Somalia Role Assessed as U.S. Flag Is Lowered

MOGADISHU, Somalia —  The American flag was still flying outside the three U.S. Army tents marked “Black Chicken Company” at Mogadishu Airport on Tuesday, even after the U.S. command flag was lowered for the last time at the former U.S. Embassy in a brief afternoon ceremony.

It was a time to take stock--the official end to what the military brass had declared a successful and unprecedented U.S. intervention, a rescue mission that military planners said would help set the standard for peacekeeping missions for years to come.

Among the mission’s front-line forces, there were more personal and human assessments.

“Was it worth it?” Army Specialist Thomas Woods asked inside the Black Chicken’s command tent over the whine of a Tower Air 747 carrying the last U.S. Marines home to Southern California.

“No,” he said, shaking his head beneath a stenciled black chicken, symbol of Woods’ Mortuary Affairs unit. The unit has embalmed and sent home the seven Americans who died here since December: two by Somali sniper fire, two by land mines, two in traffic accidents, one by suicide.

“How many Americans did we lose? Seven? Well, not one of those lives was worth it,” Woods said. “I could see going to a place to help a country out, but only if that country is willing to help us back. Heck, a lot of these people didn’t even help us help them.”

Across the tarmac, though, waiting to board the flight home, Air Force public affairs Specialist Dave Rogers said that, on balance, he felt good about his five months in Somalia.

“If even one person came out of this better, then it was worthwhile,” he said. “If we can save lives rather than take lives using our training, I say let’s do it.”

The frustration and hope voiced by the two young servicemen were widely shared among the last of the more than 30,000 American troops who took part in Operation Restore Hope as U.S. commanders Tuesday turned over to the United Nations control of a multinational force that will remain for up to two more years.

Woods, who is among the 4,000 U.S. support troops who will remain behind to help the U.N. peacekeepers, clearly represented just one of many voices in a land scarred by two years of war, murder and rape and where there is still little order and considerable danger.

Many others are more positive, among them thousands of grateful Somalis, hundreds of thankful but jittery relief workers who continue to feed and cure the hungry and sick and many U.S. service personnel who view their service here as a resounding, if perhaps only temporary, success.

At the highest levels of the military command in Somalia and among military planners in Washington, there was nothing but praise for America’s performance on a mission that many now view as a test for future U.S. military intervention--both humanitarian and disciplinary.

“There is no question that this has been a very useful blueprint for future operations,” Lt. Gen. Robert B. Johnston, who commanded the U.S.-led multinational force, said in an interview on his last day of work in Somalia. “It was a great success.”

The general indicated that the death toll among coalition forces could easily have been far higher in a country rife with weapons ranging from machine guns and pistols to long-range artillery. And Johnston praised his troops for demonstrating extraordinary patience, compassion and fire discipline that helped maintain public support among Somalis throughout a mission that some analysts had feared would become another Beirut or Vietnam.

The U.S.-led force did fire on Somalis on many occasions. And two U.S. Marines were court-martialed, convicted and punished for using excessive force on two occasions.

But its commanders made no attempt through the months of patrols, raids and isolated firefights to tally the Somali death toll, a task they said would be both difficult and dangerous in the most common situations of sniper ambushes.

And the only criticism of most Somali intellectuals and elders was that the Americans were not forceful enough.

With glimmers of hope restored in so much of the country, the overwhelming Somali assessment was one of gratitude amid lingering concern. Dozens of markets are now jammed with everything from soap to pasta, despite continuing armed robbery and looting. Seeds have replaced corpses throughout the land, and, as the clouds over Tuesday’s turnover ceremony attested, the first rains of the season of deliverance from famine known as Gu finally arrived this week.

Even the Somali warlord worst-hit by the U.S. intervention, Col. Omar Jess, who lost his grip on the southern port of Kismayu to remnants of the brutal regime that Jess helped overthrow, had kind words mixed with his criticism that the United States played favorites in Kismayu.

