Jimfish (11 page)

C
HAPTER
23

Mogadishu, Somalia, 1992–93

The Blackhawk floated
above Mogadishu, giving Jimfish his first glimpse of Somalia, and touched down in a field outside town. John Doe seemed anxious to get away the moment he had deposited his passenger, and just before closing the hatch he shouted a rapid briefing on his role as a harbinger.

‘Restore hope – that's us. Harbinger – that's you. Surgical strikes. Food aid. Votes for all. Mission accomplished. Got that? God bless!'

With that the chopper lifted into the sky and Jimfish set off to walk into the capital under the fierce January summer sun.

He had not gone far when a pickup drew level with him and for a moment he thought he was being offered a lift. Then he noticed the machine gun mounted on the truck and glowering soldiers, strung with ammunition, who demanded to know if he was an American.

Jimfish was happy he could put the record straight: ‘I am a harbinger of hope.'

‘Without doubt, an American,' they said, pointing their guns at him. ‘Tie him up.'

Jimfish pulled out his bag of rough diamonds and offered to trade, but his captors laughed. What would they do with dirty pebbles? Jimfish explained the stones could be swapped for a fortune. They laughed again. Who would trade stones for Kalashnikovs? It was dollars they wanted, but Jimfish had none. The soldiers explained that kidnapping had become the best new Somali thing. Leveraging high-end hostages into cash. Americans were blue-chip stocks. With that they tied him up, tossed him into the back of their truck and drove into Mogadishu, firing happily at anything that moved.

The truck moved through empty, silent, potholed streets lined with billboards and plastered with pictures of a stern, uniformed soldier, whose formal title was ‘Victorious Leader' and whom he took to be Siad Barre, one-time and most recent dictator of Somalia. On the left-hand side of the road the former dictator was pictured in fading posters, hanging alongside Karl Marx, Lenin and the dear leader of North Korea Kim Il-sung; he was also shown locked in a bear hug with none other than Jimfish's late acquaintance Nicolae Ceauşescu, the Genius of the Carpathians.

On the right-hand side of the road were more recent posters, showing Presidents Jimmy Carter and George Bush Senior, and Jimfish remembered John Doe telling him that the Americans had replaced the Russians in supplying the dictator's need for cash and arms.

As the pickup bounced over Mogadishu's dusty, pot-
holed roads Jimfish was once again filled with wonder at how effortlessly people reversed positions.

Seeing Nicolae Ceauşescu's face brought back to him the show trial of the dictator and his wife in Târgovişte; and how long-serving lieutenants of Ceauşescu's iron rule, abruptly and unhesitatingly switched from being life-long patriarchs of the Communist Party into proud fighters for freedom by firing squad.

Clearly, this was what sensible, pragmatic people did. Hadn't the redoubtable Robert Mugabe once gone to war to liberate his people from colonial bondage only to cheer the shooting of those who mistakenly took their freedom at face value? The liberator turned liquidator showed adaptability of a high degree.

And what of those armed guards he had seen at the Berlin Wall as it was falling down? So ready to shoot on sight anyone crossing the wall on, say, Tuesday, yet on Wednesday, calmly helping people through the breaches made by the woodpeckers with their chisels. Was this not the acme of pragmatism?

In Liberia, when Master Sergeant Samuel Doe murdered President William Tolbert, together with all his ministers to become the new President, he was demonstrating his talent, not for criminal cruelty, but for robust common sense. Samuel K. Doe, in turn, had been murdered by Prince Johnson, in about the time it takes to sink a Budweiser, setting off a race to rule Liberia amongst those warlords still standing. Which of their election promises would speak most winningly to Liberians as they were frogmarched into the voting booths? Would it be
Prince Johnson, who had carved up the late President on camera and marketed the home movie? Or Charles Taylor, running on his record of killing the mothers and fathers of his compatriots and ready to do the same to any of their children who made the wrong choice. Or would the winner be the dark horse, Brigadier Bare-Butt and his horde of hopped-up, bewigged boys, one of whom turned into the team breakfast before each battle? Hard to say.

Oh, where was Soviet Malala now? Jimfish wanted to tell him he was wrong. If this is how things were, then he no longer believed in rage and he did not care whether or not he arrived on the right side of history. If this was what adaptability meant, then he would rather die, and he said so to the soldiers as they were hauling him out of the back of the truck.

That was something they could very well offer him, they assured him, but first they would use him to set the floor price in living hostages. It was all a question of testing and trusting the market. If it turned out, when they had collected more prisoners, that they got almost as much for a dead American, then they might execute their captives and settle for a lower margin on larger volumes. With that they flung Jimfish into a cell and left him to his misery.

But he was not alone. Sitting on a bunk watching him closely was a tall fellow with a good head of hair.

