As U.S. Leaves, Somalia Braces for Rough Time

On the edge of Medina market, about a block from the perimeter of the main military compound America is leaving behind, Mahmoud Mohamed sat at a battered metal table, selling the last of the American garbage that has fed his family and tens of thousands of others for more than a year.

They are the leavings of U.S. military MREs--Meals Ready to Eat. They have fueled a booming street market in Medina during the 15 months in which Mohamed and his fellow merchants bought them from the back of Somali garbage trucks that hauled the trash for an American force that once numbered more than 20,000 here.

As the final few hundred troops began heading home this month--including about 225 who departed Saturday--Mohamed’s prices were soaring.

Marble cake in an olive-drab tin went for $1.10. A tiny bottle of Louisiana Hot Sauce was a quarter, and a miniature packet of applesauce fetched 30 cents.

“The prices of everything are going up now that the Americans are leaving--no more supply,” Mohamed said, noting sadly that his stand is among the last of dozens that once supported thousands of Somalis.

“No one knows what will happen now,” he added. “But everyone is afraid.”

As Mohamed prepared to close up shop, it was clear that America was leaving behind far more than garbage and soaring prices.

Signs of deepening anarchy, growing street violence and enduring irony swirled around him. A car was hijacked in a firefight just down the street within sight of a U.N. military checkpoint. Later, Pakistani and Egyptian peacekeepers a mile or so away fired wildly at the sound of a single gunshot. A Somali boy was killed in the cross-fire.

Hijackings have become a daily event. Looting is rampant. Renewed fighting is breaking out among rival clans in several pockets in the countryside. And dozens are dying throughout the country from a serious new outbreak of cholera.

In the capital, Somalis who had learned to survive on contracts with the Americans and the European armies that are following them out of the U.N. peacekeeping operation now are settling labor disputes with mortar rounds, land mines and death threats. Every night before the Italian troops pulled out of the city two weeks ago, gunmen attacked their north Mogadishu stronghold. They were hired by a man whose father was killed by the Italian troops months ago.

These are foreboding images of Somalia’s uncertain future, U.S. and U.N. military commanders say.

The commander of the Pakistani brigade that is inheriting the lead role in the less ambitious, largely Third World U.N. military operation that will continue to serve here for as long as another year conceded that Somalia’s immediate future inevitably will be one of increased anarchy, banditry, roving gangs, armed roadblocks and street protests.

“All the jobs these people had with the Americans will be gone now,” said Brig. Gen. Saulat Abbas. “They will become more desperate. Banditry, looting--they already are on the rise.

“It is not going to be a cool, calm and sweet place to live in.”

At the same time, Abbas confirmed that the 20,000-strong U.N. peacekeeping force currently under Malaysian command intends to largely sit back in heavily defended camps and checkpoints and watch--the result of a Security Council decision to take a more defensive posture.

Gone is the Security Council mandate that American and U.N. commanders used to hunt Mogadishu’s most powerful warlord, Mohammed Farah Aidid. Gone are the wanted posters and the $25,000 reward for the former Somali general who eluded a two-month, high-tech search by America’s most elite military squad, the U.S. Army Ranger special forces. Aidid has in fact emerged at center stage in U.N.-sponsored negotiations to end the two-year civil war that left Somalia with no government, no law, few leaders and little hope.

There are, diplomats and U.N. military officers said, some signs of progress in the political effort to reunite Somalia’s warring clans. There also has been a burst of small-scale commercial activity throughout the capital--from international telephone-call offices to thriving, open-air movie theaters--in the aftermath of President Clinton’s decision to help rehabilitate the image of the warlord who tormented the United Nations and whom Clinton’s advisers once viewed as the principal source of Somalia’s problems.

But at the heart of the potential nightmare the Americans are leaving behind is the simple fact that it remains little different from the nightmare that greeted the U.S. Marines when they hit the beachheads of anarchic Mogadishu in Operation Restore Hope more than one year and several billion dollars ago.

Here, based on interviews and images gathered during the final days before the scheduled departure of the last U.S. soldier by Friday, is a tapestry of a nation still a shambles, still deeply divided, and of the U.N. force that remains--which is concerned as much with its own safety as with the still-remote goal of rebuilding Somalia.

The battered old donkey carts line up beside their owners early each morning at the water well outside Mogadishu’s shelled and gutted Polytechnical Institute. By sunrise, there are hundreds of them. Hundreds more follow throughout the day. And most are like 30-year-old Hassan Hussein, a camel herder who fled the Somali countryside for the capital more than two years ago when his herd was slaughtered by clan militias during Somalia’s brutal civil war.

Hussein and the others make several trips a day to the water pump, where they pay 50 cents each time they fill their 200-liter oil drums with water. They use their donkeys to deliver them at a daily profit of $2 to families throughout the city--the only water source these days for much of the capital.

It is, in some ways, typical of the new grass-roots industries that have sprung up in the capital since the United Nations took command of the Somalia mission. But the donkey-cart brigade symbolizes more than the Somali entrepreneurial spirit.

They are, Somalis themselves said, living testimony to the potential nightmare the U.S. military is leaving behind. And the very need for the water brigade--15 months after the United Nations announced it restored full water service to a city with no other basic services--illustrates the many frustrations and failures in the aftermath of the U.S. mission.

It was, in fact, just a few days after the Marines hit Mogadishu’s beachheads Dec. 9, 1992, that U.N. Development Program officials here proudly flipped the switch at the capital’s main water source, climaxing their five-month effort to provide water to all parts of the city.

