By MURITHI MUTIGA mmutiga@ke.nationmedia.com
In Summary
Children can at last play in the sand, men and women are venturing out of their houses to do business and the international community is jostling to take credit for peace in Somalia.
For the last 20 years, Mogadishu has been comfortably unchallenged as the bad news capital of the world.
Displacement of populations on a scale and consistency not seen anywhere else, deaths from disease and famine, war and yet more war; those have been the consistent story lines coming out of a port city that was once one of the greatest centres of commerce on the East African coastline.
But that narrative of death and unending despair is changing. The defeat and disorderly retreat of al-Shabaab militants from the Somalia capital just over seven months ago has given way to a spurt of reconstruction and regeneration Mogadishu has not seen in decades.
Business is booming. Everywhere the visitor to the city turns they are confronted by the sight of wheelbarrows piled high with bananas and mangoes being ferried to markets which are beginning to reopen.
Women in bright blue, pink or brown lessos sell dry grains, spices and juice and cooked spicy potatoes at newly repainted roadside cafes that also offer sweetened tea and strong, black coffee. Mogadishu is a good place to be today if you are a cement trader.
Because more buildings are bombed out shells than those that are intact, a construction boom is under way.
Donkey carts driven by merrily chaotic teenagers lug mabati, cement and concrete blocks to the construction sites that are seeing action for the first time in years.
Traffic police in dark glasses, white shirts and blue trousers struggle to control the traffic with their whistles; although it is hard to see how they can catch up with offenders because more cars have no number plates than those that do.
Mogadishu today is completely unrecognisable from the besieged war zone it was just a year ago. The airport is undergoing a $150 million make over financed by the Turkish Government, which was one of the first to spot the sea of change in the security environment in the city since the Shabaab were pushed out under pressure from an African Union troops.
The airport is now receiving a surge of traffic, hitting a high of 380 passengers in the month of December as more and more Somalis return home to the city.
International airlines are making a comeback. On Tuesday, the first Turkish Airlines flight will touch down at the Aden Abdulle International Airport becoming the first major international airline to run a passenger service to Mogadishu since the late 1980s.
They will seek to offer competition to Kenyan operators Africa Express, Fly 540 and East African Airways, which have already stepped into the market with twice daily, albeit rather irregularly scheduled, flights.
Opening bell
The diplomats have also surged back to the Horn of Africa country. On August 19, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s jet touched down at the Aden Abdulle Airport and signalled the opening bell of a surge of diplomatic activity as various countries seek to “win the peace” in the country.
Mr Erdogan was accompanied by his wife and several ministers also with their wives and children and that early visit seemed to have made a major psychological impression, indicating that Mogadishu was slowly beginning the journey to reclaim its place among the community of nations.
Shortly after the visit, the African Union Commission chief Jean Ping, came calling as did the Saudi Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Abdulaziz Alsaud. British Foreign Minister William Hague was not far behind.
The flurry of diplomatic activity in the city was capped by the arrival, in the second week of December, of United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki Moon who ordered that the UN political office for Somalia be relocated from Nairobi to Mogadishu.
The sky blue flag of the United Nations now flies in Mogadishu for the first time in two decades, although there is no shortage of critics of the UN’s absentee stewardship of the nation’s drawn out peace process.
It is possible to get the impression from some media reports that the conflict in Somalia has ground to a stalemate with al-Shabaab on one side and the Kenyan, Ugandan, Burundian and allied troops ranged on the other.
The truth, as reflected by the sweeping changes taking place in Mogadishu is rather different. The resurgence of confidence in and around the city, the reconstruction spurt, the repatriation of money from Nairobi’s Eastleigh estate and the diaspora in the UK, Canada and the US, all speak to a major shift in one of the oldest cities in this part of the world.
The Shabaab, which initially enjoyed public support for bringing order to Mogadishu and other Somali towns but alienated ordinary residents through the actions of its foreign cadre such as suicide bombings that killed hundreds, has suffered a devastating reversal in Mogadishu , abandoned fixed positions in the last few months and suffered losses in other areas it previously controlled.
Its exit from the scene has given way to a security environment in Mogadishu that was last seen when the Islamic Courts Union last controlled the city.
