THE TERRORIST FROM THE HABAR-GIDIR

On a February morning, early enough that the heat’s not yet terrible, a twin-prop Ethiopian Airliner sets down outside the town of Dire Dawa, in the dry, high elevations of northeastern Ethiopia, to allow the dozen passengers to stretch their legs while the ground crew lugs aboard six one-bale-size burlap sacks of “greenleaf,” or “khat” or “chaht”—a stimulant herb, the African Horn’s drug of choice. Next stop, Shilabo, about fifty miles from Somalia; then across the border by land. Two decades of war have strangled Somalian commerce, but chaht moves everywhere across the Horn as easily as water might, if water ever moved in this desert country, trickling steadily into every hamlet and hooch.

Among the passengers heading for Shilabo with the chaht is forty-two-year-old Mohamed Farah Artran, an officer for the Somali National Alliance, which has emerged under Gen. Mohamed Farah Aidid as the country’s most powerful faction. Around the hangars of the airstrip he moves not with tropical languor, but actually with considerable nervousness: The truth is he’s red-eyed, palpitating, chomping on a mouthful of chaht and no longer enunciating intelligibly. He’s been up all night eating this stuff. He’s heading to Somalia’s seaside capital, Mogadishu, to wave good-bye to the U.N. troops as the international body pulls up stakes and sails away from his homeland, and in his company there travels an American of extremely doubtful competence, a confused and desperately friendly and, Artran hopes, well-bankrolled American who continually smiles and nods and repeats, “Salaam,” to anyone who’ll listen: somewhat the idiot nephew.

Artran’s friends call him by his nickname, “Billeh,” which means “long-awaited child”—the long-awaited son born to a family of the Habar-gidir clan and grown now to slightly less than medium size, carrying fake Ethiopian ID and a pair of extra jeans in a plastic shopping bag and making small, strange, surreptitious hand signals, as they wait to get back on the plane, to his American, whom he insists on calling “Mike,” which isn’t his name. In fact for this journey Billeh has invented a number of aliases and cover stories, stratagems that seem to spring forth boldly but swiftly pass along, like entities on a carousel; and Billeh has also decided they should sit separately and not talk to each other—but he can’t help it, he’s ripped on “greenleaf” and feels eminent and sociable, ignores his own instructions, tells the American he’s glad they’re making this trip because in Marka, south of Mogadishu, his brother has placed their uncle under a form of house arrest, threatening to kill the uncle if he steps foot outside his door, and Billeh would like to travel down there and get the trouble between them smoothed over, possibly by threatening to kill his brother. The American, a writer of some kind, is masquerading, for the moment anyway, as a German welling engineer—the water kind, not the oil. Somalis like water, and they like Germans. Better than they like Americans certainly.

However dizzying their strategies, Billeh knows he can keep the American alive in Somalia. Trained in terrorist tactics thirteen years ago in Israel by the Mosad, the Israeli secret service, he’s been involved in the Somali struggle since the fighting started against the dictator Siad Barre in the late seventies, a struggle that only intensified after Barre was brought down in ’91. Lately Billeh’s been living in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, but he’s a distant relative of Gen. Mohamed Farah Aidid, head of the SNA—they both belong to the Habar-gidir clan—and his contacts back home are the best. Although he delights in behaving like a secret agent with dementia, there’s probably not much danger.

Billeh only worries about the state of Mike’s money supply. If there’s enough of that, he can help this white guy, whatever his aim. The American’s aim: to see the U.N. off and remain behind as the Last Journalist Out of Mogadishu. Billeh’s aim: Cash Extraction and Total Assets Transplant. He brings the American’s wandering attention continually, gently, through timeworn Somali proverbs and patient explanations of Reality, back to this overarching purpose. “Where are we?” Mike keeps asking, “is it on the map? Do we have plan?” Billeh quotes venerable wisdom: “With money, you can make a road”—he points aloft now—“up in the sky. This saying,” he assures the American, “was in existence long before the Wright brothers.”

Shilabo is only a village, but it gets a place on the map because it has water. Also a dirt runway. The plane puts down in the brown darkness blown up by its props and taxis to a patch of pavement about the size of a basketball court in the midst of the East African desert. Billeh and Mike and the sacks of chaht disembark, and the plane is gone. Not a building, not a road in sight, just dried-up scrub and runty trees like big toadstools floating randomly on a sea of red dirt. A couple of trucks in the nowhere. This is still Ethiopia, though the inhabitants, when they find them, will be Somali.

“You must get your story straight,” Billeh suddenly declares. “We are visiting the area.”

“And I’m German?”

“Visiting on the Ethiopian side—only Ethiopia. Never the border. We visit Lobopar. Parmaguc. Fer-fer. Kaprigar.”

“How do you spell that? Is it on the map? Am I still an engineer?”

Some boys wearing tattered cammies and armed with pretty funky-looking Kalashnikovs turn up to load the chaht onto an Isuzu pickup. For fifty Eithiopian birrh they take the new arrivals into Shilabo, which materializes suddenly out of the general dead vegetation not a half-mile away, a town of sticks and dried mud and a couple hundred camels creaking upright off their knees to sidle out of the way as the travelers come across the square. A couple of nice-looking women pass by doing the slide, draped from crown to instep in wild rags. Children stand stock-still in the shadows, staring. Most of the buildings seem to be teat-shape huts, each with a fifty-gallon drum nippling out the top for ventilation, but others, low structures of adobe, front the lanes as well.

“Our overland trip begins here,” Billeh says. “We hire a car for Lobopar. There’s a Landcruiser. You have a lot of money? It will cost.”

“Is this a story, now, or the actual plan?”

“To get,” Billeh says, “you must spend.”

