The Road to Hell (45 page)

In fact, it was the petty nature of the Somalia dispute—small men lusting after power and loot—that made the conflict so intractable. There were no issues, no ideological differences, nothing to negotiate. As long as the UN remained in Somalia, it continued to supply the raw material of the conflict: loot. Each desperate move to get an agreement—any agreement—sapped the UN of credibility and respect. It paid massive hotel bills, flew warlords and their entourages to Addis Ababa, Nairobi, and Djibouti and literally begged them to put their signatures on documents. Ali Mahdi and Aydiid used these meetings not to make peace with each other but as political conventions where they lobbied and coerced other faction leaders, trying to convince them to sign on with a winning ticket. UN negotiators seemed to first favor Ali Mahdi, then Aydiid, then Ali Mahdi again. Neither Aydiid nor Ali Mahdi ended up with any respect at all for the institution.

Most Somalis couldn't understand what the UN was doing trying to scrape together a “democratic” government out of the remnants of the hated Siyaad Barre regime. Both camps were largely staffed by people who had worked for Barre's dictatorship—including Aydiid himself and Ali Mahdi's wife and closest advisors. In its eagerness to bring order to Somalia, the UN would have happily reinstated a dictatorship. Success for the UN would have been failure for Somalia.

But these details were of little interest to the UN's negotiators, who had no patience for the minutiae of Somali politics. For both the UN and the United States, Somalia had long ago stopped being about Somalia. It was about redeeming a faltering American foreign policy and about carving out a brave new world of peacekeeping. The more they strained to reach an
agreement, the farther away it seemed to drift. The few people within the bureaucracies who were conversant with the important details of Somalia's clan system resigned, complaining that no one was listening.

Those details, of interest only to true Somaliphiles, were extremely important. For example, most people understood that Aydiid and Ali Mahdi were members of the same clan family, the Hawiye, but came from different subclans, the Habar Gidir and Abgaal. Fewer realized that both of these subclans were broken down into further subclans that didn't entirely support the faction leaders. Ali Mahdi's Abgaal-Harti were a minority and needed to keep the other subclans happy. And Aydiid's Habar Gidir-Sa'ad were dependent on the Habar Gidir-Ayr and Habar Gidir-Suleymaan for their infantry strength. And few were remotely aware that Aydiid's even more immediate clan, the Habar Gidir-Sa'ad-Jalaf, were involved in tense negotiations with the Habar Gidir-Sa'ad-Hilolwe, the group that supplied most of his money and top advisors.

Neither the Americans nor the UN ever seemed to get a firm grasp of the clan system. The walls of their offices were plastered with clan diagrams torn from academic books. Starting with Samal, the supposed founder of the Somali people, the charts broke down into clan families, subclans, sub-subclans. It was all very neat and very graphic. But the Westerners tended to see the family trees as if they were corporate organizational charts. They therefore concluded that power emanated from the top, and that everyone was really part of one big family. The fighting was internecine and therefore senseless.

What they never seemed to understand was that the Somalis themselves never thought in terms of organizational charts. Their perspective on their own lives was from the bottom up. Starting with the immediate family, and climbing up the family tree, the farther away you got, the more remote the connection. The loyalty of the foot soldiers to the chief at the top of the clan lasted only as long as the spoils of war came down through the ranks. Aydiid needed to deliver the goods. The resources dumped by the military, the UN, the NGOs, and the journalists ensured that Aydiid had enough to spread around.

The battles being fought in Mogadishu were for real resources, scarce resources, real wealth, and the stakes were high. It was a battle for survival, far from senseless. To the contrary, it made perfect sense. For the last ten years of the Barre government, relief food poured over the docks of Mogadishu. The government used that food to build its power base and control people in the hinterlands. Individuals used the food to get rich. It
made perfect sense that the warlords would fight over relief food. Food was power and survival for the family.

