

spread the killer ethos. Somalia's transitional govern ment, a U.N.-santioned creation that was deathly ill

from the moment it was born four years ago, is about

to flatline, perhaps spawning yet another doomed inter national rescue mission. Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, the old war horse of a president backed by the United

States, finally resigned in December after a long, bitter

dispute with the prime minister, Nur Hassan Hussein.

Ostensibly, their conflict was about a peace deal with the Islamists and a few cabinet posts. In truth, it may be

purely academic. By early this year, the government's zone of control was down to a couple of city blocks. The country is nearly as big as Texas.

Just when things seem as though they can't get any worse in Somalia, they do. Beyond the political crisis, all the elements for a full-blown famine-war, displace ment, drought, skyrocketing food prices, and an exodus of aid workers-are lining up again, just as they did in the early 1990s when hundreds of thousands of Somalis starved to death. Last May, I stood in the doorway of a

hut in the bone-dry central part of the country watch

ing a sick little boy curl up next to his dying mother. Her clothes were damp. Her breaths were shallow. She hadn't eaten for days. "She will most likely die," an

elder told me and walked away. It's crunch time for Somalia, but the world is like me,

standing in the doorway, looking in at two decades of unbridled anarchy, unsure what to do. Past interven

tions have been so cursed that no one wants to get burned again. The United States has been among the worst of the meddlers: U.S. forces fought predacious warlords at the wrong time, backed some of the same

predacious warlords at the wrong time, and consis

tently failed to appreciate the twin pulls of clan and

religion. As a result, Somalia has become a graveyard of foreign-policy blunders that have radicalized the

population, deepened insecurity, and pushed millions to the brink of starvation.

Somalia is a political paradox-unified on the surface, poisonously divided beneath. It is one of the world's most homogeneous nation-states, with nearly all of its

estimated 9 to 10 million people sharing the same lan

guage (Somali), the same religion (Sunni Islam), the same culture, and the same ethnicity. But in Somalia, it's all about clan. Somalis divide themselves into a dizzy ing number of clans, subclans, sub-subclans, and so on,

with shifting allegiances and knotty backstories that have bedeviled outsiders for years.

Jeffrey Gettleman is East Africa bureau chief for the

New York Times.

62 FOREIGN POLICY



I 41

WWI

r e : The government controls just a few city blocks in

Mogadishu, near the presidential palace. The rest-an estimated 14,000 Ethiopian-trained soldiers have deserted with their weapons and uniforms.

At the end of the 19th century, the Italians and the British divvied up most of Somalia, but their efforts to

impose Western laws never really worked. Disputes tended to be resolved by clan elders. Deterrence was

key: "Kill me and you will suffer the wrath of my entire clan." The places where the local ways were disturbed the least, such as British-ruled Somaliland, seem to have

done better in the long run than those where the Italian colonial administration supplanted the role of clan elders, as in

Mogadishu. Somalia won independence in

1960, but it quickly became a Cold War pawn, prized for its strategic location in the Horn of Africa, where

Africa and Asia nearly touch. First it was the Soviets who numoed in

weapons, then the United States. A poor, mostly illiterate,

mainly nomadic country became a towering ammunition

dump primed to explode. The central government was

hardly able to hold the place together. Even in the 1980s, Maj. Gen. Mohamed Siad Barre, the capricious dictator

who ruled from 1969 to 1991, was derisively referred to as "the mayor of Mogadishu" because so much of the country had already spun out of his control.

When clan warlords finally ousted him in 1991, it wasn't much of a surprise what happened next. The

warlords unleashed all that military-grade weaponry on

each other, and every port, airstrip, fishing pier, tele

phone pole-anything that could turn a profit-was fought over. People were killed for a few pennies.

Women were raped with impunity. The chaos gave rise to a new class of parasitic war profiteers-gunrunners,

I've felt the incandescent fury of the Iraqi insurgency. I've spent freezing-cold nights in an Afghan cave.

But nowhere was I more afraid than in today's Somalia.

drug smugglers, importers of expired (and often sicken

ing) baby formula-people with a vested interest in the chaos continuing. Somalia became the modern world's

closest approximation of Hobbes's state of nature,

where life was indeed nasty, brutish, and short. To call it even a failed state was generous. The Democratic

Republic of the Congo is a failed state. So is Zimbabwe. But those places at least have national armies and

MARCH I APRIL 2009 6



The Axis of Upheaval: Somalia

national bureaucracies, however corrupt. Since 1991,

Somalia has not been a state so much as a lawless,

ungoverned space on the map between its neighbors and the sea.

In 1992, U.S. President George H.W. Bush tried to

help, sending in thousands of Marines to protect

shipments of food. It was the beginning of the post Cold War "new world order," when many believed that the United States, without a rival superpower, could steer world events in a new and morally right eous way. Somalia proved to be a very bad start.

