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From: [e-mail] (Bernhard Helander)
Subject: Somalia News Update, No 44
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In this issue:
SOMALI WARLORDS MOVING GUNWAGONS FROM MOGADISHU
FRENCH TROOPS WOUND THREE SOMALIS NEAR BAIDOA
SOMALI MUSLIMS SEEK FUNDAMENTALIST ISLAMIC STATE
SOMALIA-SHAMBLES
GUNMEN LOOT FOOD AS TROOPS LEAVE
SOMALIA-NEXT FAMINE

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               S O M A L I A  N E W S  U P D A T E


____________________________________________________________________

No 44                December 27, 1992.               ISSN 1103-1999

____________________________________________________________________
Somalia News Update is published irregularly via electronic mail and
fax. Questions can be directed to [e-mail] or to fax
number [phone]. All material is free to quote as long as the
source is stated.
____________________________________________________________________


SOMALI WARLORDS MOVING GUNWAGONS FROM MOGADISHU

By Alistair Lyon

     MOGADISHU, Dec 21, Reuter - Two Somali warlords started to haul
their "technical" battlewagons out of Mogadishu on Monday under a
U.S.-brokered peace deal, a U.S. officer said.  A French military
spokesman announced plans for 350 French legionnaires and 150 U.S.
Marines to move into the famished inland town of Hoddur on Friday,
Christmas Day. U.S. military spokesman Colonel Fred Peck said
hundreds of Marines would leave Mogadishu at dawn on Tuesday for
Baidoa, Somalia's famine capital and the launchpad for planned task
force deployments to other hungry towns.
     "It's a big convoy packed to the gills with all the equipment
they need to go north," Peck said.
     Relief agencies have been pressing the multinational force to
act swiftly to curb lawlessness and gun rule, particularly in north
Mogadishu and other parts of Somalia where clan gangs have looted
food aid meant for the starving.  A U.S. officer said militia leader
Mohamed Farah Aideed had moved 30 to 40 technicals out of south
Mogadishu on Monday and his chief rival, Ali Mahdi Mohamed, would
move a similar number from the north on Tuesday.  "This is a Somali
agreement and it's being coordinated by the Somalis," said Marine
Colonel Michael Hagee. "That in itself is a large step forward."
Freelance bandits and factions not aligned with Aideed or Ali Mahdi
would be told by radio and newspaper announcements to get their
technicals out of town fast.
     "What we are trying to do is to get the factions to bring their
arms under control so we do not have a confrontation between the
combined task force and the Somalis," Hagee said.
     Ali Mahdi and Aideed agreed on December 11 to move "all forces
and their technicals" outside Mogadishu as part of a seven-point
peace plan reached two days after the multinational force reached
Somalia to secure relief routes for the starving.
     U.S. officials said any technical sighted after the accord had
taken effect would "automatically be considered a threat." American
and French troops have in the past opened fire when they have
perceived a direct threat from technicals. In the latest such clash,
French troops shot and wounded three Somalis after a battlewagon
fired on their observation post four km (two miles) northwest of
Baidoa on Sunday night. "A French sniper stopped the vehicle dead and
there was an exchange of fire," Colonel Jean-Paul Perruche told
reporters. He said a French platoon sent to reinforce the post traded
fire with gunmen one km (600 yards) south of the position.
     More French troops went in with two U.S. helicopters in support
and found three wounded Somalis armed with AK-47 assault rifles.
Seven other gunmen in the pickup had fled. There were no French
casualties. One Somali had serious stomach wounds. Perruche called
the attack deliberate but said he did not believe it was aimed
specifically at French troops. "It seems to me that some people of
the region of Baidoa are not very happy at the presence of U.S. and
French forces in this country. Before they had all the power to
terrorise and rob the people. Now they cannot act like that," he
said. U.S. and French troops took the famine-hit town of Baidoa,
dubbed the "City of Death," last Wednesday. Perruche said a joint
U.S.-French force, under French command, would push on to Hoddur, 150
km (90 miles) north of Baidoa, on Thursday and enter the town on
Christmas morning.


