The Pirates of Somalia_ Inside Their Hidden World - Jay Bahadur [11]
Meanwhile, Boyah had once more leaked out ahead of the rest of us, bounding up the trail alone. Warsame and I gaped as he suddenly took off and effortlessly cleared the metre-wide knee-high bramble patch separating the farm from the shoulder of the highway. With gigantic strides, he ran up the slope to the cars and waited impatiently as we slowly climbed up after him.
It was time for his khat.
2
A Short History of Piracy
SOMALIA WAS NOT ALWAYS THIS WAY. THE COUNTRY OF FAMINE and bloodshed, the lawless land where Boyah and his accomplices, like the pirates of yore, have been able to operate virtually unmolested, is the result of one of the most dramatic state collapses in modern history.
On October 15, 1969, the Somali Republic’s second democratically elected president, Abdirashid Ali Shermarke, was shot and killed in the northern town of Las Anod by his own bodyguard. Though he was never proved to have ordered the assassination, army chief General Mohamed Siad Barre quickly initiated a bloodless coup that brought him to power for the next two decades.
Siad Barre was not a country person. Holding a profound contempt for the nation’s nomadic traditions, he forcibly relocated whole populations of herders into collective settlements and communal farms. In his relentless drive to urbanize the country, Siad Barre directed virtually all government investment towards the capital, Mogadishu, which contained Somalia’s only hospitals, universities, and professional opportunities. The city became a magnet for Somalia’s diverse clans, drawing a cross-section of inhabitants from their traditional tribal homelands. For all his misdeeds, Siad Barre turned Mogadishu into the jewel of the Horn of Africa, a modern cosmopolis that attracted tourists from all over the world. The northern desert, conversely, was treated by the regime as a sterile and unproductive backwater.
In the late 1990s, Somalia erupted into civil war. Years of disastrous military campaigns, backward Marxist economic policies, and clan-based discrimination caused an increasingly isolated Siad Barre to fall back on a combination of his Marehan clan network and brutal repression by his security forces. Rebel groups, formed more or less along clan lines, descended on Mogadishu from all sides: the Somali National Movement drawn from the Isaaq clans of Somaliland, the Darod-dominated Somali Salvation Democratic Front (SSDF) operating from present-day Puntland, and the Hawiye United Somali Congress (USC) based in the south.
Siad Barre did not mince words with his adversaries: “When I came to Mogadishu … there was one road built by the Italians. If you try to force me to stand down, I will leave Mogadishu as I found it,” he threatened. Sadly, he did even worse; when he finally fled Mogadishu in 1991, Siad Barre left the city in chaos.
Following Siad Barre’s defeat, Mogadishu was left in the hands of USC warlord Mohamed Farah Aidid, a man best known as the target of the manhunt that culminated in the infamous “Black Hawk Down” incident, in which eighteen US Army Rangers lost their lives. Taking retribution for Siad Barre’s persecution of their own clan, Aidid’s Hawiye militias hunted down and massacred Darod civilians in the streets. In his book The Zanzibar Chest, former Reuters correspondent Aidan Hartley describes in chilling detail the life-and-death importance of clan lineage during the worst days of the war:
A queue of civilians was huddled at a roadblock before a gang of rebels. As each person was waved through, another came forward and began uttering a litany of names. My guide with the flaming red hair said the people were reciting their clan family trees. The genealogies tumbled back generation after generation to a founding ancestor. It was like a DNA helix, or a fingerprint, or an encyclopedia of peace treaties and blood debts left to fester down the torrid centuries. I was thinking how poetic this idea was, when bang!, a gunman shot one of the civilians, who fell with blood gushing from his head and was pushed