hope restored in somalia?

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Hope Restored in Somalia?Author(s): Jonathan StevensonSource: Foreign Policy, No. 91 (Summer, 1993), pp. 138-154Published by: Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, LLCStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1149064 .

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HOPE RESTORED IN SOMALIA?

by Jonathan Stevenson

Most of the 25,000 American troops sent to rescue Somalia may have returned home but Somalia's troubles are far from over. Operation Restore Hope, America's dramatic and expensive humanitarian initiative, leaves the United Nations peacekeeping contingent with a first act few could follow. With no affirmative assur- ances that Somalia's neighbors will help it, no promises of significant long-term development aid, and nothing more than a skeletal agreement to form a provisional government, the American withdrawal raises the prospect of another U.N. failure, only this time more un- charitably gauged against raised expectations.

By the time the first Americans landed in December 1992, Somalia seemed to need a miracle. Since January 1991, when the dictator Mohammed Siad Barre fled Mogadishu, Soma- lia had limped along with no central government as the country was torn apart by violence and famine. At least 100,000 weapons, leftovers from the Cold War, fell into the hands of Somali teenagers, many of whom were addicted to khat, an herbal amphetamine. The adoles- cents roamed the streets in gun-mounted jeeps dubbed "technicals," so named for the drivers' practice of extorting money, sometimes at gun- point, from relief agencies for "technical assistance."

Meanwhile, much of Somalia starved. At the peak of the famine, in August 1992, the Inter- national Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) estimated that 4.5 million Somalis were, to varying degrees, going hungry. According to figures from the U.N. World Food Programme (wFP), one half of the people in the country's south-central region, more than 500,000 people, had perished by December 1992. In a

JONATHAN STEVENSON is a journalist based in Nairo- bi who has covered Somalia for the Economist, News- week, and the (London) Sunday Times.

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country with a population of 7 million, the death toll climbed above 1 million, according to the ICRC.

After taking control of Mogadishu, eight other cities in south-central Somalia, and the routes that connect them to the capital, the U.S.-led forces, known as the Unified Task Force (UNITAF), did succeed in dramatically improving food distribution. Soon Baidoa, the hunger vortex of the country, was receiving plenty of food through escorted convoys from the capital. By the end of December, the number of malnourished children under five in Mogadishu had returned to a near-normal 10 per cent, compared to the more than 60 per cent 5 months before. Wider food distribution has stopped migration by keeping hungry people at home and has enabled seed programs to take hold-the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization is predicting 70 per cent of normal agricultural production this year. The once-barren streets of Mogadishu are now packed, three stalls deep, with meat, grain, and bread sellers.

But there are still people in Somalia in need of food assistance, notably between Bardera and Kismayu, where bandits have gathered and coalition forces have not ventured. Although relief groups started both feeding and seeding programs in the region during the fall of 1992, a new offensive by Siad Barre loyalists in early October disrupted planting and drove out aid workers. The U.N.'s job will be to ensure security for all of Somalia, as UNrrAF has done for Mogadishu, Baidoa, and the other humanitarian relief sectors it has secured.

In addition, many Somalis are still armed. The UNITAF disarmament drive has necessarily been selective, leaving weapons in the hands of the most hardened of the bandits, whose fear of being apprehended has not restrained them, but only made them more inclined to shoot first. Relief workers, valued by gunmen before Oper- ation Restore Hope as a source of semi-legitimate "protection" income, are now prime targets for armed robbery. During the first three months of foreign troop occupation, three expatriate aid workers were killed, compared to only two during the preceding two years of anarchy. One of the expatriates, an Irish nurse,

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was gunned down in a Mogadishu suburb. Outside the areas of immediate military control, there is no more law and order than there was before the troops arrived-possibly even less.

