Approaching Mogadishu Airport in a US Army Black Hawk (Photo Al J. Venter)
Somalia’s problems are long-standing and date back almost half a century, and there is little evidence that things are going to change. In fact, with al-Qaeda becoming part of the equation with its surrogate al-Shabaab, and Kenya wishing to send all Somali refugees back to where they came from, conditions can only deteriorate further. The country has been the source of a series of terror attacks in East Africa that have left many innocents dead or maimed. Yet long before General Farrah Aideed or Mogadishu had become a regular source of unsettling news, a drama of horrific proportions was unravelling.
Even by post-imperial African standards, Somalia is a mess. But that’s nothing new. The Horn of Africa has been a scarecrow-poor battleground for as long as it has been inhabited by man.
I had been going there from the late 1960s. The first time I flew into Mogadishu was the morning after Armstrong had taken his notorious ‘giant step for mankind’. I returned with my wife in the mid-1970s. She found it an interesting experience, but she was also pleased to return to Nairobi after a week. Most Westerners who visit Mogadishu tend to react that way.
In those days, the few journalists who took the trouble to travel to Mogadishu from Addis Ababa (usually on their own initiative after hearing what others were doing in those far-flung spots, and managing to persuade their editors that the country might be newsworthy) found themselves in a totally different environment to anything else they had experienced in Africa.
In fact, before the troubles started, we found a country where little had either happened or changed since British and the South African forces drove the Italians out in 1941. We found people just as surly and antagonistic, which might be expected when there is no work – little prospect of any either. Vehicles on Mogadishu’s pitted streets are decrepit, often with twelve-year-olds at the wheel. Electricity supply is erratic, plumbing is capricious, especially in the few hotels still open and that have loos that could actually flush. As the late Bill Deeds once said about the place, it ‘was an uncovenanted mercy’.
The main post office in those days had a single bulb in its cavernous roof and the structure boasted no doors or windows. The shutters were lowered when the official felt like it or when the daily shipment of qat arrived from the airport, which was not all that surprising since half the nation was – and still is – addicted.
Mogadishu then had a single public telephone for all public communications with the world outside, cemented onto a concrete pillar in the middle of the hall so that nobody would carry it away. We stood in a reasonably well-ordered single file waiting to make our calls, often far into the night.
Mogadishu, built solidly on a range of white sandstone cliffs that stretches back into the desert behind, was a very different sort of place in the late 1960s. The city, about half the size of Nairobi, is expansive, facing a broad lagoon bounded by a reef several hundred metres out that stretches all the way up and down this part of the Indian Ocean coast.
It was a little like one of those tiny colonial outposts that we read about at school, Pago Pago in the Pacific, or Mahé in the Seychelles before that country built its first airport and international tourism took over. Mogadishu then was safe, at least before the jihadis arrived. Then, as my wife and I discovered, we could sleep securely without worrying that somebody might lob a grenade through our open window or try to force the door and slash our throats.
Approaching Mogadishu Airport in a US Army Black Hawk (Photo Al J. Venter)
Nobody stole anything from our hotel room, such as it was, and twice my wife had to walk a kilometre or more in the dark to the post office to call home. She was never molested or insulted in those mysterious, malodorous streets.
Before war levelled the town, the Italian imprint was ubiquitous. There were raffia-clad bottles of Chianti on every dinner table, the chemist’s shop bearing the legend Farmacia was manned by knowledgeable expatriates, and the police wore the kind of peaked caps issued under the rule of the dictator Mussolini with the same-style cap badges of Fascismo Italiano.
Indeed, in the 1960s and 1970s, Mogadishu reflected a dilapidated sunbleached mixture of European, African and Muslim buildings, some with high walls and steel gates enclosing tropical gardens that were a delight. It was a bit like parts of the Côte d’Azur, only all the faces were dark and the inhabitants wore the kind of garb that Somalis like – long, easy-flowing robes from which the East African kikoi or kitenge were adapted.
At the heart of the city stood a magnificent Roman Catholic cathedral, the biggest, it was said, south of the Mediterranean, but like much else in the capital, it was gutted during the civil war. There was also a fine old imperial arch in the colonial Italian tradition, complete with marble columns enriched with bas-reliefs. Modelled in the fashion of the great Roman period, fundamentalist Muslim revolutionaries who took the city over decided early on that it had to go. So, word has it, they blasted it with dynamite.
Il Villaggio Anzilotti was the suburb where the best brothels were to be found, west of the old harbour that Gaius Plinius Secundus – Pliny the Elder – mentioned in his writings almost 2,000 years ago. The streets were all viae – Via Damasco, Via Roma, Via Congo and so on. It is quite an ancient place and perhaps the oldest permanent Islamic settlement on the east coast of Africa south of the Sudan.
