Boutros-Ghali Urges U.N. Warning to Somali Warlords

In a somber report, Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali urged the Security Council on Thursday to warn feuding Somali warlords to reconcile by September’s end or face the possible withdrawal of all U.N. peacekeepers from their country.

His careful words, etched with pessimism, underscored the prospect that then-President George Bush’s dispatch of more than 25,000 Marines to Somalia beginning in December, 1992, and the large U.N. peacekeeping operations that followed will prove to have done little to untangle the Somalis’ political turmoil.

Boutros-Ghali blamed the depressing situation on the continual feuding between Mogadishu warlords Ali Mahdi Mohamed and Gen. Mohammed Farah Aidid.

He lamented the failure of both the United States and the United Nations to disarm them. Bush refused to involve U.S. Marines in general disarmament, and President Clinton persuaded the United Nations to call off all aggressive engagements after 18 Rangers died in October, 1993, in an abortive U.N. manhunt for Aidid.

In recent months, the Clinton Administration, which has withdrawn all American troops from the peacekeeping mission, has urged the United Nations to reduce the number of its troops to save money. The United Nations now has 18,760 peacekeeping troops in Somalia.

But Boutros-Ghali--while accepting limited reductions--proposed holding off substantial cuts while giving Mahdi and Aidid until the end of September to reach a peace settlement. The secretary general acknowledged that “the omens do not appear promising.”

In the report, he said that “lack of progress in disarmament, as well as factional disputes, inter-clan rivalries and conflicts, have made it impossible to proceed with the establishment of a central administrative mechanism.”

He mostly blamed feuding within the Hawiye clan--to which both Mahdi and Aidid belong. He said dissension and tension among all 15 political factions of Somalia “are also by and large attributable to rivalries within the Hawiye clan.”

Mahdi and Aidid have promised to take part in a Hawiye reconciliation conference, Boutros-Ghali said, “but there are . . . no clear signs that preparations for a Hawiye conference are under way.” Still, he proposed that the Security Council wait a few more weeks to see if the Hawiyes convene one.

Discussing the numbers of troops, he said that it would be possible to cut the force to 17,200 by the end of September and even to 15,000 without preventing it from carrying out its mandate. Peacekeepers now have authority mainly to guard airports and seaports, escort relief convoys, protect the premises of humanitarian groups and organize a police force and judicial system.

Although Boutros-Ghali confessed to “grave misgivings about the seriousness of their (the Somali factions’) commitment to peace and national reconciliation,” he said it is too early to conclude the U.N. mission “cannot achieve the objectives for which it was established.”

The mission’s U.N. mandate expires March 31. Boutros-Ghali said “there might even be a case for extending the mission . . . if national reconciliation can be achieved and an interim government established by the end of 1994.”

But an end to the peacekeeping mission could also halt relief operations, since there would no longer be troops to protect aid workers.