U.S. Policy Will Rekindle War, Somali Warns

Amid alarming signs that Somalia’s rival clans are rearming, a key warlord told U.S. officials here Thursday that the Clinton Administration’s new policy will rekindle the brutal civil war that wrecked the nation and nearly starved its people.

Meeting with diplomats in his battle-scarred office building in north Mogadishu, Ali Mahdi Mohamed, a clan leader whose duel for power with Mohammed Farah Aidid reduced this sprawling capital to a lawless ruin, flatly ruled out a political solution without a U.S.-led disarmament campaign.

Moments after the session, during which U.S. officials told Ali Mahdi that American policy will not include disarming the country’s rival militias or hunting down the fugitive Aidid, Ali Mahdi told three American journalists, “Civil war is imminent.

“We believe this new international policy is preparing Somalia for the civil war again,” said Ali Mahdi, whose 10 months of cooperation with both the U.S. and U.N. military missions in Somalia has left him embittered by the Administration’s decision to stop hunting Aidid.

Asked what message he sent back to U.S. special envoy Robert B. Oakley, who was dispatched here by President Clinton last week to defuse through negotiation Aidid’s increasingly effective guerrilla war on U.N. forces, Ali Mahdi replied, “I request you to disarm the country in the next six months, or face civil war in this country.

“If the Americans are not prepared to pay the price for what this takes, they might as well leave now.”

Later, a U.S. official who formally presented the new policy to Ali Mahdi--a key ally for the United Nations and United States in their efforts to rebuild the war-ravaged nation--said he does not believe the soft-spoken warlord actually favors an immediate U.S. pullout.

But the official added, “It was clear they were upset. . . . He is clearly worried about civil war, as we all are.”

In fact, throughout Mogadishu and the countryside, Somali clans are now digging up and cleaning their vast weapons caches, which were buried in the days before the U.S. Marines led the American military intervention to save Somalia from famine and war last December.

In the days since the Clinton Administration and Aidid’s militia announced what amounted to unilateral cease-fires after the bloody Oct. 3 counterattack on U.S. forces, there have been persistent reports that heavy weapons and the “Mad Max”-style battle wagons known as “technicals” have reappeared outside Mogadishu.

The price of an AK-47 assault rifle, a key indicator of the demand for weaponry, has soared to $250 at Mogadishu markets, up from $35 soon after the U.S. Marines arrived. And the price of a single bullet, which plummeted to a few cents early this year, is now $1.

“Everyone is buying weapons now,” said Abdulkadir Yahya Ali, a U.N. political officer and former aide to Ali Mahdi who sat in on Thursday’s meeting with the Americans.

He added, however, that the renewal of clan fighting will not begin immediately.

“It’s only a matter of time,” Yahya said. “You’ll see. The Somalis will fight. But it’s also the American policy that’s making everyone keep quiet now. We’re all confused about what the actual policy will be.”

Thursday’s meeting with Ali Mahdi also came against the backdrop of a buildup in American forces, which U.S. military officials say will protect the Americans in the 30,000-strong multinational peacekeeping force here.

U.S. Army Col. Steve Rausch, spokesman for the new Joint Task Force assembling in Somalia, made it clear that the reconstituted American contingent will confine its operations to securing main supply routes, providing a quick-reaction force beyond the capability of other U.N. forces and generally supporting U.S. troops on the ground.

The elite U.S. Army Ranger team sent to Mogadishu partly to capture Aidid started flying home Thursday, and Clinton has set a March 31 deadline for a final American withdrawal.

At the same time, the United Nations said it was continuing efforts to arrange negotiations with top aides to Aidid, who, U.N. officials said, remains “vulnerable to arrest” for the June 5 massacre of 24 Pakistani peacekeepers but is no longer the target of an all-out military manhunt.

Although Ali Mahdi focused his criticism of U.S. policy Thursday on the disarmament issue, his greatest disappointment was the suspension of the hunt for the man he views as his most potent rival to rule a future Somalia.

The roots of the hatred between the two men and their supporters, who belong to the same Hawiye clan but are members of different subclans, are deep and enduring. The lingering evidence of that hatred is almost beyond imagination.

The road that leads from Aidid’s stronghold in south Mogadishu to Ali Mahdi’s far more peaceful north is a gutted, shell-pocked ruin where the remains of the buildings have no windows and where telephone and power poles lie broken. There’s the crushed national Parliament building, shattered villas, blasted hotels and storefronts and a neighborhood along the Green Line called Bermuda that is possibly the most dangerous in the world.

These ruins are the product of a mind-shattering, months-long artillery duel between Ali Mahdi and Aidid, a fight for the spoils of power between two men who were instrumental in the rebellion that overthrew Somali strongman Mohamed Siad Barre in early 1991.

The fight, which polarized Aidid’s Habre Gedir subclan and Ali Mahdi’s Abgale group, came after Ali Mahdi, a politician and intellectual, declared himself acting president in a meeting sponsored by Egypt and Italy. That meeting excluded Aidid, a former Somali general credited with leading the uprising against Siad Barre’s brutal regime.

As he sat Thursday in an office with little furniture and barren bookshelves on the top floor of Siad Barre’s otherwise gutted former National Security Agency building, Ali Mahdi indicated that the past two years have taught him little more than to never trust his rival.

He flatly refused to meet with Aidid, whom he hugged and kissed in public after Oakley brokered a cease-fire following the Marine landing last December, although he said he would be willing to meet Aidid’s representatives.

“Always Aidid has a hidden agenda--to be president of the Somali republic by force,” he said, stressing that the new U.S. policy to negotiate with Aidid’s key aides is as “ill planned” as the U.N. operation to neutralize him.

Ali Mahdi added that he expects Aidid to keep a tight rein on his well-armed militia for the time being--perhaps even until after the U.S. withdrawal next spring.

“Aidid is gaining a lot of propaganda. He is also reinstating his involvement with the U.N.,” he said. “He is benefiting from the presence of the U.N. now, so he will maintain that status. Then, when they leave, he will start again.”

The downside of those gains, he added, is the signal that the change in U.S. policy has sent to the other renegades and anti-U.S. terrorists of the world.

“What we are facing in Somalia is a challenge to the international community, and specifically the United States,” he said. “Subversive atrocities will now take place all over the world. You are seeing it already in Haiti.

“But Aidid is not gaining any support among the Somali people, and this is why, when the war starts again, they will defend themselves against him.”

Ali Mahdi stressed that he is certain--as are U.S. and U.N. military officers here--that Aidid is using the cease-fire to rearm and consolidate his forces, a tactic that the warlord of the south often used in his prolonged war with Ali Mahdi.

Ali Mahdi denied, however, that he is doing the same thing, although his aides confirmed that not only their Abgale subclan but all the clans and subclans in the capital and the Somali countryside are gradually rearming.

Ali Mahdi turned over, first to U.S. forces and then to U.N. military commanders, large amounts of heavy weaponry earlier this year, but aides said he kept twice as much as he surrendered.