Straight to the point

Last week the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi held a press conference to discuss the ever-bleak situation in Somalia. The State Department's point men on the crisis -- Michael Ranneberger, the ambassador to Kenya, and veteran diplomat John Yates, special envoy to Somalia -- tried to sound upbeat notes about the interim government's efforts to build an inclusive political system.

It's become clear that the West has put all its Somalia eggs in the interim government's basket. So it wasn't surprising that Rannebeger put a glass-half-full spin on a recent summit on national reconciliation that, according to many observers, didn't begin to address the root causes and support networks of Somalia's large Islamist insurgency.

"The results of the conference were very positive," Ranneberger was quoted as saying in The Washington Post, though he added that the process of political reconciliation "is not over."

As The Post's East Africa correspondent, Stephanie McCrummen, noted: "The assessment was perhaps the rosiest to date for a country whose bombed-out seaside capital, Mogadishu, has been mired in daily violence since December."

Then, yesterday, I received this message yesterday from a Somali friend who's been working for a Western aid agency in Mogadishu, on and off, for much of the year. As there's no substitute for on-the-ground reporting, his message -- brief, to the point and fundamentally depressing -- is worth reading in its entirety:

----- Original Message -----
From:
To: Shashank Bengali
Sent: Thursday, September 27, 2007 1:32 PM
Subject: Re: Puntland

HI Shashank

I am now in Mogadishu and the situation is dreadful.

Level of crime have gone up
Inflation is very high
Targeted assassination's are becoming widespread
Growing Conflict between the TFG [government] leaders
Increasing insurgent attacks
A good number of new displacement

To sum up; it doesn't look good

[name withheld]

PS: I will be in Nairobi next week

Flash me

Reuters had an interesting story this week on a phenomenon known in Kenya as "flashing."

It's not what you think.

To the uninitiated, to "flash" someone is to dial their cell phone, let it ring for a split-second, then hang up before they can pick up. That way you don't get charged for the call, and it's an implicit message to the other person that they should call you. According to Andrew Heavens of Reuters, this practice happens all over Africa and goes by different names -- "missed call" in Sudan, "beeping" in Rwanda, etc.

The skyrocketing cellphone market in Africa now has 200 million users -- the vast majority of whom buy their airtime in small, prepaid increments. Unlike in the U.S., you don't get charged for receiving calls, only for making them. So flashing is an easy way to keep that last bit of credit going on your account by getting the other person to pick up the cost of the call.

When I first moved here two years ago, I found the practice more than a little annoying. In the U.S., both parties bear the cost of a call in spent minutes on their cellular plan. In Africa the system is to assign ownership: the person who needs the call more, needs to pick up the tab.

As with all tech phenomena, there are unwritten but deeply observed rules for flashing. When your mechanic wants to tell you your car is ready, for example, he can flash you -- it's your car, after all, and if you want it back, you'd better call him. (Never mind that he may have taken a week longer to fix it than he promised.) It's also hierarchical: an employee calling a superior, who makes more money, is justified in flashing -- unless he really needs a favor.

And of course, if you're trying to woo a lady, don't flash her. Ever.

My first few months here, I picked up a lot of calls that were meant to be flashes. (I often carry my cell phone in my hand, so I have a pretty quick trigger.) This embarrassed a few flashers and irritated others. "Why did you pick up? Why don't you let it ring?" a caller asked me once. "Because you called me" isn't a good answer.

The Reuters piece illustrates just how big flashing has become. An official with the cell phone giant MTC in Sudan says that there 130 million missed calls every day, and 355 million actual calls. That's an astonishing proportion, and it presents a dilemma for cellular operators, who don't make any money off the missed calls and yet find a big chunk of their technology devoted to putting them through the system.

In Kenya, Safaricom, the biggest cell phone company, allows customers to send a certain number of free text messages saying, "Please call me. Thank you." It's much nicer than flashing -- and it reduces traffic on the phone lines -- and apparently other companies are trying similar methods. Until then, flashing/beeping/miskin/bipage will remain the order of the day.

