SOMALIA’S DISINTEGRATING GOVERNMENT
By the time it attracted international attention, Somalia was in terrible shape. Barre had governed for twenty years as a typical African strongman, but he had found it more and more difficult to maintain control of the country. At the end of the 1980s, disorder intensified and violence and repression spread. In May 1990, Barre arrested his leading opponents, and his personal guards fired into a crowd at a soccer match, killing sixty-five people. He promised elections the following February, but before they could be held, rebel forces drove his government from power. On January 27, 1991, Barre fled Mogadishu. Almost immediately, the opposition split into multiple factions. The United Somali Congress (USC) named Ali Mahdi Mohamed as interim president, while another group named Umar Arteh Ghalib as interim prime minister.5 Both were rejected by Mohammed Farah Aideed, the leader of a third faction.
Fighting broke out among the factions, refugees multiplied, and famine developed. In December 1991, UN secretary-general Javier Perez de Cuellar consulted with the OAU, the League of Arab States (LAS), and the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) in an effort to find a peaceful solution to the conflict. Perez de Cuellar dispatched his undersecretary-general for political affairs, James O. C. Jonah, to the area, but no peaceful solution was forthcoming. War and anarchy spread, interrupting the normal cycles of planting and harvesting, thus causing famine. By January 1992, the International Red Cross was reporting a widespread danger of starvation in Somalia.
On January 23, 1992, in Resolution 733, the Security Council called for a cease-fire, an arms embargo, political reconciliation, and increased humanitarian assistance for the nation. Pictures of starving Somalis appeared on television screens in Europe and America, and humanitarian organizations and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) stepped up efforts to deliver food. UN observers were dispatched. They and the NGOs reported the proliferation of armed profiteers, warring clans, and blocked ports, which made it difficult and dangerous to get food through to the hungry.
Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s appointment as secretary-general in January 1992 put a French-educated Egyptian, with decades of interest and experience in Africa in general and Somalia in particular, at the helm of the United Nations.6 Boutros-Ghali’s appointment was strongly backed by Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and French president François Mitterrand and was supported by U.S. secretary of state Lawrence Eagleburger. Boutros-Ghali also had the support of the Nonaligned Movement (NAM), the Socialist International, and the OAU. He believed that Africa deserved more attention, and made it clear that Africa would be a high priority for the UN.
Some Security Council members regarded the spreading war in the former Yugoslavia as a more urgent humanitarian and strategic problem than Somalia, but that view was not shared by either the new secretary-general or the Bush administration. Two key members of the Bush team—Eagleburger and Bush’s national security advisor, Brent Scowcroft—were determined that the United States not become involved in the former Yugoslavia, a country they knew well and in which they had long personal service. The two crises competed for attention throughout 1992. In both countries, spreading military conflicts were causing widespread human misery and death, although the problems were very different.
In February 1992, representatives of the OAU, the OIC, and the LAS persuaded two of the warring clan leaders—Ali Mahdi and Aideed—to sign a cease-fire agreement that promised security for humanitarian assistance and deployment of military observers from each of the principal factions. Boutros-Ghali named Mohamed Sahnoun, a skilled Algerian diplomat, as his special representative for Somalia.
Sahnoun’s Assessment
By the time Sahnoun arrived in Mogadishu in March 1992, 250,000 to 300,000 Somalis had died of hunger and malnutrition. Most of the nation’s livestock had been lost, and half a million Somalis had taken refuge in neighboring countries—mainly Ethiopia, Kenya, and Djibouti. Women and children were dying at the rate of roughly three thousand a day, and four and a half million people were in urgent need of food. The ICRC estimated that two million people were at risk of death from starvation.7 But the rivalry between Aideed and Ali Mahdi intensified, and the cease-fire did not hold. In June, Sahnoun reported, “Somalia is today a country without central, regional, or local administration and without services: no electricity, no communication, no transport, no school, no health services.”8
In the south, clan warfare and starvation were widespread, agricultural cycles were disrupted, and basic services had been devastated by bombardment and war. In the north, major cities were without electricity or running water, and violence was ubiquitous. The tools and equipment necessary to live were missing, broken, disrupted. Displaced people needed food, medical assistance, and security. UN personnel, NGOs, journalists, and others on the ground documented the breakdown of authority and order and the resulting anarchy, in which gangs engaged in extortion, profiteering, and intimidation. Faction leaders were unable to control armed youth and fighters. Chaos reigned.
Sahnoun summarized the situation: “Lawlessness, banditry, and looting have taken the place of major fighting and open factional hostilities. Marauding armed groups, loyal to no particular warlord but only to themselves, pose a grave threat to the safety of international personnel as well as the local population, and hinder the effective delivery and distribution of humanitarian supplies.”9
On April 24, 1992, acting under Security Council Resolution 751, the UN launched an emergency humanitarian assistance program dubbed the United Nations Operation in Somalia (UNOSOM I), to expedite the delivery of food and deploy fifty unarmed military observers to monitor the cease-fire.10 But this first effort fell far short of the mark; lawlessness and disorder only intensified through the month of May, making it nearly impossible for help to reach the Somalis. In early July, Aideed said he would permit the UN’s fifty unarmed observers to monitor the cease-fire and speed the delivery of food.11 But UN flights to Mogadishu were suspended that month, and Boutros-Ghali announced plans to send five hundred UN military personnel instead.
