Shadow Wars: Chasing Conflict in an Era of Peace

2. Disillusioned

25 2 Disillusioned By 1992 no fewer than twenty-seven different factions battled for control of Somalia. In Mogadishu the fiercest fighting was between Ali Mahdi Mohamed, nominally the appointed successor of deposed president Siad Barre, and Mohamed Farah Aidid, an accountant-turned-warlord who headed the United Somali Congress, the main rebel group in the city, built around the Habr Gedr clan. A year of warfare had left 300,000 people dead and devastated roads, rails, ports, and other infrastructure. A million Somalis had fled the country, leaving crops to rot in the fields. Of the 7 million who remained behind, more than half were in immediate danger of starving. The UN assessed the humanitarian situation as “dire.” In early January 1992 UN Secretary General Javier Pérez de DisillusioneD 26 Cuéllar y de la Guerra sent James Jonah, one of his undersecretaries , to Mogadishu to try to negotiate a cease-fire. Firefights still flared as Jonah and his team entered the ruined city, its Italian colonial facades pockmarked by shells, derelict armored vehicles littering the streets. It’s testimony to the severity of the emergency that almost all of the warlords favored a cease-fire. There was just one holdout: Aidid. But even Aidid agreed that the UN should play a role in repairing the country’s fractured politics, even if he was unwilling to order his fighters to lay down their weapons just yet. Incoming UN secretary general Boutros Boutros-Ghali kept pushing for a cease-fire, and in February 1992 he got his wish. At talks in New York from February 12 to 14, representatives of Aidid and Mohamed finally agreed to a cease-fire, to be monitored by forty UN personnel. The monitors arrived in July. Tentatively, the UN laid plans for a bigger deployment of peacekeepers: five hundred at first, gradually expanding to more than four thousand. Their mission: to protect the cease-fire monitors, secure Mogadishu ’s airport and seaport, and safeguard distribution of food aid from bandits and rebels. The need could not have been more acute. As many as three thousand Somalis were dying of starvation every day as food supplies piled up in warehouses for lack of secure distribution. On December 3, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 794 (1992), authorizing the use of “all necessary means to establish as soon as possible a secure environment for humanitarian relief operations in Somalia.” All means, including lethal force. Two days later, U.S. president George H. W. Bush addressed the American public during primetime, announcing his decision to support the UN operation with troops, ships, and planes. “We willnotstayonedaylongerthanabsolutelynecessary,”hevowed. On December 9, U.S. Marines stormed ashore outside Mogadishu , their nighttime assault greeted by the glaring lights of DisillusioneD 27 TV news crews. Four months later, the UN force had swelled to 37,000 troops from twenty-four nations, including 21,000 Americans.1 Rumors spread that the UN was eying Aidid’s radio station, a vital link between the warlord and his followers in a city with few other news outlets. “They thought we were going to take it over,” said army major general Thomas Montgomery, commander of U.S. forces in Somalia.2 At 10:00 in the morning on June 5, 1993, Aidid’s gunmen ambushed a Pakistani UN force as they drove back to base after inspecting a weapons depot in Mogadishu.3Simultaneously, Aidid ’sfightersattackedanothergroupofPakistanitroopsguardinga foodhandout.“Theyputwomenandchildrenatthefrontandjust sortofletthecrowdpressin,andtheypressedinaroundthemand then disarmed them and then there were shooters in the crowd and they shot a couple of them [the Pakistanis],” Montgomery recalled. “A couple of them were literally taken apart by hand.”4 In all, twenty-five Pakistanis died and more than fifty were wounded.5 All day, UN troops exchanged gunfire and grenades with Aidid’s men at the central Kilometer Four roundabout. Eighty Pakistanis and ten Americans were pinned down and had to be rescued by Italian tanks. American Cobra gunship helicopters chattered overhead.6 The UN mission drifted from protecting aid efforts to capturing Aidid and dismantling his clan militia. On July 12, the Cobra helicopters fired missiles at what intelligence had indicated was a gathering of Aidid’s lieutenants. In fact, the men inside the targeted house were clan elders meeting to discuss a possible peace deal with the UN.7 Between fifty and seventy people died. When international journalists rushed to cover the carnage, an angry mob killed four...