Shining: The Story Of A Lucky Man
MELBOURNE man Abdi Aden was 15 when he was lined up with eight other men and shot at point blank range. His story is truly remarkable.
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ABDI Aden was a happy-go-lucky, soccer-playing 15-year-old when Somalia’s civil war hit Mogadishu and his world fell apart.
Effectively an orphan, he fled to Kenya facing violence, the death squad and starvation.
Upon arriving at a refugee camp he knew that it would lead to death.
Abandoned by UNHCR due to dangerous conditions, thousands of starving people waited to die at the camp.
With nowhere to turn, Abdi took the dangerous journey back to Mogadishu. Alone, with no money in his pockets, he went to Romania, then Germany.
He was 17 by the time he arrived in Melbourne, with no English, no family, friends, money or a place to call home.
news.com.au has obtained an extract from the book Shining, the story of Abdi Aden’s incredible journey.
Read on.
THE soldiers are predators on two legs, but we also have to worry about the predators on four legs — the hyenas, the lions, the wild dogs.
What these animals make of the war I don’t know, but they probably can’t believe their luck. Why spend the day hunting creatures in the fierce heat when humans, dead ones, others almost dead, can be found just by sniffing about?
The female lions, I am told, are the hunters of their tribe; the male lions, larger still than the females, sit at home in the shade of a big rock and wait for their wives to bring them something fresh to eat. The lions will only eat what is fresh — a rotting body disgusts them. But people die every day from disease and starvation, or sometimes simply because they want to die, so there is no shortage of fresh meat.
The hyenas are different. They will eat anything. If a body is rotted, they don’t pause for a second. I have heard of a pack of hyenas running off in four different directions, each with a piece of dead body to devour in some hidden place. And more frightening still are the stories of hyenas stealing into camps where people are sleeping, finding a small child and dragging that child off into the darkness. A hyena has a set of powerful jaws that can clamp around the chest and throat of a child, and also great strength in its shoulders, so that it can lift that child off the ground and, if necessary, run into the darkness.
Everybody in the makeshift camps off the roadsides fears the hyenas even more than the soldiers. We also hear wild dogs howling in the night, but don’t see them. They are too stealthy to show themselves.
At night I listen in a state of dread to the harsh, coughing sound of the hyenas in the scrub, and the deep, grunting roar of the lions. On such nights, sleep is impossible. So strange, to think of my enemies, those with two legs, those with four, simply as creatures of the one sort. For the truth is, the hyenas and lions are only looking for dinner, and have their reasons for wanting to eat me, while the soldiers don’t want to eat me, just kill me.
I have to say, the wild animals will be easier to forgive, but it will be years later, in my comfortable home in Australia, before I get around to forgiving them. Here, in the darkness of the Somali night, all I can think is: May God send a lightning bolt to destroy the lions, destroy the hyenas, destroy the crazy soldiers.
After weeks and weeks of travelling in this crazy, haphazard way, a day comes in late 1990, when I fall into the hands of soldiers who are ready to kill. I am not alone — nine of us are captured — but I am the youngest.
The soldiers, like all the soldiers at this time, are dressed in tattered camouflage uniforms that must have been worn day and night for months. They aim their guns at us from their two Land Cruisers — two soldiers in each vehicle, and another one driving the loader — and scream at us to lie face down on the ground.
I can see by their expressions that they have lost all human sympathy. They scream at us, sure, but their eyes are dead; they are both hysterical and emotionless at the same time. I lie with my face in the dust.
Now the soldiers get out of the vehicles, still pointing their guns at us. Then an argument of some sort breaks out among the soldiers. I can’t make sense of it. My heart is pounding against the ground; I can feel a shudder running through my body. Now the soldiers tell us to stand. Their movements are rapid. They slap us, cuff us, jab us with the barrels of their weapons. One soldier says: ‘You think you can go all day and do no work? Do you? Why are you not in your own towns? Why are you not working? Now, you work.’
This soldier has an eye that is partly closed by a scar that runs all the way around to his ear. Beads of perspiration stand on his forehead. This is not the way Somalis sweat. We are used to the sun, to the heat. We can stand in the open at midday for an hour without much more than light moisture appearing on our faces. If he is sweating like this, he has been using drugs. Any sort of madness is possible.
On the ground are several big twenty-kilogram bags of rice stacked in a heap, and other bags stuffed with clothing. There is also a pile of spare parts that must have come from the same place as the front-end loader. I have seen others gangs of soldiers carrying off stolen booty in this way. They will take anything.
We are told to pick up the bags of rice, of clothing, the spare parts. I lift a bag of rice, trying to find the most comfortable way to carry it. The soldiers keep hitting us, slapping us, as if we were animals with whom they had lost patience. When the nine of us have lifted a load, the soldiers add more to our burdens until everything they have stolen is on our backs. I am carrying two bags of rice. The soldier in charge shrieks: ‘March! Get moving! You stop, I shoot you!’
