The Road to Hell (44 page)

After a while, a small, round man with hennaed hair emerged from behind a door. He didn't say that he was Egal, and for a moment I wasn't sure. Then I remembered him from photographs I'd seen of the twenty-something prime minister meeting with LBJ at the White House, the young hope of independent Somalia, the Western-educated democrat. We went back into the hot room and started to talk. He was wet, having just washed and prayed, and he sat comfortably on the couch.

“What nobody else knows is that this is not a new entity,” he said about his country. “We're not breaking away. We're withdrawing from a union we joined voluntarily in 1960. Our union was the first step to the idea of Greater Somalia, and we miscalculated Greater Somalia is dead. We cannot fight with Kenya, Ethiopia, and Djibouti.”

Egal was Somalia's prime minister in 1967, and he traveled the world, absorbing political realities that clashed with the Somali grand dream. He realized that Somalia could never be united without the help of the great powers. So he forged new relationships with Ethiopia and Kenya. He met with Charles DeGaulle in France and agreed not to pursue union with Somalis in Djibouti, at that time still a French colony.

“What I was doing was to the annoyance of the Soviet Union. It led to the coup d'état,” Egal said. That was true, in part. The coup that started with the assassination of President Abdirashiid Ali Shermaarke was also initiated because Somalia's political system had fractured along clan lines—in 1969 there were some 60 political parties and more than 1,000 candidates vying for 122 seats—and his party used the national treasury as its personal campaign war chest.

Siyaad Barre emerged on top after the coup and sent Egal to jail for twelve years.

“The people of Somaliland have another chance now to determine their own futures. The Westerners think this is Biafra all over again. It's not. Somaliland is a state that was. We have our own traditions. We have eighty years of colonial experience to separate us from the south. British rule was indirect rule, different from the feudal rule of the south. No warlord could emerge from our people. That is a difference between us.”

Egal is perpetually annoyed because he can't get recognition from any foreign country. He finds the West's attitude patronizing, especially since the breakaway republics of the Soviet Union and the former Yugoslavia received rapid recognition and aid from the West. “All of those European countries that had never been a state before are recognized already,” he said. “Because of UNOSOM and the failure of the UN in Somalia, they aren't willing to acknowledge our successes here.”

Egal has stayed away from the series of peace conferences staged by the UN in Djibouti, Nairobi, and Addis Ababa. “How can we go to Addis? I am a head of state. I cannot go as the equal of Aydiid. We are not a faction. We are a nation. We have no one to be reconciled with. There is nothing we can say to any of those factions. They have no mandate. UNOSOM wants us to come as one of the factions. Aydiid has issued an invitation to a defunct
faction, the SNM. The SNM had a two-year mandate here and they couldn't succeed.”

Egal was referring to a particularly dangerous UN blunder in Somaliland. Even though the Somali National Movement had won the independence of Somaliland and was in large part responsible for the defeat of Siyaad Barre, they had fallen from power. In 1993, in the town of Boroma in Somaliland, a meeting of elders “elected” Egal to lead. Yet when the UN was arranging a conference in 1994, they invited the SNM and its head, Abdirahman “Tuur,” to participate. After Tuur had fallen from power, he had a change of heart and decided suddenly that Somaliland should not be independent and proceeded to cement an expedient alliance with Aydiid. The UN's “recognition” of Tuur and the SNM nearly threw Somaliland into a state of war.

“We don't want a federation with Somalia,” Egal said. “Two governments can talk. For twelve hours I talked to Aydiid. ‘You cannot talk to me about sovereignty. You are only a warlord,' I told him. What is inhibiting debate with our brothers in the south is an incongruity of status. I must have a counterpart to talk to. The warlords have no authority.”

Then Egal explained something to me, something I'd heard before from Somalis on the streets. It was a crazy conspiracy theory in my mind, but here it was coming from the mouth of the “president” of Somaliland.