Which, I suppose, is fine. You always have the option of not calling back. Unless you've got a determined flasher, in which case you'd better be prepared for your phone to ring, briefly and repeatedly, sometimes over the course of several days -- until you get a new number.

What gets measured

The weather in Nairobi has turned, finally, so that mornings are sunny and warm enough for a quick (hopefully) nine holes of golf before starting the work day. This morning on the driving range, a friend brought up a story that's in heavy rotation on BBC radio here: Monday's announcement of the first Ibrahim Index, a ranking of the best and worst governed African nations.

Everyone loves a list, and this one was bound to fuel some chatter. The Ibrahim Index is the brainchild of Mo Ibrahim, a cell phone tycoon from Sudan whose foundation aims to improve the performance of African leaders. Putting together data compiled by the U.N. and watchdog groups such as Transparency International and Freedom House, the index rated countries on the basis of safety, rule of law, human rights, economic opportunity and a category called "human development," and measured their progress over five years.

The results? Well, the bottom of the list -- Somalia, Congo, Chad, Sudan -- is a who's who of hot zones. No big surprises there. But when my friend Steve challenged me to name the best governed country, I couldn't. Not Botswana, a stable country that's spent its diamond wealth responsibly (No. 3 on the list), not South Africa, the economic engine of the continent (No. 5), not Nigeria (that was a joke).

No, the two countries rated as the best governed are the small island nations of Mauritius and the Seychelles. These tourist destinations aren't often thought of as part of Africa, except by well-off Africans looking for a beach holiday. But they are part of the African Union, so they rate. Another tiny, relatively isolated island country, the former Portuguese colony of Cape Verde, came in at No. 4.

None of these three have much in common with most of mainland Africa, so the relevance of the Ibrahim Index is already being questioned. It's also raised eyebrows for putting Rwanda at No. 18 -- 18 spots higher than it would have ranked five years ago -- despite charges by some human rights groups that President Paul Kagame has cracked down on opposition groups and journalists.

None of this would be anything more than idle golf course chitchat, except that Ibrahim's next announcement is a big one. Next month, he's expected to name the winner of the inaugural Mo Ibrahim Prize, a $5 million gift to a recently retired African president who's demonstrated great leadership. The thinking behind the prize -- which has been praised by, among others, Nelson Mandela, who isn't eligible because he retired too long ago -- is that Africa's leaders won't overstay their welcome in office if they have a chance at such a fat pension.

Ibrahim's foundation is calling it the world's biggest prize. Others say it's a scandalously large sum of money that would be better directed toward development programs to help many more people. Either way, this much is true of Ibrahim, who made his fortune with the mobile phone giant Celtel: he knows how to get people talking.

The full index and rankings are online at http://www.moibrahimfoundation.org/index/index2.asp.

Destination Djibouti

Few people ever make it to the tiny coastal nation of Djibouti, and having spent a few days there on a reporting trip last year, I can frankly say that I understand why. There's little to say about the place besides its crumbling colonial French infrastructure, epic heat and sizable contingents of French and American troops -- although people tell me there is some great diving off the coast. But when I returned to the country for a brief stay last week, it was clear that things are changing.

Djibouti may not be a holiday destination, but it's trying to take advantage of its location at the southern end of the Red Sea -- near the nexus of Europe, Africa and the Middle East -- by turning itself into a worldwide shipping hub. DP World, the major Dubai-based port operator, is transforming Djibouti's port and building a new $300 million shipping terminal that could raise the small nation's profile in the region. The plan is to give goods from East and Central Africa a more direct link with Europe, via the Suez Canal, and with Asia. (However, getting the goods by road or rail to Djibouti remains a huge challenge given the horrible state of infrastructure in this part of Africa.)

But the plan is a major shot in the arm for a poor country. A British colleague, Steve Bloomfield, told me that he recently spoke with developers who believe that Djibouti will surpass Mombasa, Kenya, as the preeminent port in this part of the world. That would be good news for locals considering that there are so few jobs in Djibouti city, where the small, five-year-old U.S. military base at Camp Lemonier is one of the leading employers.