FRENCH TROOPS WOUND THREE SOMALIS NEAR BAIDOA

By Paul Holmes

     MOGADISHU, Dec 21, Reuter - French troops wounded at least three
gunmen when they came under attack in southern Somalia, a French
military spokesman said on Monday. Relief agencies urged U.S.-led
forces to push into lawless north Mogadishu and force weapons off the
streets. A French military spokesman said troops opened fire when 10
gunmen in a "technical" battlewagon charged towards their observation
post near the inland famine town of Baidoa under cover of darkness on
Sunday. "It was a concerted attack," said Colonel Jean-Paul Perruche.
He said a French sniper stopped the vehicle in its tracks. The three
Somalis, found with Kalashnikovs by French paratroops, were taken to
hospital, one with severe stomach wounds. No French soldiers were
hurt and the other gunmen fled.
     The clash highlighted continued insecurity in Somalia, where
U.S.-led forces have intervened to keep pillaging gunmen and feuding
clan militias away from food for victims of Africa's worst famine
this century. Relief agencies on Monday piled pressure on the U.S.
military to extend their security umbrella to north Mogadishu,
nominally controlled by warlord Ali Mahdi Mohamed. "It's literally
teeming with AK-47s and teeming with technicals," said Mark Thomas,
spokesman for the U.N. Children.s Fund (UNICEF). "Any military
presence at all would help as long as it is a show of force. They
said it would happen soon but would give us no definite date," Thomas
said.
     U.S. troops who secured Mogadishu port and airport at the start
of Operation Restore Hope on December 9 have escorted food convoys
across the bombed out Green Line that divides the capital but do not
operate patrols in the north. Relief agencies have withdrawn
virtually all their foreign staff from the enclave because of the
insecurity. Thomas said the Irish aid agency Goal told a U.S.
military liaison officer at a daily meeting on Monday that it was
considering suspending operations in the north. "UNICEF supports what
Goal said about insecurity. We cannot send more supervisory staff in
until the situation improves," Thomas told reporters.
     U.S. Marines and their coalition allies have established
security bridgeheads for the relief operation in Baidoa and at a
military airfield in Bali Dogle and on Sunday swept ashore to do the
same in the southern port of Kismayu. But U.S. commanders say their
mission is not to disarm a country awash with weapons after two years
of clan killing and gun rule. Overall commander General Joseph Hoar
said last week that security would improve as more troops arrived.
     Sunday's attack on the French observation post, northwest of
Baidoa airfield, occurred a day after U.S. and French troops seized
six battlewagons and disarmed 45 heavily-armed gunmen who had massed
at a compound just outside Baidwa, 250 km (150 miles) west of
Mogadishu. A Marine patrol in Mogadishu also shot and hit a gunman in
a technical who trained a machinegun on them near the Green Line on
Sunday. It was not clear if the man was killed. "We're not in the
investigation business," said Navy Commander Jim Kudla, a U.S.
military spokesman. "The squad perceived a direct threat to them,
they fired and that's it."


SOMALI MUSLIMS SEEK FUNDAMENTALIST ISLAMIC STATE

By Keith B. Richburg
Washington Post Foreign Service
Copyright 1992 The Washington Post

