The Road to Hell (39 page)

In his speech, Clinton was trying to put the best possible spin on what had become a tragic mess. He once again raised the humanitarian banner, reminding his audience of what had supposedly brought us to Somalia in the first place. It didn't work. In the previous four months, the images from Somalia had changed: One day we were looking at photos of beefy marines rescuing big-eyed starving babies. The next day it was equally compelling images of Cobra attack helicopters strafing Mogadishu streets. Suddenly the humanitarian intervention had become a military assault. The skinny Somalis who had so recently been seen as victims had become the enemy.

Congress and the press together wondered aloud: When did the mission change? How did the humanitarian relief effort, so simple, become a hunt for a warlord? When did we get involved in nation building? This is how journalists and politicians who supported the intervention in the beginning distanced themselves from the bloody finale ten months later. Writing in the November 1, 1993, issue of the
National Review
, Brit Hume echoed the sentiments of those who had woken up to the realities of Somalia: “Mr. Bush's humanitarian mission had been transformed, with little high-level discussion and almost no public debate.” In Congress, Senator John McCain of Arizona, a supporter of Bush's intervention in Somalia, accused Clinton of changing the mission.

It was as if someone had thrown a switch while no one was looking, sending all of Somalia down a different track. In reality, however, Bush's “purely humanitarian” mission was a mirage. A realistic analysis of the situation in Somalia would have shown that the policy path Bill Clinton wandered down during his first year in office was the logical extension of the direction in which the Bush initiative was heading. If the Somalia mission was to be more than a grandiose public relations stunt, the military would have to tackle real problems, the problems that were hidden behind the simplistic notion propagated by the media and the relief agencies: People are hungry; send soldiers to deliver food.

Somalia is not a story of how a humanitarian mission became a military adventure. It's about how the people running a humanitarian mission became
so dedicated to their cause that they started to see strating, bombing, and killing as humanitarian acts. And it's about how the institutions built to perform the mission became more important than the goals of that mission. President Bush never could have gotten public or Pentagon support if he'd asked for 28,000 marines to battle factional bandits in a distant African country. He had little trouble getting support to send 28,000 marines to feed people. But in reality it was the same thing, and Bush administration officials were aware of this.
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Starvation in Somalia was political. It was caused by the warlords. The solution was going to have to be political, and probably military. In the feel-good early days of the mission, no one wanted to hear that. They wanted to believe it was all about those kids in the CARE ads. They wanted to believe it was about delivering food and making them smile. But delivering food is easy. It took trucks, people to load them, and guns to get them past the bandits. That mission was accomplished quickly. Once again, withdrawing was going to be the problem.

The violent events that occurred in 1993 were not an aberration; they were, in fact, foreign aid carried out to its logical extreme. Foreign aid run amok. The desire to help had—as it almost always does—become the desire to control. In a routine foreign aid situation there is local government, even a corrupt local government, to check the tendency of aid organizations toward control. There is a point at which the interests of the aid organizations clash with the interests of the government. Aid organizations across the Third World have been lectured or deported in hundreds of instances where governments have perceived a challenge to their sovereignty.

Aid organizations regularly complain that local governments are the main obstacle to development. If only they were allowed total control, they might be able to really do development work. Somalia was the perfect chance to test this. There were no controls on aid agencies or what they could do. It was as if a tumor was set loose in a body without an immune system. The operation in Somalia became the primary focus of a number of aid organizations, including the International Committee of the Red Cross, which spent more than half its budget there in 1993.

Although the aid organizations had total freedom to do as they pleased, there was a catch: Without a local government, there were no police to
keep the peace. Somalia was dangerous. Organizations were subjected to extortion by warlords and petty bandits. Aid workers were being killed. They hired armed guards to protect them, but just as often ended up being robbed or held hostage by those very same guards. Since there was no government and no banking system, they had to deal in cash—boxes of cash. Planeloads of it were coming in every day, which only made them more tempting targets.