PHONY GERMAN WITH A NOTEBOOK

The hundred dollar bill’s no good—” It’s not correct”—they want one made in 1990—don’t ask me to fathom the meaning of such considerations. But I’ve got one—I have three hundreds left, and thankfully one is a 1990. Otherwise we’d be making our home here forever in Shilabo. Billeh’s banging away with his jawbones at that chaht. He’s one masticating mother. And then a caravan—nine camels with big wicker water baskets either side of their humps. The Landcruiser’s going to melt. But that’s no problem—we’ll camel out of here. There’s a dust-devil about half a klik tall whirling outside of town.

They make the currency exchange, and then there’s the petrol thing, there is always, in Africa, the petrol thing—somebody knows about a gallon somewhere in a jug hid like moonshine. And we intend to burn it up across this desert. They say Shilabo burned down in the ’64 Ethiopian-Somali war, then again in the war of ’77, and then once more in the nineties during the Ethiopian internal troubles when Ethiopia’s most recent dictator was getting ejected. You’d think the fire was yesterday, looking out across this desert like rusty ash dotted with bushes burned black in the seasonal drought. Sitting in a three-legged chair propped against a tree, waiting for the petrol to happen, I try some of Billeh’s chaht—he’s a poor man, yet like all but the most devoutly Muslim Somali males, he spends a couple of dollars to supply himself with an ounce each day. No ritual has attached to this greenleaf; you just pick up a handful and shove it into your mouth. A cilantro-looking herb, but tasteless. It doesn’t kick much, not compared, say, to a pinch of Skoal, but after a few mouthfuls we’re skating out over the desert in the hot-wired Landcruiser in the company of two guys toting AK-47s with the wind licking our heads, hauling a hurricane of dust. The Somali gunmen blast us along an old tank track (not on the map) toward the unattended border, stampeding livestock into the waste, the inexplicable burros, the idiot goats and the buoyant, trotting camels, and I’m thinking, Hey, of course I can do this, I just point the way I’m going and trust these people. They’ve got half a pound of chaht among them. A chalky radium-green residue froths their lips, as if they’ve been devouring fireflies.

Over the fifty miles between Shilabo and the Habar-gidir village of Lobopar the vehicle breaks down five times. Billeh and I remain seated while the other two stand in the shade of the raised hood, apparently praying, and when they get back aboard and the driver touches together the two dangling wires beneath the steering column, the monster starts again, all five times. One more stop at sunset—we’re close to Lobopar by now—while the two get out and fall to their knees at the roadside beside their Kalashnikovs, bowing northwest toward Mecca. Billeh puts his feet on the dash and smirks. He was raised Islamic but he’s seen enough of this world to convince him it’s all a lot of crap.

SECRETS OF THE OGADEN

They arrive at today’s destination. Just the way Shilabo did, Lobopar turns up around them as if conjured, a wavering flimsy habitation of straws and sticks and patchwork canvas domes, goats on frayed pickets or fenced around by corrals of uprooted mesquite, fifty camels kneeling in the dirt. Huge birds that might be ostriches bred with storks pace the outskirts, tearing at trash—Billeh calls them “guzuru.” The sunstruck quiet gives over to a general melee as the clan turns out to study the visitors, in particular this first Caucasian to make an appearance here in years.

Billeh settles Mike, whom he’s also taken to calling “Idaho White Boy,” on a straw mat under a thatched port before the entire population of the village—women in long wraps, and children almost naked and the several elders with their hair and Vandykes bleached out orange—to hear the villagers’ tales. Only the elders speak. They explain to the writer that this is the Ogaden, the border region inhabited by nomad Somalis in makeshift hamlets linked by the tank tracks from then-dictator Siad Barre’s war against Ethiopia in 1977—an attempt to annex these Somali-populated areas of Ethiopia. Barre lost, leaving his kinsman under the doubtful protection of the Ethiopian Army, who quarter in scattered encampments throughout the Ogaden, subsisting through a casual and meager shakedown operation among these villages. Lobopar itself is without facilities, not even a well—water’s brought by camel from twenty miles off. They have no money, no medicine, nothing to trade with but what they can raise up out of the red-powder desert around them. Mostly goats and camels that forage in the surrounding earth, the goats for slaughter and the camels for milk and for transport. In the Ogaden, life comes hard, but these have won through yet another day, unlike all the others they’ve lost to sickness, famine, massacres, battles. The villagers sit close together, everyone touching someone else, steeped in a contentment that seems, at this moment, perpetual. It occurs to the writer that the secret way to happiness is in knowing a lot of dead people.

The session ends at nightfall, when the muezzin calls like one astonished by, skewered, even, by a great grief; and the villagers, a hundred or so, kneel down in a line on the track through town for the day’s last prayer…and rise up transformed by the evening’s prospects—because now is the holy month of Ramadan, during which they deny themselves food, drink, or sex during the daylight hours, those hours ended now, entirely forgotten.

The women bring out metal plates piled with chunks of goat and spaghetti—which they call “macaroni”—and Del Monte tomato sauce. Mike is, as always, bewildered by these things offered to him, and with mingled amusement and pity Billeh shows him how to eat pasta the Somali way, without utensils, taking a shock of it in his right hand, turning it this way and that and gathering the long strands up into his palm, and then shoving it into his face. Mike prefers the anjera—a floppy pancake the size of a hubcap which they tear apart and dip into a thick, tangy sauce.

And then the chaht, and then it starts. Nobody jumps up dancing, but in several tents groups of men engage in a kind of headlong socializing, chomping greenleaf and conversing all night in the ancient way of nomads run across one another: One man holds forth in a near-monotone for many minutes, maybe an hour, encouraged by one-syllable interjections from one of the others, coming at five or six second intervals—“Oh—oh—oh. Aw—aw—aw. Ha—ha—ha,” et cetera—and then the next one starts—chewing, chewing, verbalizing all night long, pausing only to hock and spit or gulp some tea.

Just before dawn, as the men go down, the women get up, and the roosters. Not half an hour later the men roll out again for the morning prayer. When do they sleep? The writer suspects that in a certain sense, they just never wake up all the way, but rest continually, simultaneously moving and surviving.

