Somalis Fear New Disaster After U.S. Troops Pull Out : Africa: March date is too early, they insist. Citizens becoming desperate as more bloodshed, famine loom.

On a warm afternoon last week, Abdulkadir Yahya Ali and his wife, Suad, spent several painful hours on the veranda of their newly opened “Peace Hotel,” looking to the day next March when the last American soldier leaves this country.

“The U.N. will collapse. Civil war will resume,” concluded Yahya, a Somali intellectual, U.N. political officer and former U.S. Embassy protocol chief who gambled his life and his future on the troubled American-led U.N. mission to pacify and rebuild Somalia.

“As soon as the U.S. troops go,” he predicted, “everything will start again. Civil war. Famine. More destruction. To me, the Americans are leaving the way they left Vietnam. And now, I will be in trouble. I will have to leave too.”

Suad shook her head.

“No, I will not leave this time--never,” she said.

Suad lived abroad during most of the brutal clan wars that demolished this lawless capital and much of the rest of the nation; her husband remained to fight alongside Ali Mahdi Mohamed, the clan chief and warlord who controls northern Mogadishu.

Suad said that when--not if--the fighting between the city’s north and south begins anew, even she will take up arms, if need be, to prevent warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid from taking power.

Theirs were but two of the many Somali voices to insist that American troops stay in this troubled land well beyond the March 31 deadline set by President Clinton.

The voices are increasingly desperate. They are tempered by intense sympathy, even shame, for the pain America wishes to leave behind here--images of U.S. soldiers’ mutilated bodies being dragged through dusty streets or wounded and held hostage in a city they had come to save.

But the pain in these voices also reflects the losses of their own, the hundreds of Somalis who have been killed by American troops and a 30,000-strong U.N. military force, which has struggled to put down warlord Aidid’s urban guerrilla crusade against them.

In the aftermath of an Oct. 3 shootout that pushed U.S. leaders into their decision to depart this troubled land, dozens of Somalis interviewed here said they believe that America alone still holds the key to a peaceful Somalia.

The alternative, said several key U.N. officials who have spent months learning the intricate inner workings of the Somali clan system, will probably be a mirror image of the Somalia that greeted the U.S. Marines when they landed last December, or perhaps worse.

“I expect tension off and on, sporadic fighting,” one U.N. officer said of the coming months, during which the United States will assemble a massive naval and land force to protect its U.N. peacekeeping forces until they leave. “Then, when the U.S. leaves, Aidid will break the will of what’s left of the U.N. Does this bode well for future U.N. peacemaking operations? No. Does it bode well for Somalia? Certainly not.”

It bodes ill for Amina Haji Abdullahi and the hundreds of women in her Iida women’s group, a tiny island of hope in the heart of the Aidid-U.N. battlefield of south Mogadishu.

As she sat in a gutted compound where illiterate Somali women were learning nursing, tailoring, basketry and basic health last week, Abdullahi and her colleagues envisioned a nightmarish return of the war and famine that killed 350,000 Somalis before the Americans arrived.

“We believe that if the Americans leave Somalia, all the other countries that have troops here will go,” Abdullahi said. “And it is too soon for us. We are very worried about this. Still, there is so much trouble between the clans. Still, we need some of their troops. If you leave before you set up some institutions, it is nonsense.”

Mariam Abkow, a younger member of the women’s group, nodded her head. “In the time they are talking about, just six months, there is not enough time to set up our . . . police, the courts, even us,” Abkow said. “If you plant a tree, you must wait for it to grow.”

When asked if they knew the anger and pain America felt, watching the bodies of young men who had come to help being dragged by ropes by Somali women and children, both women winced and shook their heads. “I can imagine,” Abdullahi said.

Abdullahi, a former university lecturer educated in Canada, said that the children of some of the women in her group were killed when American forces returned the massive fire in the Oct. 3 shootout--so many children, they said, that there was a mass burial the following day.

“We lost hundreds of Somali people that night,” she continued. “But we say, ‘What can we do? It was their time to go, and they had to die. And the dead never come back.’ If 18 Americans were killed, no one can bring them back to life, either. You came to save the Somali people. So, how can you take the other extreme now and say the American people must go out? No, it is too soon for you to go.”

Across 50 or so blocks of shell-pocked concrete hulks that once were the heart of this European-style city on the Arabian Sea, past the crumpled national Parliament and beyond the “Bermuda”--what many say must be one of the globe’s most dangerous neighborhoods--Yahya and Suad were joined halfway through a lobster lunch by Abdulkadir Arif Gassim Jailani.

Jailani, a Somali entrepreneur who returned to his Mogadishu home with hope and ambition after the United States intervened here last December, started a Somali-language newspaper. The Republic is a mimeographed daily that reports the view from north Mogadishu.

“If the Americans leave Somalia in this condition, the future of Somalia will be Saddam Hussein and the fundamentalist Islamic groups,” said Jailani, asserting that Aidid’s faction already has established high-level contacts in the Iraqi capital of Baghdad.

“Baghdad Radio,” Yahya noted, “has already started broadcasting in the Somali language--a one-hour program at 3:15 p.m. every day that praises Aidid as a hero of the oppressed.”

The bottom line for both men: If the Americans leave without a massive, forceful disarmament campaign throughout Mogadishu and the surrounding countryside, what little the U.S. troops accomplished will be lost.

Just a few hours earlier, U.S. officials had visited Ali Mahdi at his headquarters to confirm a different proposal: The Americans said they had no plans to use their massive new force to disarm a nation still awash with machine guns, rocket launchers and heavy artillery.

Yahya, a top adviser to Ali Mahdi before he went to work for the U.N. mission in north Mogadishu, heard the news firsthand. “It didn’t go well,” he said after hearing what Ali Mahdi and the Americans had to say. “It’ll never go well. You cannot negotiate with Aidid--never. It’s finished.”

Yahya fell silent for a moment. A visitor asked him how he felt after fighting so hard, first in war and then for peace.

“Disappointment. And fear,” he said. “These two words together. Is there is a word that combines that? Maybe despair.

“No,” he added. “Desperate.”