The Road to Hell, page 31
“This was my sister’s house,” Artan informed me, pointing to a shredded pile of corrugated iron.
“Was anybody killed here?”
“Yes, my mother and one sister and two of my sister’s children.”
Artan’s other sister, Haredo, arrived and began to tell me what had happened: When the fighting started on the street, she brought the children into the house. She was just beginning her afternoon prayer when bullets poured through the roof, turning the little house black with dust. Then, as the cloud settled, she found her two sons, mother, and sister cut to pieces on the floor. Haredo maintained a glassy stare. She was still in obvious shock. Her telling of the story was slow and dutiful. She didn’t want to talk, but her brother had told her she must. She didn’t want to talk because she was filled with guilt. “We told the children they would be safe,” she kept repeating.
“Where is our happiness now? Our happiness has changed to fear,” she said over and over. “When the Americans came, we greeted them with green leaves. Now our happiness has changed to fear.”
Artan took me across the street to where they had buried the dead. There were graves, hundreds of graves. Some were mounds of dirt marked with rocks and branches. Some people with more money were able to buy a little cement and had built concrete cradles around their dead. Most were fresh.
“We call that area the American monument,” Artan told me.
A donkey cart passed through the devastation with “Donated by the People of the United States of America” food bags on it.
After October 3, the battlefield switched from the streets to the pressroom at the UN compound. In mid-October, a thirty-six-member Pentagon Joint Information Bureau, or JIB, was dispatched to Mogadishu. It was headed by a crusty army colonel, Steven Rausch. The JIB would now handle all questions pertaining to U.S. involvement in Somalia. In most press conferences the “jiblets,” as they were known, outnumbered reporters by as many as three to one. The what-the-hell-this-is-Africa atmosphere of the earlier UN press briefings—once held outdoors under the camouflage net—was replaced by a stiff Washington formality.
Rausch’s JIB was the leading edge of a 12,750-member Joint Task Force composed of 4,150 troops on the ground and 8,600 afloat off the Somali coast. On November 1, the JTF was joined by heavy firepower: Some 400 vehicles, including Bradley assault vehicles and Abrams Ml-Al tanks, were paraded to the north of the city and parked on an empty stretch of desert they called, without irony, Victory Base.
The JIB assigned themselves parking spaces and launched an assault on the public perception that U.S. soldiers were under UN command. The image back home, the one that really got people worked up, was that of American soldiers ordered to their deaths by Pakistani or Egyptian officers. Rausch first refused to speak from behind the usual UN lectern in front of the backdrop of a UN flag. He stood, instead, off to the side behind a separate lectern, wrapped in green camouflage netting with a photocopied map of Africa pinned on the front. The message was clear: U.S. troops are now firmly under U.S. command.
In reality, of course, they always were. No American soldier ever took an order from a non-American officer, and decisions involving U.S. troop movements, especially the October 3 attack on Aydiid, were made entirely by the U.S. command, sometimes without consulting or even informing the UN.
The perception that the Americans were under UN control was the result of an earlier, more successful public relations effort, one that eventually backfired. When UNOSOM II officially took over from the United States in May, U.S. Army major David Stockwell became the chief military spokesman. He dutifully donned a blue UN beret and sewed a UN patch on his U.S. Army uniform. His press briefings always emphasized the multilateral nature of military activities in Mogadishu, even when they were carried out by U.S. troops under U.S. command. Then, because of concerns that Stockwell’s increasingly frequent appearances on television made the whole thing look too American, he was replaced at the podium by a New Zealander, Captain Tim McDavitt Stockwell, however, remained in charge, until the JIB showed up.
The new public relations effort got off to an awkward start. When there were no television cameras in the room, heads easily turned to Rausch when he addressed the press from his own lectern. When TV arrived, it became more complicated. Cameras and microphones had to be moved; sound technicians rushed to the front of the room as Rausch began to speak; chairs were kicked aside by cameramen looking for a better position. During one of these exercises, CNN let the cameras roll and aired the commotion. The U.S. lectern was immediately stashed in the JIB office.
Having gained control of the pressroom, the JIB set upon a second task, explaining what the additional U.S. troops and all that equipment were doing in Somalia. The primary reason, as stated, was to protect U.S. troops already there. But since the administration had called off the hunt for Aydiid, the troops already in Mogadishu didn’t need any protection. The second stated goal was to “open lines of communication,” that is, to clear roadblocks so humanitarian relief supplies could get through. This effort to re-spin the mission in humanitarian terms, so popular a year earlier, also ran into discrepancy problems with the facts on the ground. A few visits to relief agencies revealed that all the supplies they were sending were getting through anyway. And in the previous three weeks of driving around Mogadishu, I’d yet to encounter a roadblock on a major road. When I raised these facts with an American officer, he just grinned and said, “Exactly. The mission can’t fail. We need to be able to claim one success before we leave on March 31.”
