UPDF wins hearts and minds in Somalia

A UPDF officer walks hand-in-hand with a Somali national as they lead a group of men to a safe place in Mogadsihu.

Mogadishu.25/8/2016

He could hardly eat and had not spoken a word in seven months. He also cried endlessly. Awesi, a six-year-old Somali boy, had lost his family members in an Improvised Explosive Device attack in 2011. The explosion ripped through the family house, killing everybody inside.

The little boy was outside the house playing with friends when the bomb went off. He survived the impact of thunderous blast. But he was badly injured, there were deep cuts across his chest, legs and on the head. When they found him, Awesi was barely alive but the UPDF rescue team rushed the poor soul to the Amisom hospital.

In the hospital, he refused to eat or talk to anyone. Was it the shock? What was to be done with Awesi?

But it would not end just yet for him. Patient inquiry by the soldiers eventually led to information that his grandmother lived in one of the Mogadishu suburbs. She was traced and brought to the hospital to care for young Awesi.

Slowly, Awesi began to communicate but he would only speak to his grandmother. Ms Pamela Ankunda, formerly working with the Uganda Media Centre, was in Mogadishu at the time. She remembers how hard it was in the beginning to get the little boy to open up.

“We bought him sweets and biscuits to convince him to talk but he refused. He instead asked for a toy gun,” Ms Ankunda, who is now at Internal Affairs, says.

And it was through his grandmother that he asked for the ‘gun’.
But something of a miracle later happened after the seventh month. One day, he smiled and started talking to the Ugandan military medics who were treating him. Through his grandmother, he was asked whether he liked football, to which he answered yes. When he received the ball, he smiled and from then started talking to the medics even in the absence of his grandmother.

Working with UPDF medics and soldiers in Mogadishu, Ms Ankunda bought and sent clothes and toys to Awesi when she returned to Kampala.
“Tell him, that little boy of mine, that I am the one and that he promised he would eat if he got clothes and there they are now,” Ms Ankunda wrote to Maj Ronald Kakurungu who was spokesman of the Uganda Contingent in Somalia in 2012.

Awesi’s story is one shared by many children in this battered country.

There are many children like Awesi who will never know the love of a parent because the war tore them apart. The trauma hangs over them like a dark cloud; you can see the fear in their eyes. For some like Awesi, Amisom has given them hope; the understanding that maybe someone still cares enough to ensure that they are not alone.

Rahma Abdullah Hussein, 14, was in Primary Five at Alfulqan Primary School in Madina District 2011. She had become accustomed to the sound of gunfire as she walked to and from school. It was a way of life in Mogadishu.

But one day she wasn’t lucky. As she came back from school, fighting broke out between Somali government soldiers and al-Shabaab nearby. She was shot. The bullet entered through her shoulder and got wedged in her neck. Her friend didn’t make it home.

For seven months after the shooting, Rahma lived with this foreign object lodged inside her body.

Her father had abandoned the family and nobody knew where he was. Her mother, Madina Ibrahim was the sole provider for the family.

The family was advised to transport Rahma to Nairobi in Kenya for an operation to remove the bullet but they couldn’t afford the huge cost involved. The only option they had was to turn to the medical teams in Amisom. Outside of the military facilities, the hospitals in Mogadishu had been reduced to deathtraps; oftentimes they were overwhelmed and Rahma’s case would never get the attention it deserved in any of these hellholes.

Turning to Amisom was what the family did. An X-ray was carried out of the young girl and it was found that the bullet was stuck somewhere in the upper part of her sternum, just at the point where the rib cage ended. If it stayed stuck there much longer, chances are that the bullet could lead to Rahma’s premature death.

“The bullet was pointing towards the airway. It was pushing the air forward which meant she could not breathe properly,” says Lt Col Dr Joseph Asea.

It was a complicated case. It would be only after some serious consideration that Lt Col Dr Asea would lead a medical team assisted by Lt Col Dr Ambrose Oiko to operate on Rahma. The operation was recorded and the film posted on youtube by Amisom, opening a new avenue for the peacekeeping force to spread the word that it was here in the best interest of the ordinary Somali people.

This delicate two-hour operation on Rahma was one of the many stories of the triumph of modern medicine in the face of adversity at the front. In less than ideal conditions, UPDF and Somali nurses helped the doctors as they slowly probed Rahma’s delicate internal tissue, searching for the bullet which they slowly extracted.

The Amisom doctors had been under no illusion about the chances of success. “We also first advised her to go to Nairobi but we later decided to do the operation. We managed to get it out without any incident,” Lt Col Dr Oiko says.

With this operation came a new lease of life. Rahma had found happiness, hope and faith that she could live, just another day.
Lying on her hospital bed on the day this reporter met her those many years ago, smiling, she said: “I forgive them (al-Shabaab) and thankfully Mogadishu is safer now.”

That was after al-Shabaab had been pushed out of Mogadishu.
Rahma’s life was saved but as a girl she had also regained her freedom because the al-Shabaab had enforced very strict rules on women and children. Women were not allowed to play on the beautiful beaches of Mogadishu and children were not allowed to play football because it was labeled: “a Western game”.

Women were also not allowed to wear bras. With al-Shabaab out of Mogadishu, girls and boys started flocking Lido beach to swim.

