The Road to Hell (40 page)

So here were UNOSOM delegates informing a member of Aydiid's Somali National Alliance faction that his authority was based on UNOSOM's recognition. The memo concluded by saying that Awale was “upset over the matter.” Understandably so. Abdi Hassan Awale “Qeybdiid” may have had an official position within the SNA, but the supreme commander was Aydiid. Qeybdiid was in no position to authorize anything. UNOSOM didd't care. From Aydiid's perspective, UNOSOM was telling him whom they would and would not recognize as authority within his faction. UNOSOM had crossed a line that was unacceptable to Aydiid.

The next morning inspectors and Pakistani troops arrived at AWSS 5, which was also Aydiid's radio station. A crowd gathered outside the radio station. It appeared to them that UNOSOM had seized their radio station, even though the troops were exiting.

Somalis love the radio. They thrive on news and information. It is as important to them as food and water. Every evening the entire country tunes in to the BBC Somali service. Activity in every town in the country slows to a crawl. Likewise, Aydiid's station was very dear to the people of Mogadishu, even those who didn't like him very much. The thought that UNOSOM might be shutting it down was incendiary in the extreme. The sight of troops near the station was enough to mobilize militias.

There's no doubt that Somali militias attacked the Pakistani soldiers at various points that morning. What is at issue is whether it was an ambush organized by Aydiid. That was UNOSOM's instant conclusion, and that is the conclusion of the Farer report, though he includes some evidence that would seem to cast doubt on that conclusion.
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Farer writes: “The elements of the ambush strongly evidence premeditation. Whether, in the absence of any disconfirming evidence, they establish pre-planning beyond a reasonable doubt is arguable, and of course is
not essential for purposes of this inquiry which is concerned primarily with determining whether there exists evidence sufficient to support the indictment of General [Aydiid]. That evidence is built around a number of points about the way the Somali assault on the Peacekeepers was carried out: But they all revolved around the sophisticated and coordinated way the Somalis boxed in the Pakistanis, creating a “killing zone.” Farer wrote that it evidenced “careful planning” and “sophisticated use of locations and camouflage.”

Perhaps at this point Farer and others still thought the Somalis unsophisticated fighters. The truth is that Aydiid's militias had been battling in the streets of Mogadishu for four years. They knew every hiding place and every corner. A hundred times before, they had set up roadblocks and cordoned off “kill zones.” They were conditioned to do it at the first sound of gunfire.

In the wake of the killings and the reprisals, I interviewed a number of Aydiid's fighters and got the story from their perspective. One of them, a quiet young man named Abdiwele Ali told me how his day went on June 5, 1993. Abdiwele had fought with Aydiid's militias when they had captured Mogadishu in January 1991. He hadn't participated in the clan war, but he had buried his rifle inside his family's compound.

“Radio Mogadishu had been giving out information every day about what the US. and UNOSOM troops were doing,” he told me. “UNOSOM was not happy with this, and they accused the radio station of making propaganda against them. On June 5, a young boy knocked on my gate. He was out of breath and he said that Pakistani soldiers were sent to capture the radio station. With one of my neighbors I immediately ran towards the radio station. I saw people coming from the north and the west, and we joined at the main gate of the radio station. People started telling the Pakistanis to get out. This is our radio station. This is our country,' we were shouting.

“When the Pakistanis saw that some of the people were armed, they started firing in the air, but people would not stop coming. There were 2,000 people there now and they started collecting stones. Women and children began to throw stones and we were shouting, ‘Go home UNOSOM. Go home.'

“Then the soldiers lowered the muzzles of their guns and shot straight at people. I saw a young child of four and a girl of about fifteen and a boy killed. I had not used my gun since the night at Villa Somalia [when Siyaad Barre was driven out of the city]. I did not fight in the civil war, but now I ran to dig it up from where it was hidden.”

Abdiwele cleaned off his rifle and ran to his corner, a corner he had been assigned years before. All of Aydiid's fighters knew the drill. They didn't run into the gunfire. They moved to seal the city; they put up roadblocks. Abdiwele didn't see any more action that day. No troops moved through his checkpoint. Had they approached him, it might have seemed that Abdiwele was lying in a planned ambush. Over the following months I spoke with dozens of other fighters who told me similar stories.

In the reprisals that followed, UNOSOM did ultimately destroy the radio station. And they did complain that Aydiid's radio was broadcasting incendiary propaganda against UNOSOM even before the June 5 weapons inspection. Farer includes a few transcripts of radio broadcasts in his report. Here is one excerpt that Farer calls “exemplary.”
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It's no secret that Jonathan Howe was annoyed by the radio broadcasts. However, it's ironic that UNOSOM would try to bring democracy to a country by destroying free speech. The concerns expressed by this particular radio broadcast are legitimate, and the analysis, in my experience, fairly cogent. Howe's and UNOSOM's ire is also typical: People who claim to be helping tend to become extraordinarily irritated when their motives are questioned, or when they are accused of benefiting in some way from the misery of others. It must be noted again here that Somalis had a long and unpleasant experience with foreign aid. It was very natural for them to question the motives of those who had come to help.

