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Several thousand Ethiopians sleep rough in Bossaso’s
dirt, like animals. They are sustained by Muslim alms:
a free meal each day, paid for by Bossaso traders.
Some of the Ethiopians arrive in town feral with
hunger. They have to be beaten back with cudgels when
the meal is served. The hope of all of them is to be
illegally trafficked across the sea to Yemen. They
slip out of town in the moonlight, cramming into metal
skiffs that are death traps. Many drown in the
crossing: the boat sinks or they are tossed overboard
by traffickers when Yemeni patrols approach. Some of
the men interviewed in Bossaso for this story have
since drowned in this way. Refugee agencies say only a
few of those who survive will find jobs in Saudi
Arabia. The rest will drift, disappear or die young.
Then there are the destitute Somalis. Some 6,000 of
them live in one slum the size of a football pitch.
The number could grow to 10,000 within a year. If
fighting breaks out in southern Somalia, it will be
even more. It is a typical Horn of Africa slum. Only
the air is free. Several families split the rent on a
cardboard shack. Fires sometimes break out, fanned by
sea breezes, often burning people alive. Wells are
private: filthy water is a commodity for sale. There
are few jobs for the men. Women venture out to sift
through the rubbish that blooms and shines like armour
in seemingly every open space in Bossaso. Islamists
pass through the slums, looking for likely recruits.
Disease is a bigger worry. A local doctor reckons that
a new epidemic could easily break out: polio and
typhoid are already on the prowl.
The Horn of Africa has long been haunted by hunger and
by violence. The story of Bossaso is an early sign
that these evils will continue, and worsen. Islamist
expansionism in Somalia—and the armed resistance to
it—plus uncontrolled population growth throughout the
area could result in whole pockets of the Horn facing
collapse. This would be a humanitarian disaster; it
could also lead to a much wider conflict, involving
several countries.
The assumption has been that the market will somehow
find solutions for the dramatic increase in the Horn’s
population numbers (see table). So it may, in
well-watered bits of the region, where land use can be
intensified. In arid areas there is little chance of
this happening. There, nature and politics will play
their part, and the results will be disastrous.
More regional fighting, for a start. The most
immediate risk is of war breaking out between
Somalia’s Islamists, based in the capital, Mogadishu,
and the “secularist” Somali government holed up in
Baidoa and backed by “Christian” Ethiopia and the
United States—an alliance that no doubt helps
Ethiopia’s prime minister, Meles Zenawi, to repair his
relations with the West, which deteriorated sharply
last year after a dodgy election and the shooting of
scores of protesters.
The Islamist advance in Somalia was a response to
political anarchy, not a symptom of population or
environmental pressures. But UN relief agencies are
sounding the alarm on these pressures. They are
specially concerned about south Somalia and Ethiopia’s
vast Ogaden desert, where malnutrition rates are far
higher than the 15% which signals a humanitarian
emergency (nutrition rates in the Horn generally are
the lowest in the world). A drought last year resulted
in massive loss of livestock in both regions. A Somali
war involving Ethiopia would be fought asymmetrically,
with Islamist guerrillas striking across Somalia and
inside Ethiopia, raising the chances of catastrophic
famine.
Cue for al-Qaeda’s entrance
It wouldn’t take much for famine to seize hold of the
area. Humanitarian action has kept the starving alive,
but it has not enabled them to recover their lives.
The trend is an ever increasing need for food aid plus
ever less money from donors to pay for it. The World
Food Programme (WFP) is responsible for delivering
most of the aid in the Horn. It says that the number
of Ethiopians on its books has doubled since the
1990s, in bad years to as many as 10m. The situation
is not much better elsewhere. Some 1.7m hungry people
are reliant on food aid in south Somalia—when the WFP
can get it to them. And 3m people in Kenya, mostly in
the country’s arid north, will get some kind of food
aid this year.
Al-Qaeda has been quick to see and exploit the
fragility of the Horn. An audiotape, released in June
and believed to be by Osama bin Laden himself, called
on “every Muslim” in Somalia to resist the
transitional government. It also promised to attack
any country sending troops into Somalia. This was
meant as a direct encouragement to the jihadists among
the Islamists, some of whom trained in al-Qaeda camps
in Afghanistan. Some think Mr bin Laden harbours hopes
of opening up a new jihadist front in the Horn,
specifically in the arid borderlands of north Kenya,
south Ethiopia and south Somalia.
These borderlands are politically marginalised, awash
with small arms, and environmentally strained. Their
inhabitants include large numbers of feisty but
ill-educated Muslims, many of whom are skirmishing
with their Christian and animist neighbours. The area
is not much of a prize in itself, but prolonged
instability there would severely restrict development
in the larger region, as well as limiting trade
between Ethiopia and Kenya.
The rise of the Islamists in Somalia has been swift.