Towards dusk, we foreign waifs would drift along ‘sunset strip’ towards a succession of diplomatic beach clubs that stood in neat rows, each commanding its own few square metres of yellow sand by the lagoon. The British encampment was next to the Russian one, or was it the Polish? Alongside that stood the American ‘home from home’, the only place in that staunchly Muslim country where female staff could wear bikinis.
Nearly every night was party night, and with the Cold War in full swing (Somalia having thrown out the Russians and embraced the ‘Land of the Free’ for material reasons), we tended to favour Western establishments. Those of the Eastern Bloc remained stiffly aloof from the sometimes raucous goings-on a few paces away. We’d nevertheless wave amicably at each other if we caught an eye but there was hardly any social interplay between the sexes.
I made the Italian Club my base, a flimsy shack with a grass and corrugated-iron roof and enough big fans to make life bearable. No air conditioning, of course, since doors and windows were permanently open. Whatever breeze there was came from the sea, though it could be stifling in the dry season, which lasted eight months of the year, sometimes longer, and was why so many Somalis starved.
The real thrash would begin a little before midnight, when first Franco – and later Gino – both local boys of Italian parents whose families had settled in Somalia between the wars, looked for volunteers for the regular cheetah shoot. I called it a slaughter and they didn’t like it, even though the hunts were totally indiscriminate, using big-bore rifles. It was of such frequency while I was there, I was astonished that there were any of these big cats left along this stretch of the coast.
I’d enjoyed good hunting in Africa in my day, and I might have been tempted, but they were running these beautiful animals down in four-wheel-drive vehicles with floodlights, like an Australian kangaroo romp.
Italian Agusta A129 multirole helicopter on the outskirts of the city. (Photo Al. J. Venter)
Towards midnight, the Somali ‘ladies’ would appear out of the dark. These girls were tall and unassuming, most reflecting an air of diffidence, almost as if the world belonged to them which, I suppose, it did. More salient, as the posters would say, they were strikingly beautiful. They were also incredibly slender in their kikoi skirts, usually with nothing on underneath. Some seemed to be blessed with the grace of a desert gazelle.
It did not take any of us hacks very long to appreciate that, in the main, young Somali women are blessed with high cheek-bones and beautiful soft eyes.
Eventually, it was internecine strife that put a stop to all that fun. The generals who took over the country, after they murdered President Abdirashid Ali Shermarke, were soon squabbling among themselves. Then the real killings began, followed by the creation of an artificial nationalism that defied description.
For reasons best known to himself, President Siad Barre dubbed it ‘scientific socialism’, whatever that was supposed to suggest. As a consequence, government functionaries who had ensconced themselves in Mogadishu’s long-defunct parliament laid claim to a lot of territory that was not theirs: it belonged to their neighbours. Barre vigorously said that huge stretches of Ethiopia belonged to Somalia. Essentially, he wanted it all back.
Barre blundered badly when he sent his army into Ethiopia’s Ogaden in a bid to enforce that claim. It was Soviet hardware and training that drove them out of that useless strip of desert where nobody lived anyway.
Thereafter, the Somalis demanded the former French colony of Djibouti, but the Elysées Palace warned in stringent terms that if they wanted to go to war about that claim as well, then the French army and air force would be happy to oblige because they needed target practice. That terse off-the-record warning immediately ended the claim and we heard no more about it. But it was also the start of the kind of discord that wracked this nation for almost half a century. Subterfuge, insurrections, intrigue by the bucketful, and army mutinies have continued ever since.
More recently, al-Qaeda got into the act. Mark Bowden gave us a pretty good insight into that mayhem in his classic Black Hawk Down. It is about as accurate and brilliant a depiction of any I’ve seen before or after the American attempt at trying to bring sense to a nation that doesn’t understand the word.
There were other, less dramatic aberrations, but the final crunch for the people of Mogadishu came when some government functionary was paid a bribe to allow a local businessman to build a slaughterhouse just outside the town and dump camel guts into the lagoon. Soon all the sharks in the Indian Ocean were assembled off the Somali coast and attacks on humans became so frequent, that every single foreign embassy forbade its staff and nationals to swim in the waters off Mogadishu.
I went back to Somalia early in 1993, not long after the first American soldiers landed on Mogadishu beach with a spectacular show of amphibious force, their faces blackened, flak-jackets in place and M16s at the high port. They were astonished to be greeted by dozens of television crews who had been watching the pantomime from the shore.
It was planned as an invasion and it probably was, though it ended in farce. While some officers were expecting trouble, there was none, staying that way until a bunch of GIs started banging Somali heads together as soon as they fanned out across the airport.
