The date is December 5th, 1990, and place is Mogadishu, Somali capital. That morning the sun rose on that beautiful coastline city.
Everything was ok. Jama woke up, bathed, brushed his teeth, and dressed his Khaki pants and yellow shirt- 6th grades Somali School uniform back then - to get ready to School. He looked more like a banker in this uniform than a Schoolboy of 10 years old.
He then descended the stairs to join his mother and father in the dinning room to eat breakfast of Goat liver and Bread, locally known (CANJERO), a Somali dish.
They lived at a big Bungalow in Mogadishu outskirts. The furniture of the house was the best of 1990’s, expensive European model, because his father adulated the European lifestyle , since he spent 10 years in England, and Italy, where he completed his education .
Jamal, Jama’s father was elegantly dressed .He was in black suit, blue shirt, Italian leather sparkling black shoes and rimless eyeglasses. He was in his early fifties, athletic Hollywood movie star type, serene and thoughtful man. He was a professor of philosophy in Somali national university. He took Jama that morning to School, because Jama missed the Bus, gave him a hug on the School door, and promised him that he will buy a bicycle to him this evening when he comes home.
Unknowingly to Jama and his father was they were going to be apart forever, and this was the last minute they would share a valuable moment like this together. No one knows what the fate has in store for him!
The ear splitting crack stopped students from the soccer they were playing in school and the frantic teachers dismissed the school. It was Sunday, 12:00 pm in Mogadishu local time .The day started as one of many other normal Mogadishu days. That morning every one went to his business. Elders went to their work, and youngsters either went to their schools or (DUGSI) Madras. Businesses were open. Stores and public premises were running, and traffic was in a full motion, but in a twinkle of an eye things changed.
When Jama , and his school mate, got out of the School after the violent sound, a wave of muteness was overshadowing all over the city like the known world’s clock stopped ticking, and a new phase of another peculiar world came into play! All you can hear was the roar of heavy ateliers fired randomly blended with gunshots.
He came home running. His terrified mother hugged him too tight thanking her luck that is home, safe and healthy. He was very frightened and glued to his mother. The night fell and dark engulfed the whole city. There was no power or running water, because the government was under attack .The gunshots slowed down at night, but the shelling continued. It was 7:30, and Jama’s father did not come home yet. Jama and his mother went to Ashas’s house; a neighbor lady who her husband was a coworker to Jama’s father for inquiry of his about, and if he knows where he could be. Asha’s husband Jeeyte and Jama’s father were both Professors in Somali National University. Armed men had intercepted the university premises, fired randomly. They set fire on the building after they looted and take everything including my car. I came home walking on foot. Corpuses were shattered everywhere, like cotton played by the wind. I do not know what happen to Mr. Jamal. “I do not like to sound pessimistic, but the signs are not good”, he said. This news was very frightful to Jama, and he could not swallow it .
They went home, and Jama was sleeping when a heavy bang on their front gate brought him into the real world .His mother went to see who is it? A moment of stillness cut by his mother’s wailing.
A group of men were there carrying the body of his father in handcart. His vibrant, vigorous, and active father was lying on a handcart motionless wrapped with ragged clothes stained with blood all over! The men put his father’s body in the house and left. They came back two hours later to bury him.
No rituals or feast followed the burial as was the custom. He was at least lucky to get buried. Hundreds of other Somali dead ones were not so lucky to being buried as many of them were left to become prey to the wild Mogadishu dogs, which transformed into man eaters. That night Jama did not sleep .The whole thing was unbelievable to him .From that night he acquired abnormal habits that he did not have before and stayed with him in the rest of his life : wetting the bed every single night, and sometimes waking up in the midnight screaming, yelling and crashing whatever his hand reaches.
Jama lost his father, who urged him to lead a philanthropist life. He used to say this wisdom to his son to train him,” People are in three groups: first group are like livestocks. They are only useful never harmful; the second group are like animals, they are neither useful nor harmful; the last group are like the monsters, they only harmful never useful. If you can not be in the first group please do not be in the last group.”
A month or so the regime was ousted and USC militia replaced the gap the regime left behind with Killing, looting and raping. Schools and other public places were either looted or taken over by the militia to use them as camps. Jama’s mother had to work to support herself and her orphaned kid .Jama and his peers, having plenty free time and no school to go invented a fatal game. They dropped the conventional kids’ game, and developed a new game called “warring game, because the elders in the environment they were living were War. War was the only language everybody was talking. They made teams and they were warring representing the two fighting groups. They were using tools with rockets and stones. Number of them got hurt in these battles. Few months later, the USC militia fell into warring factional groups.
The alley of yesterday changed today’s enemy .Again a new severe civil war erupted in the city Mogadishu, where Jama and his mother were living.
One day, Jama’s mother was running her small business (selling tea) in the market, when militia men exchanged fire in the market, and a bullet hit her on the head rupturing it into pieces. She died in the spot. Somalia was cut from the outside world. The production of the country deteriorated. Hunger and malnutrition became the norm .Many kids joined to the militia they relate in blood to. It was the only option they had to secure food and protection. Jama was one of them. He fought along the militia knowing nothing about why he was fighting until he lost both his legs. “We did not have elderly observance, and we also told by the militia leaders, we were fighting a holy war to defend the clans pride”, he told me in his dying bed. When Jama was 16 he died due to the wounds .He lived fast and left this world fast. Tragedy stuck with him like lint. He lost the wisdom that his father gave him, and he fell into the worst category that his father warned him not to fall into .He was not mature enough to absorb that wisdom, and he was lacking parental guidelines.
"It requires twenty years for man to rise from the vegetable state in which he is within in his mother's womb, and from the pure animal state which is the lot of his early childhood, to state when the maturity of reason begins to appear." So Voltaire writes. In our friend’s case, Jama, fate did not give him the enough time to experience the maturity state that Voltaire talks about.
This story is not only a portrayal of one person’s misery, but is the misery of huge number of war zone kids in many places in this planet we live , particularly, Somali kids, who found themselves in middle of a vicious civil war. This minute you reading this article, tens of thousand of kids are falling in the battlefield. Tens of thousand others are dying fleeing from the war or from malnutrition and preventable diseases. They are caught in between two things the sweetest is bitter!
As the psychologists say, “Man is the son of his environment.” So those kids are born into a savage world, where the survival is only for the stronger and the tougher ones, and the weaker ones are destined to perish. The violence polity is the absolute polity they know. “Here is a man’s world, where the strong dog eats the weak dog, and only stronger flourishes and survives; and the feeble dies so that I did not want to be left behind”, a Somali child of 10 with an AK 47 dangling from his shoulder said to me. This scenario shows some of what Somali war young generation had been to, and where they are now today. But where they are going?
The answer of this question is obvious one. They are going to be in the war inferno for other decades to come, unless a savior emerges to cast out the violence, hatred, and grudge they are accustomed in their out raising; and teach them the benefits of love, peace, and coexistence. And yet, no one seems on the horizon. Somalia is already forgotten by the international community, while most of old Somali generation are deliberately fomenting the violence for their personal gains, which is to be the sole winner of the rotten cake they call Presidency chair, and the irony is, only one must be the victor to occupy the chair. Still, after 16 years of bloody war, no winner! Therefore, this means those kids must live under the mercy of savage wars, which erupts once and a while, one day by the name of clan honor, and the other day by the name of religion honor, and the fuel of these wars are not but only the vulnerable Somali young generation . |