The international interest in helping rebuild the city and the level of peace brought about by the AU troops who pushed out the Shabaab last August has inspired confidence of a revival.
Capital, for once, is flowing back into Somalia rather than out of it. Few people represent this change than Liban Egal, a dapper 42-year-old Somali-American businessman who has returned to Mogadishu to set up a bank.
It is different now
“I came back in August when the Shabaab left,” he says. “I drove around the city without a bodyguard and it seemed to me this time it is different. In the past, peace was not based on anything. It was always about warlords and clans. But I observed and saw that the AU forces were moving methodically block by block and not just rushing forward. Every time they seized territory they would make a defensive ring. I concluded that the peace in Mogadishu is more durable than it has been in the recent past because the East African troops will be here for the foreseeable future. The people, too, are tired of war and don’t care about clannism. All they want is peace and they don’t care who leads.”
Mr Egal has responded by putting together a group of investors who will set up First Somali Bank, an institution offering services from an indigenous vantage point to Somalis who have had to rely on informal banking channels for years.
Because the Central Bank of Somalia’s headquarters is only now being rebuilt after years in which squatters had moved in and the institution does not have any set rules on the fees required for one to set up a bank, Mr Egal and his partners are offering investment solutions to the government instead.
They are setting up a fish farm, establishing a research plant on livestock production and launching an Internet and software company that will handle the government’s payroll.
These investors are setting out to build an economy which has received a fresh lease of life from the five-year African Union effort to rebuild Somalia, an initiative which now has to rank as one of the boldest AU-led initiatives in the body’s history.
As one of the few senior officials who took up their stations in Mogadishu at the height of the crisis rather than remaining in the safety of Nairobi, Mr Wafula Wamunyinyi, the deputy head of the African Union mission (Amisom) in Somalia has had a ringside view to events in the last few years. Mr Wamunyinyi says the defeat of the Shabaab in the city has been a tough slog.
“When the African Union troops arrived in March 2007, the government was confined to a thin slice of the city in Villa Somalia (State House) and the K4 district, which includes the airport. One of the first planes bringing supplies was shot down. It has been a tough and challenging task for the Ugandan and Burundian troops. When I came to the city, we lived in constant fear and had to endure shelling. But thanks to the sacrifices of these troops, the Shabaab have been pushed out to the outskirts and Mogadishu is now 98 per cent free. Citizens are reclaiming their lives for the first time in many of the city residents’ memory.”
Best trained forces
The Ugandan and Burundian troops waged grinding trench warfare in the type of urban environment which has proved exceedingly difficult for some of the best trained forces in wars in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan.
But according to Ugandan officials, Kenya’s entry into the theatre provided a different type of challenge to the Shabaab and helped to break their backbone in the outskirts of the city.
Because Uganda and Burundi were constrained by Amisom terms of engagement and lack of equipment such as helicopters, they could not launch the type of assault on the Shabaab that the Kenyans did from October.
When the Shabaab abandoned their fixed positions in Mogadishu around the end of July last year, they retreated South towards the region near the Kenya border.
This proved the spur for Kenya to send its troops across the border to prevent, military officials say, the establishment of a Shabaab stronghold close to the country.
Major General Fred Mugisha, the Amisom force commander, told the Sunday Nation in Mogadishu that the entry of Kenya meant that the Shabaab were subjected to attacks from “force multipliers” such as helicopters and navy war ships, which they had not suffered before.
This triggered defections, he says, and sent many foreign fighters off to the south of Yemen, which is now seen as a safe haven for al Qaeda militants because it is largely free of government control.
“As a result of the entry of Kenya into the theatre,” said Uganda’s Foreign Affairs minister Henry Oryem Okello, “the Shabaab have had to break up their leadership and command structure. They have been scattered across the various fronts including the western one with Ethiopia. That has eased the pressure in Mogadishu.”
The AU troops achievement in Somalia has began to draw international attention.
Jeffrey Gettleman of the New York Times wrote recently that the tide in Somalia appears to have turned: “The African Union force in Somalia has hardened into a war-fighting machine – and it seems to be winning the war. Analysts say the AU has done a better job of pacifying Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital and a hornet’s nest of Islamist militants, clan warlords, factional armies and countless glassy-eyed freelance gunmen, than any other outside force, including 25,000 American troops in the 1990s.”
