By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
Published: April 14, 2011
Todd Heisler/The New York Times
The United Nations controls Somalia’s air traffic and collects its flyover fees, leaving little, Somalis say, to repair the decrepit airport in Mogadishu.
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Times Topic: Somalia
But Somali politicians are confident they can wrest at least one frontier from the grip of outside forces: the skies.
For almost 15 years, the United Nations has controlled Somalia’s airspace from a little office in Nairobi, Kenya, where an international staff of air traffic controllers sit quietly in front of computers to make sure the scores of commercial jets that crisscross Somalia each day — usually on their way to somewhere else — do not crash into one another.
Taking charge of this is far more than a matter of pride. Tens of millions of dollars in airline flyover fees have been handed over to the United Nations since the caretaker arrangement began, but Somali officials complain that very little of that has gone to Somalia itself.
So much of the money is spent paying the generous salaries of United Nations employees, they contend, that little is left over to train Somali aviation officials or repair the country’s decrepit airports. At Mogadishu International Airport, rats have chewed through the wires of X-ray machines, and chunks of concrete routinely break loose from the ceiling and crash down, frustrating Somali officials to no end.
“Definitely, we will reclaim that authority,” said Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed, Somalia’s prime minister. “It’s very simple. The airspace belongs to the Somali people. We are a sovereign country. This isn’t just about the money.”
United Nations officials say they agree, in principle, with allowing Somalia to play a bigger role in managing its own airspace, but they are worried about handing over the keys to a complex and potentially dangerous operation to a government that is constantly teetering on life support.
Even in the little zone of Mogadishu that it loosely controls, the Transitional Federal Government of Somalia struggles to demonstrate that it can pay its own salaries and pick up the trash, let alone juggle several dozen jetliners hurtling through the air at 600 miles per hour.
“It’s fundamentally a question of safety and security,” said Denis Chagnon, spokesman for the International Civil Aviation Organization, the United Nations agency that took over Somalia’s airspace in 1996. Mr. Chagnon said that although the agency had stepped up in disaster zones before by, for example, temporarily managing the skies above Kosovo and Haiti, “nothing really compares to Somalia.”
“If you are going to hand over the control to installations in Somalia, you have to ensure that those facilities are up to par, that the personnel involved are well trained,” he said.
Talks have been going on between the two sides for months, but some Western diplomats are suspicious of the Somali government’s interest in the airspace fees. Transparency International recently ranked Somalia the most corrupt country in the world, and one Western diplomat contended that there was “a feeding frenzy now” because it is unclear how much longer the transitional government’s mandate will be valid.
Given the uncertainty over what will happen after that, some Somali officials are “going after any little pocket of money they can find,” said the diplomat, who was not authorized to speak publicly. Continued
For almost 15 years, the United Nations has controlled Somalia’s airspace from a little office in Nairobi, Kenya, where an international staff of air traffic controllers sit quietly in front of computers to make sure the scores of commercial jets that crisscross Somalia each day — usually on their way to somewhere else — do not crash into one another.
Taking charge of this is far more than a matter of pride. Tens of millions of dollars in airline flyover fees have been handed over to the United Nations since the caretaker arrangement began, but Somali officials complain that very little of that has gone to Somalia itself.
So much of the money is spent paying the generous salaries of United Nations employees, they contend, that little is left over to train Somali aviation officials or repair the country’s decrepit airports. At Mogadishu International Airport, rats have chewed through the wires of X-ray machines, and chunks of concrete routinely break loose from the ceiling and crash down, frustrating Somali officials to no end.
“Definitely, we will reclaim that authority,” said Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed, Somalia’s prime minister. “It’s very simple. The airspace belongs to the Somali people. We are a sovereign country. This isn’t just about the money.”
United Nations officials say they agree, in principle, with allowing Somalia to play a bigger role in managing its own airspace, but they are worried about handing over the keys to a complex and potentially dangerous operation to a government that is constantly teetering on life support.
Even in the little zone of Mogadishu that it loosely controls, the Transitional Federal Government of Somalia struggles to demonstrate that it can pay its own salaries and pick up the trash, let alone juggle several dozen jetliners hurtling through the air at 600 miles per hour.
“It’s fundamentally a question of safety and security,” said Denis Chagnon, spokesman for the International Civil Aviation Organization, the United Nations agency that took over Somalia’s airspace in 1996. Mr. Chagnon said that although the agency had stepped up in disaster zones before by, for example, temporarily managing the skies above Kosovo and Haiti, “nothing really compares to Somalia.”
“If you are going to hand over the control to installations in Somalia, you have to ensure that those facilities are up to par, that the personnel involved are well trained,” he said.
Talks have been going on between the two sides for months, but some Western diplomats are suspicious of the Somali government’s interest in the airspace fees. Transparency International recently ranked Somalia the most corrupt country in the world, and one Western diplomat contended that there was “a feeding frenzy now” because it is unclear how much longer the transitional government’s mandate will be valid.
Given the uncertainty over what will happen after that, some Somali officials are “going after any little pocket of money they can find,” said the diplomat, who was not authorized to speak publicly. Continued
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