U.N., ‘Big Ears’ Agree; Water Flows to Capital

With a single flip of a generator switch on Sunday, Somali technicians at the weather-beaten and bullet-pocked Afgoi Wellfields did something extraordinary.

They turned on the water supply for the first time in months to gutted, war-torn Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital and home to more than a million desperate, hungry Somalis.

But that wasn’t the story. That simple act merely climaxed a saga as bizarre as it is sublime in its narrative of today’s Somalia.

Here at the source of 80% of the Somali capital’s water supply--miles from the center stage of arriving U.S. troops and the continuing bloodshed of rural clan warfare--Sunday’s event brought into focus the price Somalia is paying for a head-on collision between the bureaucracy of the international relief Establishment and the anarchy of a starving nation.

There were many precedents set during a meeting that passed largely unnoticed Sunday afternoon under a front-yard acacia tree just before the water pumps finally groaned to life.

The biggest victory: A senior U.N. official who has fought bureaucracy and anarchy in a two-month struggle to reopen Mogadishu’s water taps signed an agreement for security-without-extortion with the leader of the armed Somali clan that has controlled the water wells throughout two years of war and hunger.

The clan elder’s nickname is Dege Uene, or “Big Ears,” and, in the looted and vandalized wasteland that is southern Somalia, the United Nations went as far as to call him “a hero” of the Somali anarchy.

During a national looting spree so extensive it stripped all of the wires from between tens of thousands of utility poles in the streets of the country’s cities and left hardly a pane of glass in a window or light bulb in a socket, the three-square-mile water complex and its eight U.S.-made generators here are believed to be the only major government facilities remaining largely intact.

Keeping them that way was easy for Dege Uene and his men. The pumping station was attacked 11 times by five different tribes, but Dege Uene, whose real name is Abdullahi Farah, stood fast, defending his prize at the cost of the lives of four cousins and two brothers. For a fee, of course, until Sunday.

For the first time any relief official could remember anything similar happening, the United Nations signed a formal, written agreement with Dege Uene and his 61 gunmen to provide security for the water complex without having to pay the clan leader a cent of his usual $4,000-a-month fee. It came only after complicated and prolonged negotiations that one development expert called, “in classic economic terms, a labor problem.”

In exchange, the United Nations promised solely to rehabilitate Dege Uene’s hired gunmen, teach them to turn in their assault rifles for wrenches and work as paid plumbers or mechanics at Afgoi Wellfields.

“He guarded his prize asset at an enormous personal cost, and he felt he deserved some recompense. But today, we basically said ‘no’ to extortion,” a senior development official explained.

Peter Schumann, the U.N. Development Program’s resident representative in Somalia who had hammered out and signed the water accord added, “This is a major event . . . which I firmly believe is the first step of rehabilitation and reconstruction in Somalia.”

But even Sunday’s agreement was not the end of the saga.

In a country where the United Nations and its dozens of contract relief agencies have been forced to pay soaring costs for protection in their struggle to save lawless Somalia largely from itself, Sunday’s switching-on ceremony was, in the larger reality, just a quick fix for the moment.

When the two television cameramen in attendance turned on their lights to record the moment that Mogadishu got its water back, technicians could only fire up two of the eight pumping generators. They had to cannibalize a third one to fix those two, and five others still sit idle--all awaiting spare parts ordered and promised 10 months ago by the U.S. Agency for International Development. Those delays are now the only remaining cause for what will continue to be a critical water shortage in Mogadishu.

The two U.S.-made Caterpillar water-pump generators now working will only be able to supply the needs of the city’s four hospitals, 20 Red Cross feeding centers and two large central markets, leaving a severe shortfall that relief workers blame on the inefficiency and fickle priorities of the U.S. government.

“Somalia was not a very high priority before the decision was made to send U.S. troops in here,” the senior development official replied when asked why the local U.N. Development Program office has amassed an inch-thick file of papers about its attempts to get the promised spare parts from AID, a key sponsor of Mogadishu’s water-supply project.

In an interview after the ceremony at the water wells, Schumann, for his part, said that blame for the delays is shared almost equally all around--from the bureaucracy of Washington to the anarchy of Mogadishu and the United Nations in between.

Before he officially moved his office back to Mogadishu in September after a self-imposed, nine-month exile in Nairobi and personally took over the water project, Schumann said the policy to maintain a supply of water, even if it were only a trickle, was, “at whatever cost, let the water flow.”

As a result, the United Nations found itself paying high and ever-increasing protection fees to gunmen and thugs, not merely for Dege Uene’s security at the plant but to a loosely knit army of roadblock guards each time a convoy of diesel fuel was run from the capital to the plant’s pumps.

The roadblocks complicated Schumann’s negotiations to restore the city’s water supply still further, forcing him to bring in Mogadishu’s most powerful clan leader, Mohammed Farah Aidid, whose armed-to-the-teeth United Somali Congress still controls the dozen or so miles of road between Afgoi and the capital.

Enter the U.S. Marines.

Although every official at Sunday’s ceremony here stressed that the settlement predated and was unrelated to last week’s arrival of a U.S.-led military force called Operation Restore Hope, Schumann conceded that the Marines have agreed to play a key role in keeping the water-supply complex operating extortion-free.

Rather than choose among bidding warlords who control all fuel supplies, Schumann said his agency now plans to buy an entire oil-tanker load of diesel oil on the international market, ship it to the U.S.-controlled Mogadishu seaport and transport it to Afgoi under escort by U.S. Marines.

Still, for the handful of U.N. development experts in a city jammed with relief officials, Sunday’s agreement was no less important for its operational reliance on all-Somali technicians, labor and management at the water complex.

“Sure, if we called in the Marines, they would have built a much better plant than this one,” one U.N. officer said. “They’d have it up and running in no time, and everyone in the capital would have water.

“But what happens when the Marines pull out? Who’s going to run it then? These Somali mechanics know each and every nut on those generators and switching panels. And long after the American priorities change yet again, these are the guys who are going to keep the water flowing to people of the capital.”

If only, he conceded, they can get spare parts.