In this issue:
* Michael Maren: CLEANING UP FROM THE COLD WAR IN SOMALIA
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               S O M A L I A  N E W S  U P D A T E  

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Vol 2, No 25           September 20, 1993.            ISSN 1103-1999  

____________________________________________________________________ 
Somalia News Update is published irregularly via electronic mail and 
fax. Questions can be directed to Bernhard.Helander@antro.uu.se or 
to fax number +46-18-151160. All SNU marked material is free to 
quote as long as the source is clearly stated. 
____________________________________________________________________ 

CLEANING UP FROM THE COLD WAR IN SOMALIA
By Michael Maren

(By kind permission of the author. Excerpted from a forthcoming 
article in "The Village Voice".)


"Welcome to Mogadishu. Thank you for flying with the United Nations. 
We trust you had a pleasant trip and hope to see you again. "I look 
around the plane at the other 43 passengers. No one else finds this 
funny. I can't even see a smirk, only expressions of bored 
resignation. Most of my fellow travelers have slept for the duration 
of the two-and-a-half hour flight from Nairobi. Except for the Somali 
kid sitting next to me, the rest of the passengers  are soldiers and 
people working for the UN. There's a Canadian helicopter pilot, 
Italian, Pakistani, and Norwegian military officers, an American in 
bright green pants. Most of them have been on R&R in Nairobi and are 
heading back to work in Mogadishu. (...)
     After climbing out of the plane the other passengers walk into 
the hangar that serves as the UN air terminal in Mogadishu. They line 
up to get boarding passes for the helicopter shuttle that will lift 
them over the troubled alleys and streets of south Mogadishu and 
carry them safely to the UN compound three miles away.(...) 
     I walk to the back of the hangar into the bright sunlight and 
try to find a lift to the Sahafi hotel, now famous as the place where 
most of the foreign press stays in Mogadishu. The Sahafi, which means 
"journalist" in Somali, didn't exist the last time I was here, in 
1981. It didn't even exist last year, until the Marines landed. It is 
a product of this war and a monument to Somali ingenuity and 
entrepreneurship. (...)
     At that time, I was working for the US Agency for International 
Development. I was one of many aid workers warning that food aid 
pouring into Somalia was unnecessary and eating away at the fabric of 
the country, upsetting the balance of clan power by enriching friends 
and family of  the dictator Mohammed Siad Barre who were stealing 
much of the food. In addition to Barre and his pals, the main 
beneficiaries of the food aid were relief organizations (or NGOs -- 
non-governmentalorganizations -- as they are now called), who 
received funding for delivering the food, and the American and 
European governments , who were able to dump surplus food they'd 
already paid for while calling it foreign aid. At the time, the US 
government was negotiating with Barre over the use of an abandoned 
Soviet naval facility at Berbera in the north of Somalia. They 
weren't about to quibble with him over a few thousand tons of surplus 
wheat. 
     The reports we wrote predicted disaster, but no one paid them 
much mind  Food kept coming even as Somalia could have fed itself.  
As a result, the nation's food supply was controlled from the ports 
by corrupt officials, not by farmers in the countryside. So, when the 
Barre government fell in January, 1991, the biggest prize in the 
country was the port . And while the warlords battled each other  for 
the right to loot food, the people in the countryside, many living 
around fertile, irrigated areas near the Juba and Shebelle Rivers, 
starved.
     Now, back in what's left of Mogadishu, I recall explaining this  
to some of the journalists who came through the country. Few of them 
got it, or wanted to be bothered. Like most Westerners they accepted 
it as a given that Africans needed our "help,"  that there could be 
no thing wrong with feeding people. They'd write boilerplate pieces 
about stolen food resulting in hungry refugees, and then they'd 
leave. It was here in Mogadishu, in 1981, that I quit the aid 
business to become a journalist in order to investigate and explain 
how NGOs were, with the best intentions, destroying Somalia with 
their food aid.(...) It strikes me as bizzarely ironic, that 
Operation Restore Hope, the first ever US military incursion into 
Africa, a military operation that liberals could love, was launched 
so that NGOs could deliver more food. And here I am, a dozen years 
later, back reporting the story I've worked so long to prevent from 
happening. 

What's in it for us?

