Somalia: A Very Private War

By Bruce W. Nelan

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.

With reporting by J.F.O. McAllister/Washington and Clive Mutiso/Nairobi