Somalis Fed Up After War, Year’s Foreign Intervention : Africa: A Mogadishu pilot who admires Americans reflects his people’s frustration and fading optimism.

“Hey you! Lie down! Lie down!” the young Marine shouted, pointing an assault rifle at Ahmed Hussein Fidow’s head when it popped up, ever so briefly, to welcome U.S. Marines ashore here. It was Dec. 9, 1992, which seems a lifetime ago--the opening night of a year that went so wrong.

But in a little-known scene that was to foreshadow so much, the Marine’s warning wasn’t enough. “Welcome Marines! Welcome in Mogadishu!” Fidow persisted from his prone position.

So the young Marine, keyed up from days at sea, his face drenched with sweat and twisted with confusion moments after he hit the beach in this strange and hostile land, put a boot into Fidow’s back, forcing his face to the tarmac of Mogadishu International Airport.

Fidow was a Somali Airlines pilot. He hated the civil war that destroyed his nation, took his profession and threatened his family. And he respected anyone who came from so far to sacrifice so much to save Somalia. He had gone to the airport that night merely to watch history in the making, to witness the great moment when the Marines entered his country to save it--and him--from war, starvation and self-destruction.

But as he was bound with plastic cuffs and carted off with seven other Somali onlookers as potential enemies, Fidow figured, How could the young Marine have known that?

“They were just doing their job,” Fidow reflected a year later. “I tried to talk to them, and I learned that these people were just following their instructions. I know from my own duty, from when I was flying, that you do everything by the book. So I just stayed calm and didn’t fight.

“I was not angry. . . . I was almost 100% sure that the future was going to hold up very nicely. Never did I think that, one year later, we would end up here.”

Within minutes of his “capture” that night, the 35-year-old pilot was released with apologies. But since then, Fidow and his family--like millions of ordinary Somalis--have experienced a real drama, poignant in its misunderstandings, failures and constant struggle between hope and despair.

This is the story of Fidow’s year, in which the Somali people became part of an international experiment to help re-create their country and rescue their culture from anarchy and ruin.

The views of Somalis like the Fidows often have gotten lost amid the horror and hope here of the yearlong military intervention, first by the United States and then by the United Nations.

But Fidow sounds a common theme, echoed in interviews with dozens of intellectuals, refugees, shopkeepers and street dwellers: The Somalis now are as fed up with outsiders’ intervention as they are with the warlords who brought it upon them.

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Through it all, Fidow refused to take sides. None of his family was among the more than 600 Somalis estimated to have been killed by American or U.N. troops in street battles. His family was not one of those who can be held responsible for the often brutal slaughter of more than 80 U.N. peacekeepers, including more than two dozen American soldiers killed here.

Unlike his 12 brothers and sisters--indeed almost 1 million other Somalis living as refugees in foreign countries--Fidow refused to flee his homeland, even when his young wife begged him to.

Fidow was accustomed to hardship. He had married Intisar Ibrahim Urdoh in a refugee camp at the onset of Somalia’s civil war in 1991 and decided soon after, in the midst of the carnage, to start a family because “I figured, well, at least I should have children. Then, maybe, you leave something behind.”

He stuck out the year in Mogadishu, searching out a neutral, constant vantage point--a seat close enough to witness and learn from each day’s events, yet safe enough to enable him to preserve memories for the future.

Fidow vowed to spend the year watching, learning and understanding, gaining knowledge to help his people rebuild after the U.N. intervention ends--perhaps as early as May.

Through most of the year, Fidow worked as a translator for the foreign press, including The Times.

Once, longing to fly again, Fidow took a job with a U.N. contractor at Mogadishu airport. It lasted just two weeks, until, he recalled, he had learned too much about the negative side of the intervention and was forced to resign.

The contractor who hired him, he said, was paying him one-tenth of the salary it was billing the United Nations, and he saw the company working against his best efforts to rebuild Somali Airlines.

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At the end of this strange, pained year, the conclusions of Fidow and the other Somalis who stayed behind are not unlike those of veteran international aid workers who have been in Somalia for years. They are cynical and only vaguely optimistic.

“The United Nations is a failure,” Fidow said on a drive through Mogadishu’s ruined streets one recent afternoon. “The only question is how big a fiasco it’s going to be.”

He said Somalia’s clan leaders also have failed to respond to even the best intentions of the United Nations. In the process, the clans have missed their last, best chance to let the world help Somalia put itself back together.

