U.N. Team Inspects Aid Effort in Somalia

A United Nations team arrived in the ruined Somali capital Thursday to cheers from crowds of gun-toting teen-agers lining the streets as the U.N. convoy raced to meetings with rival warlords.

“They think the U.N. is bringing its army to bring peace to the city,” a Somali escorting the team told reporters.

Peter Hansen of Denmark and his 23-member team met with self-styled President Ali Mahdi Mohamed, whose vicious feud with Gen. Mohamed Farah Aidid has killed and maimed thousands.

But as members of the mission set to work, the U.N. secretary general’s special representative for Somalia admitted they were nine months too late.

“If only we had intervened before November. Because of that delay we now pay the price,” Ambassador Mohamed Sahnoun told reporters in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi.

The mission later examined security around Mogadishu’s Indian Ocean port, where gunmen have prevented the distribution of tons of food already in the country.

A cease-fire between the two Somali factions is barely holding, but poor security has virtually halted relief efforts in the anarchic Horn of Africa nation where at least 200 people now die of starvation each day.

The mission’s main task is to assess the need for security forces to provide escort and protection for a huge international relief operation.

Gunmen try to steal the relief food supplies for fellow fighters or sell it at exorbitant prices to the starving.

A senior member of the U.N. team said food was able to leave the port Thursday, and the priority is now to increase security on the roads to outlying districts.

“Road is the favored option, but we are looking at airlifts and even airdrops. That is what we will do if there is no agreement on transport,” he said.

After months of indecision, the United Nations is edging toward military action to keep the gunmen at bay and deliver food to millions of starving men, women and children.

A French minister, a veteran of disaster areas, returned from the country Thursday saying he had found “hell on earth.”

“I found death, the death of a country and above all, of children lying in the streets,” said Health and Humanitarian Action Minister Bernard Kouchner.

Somalia, widely labeled the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, plunged into chaos after the January, 1991, fall of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre.