The Other Somalia : THE INTELLECTUALS AND THE MERCHANTS OF MOGADISHU TRY TO PICK UP THE PIECES OF THEIR SHATTERED COUNTRY

THE WHITE-ROBED SURGEON, AWEYS ABDI OMAR, hands covered in blood, was cutting into the abdomen of a Somali man in Mogadishu’s Digfer Hospital when half a dozen armed men burst into the operating room, carrying a moaning figure in their arms.

“Doctor, you have to leave that one,” they said, pointing to the anesthetized patient on the table. “Our brother has been shot.”

“But this patient may die if I leave,” Omar protested. “Your brother is not hurt badly. He will have to wait.”

“You don’t understand,” the intruders said. “We will kill you if you don’t save our brother now.”

The slightly built, 30-year-old surgeon considered the consequences, then did as they demanded. He worked quickly, returning just in time to save his original patient.

Then Omar retreated to his small hospital quarters, packed a bag, withdrew his savings from a pillowcase and walked out of Digfer, where he had been doing battlefield surgery for a year without pay. He went to the airport, and within weeks, he was treating colds and stomach aches in Saudi Arabia.

But when Omar tells me this story, he is back in his quarters at Digfer Hospital and wearing the same white robe. He removes his sandals and closes the door, muffling the sounds of hundreds of refugees camped in the hallways. Then he speaks, softly, in labored English, pausing frequently to stroke the jet-black strands of his beard.

“You know,” he begins, “when I saw the war come through these doors I thought I would never want to come back.” But in December, seven months later, his brother flew to Djibouti, which had the nearest working telephone, to call Omar in Riyadh. The message: Your mother is back in Mogadishu and she says it’s time for you to come home, too.

Within days, Omar had returned. At Digfer, he often had to operate without sutures or needles; hepatitis had become endemic and he donated his own blood for a few patients. But where a foreigner still sees chaos, Omar sees hope.

“Now most Somali professionals are coming back,” Omar says, naming another surgeon and a lawyer friend. “Things are getting better. The people with guns are no longer running the hospital. And now I can help my people again.”

As I leave him, Omar presses a piece of paper into my hand. On it is a name, Fatuma Osman, and a telephone number in Canada. “Please call her,” he says. “Ask her to come back to Mogadishu. We will get married.” To get married in Mogadishu today, he says, “is a sign of peace.”

POOR SOMALIA. GONE ARE MOST OF THE TELEVISION CAMERAS THAT arrived in December, bingeing on the holiday tale of young Marines rescuing starving Africans. The 25,000 American troops who restored a semblance of order to Somalia began their gradual departure in January, handing the operation over to the United Nations. And, as their international obscurity returns, Somalia’s 7 million surviving inhabitants are taking stock.

The past two years have been brutal. What began as a popular revolution deteriorated into a civil war and, with the onset of a drought, ignited one of the most debilitating famines in modern times. More than 300,000 people have starved to death, 100,000 have been killed and 1.5 million have been driven from their homes, the U. S. State Department estimates. A generation of children, the weakest of the hungry and the angriest of the warriors, is gone.

Today, there are no national or local governments, no electrical plants, no working water systems, no working telephones, no post offices, no banks, no police forces and no public schools. Hundreds of thousands of buildings lie in ruins, criminals run rampant and unpunished, and clan animosities still burn like the hot barrels of the omnipresent AK-47 rifles. And, buried deeply beneath the rubble, is a history of innocence. The nation once known for its peaceful streets, where anyone could walk without fear, is gone forever.

With so little left, can Somalia ever pick up the pieces and start again? U. N. officials and Somalia experts insist that the answer is yes; Somalia’s problems are not insurmountable, they say. But who will do the work? Foreign soldiers can restore peace, but no foreign armies or governments can rebuild this country. The warlords can, and have, agreed to stop their fighting. But no warlord can guarantee the country’s security, reopen the stores, fix the telephones, restart the economy, police the streets or restock the hospitals.