Now entire neighborhoods of the city have been without water for weeks. Others receive it for just a few hours a day. Almost every Somali in the city is complaining about water shortages. But U.N. officials said just recently that they were unaware of a water problem in Mogadishu.

The UNDP’s acting resident representative, Larry De Boice, whose agency is still funding and overseeing the water project out of its meager $10-million annual budget for Somalia, said the main pumping station is still operating fine. And he said he knows of no widespread shortages in the city.

In the donkey-cart line at the Polytechnical well, however, which is just a few hundred yards from the UNDP’s walled-in headquarters, the explanation was simple and basic to Somali society past and present: looting.

In the spreading lawlessness that began when the Western troops withdrew from town, Somalis have punched holes in pipes throughout the city and diverted water for private sale. Others have dug up and stolen the pipes and sold them on the open market. One Somali businessman told of a neighbor who mistakenly sold the pipes that provided water to his own house.

“This is a problem that is deep inside us now,” said Somali businessman Hirei Gassem, who opened a new hotel near Mogadishu’s international airport on March 12. “The problem is, you cannot create only one project and say the job is done. You must create a number of projects at once.

“You, the United Nations, the United States, you come from another place. You cannot understand what we are thinking. Until we settle the banditry, the looting mentality, until we settle and employ these people, we haven’t done anything.

“The general feeling is that there will be more of this when the Americans leave. More chaos. I don’t deny that. But I feel that the people now are tired of war. They are fed up. They are ready for peace.”

When the leaders of the United Somali Women’s Assn. gathered under the banner “Long Live International Women’s Day” at Hirei Gassem’s new 10-room Quality Inn a few days ago, they too wished to speak only of peace.

“Contrary to the thought of many that there is going to be war when the Americans leave, it’s going to be very peaceful,” said the organization’s founder, Hawa Mohamed Ossoble, before the daylong women’s meeting began.

“It is different now than when the Americans came. Really. Even the clans, the warlords and their militias, they are all tired now. They don’t have the finances they did before. We are confident we can unite now.”

But as Ossoble spoke, another International Women’s Day rally was forming across town. It was organized by rival clans, and even Ossoble conceded: “These are factional groups that recently formed. We hope we can come together with them. We are in this process now. We are, after all, the easiest social sector to unite.”

In fact, it is not only the women of the clans who remain deeply divided after a civil war left 300,000 dead and a U.S.-led U.N. operation did little to reunite them. Nor are the women the only ones who are attempting to resolve their differences. U.S. and U.N. officials who are trying to play a catalytic role in that reconciliation have effused an almost universal optimism in recent weeks over the latest peace efforts by leaders of the best-armed Somali militias and their parallel political factions.

They cite in particular what they call a new flexibility and moderation on the part of Aidid, whose militia fought a brutal war with the United Nations that left hundreds of Somalis and dozens of American and Pakistani peacekeepers dead.

It was an October attack by Aidid’s militiamen on U.S. Army commandos that led to the U.S. decision to pull out this month. The Rangers were the cutting edge of a U.S.-sponsored U.N. hunt for Aidid, who managed to evade the elite commando operation for weeks. President Clinton abruptly abandoned the Administration’s lead role in the hunt after Aidid’s militiamen killed 18 U.S. soldiers in the Oct. 3 firefight and his supporters dragged dead Americans through Mogadishu’s streets.

Now, just five months later, U.S. officials are treating Aidid as a respectable political leader central to peace in Somalia.

“He (Aidid) is more moderate than he ever was,” said Richard Begosian, the senior U.S. diplomat in Mogadishu, who functions as American ambassador to a nation with no government. “And it’s hard for me to imagine any kind of stability that doesn’t make room for Aidid.”

Political developments on the ground early this month, however, gave few Somalis reason for hope.

Wary of Aidid’s diplomatic advances, leaders of the 12 clan-based political groups that have fought Aidid met two weeks ago in Cairo at a gathering sponsored by the Egyptian government, which Aidid considers a sworn enemy. There his rivals agreed to establish a government with a revolving presidency--a plan Western analysts said could not succeed without Aidid’s support.

Aidid boycotted the Cairo meeting. A few days later, his supporters in Mogadishu rejected the plan. Aidid remained in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi, where he has spent most of the last several months negotiating with various clans, apparently in an effort to form a government of his own.

“These leaders in Cairo, they will establish a government. Aidid is in Nairobi also establishing a government,” said former Somali Maj. Gen. Mohamed Nur Galal, who joined Aidid to lead the overthrow of Somali dictator Mohamed Siad Barre in 1990 but broke with him when the civil war began after a similar Egyptian-sponsored conference appointed a rival clan leader president.

“We are going to have two governments at the same time. And again it will be civil war. It’s much better, I think, to have no government than (to have) two.

“But this is all about power. Aidid just wants power. The group of 12 wants power. If I were them, I wouldn’t have struggled so hard for it. Whoever becomes president of Somalia, he is just an unlucky man.”

Amid the ruins of Mogadishu, Gen. Aidid’s palatial villa is ready and waiting for his return.

Less than a year after it was reduced to rubble by American AC-130 gunships and Cobra attack helicopters--punishment for the massacre of 24 Pakistani peacekeepers by Aidid militiamen on June 5--the warlord’s house has been fully restored.

There is a fresh coat of whitewash on the compound walls. The national flag, a single white star in a field of blue, is in place, with a new addition for Aidid’s Somali National Alliance: the Koranic phrase, “God is great. Mohammed is the messenger of God.”

Another addition mirrors the uncertainty that prevails outside Aidid’s compound: For the first time, every window is covered with thick iron burglar bars.