In this issue:
* Michael Maren: CLEANING UP FROM THE COLD WAR IN SOMALIA
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              S O M A L I A  N E W S  U P D A T E

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Vol 2, No 25           September 20, 1993.            ISSN 1103-1999

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Somalia News Update is published irregularly via electronic mail and
fax. Questions can be directed to [email protected] or
to fax number +46-18-151160. All SNU marked material is free to
quote as long as the source is clearly stated.
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CLEANING UP FROM THE COLD WAR IN SOMALIA
By Michael Maren

(By kind permission of the author. Excerpted from a forthcoming
article in "The Village Voice".)


"Welcome to Mogadishu. Thank you for flying with the United Nations.
We trust you had a pleasant trip and hope to see you again. "I look
around the plane at the other 43 passengers. No one else finds this
funny. I can't even see a smirk, only expressions of bored
resignation. Most of my fellow travelers have slept for the duration
of the two-and-a-half hour flight from Nairobi. Except for the Somali
kid sitting next to me, the rest of the passengers  are soldiers and
people working for the UN. There's a Canadian helicopter pilot,
Italian, Pakistani, and Norwegian military officers, an American in
bright green pants. Most of them have been on R&R in Nairobi and are
heading back to work in Mogadishu. (...)
    After climbing out of the plane the other passengers walk into
the hangar that serves as the UN air terminal in Mogadishu. They line
up to get boarding passes for the helicopter shuttle that will lift
them over the troubled alleys and streets of south Mogadishu and
carry them safely to the UN compound three miles away.(...)
    I walk to the back of the hangar into the bright sunlight and
try to find a lift to the Sahafi hotel, now famous as the place where
most of the foreign press stays in Mogadishu. The Sahafi, which means
"journalist" in Somali, didn't exist the last time I was here, in
1981. It didn't even exist last year, until the Marines landed. It is
a product of this war and a monument to Somali ingenuity and
entrepreneurship. (...)
    At that time, I was working for the US Agency for International
Development. I was one of many aid workers warning that food aid
pouring into Somalia was unnecessary and eating away at the fabric of
the country, upsetting the balance of clan power by enriching friends
and family of  the dictator Mohammed Siad Barre who were stealing
much of the food. In addition to Barre and his pals, the main
beneficiaries of the food aid were relief organizations (or NGOs --
non-governmentalorganizations -- as they are now called), who
received funding for delivering the food, and the American and
European governments , who were able to dump surplus food they'd
already paid for while calling it foreign aid. At the time, the US
government was negotiating with Barre over the use of an abandoned
Soviet naval facility at Berbera in the north of Somalia. They
weren't about to quibble with him over a few thousand tons of surplus
wheat.
    The reports we wrote predicted disaster, but no one paid them
much mind  Food kept coming even as Somalia could have fed itself.
As a result, the nation's food supply was controlled from the ports
by corrupt officials, not by farmers in the countryside. So, when the
Barre government fell in January, 1991, the biggest prize in the
country was the port . And while the warlords battled each other  for
the right to loot food, the people in the countryside, many living
around fertile, irrigated areas near the Juba and Shebelle Rivers,
starved.
    Now, back in what's left of Mogadishu, I recall explaining this
to some of the journalists who came through the country. Few of them
got it, or wanted to be bothered. Like most Westerners they accepted
it as a given that Africans needed our "help,"  that there could be
no thing wrong with feeding people. They'd write boilerplate pieces
about stolen food resulting in hungry refugees, and then they'd
leave. It was here in Mogadishu, in 1981, that I quit the aid
business to become a journalist in order to investigate and explain
how NGOs were, with the best intentions, destroying Somalia with
their food aid.(...) It strikes me as bizzarely ironic, that
Operation Restore Hope, the first ever US military incursion into
Africa, a military operation that liberals could love, was launched
so that NGOs could deliver more food. And here I am, a dozen years
later, back reporting the story I've worked so long to prevent from
happening.

What's in it for us?