The United Nations operation in Somalia, a 28-nation force 
collectively called UNOSOM II, took over from the US Marines, aka 
UNITAF, on May 5. UNITAF hit the beach in Mogadishu last December 
after peacekeeping troops from UNOSOM I found they couldn't keep the 
peace. UNITAF quickly achieved its very limited mission -- food 
delivery --and then passed the humanitarian baton back to the UN.  
The Marines had it easy. Anyone with enough trucks and firepower 
could have moved food from the port to the countryside. The UN force 
then found itself with a very different mission on its hands and 
dealing with the real problem, the power struggle that caused the 
food shortages to begin with. The US force cleaned up the blood and 
put bandages on the body, but left the patient hemorrhaging inside.
     Despite the Roman numerals that make UNOSOM II sound like a 
sequel, the operation this time is very different from its 
predecessor. UNOSOM I forces were deployed under Chapter VI of the UN 
charter which makes provisions for peacekeepers. UN troops  in the 
Sinai, in Lebanon, in Cambodia, in Bosnia, have all been under 
Chapter VI. UNOSOM II is operating under the never-before-been-
invoked Chapter VII, which provides for peace-makers. As defined by 
the UN charter, peacekeepers are only allowed to use their weapons in 
self-defense. Peace makers are allowed to go on the offensive and 
attack what they perceive to be threats to the peace. (Only the 
German troops in Somalia are there under Chapter VI.) Exactly what 
this means is  not at all clear since this Chapter VII stuff is all 
new to everyone involved. Somalia, in effect, has become the test 
firing range of the new world order. (...)

Out of Touch

(...)The UN compound is huge, self-contained, and utterly foreign. It 
has been created by linking the US embassy compound to the university 
compound and other large walled-in areas to create a sprawling 
military complex at the southern end of the city. Except for the air 
they breathe, the people inside the UN consume nothing that is 
Somali. Food and water are shipped in by foreign private contractors. 
An Israeli company has the water concession. Millions of plastic 
bottles with Hebrew lettering are coming into this Muslim country. 
Because troops from Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E., Egypt, Pakistan, and 
other Muslim countries refuse to drink Israeli water, additional 
supplies are also imported from Dubai. (...)
     Twice a day the journalists staying at the Sahafi hotel make the 
trip to the UN compound to attend press briefings. Before July 12, 
when four reporters were lynched by angry mobs of Somalis, the press 
conferences were a small part of the news-gathering effort. Now, with 
every person on every street looking like a potential killer, chasing 
down any story has become a risk that few are prepared to take. Many 
reporters confine their activity to the four kilometer strip of road 
between the Sahafi and the UN compound -- but not even this is safe.
The trip is along a major thoroughfare that has been dubbed Death 
Wish Road by some of the hacks. About half way between the Sahafi and 
the UN compound on Death Wish Road is a khat market located at a 
place sometimes called Kamikaze Corner. Khat, as most Americans now 
know, is a mild stimulant that when chewed in moderation, keeps the 
chewer alert. When chewed in larger and larger quantities it leads to 
mild euphoria, stressed-out  hostility, impotence, and tooth 
decay.(...)
     The road leading west from Kamikaze Corner heads directly into 
the heart of General Mohammed Farah Aidid's territory. It is sealed 
with a homemade road lock -- chunks of concrete and twisted steel. It 
is apparently unmanned, like many similar roadblocks erected around 
the city. But as U.S. army engineers and Pakistani troops found out 
on September 9, attempts to remove the barriers are met with deadly 
force from Aidid's militias and resistance from mobs of Somali 
civilians. At that time, 100 Pakistani soldiers, three tanks, four 
armored personnel carriers and an American bulldozer were brought in 
to move the junk.  Gunmen opened fire on the tanks and crowds  moved 
in on the soldiers. U.S. Cobra helicopters were brought in to protect 
the troops. They likely killed more than 100 people. 
     As our cars approach the khat market the traffic slows, hearts 
beat faster. Buses and pickup trucks packed with passengers navigate 
through the crowds, around huge holes in the road, and around each 
other. No one is enforcing traffic rules in Mogadishu. At least once 
during my stay there a car  was hijacked from this intersection: A 
group of armed men simply poked the muzzles of their assault rifles  
through the window and told the occupants to get out. Once past the 
khat market, the road widens again and approaches a Pakistani guard 
post a few hundred yards in front of the UN compound. To enter the 
compound we walk through hundreds of Somalis hoping to get work with 
the UN. (...)
     We go into the compound to get information about what is 
happening outside the compound from people who almost never leave the 
compound. At the daily press conference the first person to speak is 
Farouk Mawlawi who fills us in on the humanitarian side of the 
business. He runs through numbers about how many trucks of food are 
going where and how the UN is setting up district councils, meeting 
with elders, setting up a court system, and that sort of thing. He's 
rarely asked any follow-up questions. Then Major David Stockwell gets 
up and goes over who blew up what using which explosives and who shot 
at whom and who got killed and how many mortar shells sailed into the 
UN compound. Stockwell gets asked lots of questions, and I started 
feeling sorry for Farouk, but I could never really think of anything 
I wanted to ask him. (...)