Somalia’s hope for salvation rests with ordinary people, the tens of thousands of forgotten doctors and merchants, intellectuals and former bureaucrats who have the skills to turn the country around. Until now, they have been closeted in their houses or toiling in exile, out of range of the bullets and TV cameras. Many lost fortunes, as well as loved ones, in the upheaval. But, like Dr. Aweys Abdi Omar, they are emerging slowly from their despair. They see opportunity in the fragile new peace, and they’re eager to capitalize on it.

Looking at Somalia today, it’s hard to believe that anyone can arrest the decline. Neighboring Ethiopia, to take just one ready example, endured a famine and political upheaval in the 1980s, and has yet to recover. But the people who know this country best say Somalia is fundamentally different from impoverished Ethiopia. Its large and highly developed core of traders and professionals has a reach that extends deeply into the capitals of Europe, the Arab world and North America. And it is they who are driving political leaders toward the settlement that will have to precede any economic resurrection.

International relief agencies have found Somalia a particularly hard place in which to operate because Somalis don’t depend on relief agencies so much as use them. “It’s a very highly competitive, business-oriented society,” says Roger Naumann, a London-based official for the relief agency Oxfam, who has lengthy experience in Somalia. “The business of buying and selling goes quite deep among many, many people, and they work the system any way they can. That makes it difficult for us, but it shows a degree of initiative that Ethiopia never had.”

In fact, Somalia harbors one of the largest pools of entrepreneurial talent, from herders to village merchants, in all of sub-Saharan Africa. In much of Africa, the merchants are simple kiosk operators or party hacks dependent on under-the-table government contracts. Somalia has its share of those, too. But many more entrepreneurs are big-time traders and importers, risk-takers with deep respect and fondness for the free market.

For centuries, those entrepreneurs, accounting for as much as half of the population, drove Somalia’s economy. The country covers an area slightly smaller than California and Arizona combined, forming the eastern edge of the region known as the Horn of Africa. Most of the land is dry savanna, and nomads have crisscrossed the country in search of food and water for generations, influenced by centuries of commercial and cultural contact with the Arabian Peninsula, which lies 60 miles across the Gulf of Aden from northern Somalia.

Since the 10th Century, trade ships have been docking at the port of Mogadishu and, before the war, commerce flourished. Factories produced everything from candy to matchbooks, and at a profit. Until a few years ago, one small, lush region of Somalia produced 80% of the bananas consumed in Italy. Out on the dry plains, where pastoralists outnumber subsistence farmers, nomads operated as independent businessmen, amassing large herds in a free market largely untouched by political change.

Somali traders are not the sort of people who shrink from a challenge. Even in the midst of their recent civil war and famine, many continued to do business. While thousands of farmers perished from starvation, nomads with huge herds of camels still roamed the countryside. And, in the lawless cities, entrepreneurs used their wiles and their initiative to survive a scenario never taught at business school. “Even today,” Naumann says, “it is very, very difficult to pull a fast one on a Somali.”

OMAR HAJI HASSAN COUNTS HIMSELF AMONG THE COUNTRY’S UN-entrepreneurs. Two years ago, he was a wealthy man, running three stores in downtown Mogadishu. Each store was named for one of his sons--Bashir, Nadir and Yasin--and the family turned a handsome profit selling auto parts and paint.

Hassan built his empire the hard way. He started out in the accounting department of a cigarette factory, quitting when it was nationalized--and salaries deeply cut--under President Mohamed Siad Barre. Using his savings, he began importing auto parts from Italy in the late ‘70s and opened his own stores.

The business ran smoothly until January, 1991, when a long-simmering underground movement drove President Barre from office. Few outside the president’s Darod (dah-ROOD) were sad to see him go, but plenty of people, Hassan included, were shocked by the anarchy that followed the president’s departure.

