U.S. Effort to Help Somalia Off to a Shaky Start : Foreign aid: Airlift plan caught relief agencies by surprise. Delays could cut program’s effectiveness.

The U.S. emergency airlift to Somalia announced with great fanfare by President Bush a week ago is getting off to a shaky start because relief officials and organizations in Somalia and neighboring Kenya were caught unaware that the program was being undertaken.

Also left uninformed was the Kenyan government, which on Thursday protested what it called the U.S. failure to request prior clearance for military flights into its airspace. Kenya, whose cooperation is critical to the success of the airlift, threatened to shut down the operation.

The resultant planning delays and logistic hitches could hamper the airlift’s effectiveness for weeks. Eleven U.S. military cargo planes are scheduled to take part in the airlift, which will last at least two months and operate out of the Kenyan seaport of Mombasa.

Their task is to help alleviate the suffering of more than 1.5 million Somalis facing death by starvation in a land racked by civil war and still afflicted by armed bands operating in a state of near anarchy. But because of planning and reconnaissance delays, the first flight into Somalia is not expected to take place until sometime next week. Flights to refugee centers in northeastern Kenya, however, will begin today.

Officials and relief workers here, including American government personnel, say they had no notice that the White House was contemplating the airlift before the announcement in Washington on Aug. 14.

“We learned about it the same way everybody else did--from the news,” one American official said.

“Suddenly we had this huge asset we didn’t know anything about,” said Fred Fisher, regional director in Nairobi for the U.S. Agency for International Development, which will be responsible for coordinating relief cargoes for the American planes. He and other officials have spent much of this week trying to find relief cargoes to fill the planes once they are ready to fly, in part by offering to transport for free any cargoes consigned to relief groups already operating in Somalia.

As for the 145,000 tons of additional relief food announced by the White House at the same time as the airlift, that will not be made available until after the next federal fiscal year begins Oct. 1. Given customary delays in ordering and shipping, that means most of that food will not even arrive in the region until late in the fall.

Although relief officials here initially thought some of that food would come in on the military transports arriving this week, they later learned that all would be shipped by sea. Accordingly, it is unlikely that most of that food will be brought into Somalia as part of the airlift.

The first relief flight of the airlift is scheduled to take off this morning to Wajir, in northwestern Kenya, where hundreds of thousands of Kenyans displaced by drought are mixing in misery with hundreds of thousands of Somali refugees fleeing war and famine in their own land. The planes’ cargo of wheat flour, consigned to the U.N. World Food Program, was already slated to be shipped by truck to Wajir from Mombasa, but the airlift will allow it to arrive sooner.

“We’re leaning forward, ready to do whatever it takes,” Marine Brig. Gen. Frank Libutti, the airlift commander, said Thursday.

But Kenyan government permission is necesssary to use the Wajir airfield, which is a military facility, and hours before the first plane was scheduled to leave for Wajir that permission had still not been granted. Meanwhile a U.S. Embassy sposkesman contradicted the Kenyan complaint, saying,, “We definitely had clearance to land in Mombasa and to overfly.” He said negotiatons were still going on, but acknowledged that if the Kenyans “want to tell us we can’t run an airlift, they’re certainly capable of stopping it.”

American relief and military sources in Nairobi say flights into Somalia will not begin until reconnaissance teams are able to report on the safety of airstrips and the security of surrounding areas; most of the neediest famine centers harbor gangs of armed looters who are not above ambushing incoming relief flights.

The first such reconnaissance took place Thursday, when Gen. Libutti, U.S. Ambassador to Kenya Smith Hempstone and two technical staff members visited Baidoa, a severely affected famine center in western Somalia. Many of the 100,000 starving refugees at Baidoa are being served by cargo flights operated by the International Committee of the Red Cross, but that group has not been able to bring in enough food to avert the deaths of 300 Somalis a day, or more, at the camp.

The birth pains of the U.S. airlift underscore the international community’s tardy and inadequate response to the growing disaster in Somalia. Much of the starvation could have been averted, say relief sources, if the United Nations and other international donors had responded to the country’s problems one year ago, before impending famine provoked a near-total collapse of civil rule.

International relief officials in the region are loath to criticize the U.S. initiative, on the grounds that Somalia is so needy that any assistance represents progress. But they say that a lack of comprehensive planning may blunt its effectiveness, at least in the near term. Heavy shipments into remote relief camps could easily overwhelm distribution programs and attract bands of armed looters, exacerbating the problem.

“We very much welcome the airlift because we’ve been saying for a long time that what Somalia needs is an enormous amount of food,” said Ben Foote, an official of Save the Children, a British aid group, in Nairobi. “But our concern is that airlifts into isolated airfields pose a very major security problem, because there are no structures on the ground to receive this food.”

One task facing the airlift planners is rounding up enough food. Only after the Washington announcement did U.S. officials begin trying to determine how much food was even available for emergency shipment out of Kenya. The agency has so far tracked down about 30,000 tons of relief food for the planes to transport, but almost all of that is designated for delivery to displaced persons and refugee camps in northern Kenya, rather than to famine centers inside the Somali border. Even so, at the 11-plane fleet’s maximum capacity of 400 to 500 tons a day, that food would fill the airlift for nearly two months.

Relief officials and military staff are still uncertain as to how many and which airfields in Somalia and Kenya could accommodate the heavy C-130 and C-141 transport planes that will deliver the relief supplies.