The trouble was, the few Somalis they encountered – the rest of the population was hiding in their homes – happened to be legitimate. Almost all of those at the airport were working with United Nations units already in the country. A few sharp words were exchanged between the UN commander and the American officer in charge before these Rambo wannabees were curtailed.
American participation in Somalia, Operation Restore Hope was hardly a war. There were twenty-two nations involved, as diverse as France, Turkey, Egypt, Italy, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Zimbabwe, Pakistan and Botswana. Few of the soldiers had ever heard a shot fired in anger, much less fought in a war.
Saudi Arabian Humvee. (Photo Andrew W. McGalliard)
Thirty-thousand strong, they faced a mixed bag of Somali warlords, including a rather crafty rogue and former US Marine by the name of Mohamed Farah Aideed, who had done much to bring the country to its knees. For years, he had purloined food intended to feed the country’s starving millions, exporting much of it to neighbouring states for profit.
Meanwhile, all these tribal padroni had acquired a formidable arsenal of modern weapons from just about every country on earth. These included British landmines from the Second World War, mostly taken out of the Libyan Desert, Russian small arms, landmines and rocket-propelled grenades, Italian, Spanish, Brazilian, Chinese, Portuguese and American rifles, as well as a miscellany of heavier weapons from South Africa, Germany, Iran, Syria, North Korea, France and elsewhere. If it could kill, or cripple, the ferocious rabble in the streets of Mogadishu got their hands on it.
The truth is, foreign troops in Somalia were on more of a ‘rescue mission’ than as any kind of fighting force. They had lost sight of the plight of a million or so starving children that had brought them all together in the first place. As soon as things turned nasty, most of the countries that had deployed their soldiers there couldn’t wait to get them out. They argued along the lines that the Somalis could settle their own differences – it was their pigeon anyway and, I suppose, they were right.
As it happened, the Americans led the retreat. Despite the loss of life that Mark Bowden wrote about –the entire deployment was actually quite a commendable event – Washington’s effort amounted to little more than a brief footnote in history.
Remarkably, my own visit was not prompted by any wish to experience another war, or to join the hordes of journalists already packed into the few hotels that were still open for business. I had recently almost finished my latest book The Chopper Boys, and I wanted something unusual to take it into the 1990s.1 What better place than a troubled corner of Africa where there were a hundred modern and well-equipped American helicopters responsible for most of the communications, supplies and air-combat roles in which the UN had become engaged?
First impressions after landing at Mogadishu Airport on that assignment were instructive. I hadn’t expected to find dozens of wrecked aircraft lying at the far end of the runway – Chinese and Soviet MiGs, Sukhois, a few Britishbuilt Canberra bombers and American C-47s. The place was an aviation junkyard. Curiously, had somebody put their mind to it, most of those machines might have been salvageable. I’d seen some of those wrecks on previous visits, but they had since been joined by scores more.
The airport was in total disarray, looking as if it had been repeatedly bombarded and nobody had bothered to repair the damage. In fact, things were being fixed, but each time more mortars or RPG-7 rockets would come screaming in.
I recall that the words ‘Welcome to Mogadishu Airport’ were still legible, with a few of the letters missing, on the main terminal building, part of whose roof was missing. I also recall reporting at the time that not a single pane of glass in the building was intact.
When we emerged from the USAF Hercules that had brought us from Mombasa, we were met by an Arab soldier, who didn’t even bother to check our papers before herding us into a rattletrap bus that had once belonged to the Mogadishu municipality. We might have been anyone.
It took me several hours to cadge a lift to the United Nations Operation in Somalia, UNOSOM, headquarters north-east of the airport, where, I reckoned, I’d be able to put phase two of my plan into effect. The force guarding the airport was about to be relieved, I was told. That meant that I could join one of the convoys heading into the city, and from there to the UN compound.
‘But first, you must sign this indemnity, if you please,’ an Egyptian officer said. ‘If you get killed or wounded, there can be no claim on the United Nations.’
I signed. What else was there to do?
Since we’d all be travelling through hostile territory on the back of a truck, the pre-convoy briefing was specific:
‘Keep to the middle of the vehicle and stay well down. Don’t expose yourself … they snipe at us from time to time. If we stop and they climb on board, hold on to your bags, your wallet, your spectacles and anything else of value. If you don’t, they’ll steal everything that isn’t bolted down.’
The instructions came from a rather cynical Canadian soldier who had clearly had enough.
With that we were off into Mogadishu proper, or what American ‘grunts’ like to refer to in their letters home as ‘The Dish’. A column of five UN vehicles, escorted front and rear by French armoured personnel carriers (APCs) with their hatches shut, was our escort group. I took up a position behind a group of Gulf soldiers manning a .50 Browning, while the rest of our ‘protectors’ sat with their weapons cocked, facing outwards. We drove past the old Russian compound, then turned left before reaching the Villaggio Quattro Chilometri.
