50 U.N. Cease-Fire Monitors Arrive in Capital of Somalia

An unarmed team of U.N. cease-fire monitors arrived in Mogadishu on Thursday, derided by some warring clansmen as “a bunch of tourists.”

Col. Isoa Tikoca of Fiji, deputy commander of the 50-member monitoring force from 10 nations, said he could not predict if the group would be effective.

“We were approached today by some hardheads who asked what we were doing here, and called us a bunch of tourists,” Tikoca said.

The monitors will be split between the divided halves of the Somali capital. Their task is to observe a fragile cease-fire signed last March by the two clan warlords who had been fighting for control of Mogadishu since last year.

They are Ali Mahdi Mohamed, who controls the northern half of the city, and Gen. Mohamed Farrah Aidid, who controls the south.

The monitors also will observe the movement of U.N. and private food donations to the tens of thousands of starving people in and just outside the city.

Many food convoys have been looted since the United Nations and the Red Cross began delivering large supplies of grains and other foodstuffs in May.

The difficulty of the monitors’ task was illustrated by the fact that a chartered C-130 Hercules transport plane had to land 30 miles outside Mogadishu because the international airport is unusable. As it attempted to turn around after landing on a dirt strip, the heavy plane sank to its belly in soft soil.

Aid organizations stopped using the international airport in early June because of constant threats and demands for food and money from fighters who control the facility.

Mogadishu is overrun by men with guns who owe no allegiance to either Mahdi or Aidid and who loot, pillage and kill with impunity.

Ali Mahdi and Aidid began fighting for Mogadishu after the rebel United Somali Congress, the political party to which both belonged, chased President Mohamed Siad Barre from the city in January, 1991, after a month of heavy fighting.

Since then, more than 30,000 people have been killed, and tens of thousands more have died of starvation. Thousands also have been displaced.

With the capital destroyed, the rest of the Horn of Africa country has been divided up into clan fiefdoms.

The Red Cross and United Nations estimate that drought, aggravated by the fighting, has left at least 2 million of Somalia’s 6 million people at risk of starving.