A Trip To Somalia, 'The Most Failed State'

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The New Yorker's Jon Lee Anderson took a hazardous trip to no-man's land: the largely warlord-controlled failed state of Somalia. He accompanied the country's president, Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, who controls just a tiny portion of the country.
NEAL CONAN, host:
Late this summer, New Yorker writer Jon Lee Anderson took a hazardous trip to the most failed state, Somalia. He accompanied President Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed on a flight into the capital, Mogadishu, stayed in the presidential compound and cautiously reported on the war with Islamic extremists there, the activities of African peacekeepers' efforts to ship in food to starving millions in the face of widespread piracy, and on the wreckage of the capital city and the nation.
If you have questions for Jon Lee Anderson about his trip to Somalia, give us a call: 800-989-8255. Email us: talk@npr.org. You can also join the conversation on our Web site. That's at npr.org. Click on TALK OF THE NATION. Jon Lee Anderson's piece �The Most Failed State� appears in the December 14th edition of the New Yorker. And he joins us now from our bureau in New York. Nice to have you back on the program.
Mr. JON LEE ANDERSON (Columnist, The New Yorker): Thank you, Neal. It's great to be back.
CONAN: And in many ways, your story is a profile of a president who is himself a former Islamic rebel who's at war now with former colleagues as the head of a government that commands little more than his presidential compound.
Mr. ANDERSON: That's right. Yeah, one of my main purposes was to kind of answer the question for myself - one of my main purposes in going to Somalia was to answer the question for myself: What is power like for a president when he controls little more than the airstrip outside the capital city, his president palace and, with the help of foreign troops, the sea port?
CONAN: Hmm.
Mr. ANDERSON: And so I had a 10-day sort of ire on this failed state sort of at the elbow of President Sharif. It was fascinating.
CONAN: And he had an interesting rumination on exactly that point. Power, he said, well, normally, the state has a monopoly on the use of force. That's not the case, by any stretch, in Somalia.
Mr. ANDERSON: That's not the case. That's right. His former allies, the so-called Shabaab who have sort of hitched their horse to the al-Qaida wagon, espousing a wider jihad and an extreme form of Islam control much of southern Somalia and a good part of the capital, as well. Most days, Ugandan solders who are - who custody(ph) President Sharif and his very tiny Cabinet there in this compound traded fire with the Shabaab around the city. The Shabaab have also shown themselves capable of pulling off rather spectacular suicide bomb attacks in the neutral zone of this old city center around the presidential palace loosely guarded by militias who have tithed the allegiance to the government.
It's a very tenuous situation, and one in which the Shabaab still show themselves able to strike very spectacular, violent blows.
CONAN: Yet the most violent incident you witnessed when you were there -gunfire, mortars, cannons are firing, nobody quite knows why. And it turns out it has nothing to do with this conflict.
Mr. ANDERSON: That's right. It actually happened more than once. There were gunfights, mysterious - nobody in the presidential compound knew, really, what they were about. It would - generally, it took a day for someone to come back and tell me had happened. And in two cases, they were gun-battles between government militias, that is, government's - militias loosely under the tutelage of the government, but because of clan or tribal reasons, fighting it out in various parts of the city.
CONAN: And it is a dismal picture you come away with, that this man who Secretary of State Clinton describes as the best hope at the moment for Somalia clearly could not survive a day, a week without the protection of the African peacekeeping troops, or -they're paid for by the United Nations. And the place would devolve again into utter anarchy.
Mr. ANDERSON: That's absolutely right. You know, when President Sharif took off for his very first trip to the West to attend the UNGA - the United Nations General Assembly in September - the Shabaab managed to rocket the airstrip. You know, it's - bullets whizzed through the trees around the presidential palace. Inside the compound, he has to travel inside armored Toyota Land Cruisers. It's a very tenuous situation.
The food convoys that - through which, you know, a third or more of Somalis are dependent from the international community - have to be shepherded into Mogadishu's port by American naval convoys, flotillas. I saw one arrive - there were about 10 battleships and frigates and so on that had to bring them into port. And then the Shabaab did mortar the port and the area around it. The Shabaab seek to extend their control by creating chaos and making the government incapable of doing much more than it is, which is, at the moment, hunkering down and surviving.
There is a plan by the U.N. special representative for Somalia, it's a new post, to try and create something - he calls it a white zone - in Mogadishu in order to kind of create an international flag, to create a secure zone where the government can be seen to be doing something and the international community can return for the first time visibly to Mogadishu. But that hasn't happened yet.
CONAN: Is that the same man who said it is a contradiction in terms to speak of an emergency that has now stretched 20 years?