Even Lobopar has its Toyota, a dinky sedan with three of its windows shot out, and Billeh and Mike, escorted now by two more guys named Mohamed—one’s nicknamed “the Lion” and the other they just call “that one”—climb aboard and head out of Lobopar straight toward the sunrise, straight into its fiery throat it seems, alongside termite berms like primitive monuments, eight, nine, ten feet tall and five feet through, skirting obstacles—old tires, busted axles, piled stones—laid in the way by camel herders who don’t like vehicles using their roads. When a camel looms up on this close path, the beast ends up harried ahead for as much as a mile before it hits on the notion of stumbling off, exhausted and far from its pasture, into the scrub to let the car get past.

Close to the Somali border, the party stops to check out the weapons. Billeh’s been lent a Kalashnikov, sand-blasted smooth and dull like those of the other two, each with a thirty-shot clip that may or may not be full, they refuse to say, and also Lion carries a sort of rocket, or grenade, that screws down onto the muzzle of his Kalashnikov and appears not to bear experimenting with. Lion produces from his waist-band, for the writer’s use, a 1917 model U.S. Army .45 caliber six-shooter, probably a Colt. It’s got three forty-five automatic rounds in its cylinders, which are chambered for the long .45s, not the shorter automatic rounds. But Lion and Billeh both promise it’ll shoot, all three bullets, anyway. “One for each of you, if we’re attacked, and one for me,” the writer jokes—they laugh like hell for twenty seconds, then shut down tight and inform him seriously that Muslims don’t do suicide, it’s banned by the Koran. He assures them the Bible’s against it too, and everybody’s comforted.

They travel on. The writer’s sleepy, the Somalis jazzed as ever. Billeh nudges him at one point, asking, “Do you remember when we came to the fork, five kilometers ago? That was the border. Now it’s Somalia.”

AMONG THE SUBMITTERS

Mataban, Somalia, looks like an actual town, with a sector of European-built stucco houses, and a tarmac highway passing through—Billeh says it’s known as “the Long Road,” and soon enough Mike will find out why—and a larger sector of hooches cobbled together out of sticks and straw with a stray piece of cardboard maybe and the more prepossessing ones roofed with “galvanize.” On either side of the road, several shops trade from a modest store of sundries and canned goods, and two nameless dirt-floor cafes under tin roofs even have generators and electric lights, and one old refrigerator each. The town fades quickly into desert pasture where the livestock, Mataban’s most numerous inhabitants, forage surrounded by scavenging birds. A few rickety pickups cruise the streets, and a burro hauls a fifty-gallon water drum up and down the block on a two-wheeled cart, unattended by any driver.

Lion stays, but That One heads back home to Lobopar with a fifty-dollar bill. Billeh parks the writer before a plate of steaming goat parts at a long table in the larger cafe. Nobody else is eating. Somali men bunched around a shortwave radio listen with screwed-up, painful faces to the Somali BBC’s description of the misfortunes of the U.S. super middleweight boxer Gerald McLellan, beaten into a coma by Nigel Bend of the U.K. Quiet men, most of them bearing rifles. “They like Germans very much,” Billeh reminds the writer.

The drought of ’89 has passed, and the resulting famine of ’90, and folks look fed—there aren’t any fat people sitting around, but there’s food when you want: goat’s meat, onions, camel’s milk, pasta or rice, and bread slightly scorched in the adobe ovens. Dates. Watermelon. Mirinda brand orange drink. When Mike orders coffee, the old man running the place spoons Taster’s Choice Freeze-Dried directly into a cup of hot tea. No alcohol on sale, but in addition to chaht many seem addicted to Sportsman cigarettes made in Kenya of Kenya-grown tobacco. By their possession of cigarettes it’s easy to tell the lapsed Muslims from the pious ones. Even the smokers and green-lipped chaht-fiends turn out five times a day for prayers, however—all but the very few non-Muslims, like the writer, and such jaded warriors as Billeh, who spends the noon prayer time getting his party quartered in a hooch behind one of the cafes and learning that the town’s only two-way radio, by which he’d hoped to call his SNA contacts down the highway, doesn’t work. He shrugs and cops a bag of greenleaf from an elderly hunchback in rags and sits down to elevate his spirits.

In fact chaht, or “plant,” or “vegetable” appears to be the chief focusing point for these guys—at about $1.75 an ounce, each goes through a couple of ounces in a twenty-four-hour period if he can, taking a pinch now and then through the day and at the cocktail hour going at it seriously, and then, after the day’s last prayer, absolutely single-mindedly, heading through until almost dawn. Nothing stops the flow of commerce in chaht, not even civil war. It’s mild but they treat it like a big bad drug, tripping out on it for days as if it were crystal meth. The warlords use it to pay off their militia. Thus its mystique: chaht, the warrior’s drug of bloodshed and ecstasy. It certainly works for Billeh, the writer writes in his notebook. He stays…

He stays for the most part comprehensible although he hasn’t slept for two days and claims it won’t be necessary for two more weeks and enjoys making jokes I don’t get or take as serious statements, and feels compelled sometimes to inform me suddenly that, for instance, Bill Clinton is a Democrat, or that he himself has seen many UFOs, and he’s constantly changing the cover story, frequently reversing our plans or abruptly contradicting his previous explanations, and generally adding to the state of desert-dusted windblown confusion around these parts and particularly in my head. Or he speaks in strange metaphors—“The river is very wide and we can’t swim to Belet Weyne because our hands are broken” means, I eventually discover, that there are bandits camped between here and there who want to shoot our asses off, and we’ll need more than two Kalashnikovs and twelve bullets and one Mystery Surprise Rocket Grenade to dissuade them—and his diction sometimes caroms off figures of speech: by “self-taught difference” he means, I guess, to say “self-defense.” Like every person I’ve met here, he hates the U.N., from the lowest minion to the secretary general, whom he refers to as “Boutros Boutros Boutros Boutros-Ghali.” He likes my Visa credit card and has determined our highest aim should be to convert it into its cash equivalent, which is what he thinks the credit limit actually is. He informs everyone that I’m German, then asks me to tell them about Idaho. As for me, I have chewed enough chaht this session that my scalp is crawling around pleasantly on my head. In fact what it reminds me of is ephedrine, an asthma remedy sold over the counter at California truck stops to keep you driving all night…

But nobody’s driving anywhere, not out of Mataban.

