Documentary : A War Within a War in Somalia : Emergency aid workers try to cope with a devastating famine amid snipers, looting and killing.

The relief official was in the midst of a detailed briefing on food deliveries and famine statistics in Somalia when he suddenly broke off. “You have to understand something,” he said. “You have to understand what a horrible place this is.”

Many conversations in Mogadishu go like that. For this is a city where relief workers have been fighting gunmen, anarchy and world indifference to get not enough food to too many hungry people. Some are harassed to the point of nervous breakdown, some seem preternaturally serene, but all show the effects of living for months with frustration and danger while trying to get food to more than 1.5 million Somalis starving to death in the interior.

That no visitor to Mogadishu moves out onto the street without a show of firepower was made clear within moments of my arrival last week.

We landed in a UNICEF plane 35 miles southwest of the city at a dirt airstrip built by drug runners who considered security at the international airport in town too dicey for their valued cargoes of khat, a mildly stimulating drug ingested by chewing the leaves of a green plant grown in Kenya. A German relief agency gave us a lift into town in a Toyota van, its sliding side door removed to give two armed guards clear shots out the opening. Our driver avoided the paved highway running in from the airstrip, preferring the sunken drainage ditch alongside: less exposure to snipers.

Downtown, at the U.N. Children’s Fund communications compound, the agency’s local staff found us a man who would rent us two vehicles and accompanying gunmen. In an hour the vehicles pulled up: a white Toyota Corolla and a canary yellow pickup truck with a machine gun mounted on its bed. The Corolla was unarmed; that wouldn’t do. There was more dickering with the crowd of Somali men hanging about the compound, until one agreed to hoist his Russian rifle and sit in the front seat for $20 a day. He rolled down the window to make room for the barrel.

The threat of random violence in this place without a government is incessant and all-defining. Nothing is illegal because there is no authority except the gun. Relief agencies get daily reports from local contacts about which neighborhoods and streets are unsafe to travel.

Especially unpredictable is the main road to the international airport, where a group of ex-army officers, dressed in rags and looking more sad and defeated than angry, has taken up residence. Now and then they decide to blockade the road, complaining that the United Nations has left them penniless and hungry. They drag motorists out of their cars, taking their money and whatever food might be inside.

The airport itself had been closed to U.N. flights since May 31, when looters there made off with six metric tons of Unimix, an emergency food for malnourished children, and one ton of medicine brought in by UNICEF and the Red Cross. Armed gangs clearly had been tipped that both agency’s planes would be on the ground at the same time. The stolen Unimix amounted to meals for 30,000 children.

Episodes like that make Somalia a challenge to relief doctrine. The lack of food provokes violence and looting, which in turn makes it hard to bring in more food.

One day, a European relief official--he prefers to remain unidentified, so let us call him Paul--walked us through the difficulties created by Somalia’s disorder.

That same morning a convoy carrying 200 tons of food--20 full trucks--had disappeared en route to a distribution center in south Mogadishu. Likely as not the armed Somalis the United Nations paid to guard the convoy were bribed to divert it, probably into the warehouse of a private businessman. “Businessmen know what’s on a ship and it’s sold before it’s even unloaded,” Paul said. Instead of reaching starving Somalis, it ends up on the market in Ethiopia and Kenya.

Paul had dispatched Somali investigators into the city to trace the wayward shipment, but even if they found the drivers and escorts--in fact, the trucks were likely to show up for more loads later in the week--Paul would have little recourse. It is too dangerous to confront drivers or gunmen, he explained. Most foreign officials in Mogadishu routinely put up with thievery and incompetence because to fire a Somali would make an enemy of him and his family and clan, all well-armed.

“I’d leave here in a wooden box,” he said.

Paul was displaying one recognizable symptom of those who have spent long months in a relentlessly hostile environment. He seemed close to a nervous breakdown. Burly and bearded, he was constantly in motion, squirming in and out of his chair, tossing a walkie-talkie from hand to hand, his eyes darting everywhere. His vibrating body seemed about to shake itself to pieces.