The changes at the port aren't the only sign of development. Kempinski, the Germany-based chain of luxury hotels, has opened a palatial new property called, appropriately, the Djibouti Palace Kempinski. The first five-star hotel in the country opened less than a year ago and is luxe all around, from the Mercedes that ferries guests to and from the airport to the complimentary bottles of Pellegrino at the breakfast buffet and the de rigueur infinity pool out back.

With rooms starting at $360 a night, the palace is steep for almost any budget. But in light of Djibouti's location, the hotel is promoting itself as a destination for military personnel on R&R from the Middle East. All rooms are discounted by nearly half for any service member, and there's a host of other perks.

"Whether you are based in Egypt, Barhain [sic], UAE, Saudi Arabia, Iraq or Afghanistan," say the promo materials, "come to spend few days in beautiful Djibouti!" Or at least in the beautiful infinity pool.

I saw a couple of tattooed men with military haircuts lounging by the pool. But I'm skeptical of Djibouti's chances of becoming a holiday destination. For one, it's tough to get there. Even flying from Nairobi requires a stopover in Ethiopia. For another, once you've sampled the buffet and perfected your tan by the pool -- in the shadow of a large shipyard -- you're pretty much out of things to do.

But the hotel is gorgeous, by a longshot one of the nicest in the region, and I suppose if you're an officer with some R&R time and money to burn -- and you're coming from a place like Iraq -- there are worse places for a short holiday. And before the McClatchy shareholders stage a revolt, it's important that I clarify that I only stayed here because there was a sizable discount for journalists. Not as deserving as soldiers, I grant you, but we'll take it.

More with Admiral Hart

Here is the second half of an interview with Rear Adm. James Hart, commander of 1,800 U.S. troops in the Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa, based in Djibouti. Hart discusses the training of African militaries, recent civil-affairs projects in Ethiopia and Djibouti and the future of the task force's "hearts-and-minds" mission in the region.

Q: Talk a little bit about the military-to-military training you do with the nations in your area of operations.

A: What we do here in Djibouti, for example, we go to their base in Arta. Our guys deploy out each day and they train from probably about 9 in the morning to 1500 or 1600. They teach them things like how to set up a checkpoint, how to inspect a car, how to inspect people who you suspect might have weapons. They learn about IEDs [improvised explosive devices], there's physical fitness training in there, as well as the normal infantry kind of skills that you would expect.

Q: Do you provide any military equipment?

A: Equipment is...done through the embassies and the security assistance office there.... Here in Djibouti recently we were able, through the State Department and Department of Defense, to get two 55-foot patrol boats. They just arrived last month and they're getting set up and getting ready become seaworthy. It's part of a bigger plan to modernize a pier across the Gulf of Tadjoura to where it'll be both a naval base and a commercial fishing pier, and it'll have a small infrastructure for the navy there -- barracks, offices, and fuel and water will be available.

And on the fishing side we'll build an ice house so that start some commercial activity can start, people can bring the fish in and have a place to store them so they can be sold.... We'd like to be able to look back 2-3 years from now and say we managed to develop the infrastructure there and hopefully given them the right sorts of training and help so they can sustain that, have a better employment rate and so on.

Q: When you talk to the Pentagon, there's still support for that kind of work in this region?

A: Yes, there is. One thing we're trying to do in Ethiopia is really team with USAID [U.S. Agency for International Development]. We wanted to understand how the pastoralists from the Mandera Triangle [the shared border region among Ethiopia, Somalia and Kenya] make their way to Djibouti or Hargeisa or Bossasso. Because what we'd like to do is figure out what those routes are, that would be places to put wells, clinics or maybe schools. If we could map it out, then you can develop infrastructure, and then you have more of a lasting effect. We did this in a little town on the Somalia-Djiboutian border. It's taken three years but now you have a clinic with a nurse in there, who understands medicines and has the right supplies and training, you have a school with a  girls' dormitory, and we put in three wells.

Q: Your chain of command still sees this as the appropriate mission for this part of the world?

A: I've had the commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen. [Peter] Pace, the chairman of the joint chiefs, and Gen. [William] Ward, who's nominated to lead AFRICOM [a planned Africa-based U.S. military command] all out here and briefed them on all this. They all were very optimistic and endorsed what we're doing. I'm optimistic that this is something that will continue.

