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.
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.
The generals went off to talk, and returned much chastened. “Let us put this behind us,” General Elmi announced. “There will be no war.” He went on to explain that a difficult-to-control rogue militia had been manning the AWSS. “We regret the problems they’ve caused,” he said. “We’ll put pressure on them to stop.”
We had no more trouble from them.
Much of the violence on the streets of Mogadishu comes in midafternoon, when young thugs have started feeling the khat they’ve been chewing all day. Khat leaves (a mild, inhibition-removing narcotic) were flown into dirt airstrips each morning and quickly moved to market stalls to sell before they lost their potency. All morning, we’d see chewers’ bulging checks all over town. By three in the afternoon, the gangs of hostile young men were feeling they could take on the world. The occasional violent confrontations with our patrols ended badly for the khat-chewers in every instance.
Thugs and shooters weren’t the only security problem. We also got thieves — incredibly brazen thieves who’d risk their lives to steal anything, no matter how little it was worth.
One night, thieves came over a wall near a squad of Marines. The thieves were gunned down before anyone realized they were unarmed.
We later turned over the perimeter security of our compound to a less effective coalition force. But then another band of thieves came over the wall at night and made their way into our building. Voices whispering in Somali woke me up. I grabbed my pistol, ran into the corridor, and watched two men fleeing out of the building. Moments later, I heard shouts and scuffling; our sergeant major and General Johnston’s aide had seized one of them.
I quickly made the commander of the coalition force responsible for compound security aware of my displeasure. Though he assured me that he’d fix the problem, I didn’t sleep well after that, and checked his positions often.
Much more frustrating were the young street urchins. Some threw rocks at our convoys and patrols — not a smart idea, given our advantages in firepower. But worse were their attempts to grab loot by swarming our trucks as they passed through the streets. Intelligence reports that kids might be used to place bombs on the trucks made a bad problem worse. After our security troops had to shoot and kill a few of the young thieves, we started looking for ways to block the kids without hurting anyone. “There must be some way to apply less than lethal force,” we told ourselves. Nobody wants to kill kids.
One day, I was walking past our makeshift motor pool at the embassy and noticed troops gathered around a truck, testing a strange device. It only took me a moment to figure out what it was — a jury- rigged electric prod attached to the truck’s battery.
I gave them credit for their innovation, but not for their judgment. The prod was not a workable solution to the nonlethal problem. I could see a CNN shot of a Somali kid getting zapped. We needed a better, more