The Hunt For The Fugitive Warlord

Someday Howe may publicly admit that he made the biggest mistake of 
his career by turning Somalia into a personal battle between himself 
and "Fugitive Warlord" Mohammed Farah Aidid.  Issuing an order for 
Aidid's arrest, putting a $25,000 price on his head, and blanketing 
Mogadishu with WANTED posters is a sure-fire way to attract 
attention. If Aidid had the resources to hire a New York PR firm they 
might have done the same thing. And while the press has criticized 
Howe for switching the focus of the battle to one man, they've also 
gleefully taken up story. Any journalist or TV reporter will tell you 
that a good story needs  good character. Howe, not much of a 
character himself, supplied the missing ingredient. The aging Somali 
general became the Fugitive Warlord. If nobody gets blown up today, 
you can always write about the progress in the search for the 
fugitive warlord. If U.S. army Rangers slide down ropes from 
helicopters into a residential compound and find nothing they must 
have been looking for Aidid -- and the wily devil must have gotten 
away again. Despite denials, everyone assumes that the elite Rangers 
and the even more elite Delta Force are in Somalia for the express 
purpose of getting Aidid. As one U.S. officer told me in frustration, 
"Now, everytime we leave the compound and don't come back with Aidid, 
you guys [the press] accuse us of failure."
     Without Aidid Somalia would be just another boring story of 
failed development policies -- a crucial story but not one to hold 
readers'  attention for very long. And with 15 competing warlords in 
Somalia, all equally evil, it was very hard to really find a focus. 
But one Fugitive Warlord, now there's a story you can sink your teeth 
into. There's our Saddam, our Noriega. The search for Aidid became 
the thread that ties this mess together. Howe created a huge headache 
for himself.(...)
     But Howe say's he has evidence:  "The most telling piece of 
evidence that really got to me anyway, one of the reasons why I 
concluded that I had to call for Aidid's arrest as a menace to public 
safety is the shooting of his own people." Howe was referring to the 
sequence of events last June that marked the turning point in this 
conflict. On June 5, the 25 Pakistani soldiers were killed in an 
ambush as they approached Aidid's radio station in Mogadishu. The 
Pakistanis reported that
they were attacked by gunmen using women and children as shields. 
They held their fire for too long to defend themselves. Then, on June 
13, a crowd of demonstrators  approached the traffic circle at 
kilometer 4 in Mogadishu. The traffic circle, known simply as K4, is 
guarded by Pakistani bunkers on one side and the Sahafi Hotel sits on 
the other. Guns were fired from the crowd, and Pakistani gunners 
opened up from above. 
     "It isn't that the Paks didn't so some shooting," Howe said. As 
he was every time I saw him, Howe was wearing a light-colored short 
sleeve shirt and khaki pants, looking like a man better prepared to 
play a round of golf than fight a guerrilla war. "They felt desperate 
enough to shoot.  He [Aidid] also had people shoot into the crowd in 
order to create bodies and a scene of mayhem that would then be 
broadcast to the  world and compound the embarrassment to the 
Pakistanis. This I'm convinced that he did, and when the 
investigation is made public, the skeptics will be convinced. (...)
"Is there something that you've heard that has convinced you 
personally that in fact Aidid did that?" "Oh yeah," the Admiral 
said."Because that's a pretty desperate, nasty, and despicable thing 
to do." "Agreed! I really wouldn't just get out and say it if I 
didn't have evidence.""Is there any little bit you can give me now?" 
"I really can't give you specific...Just say a lot of investigation 
information to be published will document that particular event.""Are 
there people who are going to say 'I did this?'" "I'd rather not be 