Q: When AFRICOM gets here, do you expect it will change the mission of CJTF-HOA?

A: I don't think it will change the mission. We may change how we do the mission -- it may not be a [combined joint task force], it may be something else -- but i think that this mission is the right enduring mission for East Africa.

Hearts and minds

A little known part of the U.S. military's war on terrorism operates out of a former French Foreign Legion base called Camp Lemonier, in the afterthought Horn of Africa nation of Djibouti. About 1,800 service members form the Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa, or CJTF-HOA. Their mission is focused on humanitarian assistance -- drilling water wells, rebuilding schools and hospitals, providing medical and veterinary aid -- and building up the capacities of national coast guards and border patrols.

After years of disengagement in Africa following the disastrous Black Hawk Down incident in Somalia in 1993, CJTF-HOA was formed after 9/11, when the Pentagon saw the "ungoverned spaces" of the Horn of Africa -- particularly Somalia -- as potential breeding grounds for Islamic extremism. As the only fulltime U.S. military presence in sub-Saharan Africa, the mission's goal is to win some goodwill for America and, more fundamentally, fight the poverty that fosters extremism.

I first visited Camp Lemonier last January to observe a project in Ethiopia where U.S. troops helped bring a simple irrigation system to a poor village. When I returned to the base over the weekend I saw that it had added two gymnasiums and was in the process of shifting troops from tents into cozy-sounding structures known as CHUs, or containerized housing units. Troops are still working in some of the most impoverished parts of the region, including western Ethiopia, northern Kenya and Yemen. Five years on, all signs are that the Pentagon wants the mission to stay.

But in the past year two major developments have changed the calculus in the Horn: the Islamist insurgency in Somalia and the growing humanitarian crisis in the Ogaden region of Ethiopia. The task force doesn't work in either of these areas, which commanders have deemed too dangerous for a civil affairs-based mission. Have those developments changed the way the U.S. military views its role in the region?

On Sunday I sat down with the CJTF-HOA commander, Rear Admiral James M. Hart, who took over the mission in February, to talk about what his troops are up to these days. Here's an excerpt from our conversation, with more to follow tomorrow.

Q: Somalia isn't an area that you focus on for civil affairs. Are you focused much on what's happening inside the country?

A: What we are doing with Somalia is helping the African Union...by developing capacity with the [1,500] Ugandans [peacekeeping troops]. We've done some training with them, for example, logistics training, medical training, to help them build capacity and support their efforts as peacekepeers in Mogadishu.... [But] we don't go into Somalia.

Q: But when you have such a big problem in Somalia, with an insurgency that seems to be getting worse, how does having several hundred U.S. troops here compete with the pull that an insurgency can have on, for example, foreign jihadists?

A: Somalia has been ungoverned since 1991. It is a major issue. It's something that we have to watch very carefully. But what we're about is trying to help enable Africans to solve Africa's problems. We see ourselves as the facilitators, the trainers, the mentors.... One thing we try to determine [is] how do we, using the organizations they've set up, help them achieve those goals. It's through those organizations that we think we can make the most difference, because we're not a huge organization.

Q: The mission's goal is to go into "ungoverned spaces" and bring some relief. But you don't work in Somalia, the Ogaden, or in the regions of Puntland or Somaliland. And yet these areas would seem to fit right in with CJTF's mission -- it's disaffected people, it's Muslims who have grievances against the West and the U.S. in particular.

A: Somaliland, Puntland -- those are areas we're always looking at what might be the opportunities in the future. but we have to wait for our government to tell us what the policie are going to be. Right now we don't have the policies to go in there.

Q: There was a report in June out of Puntland that a U.S. Naval ship fired a missile on suspected Islamic militants who had come ashore. But you're saying you don't work with the authorities in Puntland.

A: That's not our mission.... Someone told you the wrong thing. There was no coordination or communication with Puntland. We don't have any dialogue with them.

Q: In your view, how is the African Union progressing as a military and peacekeeping force?

