Resignation

Effective as of several weeks ago, I have resigned my post as managing editor of Somalia Report, a decision I did not make lightly. Although I immensely enjoyed many aspects of the job, and had great respect for many of the brave and passionate Somali journalists with whom I worked, I ultimately felt that I no longer had the commitment to the project necessary to give it my best.

Since resigning, I have received many messages of thanks and support from Somalia Report journalists, which I appreciated greatly. I have many wonderful memories of the job, and learned much during my four months as managing editor. I have no regrets about accepting the position, nor about moving to Kenya.

I'd like to express my thanks to the talented staff and reporters at Somalia Report, especially to Venetia Archer, Ellen Mai, Asiya Shidane, Aweys Cadde, JD, Mohamed Odowa, and Mohamed Mubarak, amongst others. My appreciation as well to Somalia Report founder and publisher Robert Young Pelton for having afforded me the opportunity.

I will be remaining in Nairobi until at least September, at which point I will reevaluate my situation. I absolutely love the city, and with my newly-found free time (and newly-registered car) I hope to finally get a chance to explore this beautiful country. My virtually mandatory (as a Nairobi ex-pat) sojourn in Lamu over New Year's was a mere scratch on the surface.

I'm (slowly) starting to explore a few avenues for my next project, but there's no shortage of interesting options in this part of the world.

@HSMPress and Lazy Journalism

@HSMPress's Twitter
logo 

When al-Shabaab's "official" Twitter account, @HSMPress, was launched in December of last year, it sparked immediate global attention. It was a story at the nexus of the "How-Technology-Affects-Us" and the "Limb-Hacking-Jihadi" journalistic tropes. The concept of an Islamist insurrectionist group on Twitter seemed to represent all that the Information Age has made possible. O, brave new world, etc. etc.

The New York Times responded to the hype by publishing a quasi-investigative article about @HSMPress (while simultaneously acknowledging that al-Shabaab's use of social media was nothing new). Worryingly, the article relied on unnamed "African Union and Western officials" for evidence that the account was "legitimate," while neglecting to specify what a spokesman's "legitimacy" within the context of a terrorist organization might entail.

Another Times article published in March devoted about half its screen space to reprinting @HSMPress tweets outlining al-Shabaab's response to homegrown American jihadi Omar Hammami al-Amriki's panicked YouTube video, noting only that the Twitter page "appear[ed]" to belong to al-Shabaab. This, despite the fact that the true identity of the page's owner remains unknown, as do his connections to the organization, his place in the hierarchy, his sources, and a host of other details with which a journalist would usually be familiar before citing an official source.

I don't mean to pick on The Times; Somalia hacks regularly quote @HSMPress as if his (or her) bombastic and self-congratulatory musings represent the official doctrine of a factionalized and fragmented Islamist organization. I was surprised when one prominent Nairobi-based journalist once told me that @HSMPress was their source of first resort when reporting on a developing story in Somalia.

But I am hardly one to judge, being myself guilty of "Twitter journalism." A few months back, I posted a brief story on Somalia Report detailing the puerile Twitter duel between @HSMPress and the Kenyan Defence Forces (KDF) Twitter spokesman @MajorChirchir, who, to his credit, at least has the official endorsement of his home government. It was not until staring at the screen some days later did it occur to me what a fecklessly trite article it was. For all I knew, I could have been reporting on Major Chirchir's repartee with a deluded teenager in a dank London basement.

Believe me, I get it: Somalia reporting is a tough gig. Sifting through conflicting statements from Shabaab faction leaders, contradictory rumours, and vague eyewitness reports is a Sisyphean labour. Having a colourful official spokesman available at the end of a few mouse clicks sure beats calling Ali Dheere (al-Shabaab's putative "head of media") for a bland and contentless statement (what I call "the-infidels-will-taste-our-bullets" quotes).

Al-Shabaab, an opaque, squabbling semi-confederation, does not speak with close to a unified voice when it comes to policy (its closest approximation is the so-called "General Leadership" council, which is dominated by transnationalists such as Ahmed Godane and Ibrahim al-Afghani), or even whether a given event has transpired (when Omar Hammami was reported arrested in March, every Shabaab leader contacted by Somalia Report had their own version of the story). Yes, whoever is behind @HSMPress has intimate access to al-Shabaab information channels, and may even accurately represent the media stance of a particular Shabaab faction. When the tragic shooting of two MSF Mogadishu staffers took place last December 29, for instance, @HSMPress shocked many, including MSF's own media personnel, with an accurate (and exclusive) play-by-play account of the incident as it unfolded. But inside information does not an official spokesman make; if it did, then Julian Assange could well be considered a USG media rep.

Granted, nothing @HSMPress has tweeted has been so out of line as to provoke any senior Shabaab leader to publicly repudiate him. But neither has one officially endorsed him. Not a single public endorsement, ever.

