President Abdiqasim Salad Hassan

MOGADISHU, Somalia - Abdiqasim Salad Hassan received a hero's welcome 18 months ago when he arrived in Mogadishu, the first leader in a decade who could legitimately claim to be head of state in this stateless nation.

But his popularity wilted about as quickly as the flowers that were thrown on the streets to greet him after his appointment as president of Somalia's Transitional National Government.

Today, he can barely venture into public in Mogadishu, so few are the places where he is respected or safe. His government, if it can be called that, is bereft of money, respect and authority. It controls only part of this ruined seaside city, where warlords backed by armed gangs of drug-dazed men still rule over vast districts.

So what happened to the euphoria after the peace conference attended by 810 Somalian leaders in Arta, Djibouti, where Abdiqasim emerged as leader?

International donors stayed away, declining to help Somalia until the new government proved itself. Abdiqasim complains that foreign donors - mostly the United States - were frightened away by the failed U.N. intervention in the 1990s, depicted in the movie Black Hawk Down.

Some say he got off on the wrong foot almost immediately after his appointment at the Arta shir, or gathering of clans. He sought help from Arab countries, angering regional power Ethiopia, which fears the growing influence of fundamentalist Islam in the region.

Saudi Arabia pledged hundreds of millions of dollars in aid but actually paid less than $20 million. The transitional government says the money was used to help create a police force and army from former clan gangs. It is now so broke that the police went unpaid for four months.

Ethiopia, miffed at the lack of respect from its neighbor, has funneled assistance to several factional leaders, providing a greater incentive for them to oppose Abdiqasim's government than to join it. The Somali Restoration and Reconciliation Council, based in the town of Baidoa, is the Ethiopian-backed opposition to Abdiqasim.

"The international community from east and west has not been forthcoming," he said in an interview at his compound in Mogadishu. He recently received $2 million in aid from Libya, one of the few countries that have opened a diplomatic mission in Mogadishu.

Abdiqasim's alleged link to extremist Islamic groups is a major reason why Western nations have been uneasy about his regime. The Bush administration has warned that the lawlessness of Somalia makes it a potential hideout for fugitive terrorists from Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda organization. As a result, the administration has threatened to make the country a target in its campaign against terrorism.

Abdiqasim denies he was ever a member of Al Itihaad al Islamiya, a Somalian fundamentalist group that the Bush administration calls a terrorist organization.

He said that several documents circulated by warlords that allege he joined the extremist groups more than a decade ago were fabrications. Ethiopia and its warlord allies, he said, are playing up the terrorism threats to curry favor with the Americans.

"The Somali people have been terrorized by what we see and hear and read in the Western media," he said.

Authorities in Somalia say that whatever terrorism activity existed in Somalia has either gone underground or disappeared altogether since Sept. 11. The training camps that supposedly sheltered some of the terrorists who undertook the 1998 bombings of two American embassies in East Africa have been closed for two years.

Abdiqasim was the last interior minister under the socialist dictatorship of Mohamed Siad Barre, who ruled this nation on the Horn of Africa for 21 years until he was ousted in January 1991. Since then, no central government has emerged.

Mogadishu seems to have achieved a sort of normalcy of postapocalyptic bedlam. The city's main port and air terminal are closed because warlords who have refused to join the government can fire on them with artillery. Those same warlords often run their own airstrips or beach ports.

The foreign ministry's building and its archives - the source of some of the documents said to implicate Abdiqasim - are under the control of Hussein Mohamed Aidid. Aidid's father was the warlord whose rule the U.S. military was attempting to lasso in 1993 when 18 Americans were killed. Now Hussein Aidid is allied with Ethiopia and portrays himself as America's friend as well.

The Transitional National Government - TNG - sought to enlist the support of various warlords, some of whom were given meaningless cabinet positions in return for ceasing to fight. Abdiqasim's latest government has 35 cabinet ministers.

"Every clan is represented on TNG," said Jabril Ibrahim Abdulle, the director of programs at the Somalia Center for Research and Dialogue. "But the problem is that people who were in the city never reconciled, never talked about reconciliation. Reconciliation is not something you can buy."

Somalia seems doomed to instability in perpetuity.

No country as devastated as Somalia has emerged from anarchy without substantial international aid. And few countries could claim to be in worse condition. Lebanon, Sierra Leone and Liberia were never without central governments and institutions. Afghanistan is receiving billions of dollars in aid to reestablish a central government.

To hope Somalia can pull itself out on its own is expecting a lot. "It's kind of a chicken-and-egg situation," said a Western diplomat who monitors the region.

Considering what happened here in 1993, almost no one is eager to return to Mogadishu except for a few journalists and aid workers, who now must pay $10 admission fees to view the overgrown Black Hawk helicopter wreckages. Somalia is more comfortably experienced from afar, by American planes and ships that are now patrolling its borders to monitor suspicious movements.