Mr. ANDERSON: That's right. That's right. Absolutely. And he also is - this is Ambassador Abdullah, who's a very urbane, Mauritanian-born diplomat who Ban Ki-moon named as a special representative for Somalia. And he makes it a point of pride that to do something in his tenure. He doesn't want it to remain a failed state before he goes away.
But at the moment, there is a host of Somali experts, most of whom have to hold reports(ph) from the Kenyan capital of Nairobi, and very few of whom can actually go to Mogadishu. And they do so much as I did, arriving, you know, in an airplane on the airstrip and under the custody of these (unintelligible) -African union forces are taken to the presidential compound inside an armored personal carrier and have to leave in the same way. It's extremely, extremely fragile and tenuous.
CONAN: We're talking with Jon Lee Anderson, a staff writer for the New Yorker Magazine, about his trip to the most failed state, Somalia. 800-989-8255. Email: talk@npr.org. Ben is on the line, calling from San Francisco.
BEN (Caller): Hi, there. Thanks for taking my call.
CONAN: Sure.
BEN: My question is I was wondering if you think that Osama bin Laden would be able to escape to Somalia back and forth as another failed state, and then do his work there to influence people to take up his cause. And I'll take my answer of the air.
CONAN: Okay, Ben. Thanks.
Ms. ANDERSON: Ben, yes. Good question. I mean, no, Osama bin Laden has, in fact, endorsed the Shabaab, although it's unclear yet as to how much the links are those of solidarity rather than structural.
But, you know, one has to - all you have to do is look at the map and see that Somalia is a very geostrategic country. It's got a long coastline on the Indian Ocean and on the Horn of Africa and into the Red Sea, opposite Saudi Arabia and Yemen, which is, of course, the ancestral birthplace of Osama bin Laden and which has a strong al-Qaida presence today. So yes, indeed, it's possible.
If - you know, we have several naval flotillas in the Indian Ocean attempting to stop the piracy that's now become a problem emanating from Somalia's coast. And if they're incapable, in some cases, of stopping pirate attacks from Somalia, a thousand miles into the Indian Ocean from Somalia's shores, it follows that small boats perhaps setting forth from Pakistan or that part of the world carrying al-Qaida people for Somalia or going back and forth, might not ever be seen, might never be detected.
CONAN: You do recount an attack by US Forces on a man described as an al-Qaida recruiter who is killed by helicopter-borne troops. And there's a wonderful passage, a news conference which the president of Somalia held in his compound there, the Villa Somalia. And somebody asks him, when did he realize that al-Qaida had an influence on - well, his former organization, the Islamic courts, and now Al-Shabaab.
Mr. ANDERSON: That's right. Sharif sort of said in a jokey sort of way - he's quite a humorous character and charismatic, quite the charismatic man. He said, when Osama bin Laden, you know, said that they should attack me, that was when he realized that the Shabaab were his enemies. It was - yeah.
CONAN: Well, let's get another caller, and this is Abdulli(ph), Abdulli with us from Minneapolis.
ABDULLI (Caller): (unintelligible). Can you hear me?
CONAN: Yes, you're on the air. Go ahead, please.
ABDULLI: Yes. Well, I am a Somali-American who is currently here in the United States. I was about four or five years old when the war started. Since then, I haven't seen Somalia. But it struck me whenever I see the news - on the news what's going on there. And I would like to ask the guest, since he was living there, do you feel that since you've been there and you've heard what is going on also in the United - outside Somalia, that the world turned its back on Somalia by just saying war isn't rather than doing action about what's going on there?
Mr. ANDERSON: Well, I think that's probably the - you know, an accurate assessment. I think Somalia, you know, ever since President Clinton - following the famous Black Hawk Down incident in 1993 when American servicemen were killed and then television cameras showed the bodies of two servicemen being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu by an angry mob - this was, at the time, something that very much shocked Americans.
President Clinton was not a man who felt comfortable with exercising military power, and he withdrew American troops from that country. They had originally gone there as part of an operation, a humanitarian mission, to prevent - to bring food aid to thousands of starving Somalis and - who were starving as a result of the militia violence there.
But when the Americans left, that's true. Somalia seized to be a place that the world really paid much attention to. And it wasn't really until after the 1998 bombings by al-Qaida of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam that the Americans began to realize that Somalia was a problem, that, in fact, some of the fugitives who were involved - some of the people who'd masterminded those bombings had fled to and had taken sanctuary in Somalia.
And then, of course, after the attacks of September 11th, 2001, the Americans once again turned their attention - but again, it was kind of peripheral attention - to Somalia. The CIA paid a group of warlords who - loosely, between themselves - controlled Mogadishu, anyway, to form a kind of anti-al-Qaida front and to capture or kill al-Qaida people, to kind of be their eyes and ears on the ground. And that was the situation that held until a couple of years ago, when the Islamic Courts Union ceased power.
