Perhaps if it really had been like that, everything might have turned out differently-even for the better. The myths-of peacemaking, of good versus evil-which swirled around the 1992-95 US intervention in Somalia are now writ large in the film Black Hawk Down. It will become the "official" version of those events; a version in which the US Defence department was heavily involved as consultant and adviser.
I was one of just half a dozen western journalists in Mogadishu on that night of 3rd October 1993. I had been living there for several months. A tiny, old Fiat taxi, driven by a man who-rare among Somalis-didn't carry a gun, was my transport; long strands of spaghetti, eaten by curling it around your fingers at roadside cafes with Somali friends, was my food. Afternoons spent chewing "qat" with Osman Ato and other "warlords" was how I gathered information for my stories. This was ground level Somalia. I had no gunmen for protection, nor the trappings of westernised life that often turned people like me into targets for thieves and militiamen.
What was I doing on 3rd October? Having sent a despatch to my then editors at the Guardian, I was ending what had been a relatively calm day stretched out under the late afternoon sun on the roof of a villa, a short distance from the US air base within which the Black Hawk helicopters were parked in rows. Suddenly, the sky above me burst into life. Black Hawks roared overhead, US Rangers waving as they dangled their feet from the door space. One after the other, they sped across the city skyline. As dusk fell, the sky fell silent. When evening turned to night, news of what was taking place began to filter back to the villa. I rarely ventured out at night but there was talk of a battle, so I hitched a ride in a car being sent to take medical supplies to Digfer hospital. When we arrived at the hospital I had to wade through blood. The dead and dying lay on the floor, along corridors, on operating tables, gaping wounds testifying to the ferocity of what was taking place a mile away.
Nine years later, cold rain swept across London's Leicester Square. The Empire cinema was almost empty. A few crisp packets crackled as the land which was once my home burst into life on the screen, bringing a flood of intense memories. Yet the opening images of Black Hawk Down were familiar in ways which I had not expected: the minarets rising from the mosques were elegantly decorated and oblong, the sun set gloriously over the sea, the music was fabulous.
But the music evoked memories of Mali and the Sahel-the soundtrack lacked the distinctive depth and low keys of Somalia's music. The minarets could not have been less like those which dominate the Somali skyline, being peculiarly Moroccan. Morocco is, in fact, where the film was made; a country-unlike Somalia-where the sun does set over the sea. Not a word of Somali is spoken in the film. The few scenes in which a Somali character is allowed to speak are dominated by a grotesquely inaccurate portrayal of Osman Ato. Gold-ringed Ato makes endless calls on a mobile telephone. The aim is to contrast his greed with the nation's plight. Ato was a wealthy rogue, but he didn't flaunt it because his fellow Somalis would have rebuked him.
Moreover, all the Somalis in the film are played by black, sub-Saharan Africans. But in fact Somalis are neither black Africans nor ethnic Arabs. Mark Bowden, the Philadelphia Inquirer journalist upon whose book the film is based, recently went so far as to describe Somalia as "a nation in theory only." But partly as a consequence of its ethnic and religious isolation, Somalia is one of the most "nationalist" nations in Africa-uniquely boasting a single language with its own written script, a single tribe and a long and intense sense of nationhood.
The film is only a film, and these details ought not to be worth mentioning. But disdain for accuracy has been a part of the Somalia story from the moment George Bush senior decided to do "God's work" and save Somalia from itself.
"America was prodded into acting in 1992, in part by critics who claimed its foreign policy was racist," wrote Mark Bowden. On sending a force of 19,000 Marines to Somalia in December 1992, the Bush administration had in fact been prodded solely by its own media. The night the marines arrived on the beach in Mogadishu, the Pakistani brigadier who had been the head of a UN military observer mission in Somalia told me: "it is as if the US has discovered a new vaccine, and now they have found an animal to test it on."
The intervention in Somalia was indeed an experiment. Bush had seen the television footage of starvation and decided to respond. After the battle of October 1993, in which 18 US troops were killed and pictures of their mutilated bodies were broadcast in the US, Somalia became a "watershed in modern US foreign policy, a stern lesson in the complexity and ingratitude of the needy third world," said Bowden, who advised the film's director, Ridley Scott. He went further, saying the US intervention "was a purely selfless act, without precedent in US history and one that saved hundreds of thousands of Somali lives."
Since the terrorist attacks, much US opinion has been preoccupied with the question: why do they hate us? The same question was asked by Americans involved with Somalia. The simple answer is that the US contribution to the devastation of Somalia-the support for Mohamed Siad Barre, before his overthrow in 1991-was not forgotten by Somalis or the rival militias who battled with each other for power.
Bowden's assertion that Somalia "is a nation in theory only" is central to the film's brash misunderstanding of the country. It was the state, not the nation, which had collapsed. The cause of the famine and the nature of the war into which the US stepped in 1992 are referred to with blatant inaccuracy in a few captions during the film's opening sequence. All we are told is that thousands would die unless there was a foreign military intervention. In fact-as I wrote at the time-the death rate from famine was falling fast by the time the troops arrived, while the warlords' power had begun to wane; the need for a foreign force was far from obvious.
Bush deliberately exaggerated certain aspects of Somalia's undoubtedly serious problems to justify the US intervention, without addressing the question of whether there was an alternative to force. In so doing, he sidelined the more cautious efforts of the UN, which had sought to negotiate with the warlords to find solutions to the country's crisis.
Somalia was a US foreign policy disaster. Black Hawk Down does acknowledge the errors of military judgement which necessitated the rescue of US troops by the UN (an act which is grossly misrepresented and played down in the film). But its message is: "we may have been inept, but they were truly evil. " The film reduces the enemy to a subhuman level, gunned down by US troops and helicopters like toy ducks.
It is good to see a film taking on the theme of "America in the world," but, by failing to place the action in its context, it will make it harder for Americans to learn from their mistakes.