The U.N. has also inherited America's public relations problem. The Somalis' initial enchant- ment with the U.S. troops cooled; they came to see Americans, like the U.N., more as coloniz- ers than as saviors. To some extent it was inevi- table-guests, like fish, start to smell after a few days. General Mohammed Farah Aidid, Som- alia's most petulant and powerful warlord, had always opposed foreign intervention, and sur- prised everyone when he welcomed the United States. His subsequent change of heart when he failed to garner Washington's exclusive support seemed less surprising. He accused UNTAF and its U.S. forces of weakening him and then breaking their promise to protect his forces. In late February 1993, forces loyal to Mohammed Siad Hersi "Morgan" (some formerly under Siad Barre's leadership) were able to infiltrate Aidid-held positions in Kismayu, and Aidid complained of U.S. favoritism in a radio broad- cast, prompting his supporters to riot in Moga- dishu. Other warlords have complained as well. When UNrrAF chose not to stop Aidid's en- croachment on the northeastern part of Soma- lia, Mohammed Abshir Musa, chairman of the faction that controls the region, asked in vain for the creation of a buffer zone.

But American insensitivity to cultural differ- ences was also to blame for the increasing fric- tion. The U.S. soldiers were not well briefed about Somali peculiarities. They skinnydipped in full view of the Muslim natives, never realiz- ing that Somalis would take offense. The soldiers were also instructed not to talk to the Somalis, fueling misunderstandings. When they arrived in December, GIs were called "friends," but, with time, they were more likely to be greeted with rocks. Attacks on U.S. patrols in Aidid-controlled sections of Mogadishu in- creased in February. Unfortunately, the decline of America's image did not proportionately enhance the U.N.'s prospects-Aidid's principal lieutenant, Osman Ato, regarded the handover as "a step backwards."

As the U.N. Operation in Somalia (UNOSOM II) takes over from the Americans, it is having

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to build an army from scratch, assigning soldiers from 30 countries, including Germany, into self-contained units and then melding them into a cohesive military force. That is all the more difficult given, as one senior UNOSOM II officer diplomatically put it, "[the] variation in the level of training of the different armies." Lack of training was evident in February when demonstrations in Mogadishu turned violent and Nigerian troops panicked. They fired until they had practically run out of bullets, pasting civilian buildings in the center of town. Yet the U.N. security force will have to cover the entire country-twice UNiTAF's territory-with about the same number of troops. The Security Council in March authorized 28,000 troops-7,000 fewer than the peak levels of Operation Restore Hope, yet still the largest operation in U.N. peacekeeping history.

The U.N. faltered when it exalted bureaucratic propriety over the very results it was seeking.

Officially, the U.N. had hoped that political progress at the Addis Ababa national reconciliation conference in March would make up for the stretching of resources, operational glitches, and public relations snags during the transition to sole U.N. control. At the opening of the conference, even Aidid praised the U.N.'s efforts and vowed to work with UNOSOM II for peace. But renewed fighting in Kismayu disrupted the conference and angered Aidid. The Somali factions did salvage appearances by agreeing to set up a provisional government in the form of a three-tiered, quasi-legislative, 74- member Transitional National Council that will subsume both discrete regional authorities and inchoate national government. But knotty and essential details-such as how the membership of the council will be determined, how geo- graphical boundaries will be drawn, and how to resolve the secessionist claims of the northwest- ern quadrant of the country-remain all too vague. No timetable was set for the actual emplacement of the government, but the ac- cord ambitiously calls for disarmament by the end of June. Somali factions agreed at the conference to impound weapons and isolate

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their militias at "transition sites," but they insisted that those moves be simultaneous-a tricky proposition in the best of times made even more so with American and U.N. troops distracted by the handover of administrative, financial, and military control in early May.

The most challenging aspect of the Somali crisis, though, is Somalia's clan-based political culture. Somalis are 99 per cent Muslim and share common ethnic origins, so clans are not, for the most part, religiously or ethnically based. Instead they are vast patrilineal networks that originated generations ago. With succeed- ing generations, separate branches or "sub- clans" developed. In a given locale, people acutely identify with their clan and are suspi- cious of outsiders.

