The View from Here: Returning to Mogadishu

By Abdurahman Warsame

I've returned to Mogadishu, the city I grew up in, for the first time in years.  So I spent the first few days traveling through city, I went everywhere.

Mogadishu was once a thriving beautiful city. It's by the Indian Ocean and it's blessed with beautiful weather and white sandy beaches. A short drive out of the city and you enter the lush gardens of Afgooye. Now it's a miserable and broken city.

The scars of twenty years of civil war are only too visible. The streets are gone, famous structures like the parliament and the national theatre are nearly or completely destroyed. 

There is hardly a building without bullet marks. The areas al Shabab withdrew from are even worse: people who fled from there haven't returned yet. 

The war also damaged the psyche of the city's residents. People are used to the sound of gunfire: they can accurately guess what type of gun was fired. Is it fighting or shooting in the air, they wonder, or if it was fired by the AU peacekeepers. 

For example, government soldiers clear traffic jams by shooting in the air and people can tell from distance it's not a big deal. But death is also taken lightly. 

Everyone also listens to the dozen or so radio stations: it's essential to know which areas to avoid. There are guns in every house, aside from the thousands of uniformed armed. 

And now Mogadishu has become one large refugee camp. New camps are created every week and hundreds of people are fleeing to the city. 

But there is one positive change. There is less fighting in the centre of the city. But still the armed men who were once the militias who terrorised residents are now government soldiers. They lack discipline and have not changed their old ways. 

If the government can train them, impose discipline and remove most of them from the streets then that could be the beginning of sustainable security in Mogadishu.

Mogadishu is Somalia's capital and the largest city. Without finding peace here it's difficult to create a functioning government for the all of Somalia. 

Originally published by Al Jazeera under Creative Commons Licensing 

The View from Here: "If I Was Sane, I Would Have Fled"

Dr. Yusuf PHOTO: Mohammed Adow By Mohammed Adow Dr Mohammed Yusuf, is one of Somalia's unsung heros. He is the director and chief surgeon of the Madina Hospital, one of Mogadishu's few operational hospitals, and the country's top trauma medical facility. His work involves repairing broken limbs, intestines and uteruses. As a war in which the biggest casualties are civilians rages on outside, Dr Yusuf and his team work round the clock in the facility's emergency section. He believes he is not normal. "The difference between a robot and a human being are feelings," he observes. "I have grown numb to almost everything that goes on around me. Very few things move me," he told me as he did his early morning rounds. "If I was normal and had my feelings intact, I would have fled like the thousands fleeing my country every month," he says.  The only thing that keeps him going, he says, is the knowledge that he is saving lives. Dr Yusuf and his team at Madina operate on between 10 and 100 people a day, depending on whether there is fighting in the city. They range from patients who have bullets and shrapnel lodged in their guts to others who need amputations - at times of both legs and arms. As is the case with any hospital in a war-ravaged city, Madina is ill-equipped and poorly staffed. They use the most basic of equipment to help save the hundreds maimed in Somalia's seemingly endless war. When the Somali state fell in 1991, Dr Yusuf fled the free-for-all that ensued. For little over a decade, he worked and lived in Italy, Swaziland and Mozambique. He returned to Somalia in 2002. "I returned to help my people",  he says.   Today, a week can go by before the doctor sees his wife of the last 35 years. She, too, is a doctor and is involved in helping the sick in the Somali capital.  During the few hours I spent with him at the hospital, I realised Dr Yusuf's lack of emotion is not absolute. He is an angry man: angry at the conflict that keeps decimating his people, and angry at those who fight it. He also abhors the suffering civilians are frequently subjected to and the lack of meaningful intervention on their behalf. "In Libya, NATO is bombarding Gaddafi's strongholds on the pretext of defending civilians. Who do you ever hear speak of defending the defenceless Somalis?" he asks. He also points to examples that are closer to home. "The International Criminal Court is dragging Kenya's high and mighty to court for the country's post-election unrest that killed 1,500 people. In Somalia, the same number of people and even more die in just a single month. Where is [ICC Chief Prosecutor Luis Moreno-] Ocampo?" he asks. One image, he says, will remain with him forever: "I will never forget the day I was forced to chop off the legs of a 23-year-old pregnant lady to save her life. I did it with the full knowledge that she will require the help of someone else for the rest of her life, but I has nothing else to do." Originally published by Al Jazeera on June 29, 2011 under Creative Commons Licensing