Starving Somalis Too Weak to Tend Crops as Harvest Nears : Famine: Troops’ arrival may be too late for remote regions pillaged by armed bands, isolated by land mines.

Deep in the fertile Juba River Valley, almost 200 miles through the bush from the fanfare of the long-awaited U.S. liberation of famine-stricken Baidoa, there is a town where 30,000 Somalis almost certainly will die before U.S. Marines can reach them.

The crops are high in Saco Uen--just two to three weeks from harvest.

But the men can’t work in the fields. All are too weak from starvation.

No food has reached the town in almost three weeks. The road to Saco Uen was mined long ago by the fleeing army of ousted Somali dictator Mohamed Siad Barre, the same armed bands that pillaged all of Saco Uen’s grain stores. And all international relief flights there stopped nearly three weeks ago, after another clan army fired at the planes and robbed the shipments.

“All the people in Saco have asked for these troops to come,” said Annie Hellstrom, a Swedish nurse who has worked in the Juba Valley since 1982. “But I don’t think they will reach it in time.”

Such are the nightmares ahead for the U.N.-sponsored military effort dubbed Operation Restore Hope--the force of almost 30,000 U.S. troops that many relief officials here call “a lot, but too late.”

The Red Cross--along with the United Nations and the 20 or so relief agencies in Somalia that have clamored for days for the Marine convoy to Baidoa--has tried to define the scope of the nightmare that the U.S.-led military force will face, identifying some of the worst-hit famine zones.

Each zone is progressively farther from the capital than Baidoa, which the U.S. Joint Task Force has said will be a forward base in guarding food deliveries.

During a closed-door briefing Tuesday in the capital, American officers assured top international relief officials that they are well aware of the magnitude of their task--a mission complicated by the estimated 1.5 million land mines now in their way. Although one officer cautioned that America has no intention of becoming “the gendarmes of the entire Somalia,” he detailed plans to fan out from Baidoa, establishing bases to cover towns and surrounding areas.

But, in interviews with almost a dozen agencies Tuesday, it was clear that there are vast rural regions around Baidoa and the urban centers beyond that are still uncharted on international disaster-relief maps.

“We just don’t know what’s happening in a lot of these central areas,” said Mark Thomas, U.N. Children’s Fund spokesman in Somalia. “We haven’t even been in there because the security has been so bad.”

And each of those villages, in a region where an estimated 300,000 Somalis have died this year of famine and war, Thomas conceded, is a potential graveyard.

The “white areas,” as the Red Cross labels them, include 48 villages south of Saco Uen, once-thriving farm centers first ravaged by a fallen army and now cut off by land mines, clan armies and relief logistics. Hellstrom, who spent three weeks in Saco Uen in September and is the only foreigner to spend time there since the famine began, said the river valley that she surveyed for Swedish Church Relief now may be little more than a mass grave.

As Thomas put it, “A lot of the people who couldn’t move to feeding centers, often many miles away, are dead.” These include the people who “couldn’t walk, the ones who ended up as skeletons on the road--the people who made it into towns are lucky people.”

It is for the fortunate survivors that Hellstrom said she was issuing her urgent appeal Tuesday to the United Nations and to the American troops. “It is good the Marines are in Baidoa,” she said. “They are somewhat closer to the starving. But now, I am begging for someone, at the very least, to airdrop food on Saco Uen. It is more than two weeks since they’ve gotten anything. And sometimes, I just feel so sick.”

The American military also has expressed frustration over what many here see as a rapidly developing pattern with well-intentioned U.S. forces being stuck in a desperate catch-up mission to reverse Somalia’s cycle of death.

Just hours after the first U.S. Marines landed in Mogadishu a week ago, for example, CARE spokesman Rick Grant issued urgent, live appeals on American and British television for the troops to rush to Baidoa, where relief workers were fending off nightly attacks from last-minute looters.

And Tuesday, as the Marine-led convoy finally rumbled off to do just that, one of CARE’s field officers, Rhodri Wynn-Pope, called for similar urgent relief in Bardera, the next major city beyond Baidoa.

A land mine just outside Bardera had blown up a CARE truck Tuesday morning, he said, injuring several Somali employees; the sub-clan that apparently planted it was terrorizing CARE’s field office with last-minute looting--”trying to suck the bottom out of the gravy train before it ends.”

Indeed, relief agencies here detail an endless list of Somali disaster sites that are in urgent need of America’s new humanitarian assistance. From Baidoa to Bardera to Saco Uen to Kismayu, each pocket of human horror brings with it its own quirky configuration of warring clans, sub-clans and nomadic looters; most analysts expect them all to evaporate after a final binge of misbehavior just before the Marines roll in.

Take Bardera, for example. Once a thriving farm town under Siad Barre, it was occupied and ravaged by his ragtag army as it fled in early 1991. Then it was occupied by the sometimes-brutal forces of Gen. Mohammed Farah Aidid, whose clan-inspired guerrilla war is credited for Siad Barre’s downfall. Last Oct. 13, after just two hours of battle, Bardera was taken by forces of Siad Barre’s son-in-law, Mohammed Said Hirsi, known in Somalia as Gen. Morgan.

Before the U.S.-led force secures Bardera--as the U.S. Marines may next do--there will be yet another round of diplomacy with yet another new warlord, as has been the pattern established in Mogadishu and Baidoa by the new U.S. envoy Robert Oakley.

“This is a time-consuming process,” said one American analyst in Mogadishu. “The U.S. military logistics are time consuming. The diplomacy is time consuming. No one wants to jeopardize American lives. But, of course, in places like Bardera or Saco Uen, well, the dying wait for nothing.”