Just over 10 years ago, Mogadishu International airport was just a strip of tarmac in the middle of turmoil; teenagers with guns extorted “landing fees” from passengers descending from whatever United Nations or NGO flight touched down; sometimes rival gangs of “immigration officials” fought pitched battles over who controlled the extortion rights at the airport. Getting from the airport to some safe place in Mogadishu, usually a compound under heavy armed guard, meant a harrowing drive along sandy roads where kidnapping or plain ambush was a regular feature of life in the most lawless place on the planet. No pilot tarried on the tarmac too long. Mortars, both stray and intentional, were an occupational hazard. Even when an American-led UN force invaded the capital in 1993, venturing out of the protection of something armour-clad was asking for trouble. The UN force’s mandate was humanitarian. People were dying of hunger. But Somalis, divided by clan and ruled by warlords, were united in seeing it as an invasion force, and chased it out.
Flash forward to 2013. International flights crammed with Somalis arrive daily from Turkey, Dubai, Kenya and further afield. You get your visa from a polite man with a receipt book. The luggage, once bickered over by “porters” with AK-47s, reaches the arrival hall on a tractor-driven trailer. You have to look hard for bullet holes in the buildings. Clusters of foreigners with nametags and missions await to collect their charges. Somalis, their hand luggage overflowing with goods to sell and gifts to give, can get taxis into town and beyond.
Peace, of a sort, has returned to Mogadishu, backed by a huge international donor effort to kickstart civil society and the economy. Big hotels are being built – not the sort you might see in Copenhagen or Seattle – but five-storey affairs that tower above a landscape of single-storey tin-roofed houses and impromptu huts for those without proper shelter. There are shops, restaurants, even a bank. Once synonymous with anarchy and bloodshed, Mogadishu seems to be coming back to normality. The beautiful Indian Ocean shoreline, a taunting joke and a dangerous place in the wars of the 1990s onwards, now looks alluring. Children paddle in the waves on Lido beach. Parents loll and watch.
MediaTrain’s Andy Hill has been privileged in recent weeks and months to be part of the international effort to build a new peace in an area that was once the battlefield for superpower rivalry. From Southern Sudan, the world’s newest state, to Somalia and its would-be independent states of Somaliland and Puntland, international donors are funding programmes that support the media as a key pillar on the building of a lasting peace.
Mogadishu itself is still off-limits to most careful foreigners, patrolled by a pan-African peacekeeping force and prey to attack by Al-Shabab’s Islamic militants and their dreams of an Islamic Caliphate. But it is a town that functions. There is an elected government. There are newspapers, television stations, radio outlets and a vigorous online media. Journalists are hungry for training. A recent workshop MediaTrain was involved in centred on two themes: how to conduct investigative reporting, and how to be safe in a conflict zone. The twin themes said it all.
Somaliland, however, is relatively peaceful and has been pretty much since it declared independence two decades ago. It is not recognised internationally, but donors do acknowledge that the determination of its people and leaders not to replicate the clan wars further south has brought about an example which could help restore peace across the Horn of Africa. The media thrives and is free by most standards, but here too there is a hunger for training, knowledge, equipment and support. Working with the international agency Interpeace, MediaTrain has helped Somaliland’s journalists to author a Code of Conduct to demonstrate their commitment to responsible journalism, and to be part of democratic change. In neighbouring Puntland too, we have helped do the same, backed by partners in both places who espouse democracy and support impartiality and balance as a tool for cementing the foundations of peace. It is uplifting to look around a workshop to see men and women who are striving for better things in a part of the world that has for too long been known only for the worst.
Andy Hill, MediaTrain Director