Street Battles Leave Somalis, Aid Workers Shaken, Tense

MOGADISHU, Somalia —  On the first day of peace since rioting and gun battles ripped through the heart of the Somali capital and rattled the very foundations of the U.S.-led Operation Restore Hope, a small crowd of Somalis gathered Saturday around Abdi Aden’s tiny barbershop and took stock of America’s future in this still deeply troubled land.

“We want the Americans to stay here,” said Aden, opening his shabby shop for the first time since largely anti-American riots and sniper attacks shattered the capital’s--and Aden’s--fragile sense of security four days before.

Suddenly, a passerby shouted, “No! No! Americans, get out of Somalia now!”--and the young barber added that the massive U.S.-led operation to save this land from itself is clearly less welcome now than the day the first wave of Marines hit Mogadishu’s beachheads nearly three months ago.

“People are more concerned about the Americans now,” Aden said. “People are worrying about their motives. The American troops are not taking away all the guns. They seem to be taking away some and leaving others, playing favorites. So the people are wondering, ‘Why are the Americans really here?’ ”

As Hussein Ali, the one-eyed Somali bookseller who still carries a foot-long knife to ward off looters, put it: “I am still happy with the Americans. They did something good. They got food to the people. Less people are dying now. But the guns, they still have not left the country. And that is our biggest problem.

“They came here for a humanitarian reason. The humanitarian problem is still here. So, if they go back now, they have done nothing for us, really.”

So it was throughout this capital city Saturday, a tense morning-after for mass reflection--not only for the Somalis but for the international aid agencies headquartered here and for the U.S. officials spearheading the international intervention.

The relief workers viewed the violence as, at the very least, worrisome for Somalia’s future. But the U.S. officials saw the sudden outbreak of bloodshed--which reportedly left six Somalis dead, and five American and two Nigerian soldiers wounded--as nothing more than a small problem that had been solved.

During a morning briefing for the international aid agencies, whose compounds appeared to be the principal targets of the Somali protesters and the armed looters who took advantage of the chaos, U.S. special envoy Robert B. Oakley assured that there would be no Round 2.

The widely hated Somali warlord Mohamed Siad Hirsi was gradually being disarmed and his forces removed from the city, Oakley told the group. Hirsi, known as Gen. Morgan, had taken over the southern port city of Kismayu under the noses of U.S. and Belgian troops, sparking the anti-American protests in Mogadishu.

On Saturday, Oakley effused confidence that Mogadishu was returning to what U.S. Marine spokesman Col. Fred Peck later termed the city’s own strange normalcy.

“If there’s such a thing as normal in Mogadishu and Somalia, we’ve returned to it,” Peck said.

But after enduring the worst violence they have seen since the start of the U.N.-sponsored operation to help break a war-fed famine that has killed hundreds of thousands, most veteran aid workers here remained deeply skeptical.

Most aid officials agreed Saturday that the week’s violence clearly had shaken what little confidence the U.S.-led operation had restored to the pitted streets of Mogadishu, and that the street battles had deepened concern about what will happen when the bulk of the U.S. forces turn the entire operation over to the United Nations, perhaps by mid-April.

“No doubt it has shaken the entire operation, and it’s shaken the confidence of the international community. The question is how hard it has shaken it,” concluded Ian MacLeod, spokesman for UNICEF.

At the headquarters of CARE, the U.S.-based nonprofit agency that has been delivering food relief to the worst-hit areas of Somalia’s famine zone, operations chief Rhodri Wynn-Pope added that the week’s violence bodes ill for the nation’s future after the Americans withdraw.

“All it’s really done is heighten our concern about a transfer to a smaller U.N. force, and deepened our concern over the mandate of that force,” he said.

In the short term, the fighting caused only a brief break in the U.N.-sponsored relief effort, but Wynn-Pope and other veterans of Somali relief said it also was a key indicator of the many long-term problems that lie ahead.

The violence, they said, underscores just how unstable war-torn Somalia remains, even nearly three months after the start of Operation Restore Hope. And, as ashes from roadblocks built from burning tires still littered the streets, it illustrates just how far Somalia remains from any meaningful effort to rebuild itself after two years of ruinous civil war.

“I think a lot of people (in the aid community) feel very uneasy. They feel it’s still very, very unstable here,” said Dawn MacRae, national medical coordinator of the American agency International Medical Corps. “But it’s always been that way.

“For those of us who have been here some time, it was more of a reminder: This is Somalia. At any moment, there’s an expectation that anything can happen.”

Increasingly, though, there is a sense among even Somalia veterans that the capital and countryside have become more dangerous through their sheer unpredictability in the months since the U.S.-led troops came to secure them.

Three foreign aid workers have been shot to death since Operation Restore Hope began. The chaos in Mogadishu erupted while the aid community was still reeling from the killing of an Irish nurse, whose car was shot repeatedly by highwaymen between the capital and the famine-relief center in Baidoa.

“In the past, we had the feeling we could foresee what would happen,” said Max Hadorn, deputy head of the International Committee of the Red Cross delegation in Somalia, which had been operating key feeding centers and clinics for nearly a year before the U.S. Marines landed in December.

“But now, it’s very strange. Now, you can be attacked at any street corner on any day, and you can’t predict it or take measures to deal with it.”

Another senior aid worker in Mogadishu agreed.

“Before the troops arrived, the intimidation and the extortion was much greater,” he said. “But now, you’re more likely to get swatted on the road for no reason at all. True enough, the food and the relief supplies are moving much easier now, but our personal lives, in an almost perverse way, are much more in peril than ever before.

“I and a lot of others do feel that an awful lot of people have missed that golden breathing space we had right after the Marines landed. It was a space filled with genuine hope to lay building stones for rebuilding Somalia. That is gone now, and I don’t think it’s going to come back.”

It was just those fears that filled the streets of Mogadishu on Saturday--particularly on Panadir Street and among the men and women who crowded around Abdi Aden’s barbershop.

As the group of shoppers and shopkeepers finally nodded in agreement that U.S. forces not only must stay far longer than they plan but also intensify a pacification operation that so far has netted just over 3,000 weapons, a Somali who identified himself as Jailani started shouting in broken English.

“If Americans go, there would be very very very big problems here. No food. Fighting. Just three days of fighting, you know, and prices of everything went up. Food. Cigarettes. Water. Gasoline. Everything up.”

And, as a Times reporter walked away from the crowd, shopkeeper Mohamed Magoudra smiled and added, “You’re welcome here--with open arms.”