Next Step : Can Somali Warlords Make Peace? : The nation’s future lies with rival clan leaders who must find a way to negotiate through words, not guns.

At the outermost edge of Somalia’s prolonged anarchy, famine and clan warfare, there is, for the first time in more than two years, a police force in Belet Huen.

The city also has a clinic, several schools and a newly appointed Somali construction team that soon will break ground for a jail, a station house, a courtroom and more schools. And blanketing the entire town and its outskirts, there is a large and effective force of Canadian peacekeeping troops prepared to stay for as long as a year after American combat forces conclude their humanitarian mission here at the end of April.

Indeed, Belet Huen is a rare model for Somalia’s future--one possible future.

Northeast, across an imaginary line drawn by U.S. commanders defining the northernmost limits of the U.N.-sponsored Operation Restore Hope, there are the foreboding images of another possible future: hundreds of “technicals,” battle wagons mounted with heavy weaponry, and troops fiercely loyal to Somalia’s powerful clan chief, Mohammed Farah Aidid. Aidid leads the Haber Gedir subclan of the Hawiye tribe.

The “technicals” and troops are the razor’s edge of the deepest fears among the people of Belet Huen, the Canadian commanders and the Western aid workers who are helping the Somalis take their first steps toward reconstructing this utterly ravaged nation. They serve as reminders that, on the day the Americans leave and turn command over to other U.N. troops, Aidid’s “Mad Max” machines easily could roll southeast toward Mogadishu, the capital, flattening everything in the way, including Belet Huen, and restarting Somalia’s nightmare.

“This will not happen,” Aidid insisted in an interview with The Times last week. “We will confine our armaments and technicals in these camps and keep them there.”

But then, when asked whether his battle wagons and self-described “freedom fighters” would move south if the forces of rival clan leader Mohamed Siad Hirsi (whose nom de guerre is Gen. Morgan) moved north from their encampment on the Kenyan border, he replied: “Why not? We have to protect our people.”

Such are the battle lines that are drawn so deeply in this complex and fractured culture, as hundreds of Somalia’s rival warlords, clan elders, professionals, intellectuals and women’s leaders prepare for the next round of peace talks on March 15.

In reality, few expect any major breakthroughs during the second round of U.N.-sponsored talks that will bring Somalia’s most influential leaders to the bargaining table in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa. But most Somali intellectuals, foreign analysts and the warlords themselves said the meeting will stand as a landmark, if only due to its timing.

“We are moving through a critical phase right now,” said Peter Schumann, who heads the U.N. Development Program in Somalia, which will be a key partner in helping to rebuild the nation. “Before, if we wanted to do any development, any relief work, anything at all, we had to negotiate with the militia leaders because they had the power.”

But in the last three months, that power has shifted to the U.S.-led peacekeeping force that now numbers more than 30,000. Warlord arsenals have been raided, thousands of weapons and millions of rounds of ammunition confiscated and destroyed. As a result, the nation has entered a new era of relative peace and stability.

Although occasional spasms of violence persist, for the first time since the regime of Mohamed Siad Barre (father-in-law of Gen. Morgan) crumbled and gave way to chaos, mass murder and famine more than two years ago, there is now a popular groundswell among Somalis to put their nation back together.

“Now is the important time to test them minus the guns,” Schumann said. “What are their abilities to manage and administer rehabilitation? Which of the leaders who go to Addis is genuine, sincere and capable of using this opportunity to really develop the country properly?

“That is the importance of March 15. You see, if we, as foreigners, sit around the table and try to solve it, we come up with a Siad Barre II or III. And that would be disastrous. The Somalis have to solve this mess.”

In fact, in interviews with dozens of Somali intellectuals, clan leaders, relief workers and U.N. officers in Mogadishu, there was general agreement that Somalia could emerge a year from now with at least the rudiments of national sovereignty: a police force, a judicial system, schools, a vibrant farming industry and effective food-delivery systems that would break the famine cycle.

If the peace holds, despite a scheduled turnover of command from the United States on May 1--a date that many Somalis and international aid experts fear is premature--most agree that the Somalia of the future will not appear impressive at first glance. But it would be a stable and increasingly productive collection of locally governed districts and regions in an ill-defined state where the creation of a national government in Mogadishu would not be an immediate priority.

An otherwise optimistic U.S. special envoy Robert B. Oakley described a future Somalia during farewell briefings in Mogadishu last week as a “very large collection of loose regional entities.”

