U.S. Food Airlift Finally Reaches Starving Somalis : Relief: After two weeks of glitches, first plane is greeted by impromptu dancing at town’s gravel airstrip.

After nearly two weeks of logistic and planning glitches, the American relief airlift finally reached Somalia on Friday, as a C-130 Hercules transport touched down here just after dawn sporting a small American flag on its tail and a giant red cross on its camouflaged body.

Inside was a 7-ton shipment of rice, beans and cooking oils to help feed more than 100,000 Somalis and others gathered around this famine-stricken town 25 miles from the Ethiopian border. The three planes that followed during the morning carried another 29 tons--about half what is needed per day to keep the population from starving.

The first plane took off from the Kenyan port city of Mombasa at 5 a.m. local time, landing in Belet Huen about 2 1/2 hours later. It was greeted by Somalis doing an impromptu dance at the side of the airstrip and by a cadre of porters who unloaded the cargo onto trucks in less than half an hour.

“This represents a lot of support for us,” said Gregoire Tavernier, the head of Somalia operations for the International Committee of the Red Cross, which has been feeding tens of thousands of Somalis in Belet Huen for months.

But as welcome as the first American planes were, their arrival underscored the continuing questions about the planning and utility of the U.S. airlift, which is the product of an abrupt decision to rectify months of international neglect of the Somali famine. More than 1.5 million Somalis face starvation after 18 months of civil war and drought.

Belet Huen was selected as the initial destination of the airlift’s Somali phase not because it is the most desperate for food--since March the Red Cross has been landing four relief planes a day on its gravel airstrip--but because it is the most secure and best-organized town in the famine zone.

“This is probably the closest you’ll see to normal Somali life,” said Caroline Brass, a nurse working with the International Medical Corps, an American relief group, as she showed some visitors around feeding kitchens and medical centers in the town and surrounding settlements.

To a certain extent, the U.S. airlift will just be taking over the Red Cross’ transport capability in Belet Huen, without significantly increasing the total supply. The airlift will allow the Red Cross to divert its own transport resources to other areas of Somalia in greater need, Tavernier said.

Among those spots is the town that was the other top candidate for the first U.S. airlift flight: Baidoa, which is about 150 miles northwest of the capital, Mogadishu. Baidoa is much more afflicted by serious starvation, with hundreds of Somalis dying every day out of a population of about 100,000.

But it has been disturbed by clan fighting, with a serious outbreak of violence as recently as two days ago. The resulting difficulty of landing food and getting it safely distributed there led to the decision to begin the airlift in Belet Huen instead, according to relief officials and American sources.

Baidoa was scheduled to get another reconnaissance visit Friday from American relief officials, including Andrew Natsios, head of the Somali relief program at the U.S. Agency for International Development. U.S. relief flights may begin there sometime next week, an AID spokesman said. But no one can say when the airlift might reach the scores of Somali towns where banditry and clan fighting is so intense that no outside help at all has arrived.

On Friday, the U.N. Security Council authorized the deployment of 3,000 more troops to protect relief supplies, in addition to 500 Pakistani soldiers already on their way to Somalia. The new troop operation will cost nearly $130 million in the first six months.

The U.N. operation in Somalia now is backed by only 50 unarmed observers in Mogadishu.

The U.S. airlift for Somalia was announced by the White House on Aug. 14, without any notice given to international relief agencies or U.S. aid officials in the region.

The result was weeks of hurried negotiations aimed at finding destinations and scrounging relief food for the 12 military cargo planes deployed for the operation and headquartered at the Kenyan port of Mombasa. Meanwhile, the planes were occupied ferrying relief supplies to Somali refugees and Kenyan drought victims in northern Kenya.

Flights into Somalia were held up in part by the American military’s unfamiliarity with the location and condition of Somali airstrips and by the preeminent problems affecting relief in the country: anarchy, looting and gang warfare that makes it almost impossible to distribute food, even if it reaches the famine zone.

For his part, Natsios defended the airlift as an indispensable tool for getting food into the hardest-hit areas more quickly. Relief agencies agree that, given the absence of governmental authority in most of the country, the only way to reduce gunplay is to bring in so much food that it is not worth fighting over.

“Food is power in Somalia,” Natsios said as he watched the first Hercules land in Belet Huen. He argued that news of the forthcoming American shipment alone had been enough to drive down the price of rice by 30% in two days, or from the equivalent of about $17 for a 50-pound bag to about $10. The drop probably resulted from a reduction in hoarding and profiteering by local merchants, he said.

Others working in the district said the price drop was less noticeable, and in any event was not enough to rectify the long-term increase in food prices.

“One sack of rice is the equivalent today of about four goats,” said Matthew Jowett, an official with Save the Children Fund, a British relief group. “A year ago, that was the other way around.”

Food is still so scarce that armed looting of relief supplies occurs almost every day, Jowett said. Relief supplies are particularly vulnerable to ambush because Somalis regard the free food as belonging to anybody--or nobody.

“They won’t steal food in the market because that may belong to a clan, and the clan will fight back,” said Abdullah Warsami, a local resident working with a relief group. “But with relief food, no one can say, ‘It’s mine,’ and the looters just say they’re taking their share.”

That approach was dramatized again Friday in Mogadishu, where a gang of armed Somalis with three tanks looted food and commandeered at least 25 trucks meant to deliver aid to starving people, the Associated Press quoted U.N. officials as saying.

One unarmed U.N. peacekeeper was critically injured and another grazed when the gunmen fired on a marked U.N. vehicle as it left the port shortly before the raid.

Brian Stockwell, a U.N. World Food Program worker from Dublin, said the looters took up to 300 tons of food and 199 barrels of fuel--the program’s entire fuel supply for emergency operations in Somalia.

There is a common doubt among relief workers that the airlift can remedy the scarcity of food. Somalia as a whole needs about 50,000 tons of food a month to stave off widespread starvation, about twice what it is now receiving. That quantity, however, is far beyond the capacity of an expensive airlift to supply.

The Red Cross “was flying four planes a day in here, and it still wasn’t enough,” said Jowett, noting that the problem was even worse at greater distances from Belet Huen. “We send food convoys to villages six or seven hours from here, and they never arrive.”