The United Nations operation in Somalia, a 28-nation force
collectively called UNOSOM II, took over from the US Marines, aka
UNITAF, on May 5. UNITAF hit the beach in Mogadishu last December
after peacekeeping troops from UNOSOM I found they couldn't keep the
peace. UNITAF quickly achieved its very limited mission -- food
delivery --and then passed the humanitarian baton back to the UN.
The Marines had it easy. Anyone with enough trucks and firepower
could have moved food from the port to the countryside. The UN force
then found itself with a very different mission on its hands and
dealing with the real problem, the power struggle that caused the
food shortages to begin with. The US force cleaned up the blood and
put bandages on the body, but left the patient hemorrhaging inside.
    Despite the Roman numerals that make UNOSOM II sound like a
sequel, the operation this time is very different from its
predecessor. UNOSOM I forces were deployed under Chapter VI of the UN
charter which makes provisions for peacekeepers. UN troops  in the
Sinai, in Lebanon, in Cambodia, in Bosnia, have all been under
Chapter VI. UNOSOM II is operating under the never-before-been-
invoked Chapter VII, which provides for peace-makers. As defined by
the UN charter, peacekeepers are only allowed to use their weapons in
self-defense. Peace makers are allowed to go on the offensive and
attack what they perceive to be threats to the peace. (Only the
German troops in Somalia are there under Chapter VI.) Exactly what
this means is  not at all clear since this Chapter VII stuff is all
new to everyone involved. Somalia, in effect, has become the test
firing range of the new world order. (...)

Out of Touch

(...)The UN compound is huge, self-contained, and utterly foreign. It
has been created by linking the US embassy compound to the university
compound and other large walled-in areas to create a sprawling
military complex at the southern end of the city. Except for the air
they breathe, the people inside the UN consume nothing that is
Somali. Food and water are shipped in by foreign private contractors.
An Israeli company has the water concession. Millions of plastic
bottles with Hebrew lettering are coming into this Muslim country.
Because troops from Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E., Egypt, Pakistan, and
other Muslim countries refuse to drink Israeli water, additional
supplies are also imported from Dubai. (...)
    Twice a day the journalists staying at the Sahafi hotel make the
trip to the UN compound to attend press briefings. Before July 12,
when four reporters were lynched by angry mobs of Somalis, the press
conferences were a small part of the news-gathering effort. Now, with
every person on every street looking like a potential killer, chasing
down any story has become a risk that few are prepared to take. Many
reporters confine their activity to the four kilometer strip of road
between the Sahafi and the UN compound -- but not even this is safe.
The trip is along a major thoroughfare that has been dubbed Death
Wish Road by some of the hacks. About half way between the Sahafi and
the UN compound on Death Wish Road is a khat market located at a
place sometimes called Kamikaze Corner. Khat, as most Americans now
know, is a mild stimulant that when chewed in moderation, keeps the
chewer alert. When chewed in larger and larger quantities it leads to
mild euphoria, stressed-out  hostility, impotence, and tooth
decay.(...)
    The road leading west from Kamikaze Corner heads directly into
the heart of General Mohammed Farah Aidid's territory. It is sealed
with a homemade road lock -- chunks of concrete and twisted steel. It
is apparently unmanned, like many similar roadblocks erected around
the city. But as U.S. army engineers and Pakistani troops found out
on September 9, attempts to remove the barriers are met with deadly
force from Aidid's militias and resistance from mobs of Somali
civilians. At that time, 100 Pakistani soldiers, three tanks, four
armored personnel carriers and an American bulldozer were brought in
to move the junk.  Gunmen opened fire on the tanks and crowds  moved
in on the soldiers. U.S. Cobra helicopters were brought in to protect
the troops. They likely killed more than 100 people.
    As our cars approach the khat market the traffic slows, hearts
beat faster. Buses and pickup trucks packed with passengers navigate
through the crowds, around huge holes in the road, and around each
other. No one is enforcing traffic rules in Mogadishu. At least once
during my stay there a car  was hijacked from this intersection: A
group of armed men simply poked the muzzles of their assault rifles
through the window and told the occupants to get out. Once past the
khat market, the road widens again and approaches a Pakistani guard
post a few hundred yards in front of the UN compound. To enter the
compound we walk through hundreds of Somalis hoping to get work with
the UN. (...)
    We go into the compound to get information about what is
happening outside the compound from people who almost never leave the
compound. At the daily press conference the first person to speak is
Farouk Mawlawi who fills us in on the humanitarian side of the
business. He runs through numbers about how many trucks of food are
going where and how the UN is setting up district councils, meeting
with elders, setting up a court system, and that sort of thing. He's
rarely asked any follow-up questions. Then Major David Stockwell gets
up and goes over who blew up what using which explosives and who shot
at whom and who got killed and how many mortar shells sailed into the
UN compound. Stockwell gets asked lots of questions, and I started
feeling sorry for Farouk, but I could never really think of anything
I wanted to ask him. (...)

