by Tom Clancy
All the while, I spent as much time as I could watching over our operations outside Mogadishu.
General Johnston and I traveled constantly out to the units in the field, to get a firsthand sense of what was happening and what was needed. At other times, I went on patrols with the Canadians, visited feeding stations guarded by the Pakistanis, accompanied Marines on weapons searches, and visited orphanages with our Civil Affairs units.
I particularly remember a trip to our Marines in the south, working our most remote and desperately needy sector. As we drove up to this dusty, arid camp, with only scrub trees and bushes to break up the reddish brown terrain, I couldn’t help noticing a remarkable sea of bright yellow in the distance. As we got closer, I realized that every one of the suffering multitudes who had drifted into the camp on their last legs was wearing a yellow T-shirt and yellow sarong. The Marine commander had come up with a scheme to brighten up the spirits of these poor people with color. At his request, his wife back at Camp Pendleton organized a drive for the families back home to contribute anything yellow — material or clothes. It worked. As people came in for food, water, medicine, and shelter, they were given their yellow garments. You could see the immediate effect in their weak smiles. But the pickup in their morale had long-term effects as well. It actually helped them get physically stronger.
From Vietnam on, I’ve had the habit of immersing myself in the people and cultures of the countries where I’ve been stationed. I kept up this long-standing tradition in Somalia — sucking up everything I could about Somali society and culture. I read anything I could get my hands on; I met frequently with Somalis, both individuals and groups; and Somalis from the States, whom we had contracted to translate and liaise for us, provided additional insights.
One of these last turned out to be Aideed’s son, a student in California and a corporal in the Marine Corps Reserve when we called him up to come home. Though his surname, like his father’s, was Farrah, we didn’t actually make the connection until we had him in Mogadishu. Once we knew who we had, it was obvious that using him as a translator or liaison would be difficult, so we kept him at the headquarters (where the two of us had occasional friendly conversations). After his father’s death in 1996 (he was killed in a firefight in Mogadishu), young Aideed returned to Somalia and took over his father’s organization. Years later, when I commanded CENTCOM, he and I maintained a sporadic correspondence. (Again, Somalia was in my AOR.)
Though I could never hope to reach Robert Oakley’s deep familiarity with the Somalis’ complex culture, I did achieve a basic understanding:
There is a single key difference between Somalis and Westerners: Until very recently, the former have been nomads, while for many generations we have lived the more stable life of cities, towns, and farms. This difference has serious practical consequences. Somali time sense, for example, is vastly different from ours — more fluid, less logical and precise. In negotiations, we like to achieve conclusions, and to build on past agreements. We like to move forward in a progressive, linear manner; to get the damned thing over with, and move on. They don’t. They love meetings and committees… talking for its own sake; and they love to let talking take its own time. They don’t have our imperative to reach endings. Or, as I would later tell an audience: “The good news with the Somalis is that everything is negotiable. The bad news is that everything is negotiable all the time. What we agreed yesterday is still open to negotiation today.”
Their tribal, clan, subclan, and family unit system drives their entire culture. Everything is accepted as a group responsibility. Everything is settled by the clans, and only by the clans. There is no strong concept of individual responsibility. Thus, for example, there is a strict “blood tax,” or dhia, system. Wrongs are righted by paying for them. If payment is not made, violence often follows.
This system is central to Somali loyalty, not the nation or a state. Unless you understand that, you will never understand the Somalis.
My growing knowledge brought additional responsibilities. Ambassador Oakley found duties for me beyond my operational mission — working more directly and personally with the Somalis. Soon, with General Johnston’s okay, I was representing Oakley on a series of Somali committees he had set up; and at his request, I started dealing directly with the faction leaders.
I welcomed both duties.
Thus, I was on the political, security, judicial, police, and other committees; and I frequently met with Aideed or one of the other faction leaders on one matter or another. I also met with women’s groups, schoolteachers’ and other professional groups, to hear complaints and get cooperation for projects.
These encounters were hardly ever easy, given the Somali approach to negotiating; and my frustrations quickly grew. At one point, I had to ask Oakley what these endless meetings were accomplishing.
“When they’re talking, they’re not fighting,” he answered. “We need to keep them engaged in a lot of talking.”
He was right. But it took me a while to realize that.
In time, my presence on the Security Committee allowed me to get to know Aideed’s and Ali Mahdi’s security chiefs, General Elmi and General Abdi. These relationships headed off a lot of problems and potential disasters as the operation went on.
Another prominent Somali I got to know well was Aideed’s financier Osman Atto. Atto was an old-fashioned wheeler-dealer entrepreneur. His hands were in all kinds of pots. Because continued fighting would inevitably harm the many deals he always had working, he did his best to keep Aideed on an even keel and prevent fighting. “Don’t upset him,” Osman kept urging me. “Bad for business.” (Osman and I kept in touch after I left, and he proved to be very helpful when I returned to Somalia in 1995.)