“Now, either they have to go on the peaceful road by themselves or it’s the end of Somalia,” Fidow said of the clan elders. “It’s the end of the Somali clan--not just one clan or another clan--but the whole clan that is known as the Somali people.

“We just have these two options. And I think the people are coming to understand that now. It’s not just Mohammed Farah Aidid (the clan leader who engaged in guerrilla combat with U.S. and U.N. forces). It’s not just Ali Mahdi Mohamed (Aidid’s rival who cooperated with the foreign intervention). And it’s not just Ali Mahdi’s Abgale sub-clan or Aidid’s Habre Gedir. It’s everyone, all the clans, whose future is at stake. One of them has to give up peacefully now.

“But I am optimistic. Because now, the Somali people are coming to understand this. Sometimes you have to give up something--even for a while--when the only alternative is oblivion.”

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Fidow drew his conclusions after a year of traumas.

He taught his 1 1/2-year-old daughter, for example, to sleep through the thunder of nightly patrols by American helicopters.

“Zahra, she used to wake up in the middle of the night, crying,” he recalled. “What I did was, in the daylight times, when a helicopter came over the roof, I tried to wave my hands and smile as it went by. After time, she started waving. It took 15 days, but then she wasn’t waking up any more.”

On a deeper level, Fidow was forced to come to grips with the disintegration of his entire culture--watching helplessly as fellow Somalis, who traditionally revere the human body even more in death than in life, committed such extreme acts as dancing and singing as they dragged dead American soldiers through the street.

Fidow recalled how the members of a Somali regiment serving with the British army in Burma in World War II risked their lives behind enemy lines at night to recover fallen British soldiers. “Yes,” he said. “The Somalis have a kind of feeling that, even if he is your enemy, once he’s dead, you have to respect him.”

He said that he and other Somalis were horrified that their people could desecrate the American dead: “There was a lot of anger against this. It showed how our morality went out of us. We were just acting like barbarians. We put ourselves back 2,000 years just on that one day. We might be angry. But at the same time, we went too far.”

Fidow also was forced this past year to revise his views of America, a nation he revered.

He is among the few Somalis still living here who have visited America; he was awarded his commercial pilot’s license after training in Arizona. He had studied American history and admires Gen. George S. Patton.

He also had spent years poring over newspaper accounts of America’s military interventions in Panama, Grenada and, finally, the Persian Gulf. For Fidow, despite his brief detention that night, the U.S. Marine landing in Mogadishu last Dec. 9 represented a moment of liberation no less than the U.S.-led war that freed Kuwait.

Fidow and his family had fled their family home in 1990. The Abgale clan that predominates in his Medina neighborhood of Mogadishu had told all other sub-clans to leave or die. Within months of the Dec. 9 landing, though, the Marines’ aggressive, daily patrols had freed Medina from the grip of its armed clan militiamen and bandits.

By March, Fidow and his family were back at home, where they remain, however tenuously.

“The Marines were doing fine,” Fidow said, rocking his 3 1/2-month-old son, Mohammed, on his knee. “In the first few months, they were with the people. They saved those people who were supposed to be saved. That was the specific job they had, and it was finished long ago. Nobody among them tried to say what will be the next thing to do. The next thing to do is not up to anybody but the Somalis. The world can’t do anything.”

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In the months that followed the U.N. takeover of the Somali mission, Fidow witnessed the rapid deterioration of the international mission to save Somalia. The Marines had fed the starving, defused the crisis, accomplished their mission and departed. The rest of the American forces, he said, should have followed.

Above all, he said, the U.S. Army Rangers, whom Fidow said he still respects “more than any other force in the universe,” never should have come to assist the United Nations in its five-month manhunt for Aidid.

“They focused too much on the Somalis’ internal clan politics,” Fidow said of the United Nations’ chief of mission, retired U.S. Adm. Jonathan Howe, and the military commanders who pursued Aidid after a June 5 massacre of 24 Pakistani peacekeepers.

“You have to go back to the States--to what happened in Los Angeles,” Fidow said. “Those riots--who controlled them? They can be ignited too easily. But to control them it took even the best-trained troops. And that’s in their own country. How about the streets they never knew? How do you control them?”

Neither the United States nor the United Nations has found how to control the mayhem here. At the peak of the anti-American and anti-U.N. street violence, in the weeks before the Oct. 3 killing by Aidid’s forces of 16 Rangers and two other American soldiers after a raid on a suspected Aidid hide-out, Fidow was so full of despair that he decided to flee Mogadishu. He bundled his family into a battered, windowless van and paid for a one-way trip to neighboring Ethiopia.

