Abdisalam Osman, the 3-year-old featured last week, is gaining weight and recovering thanks to TB medication. He now weighs almost 19 pounds.
HOSPITAL HANDOUT PICTURE
MOGADISHU, SOMALIA—The famine is not about the lack of food.
Not here anyway, in the capital, where markets are crowded with bananas, bags of flour and sugar, and fish, hauled in from the Indian Ocean each morning.
Food aid continues to arrive by air and sea from humanitarian organizations and start-up charities responding to this year’s crisis.
The city is a high-risk famine zone because more than 100,000 came looking for help but couldn’t find it. Not quickly enough and not in the way aid should have been available.
“Mogadishu is a city that needs to be rebuilt from scratch. It has been destroyed for the past 20 years, a battleground for warring factions,” says Abdirashid Salah, a city project manager for the Benadir district.
The most recent fight has featured the militant Islamic group, Al Shabab, which retreated south this August.
“It really needs a huge reconstruction like the Marshall Plan that rebuilt Europe,” says Salah, referring to the U.S.-led efforts after World War II.
Britain may be taking a step in that direction. This week, the government announced that Prime Minister David Cameron will host a Feb. 23 high-level conference to tackle Somalia’s instability and economy.
There is the physical devastation of the country after two decades of war — damaged roads, buildings, schools and hospitals. But Salah and other leaders say the real need is to repair the city’s psyche and revamp how it operates, targeting corrupt leaders and inept bureaucrats.
Fixing walls and potholes will be easy. Stopping corruption and conquering the Shabab will not.
Al Shabab
Mogadishu is calm compared with the south, where nearly 10,000 Ugandan and Burundian forces with the African Union mission are fighting the Shabab with the help of thousands of troops from Kenya, and smaller contingents from Ethiopia and Djibouti. It is the latest chapter in the Shabab’s war against the internationally-backed Transitional Federal Government (TFG).
Neither is popular.
The Shabab’s Al Qaeda doctrine goes against traditional Somali lifestyle where women are powerful community leaders, watching soccer is a national pastime and chewing the leafy stimulant qat is a guilty pleasure. By imposing a law that includes public amputations and assassinations, as well as suicide bombings that kill civilians and young students, the group has been able to reign with terror.
The Shabab has recruited desperate Somalis who distrust the corrupt TFG. Many joined because the Shabab provides protection, weapons and a salary — something the TFG cannot.
American analyst Ken Menkhaus has called on Islamic scholars and clerics worldwide to condemn the Shabab’s tactics and message that they are fighting foreign powers on behalf of Muslims. “Al Shabab’s leaders must be left with no doubt that they are viewed by the entire Muslim world as un-Islamic war criminals,” Menkhaus said recently.
Some Somalis once regarded the Shabab as a patriotic force that repelled Ethiopian forces in late 2006. But it lost popularity during a recent campaign of terror, including an Oct. 4 bombing in Mogadishu that killed 70, mainly students applying for scholarships to Turkey and Sudan.
The combined AU, Kenyan and TFG forces are reportedly gaining ground against the Shabab, but the fighting is forcing thousands from their homes and hampering famine aid delivery.
International Crisis Group analyst Rashid Abdi said with so many in the south still at risk of starving, immediate intervention must be the priority, even if it means negotiating with Shabab leaders.
“It just makes moral sense. How many times have we negotiated with people we don’t like? History is replete with instances where we’ve negotiated with the Pol Pots of the world, to cut a deal, or to achieve some short-term objective,” said Abdi. “You can never have a global agreement with Shabab, something that’s binding. You cut local deals with key commanders in the field to allow humanitarian supplies. We just need to be circumspect.”
Winning the hearts and minds is critical. Whoever delivers the aid will win support and the Shabab is trying to fashion themselves as philanthropists — even dispatching an English-speaking emissary in October deliver aid as part of an “Al Qaeda campaign on behalf of Martyr (Osama) Bin Laden.”
London-based Somali journalist Jamal Osman filmed the well-publicized food distribution, later writing for the Guardian that while Al Qaeda’s involvement may seem shocking, “for the displaced, Al Qaeda is as good as anyone else giving them something to eat.”
Aid
Humanitarian aid should be straightforward and apolitical. But it rarely is.
This week, the Shabab banned 16 UN and European aid groups, including UNICEF and the World Health Organization, accusing them of “degrading values of democracy in an Islamic country.”
Some of these groups have complained about difficulty when trying to operate in Shabab-controlled areas due to American terrorism sanctions that left them open to prosecution if aid benefited the Shabab, even inadvertently.
“The sooner that Somalia can be less dependent on foreign aid, not just the government but the economy as a whole, the better,” said Menkhaus, speaking from Nairobi.
“The problem is that it is not going to happen any time soon as Somalia’s going to have humanitarian and development needs far off into the future.”
That means that unless the Shabab reverses its ban, responsibility falls to the International Committee for the Red Cross, Medecins Sans Frontieres and a handful of Turkish and Islamic organizations that have had recent success in Somalia. “We will find out in five or six months if they have been able to cover the enormous needs in southern and central Somalia,” said Menkhaus.
Corruption
Matt Bryden, the head of the UN Monitoring Group for Somalia, has called on the International Criminal Courts to investigate Shabab leaders and corrupt government officials whose actions contributed to the famine as war criminals.
In the meantime, his group, which reports to the UN’s Security Council, is investigating. The UN group has always probed the actions of the Shabab, but its mandate broadened in July to include TFG officials. It can hold these leaders accountable by freezing their assets and issuing travel bans.
Word is already spreading.
“People have responded and are providing information voluntarily,” Bryden said in an interview in Nairobi. ‘We already have some hard evidence suggesting corrupt behaviour.”
Good news
There are already good news stories in Mogadishu.
The Bakara Market is one. Considered Somalia’s Wall Street, whoever rules this labyrinth of shops and outdoor stalls controls the city.
A few months ago, it belonged to the Shabab and it was a war zone. The AU often fired indiscriminately at the Shabab, who hid among civilians.
But the Shabab’s August retreat moved the front line. Today, an abandoned building with the words “Star Branch” painted on a pocked wall is all that remains of their gun market. Another building that served as the Shabab’s Islamic court headquarters, according to local police, is just a dark room with a ratty couch and rusty filing cabinet.
Mogadishu’s fortified airport is busy with daily commercial flights from Nairobi or Dubai. Many arrivals are young Canadians hoping to help the country their parents fled.
One of them is 20-year-old Abdikarim Ahmed who came from Toronto in April. Mogadishu had always just been a place that existed in the faded photos his mother hangs in the Toronto money wire office where she works.
Ahmed came because he was tired of the stories of Western youth recruited by the Shabab. “I thought it was really stupid that somebody with all those hopes of learning abroad would come in and blow themselves up.”
He is now teaching the city’s police force computer skills and helping his uncle, the force’s deputy police commissioner, establish a 911 call centre (which in Somalia is reached by dialling 888).
But the backdrop to even positive efforts in Mogadishu is Somali realpolitik.
Brig.-Gen. Abdihakim Dahir Saeed, Ahmed’s uncle, said despite a recent $10-million grant from Japan specifically for city police, his troops have gone months without pay.
Unpaid wages was also a scandal in 2010, when the Associated Press uncovered that the TFG’s U.S.-trained military was not being paid their $100 a month salary. Some soldiers were selling their equipment or defecting to the Shabab.
A spokesperson with the United Nations Political Office for Somalia, UNPOS, confirmed that 3,500 police officers are still waiting for wages from June.
The delay is “due to the backlog from earlier years, which now being cleared.”
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