By the time the U.S. Marines came ashore in December 1992, Aydiid and Ali Mahdi had fought each other to a bloody standstill. As early as March 1992, their factions had begun to turn inward, challenging their leadership. Photo ops with American diplomats were just what were needed to raise their profiles within their own clans. From that point onward, almost everything Aydiid did was an attempt to keep his own alliance intact. While the UN was exerting its energy to broker an agreement between the warlords, Aydiid and Ali Mahdi were worried about keeping their relatives happy. In other words, billions of dollars and several hundred thousand foreign nationals were involved in a global operation to settle what was, at its core, the politics of dysfunctional families.

The man who perhaps understood the least was the one who had taken on the largest burden: U.S. Ambassador Robert Oakley.

Oakley had grabbed for himself the reputation for being “the one American who really knew what was going on.” He had the useful skill of projecting an enigmatic half smile whenever confronted with questions he didn't want to or, more likely, couldn't answer. Most of the assembled press corps interpreted this as a sign of higher knowledge. The few with more experience in Somalia figured he didn't know what he was talking about. One press conference stands out.

The day that Aydiid was taken off the UN's most-wanted list in November 1993, Oakley went to see him. As he drove back through the streets of Mogadishu with an Aydiid-supplied military escort, his little convoy found itself in the middle of a cheering throng of Aydiid supporters, who began chanting “Oakley, Oakley, Oakley.” The ambassador wisely did not yield to the temptation to address the jubilant crowd. When I asked about it later, he pretended that it was all part of the plan.

“I've seen crowds here before. When they have on their smiling faces it's good,” he said. “When they have on their nasty face it's bad, but I wasn't the least bit nervous.” One of Oakley's assistants provided a bit more detail: “They led us on … we had no idea. We came down this street and there's this huge crowd … and I thought, Gee, this looks interesting.” The truth was, as usual, that Oakley was being manipulated by Aydiid.

Several times during Operation Restore Hope, Aydiid's clan was close to running him out of town at the end of a technical. Each time he was rescued, inadvertently, by the Americans. Aydiid deftly learned that he could unite his forces only by focusing on a common enemy; a call to arms
against infidels and imperialists still gets adrenaline pumping in that part of Africa. The best way to isolate Aydiid would have been to ignore him, not to put a $25,000 price on his head or send in Delta Force. Each bloody confrontation with peacekeepers raised his profile. Likewise, every time Aydiid was flown to a meeting or was visited by U.S. special envoy Robert Oakley, he walked away strengthened.

F
or that reason, the impending departure of UNOSOM was an immediate threat to Aydiid's power, and the announcement that the marines would return to assist in the withdrawal was a final opportunity for Aydiid to raise the banner of glorious combat.

In the months before the UNOSOM withdrawal, Aydiid's power had been seriously challenged from within his own clan and from his external allies. His closest advisor and primary financier, Osman Ato, and his most powerful military ally, Colonel Abdullahi Yusuf, had been talking with members of Ali Mahdi's faction and were united in their conviction that Aydiid had become power mad and was the main obstacle to peace in Somalia. Ato had gone to the Sa'ad clan elders and gotten their agreement on this notion.

Aydiid responded by playing his anti-American card once again. Through his radio station—the one he rebuilt after the Americans leveled the first one—he told Somalis that the Americans were coming to “recolonize” Somalia. Most Somalis saw it for what it was, a desperate gambit by a desperate man. But Aydiid's core supporters in his subclan rallied round. They attended twice-weekly demonstrations (as they had during the days of Aydiid's battle against the UN) and spread the word. In the coastal town of Merka a week before the Americans were to land, a group of elders asked me to explain why the Americans wanted to take over Somalia. I tried to assure them that the Americans would be there for only two days, three at the most. They remained skeptical.

