Arms Flow Blamed for African Ills : Plea: U.N. chief urges world to curtail weapons trade, saying it leads to disasters like Somalia’s. Meanwhile, U.S. relief mission gears up.

As more U.S. troops began to move toward Somalia, U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali called on the international community Saturday to stem the shipment of arms to Africa, where he said they are responsible for tragedies like the one that has drawn the United States into a massive relief effort.

“The outside world must act, urgently, to curtail the flow of arms to Africa,” Boutros-Ghali told a conference on global development at former President Jimmy Carter’s policy center in Atlanta.

“Steps toward development will go nowhere in the long run so long as the continent is filled with weapons--arms that at any time can be used to tear down what has just been built up,” he said.

Boutros-Ghali’s plea came as the chaos in Somalia thwarted relief efforts again Saturday and as the U.S. military stepped up its preparations. Among the developments:

* U.N. and relief agencies in Somalia began withdrawing foreign workers from Bardera and Baidoa, towns centered in areas hardest hit by the famine, because of heightened dangers posed by roving gunmen.

“Security just went all to hell in Baidoa today,” CARE International spokesman Rick Grant of Toronto told the Associated Press. CARE handles most U.N. food shipments in Somalia.

Grant said much of the militia army of Gen. Mohammed Farrah Aidid, one of the country’s most powerful warlords, had returned to Baidoa from the countryside “hungry and looking for food. They appeared to be on a rampage.

“What passes for a local police force evaporated overnight, and the regional governor locked himself in his house,” Grant said.

* The United Nations failed in an attempt to move food by convoy from Mogadishu’s port to the northern part of Somalia’s divided capital.

The port was closed Nov. 11 amid clan disputes and rampant looting, and about 12,000 metric tons of wheat, rice and sorghum have yet to be distributed. The last attempt to open the port, on Nov. 25, failed when a U.N.-chartered ship was shelled as it entered the harbor.

* The Pentagon announced that two Navy battalions of Seabees from Southern California are among four major Seabee units placed on alert for possible deployment in Somalia. The battalions are Naval Mobile Construction Battalion 40 from Port Hueneme and Naval Beach Group 1 from the Naval Amphibious Base at Coronado.

Boutros-Ghali’s comments Saturday referred to an arms buildup in Africa that goes back decades. Largely because of Cold War-era competition between the superpowers and subsequent actions by the Arab world, Somalia today is one of Africa’s most heavily armed and violent countries.

The arms there “were not even bought by Somalia,” Boutros-Ghali declared. “They were given by the outside world, to serve outside interests.”

But while restraint of the arms trade is a much-voiced goal, analysts say it is all but impossible to achieve because of worldwide proliferation of small arms manufacturers, a massive glut of Cold War weapons for sale and a surge of Arab activism on behalf of Islamic factions.

For years, superpowers contesting for military bases, friends and influence in Somalia and throughout Africa filled weapons repositories with arms from America and the former Soviet Union. More recently, additional caches of small arms have been sent by such Arab countries as Saudi Arabia, Syria and Libya as they sought to extend Islam and to buy national prestige or local clients.

The arms are cheap, readily transferred and welcomed by Africa’s many warring tribal, clan and ethnic factions.

“It’s a trade that’s completely out of control, and if anything it’s probably gotten worse,” said Morton S. Miller, a retired intelligence officer who monitored the arms trade for decades.

“I don’t see as a practical proposition that any international body or movement that is not subscribed to by absolutely everybody would have much hope of slowing or stopping the supply,” Miller said. “It’s a rather bleak picture.”

The end of the Cold War has only made the situation worse, said analysts. Whole arsenals have been dismantled and sold by cash-hungry militaries, many of them in Eastern Europe. And in arms-manufacturing countries like the United States, Germany, France, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Israel, traditional governmental markets for arms have dried up, making industries more dependent on exports.

That reliance will make opponents of many of the same countries Boutros-Ghali would depend on to institute a regime of arms restraint.

One step, however, could be to equip and train U.N. peacekeeping troops to sniff out and interdict the flow of arms into trouble spots.

Barry Blechman, co-director of the Henry L. Stimson Center, a Washington think tank, said that the end of the Cold War has made sophisticated defensive systems available for use by peacekeeping forces interdicting the flow of weapons into zones of potential hostility--if the United States will permit use of the equipment by forces not under Washington’s command.

“If the U.S. military took multilateral peacekeeping seriously, as it does with other missions, you could do it,” said Blechman, a senior arms control official in the Jimmy Carter Administration. “But these units would have to be organized and trained and equipped completely differently than normal U.S. forces.