     MERCA, Somalia - At the run-down port in this steamy coastal
town, scores of workmen, shirtless and sweating, struggle under
silver tins of cooking oil and heavy sacks of rice. They are
unloading a Red Cross barge, under the watchful eye of a handful of
sullen sentries, some with red-and-white Arab-style kaffiyehs
covering their heads, all with AK-47 automatic rifles dangling from
straps on their shoulders.
     The port guards are members of the Islamic Union Party, or
Ittihad, Somalia's armed Muslim fundamentalist group, which has
established a toehold here in this Indian Ocean trading post where,
according to legend, Islam first touched Somalia's shores. Since
their arrival here earlier this year, the fundamentalists have been
credited with establishing a strict security system that has all but
eliminated wholesale looting of relief food meant for the country's
millions of starving people. Food still gets stolen in Merca, usually
from truck convoys the moment they exit this port. But inside the
port's perimeter, the Union Party exercises strict discipline and
control. "For security, they are good," said Jama Ali Kahin of the
Somali Red Crescent relief group. "They are popular because before
they came there was a lot of looting."
     Elsewhere around the country, cities have been torn by anarchy,
looting and clan violence; in the few pockets where the
fundamentalists have moved in, they generally have managed to impose
order on the chaos. The Union Party arrived in the small Wadajir
district of Mogadishu, the Somali capital, six weeks ago and imposed
its own strict brand of sharia, or Islamic law, and, said Somali
journalist A.M. Ali, "it was very, very successful - no theft, no
problem."
     In accordance with sharia, however, Ali and others said, looters
captured by Union Party members in Wadajir had their hands amputated.
"They are harsh, but they are extremely structured and they are
disciplined," said Rakiya Omaar, a human rights activist and former
executive director of Africa Watch. "People are sick and tired of
war, they are sick and tired of looting, and no one is providing
social services." The Union Party is still considered a minor faction
in Somalia, a fringe movement at best that so far has attracted
little popular support. But its method in Merca, in its northern
stronghold and elsewhere has been to move into locations where there
is a power vacuum and win converts by demonstrating how a return to
Islamic fundamentals can bring an end to the kind of violence and
banditry that have wracked this country for nearly two years.
     The fundamentalists' goal in Somalia, according to a Union Party
spokesman here, is to establish an Islamic state based on sharia.
"Islam and sharia," said spokesman Abdulkadr Abdulle. "We want people
to obey the sharia." But now, the Union Party feels a threat from  an
unexpected source: the intervention in Somalia of U.S. and other
foreign combat troops who have come to protect relief supplies and
help feed this country's starving millions. The Bush administration
and U.S. military officials have called the intervention strictly
humanitarian, a response to the searing images of emaciated, starving
women and children digging into the ground for a few extra grains of
rice. But to the Muslim fundamentalists, the intervention is akin to
an invasion, whose ultimate goal is to crush the budding Islamic
movement.
     "Of course it's an invasion - nobody asked us," Abdulle said.
"Strange enough, the Americans during the Reagan administration used
to help (ousted dictator Mohamed) Siad Barre. But when the war came
to Mogadishu, they left. Now they are coming with 30,000 men. Most of
the guns are from the United States. Most of the mortars that
destroyed Mogadishu are from the United States." During Siad Barre's
rule, according to Abdulle, Islam was suppressed as the regime tried
to impose the ideas of the West. After two years of bitter clan
warfare that has created one of the modern world's worst famines,
Abdulle said, "Now, we are seeing the whole society wants Islam as a
way of life. . . . Everybody is saying they want sharia. We have
tried capitalism - it failed. We have tried communism - it failed. We
know there is no other solution but Islam.
     "That is why the West is intervening," he added. "Because they
see Islam coming to power in Somalia." His viewpoint is shared by
other fundamentalists and their sympathizers. "We are very
suspicious," said Abdikhadir Abdi Gutali, a reporter for Qaran, one
of Mogadishu's daily newspapers. "We worry they will be here a long
time, and maybe make a new colony."
     During the 12 days since the first Marines came ashore, the
troops have been greeted like conquering heroes. But if there is any
opposition from any sector, if the initial heady expectations wear
thin, it will likely come from these fundamentalists.
     Union Party adherents are not saying they will fight the
American intervention. They concede that the arrival of U.S. troops
here is still widely popular among a people beaten down by continuous
warfare and hunger. But that popularity, they predict, will change.
"We want to orient our people," Abdulle said as other Muslim clerics
and Koran scholars seated around him nodded their heads in agreement.
"If the society becomes ready, maybe we'll fight."
     Abdulle said the Union Party already is working to turn Somali
opinion against the U.S.-led intervention. "We know how to propagate.
We know our society," he said. "We go to the markets. We go to the
old people. We write."
     The prospect of Islamic fundamentalists waging a holy war
against U.S. Marines on a faraway, hostile shore immediately raises
the image of Beirut in the early 1980s, where U.S. troops first
arrived as "peace keepers" and later became the target of terrorist
bombs and mortar attacks.
     Here in Somalia, the threat looks distant. The intervention is
still welcomed, the fundamentalist movement still considered small.
But it is a threat that lurks in the minds of many American military
and diplomatic policy makers. During the recent Somalia aid
conference in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, special U.S. envoy Robert Oakley
told a reporter he was "sure" the American military presence in
Somalia would be used as a propaganda tool by the fundamentalists.
But he said he also was certain that an "overwhelming majority" of
Somalis would reject the fundamentalist appeal. Other analysts are
not so certain the fundamentalists can be easily dismissed. They
point out that in neighboring Sudan, the fundamentalists were
considered only a minor irritant, but through discipline and sheer
tenacity they have managed to outlast the old dictatorship and
establish in its place one of the world's staunchest Islamic
republics.
     Here in Somalia, in the view of some foreign and Somali
analysts, the fundamentalists' anti-American message may find a more
sympathetic audience depending on how long the U.S. forces stay and
how effective the troops are at meeting the heightened expectations
for change. "If they don't meet the expectations of the people, the
only way to challenge the Americans will be through fundamentalism,"
said Hussein Mursal, a Somali working with the Save the Children
Fund.  Omaar said the fundamentalists may be a small minority now,
but "you don't need a lot of people. . . . They are potent. They are
extremely disciplined, and they are answering deep-seated social
grievances."
      "Somali people like the Americans," journalist Ali said. "I
don't think (the Union Party) or any other organization can fight
against them. People are welcoming them." But, he added, "maybe in
the long run, the fundamentalists will grow in number. This
fundamentalist way of Islam in Somalia has just started."


