A Fragile Hold On Power

Hussein Mohammed Aidid is still getting used to his transformation from warlord to Somalia's Deputy Prime Minister. But his assessment of the precarious hold the new government has on Somalia, after ousting an Islamist regime, is both candid and grim. "The institutions of the T.F.G. [Transitional Federal Government] are very weak," Aidid says in an interview with Time at his villa in Mogadishu. "It is a symbolic government. Permanence we do not have. We do not have institutions, we do not have a credible force. Unless [we receive outside assistance] quickly, we have no chance of building a nation."

In an earlier incarnation, Aidid was — and some say still is — commander of a clan militia that ruled a district of Mogadishu from the barrel of a gun. A naturalized U.S. citizen who became a U.S. Marine in 1987 and served in Somalia in 1992, Aidid succeeded his father, Mohammed Farrah Aidid, as leader of a Saad clan militia after he was killed in 1996. In 1993, it was the elder Aidid's faction that killed 18 U.S. troops in a bloody Mogadishu street battle made famous by the book and movie Black Hawk Down. Today, by virtue of the clan power structures that carve up this East African nation, the 44-year old finds himself Deputy Prime Minister, Interior Minister and Acting Minister for Reconciliation.

Somalia's future hangs on whether the new government can achieve that reconciliation. Since the collapse of the last functioning government in 1991, Somalia has been a prisoner of bloody anarchy, a void filled by vicious and impressively armed chaos as rival warlords, clans and subclans, and Islamists prosecuted a series of civil wars — over power, over historic animosity and over competing visions of Islam. Last summer, the Islamic Courts Union (i.c.u.) — an alliance of clerics and clan leaders — took Mogadishu and forced the warlords out. In the last two weeks, the T.F.G., backed by thousands of troops from neighboring Ethiopia, several key warlords and, tacitly, the U.S. State Department, has taken most of the country in a lightning advance, cornering the Islamists in a small, deeply forested area in the southeast of the country, against the Kenyan border. The Islamists are said to contain scores of foreign jihadist fighters from across the Middle East and South Asia, including — Somali Prime Minister, Ali Mohammed Gedi, recently said — three men the U.S. suspects of being behind the bomb attacks on American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 that killed more than 250 people.

For the new government, winning the war is only the first step toward reviving a failed state. Aidid, Gedi and President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed all recognize that they cannot succeed without reaching out to all sectors of the population. "We will reconcile with the Islamists," says Aidid. "All their remnants can join our forces." But given the chaos the warlords wrought over the past 15 years and the fragile order now reigning in Mogadishu, distrust of the T.F.G. on the streets is running high. "For the last six months," says development consultant Muktar Hassan Elmi, "we could say, 'I will live tomorrow and the next day.' Now everything has changed. The warlords are back as part of the government. Now people ask: 'Will I come home if I go out?'"