Death Reaches Somalis Faster Than Aid Can : Africa: The delivery of relief is hampered by the near-total collapse of government authority.

The child was 7 but had the physical stature of a 3-year-old. At one of the 190 Red Cross feeding centers in this wrecked capital city he sat by his father’s feet with the wide, fathomless dark eyes and motionless indifference that signify the last stages of death by malnutrition.

“He has been here three months,” said the father, Ahmed Khalir Hamad, 63, a farmer from the west who was thrown off his land, his crops stolen, by gunmen who represent the only authority in this land of civil-war-induced anarchy. He and his son made it to Mogadishu in search of food and medical care last year. “But he cannot use the food because he has diarrhea and vomiting.”

Fatuma Hassan Galbet, a former civil servant who runs Kitchen No. 51 for the International Committee of the Red Cross, nodded her head in agreement. Every day about 10 people, mostly children and elderly, die in the compound housing 2,500 under tents fashioned of twigs and scraps of bright green plastic.

“This one will be dead tomorrow,” she said.

Scenes like this, or worse, are repeated in countless places across Somalia. This is a land of 6 million people where 4.5 million are judged by the Red Cross to be in serious need of emergency food relief because of war and drought.

About 1.5 million are in imminent risk of death by starvation, relief agencies say, making the crisis in Somalia much worse than the Ethiopian famine of 1984, in which 1 million died. After a two-day visit here in late July, James Kunder, director of the U.S. Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance, called Somalia “the single worst humanitarian crisis in the world today.”

In recent months international shipments of aid have stepped up. The United Nations’ World Food Program has 23,000 tons of food due in Mogadishu by the end of this month and has issued an appeal for 84,000 more tons by year’s end. Still, the Red Cross estimates that Somalia needs as much as 50,000 tons a month, continuing for a year, to be saved. That is twice the current rate of influx.

But the delivery of relief to millions of starving Somalis is hampered by the near-total collapse of government authority in the country. In this capital, whose seaport is the key to landing adequate quantities of emergency supplies, gunmen roam the streets at will, hijacking relief convoys on a daily basis. Most overland routes to the interior are too dangerous to use, and feeding camps are regularly attacked by looters.

After months of inaction, the U.N. Security Council late last month agreed to airlift food into Somalia to relieve the suffering. But disaster officials on the ground say an airlift is an unrealistic solution to the famine because it will cost up to 20 times as much as overland shipments, and aircraft simply do not have the capacity of trucks.

“An airlift can’t be sustained,” said Graham Roberts, logistics coordinator here for CARE International. “Its sheer cost makes it not viable except in the short term. But it is needed in the short term.”

Just Thursday, a 23-member U.N. technical team arrived here to begin charting logistics for air deliveries of food to the interior. But its report will not be submitted to the Security Council until Saturday, until which point the airlift cannot begin.

Among its other responsibilities is to judge the wisdom and terms of sending a detachment of armed U.N. forces to impose order on this city and port. U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali and his designated representative here, Mohammed Sahnoun, both support the dispatch of troops in principle, but many local relief workers fear the arrival of a foreign force will only aggravate violent tensions in the city.

Today, the epitome of suffering can be found in the town of Baidoa, about 150 miles west of here, where 60,000 to 100,000 Somalis have gathered in response to rumors of incoming food. Baidoa has a Soviet-built airstrip and is served by a very good Tarmac road from Mogadishu, but so little food has so far reached it that people are dying at a rate of at least 100 a day, and possibly 500.

“I was in Ethiopia in 1984 and I haven’t seen anything like this,” said Carl Howorth, Somalia field director for CARE International, who visited Baidoa last week. “Even if a feeding program started right this minute, 70% of the kids would be dead. They’re eating goatskins in that camp.”

But Somalia’s violence eases for nobody. Even though CARE’s trucks could reach Baidoa in less than six hours, the convoy would almost certainly be attacked and the food stolen before it reached its destination. A shipment of 400 tons of emergency food that the Red Cross managed to get into Baidoa was stolen last week before it could be distributed.

Somalia’s current condition is the product of decades of unscrupulous government and superpower politics, as well as centuries of tribal and clan conflict. For 21 years it was ruled by the ruthless Mohamed Siad Barre, a member of the Marehan clan who made himself a client first of the Soviets and then of the Americans, playing them off each other and using their arms to pursue a ruinous military adventure against neighboring Ethiopia in 1977-78.

Siad Barre’s policy of exacerbating clan rivalries to keep himself in power eventually produced rebel movements in almost every part of the country. Through a period of constantly shifting coalitions they forced his army to retreat until in late 1990 the president of Somalia was derisively known as “the Mayor of Mogadishu.”

In January, 1991, Siad Barre slinked out of town in a tank, and the city was overtaken by the United Somali Congress, made up largely of members of the Hawiye clan. The rest of Somalia was controlled by one or another of nine clan-based military and political movements.

Fashioning a nation out of this mosaic of fractious clans would be difficult in any era. “Somalis are famous for being suspicious, hyperbolic, excitable,” said Fathi Mohammed Hassan, who as the Egyptian ambassador is the only foreign diplomat in the country.

Relief officials who have succeeded in bringing warring factions together report that the two sides always begin by embracing each other with genuine affection, then fall into violent arguments. On the street such meetings often end in gunplay.

In November the United Somali Congress itself splintered into two factions that began an Armageddon-like battle for the capital city. The parties shelled each other for 4 1/2 months, reducing the once-charming villas and Italianate center of town to a moonscape and forcing almost every relief agency, including the United Nations, to flee. Most did not return in force until March or April, after a cease-fire was established by the United Nations. A shipment of 7,000 tons of emergency grain from a Romanian ship unloaded at the Mogadishu port that month was the first relief food to reach the city in five months.

