A Somali Alternative to Chaos

Mohammed Awil Mohammed watches with satisfaction as four women crouch on the sandy ground outside his shop in the musty heat of the dawn here, pulling the husk from frankincense with their fingers and teeth. Each worker, her lips ringed with white powder from her labors, will clean and sort at least 35 pounds of the clumps of aromatic gum before her day ends at 11 p.m.

The effort pleases Mohammed, 25, a Bossaso entrepreneur, for he is on target to reach his weekly export quota of 220 to 440 pounds of frankincense, a fragrant resin commonly burned in ceremonial practices. This will mean up to $2,400 cash in his pocket.

Before the collapse of Somalia’s national government seven years ago and the ensuing civil war that has ravaged much of the country since, almost all of Mohammed’s frankincense and the profits it generated would have gone to the local authorities of this semiarid, sand-swept port city.

But things have changed.

“Life in the city is different,” said Mohammed, who now exports his product, which costs about $6 a pound, to Saudi Arabia and Dubai, one of the United Arab Emirates. “I’m a private businessman now. When the government was here, we couldn’t even go to the port.”

Mohammed, who also manages a thriving trade shipping shark fins to Hong Kong, is just one of scores of businesspeople who are capitalizing on the peace and stability of Bossaso, the de facto capital of northeastern Somalia. Near the tip of the Horn of Africa, about 700 miles northeast of the shattered Somali capital, Mogadishu, Bossaso has become a refuge from the anarchy sweeping this nation.

While most of Somalia has become an object of international despair and even disgust because the country’s seemingly unceasing ethnic warfare and unchecked violence have left it with no functioning central government and in the haphazard control of numerous armed factions, here in Bossaso there is no comparable inter-clan warfare underway.

Instead, this prospering haven is run by the Somali Salvation Democratic Front, a local political organization whose leaders say they are willing to reconcile with rival clans, including that of the late notorious Somali warlord, Gen. Mohammed Farah Aidid.

There has been little ethnic-based fighting in Bossaso; almost everyone here belongs to the Darood clan. Most disputes are settled the traditional way, by elders. Bossaso’s first prison is only now going up on the outskirts of town.

“People here are coming to grips with reality and facing up to their problems more than any region in the country,” said John Bierke, Somalia representative for the U.S. Agency for International Development.

If the rest of Somalia followed suit, observers say, this troubled nation could eventually return to some semblance of normality.

But realistically, the chaos and societal disintegration that characterize much of Somalia indicate that peace, order and prosperity are unlikely to return any time soon.

Fighting, for example, continues to tear apart the southern port city of Kismayu.

Mogadishu has been relatively calm after last month’s fragile cease-fire agreement between the main warlords there. Still, the airport in the capital remains closed, its port has stopped functioning and the city’s water and sewage system is defunct.

The United Nations is conducting emergency operations only and no longer has expatriate staff permanently based in the capital, where one of the main factional leaders is California-educated Hussein Mohammed Aidid, son of Mohammed Farah Aidid.

But the dismal conditions elsewhere have, in turn, made Bossaso’s relative economic progress all that much more significant to experts and observers here.

“Commercially, it’s booming,” Dominik Langenbacher of the U.N. Development Program said of the city. “A few traditional trading families are making the fortune of their lives.” They are taking advantage of Bossaso being one of the country’s only two working ports.

Marketable Products Drive the Economy

Bossaso--whose population has swollen from 6,000 to 150,000 in the past seven years--could hardly be classified as a thriving, cosmopolitan center in a Western sense. Most residents lack the basics. Potable water, electricity and indoor plumbing are still luxuries.

What many here do have, though, is marketable merchandise--and a relatively safe place to peddle it. Besides frankincense, which local officials say brings in about $150 million a year, there is a healthy trade in lobster, the leafy stimulant khat and shark fins, which fetch up to $30 a pound. Livestock--camels, sheep and goats--make up 85% of Bossaso’s exports, with 200,000 or so head going through the port each month.

Protected by 140 armed security guards supported by 110 customs officials and other staff, the port’s commercial activity, U.N. officials say, amounts to about $1 million a month, though business has slowed recently due to increased trade at the Somali port of Berbera, about 300 miles west of here.

While observers say corruption here is a problem, as it is across Somalia, it has not prevented imports of food products from reaching Bossaso. Residents can sip soda from Saudi Arabia, eat spaghetti shipped from Dubai and fry their locally produced chicken eggs in cooking oil from Yemen, Oman or the United Arab Emirates.

Such trade has been booming sufficiently that a Chamber of Commerce was established last year to manage it.

Meanwhile, in the town’s mushrooming center has sprouted a disorganized huddle of shops and kiosks made from old burlap sacks, cardboard and flattened oil barrels. These structures, which also double as merchants’ homes, constitute a bazaar of sorts, offering everything from tea to tailoring.