“The peace keepers have performed better than anyone would have dreamed,’” said J Peter Pham, director of the Africa Programme at the Atlantic Council, a Washington research institution. Yet the inconvenient questions remain whether the evident progress on the ground can be sustained and whether all the blood that has been shed to achieve the current peace was worth the effort.
The security situation in Mogadishu, though, remains fragile. Residents say they consider it very peaceful because for the first time in years their houses are not being used as firing positions by the revolving cast of fighters that have waged war in the city including the Ethiopians, the Shabaab, warlords and the AU troops.
But by international standards the city is far from safe. The Shabaab retain the ability to launch suicide bomb attacks at selected locations. They have also turned to planting Improvised Explosive Devices in the absence of fixed positions from which they can engage the AU troops.
Although there is a revival in commerce, you can tell the poor state of the economy from the fact that shopkeepers stock things such as sugar, salt and butter in the tiniest quantities demonstrating the low spending power of the population.
Many business establishments do not write banners indicating the services they offer. Instead, they draw cartoons and illustrations on the walls reflecting the fact that the education system has collapsed and most residents can neither read nor write.
Foreigners remain vulnerable to attacks by Shabaab sympathisers and the minders of the foreign journalists that are flooding back into the city advise them not to spend more than 30 minutes at any one place to avoid being targeted.
The situation in the city can more aptly be described as one of calm rather than peace. A major humanitarian problem persists in certain areas as thousands of residents flee the outskirts of Mogadishu where the Shabaab are now stationed and where the newly united Kenya, Ugandan, Burundian and Djiboutian Amisom force is expected to attack next.
Shabaab stronghold
A visit a week ago to a district in the north, known as Masalah, which is near the Shabaab stronghold of Afgoye revealed a mass exodus of the population with people having piled all their possessions on handcarts, pickups and lorries fleeing the anticipated offensive. The AU and TFG forces, however, captured the district on Friday.
One of the refugees, Mohammed Maalim, a wiry father of three, said everyone who could take off had but some had remained because they were either too weak or poor to pay for the journey to Mogadishu.
Yet despite this still uncertain security situation, many residents are celebrating the fact they can now walk around without falling prey to bullets being fired by various militants. Schools are reopening, hospital wards are receiving fewer gunshot wounds than ever and a feeling of normalcy is taking over.
The big uncertainty revolves around whether Somalia’s squabbling politicians can find a way to work together on a transition to a situation where the government does not have to be propped up by foreign troops.
A roadmap on what will follow the Transitional Federal Government after its term expires in August was agreed three weeks ago but the politicians remain deeply divided.
“The biggest problem,” says Mr Wamunyinyi, “is the primacy the role of clan has taken in the absence of a functional central government. But we are telling the leaders that this is a historic opportunity which they can’t afford to lose. I am cautiously optimistic they will agree to work together.”
In an interview ahead of an international conference on the Somali peace process in London, President Sharif Ahmed said he sensed this time Somalia would fare better than it had in the past because the international community was no longer ignoring its plight.
Sheikh Shariff said there had been progress in training local security forces and said the government was making efforts to improve the situation in the country. Asked by the Sunday Nation why he had initially opposed then supported the Kenyan intervention he said it was a question of procedure rather than substance.
Without a framework
“We have always worked well with Kenya. We have had a long relationship with the country but of course we did not want troops just coming in without a framework. That is why we spoke and agreed to work together. TFG has taken the lead and we are working very well with the Kenyan troops.”
Somalis such as the businessman Mr Egal, though, are not too worried about what the politicians do. They are relieved that their longsuffering people are knowing peace for the first time in a long time and determined to try and make this last.
“People make a big deal now that MPs are fighting in the halls of Parliament. But in the past they fought in the streets through the warlords. There is no reason why we cannot, like countries such as Sierra Leone and Liberia, build a working nation out of the embers of conflict,” he said.
Source: The Nation
In Summary
Children can at last play in the sand, men and women are venturing out of their houses to do business and the international community is jostling to take credit for peace in Somalia.