“One of the Somali traditions is regional political autonomy,” said Oakley, who ushered in the U.S.-led forces through a painstaking diplomatic effort to balance the rival armed clans. “I see the country logically moving in that direction.”

Oakley said Washington plans to make available a large force of State Department and foreign-service development experts to help streamline and administer a thoroughly reconstituted U.N. coordinating agency for Somalia, which he added most likely will be headed by an American.

“We’re not trying to impose something external or something from above on the Somalis but (to) help them develop their own institutions,” Oakley said.

He speculated, however, that if the new U.N. operation goes well, the administrative bodies that will emerge in the countryside--and ultimately in Mogadishu--will include “a lot more elders, religious leaders, professionals, intellectuals and women’s groups.”

Still, he cautioned: “There’s a sea change in the political dynamic here. So I just can’t tell you what sort of political structure is going to emerge.”

And, true enough, most Somalis would prefer it that way--that neither Washington nor the United Nations, which will spearhead regional development projects, tries to stage-manage any step of the nation-building process.

“Somalis don’t like dictatorship. They don’t like being told what to do. The authority now has to be turned over to the people,” insisted Aidid.

If left to its own devices, Aidid said, Somalia would, in fact, emerge as just such a collection of autonomous, tribal zones. He and other warlords indicated that the only national issues that should be discussed during the peace talks are a police force and a judicial system for Mogadishu.

It is not the right time, he said, to even begin debating the most contentious issue of all--the formation of a new government.

“We believe that this conference instead should examine this idea of a regional administrative body for the south of Somalia,” he explained. Much later, in his view, negotiations could begin on rejoining the south with the north, a region known as Somaliland with separate clans and separate colonial roots that was the first to break away from Siad Barre’s Somalia.

But for now, clan hatreds seem to reign.

Aidid conceded that his supporters in the capital specifically targeted the U.S. troops here last month when they believed U.S. military commanders in Kismayu had played favorites by helping his much-hated enemy, Gen. Morgan, take over the strategic southern port city.

“Some mistakes have happened, and these mistakes have to be corrected,” Aidid asserted, charging that U.S.-led forces have disarmed his faction more aggressively than others and were, at the very least, earlier duped in Kismayu into permitting Morgan’s forces to retake a city that was once their last port of retreat.

“But I think these mistakes can be corrected easily.”

In fact, so does Gen. Morgan, who is among the few leaders remaining in Somalia from Siad Barre’s Darod clan. But Morgan said he must be included in the peace talks--a demand none of the other clan leaders said they are willing to accept.

“I am in my country. I am in Somalia. I am in my homeland,” Morgan said in justifying why he too should be permitted to attend the peace talks. In a recent interview in an encampment in Doble near the Kenyan border, where U.S. forces brought his troops after driving them from Kismayu within the last week, the U.S.-trained renegade officer defined the fragility of Somalia’s new era of relative peace.

He conceded that he has 200 heavily armed men around him who are natives of Kismayu and determined to die trying to reclaim their homes, many of which were occupied by supporters of Col. Omar Jess, a who belongs to the Ogadeni clan and is an Aidid ally.

“All we say is, when someone says he owns this house, let him stay in this house,” he said. When asked whether he would be willing to meet with Jess to resolve the dispute, Morgan added, “He is the man who has the blood on his hand, and I don’t want to say hello to that man.”

Predictably, Jess, whose forces also have been barred from returning to Kismayu by the U.S. and Belgian forces holding the city, shared the sentiment. Morgan’s group, he said, “is not a real faction. It’s a remnant. And we would not like to talk to the remnants of Siad Barre.”

But even amid such seeming intransigence, there were signs in Kismayu last week that the nation’s most enduring regional dispute was cooling down a bit, with elders from both factions meeting for the first time since the civil war began, and without either warlord present.

And when pressed on the future shape of peace, the rival warlords had a remarkably similar version.

“In order to reconcile the tribes, you have to get the real people who can make the decisions and make them work,” Jess said. But he warned that “as far as the elders are concerned, if it is well organized it can help, but if it is not, it can hurt.”

Said Morgan, “The only way anyone is going to bring peace is through the elders.”

It was just as those elders were greeting one another, some for the first time in years, that a U.S. Army colonel who has acted as mediator through much of the latest dispute gave his own assessment.

“I don’t know that it won’t come apart. It’s very fragile,” Col. Mark Hamilton said of the new peace in Kismayu. “I don’t think it will unravel. . . . Left to its own devices, it won’t unravel.

“What we have done here is re-empower people. We can’t force the peace.”