The Hunt For The Fugitive Warlord

Someday Howe may publicly admit that he made the biggest mistake of
his career by turning Somalia into a personal battle between himself
and "Fugitive Warlord" Mohammed Farah Aidid.  Issuing an order for
Aidid's arrest, putting a $25,000 price on his head, and blanketing
Mogadishu with WANTED posters is a sure-fire way to attract
attention. If Aidid had the resources to hire a New York PR firm they
might have done the same thing. And while the press has criticized
Howe for switching the focus of the battle to one man, they've also
gleefully taken up story. Any journalist or TV reporter will tell you
that a good story needs  good character. Howe, not much of a
character himself, supplied the missing ingredient. The aging Somali
general became the Fugitive Warlord. If nobody gets blown up today,
you can always write about the progress in the search for the
fugitive warlord. If U.S. army Rangers slide down ropes from
helicopters into a residential compound and find nothing they must
have been looking for Aidid -- and the wily devil must have gotten
away again. Despite denials, everyone assumes that the elite Rangers
and the even more elite Delta Force are in Somalia for the express
purpose of getting Aidid. As one U.S. officer told me in frustration,
"Now, everytime we leave the compound and don't come back with Aidid,
you guys [the press] accuse us of failure."
    Without Aidid Somalia would be just another boring story of
failed development policies -- a crucial story but not one to hold
readers'  attention for very long. And with 15 competing warlords in
Somalia, all equally evil, it was very hard to really find a focus.
But one Fugitive Warlord, now there's a story you can sink your teeth
into. There's our Saddam, our Noriega. The search for Aidid became
the thread that ties this mess together. Howe created a huge headache
for himself.(...)
    But Howe say's he has evidence:  "The most telling piece of
evidence that really got to me anyway, one of the reasons why I
concluded that I had to call for Aidid's arrest as a menace to public
safety is the shooting of his own people." Howe was referring to the
sequence of events last June that marked the turning point in this
conflict. On June 5, the 25 Pakistani soldiers were killed in an
ambush as they approached Aidid's radio station in Mogadishu. The
Pakistanis reported that
they were attacked by gunmen using women and children as shields.
They held their fire for too long to defend themselves. Then, on June
13, a crowd of demonstrators  approached the traffic circle at
kilometer 4 in Mogadishu. The traffic circle, known simply as K4, is
guarded by Pakistani bunkers on one side and the Sahafi Hotel sits on
the other. Guns were fired from the crowd, and Pakistani gunners
opened up from above.
    "It isn't that the Paks didn't so some shooting," Howe said. As
he was every time I saw him, Howe was wearing a light-colored short
sleeve shirt and khaki pants, looking like a man better prepared to
play a round of golf than fight a guerrilla war. "They felt desperate
enough to shoot.  He [Aidid] also had people shoot into the crowd in
order to create bodies and a scene of mayhem that would then be
broadcast to the  world and compound the embarrassment to the
Pakistanis. This I'm convinced that he did, and when the
investigation is made public, the skeptics will be convinced. (...)
"Is there something that you've heard that has convinced you
personally that in fact Aidid did that?" "Oh yeah," the Admiral
said."Because that's a pretty desperate, nasty, and despicable thing
to do." "Agreed! I really wouldn't just get out and say it if I
didn't have evidence.""Is there any little bit you can give me now?"
"I really can't give you specific...Just say a lot of investigation
information to be published will document that particular event.""Are
there people who are going to say 'I did this?'" "I'd rather not be