Traditionally, clans would only band together if the equilibrium among nomadic enclaves was disrupted, returning afterwards to their ex- clusionary ways. In some respects, that pattern was repeated in 1989 when they joined forces as the United Somali Congress in an effort to drive from power Siad Barre, who had ruled Somalia-at times with U.S. economic and military support-since 1969. Two years later, in January 1991, the clans succeeded and Siad Barre was forced to flee to Kenya. That accom- plished, though, they broke with tradition. Because Siad Barre had favored his own clan, the Marehan, so heavily and abused others so brutally, each rebel group vengefully sought to take Siad Barre's power for itself.

In January 1991, while forces loyal to Aidid chased Siad Barre out of the capital, Ali Mahdi Mohammed, a wealthy Mogadishu hotelier, proclaimed himself interim president and de- clared a new government dominated by mem- bers of his clan. By November 1991, the situation in Mogadishu had devolved into full-scale civil war, with Aidid and Ali Mahdi, both factional leaders of Mogadishu's dominant clan, the Hawiye, vying for total control. A

Mogadishu businessman described the new clan dynamic well: "Siad Barre dominates the psy- chology of this country. All clans want what his clan had." After four months of nihilistic fighting among Somalis, the U.N. was able to bro- ker a cease-fire in March 1992, leaving Ali Mahdi in control of the north of the city and

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Aidid in control of the south. Much of Moga- dishu had been reduced to rubble.

West and south of Mogadishu, in the Juba Valley, which contains most of the country's farmland, the scorched-earth policy of Siad Barre's retreating troops created a horrific famine belt. The troops slaughtered livestock, plundered crops, and looted seeds and tools. Aidid's forces counterattacked, worsening the problem. While the relatively unscathed northeastern portion of the country was able to maintain its livestock, the Juba Valley lost almost all of its. Drought, a cyclical problem in Somalia, exacerbated the crop shortage created by the warring armies. As the victims lost their children to malnutrition and atrocities, they staggered to Mogadishu in the hope that food would arrive by sea. But with local clans exclu- sionary by nature and already frazzled from all the violence, the newcomers could not secure food from their fellow Somalis.

The outside world saw the country descend into barbaric lawlessness. From the Somalis' point of view, though, after 20 years of brutal dictatorship there was no desirable political structure worth defending. All that mattered was clan and subclan. Warlords like Aidid and Ali Mahdi depended on local clan elders to keep the young guns aligned behind them.

Yet, in some areas, decentralized clan politics did make it possible to keep chaos in check. Abshir Musa's Somali Salvation Democratic Front, for example, controls the northeastern part of Somalia, the largest area claimed by any one faction. It is untouched by UNITAF forces, and its hunger has been managed largely without outside help. Herds and non-food crops have been maintained for export-all in an area that is largely semi-desert. An octogenarian clan leader named Mohammed Nur Shodok has had similar success on a smaller scale in Hoddur, a town near the Ethiopian border. There, Shodok managed to keep Aidid out of his territory by starting his own relief operations early on and essentially nourishing local gunmen into obedience. A loose alliance with Aidid in turn insulated Hoddur and has enabled it to remain one of the least-troubled places in southern Somalia.

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Sahnoun's Way The United Nations was slow to respond to

Somalia's worsening crisis. It did not under- stand the depth of the catastrophe until late 1991, long after the famine and clan fighting had become critical. In part, the Somalis' own fierce individualism is to blame for letting the U.N. coast-no key Somali politician formally asked for help until Ali Mahdi's prime minister did in early 1992. But in retrospect an institutional resignation to Africa's hopelessness was also to blame. When asked why the U.N. had not taken action, a U.N. official in Nairobi told Newsweek, "This is Africa, not Europe, if that is any answer." James Jonah, the first U.N. trou- bleshooter, was so flabbergasted by the moral and physical putrefaction of Somalia, and so befuddled by its labyrinthine clan politics, that he privately dismissed Somalia as a problem child too filthy, bizarre, and suicidal to deal with. He did most of his peace brokering in New York and Addis Ababa, and he left Moga- dishu after only a few sheltered days.

