In this issue: * HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF * SUDAN AND IRAN SUSPECTED OF ASSISTING AIDEED ____________________________________________________________________ S O M A L I A N E W S U P D A T E ____________________________________________________________________ Vol 2, No 28 October 12, 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. ____________________________________________________________________ HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF (SNU/Reuter, Uppsala, October 12) African leaders have called a Somalia reconciliation meeting for October 20 and are trying to persuade Somali factions to attend, Egyptian newspapers and foreign ministry sources said on Monday. The ministry sources said James Jonah, a special envoy for U.N. Secretary-General Boutros-Boutros Ghali, was due in Cairo on Monday to discuss the meeting with Egyptian Foreign Minister Amr Moussa. The aim of the meeting, to be held in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa, is to end four months of conflict in Mogadishu in which about 70 U.N. troops and hundreds of Somalis have been killed. Egyptian newspapers quoted Moussa as saying the meeting would be attended by Ethiopian President Meles Zenawi, Eritrean President Isayas Afewerki and Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak, who is chairman of the Organisation of African Unity. Mubarak would discuss the Somali crisis with Boutros-Ghali, who was due in Cairo on Thursday, Moussa was quoted as saying. U.S. President Bill Clinton's special envoy, Robert Oakley, stopped in Ethiopia on his way to Somalia this week. Diplomats said he was asking Meles to broker a ceasefire with Somali warlord Mohamed Farah Aideed, who has been hiding from U.N. forces in Mogadishu, and to organise an investigation of the June massacre of Pakistani peacekeepers which the U.N. accused Aideed of ordering. Factional fighting in Somalia gained momentum in 1991 after two consecutive top-level meatings in Djibouti had stirred up a number of irresolvable conflicts among the participating militias. The top-down approach to the Somali conflict was continued by James Jonah who in February 1992 managed to get Ali Mahdi and Mohamed Farah Aideed to sign a whimsical cease-fire document that in effect consolidated their control over what they had conquered and made bottom-up approaches to conflict resolution even harder to accomplish. Withe the arrival of Ismet Kittani as the special representative to Somalia, all attempts by the UN-staff to use the traditional Somali mechanisms for peace-making were effectively blocked. The Addis Ababa meetings, in January and March this year handed over power to the very same factions that had laid Somalia in pebbles. Although the Addis Ababa agreement, signed by all the Somali factions, constitutes the legal basis for the UN operation in Somalia, the OAU has apparently decided to disregard it and again convene a top-level conference. This signals either a blatant OAU ignorance of the developments in Somalia or is simply an attempt by the Egyptians to install "their man" on the throne. With increasing instability in Ethiopia the Egyptians would certainly feel easier if a strong Somali state in the East of the Horn could help them keep an eye on possible threats to the sources of the Nile - a perennial Egyptian preoccupation. Some observers have remarked that real reason why Mohamed Sahnoun was fired as a special representative was not because his criticism of the UN, but because he had resisted an attempt by the Egyptians to send troops to the comparably peaceful republic of Somaliland. Another persistent rumour accredits James Jonah with a significant role in the palace intrigues in the UN HQ that eventually managaged to manoevre Sahnoun away from Somali affairs. With James Jonah now back on the scene in an unholy alliance with OAU - who as an organization has remained remarkably passive throughout the Somali civil war - it is hardly surprising that the recipe he turns to is another top-level conference. SUDAN AND IRAN SUSPECTED OF ASSISTING AIDEED (SNU, Uppsala, October 12) American intelligence sources supsect that the recent hits scored by warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid against U.N. forces in Somalia are the result of training and weaponry from Sudan and Iran. Intelligence information since the beginning of the year has pointed to an emerging alliance between Aidid and government- backed, Iranian-trained Muslim fundamentalists in Sudan (see SNU 22, September 11). "We have seen some evidence of Sudanese support for factions within Somalia and we are aware, of course, of the links that do exist between the Iranian government and the Sudanese government," State Department spokesman Michael McCurry said Wednesday last week to Associated Press. In March, Aidid traveled to Sudan and met with Hassan Turabi, leader of the National Islamic Front a fundamentalist political party with a militia being trained by Iranian Revolutionary Guards, said a U.S. official. Turabi, allegedly, offered Aidid help in training his loyalists and Aidid accepted, said a former administration official familiar with the intelligence reporting about that meeting. The official spoke to AP only on the condition that he would remain anonymous. Aideed's militia has large arsenals of Soviet and American small arms that was captured when Somalia's government collapsed in 1991. However, many of his armed supporters lack military training. In recent weeks, a growing number of intelligence reports say Aidid's militia has received remote-controlled mines complete with training with which they have killed dozens of peacekeepers, an (anonymous) intelligence official told AP. The training is believed to have been conducted in Sudan, possibly at a guerrilla camp run by Iranians, the official added. "They clearly are using some weaponry that was perhaps not in his (Aideed's) arsenal prior" to the latest spate of attacks, McCurry said. Some of the weapons are coming from Sudan and some from Kenya, without that government's approval, a senior administration official said. In addition, some Sudanese working for U.N.-sponsored humanitarian organizations in Somalia are suspected of helping Aidid with intelligence information about the movements of the 28-nation U.N. peacekeeping force, the U.S. official said. But military and intelligence officials are having a hard time pinning down exact details of the Sudanese aid, partly because many of the reports are anecdotal and stem from informers whose reliability is uncertain, the U.S. official explained. The United States was embarrassed in August when a ship that intelligence reports said was carrying Sudanese weapons to Somalia turned out after U.S. and French inspectors searched it to be carrying nothing but 48,000 bags of sugar. The United States at the time placed Sudan on a list of countries that sponsor terrorism, accusing the government of harboring terrorists like the Palestinian Abu Nidal group and the Iranian-backed Hezbollah and of allowing Iranian Revolutionary Guards to train them. Experts on Iran say Aidid's tactics in what has evolved into an urban guerrilla war with the United Nations are typically Iranian. "It's the same tactics used by Hezbollah all the time remote- detonated mines. It's a typical Iranian m.o.," said Kenneth Katzman of the Congressional Research Service, author of a book about the Revolutionary Guards. Hezbollah typically has used such mines to attack Israeli troops in Lebanon. A Khartoum foreing ministry official on Thursday last week said that Sudan is not providing any military assistance to the Somali faction leader. Speaking in response to the United States report that it had evidence that Sudan was supporting the general, the Sudanese foreign undersecretary, Omar Baridu, said during a routine press briefing that the accusation was baseless and that it was just one of dM the blatant U.S. lies aimed at tarnishing Sudan's image internationally. "We do not have the means to channel any military assistance to General Aidid," Baridu stated. He stressed that Sudan was in contact with all the factions in Somalia and had been urging them to solve their problems through dialogue rather than the muzzle of a gun. The foreign ministry official added that what Sudan was doing in coordination with the other nations of the Horn of Africa to bring peace to Somalia was in line with the position taken by the Organisation of African Unity (OAU). Sudan, which has an Islamic relief office in Somalia, has vehemently opposed the United States military intervention in Somalia right from the beginning. ____________________________________________________________________ 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. ____________________________________________________________________