Trips to the Moge - part 1 - an inadequate history

My latest two medevacs have taken me into the famously unsettled city of Mogadishu in Somalia. Before I start I’ll just reassure my mother who will be reading this, that Mogadishu airport is probably the safest we fly into. The UN security is phenomenally tight now. It must be, the paperwork and checks to get in and out are extremely laborious and detailed. I’m sure these reports I heard about suicide bombers were actually people spontaneously combusting in frustration. Right well now I’m sure I have the CIA reading this, hi guys, keep up the good work.

My friend Abdi from Somalia tells me that, back in the early 80s Mogadishu was a stunning city, prosperous and cosmopolitan. Before the war it was even a great holiday destination. It has long beautiful beaches with a nice reliable wind, perfect for watersports. (I wouldn’t get your kitesurfers out just yet though. I’m told there’s still a large population of sharks that skulk about there ever since the war. They must have had a good supply of meat and are still wondering when the buffet is opening again.) There is a book written about the war-torn city called ‘The Lost Paradise’ and seeing the old photos and comparing with the shabby bullet pocked buildings left standing, I can understand the sentiment. However I probably shouldn't show my photos of the airport and UN presence in Mogadishu. I might get in a wee bit of trouble.

So my potted understanding of the conflict goes something like this. As most of the conflicts in Africa, it starts with clans and colonies. You may not know that Italy once had an empire, and I am not referring to the Romans. There was a time when our tiny island of Great Britain had a rather big empire and lots of European countries wanted a piece of world domination as well. Africa became a real game of ‘Risk’. 

Somalia was divided with the Italians in the north (now known as Somaliland) and with the British in the south. During WWII we captured Somaliland from the Italians and it stayed under British rule until independence in 1960. Then there was a bit of a problem as there often is in a power vacuum. The clans supposedly united under one flag even though apparently the British advised the Isaaq of Somaliland to stay a separate nation. But they were rather excited about re-uniting the ‘five stars of Somalia’ which are the Somali people of Djibouti, Ethiopia, Southcentral Somalia, Somaliland and Kenya. Uniting Somaliland and Somali seemed like a good start. There was peace until the early 1980s when the people of Somaliland started getting marginalised by the Somali government in Mogadishu, they started getting angry with the incumbent president Said Barre (who had ruled with an iron fist for about 20 years) and formed a separatist movement called Somali National Movement (in London interestingly) and that’s pretty much where the trouble started. The military wing of the SNM started attacking from Ethiopia but then as the President became more annoyed the Ethiopians officially withdrew their support (but they didn’t really). The SNM could support themselves by this point anyway and started an insurgency capturing cities in the north. Here’s where it gets complicated.

Do you remember the scene in The Life of Brian in which John Cleese’s rebel group can’t remember if they are the Judean People’s Front or the Judean Popular Front? Just before they agree to fight for the right for Eric Idle to have babies? Well the various clans and sub-clans in Somalia cottoned on to the SNMs successful campaign and wanted a piece of the action. From north to south the United Somali Front, the Somali Democratic Alliance, the Somali National Movement, the United Somali Party, the Somali Salvation Democratic Front, the United Somali Congress, the Somali African Muke Organisation, the Somali National Front, the Somali Manifesto Group, the Somali Democratic Movement and the Somali Patriotic Movement (breathe) all started kicking off to get rid of the President’s military dictatorship.

The result? The dictatorship crumbled leaving a wonderfully complex shifting series of clan/militia alliances, grudges and conflicts which have raged ever since. The US made a wonderful pigs-ear of trying to stabilise Mogadishu by capturing the warlord Aidid in 1993 (the film Black Hawk Down) and had to pull out in 1995. It was chaos. Every town had its warlord. Boys with guns everywhere. So two independent solutions to the problem emerged; an Islamic fundamentalist movement (the ICU) enforcing Sharia law in the South and the African Union (particularly the Ethiopian troops who were rather heavy handed by all accounts) the UN and the US backed Transitional Federal Government in Mogadishu. The Isaaq in Somaliland to the north were quite happy by this point and started working on distancing themselves from all the mess down south hence the continued drive to create an independent state now (just like we told them they should back in the 60s). 

So then guess what, the Islamic Courts Union along with an aggressively militant splinter group called Al

Shabaab (the Youth) drove out the largely Ethiopian military force from Mogadishu. The TFG had lost their force and the whole place fell into chaos again. By this time the whole world and particularly Kenya were getting pretty tired of all this insecurity and lawlessness and by the end of 2011 the Kenyan forces had driven Al Shabaab out of the south up to Kismaayo stabilising their border and the UN/government forces had driven Al Shabaab out of Mogadishu.

So now we have the UN and the AU keeping things stable in Mogadishu, the US keeping an eye on the pirates from Djibouti to the north and the Kenyan forces (praying for the day the nation is stable enough that the hundreds of thousands of refugees can go home) fighting with Al Shabaab periodically in Kismaayo in the far south. And then there’s me, flying around them all, picking up their patients and wondering what the hell is going on.