Birth of A Nation

By Simon Robinson/Mogadishu

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.

GET INTERNATIONAL AID

Djibouti and a few Arab states helped underwrite the peace conference and provided four-wheel drives for the President and Prime Minister, and a few thousand police uniforms. But big money from Western governments will be harder to come by. During the cold war, Somalia attracted more aid per capita than any other African state, first from the Soviets and then from the U.S. "It's true that we had a dependency," says Mahamoud Mohamed Uluso, a minister in the Barre government. But once the cold war ended, the money dried up. What followed made many donor nations wary of getting involved in Somalia again. A U.N. operation to feed starving Somalis during a prolonged drought ended after continued clan fighting, while the failure of the related U.S.-led intervention force created a one-word rationale for America's reluctance to intervene in far-off trouble spots: Somalia. No Western country recognizes the new government, though both Italy, the former colonial power in the south, and the U.S. say they are "encouraged." Says David Stephen, the U.N. Secretary-General's representative for Somalia: "The outside world is extremely cautious."

REBUILD

A decade of fighting has left Mogadishu in ruins. Gangs steal power lines, telephone cables and streetlights. Like vultures picking at the bones of a dead animal, men have dug up the pipelines at the old oil refinery, carrying them away to sell. Electricity now comes from small generators; water comes from household tanks if you are rich or donkey-drawn carts if you are poor. People survive on money sent by relatives abroad.

The destruction is not only physical. The whole concept of a state has been distorted. At the airport, militiamen charge landing fees and sell exit visas. Anyone with $30 can buy an official Somali passport in the central Bakara market, though few countries will recognize it. A few stalls away, moneychanger Bashir Moalim Mohamed opens a huge safe packed with $10,000 worth of Somalia shillings. "I am the central bank," he says, pulling out stacks of new notes recently imported by local businessmen from a printing company in Canada. What about protection? Mohamed plucks a rusty M-16 assault rifle from the open safe. "This is my protection. Without this you're a dead man."

"We have to convince people that things have changed in Somalia, that we have come back from the brink of hell," says Foreign Minister Hurreh. "We can actually say we have seen hell itself." The lights in his hotel bedroom turned office flicker and fail. In the darkness he says, "We'll try."