Although Jonah's efforts did produce the fragile March 1992 truce, his follow-up mea- sures were too weak to capitalize on the opportunity. First, instead of urging stepped-up relief on the heels of the cease-fire, he only recom- mended a technical assessment of Somalia's peacekeeping and relief needs and the deploy- ment of U.N. observers. Then he threatened the warlords with a cutoff of food aid if the cease-fire did not hold, maintaining that it was they "who must bear responsibility for denying the starving population of Mogadishu this vital source of life." After the cease-fire, though, the warlords had little control over the worst of the looters. In any case, the warlords' humanitarian concerns were at best limited to their clans. Jonah's high-handed threat created no incentive to stop the violence, and, if carried out, would have punished innocent Somalis. Jonah's busi- ness was more properly with local clan elders who could help aid workers distribute food and discourage depredations of undisciplined gunmen.

In April 1992, U.N. secretary-general Bou- tros Boutros-Ghali appointed Algerian diplomat Mohammed Sahnoun as the U.N. special envoy

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to Somalia. In contrast to Jonah, Sahnoun immediately acclimated himself to Somalia, meeting with clan elders in the bush.

In mid-June, though, just as political talks were starting to bear fruit, a Russian plane with U.N. markings delivered military hardware and newly printed Somali currency to Ali Mahdi at his airfield in north Mogadishu. The Russian crew's contract with the U.N. had expired, but the U.N. had no ready explanation for the highly disruptive blunder. An angry Aidid, accusing the U.N. of favoring Ali Mahdi, refused to allow 47 U.N. military observers into Somalia and withdrew his consent for 500 armed peacekeepers. Sahnoun deemed Aidid's suspicions "understandable" and criticized his own organization for its "lack of vigilance" in policing its contractors. Sahnoun also under- stood well the effects of bureaucratic inertia. In July he even importuned donors to leapfrog a second U.N. technical assessment with food airlifts to Somalia's interior because, he said, "kids are dying right now."

All the while the Arab League and the Orga- nization of African Unity largely ignored Soma- lia. Sub-Saharan Africa essentially deserted it. Until recently, the only sub-Saharan African leader to visit Somalia was President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, and no country, other than Sudan, has sent a single grain of food. Neighborly help consisted primarily of Ethi- opia's and Kenya's passive acceptance of Somali refugees.

Somalia's recalcitrant politics, the U.N.'s neglect, regional apathy, and internal anarchy all distinguished Somalia as a place in the most dire need of assistance, but they severely limited Sahnoun's options. He had to make do with the U.N.'s own internal capabilities: supplying food (WFP); providing administrative expertise in relief operations (United Nations Children's Fund); resurrecting infrastructure (U.N. Devel- opment Programme); and offering political mediation (the secretary-general's office). Con- spicuously absent from that list, at first, were military services.

Facing critical security problems without a police mechanism at his disposal, Sahnoun worked indefatigably to forge at least a sem- blance of accountability among the warlords-

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particularly Aidid, the predominant leader and the one most hostile to the United Nations. (Though he has been criticized for focusing too much on Aidid, the other main players, Ali Mahdi and Abshir Musa, needed far less con- vincing. Because they were militarily weaker than Aidid, they favored U.N. intervention as an equalizer.) Aidid finally agreed in August 1992 to allow 500 Pakistani soldiers into Moga- dishu. At the same time, the U.N. was trying with a 100-day plan to improve aid distribution by tightening its logistical rein on all of the relief operations.