At that, he said conditions for his outfit had improved since it turned over one of the more dangerous jobs to a joint commit tee of Somalis appointed by two local warlords. The job: making “need assessments” in Mogadishu, deciding how much food would be delivered to feeding stations in each zone of the city. Inevitably, the task meant that Paul’s agency faced pressure tactics. “We had people walking into this office with hand grenades, pin out, yelling, ‘Where is my food?’ ”

One obvious solution to the problem of violence and looting is to reduce the value of the loot; relief workers talk constantly of the need to “flood” Mogadishu with food. “Once there is plenty of food it is not worth stealing, hoarding or fighting over,” said Tony Knight of the Save the Children Fund.

This would probably work; relief workers and Somali clan leaders agree that in contrast to Yugoslavia, almost none of the fighting in Somalia today is political. It’s economic.

“This is just the strong men taking the food,” said Mohamed Noor, a lieutenant of Gen. Mohamed Farah Aidid, the warlord who controls the area of town that contains the port. “If more food doesn’t come in, the stronger will continue to loot the weaker.”

The argument is that once the gunmen and their families are sated, the way would be open to get food to the truly needy: the women, children and elderly living in feeding centers and distant camps.

Relief agencies know that this is a truth that donor countries are reluctant to hear. Western countries do not like sending emergency relief into situations where they cannot account for its distribution. The agencies themselves are not eager to abdicate their responsibility to at least try to get the food into the mouths of the neediest first--rather than feeding the gunmen and letting the merchants gorge. In any event, talk about flooding Mogadishu is frustratingly academic. It would take 30,000 metric tons of food a month for the city alone; so far this year, deliveries of relief for the entire country have barely exceeded 20,000 tons a month.

Some people here explain Somali violence by trying to dress it up with anthropological meaning, a form of the “Stockholm syndrome” in which people who feel trapped by the intransigence of the culture they are trying to assist respond by finding some primitive virtue in behavior they otherwise consider egregious.

Here in Mogadishu the talk is of a Somali “culture” viewed as a harsh, primitive social Darwinism. The International Committee of the Red Cross has more or less the same view of Somali culture--the family and clan come first, before any concept of community or nationhood--but works within it to conduct what is by far the most successful feeding program in Somalia. The ICRC operates 190 feeding kitchens in Mogadishu, serving perhaps 250,000 people, by allowing the clans themselves to distribute the food.

“We work through the elders,” said Jean-Luc Noverraz, the agency’s field coordinator.

By staying on in Somalia when every other relief agency had fled, the Red Cross has managed to build up a nationwide network of distribution points that is now feeding 600,000 Somalis throughout the country--the Western world’s only real victory so far over hunger in Somalia. But the ICRC’s resources were so overstretched that it could make no further progress without the United Nations’ help. “We’re trying to bring in as much as possible, but what’s needed is twice what we have,” Noverraz said.

Food is not the only crisis in Mogadishu. At Digfer Hospital, the city’s largest, Dr. Mohamed Hussein Haji pads among the wards in sandals and a soiled cloth wrap. The lightless corridors are littered with foul-smelling rubbish; through the doors one can glimpse prostrate patients lying on the floors or thin fabric pallets. Bloodstained stretchers are thrown up against the walls.

Dr. Haji is ordinarily the second in command at Digfer, but his superior has left the country, as have all but eight of the institution’s 20 doctors. There are no supplies, sutures or medicines to treat the 40 gunshot victims who make it through the doors every day. Most have only flesh wounds, and they are sent on their way. The more serious are admitted, at least a third of them to die.

The principal danger, explains Edouard Stragier, a Belgian doctor working for Medecins sans Frontieres, or Doctors Without Borders, is lack of blood. The French aid agency can import anything for its outposts except blood, which is scarce everywhere in the developed world. Somalis by cultural imperative are reluctant to donate blood. So 30% of the gunshot victims will die of shock, even in cases where the original injury is not that serious.

“Sometimes a family member will donate some blood, but most of the time they just sit there and refuse. They say ‘Inshallah,’ it’s God’s will.”

