Operation Restore Hope
Feeding the hungry in Somalia may be the easy part for America. Getting out may be tougher
Even before the first marines landed in Somalia last week their presence could be felt. In the gun market in downtown Mogadishu, the price of Soviet-made AK-47s and American-made M-16s dropped from $200 each to less than $100 as some Somalis began selling off their weapons in anticipation of American disarmament. Mohammed Ragi, a 30-year-old gunman for hire, wasn't quite ready to part with his Belgian-made FAL rifle, but he was thinking about it. "If the American people come I will lay down my gun and go back to my farm," he declared.
When the United Nations Security Council voted unanimously last week to authorize a U.S.-led military relief mission to Somalia, it was with precisely that effect in mind. But even a multinational force led by an expected 28,000 American troops may find it hard to break the death grip of Somali warlords and thousands of teenage bandits. For the past two years, these parasites have raped and plundered their own country and unleashed a horrifying famine that has already killed more than 300,000 people.
But banditry is lucrative work, and Somalia's bandits are not likely to give it up easily. Ali Hersi, a fighter for the country's No. 1 warlord, Soviet-trained Gen. Mohammed Farah Aidid, explains just how lucrative: "When relief convoys leave the southern town of Baidoa, 20 bags of food from each vehicle are given to the 'technicals' "--the teenage escorts driving trucks mounted with machine guns. Other "technicals" at self-declared checkpoints are paid off along the way. When a convoy reaches a village, the local elders, the village committee and the local gunmen all take a cut. "Of the 120 bags which leave Baidoa," Hersi says, "only 20 will reach needy people."
President Bush explained his decision to send American troops to Somalia last week and issued a warning to the bandits. "Our mission is humanitarian," Bush said, "but we will not tolerate armed gangs' ripping off their own people, condemning them to death by starvation." At the same time, Bush assured the American people that the military's mission in Somalia will be both limited and brief. "This operation is not open-ended," the president declared, promising to bring American troops "home as soon as possible."
Another Beirut? But others, including Bush's own ambassador in Kenya, are less certain. "If you liked Beirut, you'll love Mogadishu," warned Ambassador Smith Hempstone in a classified and at times racist-sounding diplomatic cable obtained by U.S. News (box, Page 30). Hempstone upbraided the Bush administration for embracing what he called "the Somali tarbaby" with no "realistic plan" for getting out again.
White House officials say Bush and Joint Chiefs Chairman Colin Powell would never have accepted the Somali mission if they didn't believe it could be done quickly and at comparatively low cost. Powell predicated his endorsement on two key conditions. The first is that the military's mission in Somalia must be well-defined and of limited duration. The second is that a commitment in Somalia would not obligate the United States to attempt similar rescue missions elsewhere--particularly in Bosnia, which Powell has repeatedly warned could turn into a quagmire.
But Bush and Powell could be disappointed on both counts. With U.N.-negotiated peace agreements unraveling swiftly and dangerously in Cambodia and Angola, anarchy raging in Liberia and relief efforts faltering in Bosnia, where thousands more could die this winter, Bush and his successor Bill Clinton will find it hard to ignore the precedent.
Both Bush and Clinton are feeling mounting pressure for more aggressive international action to end the brutal wars in the former Yugoslavia. In England last week, former President Ronald Reagan called for use of military force to ensure aid deliveries and to "carve out human sanctuaries" in Yugoslavia and Sudan as well as Somalia. In Saudi Arabia, Islamic nations called on the U.N. to take tougher action to defend Bosnia's besieged Muslims, warning that the Islamic world will act if the U.N. doesn't.
In fact, at the same time it is mounting the rescue mission in Somalia, the Bush administration is renewing its campaign for U.N. authorization to shoot down Serbian planes violating the no-fly zone over Bosnia. And U.S. News has learned that some Bush aides are debating the merits of using air power to help ensure relief deliveries in Bosnia, and also considering whether to lift the arms embargo on Bosnia.
Although the Pentagon continues to resist any deeper military involvement in the Balkans, that position may now be harder to defend. "We don't have a strategic interest in Somalia and we do in an unstable Balkans," argues one frustrated State Department official. "I [have] this ironic image of a division being pulled out of Germany and overflying Bosnia on its way to Somalia."
Clinton Doctrine. While Bush is ending his term with a flurry of diplomatic and military activity, he has offered no "Bush Doctrine" to govern when and where America should intervene in other nations' quarrels, so it will fall to his successor to define a "Clinton Doctrine" for U.S. intervention in the post-cold-war world. Clinton apparently believed much of Bush's campaign hype about how well he managed foreign affairs, and he was counting on several months of breathing space while he addressed economic problems at home.
But that is clearly not to be. White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater originally said Bush was hoping U.S. troops would be out of Somalia before Clinton's January 20 inauguration, but Defense Secretary Dick Cheney brushed that timetable off as being "unrealistic." Late last week, administration officials still could not answer a number of critical questions, including how American forces will ensure that peace in Somalia will last beyond a withdrawal of U.S. troops and who, if anyone, will be available to run the country once some order is established. Without some stable political institutions in place, the country could quickly fall back into the anarchy that prompted the original American intervention.