As with any propaganda, the information supplied by @HSMPress can be a useful source if digested critically, and is certainly valuable as a counterpoint to the Kenyan government's own ludicrously lopsided depiction of Operation Linda Nchi. (Perhaps a rudimentary equation yielding accurate al-Shabaab casualty figures for a given engagement between Islamist and Kenyan forces might be as follows: (KDF casualty figures + @HSMPress casualty figures/ 2)).

But quoting @HSMPress tweets as al-Shabaab's official stance on any issue or event, however tempting, is simply lazy journalism.

The Warrior President

Abdullahi Yusuf, freedom fighter, founding father, warlord, president, died today of liver failure in a Dubai hospital. He was 77 years old.

I have very mixed feelings about Yusuf's legacy. He embodied a quintessentially Somali obstinate strength that on the one hand enabled him to almost single-handedly will the state of Puntland into being, while on the other bespoke an uncompromising, all-too-typical autocratic attitude that has led the country to ruin.

My conflicted thoughts about Yusuf are fairly evident, I think, in the obituary I wrote today for Somalia Report.

My Series on TFG Corruption

I'm in the midst of writing a three-part series for Somalia Report detailing financial corruption and mismanagement within the Somali Transitional Federal Government (TFG).

My pieces are sourced largely from a recent report published by Abdirazak Fartaag, the former head of the TFG's Public Finance Management Unit, who was fired for, well, actually doing his job.

Since his dismissal, he has continued to issue annual reports critical of the TFG's malfeasance and lack of transparency. His courage in challenging the entrenched TFG kleptocracy has made it impossible to return to Somalia, at least as long as the two Sharifs remain in power.

In Part I of my series, I discuss how the Somali Central Bank, which (in theory, at least) holds all government deposits, essentially functions as an ATM for TFG officials, issuing untraceable cash withdrawals in amounts as high as $800,000.

 Fartaag, presenting his report at
Nairobi's Regency Hotel

In Part II, I examine the TFG's makeshift annual budget, its revenue shortfalls, and its "briefcase ministries."

Stay tuned for Part III, coming soon.

Mogadishu: A First Impression

Lido Beach, Mogadishu

Although I had spent three months in northern Somalia researching my book, I arrived back from my first trip to "the Mog" two weeks ago, a five day trip with my assistant editor Venetia. Mogadishu was a strange experience. Unlike the other parts of Somalia that I had visited, Mogadishu had been a city, not a desert expanse that looks much the same now as it did two decades ago.

For the former dictator Mohamed Siad Barre, the city of Mogadishu was both his greatest achievement and a symbol of that which led to Somalia's ruin. He transformed Mogadishu into one of the jewels of Africa, a cosmopolitan tourist destination in a country that by all rights should have been one of the continent's success stories. But in doing so, he neglected the rest of the country, plowing all of Somalia's limited national income into the capital city, which contained the only universities, hospitals, and real job opportunities. Somalia's diverse clans descended on Mogadishu from all corners of the country, creating an ethnic hotbed that would eventually boil over into the pogroms, ethnic cleansing, and civil war of the early 1990s.

I've often said that there should be a word in the English language for that sense of melancholic nostalgia one sometimes feels for a place or time one has never personally experienced. It's an emotion captured perfectly in Shelly's famous poem, which describes coming across an ancient statue of a long dead king, half buried in the desert sands:

And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

That's how I feel about Mogadishu; it's a similar sense of lugubrious loss, of tragically vacated potential, that I experience when gazing on the ruins of ancient Rome. The people are living in a modern ruin, every crumbling and bullet-ridden structure a reminder of past... well, not glory, but certainly beauty.

"Everything is 'former' in Mogadishu," a Ugandan soldier commented to me as we passed the derelict national stadium, until recently used as an al-Shabaab training base. All "former"... the former National Theatre, the former Defence Ministry, the former cathedral--a bombed out structure that looks like something out of the French landscape circa 1945. The inhabitants of Mogadishu are living in a corpse of a metropolis, and the people themselves, uneducated and violent, match the deterioration of their surroundings.

Even though Mogadishu has been relatively peaceful since al-Shabaab pulled out of the city last August, our days and nights were punctuated with the occasional sound of mortars, land mind detonations, and gun shots. "Mogadishu music," the locals call it; some Mogadishans, I've heard, can't sleep when out of the country for the lack of it.

The trip went well, though I found staying at the Peace Hotel, one of Mogadishu's few options for foreigners, too expensive and highly constrictive. Highlights included hanging out with a handful of Somalia Report's brave and dedicated Mogadishu reporters, a stroll along the immaculate Lido beach, and a tour with African peacekeepers to the front lines.

One afternoon, we heard what sounded like a loud mortar go off fairly close by, and thought nothing more of it until one of our stringers, who had just been visiting with us, called me to say that he was at the site of a car bombing at the KM4 junction, three kilometres away, dodging bullets from the guns of crazed and panicking government soldiers. 15 people had been killed.

Stay tuned for an upcoming piece I'll be penning for Somalia Report about my AMISOM tour, hopefully within the next week or so.