too very specific at this point but it is hard...it's not, in other
words, just an assertion. It's backed by evidence....It was a deep
concern to me that somebody would want power enough or whatever the
motive that they would shoot their own people.  I think that just
crosses all boundary lines." (...)
    The ultimate loser in Howe vs. Aidid may be Howe himself. While
he has been supported in public, a number of European foreign
ministers are working to assure that his contract, for a reported
$28,000 per month, is not renewed. Most feel that his handling of the
Aidid matter has been an embarrassment. The reports last week that
Jimmy Carter has been in contact with Aidid only make Howe look
worse. As for Carter's  message that Aidid want's to negotiate with
the UN, that is nothing new. Aidid has long said he wants to talk.
    Howe is no stranger to the process of hunting down fugitive bad
guys. As assistant to Admiral William Crowe, then the chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, he was directly involved in attempts to
capture Panama's  Manuel Noriega. Howe has a reputation as a savvy
Washington insider,  and has served in a number of positions
associated with national security policy, starting in 1969 as a
military assistant on the National Security Council staff.  In 1991,
President Bush appointed him as his deputy national security adviser,
replacing Robert Gates. Howe also served as a NATO commander. In
positions at the Pentagon and State Department, he was involved at
the highest levels of strategic arms negotiations and headed the
delegation that implemented the U.S.-Israeli strategic cooperation
pact during the Reagan administration. It's an impressive resume, but
it also makes him a strange choice to be appointed special assistant
to the UN secretary general who would like, one assumes, to give the
impression that UNOSOM II is a true UN multilateral humanitarian and
peacekeeping effort, not just an extension of American foreign
policy.
    "He's a born-again Christian," said the head of one non-American
NGO in Mogadishu in a lengthy tirade against Howe. "He starts
meetings with a goddamn prayer. He believes that inside every Somali
there's a good Christian waiting to get out."
    Indeed, Howe's very manner and the words he chooses tell of a
man who has a Sunday-school view of good and evil. On August 8, after
four U.S. soldiers were blown up with a remote control bomb he said,
"We will not tolerate this kind of terroristic campaign by General
Aidid and I call on all the good people of south Mogadishu to join
with us in preventing  these kinds of acts of violence and terrorism
against people who are only here to give a helping hand to the people
of Somalia...I want all of the  good Somalis to help us prevent mines
and ambushes and mortar attacks."
    And like preacher with goodness on his side, Howe has not
hesitated to strike down his enemies with vengeful deadly force. Some
at the UN have reacted in horror at his tactics. A memo dated July
13, to Admiral Howe from Ann Wright at the UN's Justice Department,
criticizes the tactics used by the UN in chasing and punishing Aidid:
"The issue boils down to whether the Security Council resolution's
directive authorizing UNOSOM to 'take all necessary measures' against
those responsible for attacks against UNOSOM forces meant for UNOSOM
to use lethal force against all persons without possibility of
surrender in any building suspected or known to be SNA/Aidid
facilities; or did the Security Council allow that persons suspected
to be responsible for attacks against UNOSOM forces would have an
opportunity to be detained by UNOSOM forces and explain their
presence in an SNA/Aidid facility and then be judged in a neutral
court of law to determine if they were responsible for attacks
against UNOSOM forces or were mere occupants (temporary or permanent)
of a building suspected or know to be an SNA/Aidid facility."

