Turkey tries out soft power in Somalia

In a sprawl of plastic refugee shelters and mortar-blasted buildings in Mogadishu, a mud-caked Turkish engineering team monitors the drilling of a new borehole while their armed guards chat lazily under a tree, guns across laps.

These government contractors are on the frontline of a huge Turkish development effort in one of the world's most dangerous cities - one which UN agencies and international charities prefer to deal with from the safety of neighbouring Kenya.

Across the Somali capital, a bombed-out shell after two decades of fighting, residents say Turkey has done more in eight months to shatter the perception that Mogadishu is a no-go zone than the international community has achieved in twenty years.

"Our government likes to help anyone in crisis so we came here without thinking anything," said the lead engineer, Mehmet, who asked Reuters to use a pseudonym because government employees are not authorised to talk to the media without permission.

The retreat of al Qaeda-linked rebels from the city in August ended the daily street battles and shelling between the militants and African troops, and offered a rare chance to ramp up aid as a famine gripped central and southern Somalia.

Some 500 Turkish relief workers and volunteers poured into Mogadishu's bullet-scarred wastelands, unleashing a wave of humanitarian aid as the militants struck back with a string of suicide bombings and roadside blasts.

"Of course it is dangerous but we don't think about those things. Inshallah, nothing has happened to us. If we are afraid, we can't operate," the engineer said.

Turkish flags - white crescent moon and star on red background - flutter in the coastal breeze and billboards marking out Turkish reconstruction projects dot the capital, where potholed streets are lined by rubble-strewn ruins and mountains of garbage.

Turkey's "Arab Spring" forays into Middle Eastern diplomacy, have drawn much attention on the international stage. Its launch into Africa, however, has gone little noticed by a world more focused on China's involvement in the sub-Saharan region.

A hotspot in the US-led war against militant Islam, Somalia offers Ankara an opportunity to bolster its image as a soft power on the global stage.

There may also be rich trade pickings for Turkey's thriving economy in the energy, construction and agriculture sectors; but first comes the most basic rebuilding.

Beneath Mogadishu's gutted parliament building, Turkish medics perform surgery in a packed makeshift field-hospital.

"We come here with our hearts, not for money," said one doctor scampering between the inflatable tented wards.

"COVER FOR WESTERN INVADERS"

While security rules restrict foreign U.N. staff and diplomats to fleeting visits beyond the military-protected airport in armoured troop carriers, Turkish aid workers move freely in vests adorned with the national flag

Their access, it seems, has nothing to do with religion. The Islamist al Shabaab militant group has denounced Muslim Turkey's involvement as a "cover for the Western invaders" and has targeted Turkish interests.

A suicide truck-bomber in October killed 72 people, many of them students applying for Turkish scholarships. Two months later a car bomb blew up metres from Turkey's newly re-opened embassy but caused no Turkish casualties.

Turkey's Ambassador C. Karin Torun, on his first ever diplomatic posting, described it as a question of political will.

"Our aim is to show a different model can work in getting help to the people," said Torun, Turkey's first ambassador in Somalia since civil war erupted in 1991.

Istanbul has just hosted an international conference on Somalia, focusing on improving infrastructure and security.

"Make Somalia's voice heard"

Turkey is among a growing number of non-Western donors bringing funds, a fresh mindset and their own experience in managing natural disasters to the global humanitarian aid scene.

Addressing the Istanbul conference on Friday, Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan urged the United Nations to intensify its operation in Somalia, and called on other countries who wanted to help to establish a greater on-ground presence there.

"We have really struggled to make Somalia's voice heard, to make those who do not see or feel what's going on in Somalia, see and feel," he said. In August, he became the first leader from outside Africa to visit Mogadishu in nearly 20 years.

Privately UN officials said they admired the ability of Turkish charities and government employees to work in areas of the Somali capital seen by Westerners as too risky.

Mogadishu's central Hodan district was at the epicentre of a protracted battle between Islamist rebels and African Union (AU) forces deployed to the coastal city to prop up the UN-backed government. Now building sites are mushrooming.

Late last year, the charity Doctors Worldwide Turkey converted a building formerly used as an ammunition dump into Mogadishu's most hi-tech hospital, doing it in just two months.

"I'd never seen anything like it before," marvelled Dr Osman Abdirahman Mohamed, who left Somalia during the war to train and work first in Pakistan and then in California. He returned to Mogadishu in 2010.

The charity has trained thirty of the hospital's doctors, nurses and midwives in Turkey. Turkish specialists still visit on rotation, part of an effort to counter a haemorrhaging of local medics from the Horn of Africa country.

Turkey has fixed up Mogadishu's crumbling airport, built schools and sent hundreds of Somalis to Turkey on scholarships, installed street lighting and cleared mountains of garbage.

Behind the counter of his well-stocked pharmacy, run from a metal-sheet kiosk, Mohamed Nur lauded Turkey's "visible projects".

"Other governments say they will come but they are not serious. The Turkish government said it would come and it started operating immediately," Nur said.

Soft power hard cash

Turkey, a rapidly growing economy and multi-party democracy that has applied to join the European Union, is widely regarded as a model for Muslim and other developing countries. It has also raised the flag over trail blazing construction projects across former Soviet Central Asia and the Caucasus region.

Erdogan's government has ratcheted up Turkey's diplomatic presence in Africa, opening a string of new embassies and flexing diplomatic muscle on issues from Darfur to the Arab Spring. Turkey, analysts said, wants to be seen as the quintessential soft power.

"Prestige maximisation is a key part of Turkey's foreign policy. It is trying to portray itself as an indispensable power beyond the confines of its immediate neighbourhood," said Fadi Hakura of the London-based Chatham House think-tank.

While the risks are high - mightier foreign powers have tried and failed to mend Somalia - so too are the potential trade rewards.

Erdogan's government is closely linked to Turkey's powerful business interests, especially the "Anatolian Tiger" small companies in the country's conservative heartland that thirst for new markets.

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