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The Marine expeditionary unit that first went into Somalia as part of Operation Restore Hope was not some thrown-together organization—it was afloat on U.S. Navy ships, ready for any mission.
Getting There . . . From the Sea
Keeping the Peace in Somalia
Events in Somalia and Bosnia remind us that high technology does not always count, and that it may count much less as the world moves away from the Cold War.
The Somalian disaster was perpetrated entirely by men armed with old-fashioned small arms, the largest of which can be carried on the back of a pickup truck, yet they managed to turn the country into a death camp. Perhaps by the time these words are printed the problem will have been solved; if not, it is because modern weapons are not really designed to deal with individuals acting more or less alone. This is why police forces End it so difficult to handle gangs in major cities and. after all, Somalia is more a police than a military situation.
Somalia has a long history, not so much of ejecting invaders (and some Somalis think the Americans are really interested in setting up a colony), but of killing each other. At the turn of the century Britain nominally controlled about one-third of the country, British Somaliland, but the inland tribes were so threatening that the British kept to the coast. One native religious leader, called the "mad mullah” by the British, consolidated his hold on the interior in a series of tribal wars and managed to kill off about one adult male Somali in three.
The British finally pacified the interior tribes after World War T partly by bombing their villages.
Modern weapons concentrate power, and are most effective when used against concentrated forces. They can wipe out dispersed individuals, but there are never enough to do the job. Something else, something Probably more primitive, is needed. More to the point, what is needed probably involves large numbers of combat troops, because they must spread over the country like police.
As recently as World War I, wars were very different, at least °n land, because most armies still considered individual riflemen their main force. The new concentrated technology was coming, but few recognized it. Support services were large, but they were dwarfed by those actually in combat. Two decades later, the modern world had arrived. The concentrated weapons demanded not only very skilled operators but vast amounts of support. Suddenly the ratio of support to combat troops shifted to something like 10:1. Both sides had to follow the same pattern, because true dispersal was never an option. Cohesion demanded the concentration that made the new weapons useful.
Many critics imagine that the United States has an enormous, bloated military, with many front-line troops, but they are wrong—the weapons are served by relatively few people, and most of the military machine is back in the pipeline, keeping the weapons going. That makes good sense, as long as strong attacks on particular points or particular military formations achieve decisive results, which brings us to the enemy’s cohesiveness.
In Somalia, cohesion is pointless. The individuals who ruined the country, and who threaten the troops trying to save it, are just that—individuals. Killing a few of them probably will not affect the others, who see themselves as different. There is a parallel in the civil criminal scene where, in many cases, arrests and even executions fail to deter most criminals. The British pacified the country by threatening particular villages. That
worked because there was still cohesion: if a tribal chief decided that further war was pointless, the war stopped. One effect of modernization, however, is that the chiefs have lost their power. One man with a machine gun and a Toyota truck is his own chief.
The obvious solution is disarmament, but that is likely to be difficult and expensive, not least in lives. Those who have prospered by the gun are most unlikely to give up their weapons cheerfully, so house- to-house searches will be required. As any resident of the rougher part of a U.S. city knows, enough police can keep the level of violence down as long as they remain in place; unfortunately, there are never quite enough of them to do this. At least some Somalis must be aware that the United States has withdrawn from other countries after sustaining casualties, most recently in Beirut. If you were a prosperous gang leader or warlord, how long would you tolerate a U.S. police force? How many dead Americans would you think it would take to force the police to go home?
The Balkan Mess
The other grave problem is Serbia. As this is written, the obscenities continue in Bosnia. In December, the United States suggested establishing a no-fly zone over Bosnia, but the Europeans refused, arguing that however symbolic the initiative, it would be ineffective since the massacres are being conducted by troops, by individuals, and by artillery. There was also a real fear that enraged Serbians would massacre the European troops already in Bosnia distributing relief supplies. Without the will to bring in sufficient numbers of troops, or to attack Serbia directly, the latent threat of Serbian extremism seems potent.
In Geneva, the acting U.S. Secretary of State, Lawrence Ea- gleburger, suggested that various Serbians, including President Slobodan Milosevic, be indicted for war crimes. Unfortunately, Mr. Eagleburger did not explain how they would be caught and tried, so the rhetoric was ineffective. The European Community believes that Greece will not permit any attack on Serbia; indeed, that Greece will support Serbia if it comes to war.
Looming over the issue is the Russian shift back towards the apparatchiks, now that President Boris Yeltsin’s reformist (read: free market) prime minister has departed. The Russian Congress is still heavily loaded towards the old regime, which managed to rig most of the 1990 elections, and it could not have been happy with the Yeltsin program.
This affects Serbia, since Russia has long supported nationalism there. A 1903 coup sponsored by the Russian secret service placed in power the nationalists who, in 1914, ordered the assassination of the Austrian Archduke, and thus precipitated World War I. The nationalists, incidentally, were not particularly impressed by European public opinion. The army officers involved took a blood oath, i.e., each swore that he would literally place his hand in the blood of the king and queen who were to be killed. The oath so shook the governments that most of them refused to recognize the new regime until 1906.