The most important of my working relationships was with General Aideed himself — not easy, given the general’s mercurial personality. Today, we’d probably call him “bipolar”—manic-depressive. I could never be sure which mood I would find when I arrived at his compound. When he was in his “statesman” mode, he was articulate and expansive, making grand pronouncements about Somali and international affairs. When he was in his “alderman” mode, he harped about petty problems and complained about our operations. But in his “dark” mode, he was scary. His own men often warned me not to provoke him when he was in this mood.
For all the uncertainties of working with him, he was far and away the one person who might have led his country. His organization was actually a minigovernment, with all the bureaucratic trappings (including — improbably — a Minister for Tourism). Like Washington bureaucrats and used car dealers, Aideed liked to hand out ballpoint pens imprinted with his political party’s logo.
“You need administration, bureaucracy, and detail to run a country,” he answered when I queried him about such things; “and only I have it.” He was right. None of the other warlords had anything like it.
Without doubt, he was a dangerous character who required constant attention, but I believed he could be handled and controlled. There were times when he was relatively easy to work with him; there were times when you had to lay the law down to him; and there were times when I had to wait out a dark mood. But I could live with all that as long as we were making real progress… and we were.
Because he was a dangerous, very high-maintenance character, many people thought we ought to just threaten him — and if that didn’t work, use force — to make him toe the line. As the UN found out later, doing that opened up lots of problems. They thought they could handle him — without having any idea what they were biting into. I thought there were other ways to deal with him.
My visits to Aideed’s lair (or to one of the other warlords’ compounds) required forming up a small convoy of two or three Humvees, with security. My driver, Corporal Watts, would usually gather up eight to ten Marines from the staff, have them don their battle gear, and mount them up for the trip.
Inside the compound, the buildings were all layered with the porches tha
t are typical in tropical countries. Dozens of heavily armed men always swarmed about, staring brazenly at my Marines from every level of the buildings. During my meetings, the Marines stood beside the vehicles returning the stares of the cocky Somali gunmen.
Our entrances and exits to and from the compound were normally without incident — which was just as well, considering the possibilities. But one of our entrances proved to be deliciously memorable. As we were stepping out of our Humvees on this particular occasion, I was greeted by shocked faces on Aideed’s men. I turned to the second Humvee in line, which seemed to be the source of all the excitement: An African American woman Marine was standing there in her battle gear, with her M-16 at the ready, looking tough as hell.
I left to conduct my business. Forty-five minutes later, when I came back out, the stir was still at high pitch. It was obvious the Somalis couldn’t believe their eyes — an armed woman in Marine battle dress.
On the way back, I turned to Corporal Watts. “You brought a woman Marine, huh,” I said; I knew he’d set this scene up.
He smiled. “She’ll kill you just as dead as any man,” he said.
I laughed. He loved jerking the Somali tough guys’ chains.
Back to our headquarters, I drew the woman Marine aside for a quick chat. Corporal Watts was right. She’d kill you just as dead as any man could.
Meanwhile, Ambassador Oakley was moving the peace process forward. By early January 1993, he had arranged a conference in Addis Ababa, attended by all the faction leaders; and in mid-January, they’d all signed a peace agreement. He then convinced the reluctant UN to sponsor another conference in Addis in mid-March, where all the factions signed on to a plan for a transition government, the disarming of the militias, and the establishment of a national police force.
It had become increasingly clear that Oakley was essential if the Somalis were going to settle their differences peacefully. Only he commanded the trust, confidence, and respect of the Somalis. Yet even this was a long shot.
As food began to flow, and we had begun to reduce the violence and chaos in Mogadishu, an unexpected phenomenon just sort of broke out here and there in the city. The old policemen started coming back onto the streets, all decked out in their musty uniforms, to include batons — directing traffic, controlling minor problems, and promoting order. It was one of those seemingly minor events that was actually a very big tipping point. Where they appeared, vendors’ booths and makeshift markets set up. The police were security magnets, and people flocked to these newly “safe” areas.
In Somalia, the police have always commanded great respect. They never took part in Siad Barre’s oppression, never took sides in the bitter civil strife that followed, and even somehow maintained the goodwill of the warlords.
The reemergence of the police presented us with a splendid opportunity to turn a large piece of the security pie over to trained, competent, and respected Somalis — an opportunity the UN was reluctant to support. We were concerned that we’d lose momentum while waiting for the UN to move ahead. But when Oakley tried to persuade the UN to take on the reestablishment of the police, they refused. And when the UN decreed that it would not accept a police force that was under Somali control, Oakley dropped the job on me.
Though U.S. law has strong prohibitions against U.S. military involvement in this area, Oakley was undeterred, and he convinced General Johnston to let me help put the police back on the street. As a result, I became the head of the oversight committee formed to reestablish the force.
A superb U.S. Army military police officer, Lieutenant Colonel Steve Spataro, single-handedly put together a plan and worked with the old police leadership to vet the former police, rebuild their academy, set up the training program, arrange for equipment and uniforms to be provided, and reestablish the prisons. The Italians and Japanese contributed vehicles, uniforms, and equipment; and we arranged for weapons (“donated” in the name of Ali Mahdi, from whom we seized them) and a control system for them.
