I spent a night in Mogadishu this past March. It was less dramatic than it sounds. Two colleagues and I stayed at the base of the African Union peacekeeping force, AMISOM, which is reached by a back road directly from the airport. We didn’t dare venture into the city.


It was an optimistic time in Somalia, though in Somalia optimism is a relative concept. The buzz was that the new President, Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, elected by a select group of his compatriots in Djibouti, had returned to Mogadishu. After some initial fighting, the city had been calm for eight days. Eight days of no fighting! The news was conveyed to us as if eight days without violent clashes were nothing less than a miracle.


We met a Somali and his son who had returned from Canada. Their enthusiasm was remarkable. They had been in the country for seven months and were full of hope. They were helping to organize social action projects in Mogadishu’s battered neighborhoods, and described a range of activities from basketball tournaments to clean up efforts to peace marches. I was moved. Half of me was saying to myself that they were crazy and half of me was convinced that this is just what Somalia needed --- self-help efforts by Somalis ready to declare an end to two decades of seemingly mindless conflict.


I’m thinking of that father and son today. I hope they’re alive. I want them to be alive and still hopeful in Mogadishu, but if they’ve packed it in and returned to Canada I would understand.


The fighting in Mogadishu between government forces and the Shabaab radical Islamists has returned and intensified. The government’s hold on its few square blocks in the capital is tenuous, and AMISOM troops had to come to its rescue over the weekend. The numbers of Somalis fleeing into Dadaab camp in Kenya continue to increase to around 300,000, while the estimate of internally displaced people at Afgooye, west of Mogadishu, is up to 500,000, giving Somalis the unique distinction of inhabiting both the largest refugee camp and the largest internal displacement camp in the world.


As a humanitarian policy expert, I am supposed to be able to offer reasonable solutions. And Refugees International has indeed called for a diplomatic push to gain support from the Kenyan government to expand Dadaab; more support to AMISOM; and U.S. engagement to strengthen the fledgling government and humanitarian efforts. But in the face of twenty years of conflict and chaos in Somalia, the agenda sounds rather pitiful. We in the humanitarian community tend to be eternal optimists, which is why our 24 hours in Mogadishu in March was at times inspiring. But Somalia defeats us every time.

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