A construction under way in Mogadishu, Somalia. Mogadishu is a good place to be today if you are a cement trader as new buildings are coming up while the old ones are bombed out shells that require repair thus creating a minor construction boom.
For the last 20 years, Mogadishu has been comfortably unchallenged as the bad news capital of the world.
Displacement of populations on a scale and consistency not seen anywhere else, deaths from disease and famine, war and yet more war; those have been the consistent story lines coming out of a port city that was once one of the greatest centres of commerce on the East African coastline.
But that narrative of death and unending despair is changing. The defeat and disorderly retreat of al-Shabaab militants from the Somalia capital just over seven months ago has given way to a spurt of reconstruction and regeneration Mogadishu has not seen in decades.
Business is booming. Everywhere the visitor to the city turns they are confronted by the sight of wheelbarrows piled high with bananas and mangoes being ferried to markets which are beginning to reopen.
Women in bright blue, pink or brown lessos sell dry grains, spices and juice and cooked spicy potatoes at newly repainted roadside cafes that also offer sweetened tea and strong, black coffee. Mogadishu is a good place to be today if you are a cement trader.
Because more buildings are bombed out shells than those that are intact, a construction boom is under way.
Donkey carts driven by merrily chaotic teenagers lug mabati, cement and concrete blocks to the construction sites that are seeing action for the first time in years.
Traffic police in dark glasses, white shirts and blue trousers struggle to control the traffic with their whistles; although it is hard to see how they can catch up with offenders because more cars have no number plates than those that do.
Mogadishu today is completely unrecognisable from the besieged war zone it was just a year ago. The airport is undergoing a $150 million make over financed by the Turkish Government, which was one of the first to spot the sea of change in the security environment in the city since the Shabaab were pushed out under pressure from an African Union troops.
The airport is now receiving a surge of traffic, hitting a high of 380 passengers in the month of December as more and more Somalis return home to the city.
International airlines are making a comeback. On Tuesday, the first Turkish Airlines flight will touch down at the Aden Abdulle International Airport becoming the first major international airline to run a passenger service to Mogadishu since the late 1980s.
They will seek to offer competition to Kenyan operators Africa Express, Fly 540 and East African Airways, which have already stepped into the market with twice daily, albeit rather irregularly scheduled, flights.
Opening bell
The diplomats have also surged back to the Horn of Africa country. On August 19, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s jet touched down at the Aden Abdulle Airport and signalled the opening bell of a surge of diplomatic activity as various countries seek to “win the peace” in the country.
Mr Erdogan was accompanied by his wife and several ministers also with their wives and children and that early visit seemed to have made a major psychological impression, indicating that Mogadishu was slowly beginning the journey to reclaim its place among the community of nations.
Shortly after the visit, the African Union Commission chief Jean Ping, came calling as did the Saudi Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Abdulaziz Alsaud. British Foreign Minister William Hague was not far behind.
The flurry of diplomatic activity in the city was capped by the arrival, in the second week of December, of United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki Moon who ordered that the UN political office for Somalia be relocated from Nairobi to Mogadishu.
The sky blue flag of the United Nations now flies in Mogadishu for the first time in two decades, although there is no shortage of critics of the UN’s absentee stewardship of the nation’s drawn out peace process.
It is possible to get the impression from some media reports that the conflict in Somalia has ground to a stalemate with al-Shabaab on one side and the Kenyan, Ugandan, Burundian and allied troops ranged on the other.
The truth, as reflected by the sweeping changes taking place in Mogadishu is rather different. The resurgence of confidence in and around the city, the reconstruction spurt, the repatriation of money from Nairobi’s Eastleigh estate and the diaspora in the UK, Canada and the US, all speak to a major shift in one of the oldest cities in this part of the world.
The Shabaab, which initially enjoyed public support for bringing order to Mogadishu and other Somali towns but alienated ordinary residents through the actions of its foreign cadre such as suicide bombings that killed hundreds, has suffered a devastating reversal in Mogadishu , abandoned fixed positions in the last few months and suffered losses in other areas it previously controlled.