There is also strong evidence that UNOSOM's annoyance with Aydiid arose because the warlord had successfully conducted a peace conference
and concluded a peace agreement between his clan and a neighboring clan at the end of May. Aydiid had originally requested UN participation and, not incidentally, financial support for the conference, but then rejected UN requests that some additional subclan representatives be included in the talks. The dispute was over specific issues in a remote part of Somalia, far from Mogadishu, far from NGOs, and beyond the limited expertise of most UN advisors. The only person at the UN who understood what was going on was John Drysdale, the British longtime Somalia expert. Drysdale describes the reaction behind the walls of the UN compound: “There was general unhappiness among senior UNOSOM II political staff and the staff of the U.S. Liaison Office that Aydiid continued to upstage both UNO' SOM II and his political rivals.' Drysdale explained, “As with all public confrontations with Somalis, the United Nations senior staff were excessively sensitive about a diminution of UN ‘credibility'—the word they use, but in fact prestige would be more accurate.”
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As it turns out, Aydiid's peace agreement has endured since it was signed in May 1993. None of the UN-brokered agreements lasted very long. Aydiid's radio broadcasts around the time of the “weapons inspection” were boasting of the success of the conference. Could the UN have been acting to preserve its own power and prestige? It's not unthinkable. Aydiid had become a threat to UNOSOM's growing authority—not necessarily a threat to peace. Aydiid's challenge was to the entire concept of a Chapter VII intervention, and that was intolerable to the UN's ambitious bureaucrats. Like most aid operations, UNOSOM II eventually became self-serving. Suddenly UNOSOM II became more about building UNOSOM II than about bringing peace to Somalia.

The man in charge, Admiral Howe, believed in his mission in Somalia, so much that he wouldn't tolerate dissent or even listen to the opinions of advisors like John Drysdale if they clashed with his view of the way things were. He tended to see things in black and white, good Somalis and bad Somalis. The good Somalis agreed with his policies and backed UNOSOM II; the bad Somalis didn't. It was okay to hunt down the bad Somalis.

Howe was no stranger to the process of hunting down fugitive bad guys. As assistant to Admiral William Crowe, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he was directly involved in attempts to capture Panama's Manuel Noriega. Howe had a reputation as a savvy Washington insider, serving in a number of positions associated with national security policy, starting in 1969 as a military assistant on the National Security Council
staff In 1991, President Bush appointed him as his deputy national security advisor, replacing Robert Gates, who became CIA director. Howe also served as a NATO commander. In positions at the Pentagon and State Department, he was involved at the highest levels of strategic arms negotiations and headed the delegation that implemented the U.S.-Israeli strategic cooperation pact during the Reagan administration. He was not Boutros Boutros-Ghali's first choice to represent the UN in Somalia. The secretary general would have preferred to give the impression that UNOSOM II was a true UN effort, not just a cover for American foreign policy. But the United States insisted, and, as usual, got its way.

Howe proved uniquely unsuited for the task. On several occasions, I met with the top Somali experts in his office, who were totally exasperated at their boss's refusal to deal with the complex realities of Somali politics. Howe just forged ahead doing things his way. He failed to see that offering a reward for Aydiid made the warlord all the more powerful and that much more difficult to catch, and that blanketing Mogadishu with Wild West wanted posters just made UNOSOM look stupid. (The posters became collectors items.) I asked him how he thought the situation should be resolved. “Ideally, what I would like to happen to Aydiid? The best idea would be that he would surrender himself. Maybe the next idea is that some Somali people would deliver him to us, and the next idea would be that we ourselves would capture him. But the main thing is that I would like to get him off the scene.”

Capturing Aydiid would have provided Howe and the UN with both a problem and an opportunity. There was no court system in Somalia to try him, and questionable grounds to try him in an international court of law. A precedent needed to be set for future peace enforcement operations. “I think we all feel that sense that this is the first Chapter VII, and in a sense we are pioneering into new territory,” Howe told me. “It's been our desire from the start to try to learn from this and set a model that will really benefit other people, to do it successfully, do it well, clearly document our lessons learned—there will be plenty of them and there have been—so that the next mission that comes along in another country will really benefit from our experience.”

“It seems like a laboratory,” I offered, “because you're obviously learning as you go.”

“I think that's fair,” the admiral replied.

O
f all the violence that took place in Mogadishu, the most significant might have been on Monday morning, July 12. The U.S. military had completed
its punishment of Aydiid on June 17. Heavily armed AC-130 gunships were withdrawn. The Pentagon said it was over.

However, the military was once again in the driver's seat in Mogadishu. There was a new, more aggressive military presence on the streets, like a city under occupation. And Aydiid's forces began to act like a resistance underground. Snipers started taking shots at soldiers. Six Somalis who worked for the UN were killed as a warning. On July 7, the Americans carried out some house-to-house weapons searches, and U.S. Army colonel Ed Ward, third-ranking commander of the UN force, boasted to the
Washington Post
, “We're going to retake the city in about five days.” It was five days later that American Cobra helicopters took to the air and fired ten TOW missiles into a house where elders of Aydiid's clan were having a meeting. The house was owned by Abdi Qeybdiid and would hence be called Abdi House. Some fifty people were killed that day, many of them not necessarily allies of Aydiid and most of them respected members of the community. They were trying to discuss issues. Some were even there to urge Aydiid to step down. The military knew that Aydiid was not there that day.
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“It was a real destroy mission,” an American officer told me. And, in effect, it was the first mission that really could have been a truly offensive initiative on the part of UNOSOM. It was also a mission that required the highest levels of approval. Major General Thomas Montgomery, who commanded the QRF in Mogadishu, did not have the authority to order his troops into an offensive posture; that command came directly from the White House.

It was designed to push the limits of Chapter VII. Presumably, all this was in the name of keeping the peace in Somalia and elsewhere. In effect, however, it was the beginning of the end of UNOSOM and of any chance for a UN settlement in Somalia. And it forced Aydiid to take the offensive. He had no choice if he was to retain his position as head of the USC/SNA. He could not stand by and let the foreigners kill the elders of his clan. What did Howe and UNOSOM expect?

The fighting escalated through August and September. When four American soldiers were killed by a land mine on August 8, Clinton sent in Task Force Ranger. That, in turn, culminated in the raid on October 3 that left so many dead.