Against the mounting evidence that thousands of U.S. soldiers were sent to Somalia on a purely face-saving mission, it was announced that the Americans would establish a “presence” on the streets. Exactly what that “presence” was to consist of or when it would begin was never made clear. When Ambassador Robert Oakley was in Somalia during the first days of November, he met with representatives of Aydiid’s Somali National Alliance and informed them of U.S. intentions to venture outside their barracks. Oakley reported that an agreement had been reached and that Americans would be able to patrol the streets without fear of being shot by the militia. In fact, they never went back on the streets. They were kept safely away from danger. Their mission, to rescue the future of peace enforcement, didn’t require that they actually use their weapons.
Then, just as all the new troops were finally settled in, it was time to go.
At the end of March 1994, on the final day of the U.S. presence in Somalia, I climbed up on a towering sand dune between the Mogadishu airport and the beach-front final command post of the American forces in Somalia. From the top of that dune, members of the Command Assault Vehicle Team had been watching the steady departure of their comrades. Off the south side of their dune, the white prefab, sandbag-covered bunkers of the officer corps were perched on modest cliffs above the Indian Ocean. Along the shore to the west, amphibious assault vehicles shuttled troops to the fleet offshore. To the immediate north was the airport runway with its steady flow of massive C-5 transport planes and Sea Knight twin-rotored helicopters carting away soldiers and equipment. Beyond the runway was Mogadishu, and Somalia. Staff Sergeants Olga Pohalski and Aaron S. Dudley and Sergeant John Hamen were spending their final days in Somalia avoiding the sun and sand and maintaining the mobile radio control center that was parked with them atop the dune.
“We’re first in, last out,” said Sergeant Pohalski.
“Last out?”
“Well, maybe not exactly last, but pretty close to last. When this truck goes, all communications will be shut down.”
Locating the last soldier out, defining the precise moment the American adventure in Somalia would end, became an obsession for many of the reporters, who rushed back to Mogadishu to cover the American exit. Like the final episode of M*A*S*H, this would be the end of a TV event. Many of these reporters had stood on the beach at the beginning of Operation Restore Hope on December 9, 1992 as the marines stormed ashore and tens of thousands of Somalis lined the dunes, waving branches and wreathes to greet them. There was no question about the very moment the operation had begun. The departure would not be nearly so dramatic, that was certain, but the press needed at the very least to identify an event, a ceremony of some sort, a final gesture—a lowering of a flag, for example— to frame the adventure with the high and heady drama of that December morning. The military was determined that there would be no flag ceremony (although the cameras did catch some flags being packed away), no departing pomp that could be juxtaposed against any future violence in Somalia. The only Somalis who showed up to say good-bye were there to scavenge the crates of bottled water, MREs (meals ready to eat—military rations), and other items the military left behind.
For months, U.S. Marines had handled security at the airport, making sure that nothing interfered with the withdrawal. In the course of the morning, that duty was officially passed over to Egyptian soldiers, the transfer acknowledged with a quick handshake. And as journalists fanned out to watch the activity, the UN military spokesman, New Zealander Chris Budge commented, “Let us know where you’re going so that there will be no problems with the efficient security elements that will be in place after the Americans depart.” Budge couldn’t hold back a smirk.
At 10:15 A.M., Major General Thomas Montgomery boarded a helicopter and left. At 11:30 A.M. a dozen massive helicopter transports arose from the beaches and took to the air in formation like a line of pigeons alighting from a telephone wire. They kicked up plumes of sand that could be seen all around the city. And then Lieutenant Dave Walcott, the last man boarding the last amphibious vehicle leaving the shore, said his final words to journalists: “We accomplished our mission: the safe withdrawal of our troops.” Then, speaking to the assembled journalists, he said, “I suggest you get out of here while you can.” It was not what the military PR brass wanted from their last soldier, but it was precisely what the press had come for.
The lieutenant was as unrealistic as he was quotable, emblematic of the Americans’ total isolation from the country they had come to save. Since January, the Americans had sequestered themselves behind layers of security at the airport and along the beaches and had been quietly slipping away ever since. Many of the remaining soldiers were just there to cover the rear guard of the pullout. There wasn’t much they could offer the press in terms of homespun American reflection on the events of the past sixteen months.
“How do you feel about leaving?”
“Can’t wait to get out of this shithole.”
“How long you been here?”
“Nearly two weeks now.”
For most, their only contact with Somalis had been with laborers, employed to fill sandbags and with shopkeepers at a place called Walmart, an area at the end of the airport runway where Somalis had built souvenir stalls and cut holes in the fence through which they sold trinkets and bits of Africana, ebony statues of no particular ethnic origin. Carvings of Shaka Zulu with his spears and shield were big sellers, so the Somalis whipped up thousands of them, and neither buyer nor seller was the least bit concerned that Shaka had no connection at all to Somalia.
Pohalski and her colleagues on the sand dune were an exception. They’d been in Somalia since mid-October, arriving to shore up American troop strength in the wake of October 3. They’d been there long enough to know that there was more to Somali than the people who dragged the dead bodies of their comrades through the streets. Curious about what lay outside their barracks, they were full of questions about Somalia.
But there was no way that they were ever going to see what was out on the streets. From the day they arrived, their main job had been not to embarrass the U.S. government, to serve as a symbol that America wasn’t backing down. At the same time, they were to stay as far from potential harm as possible. On October 3, Operation Restore Hope had become Operation Don’t Fuck Up Again.