‘The men who have locked us up – what do they want?' Jimfish wondered. ‘I offered them diamonds, but they weren't interested.'

‘In a civil war there is always only one good convertible currency. In my war, dollars didn't work, nor did British
pounds. For bribes or ransoms or customs fees it had to be German Deutschmarks.'

‘Where was your war?' Jimfish asked him.

‘Hard to say,' said his fellow prisoner with a sad smile.

‘You can't have a war without a country to have it in,' said Jimfish. ‘That stands to reason.'

‘We don't bother much with reason where I come from,' said the other. ‘Let's just say I had a country once, but it went away.'

Jimfish had to laugh. ‘Where on earth did it go?'

The melancholy man shrugged. ‘Who knows? One day it was there. On all the maps, in the travel brochures, available on package tours. But the next time I looked, it was gone.'

C
HAPTER
24

Jimfish was baffled.
Maybe the man was mad. Though, looking at him, what his fellow prisoner showed was a great and sombre calmness, as if he had faced some terrible fate and accepted it, but what he had faced was so depressing he simply could not talk about it. So he spoke in riddles.

Jimfish pressed him. ‘But surely, strictly speaking, you must be
someone
from
somewhere
?'

‘Strictly speaking, I'm Zoran the Serb, from Belgrade,' said the sad man with the good head of hair. ‘I was a serving soldier in what was once the Yugoslav National Army. Created by a man called Tito, who made a country called Yugoslavia. I'm still a Tito man. To hear what they say about him these days, you'd think Tito wasn't a Croatian genius who kept Yugoslavia in one piece. No, he was another Hitler. And this from idiots who want only certified Serbs in Serbia and kosher Croats in Croatia and model Muslims in Sarajevo. Right down to the tribal wire, in every pathetic little Balkanette born from ex-Yugoslavia.
Each run by ex-Communists turned chauvinists, like Tuđjman in Croatia and Milošević in Serbia – savage sectarians who worship village gods.

‘Once upon a time I lived in a big, joined-up country where you never had to be, strictly speaking, anyone at all. Borders didn't count. We all spoke Serbo-Croat. My sister married a Slovene, my aunt was Macedonian, my grandfather came from Montenegro and married his Bosnian wife in Kosovo. Wherever in the Federation you were born, from Dubrovnik to Nis, Pristina to Skopje, you were a Yugoslav. Until it blew up.'

‘Who blew it up?' Jimfish asked.

‘We did. It started when the Slovenes wanted to leave Yugoslavia, and I was sent to fight them. It wasn't much of a war and they won – or, maybe, we just let them go. We didn't see what was coming. Overnight they ditched the old Yugoslav dinar for the German Deutschmark, threw out the Serbo-Croat dictionary and told everyone that Slovenia was the new Switzerland. It was hard to keep a straight face. Their border crossing was a bit of rope stretched across the motorway, manned by goons with guns who called themselves customs officials, lolling in deckchairs under umbrellas advertising Malboro cigarettes, and a banner that said “Welcome to the Republic of Slovenia”.

‘Then came the next war; this time in Croatia. I was based in Karlovac and we rode to the front along the motorway, like commuters, ready to take the next exit to the battlefield. Sometimes we blew apart cities; other times we fought in quiet meadows, where a sniper hid in the
belfry of the pretty little church across the fields. Our side shelled patients in hospitals, and their side blew up schoolkids. This was more like a real Balkan war and the Croats had form. They slaughtered Serbs in the Second World War; and they seemed keen to do it all over again. Our answer was to slaughter Croats. And when that sort of thing begins, no one is safe, because it's catchy, that old slaughter music. In no time all – in Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia – slaughter was Top of the Pops. Those things Serbs know about. Over the centuries, Belgrade has been wiped out more than a dozen times. And we also know about world war – we virtually started the First and died in droves in the Second. But this war we did not understand.'

‘What brought you all the way to Africa?' Jimfish wondered.

The answer surprised him.

‘I came to be enlightened. I said to myself, “If race is all the rage, if ethnic cleansing is coming soon to a ministatelet near me, then it's time to brush up on ethnic hatred and to take a look at the way others do things.” But where to start? Kashmir and the Pakistani–Indian partition? Or the Israeli–Palestine split? Belgium, where the tribes detest each other? Northern Ireland, where the sects prefer suicide? Then it came to me: who has done Balkanization better than the Balkans? South Africans! They're the champs. For decades they've been splitting their country into ethnic islands and locking up people in the prisons of race and tribe, colour and culture. Each piece of their crazy jigsaw has its own parliament, flag, president, army, borders. Everyone lives in a little hate-state where you're
free to loathe the clan or the crowd down the road or across town or over the next hill.'

Jimfish did not want to say where he was from, but an unexpected surge of patriotisim made him defend his country.