The Pakistanis' mission was to secure the port, safeguard food shipments to and from the airport, and escort food convoys from the port to destinations within Mogadishu-all without presenting a threat to the warlords. But the soldiers stayed bivouacked in seclusion near the airport for months, and never did secure the port. Their commanding officer, Brigadier General Imtiaz Shaheen, knew he was outnum- bered-Aidid alone claimed to have more than 30,000 troops-and refused to deploy his men. The Pakistanis had been assigned a task-re- placing an economy based on armed extortion and outright theft with orderly martial law-for which they were not nearly strong enough. Making matters worse, the U.N. force's rules of engagement allowed shooting only in self-de- fense-a virtual death sentence for pointmen patrolling hostile areas full of assault rifles.

Sahnoun had hoped that the military presence would show the Somalis that if food aid were channeled in an orderly fashion, there would be plenty for everyone. He hoped that Somali warlords-and, on a local level, clan elders-would then convince gunmen to help feed their starving communities rather than stealing from them.

Sahnoun recognized that for all their unfath- omable idiosyncrasies, "clans are politically interesting because they dilute power." Sah- noun aimed to put the clan system to work for Somalia. In August 1992 he had begun to secure cooperation from local elders in preparing airfields in the interior to receive the U.S. Air Force planes delivering food. By November, in fact, that cooperation was helping sustain the people of Baidoa, Bardera, Belet Huen, and

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Hoddur-four of the nine sectors later covered by Operation Restore Hope. Where clan ten- sion made cooperation impossible-in Kismayu and Merca, for example-relief operations pro- gressed slowly and at great risk to expatriate workers. Nevertheless, malnutrition and disease figures improved even in those locales during Sahnoun's tenure.

The most crucial test was Mogadishu port. There, more than a thousand young gunmen staffed five different subclan-based security teams, all insisting on being paid by CARE and WFP to escort food-which the gunmen often stole themselves-to distribution points. Sah- noun worked out a deal in August 1992 with Aidid and clan elders whereby they would be given food with which to coax the gunmen out of the port; the compulsion of Aidid's might and the elders' authority, in theory, would keep them out. Although the port was looted shortly after Sahnoun's consultations, his chastising response impressed the Somali leaders. Within a week the port had been purged and food distribution was improving. Shortly thereafter the 500 Pakistanis secured the international airport, which marginally enhanced the limited logistical capabilities of non-governmental orga- nizations (NGOs) based in Mogadishu. Those NGOs with operations based in Baidoa, for example, were able to transport medicines and supplementary food rations more quickly and frequently.

It is a pity Sahnoun was not given the chance to see his work to its conclusion. He abruptly stepped down in late October, and much of the blame lies with the U.N. bureaucracy. After Sahnoun had tortuously cajoled Aidid into allowing the 500 peacekeeping troops into Mogadishu and, after he had begun to nudge Aidid toward accepting another 3,000, U.N. headquarters announced-at Boutros-Ghali's direction and without Sahnoun's consul- tation-that it would send in the 3,000 troops regardless of the warlord's wishes. Aidid threatened to send the soldiers home in body bags, and lost interest in keeping the port open and safeguarding relief operations. The situation immediately deteriorated: The Pakistanis were attacked at the airport, a food ship was shelled and turned away, and U.N. officials were

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mugged in Kismayu. Sahnoun's four months of arduous and fruitful diplomacy had been un- done with one public statement from New York, and he was furious. He sent Boutros- Ghali a letter offering to resign and become a special envoy accountable only to the secretary-general. He did not want to quit Somalia but to circumvent obstructive U.N. bureaucracy.

Boutros-Ghali accepted the resignation, but not the proposition. He and Sahnoun are (or at least were) old friends. Before his resignation, Sahnoun's public disgust over the U.N.'s foot- dragging in Somalia did spur the secretary- general to malign the Security Council for its ethnocentric concern over the "rich man's war" in the former Yugoslavia while it ignored So- malia. That turned the tide, and by September Somalia was consuming 35 per cent of the ICRC's worldwide budget and attracting a great deal of international media attention. But Sah- noun's continued criticism of U.N. agencies and middle-managers, notably in a 60 Minutes segment, even after Somalia had gained the world's attention, appeared to cost him Bou- tros-Ghali's esteem.