President Bush and his advisors misread the clan

landscape and didn't understand how fiercely loyal Somalis could be to their clan leaders. Somali society often divides and subdivides when faced with internal

disputes, but it quickly bands together when con

fronted by an external enemy. The United States learned this the hard way when its forces tried to

apprehend the warlord of the day, Mohammed Farah Aidid. The result was the infamous "Black Hawk Down" episode in October 1993. Thousands of Somali militiamen poured into the streets, carrying rocket-propelled grenades and wearing flip-flops. They shot down two American Black Hawk helicop ters, killing 18 U.S. soldiers and dragging the corpses

triumphantly through the streets. This would be Strike One for the United States in Somalia.

Humiliated, the Americans pulled out and Somalia was left to its own dystopian devices. For the next

decade, the Western world mostly stayed away. But Arab organizations, many from Saudi Arabia and fol lowers of the strict Wahhabi branch of Sunni Islam,

quietly stepped in. They built mosques, Koranic

schools, and social service organizations, encouraging an Islamic revival. By the early 2000s, Mogadishu's clan elders set up a loose network of neighborhood based courts to deliver a modicum of order in a city desperate for it. They rounded up thieves and killers, put them in iron cages, and held trials. Islamic law, or

sharia, was the one set of principles that different clans could agree on; the Somali elders called their network the Islamic Courts Union.

Mogadishu's business community spotted an oppor tunity. In Mogadishu, there are warlords and money

lords. While the warlords were ripping the country apart, the moneylords, Somalia's big-business owners, were holding the place together, delivering many of the same services-for a tidy profit, of course-that a

government usually provides, such as healthcare, schools, power plants, and even privatized mail. The

moneylords went as far as helping to regulate Somalia's monetary policy, and the Somali shilling was more stable in the 1990s-without a functioning central bank-than in the 1980s when there was a

government. But with their profits came very high risks, such as chronic insecurity and extortion. The Tslamists were a solution. They provided security

without taxes, administration without a government.

The moneylords began buying them guns.

y 2005, the CIA saw what was happen ing, and again misread the cues. This ended up being Strike Two.

In a post-September 11 world, Somalia had become a major terrorism

worry. The fear was that Somalia could

blossom into a jihad factory like

Afghanistan, where al Qaeda in the 1990s plotted its global war on the

West. It didn't seem to matter that at this point there was

scant evidence to justify this fear. Some Western military analysts told policymakers that Somalia was too chaotic for even al Qaeda, because it was impossible for any

one-including terrorists-to know whom to trust.

Nonetheless, the administration of George W. Bush devised a strategy to stamp out the Islamists on the

cheap. CIA agents deputized the warlords, the same thugs

who had been preying upon Somalia's population for

years, to fight the Islamists. According to one Somali warlord I spoke with in March 2008, an American agent named James and another one named David showed up in Mogadishu with briefcases stuffed with cash. Use this to buy guns, the agents said. Drop us an e-mail if you

have any questions. The warlord showed me the address:

no [email protected].

Amid Somalia's two decades of fighting, it has been the moneylords, not the warlords, who have held the country together, pro viding the services that the

government cannot and will not-all for a hefty profit.

64 FOREIGN POLICY



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The plan backfired. Somalis like to talk; the country, ironically, has some of the best and cheapest cellular

phone service in Africa. Word quickly spread that the same warlords no one liked anymore were now doing the

Americans' bidding, which just made the Islamists even more popular. By June 2006, the Islamists had run the last warlords out of Mogadishu. Then something unbeliev able happened: The Islamists seemed to tame the place.

I saw it with my own eyes. I flew into Mogadishu in

Just when things seem they can't get any worse in Somalia, they do. Beyond the political crisis, all the elements for a full-blown famine are lining up again. September 2006 and saw work crews picking up trash and kids swimming at the beach. For the first time in

years, no gunshots rang out at night. Under the banner of

Islam, the Islamists had united rival clans and disarmed much of the populace, with clan support of course. They even cracked down on piracy by using their clan connec tions to dissuade coastal towns from supporting the

pirates. When that didn't work, the Islamists stormed

hijacked ships. According to the International Maritime Bureau in London, there were 10 pirate attacks off

Somalia's coast in 2006, which is tied for the lowest num ber of attacks this decade.

