Picture Mogadishu in 1992. Marauding militias loyal only to Somali clan leaders stalk the city, looting aid shipments bound for the 1.8 million Somalis facing starvation. Then, from the green-blue Indian Ocean waters, there materializes a flotilla of U.S. transports bearing aid and armed men to deliver it. In the skies overhead, U.S. attack helicopters appear, providing cover for food shipments, while an American spy plane circles the city night and day gathering intelligence on militias trying to disrupt the rescue effort.
Flash forward 17 years to the same city, still surrounded by squalid refugee camps. More than twice as many Somalis are now teetering on the brink of starvation in what many view as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. Militias of heavily armed young men still stalk the city hijacking aid shipments. This time, though, no one’s coming to the rescue.
Somalia is in dire straits—maybe worse than ever. An estimated 3.8 million need humanitarian aid (fully half the population), according to the U.N.’s Food Security and Nutrition Analysis Unit for Somalia, which calls the crisis the worst since 1991–92. In the past six months alone, the number of people forced from their homes by fighting—between the country’s barely functional transitional government and Islamist insurgents—has grown by 40 percent, to 1.4 million. Most live in squalid camps that a new report from Oxfam calls “barely fit for humans
So why don’t we care anymore? The answer lies not only in how the giant U.S.-U.N. mission to Somalia came undone—in the ashes of the Black Hawk Down firefight in October 1993—but in a legacy of failures by both Somali and Western leaders to cure the country’s ills.
Some things, of course, have changed in the last 17 years. The collapse of the dictator Mohamed Siad Barre’s regime in the early 1990s caused a civil war between the country’s byzantine network of clans, leading to a famine that killed an estimated 300,000 people. Spurred by television images of mass starvation, President George H.W. Bush, just weeks after losing the 1992 election but before his successor’s inauguration, assembled a 33,000-strong U.S.-U.N. mission, known as UNITAF, to stop the famine.
The operation, which included 28,000 U.S. troops, represented Bush’s vision of a new world order in which the world’s lone remaining superpower would work together with the U.N. to douse the world’s geopolitical brushfires. Ukrainian helicopter pilots who only two years earlier had trained for war with America now passed vodka bottles to U.S. soldiers as they choppered them in to save dying Africans.
What few recall today is that in the early months of 1993, the mission effectively halted the famine. But the new Clinton administration made a bold and fateful error in choosing to take sides in Somalia’s civil war. On a mission to capture two deputies of Mogadishu’s most troublesome warlord, Mohammed Farah Aidid, two U.S. Black Hawk helicopters were shot down, spurring an epic firefight between U.S. commandos trying to rescue the trapped pilots and Aidid’s militia. Eighteen U.S. soldiers were killed and 73 injured. America’s experiment in peacemaking there ended almost as soon as the horrifying images of the bodies of U.S. servicemen being dragged through the streets appeared on CNN.