Along the bare earth of the road we stagger, thinking what everyone thinks in this desperate situation: If I do what they say, maybe they won’t kill me. I carry my bags of rice on my back, with my arms stretched around to support them. Forty kilograms soon feels like twice its weight.
Others, carrying a greater weight, moan with the effort. The soldier in charge, the one who shouts the loudest, every so often runs among us and gives someone a whack with his fist — such a stupid thing to do because we cannot go faster.
There is no rest. My muscles ache so much I’m sure I will soon fall over and be shot. I think: I will walk five more steps — then I can go no further. After those five steps, I say to myself: Five more — then I can go no further. And again, and again. Ibra, in front of me, is beginning to lurch from side to side. He is carrying bags of rice like me, but his load is slipping lower down his back and I can see that he will soon let it drop.
I hiss at him: ‘Don’t fall. They will kill you!’ With great effort, he gets a better grip on his bags of rice and hoists them further up his back.
The sun on my head and shoulders is so hot that it feels as if my skin is being burnt from my body. I stop counting my steps and instead begin telling myself a story, one word per step. I say — not out loud — The sun will set, the night will come, you will be cool. The sun will set, the night will come, you will be cool …
The region we are trudging through is open and barren, except for a few thorn bushes and those dry clumps of grass that turn green overnight when it rains. We don’t pass anyone on the road.
Anyone ahead of us or coming towards us would run off into the thorn bushes well before we reached them. A couple of times, I glimpse people who have escaped into the grass. They stand in the distance, far enough from the soldiers to avoid being shot. It is known that the soldiers are
not very accurate with their guns beyond a range of thirty or forty metres, and the people I see are two hundred metres away.
For maybe three hours we march in this way. Now, just as my marching story promised, the sun is beginning to sink lower, our shadows on the ground are lengthening. Even when the soldiers stop to relieve their bladders or to drink from bottles of Evian, they do not allow us to put down our loads.
The soldier with the scar is the cruellest of the four. When he drinks from his bottle of Evian, he makes a great show of feeling refreshed just to torment us. He says: ‘So good, so good! What do you say boys, isn’t this good?’ And he laughs, as if he is the funniest man on earth.
Our destination is two new four-wheel-drives parked off the road. The cars would have undoubtedly been stolen and they are already packed with other stolen goods. We unload our burdens, one after another, and the soldiers are delighted with the great treasure trove they have built up.
I call them soldiers, but it would be truer to say they are pirates. In years to come, my country of Somalia will be known as a haven for pirates of the sea, but these soldiers are pirates of the land.
Once I have relieved myself of the weight of the bags of rice, I am unable to straighten up. My muscles and bones have formed themselves into a saddle, and they won’t resume their normal shape.
But even in my bent shape, I can see that the soldiers are impatient to get going. They order us to lie on the ground as they had hours before, but this time they pull our arms behind us and lash our hands together with plastic rope. Now we are forced down on our backs, staring up at the sky.
Whatever is about to happen will not be anything we would welcome, that’s for sure. If our hands are tied, we can’t carry anything, meaning that the soldiers have finished with us. I can hear someone weeping, his cries becoming high-pitched as a child’s. But another guy, I don’t know his name, is full of anger and is cursing the soldiers and calling them criminals and telling than they are a disgrace to their clan.
The soldiers pay no attention. They are chattering away like a flock of birds — ‘Hurry, hurry, tie them tighter, be quick, why are you so slow? On their backs, on their backs, idiot!’ And now, a new argument. One of the soldiers says that he doesn’t want to kill us face-upward — he wants us to lie face down.
‘What difference does it make?’ shrieks the soldier with the scar. ‘Up, down — just do it!’
The soldier who is reluctant to kill us face-upward is stubborn.
‘I don’t want them to give me the evil eye. Don’t you know that? If you kill them while they can see your face, a bad thing will happen to you.’
‘Tell them to shut their eyes, fool!’
‘No, I want them to turn over.’
The scarface soldier screams at us to roll over. And we do. We are lying in a row, almost shoulder-to-shoulder, our faces in the dirt. I have accepted that I am about to die, but who has ever practised dying? Who knows how to do it? I lie as still as I can, not knowing what comes next — pain, nothingness, I don’t know. I can hear the soldiers climbing into the cars so that they can shoot at us through the open windows. I hear the clicking sound as the soldiers make
adjustments to their automatic rifles, their AKs. Scarface shrieks: ‘Okay, okay!’
Bursts of gunfire follow, a rapid rattling noise. Ibra next to me makes a slow, moaning sound. On my other side, a man whose name I don’t know jerks quickly, as if he’s convulsing — his body is pressed against mine. The firing stops, but only for a couple of seconds.