A: Unfortunately they were given varsity problems almost at the beginning. The Darfur issue is a huge problem. I think we should give the African Union credit for having come together and deploying in there and trying to do what they could. They have not been totally successful there. But that mission -- or the mission in Mogadishu -- would challenge any military today to come in and do that job.... Hopefully this fall and winter we will see some real progress, with getting the right troop levels in there, and start to see some stability take hold.

To be continued on Thursday.

'A burning fire'

Friday's story about Ethiopian refugees claiming massive civilian killings in the Ogaden region prompted a couple of readers to suggest that the Ethiopian government's crackdown on the ONLF separatist group was all about oil. More specifically -- about China's search for oil in the Ogaden, and the Ethiopian government's desire to keep its Chinese investors happy. It's a point that didn't feature prominently in Friday's story, and it's worth exploring further.

The crackdown in the Ogaden was triggered by a major attack by the ONLF, the leading rebel group, on a Chinese-owned prospective oil field on April 24. The dry, land-locked Ogaden isn't producing oil yet, but the Ethiopian government has struck deals with Chinese, Malaysian and Indian firms to tap into some 2 billion cubic feet of natural gas reserves in the area.

News accounts of the April attack on the field run by the Zhongyuan Petroleum Exploration Bureau said that ONLF fighters stormed at dawn and, after an hour of fighting with 100 Ethiopian security personnel, 74 people were killed. Of the 74, 65 were Ethiopians and nine were Chinese. (The ONLF also took seven Chinese hostages, who were released a few days later.) Oil-industry analysts such as Philippe de Pontet of the Eurasia Group risk consultancy saw the attack as an attempt by the insurgents to embarrass Prime Minister Meles Zenawi's government.

In Bossasso, I met an ONLF commander who told me that the group was not about to let Meles profit off of their land. The commander, a bearded, skullcapped gentleman who gave his name as Elmi Mohammed, said that before Zhongyuan (a division of state-owned Sinopec) took over that oil field, the ONLF sent letters to the Chinese embassy in Addis Ababa. The letters warned the firm not to come into the Ogaden.

By doing so, Mohammed said, the Chinese firm "came into a burning fire where people are fighting. They never listened to us. They listened to Meles Zenawi."

Mohammed expressed no remorse for the 74 deaths in the April attack. In the ONLF's view, they are collateral damage in a decades-long war. And they were warned. If you take the group at its word, Meles's pursuit of oil in the Ogaden is a pressure point that the ONLF plans to exploit. Last month the group issued this statement:

Pursuing oil and natural gas exploration activities in Ogaden at this stage can only be characterized as gross corporate irresponsibility given the war crimes being committed against our civilian population. The ONLF will continue to uphold the principle of justice, democracy and respect for human rights before oil exploration in Ogaden and as such, we will not allow this regime to benefit from our people's natural resources.

The current crackdown on the ONLF may injure the group a little bit, especially if support for the campaign by the Bush administration and others allows it to carry on for much longer. But insurgent groups are almost never beaten by such campaigns. On the other hand, no one expects China, or India or Malaysia for that matter, to pull out of the Ogaden; China, especially, is becoming used to doing business in Africa's trouble spots. If no one bows, the chase for oil looks to be the latest and most explosive spark in a region already on fire.

Bossasso

"Are you going to blog about Bossasso?" my editor asked me on Friday. It was my last night there and the end of a long, sweaty week of work in northern Somalia, interviewing Ethiopians who've fled a government crackdown in the Ogaden region. I wanted to blog about this strange port city with the fascinating, Evelyn Waugh-worthy name, but there was too much to do while I was there. Now that I've left -- I flew out yesterday to Djibouti -- I can say more about Bossasso.

First, the name. It has as many possible spellings as letters -- Bossasso, Bosaso, Boosaaso. The English versions of the names of Somali towns are always open to interpretation. Start with a "B," add at least two "S's" and no more than four "O's" and you're fine. It's the largest city at the northeastern tip of the Horn of Africa, but no one has a good idea of how many people live there. Besides the "regular" residents there are tens of thousands of migrants from southern Somalia, Ethiopia, Sudan and elsewhere in East Africa, drawn there by the busy seaport, relative peace and, for some, the chance to travel across the Gulf of Aden to Yemen in search of a better life in the Middle East.