Hamilton, who also helped facilitate the nationwide cease-fire and disarmament plan adopted during the first round of peace talks in Addis Ababa in January, stressed that future peace in Somalia depends upon local political meetings and not upon international conferences.

Labeling the cease-fire accord “symbolic disarmament,” Hamilton said that even if coalition forces rid the nation of every firearm, “the next person killed will be killed with a knife. We’ll take away the knives, and the next person killed will be with a stone. The enemy here is not the arms. It’s hatred and fear.”

The only solution is empowering the clan elders--and elders of the clans’ own choosing, he said.

“Of all the cultures of the world,” he said, “this one actually has people who have decided issues of life and death for millennia. And that’s where my hope is.”

MOHAMMED FARAH AIDID

A former army general who has also served as an ambassador, the president of the United Somali Congress faction is widely credited with leading the military revolt that brought down Gen. Mohamed Siad Barre’s regime.

He is considered the most powerful warlord. U.S.-led forces have cleaned out some of his arsenals in Mogadishu, but Aidid still controls large, well-armed forces in the north, outside the area controlled by U.N. forces. Western demographers said his Haber Gedir subclan--part of the Hawiye tribe--is the largest in southern and central Somalia.

With the arrival of U.S. forces, Aidid, 57, is out to change his image from that of a wartime commander to one of a politician concerned only with rebuilding a rudderless and leveled nation. “Aidid fancies himself a statesman,” said U.S. special envoy Robert B. Oakley, who ended his tour last week. “But nobody in this country, including Aidid, has the military power or the political credibility to hold anything outside of his clan area.”

Aidid says he is not interested in personal power. “I am not asking to be a future leader.”

ALI MAHDI MOHAMED

A former hotelier who owned one of Mogadishu’s two most elegant luxury hotels before the war destroyed the capital, Mahdi and his ragtag armed forces control about a third of the city, northeast of the Green Line that continues to divide his turf from Aidid’s.

An activist in the civilian underground against Siad Barre’s regime, Mahdi, who heads the Abgal subclan of the Hawiye tribe, used his Makarama Hotel as a base for helping destroy the dictatorship. Within days of its collapse in early 1991, Mahdi emerged as president of a nation on the brink of chaos before Aidid could get to the capital to claim the leadership.

The “warlord of the north,” as several Somalis have dubbed him, emerged from a series of meetings in neighboring Djibouti that Aidid did not attend with the formal title of interim president, which he still considers himself today. The claim to power touched off a seven-month urban artillery duel that left Mogadishu a gutted ruin and regional clashes between allies of the two men that choked Somalia’s famine zone off from international relief lines.

GEN. MORGAN

Mohamed Siad Hirsi, known as Gen. Morgan and who is Siad Barre’s son-in-law, was a key army commander and represents the last remnant of the ousted president’s Darod clan. With most of the clan living in exile, Morgan has only several hundred men in Somalia.

The general’s enemies--chiefly Aidid and his southern ally, Col. Omar Jess--assert that, shortly before Siad Barre was ousted, Morgan led the national army in an attempted genocide against minority clan rebels who had declared independence and killed thousands.

A soft-spoken pipe smoker, he says he picked up the name Morgan at Ft. Leavenworth, Kan., where military trainers could not pronounce his name. His training at the fort came at the height of the Cold War when the United States supported Siad Barre’s regime. Morgan denies the alleged atrocities and says it is not his aim to return Siad Barre to power.

The flash point for future clashes involves Kismayu. If the battle between Morgan and Jess for control of the port cannot be settled, the southern zone may never be stable, analysts say.

COL. OMAR JESS

A renegade army colonel, Jess is--like his rival Gen. Morgan--U.S.-trained. He was in control of Kismayu when U.S. forces moved into the strategic port. Aidid’s key point man in the south, Jess was pushed out of his Kismayu strongholds two weeks ago by Morgan’s troops, who had slipped into the city, recovered buried weapons and attacked. The fighting led to anti-American riots in Mogadishu, where many Somalis believed U.S. forces were supporting Siad Barre’s men. But the Marines cleared out both warlords.

The hatred between Jess--a member of the Ogadeni clan--and Morgan runs deep. Just before the U.S. Marines arrived in Kismayu, Jess had Morgan’s supporters massacred. The two warlords are under surveillance by U.N. forces, but members of both camps remain within the city limits, where many more weapons may still be buried.

An articulate speaker now casting himself more as a diplomat, Jess said in an interview before losing control of Kismayu that he favored reconciliation and national rebirth. Asked how far off peace remains, he said, “It may take months, or more.”