In three days the strip of shacks along the straight band of tarmac has been transformed into a little city of nearly twenty cross-country vehicles and their occupants. Trucks hauling goats, trucks hauling camels on their knees, hauling sacks of salt, or empty fifty-gallon drums, and trucks going back unloaded to the capital for more of whatever they’ve been selling up this way. Passengers collect, folks just looking for a better place, dozens, and then scores of them, straggling in out of the desert. The two cafes can’t feed them all—the trucks have turned into shelters for all the people sleeping on straw mats underneath them as they wait—but what, Mike wants to know, are we waiting for? For militia to escort us. For word it’s safe to travel. For a bridge to be repaired. The story keeps shifting across the screen of these patient faces, the explanations glimmer in the endless monologues out of iridescent lips. But something’s wrong, something threatens, in the next forty miles. In every truck at least two men carry Kalashnikovs, and a couple of rigs are even topped by belt-fed machine guns on tripods—just the same, this desert armada doesn’t rate the military challenge ahead from the bandits, or the rival clan, or whoever they are. Mike suspects it’s the bandits themselves who’ll be escorting them in the end, or that the bandits aren’t really there but provide the basis for some militia garrison’s existence, and so their protection is completely unnecessary but nevertheless required—one of those African things, the result of deliberations made without reference to logic or utility. When logic and utility fall from grace, the mystical authority of subtler concerns rises up like an intoxicating incense, and everything is done for reasons no one understands.

Mike lives in the interim in an eight-by-ten hut with a revolving gang of young Habar-gidir guerrillas, as many as nine at a time trying to sleep in here, rather a close situation, skinny though they are. Suave men in ragged counterfeit brand-name apparel—“LIVE’S 501s”, for instance, made in China. They’ve discovered Mike’s taste for goat’s liver and rice and make sure he gets it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. He doses the cloudy well water with iodine, but he’s overlooked the disease potential in the casually handled chaht, and now he’s feverish and sinusy and given to fits of trembling. They’ve issued him his own AK to sleep with, but he doesn’t think it’s one that shoots. He’s weary of their stinking feet, their incredible patience, their monotone bull sessions and fake clothes. Lion looks after him like a child after a puppy.

Muslim means submitter. Lion is devout in his submission. He doesn’t smoke or drink or chew, observes the daylight fast of Ramadan. He and a few of the other guerrillas rise before each dawn to worship standing upright in the hooch with their heads bowed, not only out of piety but because the roof is low. At day’s end he joins the hundred others kneeling outside on the tarmac, where the desert wind mingles in the softness of dusk with the chanted prayers, which sound like forlorn questions in this emptiness, and with the goats’ terrified bleating. Afterward Lion takes a small meal and hunches over Mike’s tiny fifty-dollar shortwave, getting the Voice of America in Real Slow English. Lion has been shot twice, once in the right leg and once through the left shoulder and out his back, and recovered without medical treatment from the first wound, was treated in Mogadishu for the second, still carries a bullet fragment in his neck. Tonight the radio talks about the tragic super middleweight title fight. Lion reacts with intense interest, then with alarm, finally with deep sadness, with genuine pain. McLellan remains in a coma, floats in a darkness six thousand miles away.

DOROTHY’S DESPERATE NOTEBOOK

Evening, Sunday: Well, we still haven’t gone anywhere. And here I am once again in Africa, waiting. Waiting for tomorrow. At which time something may or may not happen. I remember now how hateful is this place for an impatient man.

Looks like better than two dozen trucks bunched up in this town now. Last night we lay out on a mat talking and watching meteors in the cool night while the warmth came up out of the ground beneath us. “We”: are me, called the White Boy, or sometimes Mike (for no discernible reason), and two Mohameds—Billeh from Mogadishu and the Lion from Lobopar. We’re going to Mogadishu with extremely vague notions as to what happens then…“The Lion”—I suppose Billeh’s the Tin Man, and we’re looking out for the Scarecrow—and naturally I’m Dorothy, and I guarantee you, Africa is as close as you can come to the Land of Oz, or as close as anybody would want to come.

In the dark it seems as distant to the horizon as to the sky overhead. No moon tonight, only every star there ever was, and satellites coursing by, and occasionally but rarely some blinking thing that might be an airliner seven miles up. Another night under a strange sky in a different realm. I listen to the reports on the shortwave of bombings, attacks, plagues, even witch-burnings (seventy elderly women burned in South Africa in the last ten months) and I feel I’m living in a world where such things are all there is…I’ve got a pocket New Testament, but I can’t read much of it—because I’m living in the Bible’s world right now, the world of cripples and monsters and desperate hope in a mad God, world of exile and impotence and the waiting, the waiting, the waiting. A world of miracles and deliverance, too. Add the invention of the Kalashnikov in 1947 into the mix, and life gets exciting. So it’s hard to read the Acts of the Apostles as I have been and consider that it’s been going on since the Creation. It shakes your faith—my faith, anyway.

Mohamed from Lobopar—we called him That One—shows up suddenly. He’s driven all night to tell us that after we left there, the Ethiopian army locked down the village for eight hours and searched every hooch, looking for the White Guy. The Somalis stonewalled them, told them nothing. “Why are you helping the White Guy,” the soldiers asked, “when you’re black like us?” And the villagers replied, “Our goats are white—they give us meat and milk. But we’ve never gotten anything but shit from the Ethiopian Army.”

