Somali Police to Enforce Law in Lawless Land

Dahir Ahmad Wardareh fumbled for five minutes with an item from the centerpiece of the United States’ $45-million parting investment in Somalia: a new M-16 assault rifle.

Wardareh had trouble with the firing pin. The spring was a problem too.

When the Somali policeman-in-training finally put the M-16 together, he shot up to his full height, stomped both feet with pride and gave an Indian army salute to his Malaysian army instructor, a field sergeant who struggled similarly under a scorching sun to put Somalia’s long-disbanded national police force back together.

The scene of Somalia’s finest preparing for a job in which they will be outgunned, outmanned and outflanked by the same ragtag militias that destroyed their country was just a glimpse of the obstacles that lie ahead for the Clinton Administration’s costly and ambitious effort to help Somalia as the last U.S. soldier left Friday.

To this ruined nation with no government, no judges and no constitution 15 months after the U.S.-led U.N. mission in Somalia began, the Administration has sent 5,000 M-16 assault rifles, 5,000 .45-caliber pistols, 2.3 million rounds of ammunition, 358 trucks, 64 generators, a dozen or so FBI agents and 5,000 nightsticks, handcuffs and safety shoes.

President Clinton personally approved the plan to help equip and train the police last year. It is the principal focus of the Administration’s policy not to abandon Somalia after the troops are gone. Clinton’s advisers argued strenuously and successfully for more than a year on Capitol Hill to win a series of congressional waivers to allow the project despite a 1974 law barring the U.S. government from creating or arming police or para military forces abroad.

The Administration’s plan calls for the United Nations to coordinate and command the force and to administer $20 million in cash donations from other countries to reconstruct an entire 10,000-man national police force from top to bottom. A police academy, a communications system, a criminal code and, eventually, a court system will be included.

The project calls for the first policemen armed with the new U.S. weaponry to hit the streets next Friday, the day after the original date Clinton set for the withdrawal of the last U.S. soldier from Somalia.

There are a few remotely similar precedents. The FBI’s David Kriskovich, director of the Justice Department’s International Criminal Investigative Training and Assistance Program and leader of the training team in Mogadishu, said he joined in a similar police-reconstruction program in Panama City after the U.S. military assault to arrest former dictator Manuel Noriega.

“But the uniqueness here is there’s no government,” Kriskovich said, adding that the most frequently asked question by Congress during his and other Administration officials’ testimony endorsing the plan was, “How can you have a police force without a government?”

As they stood in the equatorial sun stumbling over the intricacies of the United States’ latest gifts to Somalia, Wardareh and most of the other former Somali policemen in his class were wondering the same thing.

“Yes, I’m ready,” Wardareh said, shaking off his earlier difficulty in assembling the M-16. “But I don’t have enough power yet. I can’t do everything alone. There is no law. There is no government. So we’re just going to pretend we are the government?

“Until there is a government, how can you say there is real hope for the Somalis’ future?”

Some of his colleagues were troubled by related questions. Among them: Who’s in charge?

Most of the police re-trainees said their Malaysian weapons instructors were the latest in a series of U.N. instructors from other nations who have taught them sometimes conflicting tactics and procedures. And, in an allegation confirmed by U.S. and U.N. officials here, all the policemen agreed that there has been little or no coordination by their U.N. helpers.

“We have a situation now where as many as 20 countries have come up with police training,” said Richard Begosian, the most senior U.S. diplomat in Somalia, whose U.S. Liaison Office mission is trying to coordinate the American role in the program. “It needs somebody to pull it all together.”

In its defense, Begosian stressed that the police are just one of four main areas in which the United States “intends to remain engaged in Somalia” after the last U.S. soldier leaves.

Politically, Begosian said, he and other State Department officers will continue diplomatic efforts to help unite Somalia’s armed clans and warring political factions into a temporary administration that would ultimately form a semblance of national government. The United States also plans to give Somalia $32 million in food aid and other humanitarian assistance. And Begosian insisted that the United States is committed to helping the entire U.N. mission that remains here with a continuing mandate to rebuild the country “wherever possible.”

The warring clans did appear to be on a positive track toward peace this week. Under intense pressure from the United Nations at a weeklong, U.N.-financed conference in a Nairobi luxury hotel, rival warlords Mohammed Farah Aidid and Ali Mahdi Mohamed signed a general agreement Thursday that appeared to lay the groundwork for a future national government.

But Western analysts and several prominent Somalis remained skeptical. Most said they still expected the two rival militias to test one another.

In addition to the arms, equipment and training the United States is donating to the police, the Pentagon is leasing 30 U.S. M-60 tanks, eight Cobra helicopters and 80 armored personnel carriers to the largely Third World U.N. peacekeeping force that remains here. The 10-month lease will cost the United Nations $40 million.