So they needed security. They needed to bring in an armed force from outside so they could continue to do relief and development work. Led by CARE and its president, Philip Johnston, they asked for military intervention, but they wanted it on their own terms. They wanted the military to act as facilitators for humanitarian organizations, serve their interests. But the military doesn't work that way. Aid organizations quickly realized that the military had its own agenda and its own way of doing business. It was like the early missionaries and traders in Africa who asked military backing so they could go about their business. One day you had a small British garrison protecting a trade route; a year later you had a colony and total political control. No sooner had the soldiers landed than the aid organizations began to complain about them: they did too much, they did too little; they failed to disarm the factions; they were violating human rights in their attempts to disarm the factions. Aid agencies were dismayed to find that the soldiers were acting like soldiers.

But the military intervention also opened the door to a flood of aid agencies. In the violent fall of 1992, there were only a handful operating in Somalia. On the heels of the military intervention, hundreds set up shop. The publicity generated by the military intervention meant that money was pouring into their coffers. Somalia was a business opportunity.

For the U.S. military and the UN, Somalia offered a different kind of opportunity. Their agenda was much more ambitious, their problem more daunting: The UN in Somalia was creating a model for post-Cold War intervention. The UN and Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali wanted their own army. Somalia would set a precedent, a Chapter VII intervention—peace enforcement. Bush's New World Order was coming apart in Somalia and in Bosnia, but Bosnia seemed too dangerous. Ed Vulliamy, a reporter for
The Guardian
, got at least one State Department planner to openly admit, “There was no doubt that Somalia was instead of Bosnia, a way of staying out of Bosnia.”
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Bosnia was deemed too dangerous, the mission
filled with too many unknowns. Somalia would provide some answers. The idea was that an aggressive, muscular UN would emerge from Somalia ready to fight in Bosnia and probably in other sticky post-Cold War wars, wars where the United States did not have a defining national interest but where it nonetheless would want to intervene. Somalia would work the glitches out of the system. But there really hadn't yet been an opportunity to test out the military machine.

Aydiid and the other warlords had more or less cooperated with UNITAF. But Aydiid particularly had been a beneficiary of the Americans' control of UNITAF For example, after negotiations with U.S. special envoy Robert Oakley, both Aydiid and his crosstown rival AH Mahdi Mohamed had stored their heavy arms in Authorized Weapons Storage Sites (AWSS). However, whereas Ali Mahdi was told to move his weapons some 12 kilometers out of town, Aydiid's storage sites remained in town, accessible within minutes should a war flare up. During the UNITAF period, from December 1992 until May 1993, Oakley met regularly with Aydiid. The two men seemed to enjoy being seen together. General Joseph Hoar would later say, “We kept a level playing field between the clans by meeting with Aydiid every day.”

Aydiid would not enjoy such favored treatment after Oakley and UNITAF departed.

On May 5,1993, the United Nations Operation in Somalia (UNOSOM II) took over, eventually building to a 28,000-strong international military presence, including troops from Pakistan, Canada, India, Bangladesh, Zimbabwe, Botswana, United Arab Emirates, Italy, and a greatly reduced American contingent, the 1,300-man QRF, or Quick Reaction Force. The Americans were there only as backup in case of immediate threats or to support other UNOSOM troops if needed.
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The UNOSOM II mandate (UNSecurity Council Resolution 814) was much more aggressive and ambitious than what UNITAF had set out to accomplish. Where UNITAF was essentially a heavily armed food delivery service, UNOSOM was, in fact, a nation-building exercise. And it was implemented
under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, peace enforcement.
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And aggressive military involvement. The Security Council resolution spoke of “the restoration of law and order throughout Somalia,” the “reestablishment of local and regional administrative institutions, the reconstitution of the police,” and it recognized the importance of disarmament to any progress.

American lawmakers would later belittle the UN, charging that these goals were unrealistic. The reality, however, was that Resolution 814 was not written by UN bureaucrats. It came almost intact from the office of General Colin Powell.

So a group of poorly equipped and disorganized Third World armies were set up to undertake a series of tasks that the U.S. Marines refused to even consider.

