He is known as "China." At one time, he says, he worked for the Red Cross. Now, he drives one of the most famous "technicals" in all of South Mogadishu, a roofless Toyota Land Cruiser equipped with a Chinese-made antiaircraft gun and manned by 10 young fighters armed with everything from AK-47s to rocket-propelled grenades. Today, he is parked just outside the gates of the United Nations headquarters in the Somali capital. When asked about the U.N.'s imminent withdrawal from his country, China eyes the Pakistani peacekeepers peering at him over their sandbagged positions, chews thoughtfully on a stem of the amphetaminelike drug called khat, and says: "It's good. I'll feel safer then."
It was images of children starving while men in technicals looted food convoys that prompted George Bush to send the U.S. Marines into Somalia two years ago this week. Called Operation Restore Hope, the U.N.-backed mission is limping to a conclusion, a footnote to a larger peacekeeping failure in the former Yugoslavia. Today, Somalia is enjoying one of the biggest harvests in recent memory, but with the United Nations Mission Operation in Somalia (UNOSOM) scheduled to withdraw by March and the country still without a government, hope remains as elusive as ever.
Except for a few bullet-pocked walls daubed with fading anti-American and anti-U.N. graffiti, there is little evidence of the multibillion dollar peacemaking and relief effort that claimed the lives of 42 U.S. servicemen, more than 140 U.N. peacekeepers and thousands of Somali citizens. Mogadishu is as divided as in 1991, when civil war erupted. Technicals again patrol the streets, militiamen occupy checkpoints abandoned by U.N. peacekeepers and guns are back on sale in the city's Bakara market.
Worse, the warlord once considered America's most wanted man, Gen. Mohammed Farah Aidid, seems set to unilaterally declare himself president before the end of the year. While many Somalis would accept that if they thought it would bring peace, the problem of Ali Mahdi Mohamed, the country's second most powerful warlord, remains. Aidid recently offered the former hotelier (whose alleged corruption has earned him the nickname "Pockets") the position of economic czar in a government of national unity, but Mahdi refused.
Aidid and Mahdi are holding rival peace conferences on either side of the city. U.N. Special Representative Victor Gbeho is shuttling between the two groups, but few hold out hope for a deal: Every other U.N.-backed settlement and cease-fire during the last two years has collapsed. "Why is it that 6 million Somalis deserve the attention and the gold and the blood of the world forever while they fool around?" asks Ambassador Daniel Simpson, special U.S. envoy to Somalia, whose office is now in Nairobi. "We've respected their pace. Now, it's time to respect ours -- we're leaving."
Packing up. Inside the UNOSOM compound, the withdrawal is already underway. Landmarks such as the 800-person prefab housing facility known as "Boutros Boutros-Alley" likely will remain, but the bulk of the mission's $73 million worth of equipment will be removed. The most vexing problems are the city's port, airport and the compound itself, which are controlled by the U.N. but coveted by both warlords. Yet even if the vacuum created by a departing U.N. ignites a vicious clash over those strategic points, many prefer that to more years of bloody stalemate. "Unless somebody manages to conquer the whole country by force, there won't be any national government," says a U.N. official. "And I don't think any one warlord is strong enough to do that."
If a solution is as difficult to find as the headquarters of the Habr Gedr Peace Committee, Somalia's troubles will continue. Located on a bomb-cratered street in the region of Mogadishu known as the "Bermuda Triangle," the unmarked compound houses what may be the world's only pro-peace militia. Last week, two members died when Aidid's technicals attacked their rally protesting his unilateral peace conference. Now, the peace committee is amassing technicals and stockpiling arms. Says their leader, Gen. Mohamed Nur Galal: "If you go back through history, always when peace is in danger you are compelled to make war to retake the peace." Sadly for innocent civilians in Somalia -- and Bosnia, for that matter -- that is a lesson the international community has yet to learn.