“We’re very sorry at the situation they have seen themselves in here,” Jess said when asked about the frustrations of the departing American troops. “The Somalis are not against them. We have respect and thanks for them. Nobody hates them here.”

But in contrast with the value Woods placed on each American life, Jess said he would have fought the Somali civil war again, despite the destruction. “Yes, it was worth it,” he said. “We were in a state you cannot imagine for two decades and more--a state of terror and repression. We do not regret this.”

Somali elders, while grateful for the American-led mission, fear that it has not erased the potential for violence by Jess and the other well-armed warlords.

“The expectation was very high with the arrival of the American-led troops that they would rid our country of all these weapons, but the job appears to be only half-done,” said Ahlud Jama, the respected former chief of Somalia’s national police who remained apart from the brutal, two-year clan civil war.

“The most important thing was to carry out disarmament, and the Americans stopped short on that,” he said. “So that expectation remains unfulfilled.”

According to the final U.S. statistics, the American-led force did confiscate and destroy more than 8,300 rifles, machine guns and pistols, 2 million rounds of ammunition, nearly two dozen tanks and armored personnel carriers and 39 of the crude trucks known as “technicals,” which were equipped with anything from antiaircraft guns to jet-fighter rocket pods.

Johnston and his staff also declared Somalia a much safer place than the one where, five months ago, hundreds were dying each day because the armed clans and bandit gangs stole millions of dollars in food and medicine before it could reach an estimated 2 million people on the brink of death.

The American commanders, who insisted from the start that their mission did not include a nationwide disarmament campaign, conceded that hundreds of thousands of weapons may well remain buried in yards and hidden in houses, a problem that now passes to the smaller and less well-equipped U.N. force.

“The most important thing for the United Nations force now is to find and destroy all these arms and to do it in a firm and impartial way,” said Jirdeh Hussein, another Mogadishu elder who is among the few businessmen to stay in Somalia through the civil war.

“When the people are fully disarmed, many people who don’t have a say in things today will come out, and these will be the people to rebuild and chart the future course of our nation. This is our only hope for the future.”

That task falls to retired U.S. Adm. Jonathan Howe, head of all U.N. operations in Somalia and the first American to serve as a special representative of U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali.

Howe will have at his disposal a peacekeeping force he hopes will total 28,000 troops from two dozen nations with the broadest mandate for “peacemaking” in U.N. history. He also will have access to a $1.5-billion budget that includes both military operations and reconstruction funds.

Vowing a crackdown on the armed gangs that remain in isolated pockets of Somalia as the United Nations follows a mandate to move into and pacify the 60% of the nation that was not occupied by the U.S.-led force, Howe said in an interview this week that the biggest difference between the U.S.-led force and his operation will be a more aggressive policy on weapons seizure.

“We have a nation that is full of arms,” Howe conceded, “and (disarmament) is certainly a task we will endeavor to do and do well. But I just don’t want to promise it is something we will get done soon.”

Howe, who was deputy national security adviser to former President George Bush, praised the mission here as a model.

“The U.S. did in Somalia what it is best at--lift, logistics and general know-how and communications,” he said.

Howe and other present and former U.S. military officials in Somalia agreed that the process that began in the Persian Gulf War in 1991 and shifted to the humanitarian arena in Somalia last December has laid the foundation for possible intervention elsewhere, such as in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

In contrast to the Gulf conflict, the scenes and ceremonies seem short of glamour and heroism.

“Hell, everybody back home, they just forgot about us,” Kevin Williams, an Army communications specialist from Pomona, Calif.

The small press contingent on hand Tuesday to record their departure for home lent weight to his lament. In contrast, just five months ago, hundreds of cameras and scores of floodlights and satellite dishes were here to broadcast live the most-intensively reported U.S. Marine invasion in history.

But Johnston, who was chief of staff to Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf in the Gulf operation two years ago, noted that the Somalia operation was an entirely different situation.

“When we go back out of this one,” he said, “we ought to just take some quiet comfort that we made a difference--we saved millions of lives.”