On July 27, the Security Council passed Resolution 767 (under Chapter VI of the UN Charter, which does not authorize the use of force), requesting the secretary-general to make use of “all available means,” including an airlift, to deliver humanitarian supplies. In August, at Boutros-Ghali’s request, the Security Council passed Resolution 775, increasing UN forces in Somalia by three thousand (although these forces were never deployed).12 The United States was also taking direct aim at the problem: In mid-August, President Bush announced that he was sending unarmed aircraft loaded with food to Somalia, and he followed up a month later with four U.S. ships. Eventually, Aideed agreed to allow the deployment of the additional troops to protect food supplies and to permit deliveries of food, but the promise was kept only briefly.
Mohamed Sahnoun saw Somalia’s problem as fundamentally political, and he believed that the restoration of indigenous leadership and authority was essential.13 He consulted widely, relying on personal contacts with local leaders and groups to organize a conference attended by representatives of all the regions. But the situation got worse. In mid-September, after an American plane carrying food was fired on, the United States suspended its airlift. A UN food warehouse in Mogadishu was looted. Siad Barre’s forces, trying for a comeback, gained control of Bardera, the site of a large relief camp, and forced UN relief workers to close the airport that supplied it. In Mogadishu, the airport was shut down by armed gangs that demanded high fees for the privilege of landing. Five hundred Pakistani soldiers were pinned down, unable either to guard the airport or to defend the relief convoys. By this time, Robert Kaplan wrote in the New Republic, Somalia’s political culture was “in such crisis that it won’t even let you feed the inhabitants unless you send in the Marines.”14
Sahnoun remained convinced that the breakdown of order and political consensus was the problem, and that political reconciliation—not adding forces—was the answer. In fact, he bel
ieved that the UN management itself was creating problems. In a memo to Boutros-Ghali, he reported:
that most UN agencies were unable to complete their assigned tasks or do what was required to mount a massive relief effort;
that some UN agency personnel were hardly leaving Mogadishu;
that most UN agencies were reluctant to coordinate their activities with UNOSOM;
that much of the food shipments were stolen and marketed by guards or looters;
that troops from member states were too slow in arriving; and
that the Russians had violated the international arms embargo with UN connivance, outraging some Somali factions. (UN personnel arrived on the same plane as Russians and Russian equipment for Ali Mahdi.)15
By this time, it was clear that General Aideed’s faction was the one to be reckoned with in Somalia. But Sahnoun explained to the secretary-general that trying to disarm Aideed’s clan alone, rather than targeting all clans at once, was a recipe for continuous civil war. Sahnoun thought he saw signs of progress in getting the local leaders to find common ground. “We have tried to move quickly to reinforce these positive trends,” he wrote.16 But Boutros-Ghali had different ideas. So instead of receiving help from the Secretariat, Sahnoun received two critical messages: one questioning his presence in the Seychelles, where he had organized a conference of political leaders to promote political reconciliation, and a second ordering him to refrain from criticizing UN agencies or personnel.
On October 26, 1992, Sahnoun resigned under pressure, attributing his departure to “bitter experiences with the UN bureaucracy.”17 A few months later, he reflected that “those who foolishly have been pushing for a greater buildup of forces without any kind of strategy bear a heavy responsibility in the tragic events of recent weeks in Somalia.”18 Sahnoun believed that animosities against the UN would spread quickly in Somalia. American journalist Michael Maren later confirmed Sahnoun’s account of what went wrong, including the incompatibility of Boutros-Ghali’s emphasis on a centralized military solution through the UN with Sahnoun’s approach, which relied on local leaders. According to Maren, “UN headquarters in New York wanted something bigger and more sensational than one Algerian diplomat talking peace with Somalia’s clan leaders…. Boutros-Ghali wanted his massive intervention; Sahnoun stood in the way. And Sahnoun’s early successes in getting the factions to talk became a threat to the secretary general’s plans.”19
Boutros-Ghali did show a marked preference for a large multinational military operation, and he was eager to experiment with new kinds of collective military operations and new approaches to the problems of failed states of Africa.
The U.S. Decision to Intervene
It was clear from the beginning that the peacekeepers’ mission in Somalia would be very different from any in which the United States or its military had previously participated—different from Operation Desert Storm, from other UN police actions, and from typical peacekeeping, in which the peacekeepers work with separate parties who have signed a cease-fire.20
In Desert Storm, the U.S.-led coalition was organized in response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait—a classic case of international aggression. The Security Council had demanded the withdrawal of Iraq’s forces, authorized member states to use all necessary means to effect Iraq’s withdrawal, and called on them to provide the necessary armed force to enforce the demand.21 The Kuwait crisis was conducted within existing legal and political structures, with clear and foreseen goals.
