|
The
lessons of Somalia
Me Against My Brother: At War in Somalia, Sudan and
Rwanda
Scott Peterson, Routledge, £14.99 |
Reviewed by Alex Renton
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this book online from Amazon.co.uk
There's one word that those friendly British Army officers
seconded to "media ops" in Sierra Leone really detest.
It's "Somalia". It became a game among the hacks in
Freetown last month to see if you could get a British officer to
take on even the most innocent question that had the word Somalia in
it: "I'm just not going to give you a quote that says this
country is not Somalia!" one senior officer said to me. When
the Royal Marines were deployed two weeks ago, so desperate were the
media ops men to avoid any Soma-lia-style TV film of over-equipped
troops storming the friendly city's beaches, that all amphibious
landings were done without notice and at night. This was great fun
for the journalists drinking in the beach-front nightclubs who got a
grandstand view.
Scott Peterson was on the beach in Mogadishu on 9 December 1992
to watch heavily armed US Navy Seals come ashore opposed only by
rank upon rank of sniggering journalists. He watched the Americans
leave 16 months later, 44 of their number dead, driven out by the
Somalis whom they had come to save. He saw the mutilated bodies of
dead American soldiers dragged through Mogadishu's streets, and
heard President Clinton plaintively declare: "All the Americans
ever
did was go there and try to save children from starving."
Peterson, an American who reported these wars for The Daily
Telegraph, pitched up a bit later in Rwanda where, arguably, he saw
one of the results of the American humiliation in Somalia - the
genocide that resulted because of President Bill Clinton's
determination that American peacekeeping troops should never be
drawn into combat again. In Sierra Leone, of course, one of
Britain's aims is to expunge the memory of Somalia; to show that
intervention can work. That's why - even though the analogy is
pretty thin - the British officers don't like to hear the S-word.
Peterson shows very clearly how and why the Somalia expedition
went wrong - this is as succinct and gripping an account as I've
read of the debacle. It is a classic portrait of an army in its pomp
- ignorant, arrogant and ripe for the humiliation that it suffered.
That this happens at the hands of a poorly equipped, largely
civilian guerrilla force in the poorest country of the world is all
the more appropriate.
Peterson's bitterness remains. His indictment of the
pusillanimous American commander, Admiral Jonathan Howe, an old Cold
Warrior, for whom the conflict amounted to Bad Guys versus John
Waynes, is brilliant. Howe is a Colonel Kilgour, an Apocalypse Now
figure who veers visibly off the rails as the story evolves.
Peterson produces some new, fascinating - for Somalia addicts -
evidence about just who the Americans were doing business with in
Mogadishu, which just goes further to show how fatally incompetent
their intelligence was.
He is perhaps less successful at drawing conclusions. His
condemnation of United Nations incompetence, his anger at the waste
and missed opportunities comes straight from the gut, and it will
find a home in the hearts of almost every journal-ist who has
watched it at work. But he offers no diagnosis, let alone cure - you
need to go to William Shawcross's history of peacekeeping, Deliver
Us from Evil, for that. But Peterson is right to put his finger on
one crucial gap that the plan-ners of these muddle-headed
interventions never seem to spot. It applies from Somalia to Kosovo
to Sierra Leone: that the peace-keeping force must be prepared to
replace the governmental structure that has collapsed. Just by being
there, the peacekeepers become the state - and if they don't take on
that role they can very soon become the enemy.
Africa smells bad," says Peterson. That is chiefly, you
can't help but conclude, because he saw extraordinary numbers of
people die - most of them African civilians, some of them soldiers
sent to keep the peace, a few of them his friends and colleagues.
Death pervades the book - the cover photograph is of one of skulls
ordered like pumpkins on a market stall, an image that has become
emblematic of the dark side of the planet since the Khmer Rouge's
Cambodia. Such is the familiar path that Peterson trod. The other
death he chronicles is of hope - he went to Africa hoping to cover
"an anticipated blossoming of democracy across the
continent", but in four years never touched the subject.
Peterson won't consider the idea that Africa is hopeless - but his
passages celebrating the "human spirit" or spotting images
of hope among the horror are, sad to say, the least convincing.
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