All this gives Bossasso a polyglot vibe like few other places in the region. Most people are ethnic Somali, but you see lots of people with the sharp features of highland Ethiopians. And you hear a fair bit of Kiswahili from Kenyans who've moved there to work. One Somali clan -- the Darod -- controls the place and it has close ties to the weak Somali transitional government, which is led by a Darod but under pressure from rival clans. Add to that a growing crisis over counterfeit Somali money, which is rumored to be rampant -- and some think that Bossasso and the surrounding state known as Puntland are sliding toward trouble.

But compared to the chaos of Mogadishu, 700 miles away, Bossasso was a pleasure. In one week there, I saw no uniformed police or military outside of the seaport or government buildings. I was able to travel alone with a local driver and no security. I spent hours at a time among Ethiopian refugees without looking over my shoulder. At the airstrip, the sight of my U.S. passport did not trigger a massive shakedown. As in much of Somalia, there was a solid cell phone network.

I moved around with a translator named Abdallah, a young Kenyan teacher who had picked up Somali and Oromo, the language of one Ethiopian tribe, while working in Bossasso. As a Kenyan Muslim, he could appreciate the relatively tolerant atmosphere of Bossasso -- the start of Ramadan on Thursday, for example, did little to quash the citywide chewing of khat, a popular narcotic leaf -- as well as its less attractive qualities.

Abdallah liked to point out the most common means of transportation in Bossasso -- a version of the ubiquitous African minibus, only with the doors popped out on the back and one side. The buses rumbled along the gravel roads with passengers looking like they were about to fall out. Then there was Bossasso urban planning, which involved building a lot of new houses and businesses smack in the middle of roads, requiring cars to swerve constantly to avoid hitting people.

And the heat. My God, the heat. The breeze off the sea seemed die in the humidity. Most structures were built with local sandstone, which is nearly white in color, so the reflection of the harsh sunlight was nearly blinding. We decided to work exclusively in the mornings, starting at 7 a.m. and going until about 11:30 a.m. At noon the city shut down for the daily round of khat anyway, so trying to reach anyone after midday prayers was a lost cause.

But compared with the rest of Somalia, Bossasso looked promising. Mogadishu in the south is a complete mess, wracked by civil war and near-daily insurgent attacks. Next door to the west in Hargeysa, the semi-autonomous region of Somaliland is becoming increasingly unstable. Puntland might just be all right.

There is a remarkable section of Bossasso where dozens of new single-family homes are sprouting up, built by Gulf-based architects. They are solid-looking structures of concrete and stone, with neat rooftops adorned by one or more satellite dishes. Abdallah said the area was called "New Bossasso," and that most of the homes are being built by Somali expats from Europe and Canada. These families -- like those on my flight in last Monday -- rent the homes to locals for most of the year. It was a sign of hope for the city, a sign you're hard pressed to find in most of Somalia.

Sami al-Hajj on death watch

The lawyer for a Sudanese journalist imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay went on al Jazeera television today to say that his client, Sami al-Hajj, is deeply depressed and may be close to death. The cause would be "passive suicide," because Hajj has been on hunger strike since Jan. 7 to protest being held by the U.S. military for more than five years without being charged. He would be the fifth inmate to die in Guantanamo.

I met Hajj's family in Khartoum in June and wrote about his case, which is well known in Sudan and among press freedom groups, but hardly at all in the United States. Hajj, 38, was a cameraman for al Jazeera and on his way to an assignment in Afghanistan in December 2001 when he was arrested by Pakistani authorities -- on a still unclear immigration violation -- and handed over to the U.S. military. A few months later he was sent to Guantanamo as an "enemy combatant."

His lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith of the British legal aid group Reprieve, which represents several Guantanamo prisoners, told al Jazeera that doctors and psychiatrists believe that Hajj may be the next inmate to die. Troops typically try to force-feed inmates on hunger strike with Ensure, a vitamin-fortified milkshake, but the process is so brutal that inmates don't often keep much of the food down.

