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Somalia is a lesson for the UN as it considers its role in Iraq

By William Maclean
REUTERS, MOGADISHU
Saturday, Oct 11, 2003, Page 9

Charred engine parts overgrown by cactus are all that remain today of two US Black Hawk helicopters downed by Somali gunmen a decade ago. Looters were quick to turn the aluminium chassis into household utensils.

Lying by a wall in a Mogadishu street, the wreckage is ignored by pedestrians too preoccupied surviving Somalia's continuing anarchy to care about its momentous origin in a failed Clinton administration-backed UN effort to rebuild their country.

Ten years on, does similar insignificance await the US attempt to enlist the UN in reconstructing Iraq?

Somalia provides cautionary lessons for the world body, still smarting over US attempts to cast it as the scapegoat for a disastrous foray into the African country in the 1990s.

"The [Somalia] mission was doomed because the United States essentially set the UN up for failure," wrote US analysts Walter Clarke and Jeffrey Herbst in a study of the mission.

"The US leadership simply ducked the problems that logically flowed from the decision to intervene and then get out of Somalia as quickly as possible. The UN then was left to confront the problems raised by the American intervention and inevitably found the going to be quite rough," they wrote.

Now the US plans to ask the world body to mandate a US-led multinational force to help rebuild Iraq amid growing guerrilla opposition to the US military presence there.

But potential contributors such as India and Pakistan have insisted on a strong UN mandate before they send troops to joint US, British and other soldiers in Iraq.

Their caution stems from memories of mostly failed UN peace operations in the 1990s and in particular the UNOSOM II intervention in Somalia, which remains mired in controversy because of the US military's prominent role.

"We fed them. They grew strong. They killed us," one US soldier bitterly observed to reporters as the mission ended.

In reality most killing was done by US and UN forces.

US forces gunned down thousands of civilians including women and children in a failed hunt for a renegade clan leader, and then were withdrawn by an alarmed US administration after one particularly tough battle horrified US public opinion.

A generation of UN officials still winces at subsequent US efforts to pin the blame for Somalia on the world body, pointing out that in fact American forces battling militiamen were at all times under direct US military command.

"Much, though not all, of that went wrong in Somalia during UNOSOM II was as a result of decisions made by US commanders," wrote author William Shawcross in a study of UN peacekeeping.

"Giving the UN mission a political mandate without control over the military forces on the ground is where it went wrong in Somalia," said Tim Ripley of the Center for Defence and International Security Studies at Britain's Lancaster University.

Iraq is not Somalia. Iraq's big oil reserves and geographic position give it a strategic importance that impoverished Somalia can never match, and any US leader weighing involvement must take account of correspondingly bigger risks and rewards.

In Iraq, religious confession guides some political loyalties. In Somalia, it has no such role. Clan loyalty is important in both countries but in Somalia it is fundamental to social identity.

The importance of clans and warlords' ability to manipulate them were not fully apparent to outsiders when in December 1992 the UN authorized the US to deploy tens of thousands of troops to prevent mass starvation.

In this phase, UN and American interests appeared to coincide and perhaps 100,000 people were saved from starvation by humanitarian workers protected by a powerful US-led force of troops from a handful of mostly rich nations.

In May 1993 UNOSOM II took over -- most of the troops from developed countries went home and were replaced by often ill-prepared soldiers from 31 mostly poor countries.

Some US troops stayed on but quickly found themselves locked into fighting with local warlord Mohamed Farah Aideed.

On June 5, 1993, 23 Pakistani soldiers were killed in fighting with Aideed's forces. From that moment, the imperative was to find Aideed, and for the first time since the Korean war, Shawcross says, UN forces were ordered to conduct military operations against an enemy identified by the Security Council.

In July US forces attacked a private home hoping to find Aideed and instead killed dozens of men, women and children.

On Oct. 3 1993, two Black Hawks were shot down and 18 US soldiers were killed in a battle that ended any appetite then-president Bill Clinton had for further involvement. Television images of US corpses being dragged through the streets horrified the American public.

US forces were gone six months later. UNOSOM left in 1995.

Former Mogadishu police chief and Aideed ally Abdi Hassan Awale told Reuters he estimated 15,000 Somalis were killed by US-led forces in Mogadishu between July and October 1993.

The decision to make the Oct. 3 attack was taken in Florida at US Central Command headquarters and the Turkish UNOSOM II force commander was told only moments beforehand.

"It was only after the October 3 firefight that the US tried to wash its hands of an operation it had initiated and then directed almost in its entirety," wrote Clarke and Herbst.

Another key failure was an early US tolerance of warlords, who were told they could keep their guns provided they were moved out of the city or placed in special cantonment areas.

"Dealing with warlords from the start, especially without bothering seriously to reduce the weaponry under their control, was a fatal mistake," wrote French academic Gerard Prunier.

Clarke, deputy chief of mission at the US embassy in Mogadishu at the time, wrote: "The warlords, always acutely sensitive to the correlation of forces, quickly understood that their fundamental power was not being challenged."

"They therefore could wait until the US and allied units left and then challenge a force that would inevitably be less well armed and with more complicated command and control," he said.
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