Individual freedoms which had become a thing of the past have gradually returned to Mogadishu even though there is ever present danger of a suicide bomber blowing himself up in the middle of innocents.

For more than two decades, miserable children without limbs and nursing gunshot wounds had stared the cruel inevitability of an early death in the face. With thousands of patients crowding the barely working hospitals, children like Rahma frequently fell through cracks.

Then Amisom took matters in their hands, opening its facilities to the civilian population. It is a huge undertaking; the field hospital comprising rows upon rows of gigantic canvas tents are crammed full with camp beds on which the sick and injured lie. Here there is some hope.

Out-patients visit the hospital twice or three times a week.
It is all very respectful of the Islamic customs of the Somali people. Female patients are normally attended to by female Ugandan military medical personnel dressed in camouflage trousers and T-shirts, with scarfs on their heads.

This seeming charity was deliberate, calculated to improve what were originally very hostile relations between the locals and Amisom. The offer of free medical services and selfless care put a human face to what the al-Shabaab had tried very hard to cast as an invading or occupying force.

At the height of the conflict with al-Shabaab still holding a frontline in Mogadishu, cases of injuries were so high. People with shrapnel or bullet wounds were ferried in all day. The Amisom medics patiently and diligently handled their patients.

Even al-Shabaab fighters injured and captured on the battlefield would be treated before being handed over to the government.
Patients would travel from as far as Kismayo about 600km away to Mogadishu to get this free medication.

After realising that these free services were endearing ordinary Somalis to Amisom, the al-Shabaab made several attempts to attack the hospitals on days patients were getting treatment.

Suicide bombers would pretend to be patients and blow themselves up at the gates of the hospitals.

On January 27, 2010 terrorists attacked the Amisom base in Halane, killing at least one person and injuring an unspecified number of mainly Somali patients who had been receiving treatment at the nearby Amisom clinic.

Many patients would also be killed whenever they would be found in possession of medicine bearing Amisom markings. In 2011, a man had his throat slit after he was found with a prescription written by an Amisom doctor.

In spite of all this savagery, the fight for the hearts, soul and mind of the civilian population pressed on. It was very important not only to defeat the enemy on the battlefield, but also to establish a relationship with the people.

By 2012, Amisom hospitals and outpatient clinics would provide free medical treatment to more than 12,000 Somalis every month, including wounded enemy fighters. Not even the diabolical propaganda by al-Shabaab that patients were being injected with HIV by Amisom doctors could stop the flood of sick people seeking help.

The United States government and a number of international agencies have poured in the money which bought the medicine. The Ugandan doctors and nurses working alongside Somalis did the rest.

To get an idea of the extent of this undertaking, in August 2014 alone, Brig Dick Olum, the former Ugandan Contingent commander, received over 5,000 tons of medicine from the US. Most of this went towards treating the Somalis.

“They have donated these drugs to Amisom which we use for Civil Military Cooperation Activities (CIMIC),” Brig Olum then.

Different perspective
A huge dividend has been earned as result. Ordinary Somalis gradually realised that not everything they heard been told about the Amisom troops was true. An important ally in any armed conflict is the environment within which one operates; a hostile population makes the job that much harder to do. But when the people know you mean them no harm, it is one less thing to worry about.

Over the years of civil strife, Somalia has suffered the twin plagues of an almost non-existent health care system and a lack of safe water for domestic use. This has acted as a catalyst for the preventable diseases which ravage the population every now and then.

So, providing safe water has been another plank in the battle for hearts and minds.

Maj Sam Ntambwire, who recently returned from Somalia where he was a civil military relations officer, says Amisom has been busy sinking boreholes in water-stressed areas like Aribska, Barawe, Celijel.
Safe drinking water will put an end to the cholera outbreaks which have bedeviled this land.

The UPDF Field Engineering Unit has meanwhile also been opening up roads in south west to help traders move goods to markets.

As expected, this has not gone down well with the enemy that was mounting roadblocks on these roads to extort money. Early this year, al shabaab fighters attacked a UPDF engineering convoy as it moved to clear roads in Sabinole village, Afgooye in the Lower Shabelle region.

The site of this attack was at a point where al shabaab routinely staged road blocks to collect illegal taxes and harass locals. That hindrance to freedom of movement was isolated and defeated.
“Amisom forces have put out of action six al-Shabaab and injured several other terrorists,” Capt Flavia Telimulungi, the spokesperson of the Ugandan contingent, said in April in relation to that problem.
And so, it continues with each passing day in this punishing land.

The forces of good versus evil remain locked in mortal combat, at times shedding blood and losing life and limb. One side holds onto the hope that the Somali people will one day enjoy more than just the free medical care and safe water which have won their hearts to Africa’s latest attempt to restore in one of its poorest countries…

Highlight

Al-Shabaab had enforced very strict rules on women and children. Women were not allowed to play on the beautiful beaches of Mogadishu and children were not allowed to play football because it was labeled: “a Western game”.

Women were also not allowed to wear bras. With al-Shabaab out of Mogadishu, girls and boys started flocking Lido beach to swim. Individual freedoms which had become a thing of the past have gradually returned to Mogadishu even though there is ever present danger of a suicide bomber blowing himself up in the middle of innocents.

By Risdel Kasasira

Source:monitor/Uganda