Mohammed Farah Aideed, the Somali warlord who humiliated the United States in 1993, died last week in clan fighting. Mark Huband witnessed his bloody career first-hand
HE was usually grinning, broadly enough to expose a sparkling gold tooth at the back of his mouth. It sparkled almost as brightly as the massive diamond perched on the gold ring he wore on his finger. With his finger, he tapped the carved silver head of his elaborate wooden cane. The cane helped him to walk, because he limped slightly.
He lived in a wilderness, although his collection of high-quality, tasteful shirts always remained neatly ironed with sharp creases along the sleeves.
The nomads would trot past along the soft sand of the track through Bardera, where I first met Mohammed Farah Aideed in August 1992. Bardera was naturally desolate, because it had never known much fighting.
It was here Aideed, a man with a hunger for total power, plotted and prayed and plotted some more, in the wilderness, a long way from the house where he died from bullet wounds last week.
He had retreated to Bardera, in Somalia’s southern region, in 1992. At that meeting he was polite, unrepentant and as cold as steel. He lived by the gun.
A year later, as the United States dragged the rest of the world across what has become known as the “Mogadishu Line” — beyond which peace-keeping becomes war, faction leaders become “criminals,” and civilian homes become “command and control centres” — Aideed was still grinning.
His country had been laid to waste, but he had grown rich. His supporters had stolen from the relief agencies through extortion, charges, rents, armed robbery and bribery. That was Aideed: the master thief. He smiled. He was stooped like an elder statesman. Then the bombing started.
“We are going to smack them as they need to be smacked,” an American official said, as Aideed went into hiding and Mogadishu became the most dangerous place in the world.
After Aideed’s men killed and mutilated 23 Pakistani United Nations troops on June 5 1993, Washington decided to kill the man who had got in the way of its blueprint for Somalia’s future.
The drone of an aircraft engine rumbled through the city’s warm night air. Precision bombing left a hole in the table where Aideed had sat hours before. But he had vanished into hiding, leaving behind his toothpaste, after-shave and deodorant in the house where I last saw him.
For weeks, Cobra helicopters buzzed like mosquitoes over the Mogadishu rooftops, searching for the renegade. Then, on an evening bathed in orange light, the muezzin called the faithful to prayer and the noise was somehow different.
By October 3 1993, Aideed had been on the run for several weeks, sleeping in three different places every night, never being seen in public, not risking interviews, barely travelling during the day.
On October 4, a woman grabbed my hand and led me through shacks to where the wreckage of a Cobra had become a playground for scores of children who swung from its rotor blades. The million-dollar “bird” had been brought down by a modified rocket-propelled grenade.
The woman led me back on to the street. It was early morning, and it was hot. Thousands of people yelled, screamed, chanted and spat out their hatred of the outside world. A boy dragged a bloodied, dismembered corpse along the sandy street to a crossroads. A man towed a piece of corrugated iron on the end of a piece of rope. He displayed it in front of me, loosened a knot. The folded iron sprang open. The large, white body of a man wearing only his khaki military underpants, rolled within the twisted iron.
“American! American!” The screech was deafening. Here was the enemy.
Eighteen Americans and 300 Somalis had been killed when US Rangers were sent to a hotel where one of the UN’s notoriously unreliable and highly paid informers had said Aideed was holding court.
All American military decisions were made at the US supreme command in Washington. Somewhere, a world away, behind a desk in a government building where, nearby, workers were waiting for the Metro, picking up their morning newspapers or sipping the first coffee of the day, a decision was made to “snatch”.
But Aideed was not there. The bird had flown as the elite Rangers, who returned my waves from the rooftop as they sat in their helicopters, legs dangling from open doors, buzzed across the Mogadishu night to death in the sand. It was territory that Aideed’s gunmen would die for.
Photographs of the American bodies went around the world. One photographer won a Pulitzer. Aideed had won. That night he was free. The search was called off. The UN’s Wild West-style “wanted” posters with his image disappeared from the walls. The streets throbbed with victory, fear, revenge, violence and blood.
The chief architect of the disastrous operation to kill Aideed with the most hi-tech weapons in the American military’s armoury, Admiral Jonathan Howe, looked paler and more pathetic than ever. Despite being the United Nations’ special representative in Somalia, he led the Americans in a condemnation of the world body for blunders that were entirely US mistakes.
Now Aideed is dead. His bloody victory that October of 1993 was Africa’s defeat. When Rwanda lurched into genocide six months later, the world closed its eyes, covered its ears and shut its mouth. Rwanda’s rivers ran with blood, but the world fled. The Mogadishu line was not about to be crossed again.
l Aideed’s son Hussein (35), a former US marine, was elected on Sunday to succeed him. Hussein Aideed said after his election that he would follow his father’s policies in the clan wars ravaging Somalia, and that he would “eliminate all internal and external enemies.”