The backbone of US forces was its crack 10th Mountain Division, based at the airport, Baledogle. (Photo Al J. Venter)
Suddenly I was in a world stranger than anything I had ever known before, even second hand. Nor was it for lack of experience. I had been in Beirut when the Israelis invaded Lebanon in 1982 and that had some sort of shape to it. It was dangerous, sure, but under control, and as they said at the time, ‘ordered chaos’. Mogadishu, in contrast, was pandemonium.
Simply put, the city, then and now, sprawls. Approach it from the sea during the monsoon and it’s an awesome mish-mash of muddy pools, piles of garbage, open sewers and, everywhere, the turmoil of acres of pullulating crowds. The conglomeration stretched as far as you could see, and in sheer size, the numbers were extremely intimidating.
Just about every building we passed had been blasted. The road from the airport into the city was lined with the wrecks of cars, trucks and armoured personnel carriers, the majority blown apart in countles battles for control. A burnt-out Humvee, already chequered erratically by streaks of rust, spoke of events of months before. There was a time when any American military possession was fair game for Aideed’s ragtag horde.
As everyone was only to discover afterwards, there was no clear line of demarcation between the radical factions that opposed our presence. Every man on Mogadishu’s streets, as well as the streets of every other town and village in the country, carried a weapon, which often included youngsters not yet 10 years old. Women, children, the old, the crippled and the maimed milled about in and out of who knows how many narrow alleys. There were hundreds of paths and improvised weapon-pits between the few structures that still stood intact.
The road itself was impassable in parts. Jagged blocks of concrete, oil drums and wrecked cars had been hauled across the pot-holed tarmac, obviously intended to slow down the movement of traffic. Pools of filthy green water from the monsoons stagnated in every open patch, in which children were playing.
When we reached the marketplace, having come into view shortly after we’d passed 27th October Square, the throng overflowed farther onto the road and the convoy slowed to a crawl. The entire route had become a souk.
Food and military supplies being unloaded in Mogadishu harbour. (Photo Al J. Venter)
People were shouting, gesticulating at us, at each other, arms flailing, faces contorted. The eyes of some were glazed, others bloodshot, clearly the effects of qat, the amphetamine leaf that everybody on the Horn chews.
One of the soldiers on board told me that near this same market, American Blackhawks had been hit by RPGs, twice in the past few weeks. One of the aviators had been killed and those who’d survived were mauled.
He pointed at a mass of twisted metal lying just off the road, steaming from a squall that had just passed through.
‘That was a helicopter,’ he declared.
It might well have been since it was unrecognizable. It took a little longer, but we eventually drew into the American diplomatic compound with its heavy-weapon bunkers bristling with large-calibre guns.
‘We leave you here,’ said the soldier. ‘You go now,’ he pointed his carbine towards some buildings and smiled when I thanked him in Arabic, ‘Shukran.’
The big UN flag on its pole on the roof of the tallest building hardly stirred, but it did tell me that I’d reached the headquarters of the American commander of UNOSOM, the United Nations operations in Somalia.
I didn’t stay long in Mogadishu. Following an identity check, I was sent to the office of Lieutenant Colonel Fred Peck, a Marine officer whose job it was to deal with the foreign correspondent community in what had become a very dubious enterprise for the Americans.
Empty US Army coffins stacked at Mogadishu Airport. (Photo Al J. Venter)
US Air Force Lockheed C-130 Hercules heading to Mogadishu from Mombasa. (Photo Al J. Venter)
Very much as in the summer of 2007, another American officer told me years later, the US Congress was baying for ‘our boys’ to get the hell out of that African shit hole. Placating journalists every day, Colonel Pack simply couldn’t afford to put a foot wrong.
A charming, forthright veteran of several American military ventures of his own, including Vietnam, this professional soldier had been there and, over the years, had done all that it entailed.
What he didn’t do was stand on ceremony. The first time I approached him and told him about the book and why I had come to Somalia, he looked me over carefully for a few seconds before I added that I wasn’t much interested in East Africa’s starving millions. Instead, I explained what I wanted and showed him the printer’s dummy of The Chopper Boys drawn up for the Frankfurt Book Fair.
‘Yep,’ said Peck. ‘Reckon you really do have a different sort of need.’ He addressed one of his officers standing nearby. ‘Take Mr Venter here to Marty [Major Martin Culp II] and let’s see whether we can get him up to Baledogle in a day or two. They can fly him out on one of the Hawks,’ he ordered.