But Begosian and other U.S. officials in Mogadishu agreed that, in the final analysis, the Somali national police is the principal focus of the Clinton Administration’s effort to demonstrate that it is not abandoning Somalia at a time when the country’s future is as uncertain as when the U.S. Marines arrived here in December, 1992.

“How can you have stability in this place without a police force?” Begosian asked. “If you can get these people to form a police force . . . maybe you can get them to form a government.”

Then again, many prominent Somalis observed, maybe not. And the consequences of that, they agreed, could be disastrous.

“We are in a position now where there should be an army in charge, and an army needs a government,” said former Somali army Gen. Mohamed Nur Galal, who once headed the Somali police and has tried to advise the United Nations in setting up its program to re-create the force. “The police are not strong enough to confront the warlords or clan militiamen. They can’t even defend their own guns and bullets.”

The biggest problem with the police force, in fact, Galal and others said, is that it is not only too little but also too late.

“I doubt the Somali police can do what the United Nations’ well-equipped force could not achieve,” said Mohamed Ibrahim Farrah, an educated Somali businessman. “In the beginning, perhaps, when the U.S. Marines were here, if they were well-armed, the police could succeed. But it’s too late now.”

Even many U.N. military officers privately agreed that the police force has a less-than-even chance of success after the year of U.N. and U.S. delays and the Somalis’ failure so far to re-create a semblance of government.

“I give this program, at best, a 20% chance to succeed,” said one U.N. military officer who has worked in the Somali police program and asked not to be named. “I guess that means there’s an 80% chance you’ll find most of these American weapons in the hands of militias or on sale in the local arms bazaar.”

Even officially, the United Nations concedes that some of the arms and ammunition almost certainly will disappear.

“Some of it is going to go missing. That’s the nature of the beast here,” said Canadian army Maj. Tom Haney, who said he has fought through the frustration and bureaucracy for nearly a year as chief U.N. liaison officer in the police program.

“It’s a violent country. Sometimes police are going to be overpowered. But I don’t think it’s going to happen on a massive scale.”

Haney stressed that neither the United Nations nor the United States harbors any hope that the police can confront any of Somalia’s many clan militias, which are still armed with antiaircraft guns, rocket-propelled grenades, land mines and heavy machine guns. They are, in fact, being taught not to do so.

“The best we can hope for is to get them to a level where they can confront a large group of bandits,” he said. “There’s no way any of the police here can take on any of the militias.”

And the Canadian major conceded that the new force will be outmanned as well as outgunned.

“Look, Somalia needs 18,000 police, and that’s slightly less than it had before the war,” he said. “But there’s absolutely no way this country can support and pay for more than 10,000. Even that will be tricky with the current level of (international) funding.”

So why bother, Haney was asked.

“I think there is a consensus here for a force of some kind that represents some sort of law and order,” he said. “You’ve got to start somewhere.”

For the 54 U.N. military experts contracted from 18 nations to train the police, most said they have started by trying to alter the psychology of the former policemen and paramilitary soldiers they recruited for the job--members of a largely respected national force who spent most of the last two years of civil war in hiding.

“You have to motivate them. You have to explain to them that the future of Somalia lies in their hands,” said Indian army Capt. Puneet Salhotra, the U.N. training adviser to the police force.

For some of the policemen-in-training, it appeared that the message was taking hold last week.

Mohamed Aden Issak, a 56-year-old veteran who spent 26 years in the Somali national police, conceded that he will simply hide again if the clan militias retake the streets.

“But, if it is me and the bandits, I will always win,” he added proudly. “I don’t care what weapon he has. Strength is not just the gun. It is the will. It is the uniform. It is knowing I am not afraid. We all are going to die. We cannot die twice. So I might as well die defending my nation’s future.”

Not all of his former colleagues agreed.

Lt. Ali Mohamed Kediye, who earned a degree in criminal justice in Italy during the 18 years he spent in Somalia’s national police, shook his head as he set down his new M-16 rifle beneath a tree.

“It’s nice, I guess,” he said. “But for now, it’s better we throw all the weapons away. We don’t need guns anymore. We need real tools of peace.

“There is a question of morality involved here. I don’t know yet what I’m going to be able to do for this society. The people are morally ready for peace. The only ones against peace are the politicians and the militias, and we cannot confront them.

“We need the organization. We need the right mentality. And to create that, we need to create first some structures in our society--some government. But it’s too late for this now. These things should have been done long ago.

“So frankly, I just don’t know what I will do when I take (to) the streets in two weeks.”

Fineman was recently on assignment in Somalia.