Back to The Bad Old Days

By ANDREW PURVIS/ASHA FARTO

Aden Abdulrahman Mohammed believed the worst was over when the U.S. Marines arrived a year ago in his village just north of Baidoa. He had managed to reap a good harvest of sorghum, set up a water pump and construct a small chicken farm. Then suddenly in November, the bad old days returned. A dispute about two stolen camels between rival subclans quickly escalated into a hit-and-run war. When the shooting stopped, 15 villages, including Asha Farto, lay in smoking ruins. All the sorghum stored by the farmers had been looted or torched, and when the seasonal rains failed the following month, the villagers were forced once again to turn to international agencies for food. "The troops brought us no change at all," says Mohammed with a grim laugh.

Now the American and European contingents are pulling out, leaving behind a greatly diminished U.N. force drawn mostly from developing nations that have neither the resources nor the political will to engineer the peace that eluded their better-equipped counterparts. Yet the fundamental problems that triggered the famine of 1992 and the U.S.-led military intervention persist. Warlords are in the ascendant, bedeviling efforts by the U.N. and Somalis to negotiate a political solution. Violent attacks on aid workers have increased, threatening to reverse any progress made in the past year. The prospect of renewed anarchy has brought many Somalis to the brink of despair. "It will never be stopped," laments Mohammed Haji Yusur, a doctor in the port of Kismayu, where clan warfare has once again filled his hospital with the dead and wounded. "It will never end."

For the U.S., angry and frustrated at a costly mission gone wrong, even a dignified retreat is proving difficult to secure. Last week seven more service members died when their AC-130 gunship crashed off the Kenyan coast en route to Mogadishu. As the last American ground troops packed up for their departure this week, free-lance gunmen continued to take potshots at guard posts and passing convoys. Eight warships are deployed offshore should trouble erupt.

The U.S. may avoid the indignity of another Saigon. But the 20,000 primarily Third World troops who remain behind may not be so lucky. The scaled-down force will limit itself to securing a few strategic ports and airports and, where possible, to guarding relief supplies. Even those diminished goals may prove overly ambitious, say some military observers. They argue that with a few well-timed attacks, warlords like Mohammed Farrah Aidid could drive the U.N. forces out. Though the warlord continued to meet last week with other militia leaders to search for a political solution, most observers believe that he will never settle for anything less than supreme power.

In the absence of adequate U.N. protection, most aid agencies have gone back to their old methods of self-preservation. In Baidoa, the site of three separate bomb blasts since Christmas, relief workers have begun fortifying their compounds with razor wire, sandbagged guard posts and well-armed local gunmen. For many Somalis, the echoes of 1991 and early 1992, when the world stood by while the country slipped into famine, are disturbing. "Everyone will have to leave this place," says Aden Abdulrahman Mohammed in Asha Farto. That may be possible for a fortunate few. For the majority of Somalis, there will be no escape.