As rebel groups assailed Mogadishu, the capital and last bastion of government control, Siad Barre played a bizarre game of hide-and-seek. Was he holed up in his bunker near the airport, or some other secret refuge? Nope, say Western diplomats who visited him last week: he was safely tucked away in his presidential palace, where he commanded the rebels to lay down their arms. They refused. So did his own troops when ordered back to their barracks. Siad Barre now finds himself trapped by the very forces he has manipulated since toppling Somalia’s civilian government in 1969. For years he clung to power by pitting Somalia’s powerful clans against one another. The ensuing warfare claimed 50,000 lives in the last two years alone, and the bloodletting may only be beginning. “The situation looks sickeningly similar to Liberia,” says a U.S. congressional aide, referring to the slaughter of civilians by rival factions in that West African nation last summer.
Meantime U.S. and Italian forces began evacuating foreigners from the U.S. Embassy, which, with its empty golf course and pool, is at least one place in Mogadishu not littered with dead bodies.
