Insurgents Claiming Victory in Somalia

Rebels in Somalia said on Saturday night that they had won control of the capital, Mogadishu, and had forced President Mohamed Siad Barre to flee his palace. The rebels' assertions, monitored over radio about 600 miles to the southwest in Nairobi, were largely confirmed today by a team of French doctors who were treating the wounded in the Somali capital.

Stevan van Praet, a representative in Kenya of a French humanitarian agency, Doctors Without Borders, said his team told him this morning by radio telephone that Mr. Siad Barre had fled the presidential palace in a tank 15 minutes before it was seized. Mr. van Praet said he had no information about the whereabouts of the President, who has held autocratic power in the eastern African nation for 21 years. Looting of Palace Mr. van Praet said his doctors had reported that civilians and rebels had looted the palace, known as Villa Somalia, after the President's escape.

One unconfirmed report in Nairobi said Mr. Siad Barre had fled to his well-fortified bunker at the Mogadishu airport, which the French doctors said was controlled by loyal troops. Another unconfirmed report suggested that the President had fled south toward the Kenyan border. In the broadcast, the United Somali Congress said: "The Government and the responsibility of the Somali people were taken over by the U.S.C. movement. We are addressing you from Radio Mogadishu, the voice of the Somali people."

The United Somali Congress is one of three clan-based insurgent groups that have been trying to oust Mr. Siad Barre, who during the cold war received weapons from the Soviet Union and then the United States. In the last two years, under pressure from Congress, Washington cut off military aid over human rights abuses by the Somali Government.

The French doctors, who are accompanied by an English ecologist and pilot, Murray Watson, are the only independent contact between Mogadishu and the outside world. Soon after intense fighting and looting started at the end of last month, all foreign embassies were evacuated. Two weeks ago, diplomats from Italy, the former colonial power in Somalia, were the last to leave. In a radio conversation this morning with the British Broadcasting Corporation, Mr. Watson graphically described the scene in the whitewashed, palm-fringed city on the Indian Ocean. "There are not so many bodies," on the street, Mr. Watson said, "because dogs have eaten most of them." "There are hands sticking up through the sand," he said in an apparent description of bodies still strewn on the beach. He said that in the last few days, the doctors had received about 60 severely wounded civilians and were performing "10 to 15 amputations a day." Mr. Watson told the BBC that shells fired from the area of the presidential palace were "going out 5 to 10 kilometers" and landing in civilian areas.

Last week, Mr. Siad Barre appointed a new Prime Minister, Umar Arteh Ghalib, a nationally known figure from the northern-based Isaaq clan, which has also been fighting the Government. The President also offered to step down if the rebels accepted a truce, but the deal was rejected. A stream of refugees has been pouring out of Somalia into both Ethiopia and Kenya, some of them highly placed military and political figures. With considerable rivalry between the clan-based insurgents, it seemed doubtful that the United Somali Congress would be able to restore stability to the country, both Somalis and Western analysts said. Many predicted that there would be persistent factional fighting.

Coveted by the superpowers during the cold war because of its strategic position on the Gulf of Aden and close to the Middle East, Somalia is a largely rural, Muslim country of six million people. The United States had an access agreement with the Siad Barre Government for use of the port at Berbera, but the internal situation had become so unstable that the port was not used during the build up for the Persian Gulf war.

Source: New York Times