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At certain points, Mogadishu, a long-time synonym for anarchy, terrorism, and urban warfare, is indistinguishable from many other cities in the developing world. Across the city, new storefronts and sidewalks have turned the few remaining stripped or sandbagged buildings into isolated novelties, relics of a conflict that the city seems eager to leave behind. There are now freshly paved sidewalks lining streets and modest infrastructural improvements. Even at its most pulverized, Mogadishu hints at its potential recovery.
However, this narrative of tentative progress dissolves once you reach Mogadishu's refugee camps. In 2010, the southern part of Somalia was gripped with one of the worst famines. It didn't help that the worst-hit areas were under Al Shabaab's control and that they were curtailing the delivery of life-saving outside aid. In 2010, Mogadishu was home to the largest concentration of internally displaced persons on earth, a city-within-a-city of 400,000 refugees living in a spontaneous sprawl of rag tents on the city's devastated outskirts.
This Horsheed refugee camp is a tight-packed clutter of about 2,500 tents. The camp sits alongside Barre's former parade route and proves how Al Shabaab never completely left Mogadishu. Even in broad daylight, local handlers are only comfortable with tourists spending about 30 minutes there, and more outlying camps are considered no-go zones at any time of day. There is an ongoing conflict between the Kenyan army, the powerful Kenyan Ras Kamboni militia, and Al Shabaab militants. According to the camp leaders, their communities cannot go back to their villages and towns because there is no source of livelihood. They don't have any livestock anymore. Many IDPs (Internally Displaced People) work as day laborers, or merchants in Mogadishu's Bakara market. A Somali NGO runs a single health clinic in the camp, but water remains the major reason that IDPs have stayed there.
The government is only barely present in Mogadishu's IDP belt: Even the safer camps are under the control of small militia groups that don't necessarily draw an official salary. These "gatekeepers" are typically government-empowered and militia-backed "district commissioners" whose control over an individual camp has been given an official sanction. On its surface, the gatekeeper system is deeply exploitative: pseudo-warlords rule IDP camps as a kind of personal fiefdom, skimming money and aid items from NGOs, and demanding kickbacks on necessities like the purchase of local water rights.
Mogadishu's IDPs have to bear the Al Shabaab militarism, drought, lawlessness, and state authority that, at best, cannot meaningfully improve their circumstances and often preys on them. Even as Mogadishu pulls itself out of two decades of anarchy, the IDPs are a reminder of the substantial challenges that remain, and Somalia's dangerous state of flux.
Tejas Raghuvansh, March 2022