Somalia: A Very Private War

Bodies littered the streets of Mogadishu, and artillery blasts rattled its shuttered buildings. Automatic gunfire was almost continuous around the presidential palace. Crowded hospitals in the capital were without water or food. Foreign embassy staffs took cover inside their locked compounds. Ringed by tanks and the remnants of his army, Somalia's octogenarian President, Mohammed Siad Barre, held out in an underground bunker at a military air base south of the city.

Another African state was lurching into anarchy last week. The disintegration of order and government in Somalia looked like an agonizing replay of the collapse of Liberia last year. Almost duplicating the stages that shattered the West African state, a group of Somali rebel armies sapped the strength of a narrowly based and despotic regime over several years. They then closed in on the capital and smashed the government's rule without replacing it. If this is the end of Siad Barre, his successor has not yet emerged.

Much in the style of Liberia's late President Samuel Doe, Siad Barre, a onetime policeman who seized power in a military coup in 1969, sealed his own fate by depending more and more on his kinsmen and overreacting to any challenge to his autocratic rule. Former U.S. diplomat Chester Crocker, a professor at Georgetown University, calls Siad Barre an "old-style, feudal, tribal chieftain." The country is ethnically homogeneous -- 98.8% are Somalis -- so there are no significant tribal hatreds. But its 8 million people are split into rival clans that have been battling one another for centuries.

As Siad Barre grew old and sick, his ability to command dwindled, and he ^ turned to his family and his Marehan clan to run things. In May 1988 the Somali National Movement, formed by the northern Isaq clan, rose in rebellion and seized several towns. The army put down the revolt with vicious bombing and shelling that killed as many as 50,000 civilians and insurgents. Said a relief worker in Mogadishu last week: "This regime has cold-bloodedly murdered or starved to death nearly 10% of the population, driven another 25% into exile and holds a multitude in jail."

The Isaq rebellion did not collapse under the army's attacks and soon controlled the countryside in the north. Its success was matched by the Ogadeni clan, which launched the Somali Patriotic Movement and gradually took over the country's southern region. Those rebels were joined six months ago by the United Somali Congress, organized by the Hawiye clan, which predominates in the center of the country and in Mogadishu. The Hawiyes had been outraged in July 1989 when government troops opened fire on street demonstrations in the capital and killed 450 protesters. Last week the Hawiyes were doing much of the shooting in Mogadishu, and at least 500 people were dead.

On Saturday, Italy and the U.S. began evacuating the last 500 foreign residents, but neighbors and the world community are making little effort to halt the carnage. Only a few years ago, it would have been different. Superpower rivalry in the Horn of Africa, near the entrance to the Red Sea, was intense; both Moscow and Washington had stakes in Siad Barre's rise or fall.