THE ROMANCE OF A $200,000 PHONE CALL
Sewage welled up through what pavement was left. Mounds of sand blew through the streets. Rubbish was dumped atop wreckage and goats grazed on the offal. Everything that guns can accomplish had been achieved in Mogadishu. It was impossible for us to go outside our walls without a truck full of “security” (as the Somali mercenaries liked to be called). Even with our gunmen along there were always people massing up to beg, gape, and thieve. Hands tugged at wallet pockets. Fingers nipped at wristwatch bands. No foreigner could make a move without attracting a hornet’s nest of attention – demanding, grasping, pushing mobs of cursing, whining, sneering people. Young men waving AK-47 assault rifles pushed among the crowd. Rusted, dent- covered, windshield-less pickup trucks with machine-gun mounts welded into their beds sputtered by on predatory errands. We spent Christmas Eve on the roof of our mansion. ABC’s London Bureau had shipped us bottles of whiskey in camera tripod case tubes. We broke into the medical supplies and handed out the pain pills. Somali gunfire provided a light show. Bush, on his final foreign trip as president, arrived in Somalia on December 31. He spent the day visiting American troops. We’d found out, through military sources, that the president was planning a New Year’s visit to an orphanage in Baidoa, a small famine- gripped city 160 miles of bad road away from Mogadishu.
I flew to Nairobi and chartered a small plane to Mogadishu. (Those were the days when magazines had budgets !) Thanks to a side job I had as a sometimes-radio-reporter for ABC News, I had a billet in the Somali capital. The network – with the help of the U.S. military – had found a walled mansion, more or less intact, and supplied it with a generator and a water purification system for the well. Some 30 of us – reporters, camera crews, video editors, producers, and tech guys – were housed in this compound, bedded down in shifts while our 40-man army of Somali mercenaries camped in the courtyard. Somalia was true anarchy. A vicious dictator, Siad Barre, had been overthrown, and the Somalis celebrated their independence by shooting one another. Fighting had broken out everywhere. It wasn’t traditional Africa tribal warfare. The Somalis all belong to the same tribe. But the tribe has six clans, the six clans have hundreds of sub-clans, and each sub-clan is divided into infinite murderous feuds. The Somalis fought one another with rifles, machine guns, mortars, cannons and – to judge by the look of Mogadishu – wads of filth. In the old town, not one stone stood upon another. In the new part of the city everything was built out of concrete, and the concrete had been blasted back into piles of aggregate, rebar, and Portland cement. There was no public supply of water or electricity. At night the only illumination was from artillery blasts and tracer bullets. Every tree and bush had been snatched for firewood.
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February 2020
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