The gun power on the street conforms to a discernible hierarchy.

The bare minimum is an automatic weapon, easily obtainable in south Mogadishu’s gun market, where a salesman will happily demonstrate the quality of his goods by firing a few rounds past his customer’s ear.

Next comes motorized firepower in its various forms.

Pickup trucks move along the street with half a dozen gunmen jouncing around in their beds, passing rusty sedans with gun barrels projecting from their windows. Some gunmen have opted for high status by carrying grenade launchers or mounting artillery pieces on their vehicles. At the top of the spectrum are the “technicals,” a term of unknown origin referring to the motorized howitzers, generally accompanied by a squad of trained snipers, assigned to high-priority transport. A well-equipped technical is the one vehicle in Mogadishu that everyone will make way for.

At noon one day, accompanied by a U.N. technical, we crossed the Green Line, the shifting demarcation between the warlord armies controlling two chunks of Mogadishu, to get a glimpse of life in north Mogadishu under the “interim president” of Somalia, Ali Mahdi Mohamed. On the way, the Indian Ocean sparkles on our left as we round the hairpin turns of the seafront road. At one point we come upon gridlock. A food truck is turned on its side across the road, attacked by looters. People crowd in and vehicles edge away, laden with the remnants of the truck’s cargo.

Mahdi is president by his own authority, having declared himself the leader soon after his forces ejected the dictator Mohamed Siad Barre from the city. But his declaration enraged Aidid, his former comrade, who split his own command from Mahdi’s and started the battle that has turned the old center of Mogadishu from a seafront district of dilapidated colonial charm into a useless bombed-out shell.

In contrast to Aidid, whose governing technique seems to entail giving carte blanche to marauding gangs of gunmen in his part of the city, Mahdi has managed to get most of the guns off the street in north Mogadishu. He put 3,000 of his men in uniform and announced on the radio that non-uniformed personnel seen carrying guns would have their weapons immediately confiscated.

After 1,500 weapons were seized, most people in the district decided to leave their guns home.

The difference in atmosphere is palpable. There are more kiosks on the street, some shops are even open, and Somali currency is circulating. The United Nations feels safe enough to ban guns from its vehicles in the north.

“It’s much better here than in the south, isn’t it?” said a top U.N. official at the agency’s compound, as he leaned over the balcony of its three-story residence that afternoon.

At that moment there came the sound of a sharp fusillade, seemingly from right outside the compound. “Maybe I spoke too soon,” he said.

Even Mahdi acknowledges that north Mogadishu is far from peaceful. “I wouldn’t say there are no problems,” he said in an interview. Just that morning, food distribution in a nearby neighborhood was interrupted by armed looters. Sixteen of them were arrested, however, and Mahdi’s people say they will go on trial. “You see, we even have courts and jails on this side,” one said. The planned arrival of a 500-member U.N. peacekeeping force here is bound to be controversial, and violent. Foreign troops will put more than 1,000 Somali “security guards”--glorified looters--out of work at the port.

“The U.N. we needed at the time of the clash,” said Mohamed Ali, a nurse at Mediina Hospital, near the Mogadishu port. He was referring to the November-March battle between Mahdi and Aidid.

“We don’t need the U.N. force now, because there is peace,” he said. “The problem is there’s no food.”

A War Within a War

A devastating famine has ripped Somalia apart. Compounding the problem is what has become a very bloody civil war. * Behind the conflict: A rift in the United Somali Congress, which ousted Mohamed Siad Barre from office in January, 1991, led to renewed fighting. Ali Mahdi Mohamed became interim president, but a rivalry developed with Gen. Mohamed Farah Aidid, the military leader of the congress. Both are members of the Hiwiye tribe but belong to different clans.

* Relief update: The United Nations and the United States widened their relief operation on Saturday with an airlift to Somalia’s interior, delivering nearly 19 tons of food. Then, north of Mogadishu on Sunday, gunmen and looters blocked food convoys from crossing into the capital.