The National Loot

For twenty dollars you can buy a real Somali passport with all the
official stamps. Thirty dollars gets you the diplomatic model. All
the passports were looted from the ministry of foreign affairs and
are now in the hands of entrepreneurs. Do you need a deed to a house,
a driver's license, car registration? No problem. UN agencies, NGOs,
and news organizations in Mogadishu pay rent to people who seized the
homes they now claim to own. But it's not all that bad. You see, the
people who owned them in the first place likely got the money by
stealing it, often by looting relief supplies that were coming into
the country to between 1980 and the fall of President Siad Barre in
1991. More often than not these people were from Barre's Marehan
clan. One wealthy neighborhood near the airport has been dubbed "The
National Loot" by Somalis, because it was built with funds from
looted relief supplies. And while today's looters in Somalia usually
carry guns and attack truck convoys, the looters of the past, big
time looters, were called "pencil looters" -- white-collar criminals
soaking up the perks of power.
    Mohammed, my driver, tells me that the he bought his Jeep in the
old days when he was a businessman in Mogadishu. But I can tell he's
not from Mogadishu, and he's no businessman. I ask him again a couple
of days later. We've built up some trust by now. He tells me that
he's an Aidid supporter, a member of the Aidid's Somali National
Alliance (SNA). And the car? Where did he get the car? He just
smiles. I figure that it was probably stolen from some official
American agency, since no one who wasn't required by law to buy an
American-made vehicle would choose a Jeep over a Toyota.  This Jeep,
like most vehicles in Mogadishu, has a bullet hole dead center in the
windshield.  Whatever the case, in the new Somalia it's his car and
I'm paying him $130 a day to drive me around town. The price includes
a gunman who sits in the front passenger seat with an AK-47 across
his lap. It's a lucrative franchise when you figure that the average
Somali earned $210 a year in 1991.
    It's also to his benefit to work for the press or an NGO since
it's some protection against having his guns confiscated by UN
troops. The UN is trying to impose gun control in Somalia, and has
made some kind of distinction between legal and illegal arms. As long
as Mohammed works for foreigners, he can keep his guns. The fact is
that owning gun in Somalia is a necessity if you own anything else.
If you drive down the street in your car and don't have a gun someone
will take the car. The drivers know this  better than anybody.Many,
not all, of the drivers who ferry reporters around are from Aidid's
Habir Gedir subclan. (Some are from the neutral Isaaq clan from the
North. None are from Aidid rival Ali Mahdi's Abgaal subclan.)
    Poor people from the bush, shut out of wealth during the Barre
regime and ridiculed as country bumpkins, they are now in power, of
sorts. They took Mogadishu from Barre, took the houses, took the
cars, took the guns. Then battling the Abgaal subclan of Ali Mahdi to
a bloody standstill, they took all of south Mogadishu, reducing the
center of the city to rubble. Aidid brought his followers to the
promised land, to the source of the national loot. They're not about
to be deprived by America and the UN. The NGOs learned a long time
ago that the best way to buy security was to hire people from the
same clan as those who were stealing the food or, even better, hire
the people who were stealing the food.(...)
    The Habir Gedir are now cashing in on the UN presence at the
same time they're trying todrive the UN out. It's a classic win-win
situation for them. If they win, they get to keep the country and all
the goodies. If they don't win, that's OK, too. The UN is good
business. But if they lose, they're in big trouble.
    They lose if Ali Mahdi becomes president. (...) And one could
easily get the impression that the UN is biased in favor of Ali
Mahdi. In August, he was flown by the UN to Kismayo to attend the
signing of a peace accord by a group of subclans in the region. He
was the only warlord present, and as the proceedings came to a close,
he grabbed the megaphone and gave a lengthy speech. In Somali
society, the most important person speaks last. The UN later said
that he wasn't scheduled to speak, and that he just took center stage
on his own volition, but the impression that Ali Mahdi is the UN's
boy lingers. The perceived alliance between Ali Mahdi and the UN
raises the stakes for the Habir Gedir, who stand to lose it all. It
leaves Aidid and his followers fighting not so much to gain anything
but to hold on to what they've got, and to hold on to their lives.
There is a lot of blood to be avenged in Somalia.
    (...) An organization called The Voice of Somali Islamic
Salvation Vanguard (SISV) dropped off a press release calling for a
Jihad against  "the great Satan (USA) under the umbrella of UN who is
going to convert our people into nonmuslims."  A similar press
release -- which appeared to have been produced on the same dot-
matrix printer -- came from the Somali Islamic Salvation Movement
(SISM). Most journalists don't believe that either of these groups
really exits. Maybe it's a couple of people with a looted computer.
Maybe it's the SNA flashing "the Islamic card."  The SNA -- which
uses laser printers for its press releases -- blamed the killing of
the four American soldiers on what it called "The Third Force,"
implying that Islamic fundamentalists were involved somehow. At a
pro-Aidid rally someone from SISM or SISV, handed me a press release.
A representative from the SNA ripped it out of my hand and pushed the
leafleter away. "Don't read this," he told me. Later, SISM claimed
responsibility for killing the four Americans, as did another
organization calling itself  The Somalia Orphanage Association, a
group supposedly made up of people whose parents have been killed by
UN forces.