too very specific at this point but it is hard...it's not, in other 
words, just an assertion. It's backed by evidence....It was a deep 
concern to me that somebody would want power enough or whatever the 
motive that they would shoot their own people.  I think that just 
crosses all boundary lines." (...)
     The ultimate loser in Howe vs. Aidid may be Howe himself. While 
he has been supported in public, a number of European foreign 
ministers are working to assure that his contract, for a reported 
$28,000 per month, is not renewed. Most feel that his handling of the 
Aidid matter has been an embarrassment. The reports last week that 
Jimmy Carter has been in contact with Aidid only make Howe look 
worse. As for Carter's  message that Aidid want's to negotiate with 
the UN, that is nothing new. Aidid has long said he wants to talk. 
     Howe is no stranger to the process of hunting down fugitive bad 
guys. As assistant to Admiral William Crowe, then the chairman of the 
Joint Chiefs of Staff, he was directly involved in attempts to 
capture Panama's  Manuel Noriega. Howe has a reputation as a savvy 
Washington insider,  and has served in a number of positions 
associated with national security policy, starting in 1969 as a 
military assistant on the National Security Council staff.  In 1991, 
President Bush appointed him as his deputy national security adviser, 
replacing Robert Gates. Howe also served as a NATO commander. In 
positions at the Pentagon and State Department, he was involved at 
the highest levels of strategic arms negotiations and headed the
delegation that implemented the U.S.-Israeli strategic cooperation 
pact during the Reagan administration. It's an impressive resume, but 
it also makes him a strange choice to be appointed special assistant 
to the UN secretary general who would like, one assumes, to give the 
impression that UNOSOM II is a true UN multilateral humanitarian and 
peacekeeping effort, not just an extension of American foreign 
policy. 
     "He's a born-again Christian," said the head of one non-American 
NGO in Mogadishu in a lengthy tirade against Howe. "He starts 
meetings with a goddamn prayer. He believes that inside every Somali 
there's a good Christian waiting to get out."
     Indeed, Howe's very manner and the words he chooses tell of a 
man who has a Sunday-school view of good and evil. On August 8, after 
four U.S. soldiers were blown up with a remote control bomb he said, 
"We will not tolerate this kind of terroristic campaign by General 
Aidid and I call on all the good people of south Mogadishu to join 
with us in preventing  these kinds of acts of violence and terrorism 
against people who are only here to give a helping hand to the people 
of Somalia...I want all of the  good Somalis to help us prevent mines 
and ambushes and mortar attacks."
     And like preacher with goodness on his side, Howe has not 
hesitated to strike down his enemies with vengeful deadly force. Some 
at the UN have reacted in horror at his tactics. A memo dated July 
13, to Admiral Howe from Ann Wright at the UN's Justice Department, 
criticizes the tactics used by the UN in chasing and punishing Aidid: 
"The issue boils down to whether the Security Council resolution's 
directive authorizing UNOSOM to 'take all necessary measures' against 
those responsible for attacks against UNOSOM forces meant for UNOSOM 
to use lethal force against all persons without possibility of 
surrender in any building suspected or known to be SNA/Aidid 
facilities; or did the Security Council allow that persons suspected 
to be responsible for attacks against UNOSOM forces would have an 
opportunity to be detained by UNOSOM forces and explain their 
presence in an SNA/Aidid facility and then be judged in a neutral 
court of law to determine if they were responsible for attacks 
against UNOSOM forces or were mere occupants (temporary or permanent) 
of a building suspected or know to be an SNA/Aidid facility." 

