Somalia Famine Avoidable, Aid Workers Say : Relief: Many say country proves the need for a new approach to disaster relief, combining diplomacy and political negotiation with humanitarian aid.

A committed effort by Western leaders could have averted the calamity in Somalia, saving tens of thousands of lives and perhaps Somalia itself, U.N. envoys and aid workers say.

Although many say U.N. agencies should have moved faster, with better coordination, most relief officials blame governments that run the United Nations for not acting to dampen civil war.

World leaders could have forged a U.N. coalition, as they did against Iraq, or acted on their own, the officials said.

“We just left them to tear themselves to pieces,” Mohammed Sahnoun, the U.N. secretary general’s representative in Somalia, said. “We were a year and a half too late.”

Once famine struck, help was minimal until July, when Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali implied racism, suggesting the West cared more about a “rich man’s war” in Yugoslavia.

“We felt abandoned,” said Sister Maria Antonio, an Italian nurse who has cared for war victims and starving children since fighting started in 1990. “We kept asking, ‘Where is everybody?’ ”

A consensus on what went wrong emerged in interviews with dozens of U.N. officials in Somalia, Red Cross delegates, U.S. disaster experts, voluntary agency workers and the World Food Program in Rome.

Sahnoun and most others interviewed said Somalia proved the need for a new approach to disaster relief, combining diplomacy and political negotiation with humanitarian aid.

“This is a very serious lesson for the future,” he said. “We will see more and more cases like Somalia.”

David Shearer of Britain’s Save the Children added that, if U.N. agencies are charged with confronting disaster, member states cannot avoid blame if they fail.

“It comes down to accountability,” he said, reflecting a widely held view. “We get the United Nations we deserve.”

With some disagreement over details, those interviewed concurred on these broad points:

World leaders preoccupied with the collapse of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union ignored Somalia after upheaval forced the United Nations and foreign embassies to evacuate in December, 1990.

* Famine came not from drought, a regular scourge of rural Somalis, but from clan warfare and banditry after the fall of President Mohamed Siad Barre in January, 1991.

* Political negotiation, perhaps with the timely use of a small international force, could have secured ports and safety zones to allow food stocks to reach remote interior markets.

* The crisis was left to an outmoded and ill-equipped U.N. system facing an unprecedented challenge: a country with no one in charge, no working institutions and killers in the streets.

* A massive effort by the International Red Cross made the biggest impact. Its ships and aircraft delivered 100,000 tons of food by September, more than twice as much as the United Nations.

* Even after a cease-fire was negotiated in March, 1992, donors shrugged off emergency appeals by the U.N. International Children’s Emergency Fund--UNICEF--and other agencies until television cameras focused attention on Somalia.

“We only started thinking creatively about this a month ago,” said Fred Cuny of Dallas, a veteran expert on contract to the U.S. Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance.

Even now, the relief officials said, efforts lag far behind the need. An estimated 1.5 million Somalis are in danger of starving to death and already are dying at a rate of 2,000 a day.

The United States has given 80,000 tons of food since 1991, more than any other nation, mainly via the U.N. World Food Program and Red Cross. But the problem is delivery, not supply.

By Sept. 9, a high-profile U.S. airlift had delivered only 300 tons to Somalia, U.N. figures showed, while 2,000 tons a day could be moving through Mogadishu port in truck convoys.

A U.N. contingent of 500 Pakistani troops assigned to protect the port was approved by Somali factions on Aug. 10 but was delayed by bureaucratic procedure and is not expected before Sept. 20.

Mark Stirling, an Australian who directs 35 UNICEF officers in Somalia, said blanket criticism of the United Nations was unfair to volunteers who performed well under the threat of death.

UNICEF is widely respected among aid workers, who say it is hamstrung by obstacles in the U.N. system and a dependence on emergency pledges.

Likewise, Carl Howerth, director in Somalia for the private agency CARE, praised efforts by the World Food Program, a U.N. agency, in the face of difficulties it cannot control.

“Say what you like,” he said, “but WFP and CARE opened Mogadishu port.”

But U.N. officers interviewed, including Sahnoun, said their work was hampered by a lack of coordination, bickering among agencies and paralyzing procedures laid down from New York.

A U.N. Department of Humanitarian Affairs was set up this year just for such emergencies, but relief officials said it failed its first challenge for lack of resources or a mandate to cut red tape.

David Bassiouni, humanitarian affairs coordinator in Somalia, acknowledged that he was not able to be as effective as he had hoped. He was appointed in March but had no staff until August.

Bassiouni declined to elaborate, but Sahnoun said that unless the new Department of Humanitarian Affairs had more power and funds, it amounted to yet another level of bureaucracy.

The U.N. Development Program restored Mogadishu’s water supply despite loops of red tape. It also found a lone fuel supplier willing to run the risk of looting by charging only for fuel delivered, but the rules called for three bids.

Voluntary agencies, known as NGOs for non-governmental organizations, were often harsh in their criticism of the United Nations, despite praise for some individuals.

“NGOs do 95% of the work on the ground, and they are not consulted on policies that define their work,” said Stephen Tomlin of the International Medical Corps in Los Angeles.

He said NGOs had only a short briefing from a U.N. mission earlier this year that assessed humanitarian needs. “It was an insult to the intelligence,” he said.

Wilhelm Huber, regional director of the Austrian charity SOS Children’s Villages, who came to Somalia in 1984, had pleaded with Western governments and the United Nations to take action earlier.

Huber, widely respected among NGOs, ran his hospital throughout the war, earning the confidence of faction leaders. He speaks Somali and learned how the society operates, even in chaos.

In January, 1992, he met in Nairobi with Somalia watchers from Western embassies to propose security zones and corridors to take food into remote areas where famine was certain to worsen.

His detailed plan to avoid Mogadishu and keep rural families at home where they could plant crops in the fall amounts to the strategy Cuny and other experts are now developing.

“I told them exactly what they could do,” he said. “They just sat there and said nothing. The British guy snickered, and he ridiculed the idea.”

His impression, he said, was that no one was prepared to take the risk or pay the cost of helping a backwater nation with neither resources nor strategic value.

Huber’s conclusion was similar to that of Sahnoun, Cuny and most others interviewed.

When disaster strikes, they said, governments and international organizations should decide together what is needed rather than rush into high-profile individual efforts like airlifts.

Food aid must fortify local markets and reach people who need it before they have to abandon their homes, they said. If armies are obstacles, diplomats or intervention forces must dissuade them.

“The international community is always late in situations like this,” Huber said. “One day they will have to rewrite the book on disaster relief. It is better if they do it now.”