“Remote-sensing battalions (of U.N. peacekeepers) would have the capability to move sensor networks into a particular region, set up and monitor traffic and pass the information to other forces that could interdict the flow of weapons,” he said.

American reconnaissance systems built for a major war in Europe, like the “J-stars” radar aircraft and remotely piloted vehicles with cameras, could help in the struggle to maintain peace and prevent the introduction of new arms, said Blechman. Acoustic and infrared technology designed and built to monitor compliance with superpower arms-control treaties also could be used for the task.

Freed from many of its Cold War missions, Blechman added, the U.S. Navy could contribute to a multilateral peacekeeping force by reviving its training and equipping of forces designed to operate along rivers and coastal waters. Those forces could help interdict arms traffic.

“I don’t understand why the U.S. military doesn’t look at the peacekeeping mission seriously,” said Blechman. “It is a force builder. If they looked at it as a new mission, you could justify all sorts of stuff in their budgets.”

Also Saturday, Gen. Colin L. Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, suggested that the U.S. military might be taking on the peacekeeping mission with greater vigor. But Powell, a staunch advocate of maintaining U.S. control over the use of American troops, left open whether he would favor future U.S. military operations under U.N. command.

The four Navy units placed on alert specialize in construction. They have a total of about 2,000 Seabees.

In addition to the two California units, Naval Mobile Construction Battalion 1 from the Naval Construction Battalion Center at Gulfport, Miss., and elements of the 30th Naval Construction Regiment from Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, were told to prepare for action.

Elsewhere, three U.S. ships carrying arms and equipment for 16,000 Marines have left the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean and are expected to arrive on Somalia’s coast late next week, when the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force from Camp Pendleton is expected to begin arriving.

MORE ON SOMALIA: A17-A22

Q&A;: How Long Will U.S. Troops Stay?

Here are some questions and answers about the U.S.-led military operation in Somalia:

Q. How long will American troops be in Somalia?

A. Between two and three months, U.S. officials say. Defense Secretary Dick Cheney has said that he hoped regular U.N. peacekeeping forces could begin replacing American soldiers and Marines in Somalia before the U.S. presidential inauguration on Jan. 20 and that U.S. troops could be out entirely a few weeks after that. But Cheney cautioned that U.S. forces could be kept longer if they run into unexpected problems. And he said the United States may keep some “residual” forces aboard amphibious assault ships in case they are needed to protect U.N. peacekeepers later on.

*

Q. Who will go?

A. U.S. Marines and Army rapid-deployment troops will begin landing in Somalia early this week. The first units to land will include 1,800 Marines from amphibious assault ships now on station off the Somali coast. They will be joined, probably within a week, by Marines from the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force from Camp Pendleton in San Diego County and soldiers from the Army’s 10th Mountain Division Light from Ft. Drum, N.Y. Cheney said plans are eventually to send about 27,000 more U.S. troops. He added that more will be made available if they are needed.

*

Q. What will they be asked to do?

A. U.S. troops will be charged with restoring order to Somalia and with clearing the way for distribution of international food relief supplies to the millions of hungry Somalis in the southern portion of the country. They will not be expected to resolve Somalia’s general political problems. Such longer-run issues will be addressed after regular U.N. peacekeeping forces take over, perhaps sometime in mid-January or early February.

*

Q. Will U.S. troops be permitted to defend themselves if they are fired upon?

A. Yes. Cheney said U.S. forces not only will return any hostile fire but also will be permitted to protect international relief workers and do whatever they believe is necessary to eliminate danger to themselves and other personnel. That gives them wide latitude to use their weapons whenever they believe they are needed.

*

Q. How much will the operation cost?

A. Surprisingly, probably only between $250 million and $300 million, assuming that it does not last much beyond Jan. 20. And even that amount could be reduced substantially if the Administration succeeds in its current efforts to persuade other countries to make cash contributions to help defray the cost.

That is far less than Operation Desert Storm, which cost $61 billion, $56 billion of which was paid by U.S. allies. The difference is that this time, authorities believe, U.S. forces won’t be conducting a full-scale war.

The big expenses in the Somalia operation are expected to be for day-to-day living, logistics and engineering--improving airports and seaports so the military can unload supplies. There won’t be much need for air cover, ammunition or ships, which run costs up sharply. Administration officials figure much of the actual cost to the United States can be absorbed in the Pentagon’s operating budget.

Source: Times staff reports