Will America repeat folly in Somalia?

Richard Dowden, Africa editor of the Economist, Guardian News Service, London

Somalia is not an easy place. One night I was attacked by drug-crazed gunmen as I strolled along the jetty at Mogadishu port. Flashes broke the dark in front of me and something flickered past my head. Crack! Crack! Crack! And then I was lying on my back staring at the sky. "Get your fucking face in the dirt!" screamed one of the gunmen as he sprinted up and jammed his gun barrel into my ear. His companion ripped my bag from my shoulder and searched my pockets. "Stay down you fucker!" he screamed.

The American marines were not very polite when they came to Somalia in 1992. I still don't know what they were on or why they thought it necessary to capture a British journalist who, like hundreds of others, had been invited by their general the night before to witness their glorious arrival. They had already made complete idiots of themselves a couple of hours earlier by storming up the beach at Mogadishu airport as if it were hostile territory only to find it occupied by the journalists and Pakistani peacekeepers.

I was marched, hands in the air, back up the jetty to where some colleagues and our Somali team, translator, driver and two guards, were waiting. Somali guards, once paid, were completely committed to dying or killing. When they saw me captured they went for their guns. I screamed at them to put them down -- which they did with a shrug as if to say: "Why employ us to protect you then?"

Then the marines made their biggest mistake. "Whites over here -- Somalis over there," they ordered. I tried to warn them. Somalis do not like being treated as inferiors but the marines were not taking advice from their prisoner. The Americans lost the battle for Somalia when they arrived.

They had come two years after the country, once the closest ally of the U.S. in the region, had descended into chaotic civil war. In 1991 President Siad Barre fled and clan-based rebel factions fought for the remains of the country. Famine gripped parts of the south and the capital, Mogadishu, after the food producing area was pillaged and fighting blocked the movement of food supplies. President Bush sent in the marines thinking that a show of force would make the warlords step back and allow food to reach the hungry. Then the country could be handed over to the United Nations and put back together again.

It was a wild miscalculation based on a fundamental misunderstanding of Somalia. It all ended predictably in tears 10 months later when American special forces tried to grab Gen. Mohammed Aideed, their erstwhile ally who turned against them. They had already tried six times, on two occasions arresting UN workers and on another seizing a pro-American Somali leader. Each time they had been manipulated by false reports.

In the afternoon of Oct. 3, 1993, a team of Delta Force soldiers and Rangers tried to seize two of Aideed's commanders in central Mogadishu. They found themselves trapped by hundreds of armed Somalis. Two helicopters were shot down and the retreating convoy was trapped in a maelstrom of bullets and rockets. They made their way through a grid of streets, one of their vehicles full of dead Americans being pushed by another, with gunmen catching them in crossfire at every crossing. The special forces were operating alone. They had not informed the main American force in Somalia and there was no back-up plan. In the middle of the night the Americans had to beg Malaysian UN peacekeepers to send an armored convoy to rescue them.

Out of the 160-odd Americans involved in that operation 18 were killed, 75 wounded and one was captured. Dead Americans were dragged through the streets. At least 500 Somalis were killed that night, probably more than 1,000. Days later President Clinton pulled the Americans out, leaving Somalia worse off than before. America blamed the UN for their blunder and shunned foreign peacemaking operations for a long time.

So are they going back to Somalia now? Revenge may be in their minds. They claim to have evidence that al-Qaeda has bases there. President Bush has already ordered the closing down of Barakaat, one of Somalia's remarkable telephone and banking systems that have grown up in the absence of government, handling between US$300 to $500 a year in remittances from Somalis living abroad to keep their families going. The closure is causing immense suffering to Somalia, already wracked by poverty and drought. Barakaat is said to have been used by al-Qaeda. Do you close down a telephone company because a criminal used it to make a call?

Washington has also declared al-Itahaad, a Somali Islamist movement, to have "terrorist" links and sent spy planes and a five- man mission to look for their bases in Somalia. Al-Itahaad grew up in the late 1980s and early 1990s in response to the chaotic clan warfare that was tearing Somalia apart. It received some money from Saudis and ran schools and clinics but it never weaned Somalis away from clan politics or persuaded them to unify under an Islamic banner. Al-Itahaad was always a purely local Somali phenomenon, without an international vision. Now it is in decline.

America's informants on the "terrorist" activities of al- Itahaad are its local enemies, the Rahanwein clan militia of the south-west and their allies, the Ethiopians who are also America's favored regional power. Ethiopia has always been Somalia's main rival in the region and its foreign policy is always aimed at keeping Somalia weak and divided. Last year a long drawn out peace conference ended in the nearest thing that Somalis have ever had to a broad-based national government. Ethiopia immediately started supporting its rivals, powerful warlords like Hussein Aideed, the son of Mohammed Aideed, and Mohammed Hersi Morgan, a war criminal who destroyed Hargeisa city 10 years ago. They and the Ethiopians are telling the Americans that the new civilian government has "terrorist" links and, it seems, the Americans are willing to listen. It is a classic case of America's allies telling Washington that their local enemies are terrorists.

The Americans fear that Somalia, having no national government, will become a haven for al-Qaeda fighters fleeing Afghanistan. Again they seem to be misreading Somalia. Although it has no national government, every inch of Somalia is under the control of a clan militia. Foreigners, always mistrusted by Somalis, could never simply settle there. Outside Somali clan politics, Somalis are purely commercial, as several foreigners have discovered. Several have been kidnapped and sold for ransom in recent years. Osama bin Laden would be no exception, especially with such a price on his head.

After more than a decade of war, most Somalis want to have their country and their lives back. The country remains deeply divided but there is little actual fighting apart from a few old battlegrounds. The telephone and remittance companies have enabled survival and could, in time, build an economy which would bind people together, create trust and cooperation and make peace. Another clumsy, ill-informed American intervention could pitch that process back into war.