‘Maybe that was so in the old South Africa,' he said. ‘But Nelson Mandela's out of jail now and he'll be the next President. Apartheid is dead and buried. There will be free elections, a free health service, jobs for all and a chicken in every pot every Sunday.'

Zoran the Serb shook his good head of hair in his gloomy way and waved a cautionary finger.

‘If ex-Yugoslavia is anything to go by, elections just put new hats on the same old heads. In Belgrade cradle Communists turned into noisy fascists overnight. Same thing in Croatia.'

With a sinking heart, Jimfish remembered the men in hats on the roof of the Central Committee Building in Bucharest. But he felt he must defend the achievements of his country.

‘In South Africa I'm sure the change will be blindingly clear.'

‘Blinding, perhaps,' said Zoran, ‘but clear? In ex-Yugoslavia socialists wore red and fascists went for brown. But then came the war – and we couldn't tell the difference any more. Scratch a red and he bleeds brown. And vice versa. So I decided on South Africa. Because that's where we're heading in ex-Yugoslavia.'

‘You're too late.' Jimfish tried to get his cellmate to see sense. ‘Those ideas are dead and gone. And so is the apostle
of apartheid who invented them – Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd.'

‘Maybe dead down your way, but he's alive and laughing where I come from,' said Zoran the Serb. ‘My first taste of Africa was in Zaire. The Great Leopard rented a batch of us Serb and Croat sharpshooters. We lived in separate barracks, ate off separate plates with separate knives and forks, and used separate toilets. But at night, after a day in the field, we relaxed over slivovitz and spoke Serbo-Croat. We hated each other at home and fell in love in Zaire. But one day Mobutu figured out that if he wanted to modernize Zaire ballots beat bullets. Just like our man Milošević in Belgrade, he saw that elections, carefully run, are the up-to-date way to emasculate the electorate.

‘Sharpshooters were suddenly surplus to requirements in Zaire. Luckily, demand for skills like mine never slackens. Siad Barre in Somalia was recruiting snipers. I'd barely signed on when the Victorious Leader climbed into a tank and headed south, taking the national bank deposits with him. No one wanted snipers any more. No money to pay them. And it's slow work, taking out one man at a time. Somali clan leaders were looking to mow down their enemies in numbers. Luckily, the Americans stepped in with RPGs and heavy automatic stuff, which the warlords love. They mount them on pickups and blow away scores of people in no time at all.'

Jimfish felt a surge of familiar confusion. ‘But why should Somalis hate each other? If they're one people with one language and religion.'

Zoran the Serb smiled his sad Serbian smile. ‘Ethnic
hatred is a help if you're hoping for civil war. But you don't need distinct tribes worshipping different gods to whip up a good massacre of the neighbours. A happy family can be at each other's throats quicker than you can say “ex-Yugoslavia”. In Somalia it's your clan that counts. Yours against theirs. And their family feud has killed hundreds of thousands. Even more are starving. Outsiders try to help, but aid trucks get ambushed, cargo planes shot down, ships can't dock. Anyone who isn't dead is dead broke. The latest idea is to sell hostages. That's why they locked me up here. I told them: “I'm a Serb – no one wants to buy a used Yugoslav. Hell, we're worth even less than South Africans!”'

Jimfish decided it was time to tell his cellmate the truth. ‘I happen to be from South Africa.'

For the first time Zoran looked quite cheered. ‘Good heavens! A Serb and a South African – twin polecats of the western world and we end up in the same cell!'

Suddenly, helicopters were clattering overhead and they heard the sound of shooting. Zoran walked to the door of the cell and, to his astonishment, it opened.

‘Our jailers – they've gone! What is going on? I'm getting a bad feeling.'

Jimfish was happy to reassure Zoran. ‘It's very good news. They've gone to the beach. It means the Americans have landed.'

‘Americans invading Somalia?' Zoran was incredulous. ‘I'm getting a very bad feeling.'

‘Not invading,' said Jimfish. ‘Intervening. This is a humanitarian operation. The Somalis will greet them with open arms.'

‘They'll open fire, more likely,' Zoran said. ‘The soldiers who kidnapped us have gone hunting for high-end hostages. They don't need us bottom feeders any more.'

Jimfish was shocked at Zoran's Serbian cynicism. ‘The Americans plan a short, surgical intervention. They'll feed the starving, treat the sick, shoot the warlords and leave.'

‘My very bad feeling just got worse,' said Zoran. ‘How do you know all this about the American plans?'

Jimfish reassured him. ‘Because I am the first stage of the mercy mission – I am the harbinger of hope.'

‘More like the canary in the coal mine,' said Zoran. ‘Let's get out of here before the goons get back with new hostages and shoot us because they need the cell space.'