Its exit from the scene has given way to a security environment in Mogadishu that was last seen when the Islamic Courts Union last controlled the city.
The international interest in helping rebuild the city and the level of peace brought about by the AU troops who pushed out the Shabaab last August has inspired confidence of a revival.
Capital, for once, is flowing back into Somalia rather than out of it. Few people represent this change than Liban Egal, a dapper 42-year-old Somali-American businessman who has returned to Mogadishu to set up a bank.
It is different now
“I came back in August when the Shabaab left,” he says. “I drove around the city without a bodyguard and it seemed to me this time it is different. In the past, peace was not based on anything. It was always about warlords and clans. But I observed and saw that the AU forces were moving methodically block by block and not just rushing forward. Every time they seized territory they would make a defensive ring. I concluded that the peace in Mogadishu is more durable than it has been in the recent past because the East African troops will be here for the foreseeable future. The people, too, are tired of war and don’t care about clannism. All they want is peace and they don’t care who leads.”
Mr Egal has responded by putting together a group of investors who will set up First Somali Bank, an institution offering services from an indigenous vantage point to Somalis who have had to rely on informal banking channels for years.
Because the Central Bank of Somalia’s headquarters is only now being rebuilt after years in which squatters had moved in and the institution does not have any set rules on the fees required for one to set up a bank, Mr Egal and his partners are offering investment solutions to the government instead.
They are setting up a fish farm, establishing a research plant on livestock production and launching an Internet and software company that will handle the government’s payroll.
These investors are setting out to build an economy which has received a fresh lease of life from the five-year African Union effort to rebuild Somalia, an initiative which now has to rank as one of the boldest AU-led initiatives in the body’s history.
As one of the few senior officials who took up their stations in Mogadishu at the height of the crisis rather than remaining in the safety of Nairobi, Mr Wafula Wamunyinyi, the deputy head of the African Union mission (Amisom) in Somalia has had a ringside view to events in the last few years. Mr Wamunyinyi says the defeat of the Shabaab in the city has been a tough slog.
“When the African Union troops arrived in March 2007, the government was confined to a thin slice of the city in Villa Somalia (State House) and the K4 district, which includes the airport. One of the first planes bringing supplies was shot down. It has been a tough and challenging task for the Ugandan and Burundian troops. When I came to the city, we lived in constant fear and had to endure shelling. But thanks to the sacrifices of these troops, the Shabaab have been pushed out to the outskirts and Mogadishu is now 98 per cent free. Citizens are reclaiming their lives for the first time in many of the city residents’ memory.”
Best trained forces
The Ugandan and Burundian troops waged grinding trench warfare in the type of urban environment which has proved exceedingly difficult for some of the best trained forces in wars in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan.
But according to Ugandan officials, Kenya’s entry into the theatre provided a different type of challenge to the Shabaab and helped to break their backbone in the outskirts of the city.
Because Uganda and Burundi were constrained by Amisom terms of engagement and lack of equipment such as helicopters, they could not launch the type of assault on the Shabaab that the Kenyans did from October.
When the Shabaab abandoned their fixed positions in Mogadishu around the end of July last year, they retreated South towards the region near the Kenya border.
This proved the spur for Kenya to send its troops across the border to prevent, military officials say, the establishment of a Shabaab stronghold close to the country.
Major General Fred Mugisha, the Amisom force commander, told the Sunday Nation in Mogadishu that the entry of Kenya meant that the Shabaab were subjected to attacks from “force multipliers” such as helicopters and navy war ships, which they had not suffered before.
This triggered defections, he says, and sent many foreign fighters off to the south of Yemen, which is now seen as a safe haven for al Qaeda militants because it is largely free of government control.
“As a result of the entry of Kenya into the theatre,” said Uganda’s Foreign Affairs minister Henry Oryem Okello, “the Shabaab have had to break up their leadership and command structure. They have been scattered across the various fronts including the western one with Ethiopia. That has eased the pressure in Mogadishu.”
The AU troops achievement in Somalia has began to draw international attention.