Rioting troops and rebels cleaned out two of Hassan’s stores in one day, and later took everything he hadn’t managed to salvage from the third. The Hassan family fled Mogadishu, with Siynap Hassan, Omar’s wife, concealing her jewelry in a silk scarf wrapped around her waist. They returned a few weeks later, hiding in their suburban home behind a 12-foot-high wall spiked with shards of broken glass. During the first months of the revolution, they sold spare parts and paint to passersby from their home, and their six armed guards fended off attacks at the front gate.

President Barre and his troops retreated westward across Somalia, looting farms, burning homes and killing civilians in their flight. The rebels of the United Somali Congress, who pursued Barre’s troops, also pillaged farms and cities already hard-hit by a drought.

Siynap Hassan’s parents were caught in that double-edged assault in Baidoa, 150 miles northwest of Mogadishu. They owned an ice-making factory, a music cassette store, an auto-parts store and a cafe that served meals, as well as mango juice and Italian gelato. Barre’s troops hauled away all the refrigerators and furniture; the rebels took the rest a few days later. When the family tried to leave Baidoa, their car was stolen at gunpoint. They hitchhiked the rest of the way to Mogadishu, and moved in with Siynap and Omar Hassan.

Soon, 50 relatives had found refuge at Omar Hassan’s home. They included parents, grandparents, sisters, brothers, nieces and nephews, all camped out in the large living room and five bedrooms. Food was scarce and expensive.

The family had once dined on huge meals of camel meat, chicken, fruit and pasta; now they were eating corn for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Hassan’s savings dwindled quickly.

Then, last July, Omar Hassan took a gamble. He borrowed money from friends and went to Dubai, across the Arabian Peninsula in the United Arab Emirates. He bought $20,000 worth of rice and sugar and paid a ship captain $2,500 to bring it to Somalia. Insurance on the shipment was out of the question; a country in the midst of a civil war was much too risky a destination. So Hassan returned home for an anxious wait.

Two weeks later, a monsoon capsized the boat in the Indian Ocean, and the investment disappeared. Hassan vomited when he got the news. To pay off their debts, the Hassans had to sell Siynap’s jewelry and most of their paintings in the local market, which continued to flourish right through the war.

The decision to sell the Siynap’s jewelry didn’t come easily. But Omar Hassan felt an obligation to his lenders. “These were poor people, and I had to repay them,” Hassan says. “The jewelry was all we had left. But instead of arguing, she just did it.”

Omar Hassan didn’t give up, though. He formed a partnership with three other Somalis who, like him, had stashed money in their large homes and were looking for a new investment. With the money in hand, he returned to Dubai, bought more food and again shipped it to Somalia. This time the plan worked, and the goods, sold under armed guard in the market, turned a small profit. On his next trip to Dubai, Hassan bought clothes, which proved to be an even better seller in Somalia. He recently returned from his fourth trip, investing $25,000 in clothing, and he expects another shipment soon.

Hassan recites these events stoically as he sips lemonade on his porch on a hot afternoon. A slender 48-year-old, he has just returned from prayers at the local mosque and wears a crisp, white open-collar dress shirt. His smooth, handsome face shows no trace of anguish or bitterness. Of course, this wasn’t the life that he had imagined back in the days when his stores were open. But, he says, a businessman has to learn to deal with setbacks.

Hundreds of Somali businessmen like Hassan have changed tack in recent months. Some have begun renting their cars and houses to relief agencies and journalists. One man who lost his office buildings has started a hotel, and within weeks he had bought a generator for electricity, hired cooks for the restaurant and imported 50 television sets and 50 air conditioners.

If the fighting stops and a strong government takes over, Hassan believes, the Somalis can forget their recent past. But his voice suggests it is a wish, rather than a prediction. “I have seen many places in the world, and this is the best for us,” he says. “If there is no fight, I want to be here.”

Omar and Siynap Hassan now have seven children, ranging in age from 2-year-old Fatima to 21-year-old Mohamed, and Siynap is expecting another child--contraceptives disappeared from Somalia after the war began.