“UNOSOM and the secretary general have evolved a policy for Egypt to safeguard the Nile,” he continued. “Sixty percent of the Nile water comes from Ethiopia, which is undergoing a population explosion. One of those countries, Egypt or Ethiopia, will be without water. Egypt wants to keep this part of the world unstable for a while. The best way to do that is to keep Somalia as a loose cannon. We are Boutros-Ghali's greatest enemy because we have removed the threat of Greater Somalia. UNOSOM's only work is to sabotage everything we are doing here.”

My initial reaction was that Egal had just blown his argument. He was beginning to sound like a flake. But as I thought about it, his case began to make sense from his perspective. The entire colonial experience in East Africa was based on the strategic quest to locate and then protect the source of the Nile.

Outside intervention in Somalia has never really been about Somalia. The Italians held the Benadir coast because it provided them with seaports from which to mount their campaign against Ethiopia. The British held Somaliland in the north to secure a supply of fresh meat to their garrison stationed across the gulf in Aden. The Aden garrison, in turn, was there to
protect the Suez Canal. The possession of Jubaland in the south was a result of their hold of the Kenya colony (which, in turn, was taken over to protect Uganda and the headwaters of the White Nile upon which their Egyptian venture depended). The Soviets and Americans during the Cold War both invested in Somalia because Ethiopia was on the other side. Ethiopia is the source of the Blue Nile, which provides most of the water that provides hydropower at the Aswan Dam and then fertilizes Egypt before seeping into the Mediterranean.

All Somalis know this. To them, Somalia has always been about the security of Egypt. So when the former Egyptian foreign minister turned secretary general of the United Nations, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, sent troops to Somalia, they were naturally suspicious. As foreign minister, BoutrosGhali had been friendly with Siyaad Barre and had provided support for his repressive regime. It all seemed so very transparent.

Somalis tend to view politics somewhat differently from Westerners. To them it is personal. Acts are carried out by the man, not by the office he holds. Boutros-Ghali was the same man in New York as he was in Cairo. His aims were the same. Protect the Nile.

So when the Americans landed in Mogadishu in December 1992, most Somalis figured something was up. More was at stake here than Somalia. They knew that the foreigners would soon lose interest, and they planned to get as much as quickly as possible from them. Somalia is not about Somalia.

In the years since the Somalia intervention fell apart, most of the postmortem has borne out Somali suspicions, with conferences and seminars dealing with such topics as “Somalia: What Went Wrong,” and “Somalia: Lessons Learned.” The real focus of the discussions was on how to improve the bureaucracy. Histories written about Somalia have concentrated on the actions of diplomats: characters who came and went but who ultimately were of little consequence to Somalis. To them, the UN was just another foreign entity on its shores, and one that would eventually go, leaving Somalis to sort out their problems as they always did. One year later the UN was packing its bags.

S
adness permeated the UN's departure from Somalia in March 1995, as if it were the premature closing of an underappreciated Broadway show. The giant operation collapsed into itself. UN personnel retreated from the 80acre UN compound to the seaside port-airport complex, and finally to the port alone. Holes were dug in the sand and perfectly good vehicles were buried—just to keep them from looters. UN workers packed their bags and
tore down the prefab houses they'd erected along the beach. Pakistani and Egyptian soldiers combed their hair and shaved and waited for the ships and planes that would take them away.

With every departing charter flight, the compound became a bit quieter and a lot emptier. The French-run PX, which formerly echoed with the happy sounds of UN employees buying party-size crates of beer, whiskey, and cigarettes, became a dormitory for the last UNICEF workers. Then buildings were abandoned, and the last foreigners moved into empty shipping containers. Somali staff lined up to collect their final paychecks and demand additional compensation for working overtime and holidays. The UN slowly backed away, covering their retreat with disbursements of more than $1 million a day to keep things quiet. Every night, fewer and fewer people were pressed into tighter and tighter quarters until the whole operation vanished into a dot on the horizon.

Above and beyond it all were the Americans, who had returned to cover the UN's retreat just a year after their own unceremonious withdrawal. This time the Americans were there to rescue and protect. They were the cavalry rushing in as saviors, their uniforms unsoiled by their own now-distant involvement in Somalia. This time the failure was all the UN's.