Today Mogadishu is rent in two along an uneasy Green Line, with the north controlled by the self-declared “Interim President” Ali Mahdi Mohamed and the south by Gen. Mohammed Farah Aideed, two former comrades-in-arms who now despise and mistrust each other and have so far refused to come together to negotiate a lasting peace.

There is no question that one other element contributing to Somalia’s nightmare is the indifference of the world community, preoccupied during this country’s political collapse with first the Persian Gulf War and subsequently the crisis in what used to be Yugoslavia.

Secretary General Boutros-Ghali last month complained that, compared to Somalia, the conflict in Yugoslavia was a “rich man’s war” and suggested that indifference to the Somali plight could be ascribed to racism.

But the United Nations itself has withdrawn from Mogadishu twice in the last year because of the city’s insecurity. And in contrast to the European Commission’s intense involvement and pressure on the United Nations on behalf of former Yugoslav republics, the parallel multilateral bodies in this region, the Organization of African Unity and the Arab League, have made almost no effort to bring about a Somali settlement or import aid. The last African diplomat to visit the country was Nigerian Foreign Minister Ike Nawachuku, who came as a representative of Nigerian President Ibrahim Babangida, then the OAU chairman, nine months ago.

Nevertheless it is probable that a concerted relief effort last year could have averted the internecine war of last November, which destroyed Mogadishu and gave birth to the continuing violence interfering with relief today.

“That outbreak was largely economic, not political,” said a U.N. official in Mogadishu who asked not to be identified. “It was over a lack of food. If the U.N. had intervened in September, it would not have happened.”

By then other major donors of relief in the Horn of Africa had also pulled out. The United States, which had built a new multimillion-dollar embassy on the Mogadishu seashore in the last year of its client regime’s existence, evacuated Saigon-style during the dictator’s ouster, as rebels came over the walls and traded fire with Marines sent to rescue the besieged diplomats. Marauders swiftly demolished the structure, once a monument to state-of-the-art security design.

The pullouts left the country in the hands of rebels with no links to any powers in the outside world.

“Not the Americans nor the U.N. nor the Egyptians nor anybody has much leverage here” to force a settlement, Egyptian Ambassador Hassan said. “Everybody has been waiting for months to gain some leverage, and maybe now the U.N. will, based on its (relief) assistance.”

But Mogadishu is still beset by gunmen without secure ties to any leader. Although the shelling has ended and the random gunfire has been reduced in recent weeks, the city is still among the most dangerous spots on Earth.

This is not least because of the population’s predilection for khat, a stimulant ingested by chewing the leaves and stems of a green plant. Demand for khat is so great that during the worst of the fighting in Mogadishu the city’s khat merchants built their own dirt airstrip 30 miles west of the city to land their daily shipments from Kenya. (The United Nations rents the strip to bring in its own personnel and supplies, at hundreds of dollars per flight.)

By afternoon, the most perilous time of day, gunmen as young as 6 are staggering along the streets like zombies or scattering pedestrians with their careening cars--or erupting into murderous arguments.

On a recent day, doctors at Digfer Hospital in the south of town reported treating 39 gunshot wounds, about the daily average. “They come from the markets, looting incidents. Or sometimes there’s joking between friends and they shoot each other,” Dr. Mohammed Hussein Haji said.

Why would friends shoot each other? Dr. Mohammed smiles. “Maybe they’re eating khat ,” he said.

The insecurity and looting in the city are so great that relief officials routinely consider strategies that would be unacceptable in any other food emergency in the world. One is to simply flood Mogadishu with food to drive down its price and make it a commodity not worth stealing.

The problem is that food donors want to know that their donations are getting to the people most in need and that under this plan, the gunmen and quasi-military cadres will get fed first and the starving last.

“As an agency, we have a moral duty to the people who contribute food to put the food into the mouths of the people who need it,” CARE’s Howorth said. “We’re trying our very best under the circumstances, but it’s becoming increasingly difficult to do that.”

Much of the food being landed is already being diverted to private merchants who are profiteering by sending it into markets in Ethiopia and Kenya.

Some relief officials estimate that as much as 80% of the food already distributed has been stockpiled by Aideed and Mahdi against the day that their disagreements again flare into war, something that could happen at any moment. The figure is uncertain, because relief agencies have recently found it so dangerous to follow food convoys to their destinations that they are unsure where the food is going.

Relief and distribution agencies already spend tens of thousands of dollars on armed escorts for their shipments and personnel, making that business virtually the only economic activity in Mogadishu. No convoy is without its retinue of “technicals,” camouflaged vehicles mounted with cannons and filled with gun-toting teams. Even so, many of the shipments disappear en route, shanghaied by the very gunmen hired to guard them.

The Red Cross tries to forestall such looting by the tedious expedient of sending food daily to its 190 Mogadishu feeding centers in small, kitchen-ready shipments. That renders the shipments too small to be valued as loot and ensures that no food remains vulnerable to theft overnight.

“The kitchens are good, because you can see that food is going straight to the beneficiaries,” said Jean-Luc Noverraz, the Red Cross field coordinator. With 350 such kitchens operating countrywide, the Red Cross is currently feeding 600,000 Somalis.

Even so, the rate of theft is high. Noverraz, like many other relief workers, argues from desperation that in a situation as dire as Somalia’s even the diversion of relief food does some good.

“We are not losing food,” he said. “Because even these guys who steal are feeding their families.”