Merchants have plastered their buildings with colorful pictures so their illiterate customers know what goods or services are available.

The quarrelsome-sounding Somali language rings through the air here as pedestrians--few people, even in this prospering place, have cars--jostle with scraggly goats on the gravel streets.

In the shade of a row of shacks, dozens of money-changers straddle plastic sugar sacks stuffed with bundles of up to 10 million Somali shillings; 1,000 Somali shillings are equal to about 8 cents.

These days, Abdulahi Ahmed Noar, 26, a money dealer for three years, figures he handles the equivalent of up to $2,000 a day. The figure rises tenfold when the ocean traffic is good. He gloats that there is no need for heavy, armed security to guard his cash, because there is an unspoken code of trust among clan members here.

The money-changers work with capital borrowed from local shopkeepers or from their extended families. Their customers are businesspeople or average Somalis whose overseas relatives have sent them foreign currency.

Utilities for Those Who Can Afford Them

That there is money flowing in Bossaso is readily apparent from the stone construction that is steadily creeping into the surrounding parched desert landscape. Water and electricity are now available to those who can afford them. Huge satellite dishes perch atop a couple of new hotels and other private enterprises.

Mohammed Said Omar owns a makeshift outdoor theater, where residents can pay 1,500 shillings (12 cents) to watch the latest films. Action movies--such as “Rumble in the Bronx,” starring Jackie Chan--are guaranteed to draw sellout crowds. Up to 300 moviegoers sit on rickety benches through what is normally a double feature. Omar tries to bring in a new movie every three months.

Just around the corner, at another outdoor auditorium, viewers can watch on three televisions broadcasts of CNN, NBC and an Arabic-language channel. Mohammed Abdi “Italiani,” owner of this video parlor, laments that the reception for the BBC is poor. He also says he cannot pick up ESPN, despite the two huge satellites on his roof that he imported from Dubai for $1,400 apiece.

Entry to the video parlor used to be free. But since life has improved in Bossaso, most can now afford to pay a 1,000-shilling fee. With its scorching year-round temperatures soaring above 100 degrees, Bossaso was considered by past Somali and colonial governments as a place of punishment and exile.

But now, Somalis from war-torn parts of the country are migrating to this region. Langenbacher said U.N. workers have identified 10,000 more Somali refugees--both within and outside the country--who want to relocate here.

“I was homesick for Bossaso,” said money-changer Abdul Aziz Adam, 30, who recently returned from Yemen, to which he fled in 1992. “This is where I was born.”

Although the new arrivals have tested the strength of the town’s fragile social and security infrastructure, the refugees have also contributed to the economic boom, working as servants and laborers, collecting garbage and building shanties.

Abdula Sheikh Adam, 35, fled Mogadishu 18 months ago because of the fighting there. He left behind a wife and three children. But the tailor said he hopes to earn enough to reunite his family soon. The walls of his tiny kiosk are adorned with patterned shirts and cotton pants. Adam, who charges $4 or so per garment, can whip up quite a business on his decrepit German-made pedal sewing machine.

“I’m happier here,” he said. “Life is better.”

Members of the Somali diaspora are also returning home from abroad and investing money in Bossaso. North East Telecommunications Corp., which charges Somalis just $2 a minute to call anywhere in the world, was established primarily by expatriate Somalis in 1994.

Another returnee, Mohammed Said Yusef, who came home from Saudi Arabia in the early 1990s, got involved in the livestock trade. His business was prosperous and flourishing until early this year, when it was disrupted by internal squabbles. Still, Yusef noted of Bossaso and being home and working here: “I’m a Somali. It is better to invest in my own country.”

Said Mohammed Hassan, who works with UNICEF here, said that “most people who come back bring new initiative, new ideas, new energy.”

The Many Problems Still Not Solved

Despite the optimism shared by many Bossaso residents, U.N. officials acknowledge that numerous problems need to be resolved before this city can ever be considered a total success story. And that could take decades. Improvements in education, health care and the environment are among those urgently needed.

But money is short, enthusiasm lacking.

“All the donors are sick and tired of Somalia, and aid levels are dropping at the very time that we are about to turn the corner in Somalia,” said Bierke of the Agency for International Development, noting that annual American assistance to Somalia now amounts to $15.5 million.

More important for solving Bossaso’s social and economic problems is good governance. Although the local political party performs some government functions and has allowed the creation of three regional authorities, conflict within the party has hindered plans to unify these authorities under one central body. “The political situation is a threat to further development,” said Langenbacher of the U.N.

Some local politicians acknowledge this and claim they are trying to fix the problem.

“We need a comprehensive national reconciliation conference, in which all Somalis can be included,” said Gen. Mohammed Abshir Musa, the party chairman. He added that an all-Somali peace conference is planned for October and that he and others from this area plan to tell their countrymen: “Enough is enough. Our people have suffered. We Somalis have no one else to blame.”