Much of Sahnoun's swagger was tactical rather than impulsive. He said in an interview that the U.N. would have to work hard to "repair the damage" caused by the Russian plane incident and hinted later that personaliz- ing the U.N.'s involvement in Somalia was the way he had chosen to do it. But the U.N. bureaucracy--especially Jonah-felt jilted and let Boutros-Ghali know about it. Sahnoun's effectiveness in an exhausting, thankless job was undeniable, so Boutros-Ghali kept quiet through most of Sahnoun's stint. But in No- vember Sahnoun publicly refused to deal with "the bureaucrats and nomenklatura at headquarters," and Boutros-Ghali apparently felt he had no choice but to accept Sahnoun's resignation.

Sahnoun's replacement, Ismat Kittani, plainly lacked the Algerian's charisma and tirelessness. More important, Kittani did not realize that the key to solving the Somali problem was an un- derstanding of the Somali mind. A loyal, long- time U.N. bureaucrat, Kittani focused on "eliminating the daylight" between the U.N. and Somalia's other benefactors. That attitude

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quickly proved counterproductive because many Somalis harbor a deep distrust of the U.N. in general, and Boutros-Ghali in particular. One problem was the U.N.'s earlier fecklessness and Aidid's impression of the U.N.'s apparent tilt toward MAli Mahdi. The other was a widespread rumor stoked by Aidid about Egypt's alleged designs on Somali lands during Boutros-Ghali's tenure as Egyptian foreign minister. Many Somalis believe that Egypt agreed to provide Siad Barre with arms in exchange for granting farming rights to Egyptians on some of So- malia's most arable land, displacing the native Somalis. Egypt flatly denies the allegation, but many Somalis still see Boutros-Ghali as a Siad Barre collaborator.

Sahnoun's four months of arduous and fruitful diplomacy had been un- done with one public statement from New York.

Sahnoun had always sought the consent of the warlords and proposed only limited deploy- ments at selected points because of the Somalis' fear of military occupation. The Security Coun- cil, though, faced a barrage of public criticism for its failure to act and it was all too happy to give U.S. president George Bush the U.N. fig leaf for an American intervention. Almost immediately Aidid began amplifying Somali mis- givings about the U.N. in order to marginalize the U.N. in favor of the United States, which he regarded as a more potent, though more corruptible, backer. He was to some extent successful. The December talks in Addis Ababa only made headway when the United Nations left the table. Boutros-Ghali's motorcade was pelted with stones and rotten fruit and denied access to U.N. headquarters during his January 1993 visit to Mogadishu. As it turned out, Sahnoun's very distance from the U.N. had been his greatest asset in Somalia. In his place, the U.N. got two perishable novelties: camou- flaged U.S. Marines with military hardware, and the prospect of American sponsorship of a legitimate Somali government.

Ambassador Robert Oakley, the U.S. special envoy to Somalia from December through

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February, has been the only post-Sahnoun diplomat who has had any real influence with Somali strongmen. Like Sahnoun, Oakley grasped the reality that clans in Somalia take clear precedence over both nationhood and religion as sources of allegiance. And like Sah- noun, he was convinced that the basic clan structure should be preserved and exploited in order to check the aggrandizement of any one clan.

The greatest diplomatic challenge, then, has always been to reverse Siad Barre's corruption of Somali tradition, so that some kind of equilibrium can prevail. In their March agreement at Addis Ababa, Somali leaders merely agreed that this is indeed the problem and vaguely outlined a possible solution without specifying how to arrive at it. But much remains to be done.