On the streets of Mogadishu, the American withdrawal barely caused a ripple. Few Somalis turned their heads as the American choppers took to the sky. There was no reaction to Harrier jets booming overhead as a warning to potential last-minute troublemakers. Somalis know an empty gesture when they see one.
Likewise, there was little reaction on the streets to the “peace” accord signed the previous day with much UN-generated hoopla in Nairobi by Aydiid and rival AH Mahdi. The ceremony in Nairobi seemed designed to mimic the signing of the Israeli-PLO accord on the White House lawn the previous fall. The former fugitive warlord and his murderous rivals had attained the status of statesmen in record time.
The accord repudiated “any form of violence as a means of resolving conflicts” and set up an April 15 meeting in Mogadishu to establish a national reconciliation conference to be held on May 15. The conference, predictably, was never held.
The only thing that was certain was that the United Nations got what it wanted; a semblance of an agreement to accompany the American departure. The UN was just happy to get the signatures, and the warlords had a nice time in Nairobi. They stayed in first-class hotels, were given phone and secretarial services by the UN (for a cost of $50,000 a day), and did a lot of shopping. Aydiid himself had been in Nairobi for months, staying at Nairobi’s five-star Serena Hotel until he was asked to leave because he and his entourage were frightening the tourists. He moved to the Intercontinental. Several Somalis commented that $50,000 a day was a bargain compared to the nearly $3 billion that was spent in Somalia, and it might be more economical just to keep them there.
When the Americans left, the press returned to the Sahafi Hotel and began packing up their gear. Satellite phones were folded up and video decks stowed away. Reporters filed their last stories and checked onto flights back to Nairobi. Most of what followed in Somalia did so without the world’s attention. There were no Pakistani journalists in Somalia, no Egyptians, Indians, Zimbabweans, or Malaysians running around asking their troops what they thought of the situation here.
The press and the military together agreed to close a chapter on Somalia. Neat packages make for good newspaper copy and academic conferences. But in Somalia, today, there is nothing left. No electricity, no plumbing, no infrastructure, no wires on the poles. Except for some graffiti and prefab buildings, there is little evidence that more than 100,000 American soldiers marched through the country over sixteen months. Back in the States, plans were being made at academic institutions to ponder the mechanics of peacekeeping. The “lessons learned” from Somalia are certain to be enumerated many times. Politicians will speak of “another Somalia,” with the same intonation they once used for “another Vietnam.”
Some of the people who were affected by the exercise had more basic questions. Families of the dead Somalis and peacekeepers can never be sure why their loved ones died. It’s difficult to explain that policymakers were pushing for precedents, trying to establish the limits of Chapter VII power, seeking to define the Mogadishu Line between humanitarian intervention and political involvement.
“I’d really like to know what was going on out there,” Sergeant Hamen said from atop his sand dune the day before he left Somalia. “I mean, what do we tell our kids? Was this a war, or what?”
* It was the first time the medals had been awarded since Vietnam.
* According to a report in the Los Angeles Times just before the December 9, 1992, intervention, “Officials caution that once the food supplies are rolling again, the allies … would face an even more trying question: how to put together a viable government capable of running the country without increasing civil strife.”
* The Guardian, May 20, 1996, p. 12.
* Despite the partisan anti-UN hysteria that arose in the States after October 3, that was never the case. At no time was the QRF under UN command. They were commanded on the ground in Somalia by Lieutenant General Thomas Montgomery, who answered to CENTCOM in Florida, commanded by General Joseph Hoar. Hoar answered to General Colin Powell.
* The best explanation of the difference between Chapter VI, peacekeeping, and Chapter VII, peace enforcement, was articulated by British colonel Allan Mallinson , writing in Jane’s Defense Weekly, October 28,1995. Mallinson is responsible for the development of the British army’s doctrine for operations other than war.
Peacekeeping is politically centered. The essence of peacekeeping operations is that UN troops op’ érate in support of diplomacy, acting as a third party, transparently applying principles that sustain the belligerents’ consent to international intervention. This facilitates dispersal and freedom of movement, essential for a peacekeeping force, and keeps force levels low, aiding operational endurance.
On the other hand, peace enforcement is ultimately about using force to compel compliance in the absence of consent: the probability is that one, or more, of the belligerents becomes the de facto enemy, and the intervention troops themselves become combatants. In these circumstances an approach akin to warfighting is required, with peacekeeping principles supplanted by the principles of war; notably surprise, concentration of force and offensive action.
* Among other things, Resolution 834
Strongly condemns the unprovoked armed attacks against the personnel of UNOSOM II on 5 June 1993, which appear to have been part of a calculated and premeditated series of cease-fire violations to prevent by intimidation UNOSOM II from carrying out its mandate as provided for in Resolution 814 (1993)….
Reaffirms that the Secretary-General is authorized under Resolution 814 (1993) to take all necessary measures against all those responsible for the armed attacks referred to in paragraph 1 above, including against those responsible for publicly inciting such attacks, to establish the effective authority of UNOSOM II throughout Somalia, including to secure the investigation of their actions and their arrest and detention for prosecution, trial and punishment.