In Africa, though, violence often lies ahead of as well as behind those in flight. Unrelated clan wars at the Ethiopian border permitted only Fidow’s wife, who belongs to a northern Somali clan, and his children to pass.

Fidow returned alone to Mogadishu, only to find that President Clinton had made an abrupt about-face. Responding to one of the deadliest attacks on U.S. forces since the Vietnam War, Clinton broke off the hunt for Aidid, withdrew the Rangers and committed America to a March 31 pullout deadline. That decision instantly defused the war on the streets of Mogadishu.

“I think they corrected themselves,” Fidow said of the Americans. “They were the ones who made the mistake of having two or three different courses. Now, they’re trying to correct that.”

But not before the loss of hundreds of lives--Somali, American, Pakistani Malaysian and many others, he added.

Yet it is for the U.S. Rangers that Fidow said he grieves.

“I used to think that the Rangers of the United States Army were the protectors of this universe,” he said, moving into another room to fetch something small, holding it in his balled-up fist. “That’s the clout that I was putting in them. . . .

“And all of a sudden I found these Rangers on the streets of Mogadishu being killed. But being in the streets of Mogadishu for the purpose of fighting was wrong.”

Then Fidow opened his hand to reveal a small U.S. Ranger patch--a gift from a soldier, he said. “I am trying to put this onto the neck of my son. But I have only thread. And you can’t use just thread for the Ranger sign. Maybe silver. Maybe gold. A chain, maybe. But I am going to put it around his neck until he grows up, just so he knows. The Rangers are still to be respected by all people of the world.”

And what of America as a whole? Fidow was asked.

“What I feel is, America still has a chance to prove itself,” he said. “It’s a superpower, and I can understand their feeling, the way they wanted to correct things that are wrong here in Somalia. But sometimes you have to accept things the way they are, and correct it slowly. . . .

“So we have to wait and see. But the Americans do have to prove themselves, that they are a superpower. They have to prove that they are more patient. And you can’t do that by fighting in the streets.”

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As for his own life, Fidow concluded, the same tenets now apply: patience and nonviolence.

Sitting on an empty box in his sun-drenched courtyard beside flowering trees that his brother planted nearly a decade ago, he confirmed that the modest, six-room house is something of a monument to the uncertainty of the past year and the one ahead.

It still has no furniture--a precaution in a city where bandits and warlords still rule. It hasn’t been painted in three years. “Why bother?” Fidow said with a shrug.

The bedroom Fidow again shares with his wife, who returned with the children from Ethiopia soon after he did, is stacked with empty suitcases at the ready.

In the corner of the room is a rusted old assault rifle. Fidow picked it up from the airport grounds in January, 1991, the night Somali dictator Mohamed Siad Barre fled the capital.

But, in a city where gunfire has been an hourly occurrence ever since, Fidow insisted that he has fired it only twice, just to make sure it still worked.

Rifle in hand, Fidow tells the story of the first time he refused to use the weapon. That was the night he broke all clan etiquette and actually spoke to members of the rival sub-clan across the street, six months before the Marines arrived. It was the night his neighbors’ leaders ordered Fidow’s sub-clan to leave or die.

They argued, Fidow recalled. They nearly came to blows. Finally, Fidow convinced them through words--not bullets--that their bond as neighbors was deeper than clan allegiances.

“Nearly a year later, when I came back, there wasn’t a single scratch on the house, and nothing was missing,” he said. “Every house in this area was looted except this one. Now, of course, I can’t even speak to the other members of my own sub-clan. They tried to draw me into their war, and I refused.

“But I have no regrets. These three years--the last one especially--helped me a lot in shaping myself. This is the time that I finally came to understand the Somali people.”

Fidow set the automatic rifle back in the corner.

“What I learned is, sometimes it’s much better to use your mind. I learned that using a gun was not the best way to solve an argument.”

He also found that it’s better to stay and learn than to fight and flee.

“Where am I to go? This used to be my country. I have to understand what is going on, what is happening to my homeland,” Fidow replied when asked whether he is more ready to leave now than a year ago.

“In the end, you see, there is no morality left for this whole nation. So, if we are going to pick up the pieces, we have to figure out first where the morality went,” he said. “I have watched it disappear to understand how to repair it. That is our job now.

“This is what neither the United States nor the United Nations can understand. . . . It is the whole society that has gone wrong--not just one person. And it is the whole society that now must rebuild itself--one person at a time.”

* U.N. FORCE FACES CUTBACK: Few nations pledge troops for Somalia after GIs leave. A24