The Americans talked about how the UN mandate in Somalia had been overambitious, how a “purely” humanitarian intervention had somehow become “nation building,” and how that was never the intention. Somehow the UN got out of control. It was that UN Security Council Resolution 814, which used terms like “political settlement” and “transitional government institutions,” that had stretched this thing way beyond its original intent. Most of the UN officers were too diplomatic—or too tired—to point out that Resolution 814 was an American initiative rammed through the Security Council in March 1993 by the Americans, who then left Pakistani, Malaysian, Bangladeshi, Indian, Zimbabwean, and Nigerian troops to do what their own marines had decided was unfeasible.

It seemed that failure was written into the plan.

A
s the plug was being pulled, it was hard not to think of the way things had been: Not so long ago, the UN operated like a gigantic clock. The air was constantly filled with helicopters shuttling people around as if Mogadishu was some futuristic model city. Passengers and freight moved through an efficient transport web that covered the entire country. A satellite communications system made remote UN outposts easy-to-reach extensions of a New York City telephone exchange. Thirty thousand soldiers
and several thousand civilians were supplied with food and water from abroad. Dignitaries came and went. Aid workers with radios attached to their belts attended security meetings every morning.

This was largely the accomplishment of Admiral Jonathan Howe: The man destined to be remembered for his ill-fated hunt for General Aydiid had wrested a vast functioning bureaucracy where once there was chaos and desert. And it all ran beautifully.

From the Somalis' perspective, however, the entire bureaucracy was an object of endless amusement. They saw foreigners, hundreds of them, darting about the streets of Mogadishu, risking their lives, occasionally getting killed or kidnapped, going from meeting to meeting, always busy, always going in and out of offices, always in a hurry, yet seemingly doing nothing. Nothing was ever built in Mogadishu that the Somalis didn't build for themselves. The only thing the foreigners left behind was military debris and trash—vast fields of empty plastic water bottles that poor Somalis first hoarded but soon had their fill of. The UN paid Somali contractors to cart off the refuse and sewage, but then showed little interest in what was actually done with the waste once it left the confines of their compounds. Other than this, the entire UN operation seemed totally isolated from Somalia, as if it were under a plastic dome.

For the last year and a half before the withdrawal, the UN troops were there only to protect UN troops. Most of the UN personnel were in positions that provided service only to UN personnel. The U.S. military ended up adopting the Somali view of the bureaucracy. American officers described the operation as a “self-licking ice cream cone.”

George Bennett, the UN's spokesman—and one of a handful of people who had been with UNOSOM from the beginning—gamely continued in the last days to put a positive spin on the situation. But Bennett was tired, and his spinning lacked its usual energy and conviction. As with everyone else, his disappointment was tempered with relief: After many close calls and last-minute reprieves, the United Nations Operation in Somalia, UNOSOM II, was finally over. Bennett had represented three different UN special representatives in Somalia. One, Jonathan Howe, had tried to kill Aydiid, and the most recent, Victor Gbeho, had, in Bennett's words, been seduced by Aydiid. Bennett sat in his office, now stuck inside a hangar on the airfield, smoking cigarettes and trying to speak over the roar of jet engines and diesel trucks. I suggested to him that the entire operation might have been unnecessary or, at the very least, overambitious. Perhaps the UN could have saved the billions of dollars that it spent on building its own infrastructure and instead employed one person and a couple of assistants to
sit in Mogadishu and offer to mediate whenever the warlords were in the mood to talk to each other.

Bennett sat silently for a moment and then responded with a Somali proverb: “If you sweep the earth with a broom, it is the broom that wears out.”

The UN's peacemaking machine was cursed with a built-in flaw: It desperately needed to succeed. When the only way to bring peace to Somalia might have been to walk away, the bureaucracy was compelled to stay and find a peace for which it could take credit. The future of peacekeeping and peace enforcement around the world depended on it. Indeed, of all the conflicts in the world, Somalia was chosen because it was deemed, in the words of General Powell, “doable.” The fight there was regarded as petty as compared to, say, the “ancient animosities” that were enflaming passions in Bosnia.