Signs of Life, Hope Sprout in Somali Capital

In the two years since his high school was shelled, gutted, looted and transformed into part of the ravaged Somali capital’s lethal Green Line, Hassan Aden has lived an animal’s life--running from armed gangs, hiding in refugee camps, eating only when fed by relief agencies.

But Wednesday afternoon, as the former English teacher stood bony shoulder to bony shoulder with the thousands of Somalis who lined the city’s fractured rooftops, bunkered hills and blasted walls for a glimpse of the American military buildup at the city’s two key ports, the first real smile in years washed over Aden’s proud face.

“Look around you today,” said the 35-year-old educator, a stick figure who spoke in perfect English and stood with endless dignity as the first international relief flight in more than a month was landing. “For the first time in two years, this city is full of people. For the first time, guns are virtually nonexistent on the streets today. That was the people’s invitation to come out.

“Today, you see,” he said, “is a new day for Somalia--the beginning of a new era.”

So it seemed throughout this urban nightmare as the arrival of more than 1,000 U.S. Marines breathed the first signs of life and hope into a city that had given itself up for dead. Within hours of the Marines’ pre-dawn arrival, shell-pocked streets accustomed to roving bands of armed gangs instead filled with tens of thousands of unarmed Somali men, women and children.

Scores of them pushed their few possessions in rickety carts across the once-dreaded Green Line that divides the warring clans that replaced Somalia’s dictatorship with anarchy.

They were going home.

There were sounds of hope, as well.

There was the hammering and scraping of new windows going into place in a land where none were left after two years of war. Children giggled. Former students gathered in groups to chat; others played on the two ancient, battered aircraft that stand as monuments outside the city’s leveled former air force headquarters.

The sweetest sound of all, though, was the cacophony of blowtorches and hacksaws heard through the night and day at ramshackle welding shops all across town, where workers were removing hundreds of machine-gun mounts and restoring battered pickup trucks to their previous lives.

These “Mad Max” machines of death were dying, along with the terror they once spread nationwide.

In Mogadishu’s muddy, reeking markets, business was booming. Money changers shouted and rattled cardboard boxes overflowing with Somali shillings, while others shook fistfuls of dollars. The dollar’s value, buoyed by hope and manipulated by a handful of powerful speculators, plunged to its lowest level in two years--4,000 shillings.

Old appliances reappeared on shelves in markets, free, at least for now, from the nation’s once-unrivaled economy of looting. The prices of huge stockpiles of looted sacks of rice, sugar and flour fell dramatically, which one educated Somali attributed to “the new consumer confidence.”

Throughout the city, new tea shops and restaurants sprang up from the ruins and reopened for business. They were Spartan but congenial establishments where smiling Somalis lounged, talked politics and basked in their first glimmers of hope since warlord politicians turned the nation into a starving battle zone.

During a daylong tour of Mogadishu’s living hell, though, it was clear that the operative word of the day was, indeed, “hope.”

There is little else left in the Somali capital that greeted the Marines on Wednesday; the patchwork of destruction here rivals war-torn Beirut and includes little but tin shacks, blown-out buildings and roofless concrete shells.

The soccer stadium that was once the pride of the capital has been wrecked. It is now a modern ruin that serves as refugee camp for some of the tens of thousands who have fled the war-fed famine that has killed 300,000 Somalis in the countryside this year alone.

Perhaps the only vestige of the nation’s long era of modernization is the handful of traffic lights--an item with no apparent purpose in a nation with no rule of law.

It was amid such utter destruction that Mohammed Hussein Ibrahim decided to reopen his National Barber Shop near the broken heart of downtown Mogadishu this week.

“It is because the American troops came, and they will make me safe,” said the elderly barber, for 36 years an institution in the neighborhood, who was forced to close for the past two years. “When I closed, it was for my survival,” he explained. “Too much war. But now that the security of the Americans is here, I must work for my survival.”

There was ample evidence of similar sentiment in the looter’s bazaar of Bakara, where traders dusted off dozens of ancient, yet still valuable, refrigerators, stoves and even television sets in a city with no power, let alone a TV station.

And, for the first time that anyone can remember in the past two years of Mogadishu’s horror, there were traffic jams of battered, old, unarmed vehicles. Many of them were without windshields or hoods; most were on the street for the first time since the warring clans carved up the seafront capital.

Amid the bizarre kaleidoscope of normalcy, most foreign relief officials who have been struggling to bring Somalia back from the brink were tempted to effuse optimism.

Said Rick Grant, spokesman for the food-distribution agency CARE, “It’s getting to be an idyllic little Indian Ocean resort town, compared to what it was just yesterday.”