In Somalia, nothing was so clear. Here the problem was not international aggression but the breakdown of internal order and authority, aggravated by the presence of several armed factions and a lack of food. The original goal of the United States was to save the Somalis from starvation by delivering food.22 But if the objective was simple, achieving it was not. The relief effort was hampered by war and anarchy, by the need to protect relief workers, by the lack of a government in Somalia, and by Boutros-Ghali’s desire to limit U.S. independence in the use of force and establish a central role for himself in this and other such international operations.
The situation was further complicated because the use of force to resolve the internal problems of a nation is explicitly forbidden by the UN Charter, 23 which allows the Security Council to consider the use of armed force only where it is necessary “to maintain international peace and security.”24 Nonintervention in the internal affairs of states is a central tenet of the UN, as explicitly stated in Article 2.7: “Nothing contained in the present Charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state or shall require the Members to submit such matters to settlement under the present Charter….” Without a direct threat to international peace and security, the UN had no authority to intervene in Somalia’s civil war. When confronted with a humanitarian disaster in the post–cold war world, however, concerns about this violation of the Charter were swept away.
It could not be claimed of Somalia (as it was claimed of the Kurds in northern Iraq) that a massive human rights violation had created a danger to international peace and security by driving refugees across borders.25 For a long time, the crisis was contained in Somalia. There were other differences as well. In Kuwait, the goal was to return a government to power; in Somalia, there was no government.
If Somalia was no Kuwait, it was also no Lebanon, though it reminded some of October 1983, when 241 U.S. Marines, sent to Lebanon as part of a multinational peacekeeping force, were murdered by a truck bomber. But that multinational force was not a UN operation, and there was a big difference in the size of the operation: Where Ronald Reagan provided only a few hundred troops in Lebanon, George Bush would eventually send nearly twenty-eight thousand Americans to Somalia—heavily armed and authorized to use all necessary force. Nor was Somalia another Yugoslavia, where violence broke out among component states after the new Serbian president, Slobodan Milošević, sought to consolidate power, trampling on the Yugoslav Constitution and the historic powers of its states. The violence quickly spread to four states and threatened to spread farther. That situation—to which the United States had not committed troops—constituted a clear threat to international peace and security.
The most pressing problem in Somalia was widespread hunger—a terrible humanitarian problem, but one that did not threaten to ignite an international conflict. Yet Boutros-Ghali insisted that the real problem in Somalia was the nation’s economic and political underdevelopment, and the violence, which was at least a theoretical threat to the region. He cited the emerging theory of failed states—and the links among famine, breakdown of internal order, and international peace and security—to justify the use of force.
Whatever the underlying reasons for the breakdown in Somalia, President Bush and the United States Congress found the humanitarian crisis sufficient grounds for sending forces to deliver food and medicine.26 Images of desperate, undernourished Somalis were appearing frequently on television screens by the fall of 1993, creating the phenomenon now known as the “CNN effect.” The world became aware of the unfolding tragedy without knowing why the problem had suddenly arisen, how it had developed, or what to do about it. And, as the United States cast about for a strategy to address the problem, the hard facts of the situation—that the famine had both natural and man-made causes, and that war and anarchy on the ground would make solving it nearly impossible—were temporarily overlooked.
In August 1992, Congress passed a resolution calling on the president to seek UN action and deploy security guards to protect food shipments. Bush ordered a new round of food airlifts to Somalia on U.S. aircraft. On September 16, he ordered four U.S. Navy ships to the Somali coast. A few days later, however, a U.S. flight bearing food was fired on; Bush responded by suspending all U.S. flights to Somalia.
To protect further food shipments and personnel, Bush proposed to Boutros-Ghali that aid should be delivered by an American-led coalition outside the auspices of the
UN. Under this plan, the United States would deploy up to thirty thousand troops to secure seaports, airports, and roads in central and southern Somalia. These troops would operate under American command and would remain for a limited time, with the UN taking control of the operation after three to four months. The objectives would be specific and minimal: to stabilize the military situation to the extent necessary to deliver relief supplies.27
Neither the United States nor the UN had ever undertaken an operation quite like this one, in a country with no government. But top officials in the Bush administration had experience with various kinds of military operations, and Bush himself was deeply interested in international operations, collective action, and promoting cooperation in a UN context. A number of Bush administration members shared the president’s interest in trying a new approach to collective security and military operations. The United States had the food, the forces, and the transport capabilities to meet the Somalis’ needs, and Desert Storm had left Americans with positive feelings about collective action, the role of the UN, and when it was permissible to use force.
In late November 1992, just two months before he left office, Bush decided to get involved in Somalia—on a large scale. After Secretary of State Larry Eagleburger assured the president that the Somalia operation was “doable,”28 Bush resolved to move, and Eagleburger informally assured the UN that the United States was ready to take the lead in organizing and ensuring the delivery of food to Somalia. The result was the U.S.-led “peacekeeping” mission that began as “Operation Restore Hope” and became the Unified Task Force (UNITAF), which would take the United States and the UN alike into uncharted waters.
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