Somalia Cease-Fire Called a Long Shot : Africa: After a fruitless three-day peace mission, a special U.N. envoy says ‘organized civil society’ has broken down.

Returning almost empty-handed from a three-day peace mission into war-ravaged Somalia, U.N. special envoy James Jonah said Monday that a Somalian cease-fire may be almost impossible to accomplish under existing conditions because “organized civil society” has broken down.

Also, one of the two major warlords fighting for control of the capital, Mogadishu, has flatly rejected the need for an internationally supervised cease-fire, Jonah said.

Jonah is scheduled to return to U.N. headquarters in New York, where he will report his findings to the Security Council. He declined to say what he will recommend but agreed that--given the remote prospect that the fighting Somali clans will settle their own problems peacefully--a U.N. force may be the only solution.

Factional fighting and random gunplay have been facts of life in Somalia since the departure just over a year ago of the country’s long-term dictator, Mohamed Siad Barre.

But it reached a special intensity after mid-November when rival clans began a street-by-street battle for the city. By Christmas, as many as 5,000 people, most of them civilians, had been slain.

“The intensity of the fighting between the 20th and 25th of December was unprecedented in Mogadishu,” Jonah said at a press conference in Nairobi on Monday, after returning from the last of three flights into the country.

Throughout this period, random killings and general insecurity have kept most international relief agencies from entering the country in numbers large enough to stem a widening famine and illness among as many as 500,000 Somalis displaced by the warfare, or to care for tens of thousands of wounded civilians.

One Belgian Red Cross worker died Dec. 16, five days after he was shot and critically wounded in front of Somali Red Crescent headquarters in Mogadishu.

Another relief worker, Dr. Martinka Pumpalova, a Bulgarian pediatrician, was killed Sunday in what Jonah described as an “assassination” in the port of Bosasa in northern Somalia, which early this year split off from the rest of the country and declared its independence as Northern Somaliland.

“This murder was unquestionably planned,” Jonah said. Pumpalova was killed when a squad of armed men sprayed the cafe in which she was sitting with gunfire. One of her associates, a Somali, was also killed.

That killing may have a particularly baleful impact on relief operations in the region because Northern Somaliland had previously been considered relatively safe, Western relief officials said.

“Now, I won’t let any of my people go in there, either,” said a Western relief official who asked not to be identified by name. He said there was evidence that Dr. Pumpalova, who had spent three weeks in the region organizing maternal and child health services under a U.N. Children’s Fund grant, was the target of a campaign by a fundamentalist Muslim preacher who had called for a campaign to evict Western aid workers, particularly women, from the area.

What little relief supplies have made it into the country cannot be safely distributed, officials say. One consignment of 8,000 tons of American emergency food has been stalled on a wharf at the port of Mogadishu because aid workers and local leaders fear that trying to distribute such a small amount would provoke hungry residents of the city to gunfire.

“To hold up food over the belief that people would shoot each other over it,” remarked a prominent Western aid official, “that’s about as sad a situation as I’ve ever seen.”

Jonah himself encountered misfortune during his mission that underscores the chaos of Somalia. His safety had initially been guaranteed by Mohamed Farah Aideed, one of the two rival warlords battling over the system. But Aideed abruptly withdrew his guarantee just before Jonah departed Nairobi for Mogadishu on Friday.

Jonah’s plane was prevented from landing at Mogadishu airport and put down at a secondary airstrip about 60 miles from the city. Aideed later that day flatly refused to accept a U.N. role in ending the conflict, contending that a cease-fire was already in effect.

“But in the last few days, we know there has been an exchange of gunfire,” Jonah said. The second faction leader, Ali Mahdi Mohamed, later told Jonah that he would welcome an international peacekeeping force. But Jonah observed that formerly neutral clans have recently been drawn into the fighting in Mogadishu, making the prospect of peace even more remote.

Many diplomatic observers here also contend that, under present conditions, a U.N.-sponsored peacekeeping force would fail. In part, this is because no nation in the region appears able or willing to head it, especially since the force would almost certainly incur casualties. And the military situation in Somalia is so unsettled that an incoming force would likely be drawn into the warfare itself.

“It’s always been true that you can’t have a peacekeeping force somewhere until there is some peace to keep,” said one Western diplomat in Nairobi. “And that isn’t the case in Somalia.”