U.S., Kenya Resolve Dispute Over Aid : Somalia: Agreement clears way for airlift of food to the starving.

The U.S. and Kenyan governments on Friday averted a showdown over an American relief airlift to Somalia and northern Kenya, clearing the way for two flights during the day to aid refugees and displaced persons in Kenyan camps.

But there was still no indication of when the first flights might be made into Somalia, where more than 1.5 million people face imminent starvation.

The Kenya-U.S. agreement came a day after Kenya protested what it called a violation of its airspace by U.S. military cargo planes that had arrived during the week to begin relief flights. The friction threatened to halt the airlift even before the first flight had taken off. For their part, U.S. Embassy spokespersons insisted that official clearance had been granted for the arrival of the U.S. planes.

At a joint press conference with U.S. Ambassador Smith Hempstone, Kenyan Foreign Affairs Minister Wilson N. Ayah called the issue “a little misunderstanding that may have been there because of the short notice” on which the airlift was established.

Ayah declined to comment on reports that the United States had not requested official clearance until the first arriving planes had already set down Monday at the airport in Mombasa, the port city from which the airlift will be staged.

There were some indications that the Kenyan government’s principal objection was to hints that U.S. military personnel would take over the distribution of relief food within Kenya’s borders. Like most Third World countries, Kenya is extremely sensitive about how relief supplies are distributed to its people. In its letter of protest Thursday, the government had complained that “U.S. armed military personnel” would be distributing food.

In a meeting Friday morning, Hempstone assured President Daniel Arap Moi that the U.S. relief role in Kenya was never designed to go beyond transporting the supplies by air for distribution by Kenyan authorities and international relief workers on the ground.

Moi and Hempstone agreed to establish a joint committee to coordinate the relief effort in northern Kenya, where hundreds of thousands of drought-stricken Kenyans are mixing with Somalis fleeing civil war and famine. The combination is troublesome in the region, which has been ethnically and politically unstable for decades.

Later Friday, two U.S. C-130 cargo planes flew to the northern town of Wajir with loads of technical equipment and 15 tons of relief food.

Flights over the border into Somalia, the principal target of the airlift, were on hold until American officials can learn more about security conditions around the country’s remote landing strips and assess the ability of the airstrips to accommodate heavily laden cargo planes. The first Somali flights are not likely to take place before early next week, U.S. sources said.