They took control of the capital in June, vanquishing
the loathed Mogadishu warlords whom the CIA had
misjudgedly backed. They are loosely grouped into an
alliance of Islamic courts, each court pooling gunmen
into a central militia. The first courts in south and
west Mogadishu were set up in 1994, with the aim of
arresting, prosecuting and punishing criminals. Sufi
traditionalists and moderate Islamists, associated
with the pacific wing of the Muslim Brotherhood,
outnumber radicals in Mogadishu. But it is the
radicals who control the court militias and are
increasingly holding sway.
And it is to the radicals that al-Qaeda is looking for
action. It is known that they have received several
arms shipments from Eritrea, which would like to draw
Ethiopian troops southwards, away from its own border.
More weapons and explosives may now be coming in:
Mogadishu port was reopened in late July.
The United States will not talk to the radical
Islamists until they give up al-Qaeda suspects who may
be sheltering in Mogadishu. One worry is that Somali
jihadists, led by Ahmed Abdi Godane, an al-Qaeda
graduate from Afghanistan, and supervised by Sheikh
Hassan Dahir Aweys, a former Somali army colonel who
presides over the Islamist militia, may develop their
own terrorist organisation. Already, Mr Aweys’s
lieutenant, Aden Hashi Farah Ayro, is suspected of
murdering foreign aid workers and freethinking
Somalis, and desecrating a Christian cemetery. Mr
Aweys considers Mr Ayro a “good man”.
Moderate Islamists want the Islamic courts to impose
order, making it easier, among other things, to run a
business. Radicals like Mr Aweys are working towards
the establishment of an Islamic emirate of Somalia,
taking in Somali-populated areas of Ethiopia and
Kenya. In other words they want to push out into the
borderlands. In Ethiopia this would mean taking the
Ogaden by force, as Somalia tried and failed to do in
1977. The situation is less clear with regard to
Kenya. Islamists have so far been careful to
distinguish Nairobi from Addis Ababa. Some Islamists
privately say they would like to push the borders of
the emirate as far as Garissa, but only through
peaceful negotiation.
Islamists on the rise
Since taking control of Mogadishu, the Islamists have
fanned out across central Somalia, installing courts
and securing strategic bridges and airstrips. In
response, Ethiopia has sent hundreds—maybe
more—soldiers into the country, including a troop
placement in Baidoa, reinforcing Somalia’s feeble
transitional government. Perhaps 25,000 Ethiopian
troops are on the border. Some of the government’s
former local allies are moving over to the Islamist
side, judging this to be preferable to spurring
another war. But the government itself is resisting,
and its external supporters are not prepared to risk a
radical Islamist Somalia. The Islamists, for their
part, feel things are going their way and are unlikely
to seek an accommodation with Ethiopia.
In this warlike context, the Horn’s uncontrolled
population growth appears even more explosive. The
borderlands have among the highest fertility rates in
the world, particularly so among the Somalis. Women in
these areas are likely to have six or seven children,
against three in the cities. Over half the population
is aged 15 or under. There has been little progress in
family planning. In remote areas there is no provision
for birth control at all. A recent study by the
Ethiopian government, which is making tentative steps
to reduce population growth, found that only 3% of
Somali women in Ethiopia had access to contraception,
compared with 45% of women in Addis Ababa.
Some parts of the borderlands already look like
something out of “Collapse: How Societies Choose to
Fail or Succeed”, a study of environmentally ruined
societies by Jared Diamond, an American academic. The
Horn is among the most degraded ecosystems in the
world, with only 5% of its original habitat remaining.
According to Conservation International, an NGO, the
main culprits in the borderlands are overgrazing and
cutting down trees for fuel and charcoal.
Much of the region is a no-go area. Hardly a day goes
by without a cattle raid, a retaliatory attack or a
shoot-out over access to a watering hole or the
distribution of food aid. “We used to spear each other
in the past,” says a Kenyan Samburu warrior, “but
nowadays we shoot each other.” This means that the
dead now include women and children. “Since the guns
came [in the early 1990s] there has been more killing.
You don’t need to look your enemy in the eye any more.
With a gun, a boy can kill a man.”
How many cows for a gun?
The Soviet Union and the United States dumped most of
the small arms in the Horn during the cold war. They
have kept on coming since. A good quality AK-47
machine-gun sells for three cows in the borderlands.
An American M-16 goes for five cows. The price of a
gun, and the prestige attached to getting one,
explains why government disarmament campaigns in Kenya
and Ethiopia have faltered. For every weapon that is
handed over, others remain buried. Such disarmament as
there is tends to fall more heavily on tribes with
better relations with the government.
