Mission Half Accomplished

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

Bill Clinton's mind was plainly on that other war, in Europe, when he greeted soldiers just home from Mogadishu in a photogenic ceremony on the White House lawn. The imagery was intentional: a President welcoming U.S. troops back from exemplary military intervention abroad. While the occasion was to honor their service in Somalia, its real object was to make Clinton look more like a Commander in Chief as he contemplates a much tougher operation in Bosnia. "Your successful return reminds us that other missions lie ahead for our nation," he said. "You have proved that American leadership can help to mobilize international action to create a better world."

Well, yes and no, if Somalia is the example. When American Marines began landing there Dec. 9, armed bandits had made the country unsafe for anyone who had anything worth stealing. Five months later, as the U.S. pulled out almost all its remaining troops and handed over responsibility for Somalia to the United Nations, armed bandits were still making most of the country unsafe for anyone who had anything worth stealing.

So was Operation Restore Hope a failure? The U.S. sent in 25,800 soldiers armed with machine guns, tanks, rocket launchers, antitank weapons and helicopters at a cost of $30 million to $40 million a day to carry out a humanitarian mission. They accomplished the primary goal: saving thousands of Somalis from imminent starvation. The Americans and their allies in the 24- nation expedition created at least some oases of safety in a desert of anarchy. And they blazed the way for a new kind of U.N. force -- not the lightly armed peacekeepers of the past but "peace-enforcing" troops toting enough weapons to fight a real battle and authorized to shoot when needed.

To the U.S. military, the job is finished. The hand-off to the U.N. officially began on May 1 when Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali started paying the bills. Last week Turkish General Cevik Bir took command of the 30- nation contingent that will eventually number 28,000. U.S. troops are streaming home. By June 1 only 4,000 will remain -- 1,300 as a rapid- deployment unit, plus 2,700 others left in charge of logistics.

Yet the unfinished, in some cases unstarted, tasks the Americans are handing over are staggering. Somalia's underlying problems -- the absence of any central government, the lack of basic security, the clan warfare and banditry, the destruction of the country's infrastructure -- have not significantly improved. Charged with broad responsibility for national repair and reconciliation, the U.N. troops will have much more to do than the U.S.-led force. They will be more lightly armed, deploying weapons such as mortars but no tanks or heavy artillery, and they will be stretched over the whole of Somalia, not just the southern and central population centers.

The U.N. forces are supposed to complete the disarming of Somalia's warlord gangs and free-lance bandits and create a police force capable of maintaining law and order, two tasks the U.S.-led contingent barely began. The warlords who have spilled so much Somali blood have in fact gained undeserved authority because the Americans felt compelled to negotiate with them to head off clashes between their fighters and U.S. troops.

Now the U.N. is supposed to tame these warlords enough to make possible the formation of some sort of national government. The alternatives are grim: a kind of permanent U.N. protectorate over Somalia, as in Cyprus, where U.N. troops still patrol almost 30 years after going in to preserve a truce; or Somalia's relapse into chaos, anarchy, famine and mass death. Says Patrick Vercammen, the U.N. humanitarian official in the town of Baidoa: "The Americans could have done 10 times more than they have done. Fifty times. They thump on their chests, but the biggest part of the job has yet to be done."

U.S. officials have a ready rejoinder: Operation Restore Hope was never intended to be more than a stopgap. Washington originally moved unilaterally because only the U.S. had the power and will to get soldiers on the scene immediately. The mission focused narrowly on saving lives by moving food supplies past the guns of looters, instituting just enough law and order to get that done but leaving the longer-range jobs of pacification and nation building to the U.N. Says Robert Oakley, the U.S. special envoy who oversaw the political side of the operation: "I compare our mission to taking someone with hysterics and slapping him out of it. There will be violence in Somalia for a long time, but it will be low-level violence. The cycle ((of anarchy and starvation)) has been broken."

The famine that snuffed out 300,000 lives in 1992 may have passed its peak before the Marines landed. But there is no doubt that the American-led intervention saved many. Julie Bryant, a Red Cross nurse outside Bardera, recalls that often children were trundled in in wheelbarrows, too weak to walk. "Look," she says, pointing to a boy registered in her logbook. "That child should have been dead. Now there is such life here: they argue, they play football." As she speaks, a group of kids runs past chasing a pet baboon with a red cross painted on its bottom.

Somalis jamming into the towns where foreign troops are stationed have found protection as well as food. But security in Somalia is a very, very relative term. The U.S.-led troops have generally stayed inside the main towns rather than venturing into the countryside, and they have negotiated pacts with local warlords rather than trying to disarm their followers. That policy certainly helped avoid casualties: eight U.S. servicemen have been killed in Somalia in five months, no more than would have lost their lives in training accidents if they had stayed home.

Critics charge that the U.S. command did everything it could to protect American soldiers at the expense of an effective peacemaking mission. The Marines refused to take on the task of forcible disarmament on any large scale, even with their superior firepower. U.S. soldiers did not intervene in the worst fighting in the port city of Kismayu in February, opting instead for a "show of force" that accomplished nothing. Marines avoided forays beyond the town of Bardera because it would have placed them at risk from land mines and marauding gunmen.

That policy has done little to suppress the bandits, who at first melted into the countryside but lately have resumed depredations inside the towns. The continuing looting and shooting has prevented most displaced Somalis from returning home to their farms and fields. Particular targets of the armed thugs are relief agencies and their workers, who are among the few people in Somalia still possessing cash or other valuables. Over the past four months, four foreign aid workers have been killed, more than in the two years prior to the Marines' arrival.

Armed guards formerly employed by relief agencies to safeguard food supplies have lost their jobs, and many have turned their guns on their employers. In February jobless guards besieged the Mogadishu office of CARE, demanding $500,000 in alleged "back pay." CARE refused to comply, then flew out most of its personnel and suspended food deliveries to avert holdups. Other relief agencies are pulling out altogether for safety reasons.

All of which increases the stakes, and the risks, for the U.N. Operation Restore Hope pioneered a new type of American military intervention, one driven by humanitarian concern rather than economic or strategic interests. Taking over in Somalia now poses a test case for the ability of the U.N. to damp down the internecine wars, actual and threatened, that have burst out since the end of the cold war. Are the suffering people of Bosnia less deserving of help? Then maybe even some of the strife-torn republics of the former Soviet Union? Perhaps -- if the Somalia mission can actually find a way to bring permanent order and stability to the country. But if it fails, the U.N., and the U.S., will have demonstrated their impotence more clearly than ever.

With reporting by Ann Blackman/Washington and Andrew Purvis/Bardera