According to the Security Council resolution, the U.S.-led international force will be allowed to use "all necessary means" to create a "secure environment for humanitarian relief operations in Somalia." American officials are betting that a show of massive force will stop most if not all of the looting and banditry. "No warlord in his right mind would want to go up against Uncle Sam," agrees Rutgers University historian and Somali national Said Samatar. General Aidid, who once threatened to send U.N. troops "home in body bags," has already welcomed the American intervention in an apparent attempt to curry favor with the newest and biggest warlord on the block.
Once they fan out beyond Mogadishu (box, below), "the Americans will be welcomed as a liberating force," predicts Samatar. In the so-called triangle of death--the most severe famine area, about the size of Indiana--"the local people have nothing in common with the warlords who are terrorizing them: not culture, not even dialect," Samatar explains. "Somalis are above all pragmatists, and they know that the Americans are where the action is."
But the first American troops in Beirut were greeted as liberators, too, and quickly became targets instead. In Somalia, the marines could again find themselves caught in the crossfire of clan feuds and ethnic quarrels they scarcely understand. General Aidid is believed to be preparing to retake one place high on the list of candidates for American help--the provincial town of Bardera, which Aidid lost last October to Gen. Mohammed Said Hersi Morgan, the son-in-law of deposed Somali dictator Mohammed Siad Barre.
A much harder question is how American forces will create a "secure environment" so they can hand off control to a much smaller U.N. peacekeeping force as planned. U.S. intelligence believes as many as 300,000 Somalis in the southern third of the country are armed with thousands of automatic rifles, mortars and even antiaircraft guns and artillery, and a senior administration official warns that U.S. troops will not be able to leave Somalia "if the arms are still circulating." But Marine Gen. Joseph Hoar, Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf's successor as head of the U.S. Central Command, told the Pentagon he does not want the essential task of disarming Somalia's many factions and bandits--an exercise that could require house-to-house searches. There has been some talk of the Americans' offering to buy back weapons, an uncertain solution at best.
Even if the private armies are disarmed, rebuilding Somalia's civil society may prove to be the hardest task of all. President Bush assured the Somalis that he has no intention of "dictating political outcomes." And Clinton adviser Rep. Lee Hamilton of Indiana warns that "if we tie the withdrawal of American troops to political stability, that opens the risk of a quagmire." But it is hard to imagine how U.S. troops could leave Somalia without first creating political stability.
At the U.N. last week, some African diplomats argued that the international body will have no choice but to take over the political administration of Somalia--as it has in Cambodia--to oversee relief efforts and begin the long process of rebuilding shattered local institutions.
But most analysts agree that the breakdown of Somali civil society is so complete that it could take months or years to rebuild even a rudimentary political consensus, let alone a government capable of running its own affairs. After two decades of Stalinist dictatorship and more than a year of anarchy, Somalia lacks the most basic civic building blocks: There are no real political parties, no recognized national leaders, no real government.
Wizards of Oz? Even the warlords the U.N. has tried to negotiate with for months may prove far less influential than they appear. "These are not men who have supreme command over a horde of followers and can deliver them to the field of battle or a negotiating table," says Rutgers Professor Samatar. "Their power depends on the dynamics of war, and when you deprive them of the capacity to rape and loot, their supporters will slip away."
General Aidid, for instance, is in financial trouble, and his sudden endorsement of American intervention may be the result of pressure from businessmen backers who feel that the profits to be made from an unimpeded relief operation will be greater than those they are currently reaping.
Samatar suggests that the U.N. will have to base any new Somali consensus on local clan elders, the traditional indigenous leadership that has been badly weakened by two decades of dictatorship. Samatar says the United States and the U.N. could help relegitimize these leaders by using them to help distribute food. Samatar also worries that Islamic mullahs, who U.S. officials say are receiving support from Iran, "could whip up a frenzy against the Christian invaders." To counter that, he argues, the U.N. must also bring more moderate religious leaders into any political negotiations.
A first step? U.N. officials may have taken the first step toward orchestrating a political reconciliation last week, with a long-planned meeting in Ethiopia between relief agencies and representatives of some 20 Somali clans and nearly a dozen political factions. Neither Aidid nor his principal rival for control of Mogadishu, self-proclaimed Somali Interim President Ali Mahdi Mohamed, showed up, but each sent representatives. It was the largest meeting of Somali notables since the crisis began, and CARE Executive Director Philip Johnston, who traveled to Addis Ababa, described it as "a very important first step."
Although he supports intervention, Johnston, who will be overseeing the U.N. relief effort from Mogadishu, warns that it will take months to stabilize the political situation in Somalia. "There are very few societies that have disintegrated to the degree this one has," he warns. If the Americans pull out too quickly, Johnston cautions, "the country will just revert back to chaos." But it may not be easy to know when it's time to leave.
Anarchic Somalia U.S.-led coalition forces will need to create a secure and stable environment for the delivery of relief supplies before they can be withdrawn. But Somalia's complex clan structure and social disintegration could mean that getting out will take longer than expected.
Somalia at a glance
Population: 6 mil. (est.)
Real GDP per capita: $861
Adult literacy: 24 pct.
US Units slated for deployment Troops
15th Marine Expeditionary Unit 1,800 1st Marine Expeditionary Force 16,000 Army 10th Mountain Division (Light) 5,000
USN&WR--Basic data: U.S. Dept. of Defense, CIA, United Nations, International Committee of the Red Cross, CARE.
This story appears in the December 14, 1992 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.