Now the soldiers are sweeping their fire down the row, then up again. My eyes are shut tight but my face is sprayed with dirt as the bullets strike the ground in front of me. Another pause of two seconds, then the firing begins once more. The man on my right side is no longer moving, but Ibra, on my left side, is still moaning softly.
One of the soldiers cries out: ‘Son of a bitch!’ And then: ‘My rifle’s jammed, man.’ Ibra has fallen silent.
The scarface soldier with the high-pitched voice screams out: ‘Let’s go! Let’s go!’ I hear the roar of the car engines, the crunch of the gears. The soldier who called out before is still complaining about his jammed rifle. I can’t let myself believe that the soldiers are going. I can’t risk opening even one eye. As far as I can tell, I am alive. But I am wet all down my left side, all down my right side, and the only thing that could make me wet is blood.
Sometime earlier, I heard a man speaking to some other men about a big scar on his chest close to his shoulder. He was saying that it is possible to feel as if you have escaped injury when you are being fired at, only to find, when you stop running, that blood is pouring from a big hole in your flesh.
That is what happened to him. He didn’t know he was wounded until he stopped running and hid himself. Then he looked down and saw that he was kneeling in a pool of blood. He reached a hospital and was saved.
So the wet blood I am aware of must be coming from me. This causes a sickening panic to grip me, and it is only with a great effort of will that I keep my mouth shut. I want to scream my lungs out. My blood is running from my body. I have a vision of water dripping from a bottle, and the bottle emptying until it is only two-thirds full, then half, then less than half …
Have five minutes passed since the cars drove away? Are five minutes time enough for safety? I say to myself: ‘No. Ten minutes more. Fifteen. Don’t move for another fifteen minutes.’ I can’t hear anything but the cries of harmless birds — linnets and starlings, to give them their English names.
But what if the ravens come while I am waiting? The ravens that devour the flesh of corpses? Or worse, the hawk-eagles that will not eat anything that is dead, but will attack the wounded, like me? All I can hope is that Somalia is already such a banquet table for birds that eat human flesh that I will be spared.
I am trying to judge fifteen minutes, but it is hopeless. When I begin counting, my flesh shrieks back at me: ‘Counting? Are you mad? Get up and run!’ I open one eye, but slowly, a millimetre at a time. My blurred vision can make out the earth into which my face is pushed. I open my eye further. I can make out cartridge shells on the ground, many of them, many, many, shining in the setting sun.
A starling lands among the shells and pecks at them, as if they were food of some sort, caterpillars, maybe. I watch the bird, one of those starlings with orange breasts and black feathers along its back, in its foolishness strutting among the shells. Starlings are cautious birds. If it has landed here, a metre from my face, it must believe that we are all dead, all harmless.
I lift my head in order to see further, and the bird rises into the air in alarm. I can see no one. Close to where the cars were parked, a Mars Bar wrapper lies on the ground, left by one of the
soldiers, probably. With great caution I rise to my knees, my hands still lashed behind me. On both sides, the bodies of the other eight of my companions lie motionless, torn apart by the bullets — some have broken skulls.
Without waiting to check my own body for wounds, I struggle to my feet and run in the opposite direction to the soldiers. I run fast, leaning forward, hands behind me at first, until the rope loosens and falls off.
Whenever I imagine the soldiers chasing me — they are not, of course — I speed up. My bare feet hardly touch the ground. I want to put kilometres between myself and the soldiers.
I stumble and crash to the ground, but I am up and running again in a split second. It is only when I have covered as much ground as my strength can manage that I veer off the track into the scrub and sit down to regain my breath. I have a terrible stitch in my side from running. I wait for the stitch to ease, then immediately get back on the track and start running again, and I keep running, kilometre after kilometre.
I rest for a second time in a place where the scrub and trees on the sides of the track are thick enough for me to escape into if any soldiers appear. It is only now that I search my body for wounds. It will seem strange to my readers that I should have waited this long to see if any of the soldiers’ bullets have harmed me. But this is what I thought: that I was certainly wounded and would likely bleed to death, but that I had to keep running whatever the cost.
Do you see what this illogical thinking suggests? That I was more afraid of the soldiers than actual death. Perhaps this means that we are more afraid of what can cause our death than of death itself.
As it happened, I was not wounded. The blood on my legs and my flanks came from those on either side of me at the time of the massacre. How strange can things become? The soldiers raked the nine of us with automatic gunfire from weapons that can destroy you with a single shot, killing the men and boys to my left and to my right. And yet not a single bullet broke my skin.
This is one of those occasions that everybody above a certain age has, I think, experienced, one of those times when you say to yourself: Somebody is watching over me. My time has not come.
Shining: The Story of A Lucky Man is published by Harper Collins RRP: $29.99. For information visitwww.bookworld.com.au
This extract was reproduced with permission.
Originally published as Shining: The Story Of A Lucky Man