SOMALIA-SHAMBLES

By MORT ROSENBLUM
AP Special Correspondent  Copyright, 1992.
The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

     MOGADISHU, Somalia (AP) -- Stripped of their killing gear, the
Darth Vader war wagons are harmless heaps. The roadside burial mounds
level off with the rains. Doors once bolted in fear now open, more
every day. In a moldering hut under the papayas at the United Somali
Congress compound, a sort of government seat for one of Mogadishu's
warlords, a green computer screen blinks.
     Slowly, people are picking up the pieces. But very slowly.
Despite touches of normalcy, Somalia is in such shambles that those
who try to help find the country in a league with Humpty Dumpty. "It
may never be put back together again," said James Fennell, a CARE
veteran, explaining how betrayal and bloodshed among clans had rent
the fabric of Somali society.
     Seifulaziz Milas, a Mozambican sociologist with the United
Nations, was slightly more hopeful: "Somalia could rebuild itself,
but not any time soon." While the world looked elsewhere, a half
million Somali children died or starved past the point of mental
recovery. The ruling class is dead or in exile. Somalia, in the sense
of a nation, is gone. Now, Fennell said, outsiders must focus on the
various pieces: getting farmers home to villages; reopening schools;
turning on power and water; sweeping the streets of teen-age killers
and other riffraff. Toward this limited goal, some signs are
encouraging.
     The fall's rains were good, filling catchments and soaking
parched fields which have sprouted lush grain. Donated seed and tools
are trickling out to farmers. A few former traffic cops in Mogadishu
are back at work in hopes that someone will finally pay them. Somali
exiles are venturing home to trade, bringing cigarettes and spare
parts. Donkey convoys carry garbage to be burned. Pharmacies are
opening with the rudiments of medicine. Where Islamic mullahs have
taken charge, kids carry schoolbags instead of AK-47s.
     Mogadishu's water is back on. A tiny clan fought 11 battles over
two years to control the city's pumps. The U.N. refused to compensate
them; they refused to turn the valves. After months, the U.N. agreed
that clan members would be paid to run the waterworks.
     Along the Green Line between north and south Mogadishu, the
well-connected and well-protected are restoring buildings among the
blackened ruins of the gracefully arabesque whitewashed downtown. If
a tenuous peace among clans can hold, the Green Line may disappear.
     Many of these developments are because Somalis are fed up with
craziness and want something more. Some can be traced directly to the
arrival of U.S. Marines, followed by other U.S. and multinational
forces. World attention, at long last, has settled on Somalia. The
media, along with the aid industry, is also pumping cash into the
economy. Television and print coverage of Operation Restore Hope, in
its first stages, should cost about $20 million, as much as the
largest relief agency, CARE, spent here over the year, Fennell said.
     The sudden income is a mixed blessing. As people still die by
the thousands for lack of a handful of food, and entrepreneurs are
pocketing millions of dollars by cornering the market on essentials
such as fuel and food staples. Free-spending foreigners have
distorted an already shapeless economy.
     At Mogadishu airport, a porter hefted a visitor's bag 200 feet
to a taxi. Handed a dollar bill, he threw it on the ground. "That is
no money in my country," he said. He wanted $20. At the Islamic
orphanage in Baidoa, the visitor gave $20 to the administrator, who
beamed as though given an extra month's budget.