When I spoke to Smith in July, he'd recently visited Hajj and said that he was withering away and suffering from depression. His condition appears to have gotten much worse in recent weeks, Smith said today. Hajj and Smith continue to push for a trial so that he can try to exonerate himself.

The Hajj that Smith described was a far cry from the happy romantic that his younger brother and sister remembered. Growing up in their hometown of Sinar, his brother Asim said that Sami would sometimes disappear for hours at a time, and he'd find him sitting alone with a camera by the side of a lake, taking in the view. Becoming an al Jazeera cameraman was the fulfillment of Sami's lifelong dream to work behind a camera, Asim said.

The U.S. military maintains that there's good reason to hold onto Hajj, stemming from work he did in Azerbaijan for a Muslim charity. But Smith said Hajj was little more than a bag man in that case, and that nearly all of the questions put to Hajj by military interrogators have revolved around whether his current employer, al Jazeera, has links to al Qaida.

The main reason that Hajj continues to be held, Smith said, is because the U.S. and Sudan have poor diplomatic relations and because the Bush administration distrusts Qatar-based al Jazeera. "If you work for the BBC, no matter what your nationality is, the British government intervenes on your behalf," Smith said. He urged the Qatari government to try to secure Hajj's release or push for a trial. Neither seems likely, and at this late stage it may be too late to save Hajj's life anyway.

Gangsta music

On the last leg of a six-city, 28-hour plane journey from Nairobi to the northern Somalia port town of Bossasso, I was approached by Hamud, who tapped me on the shoulder, roused me from my iPod coma and asked, in a perfect American accent, "Edhcudh me, can I dhit nedh to you?"

Hamud was nine. His front two teeth had just fallen out, so he was a little hard to understand, but otherwise he sounded like any American kid. He was traveling from Djibouti to Bossasso with five other excited children and one worn-looking woman, whom Hamud said was his aunt -- an extended family completing a long trip from the U.S. back to northern Somalia.

We were aboard Daallo Airlines, a shoestring carrier that services some of the remotest and least desirable cities in the Horn of Africa with a hardy fleet of old Russian planes and older Russian pilots. Daallo crews don't tend to bother with the standard pre-flight safety demonstrations, preferring to spend that time on the tarmac smoking or tightening screws on various parts of the landing gear.

We were near the front of the cabin and the cockpit door was open, giving the kids a rare thrill. Hamud and his cousins across the aisle had a clear, "awesome" view of all the dials and controls, which kept them occupied for most of the flight.

Later, Hamud noticed my iPod. He tapped my shoulder again. "What are you listening to?" he asked.

I slipped my headphones off and placed them on his head. I have one of those industrial-strength contraptions from Bose, and they made little Hamud look ridiculous. "Jackson" by Johnny Cash filled his ears and a disapproving look crossed his face.

"Don't you have any gangsta music?" he asked.

"Like what?"

"I don't know, like 50 Cent, G-Unit, The Game..." He listed a bunch of other names I hadn't heard of.

I scanned my iPod. In fact, I did have G-Unit's album "Beg for Mercy," which I don't think I've ever listened to -- amazing how random stuff finds its way onto iPods -- but a quick glance of the songs revealed several titles with words inappropriate for a nine-year-old. I found "Just A Little Bit," a club track by 50 Cent from a couple of years ago that I figured Hamud had heard before, so at least I couldn't be accused of corrupting the kid. He had me replay the song three times until the plane landed.

I asked him where he first heard that song. "On the radio in my uncle's car," he said. His uncle lived in Minnesota, where Hamud had been for the past couple of years. Now he was coming back to northern Somalia for he didn't know how long and preparing to begin a new school year.

He'd acquired an American accent and taste in quintessentially American music, but like so many young kids straddling two worlds, had a foot planted firmly in each. "I speak Somali, so it's OK," he said. He was more concerned about me. "You don't speak Somali. What are you going to do?"

