In this issue: * BACK TO SQUARE ONE? * FURTHER NOTES ON AIDEED'S KHARTOUM CONNECTION. ____________________________________________________________________ S O M A L I A N E W S U P D A T E ____________________________________________________________________ Vol 2, No 33 November 10, 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. ____________________________________________________________________ BACK TO SQUARE ONE? (SNU, Uppsala, November 10) - This week has seen the revival of the tone of rhetoric that dominated the Siyad Barre-appointed General Mohamed Farah Aideed's public speeches during last autumn - before the operation "Restore Hope". In a statement issued last Sunday, Aideed rejects U.S. plans to send American troops back into the streets of the wrecked city after an absence of several weeks. Aideed, who is chairman of the umbrella Somali National Alliance (SNA) and whose militia is blamed for the June 5 killing of 24 Pakistani peacekeepers, said a forceful U.S. military presence would violate a ceasefire he declared last month. "If the U.S. goes ahead with this plan, it will be a provocative step which violates the ceasefire," Aideed said. "Any policy of a return to the streets is a policy that will surely lead to violence and bloody confrontation," he told a news conference in Mogadishu. U.S. military officials said they would not be deterred from their mission of securing relief supply routes and providing support for United Nations military forces. "He (Aideed) made a number of allegations against the U.N. mission and the current peace process and in general it seems that he ultimately favours no one but himself," a high-ranking U.N. official told Reuters on Monday. U.N. officials said U.S. troops, mostly confined to bases after 18 Americans were killed in a fierce battle in Mogadishu on October 3, would return to the streets in days but no one has given an exact date for the operation. A U.S. military official said last week that U.S. troops hoped the decision to send them back on patrol would end confusion about their role in Somalia. However, the U.S. command also displays clear signs of intimidation by Aideed's words: the number of Marines to take part in the four days of training manoeuvers with Moroccan soldiers have suddenly been decreased from the original 1,950 to 400. Furthermore, the landing amphibious landing of the marines, scheduled to take place tomorrow morning, will occur 50 miles south of Mogadishu to avoid provoking Mohamed Farrah Aidid, who controls the southern half of the capital. It originally had been planned for Mogadishu. Last autumn, after the security-council eventually had agreed to send a peace-keeping force of 500 Pakistani troops to Mogadishu, the troops were forced to confine their activities to their base near the airport since Aideed refused to grant them access to the city. With the U.S. decision to pull out its troops from Somalia by March next year, the SNA alliance has gained momentum and the past weeks has seen a return of "technicals" in the streets of the capital. The worsening security situation in Mogadishu was the subject for a heated exchange of views between U.S. secretary of state Warren Cristopher and the U.N. secretary-general Boutros Boutros-Ghali yesterday. According to sources present at the meeting the secretary- general pointed to the need for continued presence of foreign troops while Cristopher urged the U.N. to find a rapid political solution. FURTHER NOTES ON AIDEED'S KHARTOUM CONNECTION. (SNU, Uppsala, November 10) - The military regime in Khartoum was last month having a field day over the problems being experienced by the United States-dominated United Nations forces in Somalia. According to an article in the November issue of the Sudan Democratic Gazette, Khartoum took considerable pleasure the day that two American Blackhawk helicopters were shot down and many American troops killed or wounded. Like the the Iraqi media, reports in the Sudanese state- controlled media concentrated upon the US turning and running away when the going gets tough. For a long time the regime has fed the Sudanese public with stories of impending American military intervention in Southern Sudan. By implication the regime was saying that the going would be even tougher for the Americans in the jungles of the South. Senior members of the regime have publicly warned that more Americans would die in the jungles of the South than did in the entire American experience in Vietnam. Even without clear ideological links between General Aideed and the Islamic Fundamentalists in Khartoum, their relationship has been gaining momentum since last autumn. In addition the Iranian government is believed to have pressured Khartoum into extending its links with General Aideed. The Iranians have seen Sudan and Somalia as entry points for its own designs in Africa and the Middle East, the Gazette conintues. Iran has supplied weapons to General Aideed via its friends in the Khartoum regime. The cost of such supplies has been minimal to the Teheran regime because much of it is old Russian stock captured from Iraq during the Iran-lraq war. However, its purchasing power has been very-great and both of lran's regional rivals, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, have been outflanked in Somalia and Sudan. Whilst evidence of Iran's links with General Aideed was being picked up with relative ease and published (see previous SNU issues), the US spent its time looking for more credible evidence of Sudanese and Iranian involvement. The links between Aideed and Khartoum were easy to establish as the General made at least two trips to the Sudanese capital during 1992-93 and his itineraries on these visits were well-known. The connections between Khartoum and Teheran have been public knowledge for a considerable time. Khartoum has received military equipment from the Iranians for an equally long time and the regime took little persuasion to become the middleman for transferring Iranian weaponry to General Aideed in Somalia. Khartoum used the routes through its neighboring countries Ethiopia and Kenya to deliver the