At a time when the people of so many countries in the Middle East and Northern Africa are standing up for their rights, for freedom of speech, for the choice of leadership, Somalis have no such movement. There is no government to rebel against, no platform to unite around, no opportunity for truth to be heard -- Somalia is anarchy in its purest post-apocalyptic form. An entire generation has already grown up not knowing a single day of peace. They are called jiilka dagaaka sokeeye - the lost generation.
Think back to the days after Katrina in New Orleans. Imagine if the government never got it together. What would New Orleans have looked like twenty-years into that future? Try Mogadishu today.
And yet Mogadishu was once a beautiful seaside capital that attracted tourists from around the world. Most Somalis long to simply walk the streets in daylight without the danger of death.
In 2004 I had the privilege to meet several Somalis who were trying to preserve a semblance of dignity in hopes of a better future. I wrote about them for the NGO that underwrote some of their activities, Concern Worldwide. The Elman Football Club was a group of young men comprised of various clans who played soccer across war-torn Somalia to prove it was possible to work together for peace and play.
I had intended to visit Mogadishu to write their story, but a BBC correspondent was killed two weeks prior to my trip; Elman deemed it too dangerous. I conducted phone interviews and exchanged emails with the team rather than abandon the effort. I met the head of the football club in Dublin and interviewed NGO personnel.
Although Concern used the story internally, the piece never found an audience. Back then the world was preoccupied with Iraq. Due to the conditions in Somalia today, no one will go on record about what’s happening, the Elman website hasn’t been updated since 2008. For all I know, the club disbanded and management disappeared. For the sake of Somalia’s future, I hope this is not the case and that one day I can write Elman’s next chapter. Until then, here is the story of their 2003 journey through war-torn Somalia to play soccer and preach peace.
The Somali soccer champions, Elman FC, are only thirty kilometers from Mogadishu, their home base, when they come upon the first checkpoint. Their bus and the team Land Rover pull up behind sixty or so dusty vehicles stretched across the bridge leading into Balcad, a town of twenty thousand in southern Somalia. On the other side of the river are two Toyota pick-up trucks with machine guns mounted in the beds. The line inches forward.
In the back of the bus, Aweys Winkey, a twenty-three year old striker, is heading a ball with the player next to him. As they approach the checkpoint, Aweys looks out at the brown expanse of countryside and says, "Why is there fighting when the land is so much more than us?"
Kids with AK-47s stand in front of a large utility pole blocking the road. The bus quiets as one of them approaches. Qaasim Hammaro, the driver, slides open the window. A teenager barely tall enough to see into the bus demands four-hundred-thousand Somali Shillings (roughly twenty US dollars).
Qaasim explains that he is carrying the famous Elman squad on the country's first soccer tour since the outbreak of civil war in '91. "It has all been arranged with the town elders," he says. "This is our first stop. Surely you have been told."
The barrel of the AK-47 now rests on the base of the open window. "Four-hundred thousand," the kid says again.
Haji Abdulle, one of the team chaperones, is sitting behind Qaasim, watching. At sixty-three, he has already outlived the average Somali by fifteen years. Before the war he was a member of the regional Olympic committee. Now Haji rises from his seat, exiting the bus slowly, his weathered hands held high so the guards can clearly see them. He steps toward the child soldier. "Look at this," he says, handing over a photo he has brought for just such an occasion. "It is of your leader."
In the pre-war photo, Muse Sudi, the powerful warlord of the Abgaal clan, is presenting a trophy to the Olympic team.
"That's me," Haji says, pointing to a much younger version of himself next to the warlord, who controls much of the area around Balcad.
The boy grabs the faded photo and returns to the contingent of guards. They argue, light fresh cigarettes. The kid who appears to be in charge shouts. He is chewing qat, a popular leafy narcotic, and a trail of greenish splotches marks the hard clay around him.
The boy hands the photo back to Haji. Dust rises from the road as the other guards watch from a distance. Suddenly the boy says, "Away."
Haji hustles back to the bus, and Qaasim fires up the ignition.
After the collapse of Siad Barre’s regime in 1991, Somalia fractured into clan-based fiefdoms run by warlords. The so-called 1993 humanitarian mission of the US and UN culminated in the Black Hawk Down incident that left eighteen Americans dead, seventy-three wounded, and estimates of over a thousand Somali casualties. The subsequent US and UN troop withdrawal allowed conditions to deteriorate further despite local efforts to reestablish a government. By 2003, clan antagonisms and territorial borders like the one in Balcad made travel within Somalia difficult and treacherous, and yet in the summer of that year Elman FC set out to play soccer across the country as a way to promote peace.
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This is an excerpt from a longer piece now being considered for publication.