There is not much disarming of Somalis in northern
Kenya. It is too dangerous. Somali arms dealers do
most of the selling and buying, and it is the Somali
cattle raiders the other tribes most fear. The
Samburu, a mostly Roman Catholic and animist tribe
living in a fairly prosperous bit of north Kenya, have
joined with other tribes in recent years to fend off
Somali raids.
Last year’s drought heightened tensions. Some tribes
in the borderlands are buying guns and ammunition in
preparation for battles they expect to be fought in
December, when the cattle will be strong enough, after
the rains, to be marched off by raiders into enemy
territory. There is concern that the raiders are
gaining in strength—and will get stronger yet if, as
in the case of the Somalis, they are reinforced and
organised by the Islamists.
War in Somalia could ignite other wars. Most of these
will probably be small tribal affairs, such as the
battles in northern Kenya, which tribal elders say
have claimed more than 100 lives this year. But an
Ethiopian offensive in Somalia could result in Eritrea
taking its chance to attack Ethiopia. A war between
the two countries fizzled out in 2000, but with no
resolution on their disputed border.
Even with the fear of greater bloodshed, the main
problem in the borderlands remains the stark
environmental fact that there are simply too many
people and too many animals and not enough grass. Some
experts, such as Lammert Zwaagstra, an adviser to the
European Union, believe that without outside
intervention whole stretches of the Horn will come to
look as wretched as Darfur in Sudan, with its people
fighting over water, grazing, firewood and other
scarce natural resources.
Mr Zwaagstra has been studying the borderlands for
decades. Not known as an alarmist, he is now pressing
the red alert button. There are too many cattle for
the capacity of the land, he says, but too few to
sustain the community. Population growth is part of
the problem; drought is another. The Horn appears to
be drying up. This may or may not be a result of
climate change, but experts give warning that if the
predicted increase in temperatures does come about, if
only by one or two degrees, the borderlands will
become unsustainable.
Rainfall is even less predictable. The drought cycle
has shrunk from once every eight years to once every
three years, according to the American government’s
Famine Early Warning System. “That means no recovery
time for the cattle, for the land, for the people,”
says Mr Zwaagstra. And the changes are happening at
breakneck speed.
Even the WFP admits that their delivery of aid is no
more than sticking plaster. Others are even more
critical. Food aid is like “crack”, says one
Nairobi-based aid chief: “It is addictive and creates
an unhealthy dependency.” Well, maybe. But any attempt
to swing the balance from humanitarian aid to
development aid comes against the imperative of saving
the starving today. The scale of potential misery is
becoming clearer. Rough estimates of famine victims in
the next few years range upwards from 10m.
The risk of whole areas of the Horn collapsing with
famine and irreversible environmental damage, urged on
by jihadist and tribal clashes, is clear cause for
alarm. A first task, if Somalia is to be salvaged, is
to support a moderate and competent government there.
That will be hard, to put it at its mildest. The
transitional government is moderate but inept: the
Islamists well-organised but given to jihadist
tendencies.
Another obvious step is to deter the cattle raiders by
improving security in the arid borderlands. Disarming
tribal warriors there is difficult; investing in local
police and army units is not. However, the police are
often ill equipped for the task. Kenya, for instance,
has hardly any serviceable helicopters to track cattle
raiders and other miscreants. Most of Ethiopia’s 7m
pastoralists are Muslim and the parched lands they
roam are particularly combustible. The Ogaden and
Oromia regions of Ethiopia already have their own
rebel groups but these, in some areas, could be pushed
aside by Islamist guerrillas.
Some people have suggested that the area could end up
looking like the tribal lands of Afghanistan. Maybe,
but there is one saving factor. Unlike Afghanistan,
which has opium (and Iraq which has oil), the Horn has
little of economic value to fuel a war: its frontline,
after all, can barely keep a cow alive.
The road from ruin
In the long run, the crucial target is to bring down
population growth, to stop this barren area from being
so dangerously over-exploited. This means that
controlling growth must be on the political agenda.
The messiness of the problem, and a certain queasiness
on the part of diplomats, means that it is not.
Indeed, the climate for family planning is in some
ways more conservative today than it was in the 1970s
when interventionist policies prevailed.
More family-planning clinics are needed, stocked with
a greater variety of contraceptives, including
injectables and pills, not just condoms (which Somali
men don’t care for). More controversial is the
possibility of providing very early-term abortions on
request. Reform also calls for educating girls; the
more education a girl has, the fewer children she is
likely to have.
An equally urgent approach is to invest in the
borderlands while helping pastoralists with no grass
left to move to towns where they may find jobs and
will almost certainly have fewer children. Without
help, and with little education, the hopeless and
redundant often end up in the most abject slums, like
those in Bossaso.
Tony Blair’s report on Africa last year hardly
mentioned population growth. “It’s the unmentionable,”
says a well-placed ambassador in Nairobi. “It’s the
elephant in the corner of the room,” says another. It
is time to start talking about it now.
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