Precisely because the Somalis perceived Op- eration Restore Hope as an essentially unilateral American effort, Oakley suffered a tactical disadvantage that did not burden Sahnoun. Each Somali political leader, notably Aidid, insisted on the U.N.'s neutrality but sought U.S. support for his own clan-which was distinctly incompatible with equilibrium among clans. Most Somalis in positions of power still could not stomach the idea of a clan-neutral, egalitarian polity arching over the network of regional clans.

The American military presence encouraged the warlords to vie for special treatment and, when that was not forthcoming, to interfere with reconciliation. Between the American landing at Mogadishu on December 9 and the March conference, Aidid took the opportunity, in sequence, to welcome the United States as a white knight to the U.N.'s colonial raider; to portray himself as a U.S. crony (he spread the rumor that Bush came to Mogadishu on New Year's Eve to help him set up a provisional government); and to accuse the United States of betrayal when Morgan loyalists overran Kis- mayu. The problem did not end when Robert Gosende took over from Oakley before the conference in March 1993. Shortly thereafter, Jonathan Howe, yet another American, replaced Kittani as the U.N. envoy to Somalia.

Sahnoun, by contrast, had precious little with

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which to tempt Aidid or any of the others. His honor and hard work earned him the warlords' grudging respect, and, with nothing else on the horizon, that might have been enough. The diplomatic task of forging peace now reverts back to the U.N. and the Somalis themselves, but U.N. neutrality may seem to the warlords inadequate compensation for the possibility of special favors from the United States. Notwith- standing Oakley's perceptiveness and resolve, a Somali political solution would have most likely come easier without the U.S. intervention.

In fact, the expensive American initiative would have been unnecessary had the U.N. not fired Sahnoun, rendering a political solution impossible at the moment of Somalia's most critical need. Sahnoun had been working toward precisely the conditions that Operation Restore Hope has produced-locally sustained peace, functioning markets, and a population gainfully surviving--only without the added complications of a massive outside military presence. His program had a good chance of working. Mark Stirling, UNICEF representative for Somalia, ruefully remarked that "with Am- bassador Sahnoun there was confidence in the U.N.'s political leadership." Boutros-Ghali himself deemed Sahnoun "indispensable." In- deed, Sahnoun had entire governments behind him. The Belgians and Canadians committed their forces to the U.N.'s initial 3,500-troop effort on the basis of Sahnoun's diplomatic skill at setting the table for their arrival.

Recent efforts to legitimize Somalia's economy through competitive bidding programs for selling food and awarding transport contracts, in fact, started with proposals Sahnoun had ad- vanced. The cooperation of clan elders in Bai- doa and elsewhere that Oakley was able to secure was also nothing new; Sahnoun accom- plished the same thing months earlier in Hod- dur, where fines and jail terms effectively de- terred gunplay. Banditry on the road between Mogadishu and Baidoa had made local cooperation in Baidoa of tertiary importance, so Sah- noun concentrated instead on getting Aidid to consent to the ancillary military help needed to secure the truck routes. His priorities were right on target. Moreover, the original 500 Pakistanis did secure Mogadishu airport. An-

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other battalion might well have been able to secure the port and get convoys moving safe- ly-particularly if they had the preemptive rules of engagement that the Americans were given. Indeed, private relief groups were holding their own in Baidoa at the time Sahnoun departed. The number of dead recorded weekly there shrank from 1,780 on September 6 to 335 on November 1.

Finally, the Somali peace process is not much further along than it was under Sahnoun's stewardship. The national reconciliation conference in March was held about the same time that Sahnoun had pegged as realistic for such a conference. In fact, the idea originated with him and gathered its initial momentum from his efforts. The agreement produced at that conference was precatory, with Aidid the principal obstacle to consensus. Given Sahnoun's special relationship with Aidid, Sahnoun probably could have emerged with something of greater substance.

Operation Restore Hope leaves the U.N. peacekeeping contingent with a first act few could follow.

