Somali Warlord Covets Control Amid Anarchy : Africa: Aidid objects to dispatch of 3,000 U.N. troops to guard food shipments, says his unruly forces can do it.

At what passes for a hospital in this once-proud town there are 10 beds in the main ward, occupied Wednesday by 45 patients. One of them, a farmer named Yusuf Sheikh Husein, lay prostrate, his muscles wasted to nothingness from months of starvation.

A doctor leaned over and roughly pinched the skin between the man’s ribs. It came away like a thin leaf of paper.

“You see?” the doctor said. “There is nothing left of him.”

Not a mile away, in his heavily guarded headquarters compound, Somalia’s most powerful warlord explained why he will not consent to the deployment of 3,000 U.N. troops to safeguard food shipments so that they can reach Bardera overland from Mogadishu, the capital.

“These troops were announced without a consultation with us,” complained Gen. Mohamed Farah Aidid, fingering a silver-tipped walking stick. “What we need is food, not troops. The money the U.N. would spend on 3,000 troops they can use to train 6,000 of our Somali policemen.”

Aidid’s insistence on exerting control over a country in a state of anarchy has, by many accounts, sustained that anarchy to the point where sufficient food and medicine to stave off the deaths of more than 1.5 million people cannot be safely landed in Somalia.

Although he contends that, given the chance, his own forces can guarantee the security of relief supplies, the latest transgression against the international relief effort has been laid at his door: the looting last Friday of 300 tons of relief food and 199 barrels of fuel for food convoys from the port of Mogadishu.

The costly free-for-all was overseen by three tanks of a sort that only Aidid commands in Mogadishu. In its aftermath, the port was cleared of all armed “security men” except those responsible to his own officers. The stolen food had been destined for distribution in north Mogadishu, which is controlled not by Aidid but by a powerful rival.

No food has been unloaded at the crucial port since then, and none will be “until we get this situation straightened out,” said a prominent relief official in Somalia on Wednesday.

For his part, Aidid blamed the raid on “bandits” and disputed relief agency estimates of the size of the haul and the loss of 25 trucks. Only five trucks were taken, he said, and “to my knowledge no fuel was looted.”

Incidents like that make the obstreperous and dangerous Aidid one of the most dubious characters with whom international relief officials in Somalia must deal.

A former military officer, Cabinet minister and ambassador in the government of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre, Aidid was jailed by Siad Barre from 1969 to 1975 for suspected complicity in a coup attempt. Released and rehabilitated, he left government service in 1989 to join the anti-Siad Barre campaign of the rebel United Somali Congress. After Siad Barre tried a military comeback following his ouster in January, 1991, Aidid pursued him to the Kenyan border, driving him from Somalia apparently for good.

Today, Aidid’s cooperation is thought to be essential in mounting major operations such as the deployment of foreign troops, but his motives are suspect and the actual scale of his control over the territory he claims is impossible to determine.

In a long interview Wednesday with The Times, Aidid argued that his own force could “guarantee that not a sack of relief food will be diverted”--if the relief donors guarantee that his own men will be fed. “If the men are not getting food, then nobody can control them,” Aidid said.

He said he can muster about 30,000 men under the banner of the Somali Liberation Alliance, a loose confederation of four clan-based armies. But his ability to maintain order in Mogadishu, much less the rest of Somalia, is so far not apparent. The section of the capital under his flag is one of the wildest places on earth, where nearly every man able to stand upright is carrying a gun for protection or extortion.

“We can’t control the city,” Aidid acknowledged. “We don’t have enough people, but our forces are doing their best.”

Nevertheless the United Nations regarded his consent as crucial before it decided last month to assign 500 foreign armed guards to the Mogadishu port and its environs. (The detachment is due to arrive within three or four weeks). Aidid had long opposed the deployment as a violation of Somali “sovereignty,” but eventually relented.

“We agreed to the 500 just to give foreign donors some confidence,” he said Wednesday. “We don’t mind for the port and the airport to have these troops.”

He did draw the line at the additional 3,000, authorized by the U.N. Security Council late Friday, after the port raid. However, he stopped short of threatening to attack the U.N. force if it lands without his consent: “We want to negotiate, not talk about an attack.”

U.N. and relief officials say it is now clear that food can safely move through Somalia only with armed escorts, but preferably those not aligned with any internal group. Otherwise, they say, clan loyalties are so fierce that each clan will try to prevent members of others from receiving scarce food.

The result of the failure to move food is visible in this town lying just outside Aidid’s doorstep, perhaps as vividly here as anywhere in the country.

Once the Islamic spiritual and educational center of Somalia, Bardera today is a ruined shell. Scarcely a single building in the center of town stands intact after fighting more than a year ago between rebel troops and the fleeing armies of dictator Siad Barre. The town is ringed by a circle of shantytowns that keeps growing larger. Local Somalis say that more than 300 people migrate into town each day, drawn by rumors of food, swelling the population of needy and starving people to more than 30,000.

Many of them are reduced to eating animal skins, which are made barely edible only by boiling them in a vat overnight. But the skins have no discernible nutritional value. Clumps of gnawed skin cover the refuse piles all over town.

Food can be airlifted into Bardera, but not in sufficient quantity. Moreover, up to now relief agencies have had so few workers and backup organization in the town that it could absorb no more than 40 tons of food a week, less than half of what is needed.

The first U.N. plane with food arrived Aug. 19, bringing 15 tons. On Wednesday, the sixth flight since then was scheduled to arrive, bringing the total of food to 91 tons in about three weeks.

In that time, at the feeding center set up at the town hospital to deliver 4,000 meals a day, 61 children have died. On Wednesday alone, nine people, including three children, died at the hospital from the effects of malnutrition; their bodies lay in one of the wards, awaiting pickup, wrapped in empty relief food bags.

Here, three out of five children under 5 years old are severely malnourished. Similar statistics apply at each of the other three feeding kitchens in Bardera.

There are so many bodies that a single graveyard no longer suffices. Bodies are deposited under any plot of spaded soil.

“The graveyard is everywhere,” said Haji Dagane Duba, the administrator of one feeding kitchen.

Predictably, Aidid disclaimed any responsibility for the agony unfolding in his headquarters town.

“The Siad Barre regime caused all this destruction, genocide, moral degeneration of the people,” he said. “In this region they destroyed everything, the infrastructure, too; they even took the farmers’ seeds away. We fought against him, we succeeded in driving him away. We fought for peace and development.”