CONAN: Headed by the current president.
Mr. ANDERSON: Headed by the current president, in his earlier, slightly more radical metamorphosis.
CONAN: We're talking - thanks very much for the call. We're talking with Jon Lee Anderson of the New Yorker Magazine. You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.
And let's see if we can go next to Yolanda, Yolanda with us from Park City in Utah.
YOLANDA (Caller): Hey, I'm just curious. What percentage of the population is actually engaged in any kind of fighting, and what percentage is sitting at, you know, sitting at home being protected?
CONAN: Very�
Mr. ANDERSON: That's very difficult to say.
CONAN: I would say very few are being protected.
Mr. ANDERSON: Yes, it's - I mean, you know, the civilians - civilians live in Mogadishu, I mean, which is where I was, at the mercy of whatever piece of lead is flying through the air. It happens to - you know, your safety depends on where you're standing at that particular moment. Gun battles and mortar attacks and so on are like - you know, I compare them in my piece, actually, to sort of tornadoes in Oklahoma or Texas. It's sort of luck of the draw. And that's often the way it is in these sort of places.
CONAN: There's a visit you make to a clinic, which is one of these African peacekeepers - they brought doctors along with them in the clinic there, where he is treating people with shrapnel wounds and gunshot wounds, and also large numbers of women all suffering from infections.
Mr. ANDERSON: That's right. Yes, it's really very sad. It's pretty much all that exists in the way of medical treatment for people in this area of the city, many of whom are refugees living in very precarious situations. Twice a week, these Ugandan troops hold these clinics. There was one young fellow who was being operated on for an - you know, he'd been in the head by shrapnel in an IED explosion. He died within minutes.
There were many women there suffering mostly from genital urinary infections. And this is a result of poor hygiene, poverty and the fact that a very extreme form of genital - female genital circumcision is practiced in Somalia and often causes many problems for the women who suffer from it, especially nowadays, with virtually no medical treatment.
So it's, you know, it's a benighted place, with, you know, with many, many people living at the very, very extreme edge of poverty. It's one of the biggest feeding programs the international community has. Many people live very precariously. And there's not much between them and death, just as was the case in the early '90s, when the first Americans went there to try to stop the starvation.
CONAN: Thanks very much for the call, Yolanda.
YOLANDA: Thanks.
CONAN: And Jon Lee Anderson, I have to turn to the conclusion of your piece, which was - it goes really back to Abdulli's question about how does Somalia got the attention of the world again, and that they have found ways to get the attention of the world through the piracy that has become, as you say, a bigger problem in the Red Sea, in the Indian Ocean, and indeed the idea that al-Qaida might be able to establish a foothold there.
Mr. ANDERSON: That's right. I think, yes, Somalia's problems have kind of reached a critical mass. Clearly, the country is hemorrhaging. It's shown with its piracy - we now hear about these young boys from the Somali-American communities who have been lured back to Somalia for whatever reasons and have served as suicide bombers in a few cases, these very worrying trends. The idea that al-Qaida, maybe if very squeezed in Pakistan or Afghanistan, might decide to use Somalia - which is very receptive at the moment with the Shabaab there -as a final readout or an alternative place. And, yes, I spoke to a very interesting man, a senior former military officer and actually an Islamic scholar, who told me the following: In a kind of cynical way, Somalis often speak in parables. And this was an example. He said Allah has finally come to our rescue. We've served as a Cold War proxy battleground, as a regional battleground, and we've been in a civil war.
We appealed to everyone to help us, but no one came. And so finally, we appealed to Allah. We asked him to give us oil so as to interest the Americans. Or else, we said, we need a couple of fighters from Afghanistan. So now, the Somalis have a weapon. We are a staging ground for the fight against global terrorism. After so many years, with our piracy and our jihad, we are finally able to project fear.
CONAN: Jon Lee Anderson's piece on the most failed state appears in the December 14th issue of the New Yorker Magazine. Jon Lee Anderson, I hope it was your idea to go there. No editor sent you, I hope.
Mr. ANDERSON: It was - no, I always wanted to go to Somalia. I don't know what it is, but I was fascinated by the place.
CONAN: Thanks very much for being with us today.
Mr. ANDERSON: Thank you, Neal.
CONAN: Jon Lee Anderson joined us from our bureau in New York.
Tomorrow, it's TALK OF THE NATION: SCIENCE FRIDAY - whether or not companies should be allowed to patent genes. Plus, a Copenhagen climate update.
This is TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. I'm Neal Conan, in Washington.
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