The U.N. faltered when it exalted bureaucratic propriety over the results it was seeking. It might have seemed dishonorable to keep a cantankerous malcontent like Sahnoun on the payroll, but beyond appearances lay an important irony: His minor indiscretions endeared him to the Somalis and let a stigmatized U.N. glide quietly along behind him. His indepen- dence had not reached a point of institutional self-deprecation-it was not as if Sahnoun's cachet with the Somalis turned only on his flippancy and insubordination, or came only at the U.N.'s expense. His program was well conceived and beginning to work. He criticized "rich Arab nations" and the West for their neglect far more than he did the United Na- tions.

As time passed, by his very domination of the Somali political process, Sahnoun was slowly closing the gap between himself and his em- ployer. To the Somalis, in effect, he was be- coming the United Nations. Most important, he was able to moderate Aidid's calculated

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fickleness--something at which neither the Americans nor the U.N. has been remotely successful. Humble pragmatism would have dictated tolerating Sahnoun for the sake of both the Somalis and, ultimately, the U.N. itself. By firing Sahnoun and enervating his initiatives, the U.N. made a full-blown military occupation a practical necessity. In the bargain, it introduced a whole host of difficulties-more risks to relief workers, the military transition, and its own marginalization, to name a few- that otherwise might have been avoided.

The Americans, meanwhile, stepped right into the middle of the U.N.'s mess. "The Weinberger-Powell doctrine has succeeded beautifully in Somalia," remarked Oakley in a statement that can only be regarded as disin- genuous. Overwhelming strength has improved the feeding situation, but it has created a wholesale dependence on foreign soldiers, and the Somalis have come to resent that dependence because it falls so far short of salvation.

The one tangible benefit UNITAF and UNOSOM II may leave behind is a degree of disarmament. Total disarmament is practically impossible-and perhaps even unfair-but the elimination of heavy weapons and the registra- tion of small arms should prevent serious territorial battles. If disarmament goes far enough, there is a reasonably good chance that the various Somali factions will be able to agree on territorial boundaries. That is the sine qua non of national self-government. One point emerged clearly from the Somali talks: Unless each of the 15 factions is assured of its territorial integrity, none will accept a singular rule of law from a central authority.

Nonetheless, there will probably be enough guns and ammunition left in circulation to support limited guerilla operations for years to come. That means political reconciliation efforts in Somalia will likely be strained by low- intensity conflict, like that in Kismayu, among a dozen different factions. Progress is bound to be painfully incremental; and, despite the showy March 29 agreement to form a provisional national government, progress must proceed from the ground up.

The U.N. should resist any temptation to impose a protectorate or trusteeship. Its ap-

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FOREIGN POLICY

proach should instead emphasize self-help, as both Sahnoun and Oakley clearly advocated. At the same time, it seems myopic to provide emergency aid but not protect the investment with longer-term development aid. The U.N. should promote such assistance to the Somalis, but on the strict condition that they reach a peaceful political solution within a reasonable period of time. Countries donating funds to the U.N. for humanitarian aid to Somalia have imposed a similar requirement, and that seems to have most of Somalia's political figures gen- uinely worried.

The general solution to the factional problems that tore apart Somalia is not the military. Operation Restore Hope's main achieve- ments-food distribution, partial disarmament, and the beginnings of political reconciliation-would almost certainly have resulted from Sahnoun's softer techniques. The U.N.'s stron- gest suit is its ability to slog relentlessly through the political underbrush of troubled countries with gritty diplomacy, without taking sides or parceling out favors, clearing the path to political self-sufficiency. "Wherever there's oppression or a violation of human rights," Sahnoun has said, "the secretary-general must take the initiative of sending wise men very quickly." And they must improvise, inventively using the tools they find in place.

In this case, the U.N. found it easier to arm the Americans with a Security Council resolu- tion and let them pave a highway for the U.N., as it had done in the Persian Gulf. In the fu- ture, the U.N. will need to discard its white- collar attitude toward crises. Workmanlike programs like Sahnoun's must be the rule, not the exception.

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hope restored in somalia?

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