To Hell's and back

The end of the week here in Nairobi was quiet, and with a long day of travel looming on Sunday (I'm headed to northern Somalia), I took the opportunity to get out of town on Friday. I drove up to Hell's Gate National Park with two friends visiting from California. Hell's Gate, at the southern edge of Lake Naivasha, is a small park with dramatic rock formations and is the only national park in Kenya that you can explore on foot. Angelina Jolie fans, if they paid attention to the scenery, may recognize it as one of the locations for Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life.

We rented mountain bikes from a nearby campsite and set off on a dusty road through the park, which features wide grassy savannahs ringed by jagged walls of red-gray rock -- I thought of a scaled down, greener, less intimidating Joshua Tree. The most dramatic landmark is Fischer's Tower, an 80-foot-tall volcanic obelisk near that guards the eastern entrance (right).

The zebras, gazelles and giraffe weren't abundant, but breezing past them on a bike was much better than seeing them from a mud-caked safari car. Even when the road turned to sand and we nearly spun off our bikes, there was the rare thrill of walking through a park with gazelles and warthogs in plain sight. It was a relatively easy three-hour ride. Terence scattered a herd of zebras as he biked toward them; Brian spotted a zebra halfway up a rock face.

There were few other visitors that day, a handful of bikers and one school group, so for the most part we had the feeling of being alone in the park. Then we stopped for a drink of water and to catch our breath, and we came across this sign:

I'd heard of Great Wall Drilling, one of the many Chinese companies doing heavy construction work in Kenya. I was surprised to see its name in a national park. After a few minutes we saw two Chinese men in blue jumpsuits drive by in a minivan. They waved at us.

Back at the park gate, as we loaded the bikes back into the car, I asked the guards what the drilling was about. "Power," one of them said. Great Wall was evidently working at Olkaria, a geothermal power plant inside the park that converts steam from underground geysers into electricity and is one of the Rift Valley area's largest sources of current. Kenya has been slow to tap into this power source, due to poor planning and a lack of technology. But eventually it could become one of the major power producers on a fast-growing continent that desperately needs it.

It was a reminder, deep in the heart of a national park, of all the ways in which Chinese companies are doing so much of Africa's heavy lifting these days, especially in infrastructure and industry. But after three hours of biking, there was another, more painful reminder of Chinese companies' reach into Africa when I looked down at my red right palm. A blister was developing where I'd been gripping the cheap  replacement grip on the handlebar. The manufacturer's name was there on the handlebar in raised plastic letters: Fu Xing.

Please leave. No, wait.

I had an interesting chat Monday with a humanitarian official who was recently asked to leave Sudan. It seems that this official angered Sudanese authorities with a report last year on political and security developments in Darfur that could emperil his charity's workers. Such reports are standard procedure for aid agencies working in chaotic Darfur, but still highly sensitive, and the official only e-mailed it to a few top staff in his organization.

It's not clear how the report was leaked, but a few months later the official learned that his work wasn't appreciated by the government in Khartoum, which rejects any allegation that it continues to fuel the instability in Darfur. Khartoum accused him of "intelligence gathering," a favorite bit of rhetoric that it often fires at international aid agencies that say even one word publicly about politics.

This has made aid workers more reluctant than ever to speak to reporters. On my last visit to Sudan, in June, former sources within the charity community rejected my inquiries so swiftly (though usually politely) that I felt radioactive.

The official I met tried to assuage the government's concerns in a series of letters and conversations. It didn't work. In August, nearly 12 months after the report, he was called into a government office, served tea, and informed that he had 72 hours to leave the country.

True to form, the Sudanese officials sugar-coated this as best they could. "This isn't my decision; it comes from higher up," one said. "They wanted to give you 48 hours, but I convinced them to make it 72."

At that point, there's little that the veteran aid worker could do. He packed his things and prepared to fly to Nairobi, where he could lobby for his return. But there was one final formality: he needed an exit visa. As the 72-hour deadline approached, the visa still hadn't arrived. The section of Sudan's sprawling bureaucracy that deals with humanitarian affairs seemingly hadn't coordinated with the section that deals with immigration, so that even though he was ordered to get out of Dodge, he didn't have permission to do so.

In the end, the official had to secure a 12-hour extension to obtain his formal authorization to leave the country. Sudan hasn't yet responded to requests by his agency to allow him to return.