None of the Hassan children has been to a school in two years. They have spent most of that time within the walled compound of their home, afraid to venture even onto the dirt street outside. Nadir, 12, plays soccer in the yard with his brothers and cousins. He studies the Koran every day at a nearby mosque and wants to go back to his school. His dream, he says, is to become a doctor, “to cure people and make money.”

Siynap worries about the children. Like many parents all across Somalia, she and her husband teach the children at home. But it’s not the same as a proper school. And they worry that a minor injury or an illness in a country with few medicines and poor medical care could be a tragedy. “It’s not healthy for children here,” she says. “I’m always saying, ‘Don’t get hurt.’ But what can you do?”

Life in the Hassan household has been improving steadily, though, since the foreign soldiers arrived in Somalia. The other day, for the first time in two years, Siynap ventured into the streets in her small pickup. And she rarely dreams of leaving Somalia anymore.

“If Somalia becomes better and the schools reopen, I’d like to stay,” she says. “I like my country. I know these people.”

Her father, Abdulkader Sheik Adde, has found it more difficult to bounce back from the loss of his businesses and house in Baidoa. “He doesn’t eat that much, and sometimes he just stares at you,” says Siynap. “Most of the time he just holds his face in his hands and thinks.”

What does he think about? “I used to think, ‘When are we going to have peace?’ ” says Adde, a stocky 60-year-old with red-tinged hair, a sea-blue tunic and plastic sandals. “And I would think, ‘If we have peace, where am I going to start? Can I start again? How will I support my family?’ I am a hard worker. But I don’t have anything to start with.”

In Baidoa, Adde remembers, “I used to be somebody . I was a millionaire. But now even the millionaires are poor.”

The Somali soldiers who looted Baidoa left hundreds of homes and stores gutted, stealing everything from brick walkways to metal roofs. And the banditry at nearby farms and ranches helped turn Baidoa into the famine belt capital. The city’s population doubled, to 100,000, with the arrival of starving refugees. Just six months ago, up to 200 people were dying daily of hunger in Baidoa.

When the U.S. Marines arrived in December, order was restored to the city and corridors for relief food into the hinterland were reopened. Adde’s wife recently returned to assess the damage to their businesses. Only the walls of their three buildings and their home remained. Squatters living in the shell of their restaurant refused to leave.

Adde’s wife has begun to rebuild in Baidoa, and she already has put a roof over one room in the house. But the road ahead may be too steep for her husband. “They say the peace is excellent now, and I would like to start over,” he says. “That’s the place I know, but how can I go back? I don’t even have a place to sleep there.”

THE DRIVE TO UNSEAT BARRE WAS LED BY MEN WITH GUNS, BUT ITwas underwritten by intellectuals such as Mohamed Abdi Hussein. Hussein worked for months raising money for the rebel movement, the United Somali Congress. “The only thing everybody agreed on was their hatred for Barre,” Hussein remembers. “We could have accepted sharing Somalia with the Darod (Barre’s clan), but they always wanted to be on top.”

In the early years of his rule, Barre was viewed as a benevolent, reform-minded strongman. He gave the country a written language and women the right to vote, and he instituted a law that made it illegal to ask anyone their clan background. But Barre’s blatant favoritism for his own Marehan (mah-ree-HAN) people, part of the Darod clan, along with corruption and dissatisfaction with his state-controlled economy, began to drag down the government in the 1980s. Three rival clans temporarily joined forces to oust Barre, forcing him into exile in Nigeria. The rebel alliance didn’t last long, though. Clan rivalries that had simmered under Barre erupted into a criminal free-for-all.

In the revolution that ensued after Barre fled, Hussein and other intellectuals discovered that they had created several heavily armed warlords--and more problems than solutions.

“It’s very shameful that the USC has been fighting itself,” Hussein says. “I didn’t expect that. We didn’t think there would be rioting when we started this. We were thinking of equal rights and justice. And we never wanted a soldier to run this country.”