 

Morning, Monday: And now, the latest from the Horn of Africa: We’re going nowhere, we’re doing nothing, and I’m not getting any better at either one.

 

Afternoon: I’m out of the sun in the hooch we’ve been staying in, and little coins of sunlight get in through the gaps to make it kind of pretty in here.

In his vague half-joking semicoherent ambiguous way, Billeh seems to be indicating that the Ethiopian Army’s interest in me has elevated me to the status of international fugitive, and that I should definitely plan a route home that bypasses that beautiful country. I’m guessing I can somehow get to Nairobi and from there to Frankfurt…But I’m getting way ahead of myself, which, in Africa, is step number one on the road to mental chaos…

 

Morning, Tuesday: The passengers are boarding the convoy now—Toyota pickups, Mercedes and Fiat diesels. Maybe a hundred people, fifty goats, eighteen camels on their knees heading into the big city, bedded down in a double hauler and gazing out of their tremendous serene eyes at the Horn of Africa. I’m sitting up front in a big throbbing blue Nissan diesel. We’re preparing to go. There were never any bandits—a bridge was out…we never waited…we were never here…Now we’ve come to the edge of town, nothing before us but the absolutely straight strip of tarmac across the absolutely flat desert. And we stop. The bridge is out. We were always here…We’ve never been anywhere else. The driver speaks only a few words of English. I ask him what we’re doing and he tells me, “We’re waiting.”

 

Ten minutes later: We’re moving—somebody had to radio ahead—evidently there are bandits, or were bandits…Five miles later: We’ve stopped. The truck just ahead of us has a flat tire—actually it doesn’t look flat, but they’re changing it. Two miles later we stop again at a little roadside settlement. Apparently it’s “time for a break”…—it’s teatime! There are no—repeat, no—bandits. All the trucks pull aside, everybody gets out. We’ve been on the road ninety minutes and we’ve come about twelve miles. A dozen people, six or seven hooches, but this place has a name—Per Gerit. There are hundreds of folks on this convoy—or say one hundred, at least, almost all adults, men and women—and of all these I’m the only one who thinks there’s anything wrong with setting out to go somewhere and then stopping immediately and repeatedly.

Suddenly (thirty minutes later) everybody’s leaping up, scattering, peering down the road, cocking the actions on their guns. Then we all jump in the trucks, drive to a deserted village a kilometer up the road, and stop again…Now we’re going again…The road’s lined with gunmen—then a detour fording a dry river, and we maneuver around two trucks blown up last week, as the driver tells me now—the bridge is out, and there are bandits…

The tarmac ends—400 kilometers between Mataban and Mogadishu, into which distance they’ve managed to cram seven billion miles of bad road, and all kinds of hot weather. We’ve entered a wasteland of two-rut tracks in confusing proliferation, because where the ruts get too deep a detour develops, and then a detour off the detour when that one gets rutted out, and so on. The folks on top of the trucks holler advice as to which detour looks most promising. We’re averaging well under ten mph, when we’re moving at all. We stop in the middle of nowhere for the Muslim prayer time just before sunset. Distant plateaus…lonely mile-tall dust dervishes dangling over the land…bushes like claws, and flattop trees, none of them taller than three meters. Everything’s in silhouette at dusk, the earth suddenly vermilion…as if a page had turned and its shadow fallen over all the world.

 

Two days later and two dozen miles from the coast the checkpoints begin, only three or four before the city proper, boys tensing a rope across the road, others leveling rifles from behind oil drums. Burros bent over the patchy fodder, urchins asleep in the shadows of adobe kiosks. Machine gunners in the shade: They call themselves “Technicals”—all-terrain trucks with their roofs cut off and antiaircraft guns or recoilless rifles set up in the back. Lion suddenly says good-bye to us here—he’s been drafted. He lives at this checkpoint now, and that’s that. In this land without a government, the Technicals generally call the tune. They want money from the convoy. The drivers pour from their rigs in a crowd, jostling and sweating and making their points. The price goes down, they strike a deal, the rope descends, and the line of trucks heads east again, passing more swiftly along beat-up tarmac between two large ponds surrounded by rice paddies and populated by storks, guzuru, cattle, buzzards, flocks of smaller fowl. The air gets damp, almost tropical. Cresting a rise the caravan looks down on a maze of stucco walls fronting torn-up streets, a low skyline of European-style buildings, Mogadishu spilling toward the Indian Ocean.

It’s plain that few people inhabit these stone structures—even in the cities they raise up hooches of sticks and straw, no more interested in preserving, restoring, or stealing the big windy dwellings of the Europeans than the Europeans would be in moving into scrawny shacks beneath the shadow, say, of the Eiffel Tower. No building stands complete anymore anyway. The town is a labyrinthine ruin, looks almost archeological. Trash moves along like tumbleweed and gathers into drifts and it’s starting to bury small structures. Children swing on lines dangling like jungle vines from the concrete power poles. Surprising to see, in the hands of kids on the streets—toy guns: toy machine guns, pistols, cap guns, electric ray guns. A boy of kindergarten age holds a gun to his friend’s ear. They both wince—it’s all quite realistic. Maybe they’ve seen it done.

The convoy slows down in a market run amok over the avenues. This must still be the thoroughfare, or must have been once. Whatever it used to be, it’s everything now, the center and origin and destination of all things—anything but a place for vehicles—carts and stalls under canvas jammed together almost to the point of piling up; they’ve taken over the highway and have to be beaten back, nudged by the huge wheels of the first truck before the vendors wrench their stores just slightly out of the way of being crushed and stand atop their wares screaming through the windows at the drivers. The Nissan labors forward like a raft through a swamp—a swamp of people black as obsidian. They look like silhouettes draped with clothing. “Bakara Market! You can get anything here,” Billeh shouts down to me—“Clothes, medicine, many kinds of food. Guns! Bombs! Slaves! Gold! Silver! Petrol!”