     Supplies range from short to non-existent, and profiteers gouge
outsiders who pay any price. In Baidoa, gas is $40 a gallon and
rising. But Somalis who benefit from foreign cash are a scant
fraction of the 6 million people who survived the war and famine and
now must try to shape themselves into a functioning society.
     In urban areas, swarms of people amble the streets in search of
an odd job to help them scrape by another day. With neither industry
nor government running, the prospect is dim.
     In the countryside, farmers sit idly by cleared and watered
fields, waiting until relatives, or relief workers, come through with
enough seed and a hoe so they can get back to work. Everywhere in
between, herders follow their camels back toward their traditional
wild pastures, trusting Allah more than the Marines to keep the
peace.
     Before Somalia imploded, two-thirds of its export earnings came
from livestock. But the fighting wrecked veterinary services, closing
the crucial Persian Gulf market because of the fear of rinderpest, an
infectious livestock disease. What happens next depends on how much
foreign troops can scatter bandit gangs and whether principal clan
leaders can find common ground for any sort of lasting government. It
is anyone's guess. For the present, the signs can be read in any way.
The road to Baidoa is dotted with a dozen makeshift roadblocks, grim
little checkpoints of junk metal and old tires. Last week, someone
decorated one with purple boughs of bougainvillea. For travelers who
had seen the road in another time, it was a cheery note of hope. Two
days later, the deep purple had faded in the sun to a crisp brown,
and most of the petals had dropped to the ground.


GUNMEN LOOT FOOD AS TROOPS LEAVE

By Aidan Hartley

     MIIDOW, Somalia, Dec 17, Reuter - Somali gunmen began looting
relief food minutes after the departure of U.S. and French troops who
escorted it to starving bush villages on Thursday. On their first
mission into the villages surrounding Baidoa, the inland town where
they arrived on Wednesday, U.S. Marines and French legionnaires
accompanied a convoy of 10 trucks carrying grain for the relief
agency CARE.
     Troops in four armoured vehicles and trucks mounted with missile
launchers and machine guns, backed by a Cobra attack helicopter,
delivered the food to four villages up to 24 km (15 miles) northwest
of Baidoa. But within minutes of the convoy moving on, Reuter
reporters saw armed men move in to start removing bags of grain from
village hut stores. It was this sort of incident that led to the
U.S.-led armed intervention in Somalia to protect famine relief, and
it was an indication of the problems the eventual 35,000-strong force
will face in the gun-swamped country.
     In the hamlet of Musibe, Reuter photographer Yannis Behrakis
said he saw several men, one carrying a gun, in a pick-up truck piled
with bags of food 10 minutes after the troops left. The pick-up
quickly drove away. "Some villagers came running, waving their hands
for help. They said the men had come to loot the food the Americans
had just brought," said Behrakis.
     In nearby Miidow village, this reporter saw a gunman near the
village food store which had just been filled with a truckload of
grain delivered about 30 minutes earlier under armed guard. The man,
carrying a semi-automatic rifle, ran off when he saw the reporter's
approaching car. A woman stood nearby shouting in Somali and
villagers looked agitated. Sidow Ali, who said he was an elder of the
village, told Reuters through a translator the man was from a gang
which had come to loot food.
     "He wanted to take 10 bags of food. When he saw your vehicle he
ran away...he was waiting for his friends," Sidow Ali said.