Just before the Somalia landing, the Pentagon unveiled an array of hightech nonlethal weapons that it had in its arsenal. These included StickyGoop, which would disable an onrushing crowd by engulfing people in a mountain of glue, binding them to themselves, other people, and the ground, and carpets that would release CS gas if trod upon. President Clinton had reportedly been upset by the numbers of civilian casualties involved in a series of U.S. operations in Somalia, starting with the deaths of at least 100 bystanders, many of them women and children, in a September 9, 1993, firefight. But his most immediate concern was with the Republicans, and avoiding anything that would serve as a vehicle for recalling
the disastrous October 3 attempt to capture Aydiid. The plan was to keep it low-key and nonviolent. The announcement of these nonlethal capabilities was designed to let potential looters and troublemakers know that the United States was prepared to deal with them. The message to Somalis was,
Stay away
.

The Somalis didn't get it. For a week before the arrival of the marines, the streets of Mogadishu were abuzz with rumors about the fantastic comicbook science-fiction gadgets the Americans were bringing with them. People planned to go to the gates of the port and airport just to see the stuff. What the hell? It couldn't kill you.

So once again, the Americans had completely misread the situation on the ground in Mogadishu. Their humane gesture was interpreted as a sign of weakness and an invitation. Privately, U.S. commanders were concerned about just that. “Once the bad guys figure out we're not going to kill them, they become more dangerous and endanger the force on the ground,” said one military planner.

But once again the Pentagon's eye wasn't exactly on the ball. They may have been back in Somalia again, but their concern was with future peacekeeping missions. If the United States ever hoped to employ Egyptian, Pakistani, or other forces in future multinational operations, it needed to demonstrate that Americans would put their lives on the line to protect them. And despite a real distaste for the peacekeeping business in Washington, Pentagon officials accept that the military had better be doing something if they're going to continue getting huge budget allocations. “It's becoming inevitable that we're getting these types of capabilities thrust upon us,” said a Pentagon source. “The attitude is let's dance with it rather than wrestle against it.”

T
he Pentagon is now dancing in the ruins of Yugoslavia, and Somalia has slipped back into its preintervention stateless state. There is almost no evidence that the United States and UN were ever there and little trace of the $4 billion that was spent. Mogadishu remains a collection of clanbased enclaves, each protected by its own militia. Somehow people eat and survive, children go to school, businessmen import and sell goods. Occasionally a battle erupts.

Somalis are now responsible for their own futures. There are no foreigners to blame for their failures. And sometimes a bright spot emerges. Elman Ali Ahmed, a Somali electrician, stayed through all the fighting and ran a technical school for Mogadishu's orphaned children and for former militia members. He was known in Mogadishu for his dreadlocks and his car, a
beat-to-death Toyota with no roof. Journalists knew him because he would drop by to visit and help people repair computers and other electronic equipment. He spent all his days trying to convince Somalis to come to their senses and organize against the warlords for peace. On March 10, 1996, he was shot to death by gunmen who supported Aydiid.

He was unique in Mogadishu. He did what most people waited for foreigners to do. He never formed an NGO or asked for money from the UN. Elman always knew he was in danger. He understood that there was no such thing as a “pure” humanitarian intervention. Humanitarianism, like poverty and underdevelopment, is political. It takes commitment, and it comes with risks.

*
UNSecurity Council Resolution 923 renewed the mandate until September 30, 1994, while reaffirming the objective that UNOSOM II complete its mission by March 1995.

*
Victor Gbeho replaced Admiral Jonathan Howe, who left in February 1994.

†
Brown & Root has collected around $250 million from the Pentagon for work in Somalia and Haiti and is now the primary U.S. contractor in Bosnia. The firm is owned by the Dallas-based Halliburton Company. The man who now runs Halliburton, Dick Cheney, was secretary of defense when Brown & Root won the Pentagon contracts.

*
In the spring of 1994, Aydiid's financier and top advisor, Osman Ato, deserted him along with Mohamed Hassan Awale, the SNA's “foreign minister,” and Abdi Hassan Awale Ato, who had been imprisoned by the Americans and had millions of dollars worth of equipment destroyed in American raids, thought that Aydiid was being too anti-American and too intransigent in negotiations.

†
UNdocument S/1994/1068.

RUNNING TOWARD RWANDA