Farther downtown, Billeh and I leave the convoy. The truck lets us off onto a street of shops where commerce continues, on a survival scale, in canned goods, soft drinks, powdered milk. Here and there small browsing herds of goats, even camels, as the nomad lifestyle, like the eternal sand, drifts back into the city out of the desert, out of the seaside dunes, out of the middle ages, as if the urban twentieth century had been a ripple across the screen of heat, a curious ghastly mirage…

There’s little traffic—but much more, on reflection, than there ought to be: Miraculous to see cars and trucks, these things running off drops of petrol sold out of five-gallon jugs at the curbside by just a few lucky vendors, still moving way after they’ve turned to junk: vehicular Frankensteins that look as if they’d been rolled down the sides of mountains, corroded and battered and lurching along on tires of varied unmatched sizes, and laden with people, anybody who’ll pay a coin or two. Here, whatever moves is commercial.

Climbing aboard a van full of passengers, Billeh and his charge excite some flurry of debate: the others think the White Boy ought to get the hell out, or pay a hundred dollars, because his presence is hazardous. Suppose he attracts a grenade or something? Billeh concedes the point, and reintroduces himself to a couple of cousins, and suddenly everyone makes them welcome. Some begin complaining about the Marines, and others point with pride to the water trucks and big guns stolen from the U.N., to the blown-up troop trucks upended and wheelless in the streets, and the corner, a monument now, where eighteen U.S. Rangers died fighting Somali militia. The U.N.—what did it accomplish? The tons of food and medicine, it’s all forgotten. Only the police effort and the bossing stay fresh in the minds of Mogadishu. The outfit that saved, by its own count, 150,000 lives here seems almost universally derided and resented.

When the ill-timed efforts of nation-states to impose their idea of stability unbalances the tribal powers, the return to balance is violent. A case in point: U.N.-imposed peace talks in Djibouti in July of ’91 led to Ali Mahdi’s swearing himself in as president the following month. But Mahdi had no real following. The mistake resulted in fighting that killed as many as 30,000 people in Mogadishu and virtually destroyed the city with mortar fire.

MOHAMED OF THE AL SAHAFI

Mohamed Jirdeh Hussein, owner and manager of the Al Saha Hotel in Mogadishu, a standout figure of a man, a full head taller than the average Somali, bald, smiling, quietly alert and eminently helpful, drives north through the capital accompanied by three gunmen in his Nissan Patrol. They negotiate the checkpoints out of Aidid’s territory and across the Green Line into Ali Mahdi’s domain, and continue clear out of town along a lonely seaside track, past centuries-old brick ovens set in the sides of bluffs, past the prison turned into a hospital, the kind of place where a foreign legionnaire would recuperate with grinning forebearance from his wounds, past shantytowns that look deserted in the noon heat.

Mohamed and his men stop at a desert airstrip in sight of the ocean. For quite a while he waits chatting with the handful of militiamen who run this operation—Ali Mahdi’s men, of the Abgal clan—in what he likes to call “Terminal A,” a stifling metal cargo crate furnished with seven theater seats. West of the road the red desert goes forever. On the east beautiful barrens and white dunes roll down to the Indian Ocean. But the water’s said to be hazardous. A bit farther north there was situated, for years, an abbatoir for camels, that dumped its bloody waste into the sea. And the shores of Mogadishu became a haven for sharks.

And journalists come down out of the sky. Meaning, in this case, the South African video crew Mohamed came here to collect, three whites and one Zulu taxiing toward him in a charter from Nairobi.

The hotelier welcomes them in the blowing dust. He remarks that almost all the Western journalists have left town. They float offshore now with the last few thousand U.N. troops, waiting to get out of this place. “For that part of the world, the story’s over,” one of the South Africans acknowledges. “But for our part it’s just beginning.”

Mohamed takes them into the city, along avenues shellshocked and drifted with sand and half-gone back to dune, among houses blown apart and shot up and then, it would appear, burned by fire and finally crumbling under the simple weight of time and ruin. “It’s a nice little town,” he says. “It’s devastated now, but…” He points out the sights—hulks with the blue of the sky and the sea showing through, former mansions looking purified by the sweet hot seaside African light, but absolute ruins—“Ah! The French embassy…Here are the residences of American diplomats…This,” he says of a pile of rubble, “is a wonderful night club—and here is the town’s most beautiful hotel,” he tells them, adding, “It’s a shell now.”

The Nissan makes good time, driving right or left of the medians, taking the roundabouts clockwise or not—“You can have any lane here,” Mohamed explains, his face lit by a jovial mood as they hurtle through the apocalyptic streets jammed between sweating gangsta gunsels, the horn buzzing nonstop—“Not like the U.S.!”

On a thoroughfare of buildings eaten away by small-arms fire, the Al Sahafi Hotel stands scarcely marked by bullet holes, its three stories completely intact, the last shred of civilization in the capital, like a museum depicting life in the twentieth century. The generator works, there’s hot water in the showers and electric light all night; air conditioners and iceboxes function turgidly in the rooms. Yes, the phones have quit, but only recently.

Downstairs Mohamed manages to serve three full meals a day. Eggs, meat, pasta. Tropical fruit and green salads. On a pillar in the hotel’s dining room: an enlarged black-and-white photo of Mogadishu as it once was—a city like Honolulu in the fifties, a restful place of sea and sunlight.

A half-dozen Western reporters, British and American, remain upstairs waiting for a chaht flight out in the morning. In the meantime they’ve barricaded themselves in a room among stacks of beer and soft drinks, flak jackets and Kevlar helmets lying about, the six of them half-drunk and celebrating moreover with chaht and a bag of Somalian reefer—“all of it fucking legal, mate!” a blond Englishman cries when they greet the new arrivals. They’ve made it through another story, the work’s over, the competitive game-playing, too—temporarily. Everybody’s buddies, temporarily.

