TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/011491/0114001.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.3 KB | 121 lines

                                                                                WORLD, Page 25

SOMALIA

A Very Private War


With the world otherwise occupied, rebel armies seize the
capital, at least 500 die, and the country sinks into anarchy

By BRUCE W. NELAN -- Reported by J.F.O. McAllister/Washington
and Clive Mutiso/Nairobi


    Bodies littered the streets of Mogadishu, and artillery
blasts rattled its shuttered buildings. Automatic gunfire was
almost continuous around the presidential palace. Crowded
hospitals in the capital were without water or food. Foreign
embassy staffs took cover inside their locked compounds. Ringed
by tanks and the remnants of his army, Somalia's octogenarian
President, Mohammed Siad Barre, held out in an underground
bunker at a military air base south of the city.

    Another African state was lurching into anarchy last week.
The disintegration of order and government in Somalia looked
like an agonizing replay of the collapse of Liberia last year.
Almost duplicating the stages that shattered the West African
state, a group of Somali rebel armies sapped the strength of
a narrowly based and despotic regime over several years. They
then closed in on the capital and smashed the government's rule
without replacing it. If this is the end of Siad Barre, his
successor has not yet emerged.

    Much in the style of Liberia's late President Samuel Doe,
Siad Barre, a onetime policeman who seized power in a military
coup in 1969, sealed his own fate by depending more and more
on his kinsmen and overreacting to any challenge to his
autocratic rule. Former U.S. diplomat Chester Crocker, a
professor at Georgetown University, calls Siad Barre an
"old-style, feudal, tribal chieftain." The country is
ethnically homogeneous -- 98.8% are Somalis -- so there are no
significant tribal hatreds. But its 8 million people are split
into rival clans that have been battling one another for
centuries.

    As Siad Barre grew old and sick, his ability to command
dwindled, and he turned to his family and his Marehan clan to
run things. In May 1988 the Somali National Movement, formed
by the northern Isaq clan, rose in rebellion and seized several
towns. The army put down the revolt with vicious bombing and
shelling that killed as many as 50,000 civilians and
insurgents. Said a relief worker in Mogadishu last week: "This
regime has cold-bloodedly murdered or starved to death nearly
10% of the population, driven another 25% into exile and holds
a multitude in jail."

    The Isaq rebellion did not collapse under the army's attacks
and soon controlled the countryside in the north. Its success
was matched by the Ogadeni clan, which launched the Somali
Patriotic Movement and gradually took over the country's
southern region. Those rebels were joined six months ago by the
United Somali Congress, organized by the Hawiye clan, which
predominates in the center of the country and in Mogadishu. The
Hawiyes had been outraged in July 1989 when government troops
opened fire on street demonstrations in the capital and killed
450 protesters. Last week the Hawiyes were doing much of the
shooting in Mogadishu, and at least 500 people were dead.

    On Saturday, Italy and the U.S. began evacuating the last
500 foreign residents, but neighbors and the world community
are making little effort to halt the carnage. Only a few years
ago, it would have been different. Superpower rivalry in the
Horn of Africa, near the entrance to the Red Sea, was intense;
both Moscow and Washington had stakes in Siad Barre's rise or
fall.

    The Somali dictator was in fact a client of both superpowers
at different times. The Soviet Union supported his brand of
"scientific socialism," then also lent its backing to his
neighbor, Ethiopia, when it turned Marxist in 1977. Somalia was
at war with Ethiopia over the disputed Ogaden province, so Siad
Barre reversed his allegiance and appealed to the U.S.
Washington was happy to provide him with $100 million in
military and economic aid annually in the mid-1980s to counter
Moscow.

    Washington did not finally cut off aid until 1989, when Siad
Barre's massacres of rival clans became too blatant to ignore,
but the level of its contributions had been sinking steadily.
Now that the cold war is over, Third World conflicts no longer
figure as potential victories or losses for the U.S. or the
Soviet Union, ironically making the world safer for brush-fire
wars and insurrections.

    Somalia's three rebel fronts dismissed Siad Barre's call for
a cease-fire and negotiations last week, and the United Somali
Congress marched reinforcements into Mogadishu for what it
called the "final offensive." In a joint statement issued in
London, the three groups announced their agreement to form a
"transitional government that will pave the way for the
restoration of democratic institutions."

    That worthy objective may never be achieved. The rebel
factions have no political program; the only principle that
unites them is their hatred of Siad Barre and their
determination to oust him. Their organizations are completely
clan-based and are divided by hundreds of years of intramural
fighting. With no restraining influences from abroad and the
superpowers attending to other concerns, Somalia's future is
likely to be sadly similar to its bloody past.