General Yusuf Talan was sipping coffee at a popular Mogadishu
cafe last fall when the four gunmen approached him. They demanded
he get in their waiting car, and when he refused, one of the
men raised a G-3 assault rifle to his shoulder and pumped nine
bullets into the general's head and chest. Talan had recently
been given the job of disarming the thousands of militiamen who
still control large swaths of this Horn of Africa country. The
bullets that killed him were a blunt message from the warlords
to Somalia's new government: You control nothing; take us on
at your own risk.
Normally in Somalia such a shooting would trigger a series
of revenge attacks. Violent clashes have torn Mogadishu for years.
But this killing sparked something different: a government commission
of inquiry and surprising peace on the streets of Mogadishu.
The city looked, to some eyes, almost civilized. And it may foreshadow
a similar change in the country as a whole. "We want reconciliation
with them," President Abdiqasim Salad Hassan says of the
country's still violent warlords, "and to make peace in
our country."
Reconciliation and peace in Somalia? Since the collapse of
former dictator Siad Barre's regime in 1991, the country has
become synonymous with violence and chaos, the archetypal "failed
state" in United Nations-speak. But 10 years on, Somalia
is finally and slowly beginning again. In August a peace conference
in neighboring Djibouti elected a Somali parliament that then
chose Hassan, 58, a long-serving minister in the Barre regime,
as President. In October, he and the new M.P.s arrived in Mogadishu,
the capital, to begin re-creating their country from scratch.
Last month the U.N. said it will begin looking for ways to help
out. "The people are anxious to get on with things,"
says President Hassan. In that case, here's what they have to
do:
Build a Government
Somalia's seat of government is two modest Mogadishu hotels.
The Prime Minister and most of the ministers have small, basic
offices in the three-story Ramadan, where a coil of barbed wire
stretches across the driveway and visitors are frisked for weapons
at the door. "I haven't made new business cards yet,"
says Prime Minister Ali Khalif Galaydh, handing over a card identifying
him as the chairman of a telephone company based in Dubai. "We
have no furniture, no stationery, no buildings. We have nothing."
Parliament met for the first time in a blue-and-orange-tiled
hall at the Laf-Weyn (Big Bone) Hotel, a few minutes' drive away.
The 245 M.P.s shuffled in, got as comfortable as they could in
the white plastic chairs and began discussing the appointment
of ministers. A problem arose. Ministers had been sworn in before
the parliament had approved them. The process would have to begin
again. "We are learning by doing things," says Galaydh,
a Harvard fellow who earned his Ph.D. and taught public administration
at Syracuse University. "Nothing I taught prepared me for
starting a state from zero."
Establish Security
Mogadishu is safer and livelier than it has been in years. But
safe is a relative term in Somalia. Visitors must travel in convoys
with half a dozen Kalashnikov-toting young men riding shotgun.
Power has shifted from the warlords to business leaders, who
support and bankroll the new government, and to the Islamic courts.
Most Somalis despise the warlords, or faction leaders, as they
like to be called, and the militias the warlords feed and arm
are increasingly loyal to whoever can pay them, not necessarily
their fellow clansmen. Still, the warlords remain strong enough
to be spoilers. In a rare display of unity but characteristic
defiance of authority, a group of them recently announced they
would stop the government from reopening Mogadishu's main seaport.
"We will tell them to f___ off. Your boys can't do that,"
says faction leader Mohamed Qanyare Afrah outside his home northeast
of the city. "The gun is loaded."
The government ignores such threats in the hope that its increasing
strength will render the warlords irrelevant. It has enticed
some 5,000 of the estimated 20,000 militiamen around Mogadishu
into five "demobilization" camps where they will be
retrained as the new national army. "Some of them have good
discipline," says Colonel Ali Hashi, head of demobilization
in the city. Hashi says the government controls 180 of the 300-odd
"technicals"--trucks and pickups with rear-mounted
antiaircraft and antitank guns--in the city. Afrah, however,
scoffs at the notion that warlord power is slipping. "This
is our business," he says, as he points out the features
of his battle wagons with a long thin stick tipped with a small-caliber
bullet shell.
Unify Somalia
Incredibly, parts of Somalia have avoided the years of chaos.
The self-declared state of Somaliland in the northwest has its
own government, police force and currency. Together with Puntland
in the northeast, it offers its citizens stability and peace.
Like the warlords, both ministates boycotted the Djibouti peace
conference and challenge the new President's claim to represent
the entire country. The government in Mogadishu says it will
not force the northerners into the nation but will lure them
back by building a federal system that allows each region a measure
of autonomy--a kind of political balance they hope will appeal
to leaders used to self-determination. "Somaliland will
continue but in another form," says Foreign Minister Ismael
Mahamoud Hurreh.
Get International Aid
Djibouti and a few Arab states helped underwrite the peace conference
and provided four-wheel drives for the President and Prime Minister,
and a few thousand police uniforms. But big money from Western
governments will be harder to come by. During the cold war, Somalia
attracted more aid per capita than any other African state, first
from the Soviets and then from the U.S. "It's true that
we had a dependency," says Mahamoud Mohamed Uluso, a minister
in the Barre government. But once the cold war ended, the money
dried up. What followed made many donor nations wary of getting
involved in Somalia again. A U.N. operation to feed starving
Somalis during a prolonged drought ended after continued clan
fighting, while the failure of the related U.S.-led intervention
force created a one-word rationale for America's reluctance to
intervene in far-off trouble spots: Somalia. No Western country
recognizes the new government, though both Italy, the former
colonial power in the south, and the U.S. say they are "encouraged."
Says David Stephen, the U.N. Secretary-General's representative
for Somalia: "The outside world is extremely cautious."
Rebuild
A decade of fighting has left Mogadishu in ruins. Gangs steal
power lines, telephone cables and streetlights. Like vultures
picking at the bones of a dead animal, men have dug up the pipelines
at the old oil refinery, carrying them away to sell. Electricity
now comes from small generators; water comes from household tanks
if you are rich or donkey-drawn carts if you are poor. People
survive on money sent by relatives abroad.
The destruction is not only physical. The whole concept of
a state has been distorted. At the airport, militiamen charge
landing fees and sell exit visas. Anyone with $30 can buy an
official Somali passport in the central Bakara market, though
few countries will recognize it. A few stalls away, moneychanger
Bashir Moalim Mohamed opens a huge safe packed with $10,000 worth
of Somalia shillings. "I am the central bank," he says,
pulling out stacks of new notes recently imported by local businessmen
from a printing company in Canada. What about protection? Mohamed
plucks a rusty M-16 assault rifle from the open safe. "This
is my protection. Without this you're a dead man."
"We have to convince people that things have changed
in Somalia, that we have come back from the brink of hell,"
says Foreign Minister Hurreh. "We can actually say we have
seen hell itself." The lights in his hotel bedroom turned
office flicker and fail. In the darkness he says, "We'll
try."