weaponry to Somalia. Since 1991 Khartoum has violated Ethiopian territory with a degree of impunity. Ethiopia has been unable to challenge Khartoum and so has acquiesced to the violations. On a smaller scale, a similar thing has happened in Northern Kenya. However, it has mainly been through Addis Ababa airport that General Aideed has been supplied with Iranian weaponry. Sudan is reported to fly in the weapons to Addis Ababa in huge transports and then, without any customs clearance, have the cargo transferred onto small planes and flown to remote airstrips in Somalia. Khartoum is able to get away with this because the Ethiopians have reason to be indebted to the regime for its help in overthrowing the Mengistu regime. The Gazette claims that this indebtedness has been played upon so much now that strains in the relationship are beginning to show. It seems rather surprising that the Americans did not detect the airlift supply route through Ethiopia and even more surprising that when, last August, they stopped and searched a Sudanese cargo ship off the coast of Djibouti, the lack of any military hardware on board convinced them that Sudan was not in fact supplying arms and ammunition to General Aideed. However, the Gazette argues, "why would the Sudanese risk using a sea route when General Aideed's forces do not control any Somali port at which to unload a military cargo? The cargo ship was a decoy designed to divert American attention from the air route and it appears to have worked. At least with the air route, Khartoum knew that it could send the supplies to airstrips still under the control of Aideed's forces". On Wednesday 6 October, a spokesperson for the US State Department, Michael McCarty, said that "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". The statement went on to say that "the United States strongly suspects that the recent hits scored by the warlord Mohamed Farah Aideed against UN forces in Somalia are a result of training and weaponry from Sudan and lran". It has been known for some time that Sudan was using a number of camps inside the country to train militias from various countries in the region. The camps have mainly been used to train Islamic Fundamentalists from North African countries such as Egypt, Algeria and Tunisia, as well as for Palestinian groups such as Hamas and the Lebanese Hezbollah. Extending training to Aideed's forces will have been an easy and natural progression for the Khartoum regime to make, writes the Gazette. Apart from the direct supply of weaponry to Aideed's forces, the Gazette suggests that the Khartoum regime has explored a number of other avenues for undermining the UN presence in Somalia. The Islamic relief agencies operating in the country have provided a convenient front for Khartoum's agents to pass on intelligence reports and supplies to Aideed's men. One such agency is the Sudanese-run African lslamic Relief Agency, AlRA. AIRA is believed to be a front for the National Islamic Front (NIF) which has used its offices as a cover for its subversive political agenda. In addition there are a number of Sudanese Islamic Fundamentalists working within the UN system in Somalia, as well as with other relief agencies. Khartoum has been exploiting these connections ever since American troops first landed last December. At that time Khartoum made it plain that it was prepared to do anything to disrupt the American-led United Nations actions. In spite of all the evidence pointing to Ethiopia's connivance in the supply of Iranian weaponry to Somalia via Sudan, the US appears intent upon compounding its previous mistakes in the region. As part of President Clinton's desire to find a political solution for Somalia, it was announced that one of the US options was to ask the government of Ethiopia to organise an independent conference on Somalia and an investigation into the killing of twenty-seven Pakistani UN peace-keeping troops last June; the event which triggered off the present problems for US forces in Somalia. Both General Aideed and the Khartoum regime have welcomed this suggestion, which ought to be alarming for the Americans. When former US president Jimmy Carter boosted Meles Zenawi's image by referring to him as "the most remarkable leader I have met anywhere in the Third World", he was doing so for a specific reason. Mr Carter hoped to persuade Washington to give Melee Zenawi a role in negotiating an end to the Sudanese conflict. It is unlikely that Mr Carter envisaged him being used as a peacemaker for the conflicts its of the entire region. U.S. special envoy Robert Oakley and nine African leaders agreed last week that a peace conference involving all Somali factions should be held as soon as possible, but this would be preceded by a humanitarian meeting opening Novemver 29 in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa. Just as US policy in Somalia began unraveling, President Clinton took the opportunity to give Khartoum another stern warning when the new Sudanese ambassador to Washington presented his credentials at the White House. Speaking at the accreditation ceremony on 8 October, President Clinton told Ambassador Ahmed Suleiman to inform Khartoum of the United States concerns over human rights, democracy and the sponsorship of terrorism in Sudan. Mr. Clinton said that relations between the people of Sudan and the US were long-standing and good but that it was unfortunate that such was nor the case between the present regime in Khartoum and the US administration. He stated that America had nothing against Islam and described it as one of the greatest religions of the world. However using Islam to subvert international order was unacceptable and so he asked Ambassador Suleiman to counsel Khartoum to heed US concerns over the issues of human rights democracy and terrorism. ____________________________________________________________________ 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 University, Sweden. SNU is produced with support from the Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, Uppsala, Sweden. ____________________________________________________________________