But this was precisely the idea. With all sorts of nastiness cropping up in places like Rwanda, Liberia, and Haiti, potentially in central Asia, and most immediately in the Balkans, the UN needed to build the capacity for dealing with these new things called failed states. The people behind Resolution 814 never actually believed it would succeed in Somalia. There were too many problems to begin with, starting with the fact that the country had never known anything like the democratic institutions 814 was purporting to set up. Or, as one high-ranking U.S. official put it, “You had to have a lot of imagination to think you could do anything with Somalia.”

But to really test its wings, the UN needed an enemy; Aydiid was only too happy to oblige. In Aydiid, they had themselves a formidable foe, but one who could be beaten, or so the planners thought.

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I
n June of 1993, the UN went after Aydiid, invoking the full powers granted under Chapter VH of the UN Charter. A line had been crossed that would become known as the Mogadishu Line, the abandonment of a humanitarian neutrality, but the term would not be used until more than a year later, in a very different place. As Serb forces were shelling and capturing so-called UN safe areas, Lieutenant General Sir Michael Rose, the UN commander, spoke of his reluctance to call UN troops into action. He did not, he said, want to cross the Mogadishu Line.

In Somalia that line was crossed in a flash on June 6, 1993. In a special Sunday session, the UN Security Council declared war on Aydiid when it issued Resolution 834.
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On June 5, twenty-four Pakistani soldiers were killed and fifty-six were wounded in gun battles around Mogadishu. Without any investigation of what had happened, the UN charged Aydiid with a premeditated ambush and issued an instant indictment, launching a week-long series of attacks on Aydiid's various strongholds and Authorized Weapons Storage Sites (AWSS) around the city. When the bombardment ended, the Special Representative of the Secretary General (SRSG) in Mogadishu, American Admiral (retired) Jonathan Howe, issued a warrant for Aydiid's arrest and placed a $25,000 bounty on his head. Somalia became a war zone between the UN and Aydiid's militias.

Pursuant to Resolution 837, the UN hired Professor Tom Farer of American University to undertake a study, which was to become an indictment of Aydiid. Farer arrived in Mogadishu two weeks after the incident and just after the UN, employing the American QRF, ended its week of reprisals against Aydiid.

Aydiid himself had called for an independent investigation into the events of June 5, claiming that the UN was not a neutral party and had a
serious conflict of interest setting itself up as a fair and impartial jury in judging an assault on its own troops.
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Admiral Howe's insistence that the UN could conduct an impartial investigation was early evidence that in the absence of any civil authority in Somalia, UNOSOM was taking for it' self near dictatorial powers. The Farer report bears out Aydiid's suspicions. It is nothing if not a whitewash.

The report—never officially released by the UN—is absurd and arn> gant. Although a scholar in international law who had written a book on the politics of the Horn of Africa,
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Farer was by no means an expert on Somalia or Somalis. “The great bulk of our inquiry has consisted of lengthy interviews with military and civilian personnel associated with UNOSOM II.” The report then goes on for two and a half pages about how difficult it was under the circumstances to interview Somalis.

Some facts are not in dispute. As part of the factions' agreements with the UN, heavy weapons had been placed in Authorized Weapons Storage Sites. UNOSOM officials decided to conduct a search of sites where weapons of Aydiid's faction—and only Aydiid's faction—were stored. The inspection would take place on Saturday, June 5. A memo went to Aydiid on Friday, June 4, the Muslim Sabbath and a day when Aydiid was not in his office.

The letter of intent to inspect the sites was therefore presented to Aydiid's lieutenant, Abdi Hassan Awale “Qeybdiid” (whom the Americans called “Mad Abdi”). According to an official memo, “Mr. Awaleh [sic] was
somewhat shaken by the notification …” He then made several excuses about why he could not accept it. The memo, contained in Farer's report, continues: “After listening to all of Mr. Awaleh's comments, the representatives informed him of two facts. One, that he, Mr. Awaleh, is recognized as an appropriate high official of the SNA/USC. Two, the visit would be considered an official Notification.”