SOMALIA-NEXT FAMINE

Copyright, 1992. The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
By MORT ROSENBLUM

     AFGOI, Somalia (AP) -- In a headlong rush to save people, aid
workers have neglected the animals and the farms, exposing Somalia to
a potentially worse catastrophe next year, agriculture experts warn.
Already, sleeping sickness and rinderpest are killing cows that
managed to escape rustlers during two years of war. No one sprays the
deadly tsetse fly. Veterinary services have collapsed. "They just
forgot the animals," said Omar Ali Ainanshe, a British-trained
veterinarian whose drug stocks are down to some human pain pills.
"Somalia is finished without its livestock."
     At the same time, irrigation canals off the Shebele and Juba
rivers are choked with mud. Relief agencies are reaching only a small
fraction of farmers with seed and tools for the coming rains. "There
is no coordination, no systematic coverage to get seed to villages,"
said Hassan Khalifa of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.
"Without it, they can plant nothing." Khalifa, a Sudanese agronomist
with 30 years' experience, works with a Kurdish livestock expert,
Talid Ali, at FAO's tiny mission in Mogadishu. Both have received
only modest promises of funding. "You can feed people now, but if you
don't save their animals and crops, what do they eat next?" Ali said.
"Two-thirds of Somali exports are livestock. Without this, there is
no income."
     The International Red Cross, spotting the problem early, set up
feeding centers early this year in this bustling crossroads on the
Shebele, just west of Mogadishu.
     "We felt that farmers had to keep up their strength," said Horst
Homborg of the Red Cross. "And we also wanted to attract people back
to the farms so they did not settle in the city." Other agencies
agree. "The most important thing now is to get people back to their
fields so they have food in June and don't have to move again," said
James Fennell of CARE in Baidoa. Before the September rains, the Red
Cross distributed seed to 250,000 Somali farmers, and other voluntary
agencies reached scores of thousands more. Corn and maize should be
harvested next month.
     But Khalifa said the donors need a massive program now so that
farmers can plant before the longer rainy season which begins in
June. He needs at least $3 million and cannot get it. "We must
coordinate," he said. "Agencies want to help, but some know nothing
about Somali agriculture." He said one agency imported the wrong kind
of seed, which can weaken local varieties.
     For Ali, saving the livestock is an even greater priority. He
estimates that $28 million is needed urgently to set up animal health
facilities and vaccinate cattle against rinderpest. Nearly 80 percent
of all Somalis depend on camels, cattle, sheep or goats for their
livelihood. During drought, families survive on milk, meat and the
cash they earn from selling their animals.
     An outbreak of rinderpest could deplete Somali herds and spread
to Ethiopia and Kenya, he said. Since tsetse have not been sprayed
since 1988, he added, cattle are dying fast from sleeping sickness.
In Afgoi, the crisis is clear. Over the last two years, more than
half the cattle in the region were lost to drought, disease or theft,
according to Ainanshe.
     Drugs can prevent and cure cattle of sleeping sickness, but none
are available. "I have had nothing for seven months," the
veterinarian said. "No rinderpest vaccine since 1990." At the
livestock market here, herders find the animals offered are in bad
shape, and they are getting worse. Ali Haj Mohamed lost 40 camels to
sleeping sickness in the last year. His last 100 suffer from a skin
disease he cannot treat. Ainanshe knows why: Herders use the wrong
drug for ticks. There is nothing else. Dore Bale Alim, now who looks
75 at 60, dropped quickly from rich to well-off, and he is plummeting
toward ruin.  Before the fighting started, he had 150 cattle. He lost
40 to sleeping sickness. More died for lack of grazing. He had to
sell some to survive. Rustlers took a cut. "Now I have 50 head," Alim
said. "If things continue as they have, I will be down to zero. Then
we will starve."


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Posted by Bernhard Helander in Uppsala, Sweden.