Raining death and disinformation

The headline on the cover of Wednesday's Daily Nation

here in Nairobi was serious:

U.S. WARPLANE RAINS DEATH ON SOMALIA

Not exactly what you want to wake up to if you're a U.S. official in Kenya. The U.S. government has been trying to convince the people of Somalia, and of East Africa, that it isn't trying to bomb the crap out of Somali civilians, or take revenge for the 1993 "Black Hawk Down" battle in Mogadishu that left 18 U.S. servicemen dead, or set up a military base in Somalia from which it can rain death on unfriendly Gulf countries, or occupy Somalia to keep transnational terrorists from setting up shop. All these theories are espoused in Somalia, and none of them, say U.S. officials, is remotely true.

And yet all we heard from the U.S. government for three days this week, since it was first reported Tuesday that a U.S. military helicopter had bombed a group of suspected al-Qaida affiliates in remote southern Somalia, was a loud silence. On Tuesday and Wednesday, residents reported new airstrikes, and thousands of people fled their villages. Meanwhile, Somali government officials and civil society groups were describing civilian casualties in the dozens, and angry rebukes were coming in from the U.N. Secretary-General, the Arab League, the Italian Foreign Ministry and elsewhere over the "indiscriminate" U.S. bombing. News stories for three days reflected these dramatic accounts.

As it turned out, the reports were very likely wrong, or at least exaggerated. Yesterday the U.S. government launched a PR offensive to counter the reports. The ambassador in Kenya told the BBC Somali-language service that there had been only one U.S. airstrike, on Monday, and that no civilians were killed, although he didn't say how he knew that. A top official in Kenya later briefed a group of journalists on background and confirmed that, but also refused to offer details. Some officials in Washington and Nairobi speculated that further airstrikes could have been conducted by U.S. ally Ethiopia. Then suddenly a Somali government spokesman who had said Wednesday that U.S. raids were ongoing, changed his story and said there had been only one U.S. strike.

Who knows what the real story is. There's a lot of misinformation and disinformation out there, but in a place like Somalia - lawless, chaotic and mostly inaccessible to outsiders - anyone who steps up to the mic is going to be heard. As we tried to report Tuesday and Wednesday on what was happening, my colleagues from rival news organizations and I tried to insert the appropriate caveats. "It was unclear whether..." "Unconfirmed reports said..." "According to residents' accounts, which could not be independently verified..." The last refuges of journalists working in the fog of war. (Or whatever this was.)

We probably didn't win any journalism prizes this week. But the U.S. government didn't help matters by staying silent for so long. Forty-eight hours is an eternity these days, and the U.S. should have put its version of events out there sooner. It might not have averted the firestorm, but it would have helped calm some Somali fears.

As the U.S. official who briefed us privately yesterday acknowledged, things still move slowly in the bureaucracy of the State Dept. and the Pentagon, and the delayed response reflected some confusion and buck-passing. But I believe it showed more than that.

It showed how low Africa still ranks on the U.S. priority list. Had this been Iraq or Afghanistan or Pakistan, you would expect a swifter public-diplomacy operation. Yet even though this was a covert counterterrorism operation against al-Qaida targets that had suddenly become public and produced an outcry in a Muslim nation, it was still in Africa, and therefore less deserving of attention. Or so it seemed. Every U.S. official who comes through this region insists that they are trying to do good in Somalia. This is a place where the U.S. has a bad history, including Black Hawk Down in 1993. And since 9/11 they've warned that it could be a place where terrorists take root.

You can't blame the government entirely. Somalia has been a big story for three weeks now, since the Islamists who ruled the country were driven out by Ethiopian troops starting around Christmas. For a couple of days there, Africa was a front-page story in the United States for several days in a row. If you looked at a major U.S. paper that week, you'd see Somalia stories with bizarre datelines like London, Zanzibar and, in my case, a tagline saying that I "reported from the United States" (I was at my parents' house in California). That was the sign of journalists' vacations getting screwed up to cover this. It was a priority for news organizations. And yet most people I spoke to in the U.S. that week had no idea there was anything happening in Somalia, or where Somalia was. One person asked me if I meant "Sudan."

So we've all got a long way to go in figuring out this most maddening of African countries. If it's as important to U.S. interests as the Bush administration keeps telling us, and it probably is, we ought to all pay a bit closer attention. The good news is that this is a time of major change in Somalia and after the events of the past few weeks it's probably going to register on the journalistic radar a little better.