The Islamists' brief reign of peace was to be the only six months of calm Somalia has tast ed since 1991. But it was one thing to rally together to overthrow the warlords and

another to decide what to do next. A rift

quickly opened between the moderate Islamists and the extremists, who were bent

on waging jihad. One of the most radical fac tions has been the Shabab, a multiclan mili

tary wing with a strict Wahhabi interpretation of Islam. The Shabab drove around

Mogadishu in big, black pickup trucks and beat women whose ankles were showing. Even the other Islamist gunmen were scared

of them. By December 2006, some of the pop ulation began to chafe against the Shabab for

taking away their beloved khat, the mildly stimulating leaf that Somalis chew like bubble

gum. Shabab leaders were widely rumored to be working with foreign jihadists, including wanted al Qaeda terrorists, and the U.S. State

Department later designated the Shabab a ter rorist organization. American officials have

said that the Shabab are sheltering men who masterminded the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998.

Somalia may indeed have sheltered a few unsavory characters, but the country was far

from the terrorist hotbed many worry it has now

become. In 2006, there was a narrow window of

opportunity to peel off the moderate Islamists from the likes of the Shabab, and some U.S. officials, such as

Democratic Rep. Donald M. Payne, the chairman of the

House subcommittee on Africa, were trying to do

exactly that. Payne and others met with the moderate Islamists and encouraged them to negotiate a power

sharing deal with the transitional government. But the Bush administration

again reached for the gunpowder. The United States would not do much of the fighting itself, since

sending large numbers of ground troops into Somalia with Iraq and

Afghanistan raging would have been deemed insane. Instead, the

United States anointed a proxy: the Ethiopian Army. This move would be Strike Three.

Ethiopia is one of the United States' best friends in

Africa, its government having carefully cultivated an

image as a Christian bulwark in a region seething with Islamist extremism. The Ethiopian leadership savvily told the Bush administration what it wanted to hear: The Islamists were terrorists and, unchecked, they would

threaten the entire region and maybe even attack American safari-goers in Kenya next door.




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Battle ready? The Italianate architecture overlooking Somalia's.beaches is

peppered with bullet holes. A recent shooting involved the Shabab, a group of

hard-line Islamists who

have implemented sharia,

including a strict dress

code for women.

Of course, the Ethiopians had their own agenda. Ethiopia is a country with a mostly Christian leadership but a population that is nearly half Muslim. It seems only a matter of time before there is an Islamic awakening in

Ethiopia. On top of that, the Ethiopian government is

fighting several rebel groups, including a powerful one

that is ethnically Somali. The government feared that an

Islamist Somalia could become a rebel beachhead next door. The Ethiopians were also scared that Somalia's Islamists would team up with Eritrea, Ethiopia's archenemy, which is exactly what ended up happening. Not everyone in Washington swallowed the

Ethiopian line. The country has a horrendous human

rights record, and the Ethiopian military (which receives aid for human rights training from the United States) is widely accused of brutalizing its own people.

Death comes more frequently and randomly than ever before. I met one man in Mogadishu who was

chatting with his wife on her cellphone when she was cut in half by a stray mortar shell.

But in December 2006, the Bush administration shared

prized intelligence with the Ethiopians and gave them the green light to invade Somalia. Thousands of

Ethiopian troops rolled across the border (many had

secretly been in the country for months), and they rout ed the Islamist troops within a week. There were even some U.S. Special Forces with the Ethiopian units. The United States also launched several airstrikes in an

attempt to take out Islamist leaders, and it continued

with intermittent cruise missiles targeting suspected ter rorists. Most have failed, killing civilians and adding to

the boiling anti-American sentiment.

* 'Il *

The Islamists went underground, and the transitional

government arrived in Mogadishu. There was some

cheering, a lot of jeering, and the insurgency revved up within days. The transitional government was widely reviled as a coterie of ex-warlords, which it mostly was.

It was the 14th attempt since 1991 to stand up a central

government. None of the previous attempts had

worked. True, some detractors have simply been war

profiteers hell-bent on derailing any government. But a

lot of blame falls on what this transitional government has done-or not done. From the start, leaders seemed

much more interested in who got what

post than living up to the correspon

ding job descriptions. The government

quickly lost the support of key clans in

Mogadishu by its harsh (and unsuc

cessful) tactics in trying to wipe out the

insurgents, and by its reliance on

Ethiopian troops. Ethiopia and Somalia have fought several wars

against each other over the contested

Cornden reorinn thn~t Fthinnini now

claims. That region is mostly ethnically Somali, so team

ing up with Ethiopia was seen as tantamount to treason.

The Islamists tapped into this sentiment, positioning themselves as the true Somali nationalists, and gaining

widespread support again. The results were intense

street battles between Islamist insurgents and Ethiopian troops in which thousands of civilians have been killed.

