Birth Of A Nation

General Yusuf Talan was sipping coffee at a popular Mogadishu cafe last fall when the four gunmen approached him. They demanded he get in their waiting car, and when he refused, one of the men raised a G-3 assault rifle to his shoulder and pumped nine bullets into the general's head and chest. Talan had recently been given the job of disarming the thousands of militiamen who still control large swaths of this Horn of Africa country. The bullets that killed him were a blunt message from the warlords to Somalia's new government: You control nothing; take us on at your own risk.

Normally in Somalia such a shooting would trigger a series of revenge attacks. Violent clashes have torn Mogadishu for years. But this killing sparked something different: a government commission of inquiry and surprising peace on the streets of Mogadishu. The city looked, to some eyes, almost civilized. And it may foreshadow a similar change in the country as a whole. "We want reconciliation with them," President Abdiqasim Salad Hassan says of the country's still violent warlords, "and to make peace in our country."

Reconciliation and peace in Somalia? Since the collapse of former dictator Siad Barre's regime in 1991, the country has become synonymous with violence and chaos, the archetypal "failed state" in United Nations-speak. But 10 years on, Somalia is finally and slowly beginning again. In August a peace conference in neighboring Djibouti elected a Somali parliament that then chose Hassan, 58, a long-serving minister in the Barre regime, as President. In October, he and the new M.P.s arrived in Mogadishu, the capital, to begin re-creating their country from scratch. Last month the U.N. said it will begin looking for ways to help out. "The people are anxious to get on with things," says President Hassan. In that case, here's what they have to do:

Build a Government
Somalia's seat of government is two modest Mogadishu hotels. The Prime Minister and most of the ministers have small, basic offices in the three-story Ramadan, where a coil of barbed wire stretches across the driveway and visitors are frisked for weapons at the door. "I haven't made new business cards yet," says Prime Minister Ali Khalif Galaydh, handing over a card identifying him as the chairman of a telephone company based in Dubai. "We have no furniture, no stationery, no buildings. We have nothing." Parliament met for the first time in a blue-and-orange-tiled hall at the Laf-Weyn (Big Bone) Hotel, a few minutes' drive away. The 245 M.P.s shuffled in, got as comfortable as they could in the white plastic chairs and began discussing the appointment of ministers. A problem arose. Ministers had been sworn in before the parliament had approved them. The process would have to begin again. "We are learning by doing things," says Galaydh, a Harvard fellow who earned his Ph.D. and taught public administration at Syracuse University. "Nothing I taught prepared me for starting a state from zero."

Establish Security
Mogadishu is safer and livelier than it has been in years. But safe is a relative term in Somalia. Visitors must travel in convoys with half a dozen Kalashnikov-toting young men riding shotgun. Power has shifted from the warlords to business leaders, who support and bankroll the new government, and to the Islamic courts. Most Somalis despise the warlords, or faction leaders, as they like to be called, and the militias the warlords feed and arm are increasingly loyal to whoever can pay them, not necessarily their fellow clansmen. Still, the warlords remain strong enough to be spoilers. In a rare display of unity but characteristic defiance of authority, a group of them recently announced they would stop the government from reopening Mogadishu's main seaport. "We will tell them to f___ off. Your boys can't do that," says faction leader Mohamed Qanyare Afrah outside his home northeast of the city. "The gun is loaded."

The government ignores such threats in the hope that its increasing strength will render the warlords irrelevant. It has enticed some 5,000 of the estimated 20,000 militiamen around Mogadishu into five "demobilization" camps where they will be retrained as the new national army. "Some of them have good discipline," says Colonel Ali Hashi, head of demobilization in the city. Hashi says the government controls 180 of the 300-odd "technicals"--trucks and pickups with rear-mounted antiaircraft and antitank guns--in the city. Afrah, however, scoffs at the notion that warlord power is slipping. "This is our business," he says, as he points out the features of his battle wagons with a long thin stick tipped with a small-caliber bullet shell.

Unify Somalia
Incredibly, parts of Somalia have avoided the years of chaos. The self-declared state of Somaliland in the northwest has its own government, police force and currency. Together with Puntland in the northeast, it offers its citizens stability and peace. Like the warlords, both ministates boycotted the Djibouti peace conference and challenge the new President's claim to represent the entire country. The government in Mogadishu says it will not force the northerners into the nation but will lure them back by building a federal system that allows each region a measure of autonomy--a kind of political balance they hope will appeal to leaders used to self-determination. "Somaliland will continue but in another form," says Foreign Minister Ismael Mahamoud Hurreh.