What Were they Thinking?

The UN insists that all of this fuss is just a south Mogadishu
problem, and the rest of the country is just fine.(...)But at the
evening briefings we hear about military convoys being attacked
outside these towns. Not civilians, UN military convoys. The UN is
now spending $25,000 a day to fly water from Mogadishu to Belet Uen.
Every day an empty Southern Air Transport C-130 takes off empty from
Nairobi, picks up Israeli water and German beer in Mogadishu, and
flies it to the German and Italian troops in  Belet Uen. Then the
plane goes back to Mogadishu and takes another load before heading
back to Nairobi for the night. The UN knows that the road isn't safe,
and Southern Air Transport won't risk leaving their planes in
Somalia. And not only is much of south Somalia unsafe, most of
Kenya's Northeastern province, along Somalia's southwestern border,
has become impassable, due to armed gangs of Somali bandits. The
Kenya army, sent to protect Somali refugees as well as Kenyan ethnic
Somalis, has engaged in it's own raping and looting spree.
    According to a Kenyan-born Somali human rights lawyer, there
have been over 200 reported rapes of Somali women by Kenyan military
and police officials -- and a very small minority of rapes ever get
reported in Africa. The town of Wajir in Northeastern Kenya was a
beautiful and wealthy desert oasis. Today it is another basketcase
town. Two weeks ago an American pilot working for UNICEF was shot and
killed there. At least 35 security officers and 50 civilians had been
killed in the Kenyan towns of Wajir, Garissa and Mandera since
January. Kenya was solidly behind Somali President Mohammed Siad
Barre, and now  backs his son-in-law, Mohammed Said Hersi Morgan.
Morgan has been one of the "good Somalis" lately, cooperating with
the UN, but other Somalis are not likely to forget that it was Morgan
who bombarded the city of Hargeisa in the north, killing 50,000
people. The Kenyans, now wrapped up in their own ethnic problems
haven't had much to say about UNOSOM, but they will certainly chime
in when the future of Somalia is really on the line. The head of
Kenya's military, Mohammed Mohamoud, is Somali and will do everything
he can to assure that a friendly regime takes over in Somalia.(...)

Postscript: The War on TV

I flew out of Mogadishu in the cockpit of a Southern Air Transport C-
130, piloted by a bunch of ex-Vietnam fighter jocks who'd flown in
Angola and Central America and were now in the food delivery
business. Southern Air is making some good money off of Somalia.
    I'm now watching the war on CNN with everybody else. The
television shows the bodies of some of the eight Nigerian soldiers
killed in an ambush last week. People dance and pose around the
corpses. One man seems to be symbolically dumping sand on the body. I
can see the dead man's face. If the slain soldiers had been
Americans, this scene would never have been aired out of respect for
the families of the dead. Yes, they watch CNN in Nigeria, too. But
then the story got bumped by pederasty charges against Michael
Jackson. (...)
    (...) So what exactly were the geniuses in Washington thinking
when they sent the Marines into Somalia last December? We'd feed the
people, they'd thank us, the UN would help set up a government, and
they'd all live happily ever after? Restore hope? Was there ever any
hope in Somalia? The UN and the US were very happy to do business
with a brutal dictator in a country that lived off foreign aid.
Diplomats dined with Somali officials who looted millions of tons of
relief food. The average Somali was destitute, or lived a very simple
life as a nomad. Certainly the UN doesn't plan on restoring that. Are
they talking about building a democracy on the Horn of Africa? Not
exactly. Les Aspin used the word "security," as in "...unless we
return security to south Mogadishu chaos will follow the UN
withdrawal."
     Even if they do return security to south Mogadishu, not an easy
thing to do, chaos will follow the UN withdrawal. To leave peace
behind the UN will have to create a force strong enough to control
the factions, and there will be nothing to stop that force, whoever
is in charge, from grabbing its share of the loot when the time
comes. (...)
____________________________________________________________________
SNU is an entirely independent newsletter devoted to critical
analysis of the political and humanitarian developments in Somalia
and Somaliland. SNU is edited and published by Dr. Bernhard Helander,
Uppsala, Sweden.
____________________________________________________________________

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