But the South Africans’ work is only starting. They’ve got to venture out into the city. Idaho Mike tags along, most grateful to share Mohamed’s Nissan and his squad of guns. The truth is Mike can’t afford his own bodyguard. He’s down to one gold Krugerrand, a medium of tender the Al Sahafi promises to view with the greatest respect as soon as it can be authenticated (meanwhile he please mustn’t charge drinks), and credit cards are considered pretty funny in this town. Billeh’s off making the rounds among an infinitude of cousins, bearing hundreds of U.S. dollars.

The South Africans want footage of Mogadishu’s chief players: General Aidid, and Aidid’s bankroller Osman Ato, and their chief rival Ali Mahdi. Their host ferries them to the gates of power. But they’re only admitted a few feet inside the high walls, into the yards of the big houses, and stopped by men with rifles and factotums with apologies—nobody’s talking, nobody’s seeing journalists while the U.N.’s still in town. The video cameras record only these tense faces, the crowds of the self-important outside the doors of the truly important, those men inside who broker the momentary peace and cut up the spoils and hold the crumbling future in their hands. Men living in great mansions, but on streets buried beneath chaos. Leaving Osman Ato’s home, the Nissan skirts blown-apart vehicles drifted over with sand and the sand-piles topped with fresh rubble from buildings. In all the streets they take note of a kind of sedimentary devastastion—the latest devastation covering yesterday’s devastation, and the devastation before that.

Perhaps the visitors would like to see the hospital?—the Isbetaalke-Guria, five stories high, a building as filthy as a New York subway station and smelling like one, full of echoing screams? Meet a kid blown up by a mortar, hooked to a drip and a catheter, waiting for his third operation in a room like a tenement basement, with his plastic toy gun beside him on the bed? Get a view of his abdomen, which looks like a shark went at it? Talk to guys without legs, without arms, without faces? The power’s off. It’s hot. Women sit by some of the wounded waving little fans of woven straw. Not a doctor in sight. No medicine here. Somebody has to find it outside, downtown, in the Bakara Market, and bring it in. The elevators don’t work. The journalists climb from floor to floor as if sentenced to do it, interviewing people without voices, getting footage of people without feet.

Something’s different about Mogadishu when they get to the streets. People are scarce. The traffic’s disappeared. The hush anticipates two transitions in the city’s life: the departure of the U.N., which comes tonight, and the breaking of the month-long fast of Ramadan, which comes tomorrow. The fixtures of certain factional realities remain, the cruising Technicals, the checkpoints, and clumps of gunmen ready to assume a new authority. Others loiters in limbo: here and there the Mogadishu Police, in crisp obviously quite new olive outfits, policing not at all. They’re U.N.-funded. Out of work now, and hourly less and less evident. One guesses that by nightfall those uniforms will have found their ways deep into storage.

At midafternoon the journalists stand at the city’s dead center, along the Green Line, the boundary between Ali Mahdi’s sector and Aidid’s South Mogadishu. It looks as if somebody rolled an asteroid through town and out to sea. The Somali Parliament building’s rubble stands smack on the Green Line. The monument to the Unknown Soldier—from which war? Mohamed can’t remember. That’s the rubble of the gas station. Rubble of the car wash, the Bank of Commerce. “Now,” Mohamed says—why? Why does he think it has to be said?—“now it’s a ghost town.”

“The Marines will be leaving,” the journalists remind him. “We’d better get down to the port,”

“Yes, it’s time. I don’t think I’m going with you.”

Mike says, “We’ll get Billeh.”

4:11 P.M. Thurs.

A Huey helicopter flies east overhead as the last of the U.S. Marines make ready to leave the beach; a buzzard dangles in the thermals closer over the town. Troops have vacated all but the port, leaving behind in the city itself a vacuum, as under a hand just raised to flatten something. Or it’s as if the gates were swinging open on a bastille, and soon comes the moment when the prisoners within either rage out into the streets, or step forth blinking into peace and freedom. Over loudspeakers the calls to prayer start up, the muezzin moaning from the minarets in the hush. A big gun starts up somewhere in the distance but then stops—the silence everywhere—then the sobbing music of the Muslim prayers.

4:25 P.M.

Billeh and I stand with a few last journalists overlooking the port, directly next to a sandbag emplacement of U.S. Marines under a palm-thatch shelter, one of three Marine positions left now on the port’s inland side. These American boys muttering into their radios and sighting along their gun barrels at suspicious figures below them among the cargo crates are the last U.N. troops in the country, along with some platoons, a half dozen at most, dug into the beach below and camouflaged by stacks of lumber that would look more incidental if the boards weren’t brand-new. As we watch, three platoons suddenly vacate their positions down there and put hurriedly to sea in a black rubber raft. They rock a minute in the low surf, then accelerate out toward a larger landing craft full of more Marines. Beyond them floats the Vergina, a Greek charter loaded with 1,500 U.N. troops, most of them Pakistani.

4:32 P.M.

Now the eight Marines next to us leave their emplacement and file quickly past, the last saying, “Go! Go! Go!” They break into a run.

We follow behind, running, too, and catch up around the corner of a wall as they board an amphibious transport as tall as a semi. The vehicle makes a tight corner with its outer tread clawing at the sand and swings past kicking up dust in our faces, and I feel—I hadn’t expected this, but I feel personally ashamed. The transports, three of them now, crawl onto the open ramp of landing craft. We watch them go, but I don’t think we want to turn around and see what they’ve left. Billeh pinches me on the ass: “You’re not the last journalist left in Somalia,” he says, “but I’m happy to tell you that you’re the last American.”