Now that the shooting is subsiding, Hussein and the other educated men and women who launched the liberation struggle with such high-minded principles are regrouping. There are hundreds of them in Mogadishu, and thousands more in the hinterlands. Some are religious leaders, who remain the figures Somalis look to for guidance. Many more are well-traveled businessmen and bureaucrats, trained abroad and often fluent in English or Italian, a colonial legacy of the late 19th Century, when Britain took over the north and Italy the south. (After Italy was defeated in World War II, Somalia came under British military rule. The United Nations allowed Italy to return as a caretaker government in 1950, and Somalia became independent in 1960, when the Italian flag was lowered and the blue Somali flag raised in a midnight ceremony attended by tens of thousands in downtown Mogadishu.)

Hussein, a college graduate with a degree in civil engineering, was born 39 years ago in Merca, an old port city south of Mogadishu, the eldest son of a policeman. One of his most vivid memories is of a U.S. Peace Corps volunteer, Jerry Martin, who drove the 12-year-old Hussein to a Mogadishu hospital and paid for the appendix operation that saved his life. His first job after college was with a German government relief agency, and he used his earnings to start a grocery store that sold imported canned foods and a 24-hour outdoor cafe that catered to the thousands of young, upwardly mobile Somalis in the thriving capital.

But by the time the U.S. Marines arrived in Mogadishu, eight months of clan warfare had killed 35,000 people; all semblance of government had collapsed; nearly every office, from the police department to the national air carrier, had been stripped bare, and the capital was divided into two zones separated by a mostly deserted two-lane street known as the Green Line. Hussein’s businesses vanished in the civil war, along with his relief-agency job, as the Germans, like the Americans and every foreign diplomatic group in the capital except for the Egyptians, fled the growing anarchy.

Now Mohamed and his 28-year-old wife, Falis, draw on their meager savings and accept donations from his seven brothers, all of whom fled to Canada during the war. The Husseins live in a single-story home tucked behind a concrete fence and scraggly bougainvillea in a southern Mogadishu suburb. They built the house seven years ago, but the walls inside remain unpainted. They bring water in by donkey cart, using jerry cans to flush the toilets each evening. A gasoline-powered generator keeps the electric lights burning at night.

The Husseins have six children, from 13 months to 9 years old. A seventh child, just 6 months old, fell ill and died after the family walked to Afgoi, 20 miles west of the capital, to escape the fighting in 1991. Though their primary school was destroyed in the fighting two years ago, the older children’s education continues, after a fashion. Each day at sunset, Hussein takes them onto the patio, where he uses a small blackboard to teach them English.

Mohamed and Falis have a mixed marriage, by Somali standards. The Somali people believe themselves part of one large Muslim tribe descended from the mythical founder Samaale. They speak the same language and share much of the same culture. But they are divided into hundreds of clans, sub-clans and sub-sub-clans, and each Somali is able to recite his genealogical history.

The Husseins come from the same clan, the Hawiye (haw-WEE-yay), one of the largest in Somalia, but from different sub-clans. Mohamed’s sub-clan is the Habir Gedir, which controls southern Mogadishu. Falis is an Abgal, who control northern Mogadishu.

The Habir Gedir and the Abgal have no particular historical animosity. Like most clans in Somalia, they speak the same language and intermarriage is common. But when conflict arises, especially in a country without a police force, Somalis fall back on their clan roots. “It’s not a matter of liking or disliking each other,” Mohamed Hussein explains. “It’s just a feeling that ‘My clan is better than your clan.’ But if someone is taking your car, you call your clan and they take revenge on the other clan.”

Most experts believe a federal system, with strong clan-based regional autonomy, holds the only hope for Somalia. But before a new government can be installed, the U. N.-led troops will have to disarm much of the country, restore the police force and encourage village elders and religious leaders to assume political control--as well as mobilize people like Hussein.

“We need to settle the problems of Somalia,” he says. “But how? That is the question. I love this country. It is very rich. It is short only of minds.”