Ethiopian forces have indiscriminately shelled entire neighborhoods (which precipitated a European Union

68 FOREIGN POLICY



investigation into war crimes), and have even used white

phosphorous bombs that literally melt people, according to the United Nations. Hundreds of thousands of people have emptied out of Mogadishu and settled in camps that have become breeding grounds for disease and resentment. Death comes more frequently and random

ly than ever before. I met one man in Mogadishu who was chatting with his wife on her cellphone when she was cut in half by a stray mortar shell. Another man I

spoke to went out for a walk, got shot in the leg during a crossfire, and had to spend seven days eating grass before the fighting ended and he could crawl away.

It's incredibly dangerous for us journalists, too. Few

foreign journalists travel to Somalia anymore.

Kidnapping is the threat du jour. Friends of mine who work for the United Nations in Kenya told me I had about a 100 percent chance of being stuffed into the back of a Toyota or shot (or both) if I didn't hire a pri vate militia. Nowadays, as soon as I land, I take 10

gunmen under my employ.

y late January, the only territory the tran

sitional government controlled was a

shrinking federal enclave in Mogadishu guarded by a small contingent of African Union peacekeepers. As soon as the

Ethiopians pulled out of the capital, vicious fighting broke out between the various Islamist factions scrambling to

fill the power gap. It took only days for the Islamists to

recapture the third-largest town, Baidoa, from the gov

ernment and install sharia law. The Shabab are not wild

ly popular, but they are formidable; for the time being they have a motivated, disciplined militia with hundreds of hard-core fighters and probably thousands of gun men allied with them. The violence has shown no signs of halting, even with the election of a new, moderate Islamist president-one who had, ironically, been a

leader of the Islamic Courts Union in 2006. If the Shabab do seize control of the country, they

might not stop there. They could send their battle hardened fighters in battered four-wheel-drive pickup trucks into Ethiopia, Kenya, and maybe even Djibouti to try to snatch back the Somali-speaking parts of those countries. This scenario has long been part of an ethe real pan-Somali dream. Pursuit of that goal would internationalize the conflict and surely drag in neigh boring countries and their allies.

The Shabab could also wage an asymmetric war,

unleashing terrorists on Somalia's secular neighbors and their secular backers-most prominently, the United States. This would upend an already combustible dynam ic in the Horn of Africa, catalyzing other conflicts. For

instance, Ethiopia and Eritrea fought a nasty border war in the late 1990s, which killed as many as 100,000 peo ple, and both countries are still heavily militarized along

the border. If the Shabab, which boasts Eritrean support, took over Somalia, we might indeed see round two of

Ethiopia versus Eritrea. The worst-case scenario could

mean millions of people displaced across the entire

region, crippled food production, and violence-induced breaches in the aid pipeline. In short, a famine in one of the most perennially needy parts of the world-again.

The hardest challenge of all might be simply prevent ing the worst-case scenario. Among the best suggestions I've heard is to play to Somalia's strengths as a fluid, decentralized society with local mechanisms to resolve conflicts. The foundation of order would be clan-based

governments in villages, towns, and neighborhoods. These tiny fiefdoms could stack together to form dis trict and regional governments. The last step would be

uniting the regional governments in a loose national federation that coordinated, say, currency issues or

antipiracy efforts, but did not sideline local leaders. Western powers should do whatever they can to bring

moderate Islamists into the transitional government while the transitional government still exists. Whether people like it or not, many Somalis see Islamic law as the answer.

Maybe they're not fond of the harsh form imposed by the

Shabab, who have, on at least one occasion, stoned to

death a teenage girl who had been raped (an Islamic court

found her guilty of adultery). Still, there is an appetite for a certain degree of Islamic governance. That desire should not be confused with support for terrorism.

A more radical idea is to have the United Nations take over the government and administer Somalia with an East Timor-style mandate. Because Somalia has

already been an independent country, this option might be too much for Somalis to stomach. To make it work,

the United Nations would need to delegate authority to clan leaders who have measurable clout on the ground.

Either way, the diplomats should be working with the

moneylords more and the warlords less.

But the problem with Somalia is that after 18 years of

chaos, with so many people killed, with so many gun toting men rising up and then getting cut down, it is

exceedingly difficult to identify who the country's real leaders are, if they exist at all. It's not just Mogadishu's

wasteland of blown-up buildings that must be recon

structed; it's the entire national psyche. The whole coun

try is suffering from an acute case of post-traumatic stress disorder. Somalis will have to move beyond the narrow interests of clans, where they have withdrawn for protection, and embrace the idea of a Somali nation.

If that happens, the work will just be beginning. Nearly an entire generation of Somalis has absolutely no idea what a government is or how it functions. I've seen this glassy-eyed generation all across the country, loung ing on bullet-pocked street corners and spaced out in the back of pickup trucks, Kalashnikovs in their hands and nowhere to go. To them, law and order are thoroughly abstract concepts. To them, the only law in the land is the business end of a machine gun. IiE




the most dangerous place in the world

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