The National Loot

For twenty dollars you can buy a real Somali passport with all the 
official stamps. Thirty dollars gets you the diplomatic model. All 
the passports were looted from the ministry of foreign affairs and 
are now in the hands of entrepreneurs. Do you need a deed to a house, 
a driver's license, car registration? No problem. UN agencies, NGOs, 
and news organizations in Mogadishu pay rent to people who seized the 
homes they now claim to own. But it's not all that bad. You see, the 
people who owned them in the first place likely got the money by 
stealing it, often by looting relief supplies that were coming into 
the country to between 1980 and the fall of President Siad Barre in 
1991. More often than not these people were from Barre's Marehan 
clan. One wealthy neighborhood near the airport has been dubbed "The 
National Loot" by Somalis, because it was built with funds from 
looted relief supplies. And while today's looters in Somalia usually 
carry guns and attack truck convoys, the looters of the past, big 
time looters, were called "pencil looters" -- white-collar criminals 
soaking up the perks of power.
     Mohammed, my driver, tells me that the he bought his Jeep in the 
old days when he was a businessman in Mogadishu. But I can tell he's 
not from Mogadishu, and he's no businessman. I ask him again a couple 
of days later. We've built up some trust by now. He tells me that 
he's an Aidid supporter, a member of the Aidid's Somali National 
Alliance (SNA). And the car? Where did he get the car? He just 
smiles. I figure that it was probably stolen from some official 
American agency, since no one who wasn't required by law to buy an 
American-made vehicle would choose a Jeep over a Toyota.  This Jeep, 
like most vehicles in Mogadishu, has a bullet hole dead center in the 
windshield.  Whatever the case, in the new Somalia it's his car and 
I'm paying him $130 a day to drive me around town. The price includes 
a gunman who sits in the front passenger seat with an AK-47 across 
his lap. It's a lucrative franchise when you figure that the average 
Somali earned $210 a year in 1991.
     It's also to his benefit to work for the press or an NGO since 
it's some protection against having his guns confiscated by UN 
troops. The UN is trying to impose gun control in Somalia, and has 
made some kind of distinction between legal and illegal arms. As long 
as Mohammed works for foreigners, he can keep his guns. The fact is 
that owning gun in Somalia is a necessity if you own anything else. 
If you drive down the street in your car and don't have a gun someone 
will take the car. The drivers know this  better than anybody.Many, 
not all, of the drivers who ferry reporters around are from Aidid's 
Habir Gedir subclan. (Some are from the neutral Isaaq clan from the 
North. None are from Aidid rival Ali Mahdi's Abgaal subclan.)
     Poor people from the bush, shut out of wealth during the Barre 
regime and ridiculed as country bumpkins, they are now in power, of 
sorts. They took Mogadishu from Barre, took the houses, took the 
cars, took the guns. Then battling the Abgaal subclan of Ali Mahdi to 
a bloody standstill, they took all of south Mogadishu, reducing the 
center of the city to rubble. Aidid brought his followers to the 
promised land, to the source of the national loot. They're not about 
to be deprived by America and the UN. The NGOs learned a long time 
ago that the best way to buy security was to hire people from the 
same clan as those who were stealing the food or, even better, hire 
the people who were stealing the food.(...)
     The Habir Gedir are now cashing in on the UN presence at the 
same time they're trying todrive the UN out. It's a classic win-win 
situation for them. If they win, they get to keep the country and all 
the goodies. If they don't win, that's OK, too. The UN is good 
business. But if they lose, they're in big trouble. 
     They lose if Ali Mahdi becomes president. (...) And one could 
easily get the impression that the UN is biased in favor of Ali 
Mahdi. In August, he was flown by the UN to Kismayo to attend the 
signing of a peace accord by a group of subclans in the region. He 
was the only warlord present, and as the proceedings came to a close, 
he grabbed the megaphone and gave a lengthy speech. In Somali 
society, the most important person speaks last. The UN later said 
that he wasn't scheduled to speak, and that he just took center stage 
on his own volition, but the impression that Ali Mahdi is the UN's 
boy lingers. The perceived alliance between Ali Mahdi and the UN 
raises the stakes for the Habir Gedir, who stand to lose it all. It 
leaves Aidid and his followers fighting not so much to gain anything 
but to hold on to what they've got, and to hold on to their lives. 
There is a lot of blood to be avenged in Somalia.
     (...) An organization called The Voice of Somali Islamic 
Salvation Vanguard (SISV) dropped off a press release calling for a 
Jihad against  "the great Satan (USA) under the umbrella of UN who is 
going to convert our people into nonmuslims."  A similar press 
release -- which appeared to have been produced on the same dot-
matrix printer -- came from the Somali Islamic Salvation Movement 
(SISM). Most journalists don't believe that either of these groups 
really exits. Maybe it's a couple of people with a looted computer. 
Maybe it's the SNA flashing "the Islamic card."  The SNA -- which 
uses laser printers for its press releases -- blamed the killing of 
the four American soldiers on what it called "The Third Force," 
implying that Islamic fundamentalists were involved somehow. At a 
pro-Aidid rally someone from SISM or SISV, handed me a press release. 
A representative from the SNA ripped it out of my hand and pushed the 
leafleter away. "Don't read this," he told me. Later, SISM claimed 
responsibility for killing the four Americans, as did another 
organization calling itself  The Somalia Orphanage Association, a
group supposedly made up of people whose parents have been killed by 
UN forces.

