``The whole country is in crisis, and we make an appeal internationally to do something as soon as possible.`` So said the new interim president of Somalia, Ali Mahdi Mohammed, one of the civil-war victors laying claim to the spoils. And Somalia, a Muslim country in the Horn of Africa, definitely is spoiled.
More than 4,000 people, including many civilians, are believed to have been killed in the monthlong battle between a coalition of rebellious Somali clans, the United Somali Congress and the regime of Mohammed Siad Barre. His flight from the capital city of Mogadishu on the last weekend in January ended a fierce conflict that destroyed half the capital and left bodies and vehicle hulks littering the streets.
Because Siad Barre had been spoiling Somalia ever since taking power in 1969, his departure is no loss; it was overdue. An autocrat who increasingly isolated himself and rejected advice to reform, Siad Barre made a large contribution to his own downfall.
All the weaponry poured into Somalia, mainly by the Soviet Union and then the United States, played a role as well. Although U.S. military aid was cut to almost nothing, leftover arms and combativeness served to worsen the carnage. The U.S. gave Somalia about $250 million in military aid in the 1980s. In the 1970s the benefactor was the Soviet Union, which sent about $300 million in aid.
But these big-power ``investments`` didn`t divert Siad Barre from his course toward an ever stricter police state, and it became clear that the money had been poorly spent. Outsiders lost first hope and then interest, and Somalis were left to their own devices. That remains their condition.
They must pull themselves and their country together on their own. Somalia isn`t important enough to grab off much of the world attention focused on the war occurring to the north across the Gulf of Aden. Even if the international community weren`t preoccupied elsewhere, there would be little it could do.
Somalia`s rebel groups-three main ones, plus several minor ones-have to overcome their many differences before there is any hope of creating the
``broad-based democratic government`` a Somali Congress spokesman declared is the goal. It will be hard even to raise some legitimate authority above a horizon now dominated by chaos. Good luck, lonely Somalia.