Jeffrey Gettleman of the New York Times wrote recently that the tide in Somalia appears to have turned: “The African Union force in Somalia has hardened into a war-fighting machine – and it seems to be winning the war. Analysts say the AU has done a better job of pacifying Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital and a hornet’s nest of Islamist militants, clan warlords, factional armies and countless glassy-eyed freelance gunmen, than any other outside force, including 25,000 American troops in the 1990s.”
“The peace keepers have performed better than anyone would have dreamed,’” said J Peter Pham, director of the Africa Programme at the Atlantic Council, a Washington research institution. Yet the inconvenient questions remain whether the evident progress on the ground can be sustained and whether all the blood that has been shed to achieve the current peace was worth the effort.
The security situation in Mogadishu, though, remains fragile. Residents say they consider it very peaceful because for the first time in years their houses are not being used as firing positions by the revolving cast of fighters that have waged war in the city including the Ethiopians, the Shabaab, warlords and the AU troops.
But by international standards the city is far from safe. The Shabaab retain the ability to launch suicide bomb attacks at selected locations. They have also turned to planting Improvised Explosive Devices in the absence of fixed positions from which they can engage the AU troops.
Although there is a revival in commerce, you can tell the poor state of the economy from the fact that shopkeepers stock things such as sugar, salt and butter in the tiniest quantities demonstrating the low spending power of the population.
Many business establishments do not write banners indicating the services they offer. Instead, they draw cartoons and illustrations on the walls reflecting the fact that the education system has collapsed and most residents can neither read nor write.
Foreigners remain vulnerable to attacks by Shabaab sympathisers and the minders of the foreign journalists that are flooding back into the city advise them not to spend more than 30 minutes at any one place to avoid being targeted.
The situation in the city can more aptly be described as one of calm rather than peace. A major humanitarian problem persists in certain areas as thousands of residents flee the outskirts of Mogadishu where the Shabaab are now stationed and where the newly united Kenya, Ugandan, Burundian and Djiboutian Amisom force is expected to attack next.
Shabaab stronghold
A visit a week ago to a district in the north, known as Masalah, which is near the Shabaab stronghold of Afgoye revealed a mass exodus of the population with people having piled all their possessions on handcarts, pickups and lorries fleeing the anticipated offensive. The AU and TFG forces, however, captured the district on Friday.
One of the refugees, Mohammed Maalim, a wiry father of three, said everyone who could take off had but some had remained because they were either too weak or poor to pay for the journey to Mogadishu.
Yet despite this still uncertain security situation, many residents are celebrating the fact they can now walk around without falling prey to bullets being fired by various militants. Schools are reopening, hospital wards are receiving fewer gunshot wounds than ever and a feeling of normalcy is taking over.
The big uncertainty revolves around whether Somalia’s squabbling politicians can find a way to work together on a transition to a situation where the government does not have to be propped up by foreign troops.
A roadmap on what will follow the Transitional Federal Government after its term expires in August was agreed three weeks ago but the politicians remain deeply divided.
“The biggest problem,” says Mr Wamunyinyi, “is the primacy the role of clan has taken in the absence of a functional central government. But we are telling the leaders that this is a historic opportunity which they can’t afford to lose. I am cautiously optimistic they will agree to work together.”
In an interview ahead of an international conference on the Somali peace process in London, President Sharif Ahmed said he sensed this time Somalia would fare better than it had in the past because the international community was no longer ignoring its plight.
Sheikh Shariff said there had been progress in training local security forces and said the government was making efforts to improve the situation in the country. Asked by the Sunday Nation why he had initially opposed then supported the Kenyan intervention he said it was a question of procedure rather than substance.
Without a framework
“We have always worked well with Kenya. We have had a long relationship with the country but of course we did not want troops just coming in without a framework. That is why we spoke and agreed to work together. TFG has taken the lead and we are working very well with the Kenyan troops.”
Somalis such as the businessman Mr Egal, though, are not too worried about what the politicians do. They are relieved that their longsuffering people are knowing peace for the first time in a long time and determined to try and make this last.
“People make a big deal now that MPs are fighting in the halls of Parliament. But in the past they fought in the streets through the warlords. There is no reason why we cannot, like countries such as Sierra Leone and Liberia, build a working nation out of the embers of conflict,” he said.
Source: The Nation
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