If Russia destabilizes back toward the old regime, will its leadership be forced to support Serbia? The ties are strong in two quite separate ways. One is historical, but the other is that Milosevic is an old-line communist, and the reborn communists who may come to power in Moscow could find it difficult not to help him. It is entirely conceivable that real Russian volunteers may show up. They are already appearing in the nationalist wars across the southern part of the old Soviet Union.
The sort of strong talk but weak action current in Europe this December carries strong and frightening echoes of the 1930s. Did the Bosnian President think that perhaps he was actually Haile Selassie in 1935? The League of Nations at the time roundly condemned Mussolini’s aggression in Ethiopia, but its members could not quite bring themselves to break with him. Nor could they solve the military problems of intervention or even a real embargo. In the end, they decide it was better to let things go until the next time.
Somalia’s gang warfare may be relevant here. President Milosevic claims that he cannot control the gangs of nationalists who are actually doing the killing. Their blood is up, and the indignities of several hundred years must be avenged. Wiping out a gang at a time may well have no effect.
The U.N.-imposed arms embargo does not discriminate between Serbia and its enemies, such as Bosnia. When Yugoslavia broke up, much of the former federal Yugoslav army gravitated to Serbia, and so did most of the Yugoslav national arsenal. It is fairly obvious that the massacres—mainly of Moslems in Bosnia were made much easier by the gross imbalance of armaments. Early in December the Organization of Islamic Countries (OIC) called for U.N. intervention in Bosnia-Hercegov- ina; at the least, they wanted the arms embargo lifted so that the Bosnians could defend themselves. Although OIC diplomats avoided any immediate call for unilateral intervention, there was clearly fury that the West had not already done something about the massacres, and a fear that somehow the old equation of Christians (i.e., Serbs) with the West and against Islam still held. The West’s obvious willingness to intervene in the Moslem-Moslem conflict in the Gulf (and now, in Somalia) must seem to contrast sharply with non-intervention in Bosnia.
Many in the Moslem world already consider the Bosnian struggle a holy war, worthy not only of cash infusions but also of volunteers. All this must raise the specter of the humiliation inflicted by the Christian West on Islam over several centuries.
The OIC meeting ended by imposing a 40-day deadline for U.N. action to end the war. No particular action was threatened if peace was not imposed, and Western commentators differentiated between moderate (status quo) states such as Saudi Arabia, and radical (interventionist) states such as Iran. They extracted numerous expressions of agreement that any action should be with, not against, the United Nations, and that “world public opinion” would surely condemn unilateral measures. Yet the sense of injustice in Bosnia must be extremely strong, far too much so to justify inaction continued very much longer.
British and U.S. negotiators counselled patience, arguing that any fresh infusion of arms to the Bosnians would encourage the Serbians’ traditional suppliers, particularly the Russians and other former Soviet Republics such as Belarus, to escalate the level of violence. It seems most unlikely that the Islamic governments were much impressed, given the genocidal war Serbia—and, to a lesser extent, Croatia—is pursuing at the current level. There may be some fear on the part of the Western Allies that if Serbia seems to be an underdog, that will encourage reactionary forces in Russia itself, with terrible consequences for the West.
The OIC situation is complicated by the long-standing rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia for primacy in the Moslem world. Iran has already provided some arms for Bosnia. Saudi Arabia is probably providing money, but arms may not be far behind. An interesting naval question is whether Western ships will be ordered to shoot to keep arms out of the hands of the obvious victims of the civil war. If Moslem volunteers appear, countries neighboring Yugoslavia may well be tempted to let them through, if only to clip Serbian power before Serbia decides that the borders with its neighbors have been misdrawn.
The Yugoslav war has gone on so long, and is the product of such deep divisions, that it seems unlikely that any purely economic or political pressure will solve the problem. In particular, Serbian nationalists such as the state’s President, Slobodan Milosevic, insist on “cleansing” a largely Moslem southern province, Kosovo. Kosovo is particularly important because it was the site of the victory that brought Moslem control of medieval Serbia. The province is largely populated by ethnic Albanians. Albania itself is far too weak to engage Serbia, but pressure is mounting on Turkey to intervene. Turkey is involved in intense rivalry with Iran for influence in former Soviet central Asia. Each considers itself the protector of Moslems everywhere; Iran, for example, tried to ship weapons to Bosnia this year.
Turkish intervention against Serbia could touch off war with Greece, since the latter strongly supports Serbia’s refusal to allow the old Yugoslav province of Macedonia to become an independent state. Greece argues that the only legitimate Macedonia is in Greece, so, the use of the same name for another state can only be construed as an an attack. Apparently Greece exacted European Community agreement to this policy in exchange for adherence to the Maastrict Treaty (for closer union within the European Community) late in 1991. Greece and Turkey remain extremely wary of each other; there was real fear, in Turkey, of Greek ethnic involvement in the accidental U.S- Sea Sparrow attack on the destroyer Muavenet. It cannot help that the Turkish application to join the European Community has been blocked for some years, almost certainly mainly by Greece.
And of course the destruction of Serbia could justify Russian re-armament, on the emotional ground that the country must once again protect the south slavs from their ethnic enemies (including catholic/protestant Europe). The cold war could return, this time on a more traditional line. But then, since it was never really about communism, why shouldn’t it?