What Were they Thinking?

The UN insists that all of this fuss is just a south Mogadishu 
problem, and the rest of the country is just fine.(...)But at the 
evening briefings we hear about military convoys being attacked 
outside these towns. Not civilians, UN military convoys. The UN is 
now spending $25,000 a day to fly water from Mogadishu to Belet Uen. 
Every day an empty Southern Air Transport C-130 takes off empty from 
Nairobi, picks up Israeli water and German beer in Mogadishu, and 
flies it to the German and Italian troops in  Belet Uen. Then the 
plane goes back to Mogadishu and takes another load before heading 
back to Nairobi for the night. The UN knows that the road isn't safe, 
and Southern Air Transport won't risk leaving their planes in 
Somalia. And not only is much of south Somalia unsafe, most of 
Kenya's Northeastern province, along Somalia's southwestern border, 
has become impassable, due to armed gangs of Somali bandits. The 
Kenya army, sent to protect Somali refugees as well as Kenyan ethnic 
Somalis, has engaged in it's own raping and looting spree.
     According to a Kenyan-born Somali human rights lawyer, there 
have been over 200 reported rapes of Somali women by Kenyan military 
and police officials -- and a very small minority of rapes ever get 
reported in Africa. The town of Wajir in Northeastern Kenya was a 
beautiful and wealthy desert oasis. Today it is another basketcase 
town. Two weeks ago an American pilot working for UNICEF was shot and 
killed there. At least 35 security officers and 50 civilians had been 
killed in the Kenyan towns of Wajir, Garissa and Mandera since 
January. Kenya was solidly behind Somali President Mohammed Siad 
Barre, and now  backs his son-in-law, Mohammed Said Hersi Morgan. 
Morgan has been one of the "good Somalis" lately, cooperating with 
the UN, but other Somalis are not likely to forget that it was Morgan 
who bombarded the city of Hargeisa in the north, killing 50,000 
people. The Kenyans, now wrapped up in their own ethnic problems 
haven't had much to say about UNOSOM, but they will certainly chime 
in when the future of Somalia is really on the line. The head of 
Kenya's military, Mohammed Mohamoud, is Somali and will do everything 
he can to assure that a friendly regime takes over in Somalia.(...)

Postscript: The War on TV

I flew out of Mogadishu in the cockpit of a Southern Air Transport C-
130, piloted by a bunch of ex-Vietnam fighter jocks who'd flown in 
Angola and Central America and were now in the food delivery 
business. Southern Air is making some good money off of Somalia.
     I'm now watching the war on CNN with everybody else. The 
television shows the bodies of some of the eight Nigerian soldiers 
killed in an ambush last week. People dance and pose around the 
corpses. One man seems to be symbolically dumping sand on the body. I 
can see the dead man's face. If the slain soldiers had been 
Americans, this scene would never have been aired out of respect for 
the families of the dead. Yes, they watch CNN in Nigeria, too. But 
then the story got bumped by pederasty charges against Michael 
Jackson. (...)
     (...) So what exactly were the geniuses in Washington thinking 
when they sent the Marines into Somalia last December? We'd feed the 
people, they'd thank us, the UN would help set up a government, and 
they'd all live happily ever after? Restore hope? Was there ever any 
hope in Somalia? The UN and the US were very happy to do business 
with a brutal dictator in a country that lived off foreign aid. 
Diplomats dined with Somali officials who looted millions of tons of 
relief food. The average Somali was destitute, or lived a very simple 
life as a nomad. Certainly the UN doesn't plan on restoring that. Are 
they talking about building a democracy on the Horn of Africa? Not 
exactly. Les Aspin used the word "security," as in "...unless we 
return security to south Mogadishu chaos will follow the UN 
withdrawal."
      Even if they do return security to south Mogadishu, not an easy 
thing to do, chaos will follow the UN withdrawal. To leave peace 
behind the UN will have to create a force strong enough to control 
the factions, and there will be nothing to stop that force, whoever 
is in charge, from grabbing its share of the loot when the time 
comes. (...)
____________________________________________________________________ 
SNU is an entirely independent newsletter devoted to critical 
analysis of the political and humanitarian developments in Somalia 
and Somaliland. SNU is edited and published by Dr. Bernhard Helander,
Uppsala, Sweden.
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