MOGADISHU, Somalia — Ramadan Mohamed, who had spent a career riding atop a crudely customized Toyota truck that was mounted with a .50-caliber machine gun, was feeling cheated.
Sitting idle in the courtyard of a large residential compound that houses the headquarters of his leader, Mohammed Farah Aidid, Ramadan expressed bitter regret that a final victory had eluded his militia and now might slip away forever.
"Everyone knows that Aidid is the power and cannot be stopped," he told a visiting reporter. "We must get our fair share of power."
Several of his companions, all cradling worn combat rifles of varying national origins, nodded approvingly at the words. Their view of the results of two years of civil warfare is disputed by other militias and gangs that have collectively ravaged most of the southern two-thirds of Somalia. But for young men such as these, their own clan can do no wrong.
These armed movements have fancy high-sounding names. Aidid's group, for instance, is known as the United Somali Congress. But make no mistake, this is family business.
The number of clans and the confusion of alliances and rivalries make reconciliation in Somalia an improbable task. The United Nations has scheduled a peace conference Monday in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia. The meeting is designed as a first step toward bringing Somalia's warring sides together. The United Nations has seized a moment of relative stability in Somalia's suffering to launch a move toward finding long-range solutions.
Gathering together representative groups from this fractious society has already been a problem. For the moment, Aidid, head of one of the most powerful militias in the country, has stopped short of authorizing delegates to go to Addis Ababa. And even if Aidid's group does attend, it is virtually impossible to ensure that the conference is all-inclusive.
"Take the politics of Chad and Lebanon and combine them and you might reach the level of complexity in Somalia," said a U.S. official, comparing Somalia with two other convoluted trouble spots.
Politics is too mild a word for the brand of warfare that has scarred Somalia. Until the arrival of the U.S.-led peacekeeping soldiers last month, the country subsisted in a kind of brutish state of nature, with ancient enmities and barbaric practices repackaged into a quest for national power. The scale of deaths, pillage and rape will never fully be calculated. Tens of thousands have died of starvation alone, much of it provoked by the tactics of the warfare.
