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NomadNetby Sam Kiley
Charming but crafty, General Aidid wanted to lead Somalia but was happy to make a fortune from the woes of his people.
THE Somali warlord, General Muhammad Farrah Aidid, who forced the combined American and United Nations forces into a humiliating retreat in 1993, was buried yesterday he had died aged 59 from bullet wounds after a battle in the south of the capital, Mogadishu.
His spokesman in Washington said he died of a heart attack at his home on Thursday while undergoing surgery for the gunshot wounds. The battle was last weekend.
In Mogadishu yesterday, more than 10,000 Somalis, many of them wailing, attended the general's funeral at Haliwa, in his south Mogadishu fiefdom. His flag-draped coffin was carried through streets in a Toyota pick-up decorated with flowers, witnesses said.
To his Habir Gedir clan, the general, whose name means man of steel'', was a national hero. To his enemies, he was a monster. To outsiders he was the epitome of the Somali character: witty, intelligent, unpredictable, charming, ruthless, brave and treacherous.
I first met the Soviet and Italian-trained general in December 1991, a month after fighting broke out between the Habir Gedir clan, in south Mogadishu, and their rivals, the Agbal, in the north. Sitting at his feet in his house, he told me he had just formed a new government. What will be the first stage of your economic recovery programme?'' he was asked. Tourism ... we have the longest beaches in Africa,'' he replied, as a mortar crashed in the garden.
Born in central Somalia, Aidid always flashed a confident smile. His air of optimism never left him, even when he almost lost control of his band of wild Somali bushfighters who overran Mogadishu in January 1991 and drove Mohamed Siad Barre, the former President, from power. His confidence was not destroyed when civil war broke out between their two factions, nor during the four months in 1993 when commandos of the US Delta Force sought to arrest him.
His driving ambition was to be Somalia's head of state, but he never had the interests of ordinary Somalis at heart. During the 1992 famine, he made a fortune from aid through protection rackets. I met him then in Baidere on the Juba river in southwest Sudan. I had stepped over the bodies of teenagers who had starved to death, and then watched his militia loot supplies. When I asked him how he could sit back on his velvet cushions as his people died, he ordered a flunkey to bring freshly squeezed watermelon and lemon juice. It is the UN. They are not sending enough food,'' he said.
More than 350,000 Somalis died in the famine, but for Aidid and other warlords it was a money-spinner. The racket was so obscene that George Bush, then US President, sent 28,000 Marines into Somalia that December, with support from 7,000 UN troops.
General Aidid saw the invasion as another chance for gain. US envoys found themselves having to deal with him, lending him a legitimacy he did not deserve. His main financier, Ali Hassan Osman Ato'', earned the Habre Gedir clan millions of dollars from contracts to build camps for the US and UN troops.
In June 1993, his men killed 28 Pakistani peacekeepers, after they tried to police a disarmament programme, and a warrant was issued for his arrest. For the next three months, Aidid lived a charmed life; even when his home was flattened in a US air raid, he escaped unharmed. In October, his men killed 18 Delta Force soldiers in an eight-hour battle, and President Clinton lost heart in Operation Restore Hope, ended the Aidid manhunt and soon after withdrew US forces.
The end of the UN mission to Somalia, in March last year, provoked a split between General Aidid and Mr Ato, and clan infighting broke out. Since then hundreds have died: the latest victim is the general himself.
It now remains to be seen whether Mr Ato will be able to make peace with the general's rivals in the north of Mogadishu yesterday they offered a unilateral ceasefire or whether he, too, will revert to the Somali national character. Mr Ato also flashes a broad smile.