WITNESS-The road to Mogadishu, via chopper and cow field
Source: Reuters
By C. Bryson Hull MOGADISHU, Jan 7 (Reuters) - My road to Mogadishu started with a four-word text message: "Lucky you -- Baidoa tomorrow!" I had just landed in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa on an assignment to get into Somalia and report on the fighting there between Islamists and the Ethiopian-backed Somali government. So the message from my bureau chief that the first step of my task had sorted itself out was welcome news, coming the day after a Christmas interrupted by a war. Barely 10 hours later, I was on an Ethiopian government plane flying over the arid Ogaden region to the Somali government's temporary capital Baidoa. It was supposed to be a one-day trip, so I had only the clothes I was wearing, a laptop, two phones, pen, pads and the travelling reporter's best friend -- cash. But organisation and tight schedules are largely foreign concepts in Somalia, a nation whose people have been nomads for countless generations and in anarchy for the last 15 years. So we spent the night in Baidoa. After visiting a former Islamist base and walking through a battlefield where the sun-bloated corpses of Islamist fighters made a maggot's feast, we were supposed to fly back. As the propellers on the plane started to spin, four of us were offered a helicopter flight with Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi to Afgooye, an agricultural town at the edge of Mogadishu. Mogadishu was falling quickly and Gedi wanted to be there to claim the capital that had eluded his government for two years. We all took the offer to be where the news was. BOILED BULL AND WHISKEY After reaching Afgooye, we travelled to Gedi's ancestral bushland home of Mundul Sharey, where we slept in a cow field after being feted at 3 a.m. with a bull slaughtered and boiled for the occasion. Gedi slept alongside us on dewy tarpaulins crawling with bugs. By afternoon, we were roaring out of Afgooye in a heavily-armed convoy toward a city synonymous with anarchy, guns and death. I had written about Mogadishu for two years but never seen it. My first view of the brilliant white buildings of a Horn of Africa jewel shattered by war was stunning. We barrelled through the gates of the international airport, turning past an Ethiopian tank at the entrance and drove straight down the runway, a line of sand dunes and the wind-whipped turquoise Indian Ocean to my right. Then we skidded through the city's snaking streets to the seaport, where Gedi hopped out for a victory lap in the late-afternoon sun. We finally settled into a compound of three villas in Mogadishu's old diplomatic district, and for four days reported from there as Gedi held a string of meetings and news conferences. We even managed to find a half-full bottle of whiskey to ring in the New Year, a prize in a city that for six months had been ruled by armed Islamists who frowned upon alcohol and cigarettes. Journalism gets you front-row tickets to the best and worst the world has to offer, and this time it was a moment in history well worth the gruelling trip. But when it came time to fly out on Jan. 2, I was more than ready to catch a chartered plane for Nairobi. One resourceful Swiss newspaperman on board produced a bottle of scotch and we toasted 2007 -- and getting out safely -- as Somalia's glittering coastline disappeared behind us. It was a long way from that cow field.
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