A Somali immediately begins grabbing up the electric communication wires strung along through the dirt underfoot, but another stops him. “Wait until the journalists are gone—” Billeh translates. Down on the pier the looting starts—the journalists call it “Affirmative Shopping”—as locals gang together to tip over the cargo crates and set dozens of empty fifty-gallon drums rolling along everywhere like big cookies in some burning black fairy tale of war in the sunset of our idea of civilization. It doesn’t look as if there’s a whole lot left to steal. A man shouts, “Journalists! Time is up! Now is danger come!” How does he know? People are clumping up together out of nowhere, and they look panicked. Angry faces bloom all around us. “They’re saying the journalists are making it dangerous,” Billeh says. The shooting begins—here, there—where? Who? You never know, you never see, it’s one of the strange laws of urban warfare, you can never see who’s shooting. “We must get off the streets,” Billeh says. But the gunfire’s sparse, scattered—celebratory fireworks. It’s a party, not a battle.

 

That night Mike and Billeh and the South Africans stand on the Al Sahafi’s roof in the cooling dusk. Just after dark the Marines, putting out to sea beyond the harbor, send up flares that boom at first like mortars and then pop open into silence, frail orange suns dangling in the sky and making an eerie dimness below, in which nothing is familiar. One last firefight down at the beach—they hear the AKs popping in their characteristic way, and then, from the boats, the triple-snap of U.S. M-16s in three-burst mode, every third round an arcing crimson tracer. It’s over in minutes. For a couple of hours the flares rise and set over Mogadishu, and then it’s dark—without electric lights, the city disappears as completely as the international presence has.

ONE MORE WIZARD WITH A MICROPHONE

The next morning the city of Mogadishu breaks its fast. It’s over—little parties all around town, including one at the residence of Gen. Mohamed Farah Aidid, a hundred people laughing and eating bits of jelly and pastries handed around on paper plates. The journalists are glad to see the bottled water. But they didn’t come for water. Where’s Aidid? He’ll make a statement soon. Deeply, deeply, Mike feels the need for a cover story—but Billeh introduces him all around the gathering as the Last American in Somalia. “We have him now!” he jokes, gripping Mike’s wrist in both his hands. Ho-ho! Mike doesn’t touch a bite. In celebration of the end of Ramadan, the cap guns are going off all over—harmless, but disconcerting—eerie that kids should hold toy weapons in their hands as they stand in the bullet-riddled alleys…

Later the journalists are led upstairs and out onto a veranda with a floor of white and black shiny tiles and seated in an arrangement of green and orange wicker chairs. For some time the journalists wait facing a long table on which rest a shock of plastic flowers in a straw pot painted gold and a little blue Somalian flag with its one yellow star. A half hour passes. Occasionally someone steps up and lays a tape machine or a microphone gently on the wrinkled white tablecloth. The wind comes over the veranda’s railing, laying down the red dust that owns everything, and its wife the sand. The little flag blows over. Africa: the sudden passionate fixing of attention to some ridiculous trivial detail—the position, now, for instance, the line of the angle, of an electric cord for a microphone. Perhaps the tall assistant’s fumbling ministrations parallel the neurotic superstitions of gamblers—the charms of one who’s survived over and over the lottery of random destruction. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he says: “General Aidid to speak with you.”

The warlord who has driven the world from his domain, who snookered the West Point generals and transformed himself from a man with a U.N. price on his head into the chief negotiator of the U.N. departure, the one person they could deal with in getting out of the country without bloodshed, this one strides forth and looks out at the assembled press and smiles.

How appropriate that this should feel above all like the moment when Oz, the great and terrible, steps out from behind his curtain, uncovered now as a plump man with coffee-colored skin, short, bald, in a pinstriped shirt and conservative necktie, an avuncular man, a weary man, only somewhat freshened by triumph. He lays his gold-knobbed cane against the table and stands beside it, touches the tablecloth, takes up his statement in trembling fingers. “I am extremely very happy,” he reads in English, “to meet with you today here at my residence.”

He reads that the Somali people were “conducting the most desperate struggle ever to happen in the history on the Earth.” He reads the future: Security, rehabilitation, resettlement of displaced people, development and elections…It’s clear he hasn’t the slightest idea what happens next.

As for the transitional government, he says it will be “a government to unite, to rebuild, to solve all the Somali problems.” He assures those assembled that he is going “to save my country.”

The journalist from America has decided to cling to the notion that out there, in the countryside he passed through to reach this crazy city, the people know what they’re doing. Their leaders don’t, and we don’t. But they know. All this destruction is shaping tomorrow—a tomorrow without a lot of Idaho White Boy ideas in it.

They got along for centuries on their own. No reason to think that in two decades they’ve mislaid the skills entirely, but the skills aren’t honed. The main rehabilitation won’t be structural, but human, spiritual.

Meanwhile General Aidid states that he intends to repeat the age-old errors, as he prepares to institute some sort of modern democratic government that will turn, if successful, to the other nation-states for endorsement, support, military muscle.

But the nation-state, the twentieth-century geopolitical entity held together by the government’s monopoly on the use of force—it’s finished. The Kalashnikov rifle and the Stinger missile, and the worldwide dissemination of these weapons during the proxy conflicts of the Cold War, have changed things as much as the invention of gun-powder did in the thirteenth century. A determined Third-World people can now hold out against the greatest powers—witness Vietnam—and even a loose coalition of determined clans or factions can drive away the strongest armies—witness Afghanistan—and now in Somalia and the former Yugoslavia it’s been made plain that even factions at war with one another can, with their left hand, as it were, stalemate the U.N. in its efforts to stop the fighting among them.

It begins to waver and dissolve, but still it stands, humanity’s mass hallucination: the vision of a planet of united nations, the great delusion that the nation-state doesn’t work yet, but someday will—that the governments who killed each year of the twentieth century, on average, a million of the civilians they claimed to protect and serve, can be trusted to cease their wars.

Another general makes ready to join them, all those people who’ve proven they can’t run the world. Still they go on seeking order by making war, because anything’s preferable to anarchy—so say the survivors.

The general is open for questions. A reporter just arrived from Madrid lifts up his hand. “Can you say the war is over?”

Pause. The general nods, he smiles, happy to demonstrate his ability in this regard. He pronounces the words perfectly: “The war is over.”