Moyiga Nduru
A banana war between two of Somalia’s main warlords is under way over the control of the lucrative banana export trade.
The forces of General Mohamed Farah Aideed, the self-proclaimed president of Somalia, are pitted against the militiamen of his former financier, Ali Hassan Osman “Atto”.
Aideed needs the revenues, estimated at around $800 000 a month, to pay his soldiers as he tries to establish his control in the Bay and Bakol regions and take on the Rahenweyne clan. Atto, in a lose alliance with another self- proclaimed president, Ali Mahdi Mohammed based in northern Mogadishu, wants to deny him.
Renewed clashes beginning last month have left scores of people dead, as business leaders and elders attempt to negotiate a truce.
“What’s happening in Mogadishu is an economic war; an attempt to control the port of Merca and Somalia’s lucrative banana trade. That’s why the fighting is not being joined by other Somali factions,” says Hussein Ali Dualleh of the Nairobi-based Somali Affairs Monitoring Committee.
Atto and Ali Mahdi blocked Aideed from using Mogadishu port last October. Fighting again flared in March when Atto demanded that the warlord either share the revenues from Merca or see that port closed.
In the battle that followed, Aideed’s forces were overrun. A full-scale war was averted after elders of the Habir Gedir clan, to which the two warlords belong, persuaded Atto to withdraw.
As they pulled back to Mogadishu, Atto’s militia felt “humiliated and bitter”, according to a Somali elder who refused to be named, “and they immediately attacked Aideed’s forces. That’s the origin of the present conflict.”
Before Somalia collapsed into the anarchy of warlord politics with the overthrow of former dictator Siad Barre in 1991, the country was earning some $20-million annually from banana exports. That represented around 15% of the country’s total export earnings.