We ended up with a national police force of 4,400 personnel, operating in sixteen cities, while Oakley worked with our lawyers to establish jails, and to set up a judicial committee that put in place judges, legal representatives, and a legal code.
Though by January 1993 UNITAF had achieved its mission to create a secure environment for the conduct of the humanitarian effort, Somalia was still a dangerous place, with violence ready to explode at a moment’s notice. Obviously, in the best of worlds, the Somalis would have gladly given up their arms, turned them into plowshares, and lived blessedly in peace and harmony. Since that was not going to happen, we had to consider some less than ideal ways to pacify a warlike society awash with weapons… while somehow or other grappling with UN Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali’s demand that UNITAF forcibly disarm the factions. Still impossible, in our view. If we attempted it, the warlords would fight; Mogadishu would become a combat zone; and the bloody fighting would put an end to humanitarian operations.
An alternative proposal was to offer “incentives” for weapons. We’d throw money at the problem… offer them a “buyout.” On the face of it, this was a pretty good idea. But in fact, it was as much a fantasy as Boutros-Ghali’s. Not only would it have cost us a fortune, it would have fed an arms market that would have brought in even more weapons.
The solution we came up with was a program to reduce arms gradually, basing the program on increasingly tight controls on weapons, a formal agreement for their voluntary cantonment [66] by the militias (with an inspection requirement), and an active effort to search for and confiscate un-cantoned weapons.
It worked. We removed all visible weapons from the streets, cantoned the weapons belonging to the faction militias in Authorized Weapons Storage Sites (AWSSs) that we watched and inspected, and disrupted the two arms markets in Mogadishu. Our sweeps captured thousands of weapons and millions of rounds of ammunition. Within days, the price of weapons skyrocketed; the gunshot wounds treated daily at the hospitals were reduced to low single digits; and the faction leaders began to participate in Oakley’s political process without fear of attack.
Putting a permanent lid on violence was of course not in the cards. There was no way we could avoid violent confrontations.
One incident with long-term consequences occurred in February at the southern coastal city of Kismayo.
Following Aideed’s victory over Siad Barre, General Hersi Morgan, a graduate of the U.S. Army’s Command and General Staff College and Barre’s son-in-law, took charge of the remnants of the former dictator’s army near the Kenyan border. Early in 1993, Morgan started conducting probes in the direction of Kismayo, one of which provoked a major counterattack by U.S. helicopter gunships and Belgian light armor (Kismayo was in the Belgians’ sector). After losing several technicals and some heavy weapons, Morgan’s forces scrambled back into the bush.
They came out again on February 22. That night, Morgan conducted a raid on the city (in violation of an agreement brokered among the warlords to freeze forces in place until negotiations on a peace plan were worked out). He infiltrated his fighters, picked up weapons he’d previously stashed (undetected by the Belgian troops), and attacked and drove off Colonel Omar Jess, an ally of Aideed’s and the ruling faction leader in Kismayo. Jess, who had committed many atrocities, was not popular; and the residents welcomed his expulsion.
Aideed naturally insisted that we expel Morgan from Kismayo and return Jess to power. Though Oakley and Johnston gave Morgan and Jess an ultimatum that essentially had them revert to the situation before the raid, and the two warlords essentially complied, Aideed staged violent protest demonstrations in Mogadishu in front of our embassy compound and near UN headquarters in Mogadishu. We had to put them down.
These demonstrations had a serious impact on UNOSOM, the NGOs, and the press, who feared a renewal of civil war. Press reports, based on an incomplete view of the situation, were overblown and inaccurate. In fact, the demonstrations were more annoyances than battles.<
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Though Aideed was a master of political theater, his violent demonstrations were not normally directed toward UNITAF. Most of the time, he saved them, and the accompanying shooting sprees, for Egyptian forces and the visits of Boutros-Ghali. The Egyptians were not liked by the Somalis, while the UN Secretary-General was hated. In his days in the Egyptian Foreign Ministry, Boutros-Ghali’s policies in support of Siad Barre had — in the Somali view — kept the dictator in power. (Since Siad Barre was in exile in Nigeria, there were also demonstrations against the Nigerian troops.)
Meanwhile, the U.S. Marine commander of the Mogadishu sector, Colonel Buck Bedard, ran the security of the city with an iron hand and responded quickly and decisively to all of Aideed’s provocations.
One of his more effective measures was to station Marine sniper teams in taller buildings around the city. When over the course of several nights, armed gunmen had tried to move into ambush positions near our compound, all of them were picked off by our snipers. The remaining ambushers decided to find a better way to spend their time.
Later, gunmen from an Aideed AWSS started taking potshots at passing troops. When my warnings failed to stop the shooting, the Marines attacked the compound with helicopter gunships, tanks, and infantry. The AWSS was captured with no friendly casualties.
I called a security meeting for the next day. It was a tense, confrontational encounter. “You have to make a decision right here,” I told Aideed’s generals. “Are we at war or not? Decide now. We’ll take our next actions based on your decision.”
I then threw on the table several rounds that had landed in our embassy compound from a random shooting that had originated in the AWSS we’d just attacked. “We won’t tolerate this any longer,” I told them.