AS THE FAMINE BEGINS TO subside, relief officials face a delicate task. They must continue to feed the remaining hungry and at the same time keep market prices for food high enough to encourage Somalis to plant new crops.

Aid agencies admit they failed at that task in Ethiopia, where the markets collapsed under the crush of grain donated during the 1984-’86 famine and the farmers refused to return to their fields. But Ethiopia had a perennial food shortage, exacerbated by drought, deforestation, overpopulation and misguided central planning. Somalia, on the other hand, has been self-sufficient in food for more than three decades, and it has a centuries-old tradition of unbridled capitalism.

Issak Abdu Rahaman, a tall 33-year-old with a thick black mustache, is of that tradition. By day, he goes door-to-door in Mogadishu’s better neighborhoods, offering to dig pits and bury the homeowner’s garbage. On a good, 12-hour workday, the displaced farmer can earn $1, which he spends on tea and sugar, as well as rice and meat, to supplement the Red Cross food for himself, his wife and their three children.

Seven months ago, the family came to Mogadishu on foot in a desperate search for food after Barre’s troops had taken the Rahamans’ cattle and food. Carrying the smallest children on their backs, the parents walked 150 miles in 12 days, boiling and eating camel skin they found on the ground. Now, at a feeding center called Kitchen No. 26, they have been nursed back to health by the foreign handouts. And, though they must stay until the rains return in April, they itch to go home, to teach their son to be a nomad, passing the torch to an 11th generation. “I would be happy to go back home,” Rahaman says. “I am ready.”

Relief officials say Somalia’s recovery depends on that desire.

No one knows what will become of Somalia. War and famine have robbed tens of millions of dollars’ worth of material possessions and hundreds of thousands of lives. “A whole generation of children has been lost,” says Dawn MacRae, an American who coordinates programs here for the Los Angeles-based International Medical Corps. “I don’t think people can recover that quickly. All we can do is look at what they’ve been through, and be compassionate.”

Yet despair has been tempered by a surprising resilience. Most Somalis welcomed the arrival of American troops in December, thinking that peace and tranquillity could not be far behind. Within hours of the Marines’ beach landing, Somalis were asking the flak-jacketed young troops: “When are the Americans going to reopen the factories and the schools?” One day, a Somali militiaman at the infamous Green Line thrust his AK-47 rifle into my hands. “Take it,” he said. “None of us are really soldiers. We are truck drivers, hotel clerks and factory workers. We don’t want this war.”

As the weeks pass, Somalis are growing impatient. Traders, dipping deeply into the pockets of relatives overseas, have kept the economy alive. The arrival of relief agencies and journalists has brought so much cash into the country that the Somali shilling has doubled in value against the U. S. dollar, and money changers will accept nothing less than crisp $100 bills. But the factories and most of the schools still are closed. Relief food has been reaching the neediest people, but Somalis hope for something more than an end to famine. They want a return to prosperity, to normal life. And incrementally they are building it.

When Fatima Elmi Egal summoned her son home, Dr. Aweys Abdi Omar didn’t hesitate to obey. She had been in Nairobi, staying with her daughter. But when she saw that the Marines had arrived in Somalia, she decided to return, and no one could talk her out of it.

Omar’s mother, a 55-year-old widow, is a dignified woman with a weary, lined face. Sitting on a sagging mattress in the bedroom of her brother’s house in Mogadishu, she wears modest earrings and red polish on her nails.

She had been driven out of their home and grocery store in Baidoa in 1991 and, last year, out of a home in Mogadishu. Now, she is ready to start over.

“It’s not like before,” she says, rubbing eyes going blind with advanced glaucoma. “We are no longer afraid. Even these guns are becoming very rare.” Like so many Somalis, Omar’s mother blames her fellow countrymen for Somalia’s plight. “The Somalis themselves are responsible for what has happened here,” she says. “All these different clans . . . I wish we could all just become ‘Somalis’ again.

“There’s no time left for me,” she adds. “But my children will carry on. Everybody in Somalia is going to do their jobs.”