Somali Peril Not Over, U.S. Says : Famine: Troops secure Baidoa, but special envoy Oakley cites areas that are even more tense. U.N. trucks will compete with costly local shipping cartel.

As a U.S.-led force of 900 troops consolidated control of the strategic city of Baidoa on Wednesday, American officials in the capital warned that the military intervention to rescue Somalia from war, famine and disease has not passed the point of peril.

“We can’t say that the examples of Mogadishu and Baidoa will be repeated elsewhere,” said U.S. envoy Robert Oakley, basking in the early success of the latest military relief operation that he said went “without a hitch, and with the full cooperation of the Somali people.”

During a news briefing on the tennis court of his new residential compound, Oakley added, “There are a lot of parts of the interior where there’s more trouble, where the situation is more tense.”

Across town, at an international airport frenetic with incoming troops and waves of cargo jets, U.S. Joint Task Force spokesman Col. Fred Peck declared of the American role in the unprecedented, U.N.-sanctioned humanitarian mission in Somalia: “Three times in a row (at Mogadishu, Bela Dogle and Baidoa) we were able to walk in peacefully, without a shot being fired. I just hope it stays that way.”

With Somalia’s most powerful warring clan leaders seriously negotiating what Oakley called a unilateral “arms-control and reduction” pact, there were clear indications that Operation Restore Hope was becoming a real-life training exercise for most of the 6,000 troops on the ground. As one U.S. Marine colonel observed at Mogadishu’s port this week, “There’s just enough danger here to make this a good training exercise, but not enough to make it really dangerous.”

Indeed, when U.S. and French combat forces rumbled into Baidoa just after dawn Wednesday, the assault looked more like a military parade than an invasion. More than a dozen network television camera crews jostled with large welcoming crowds as hundreds of barefoot Somalis lined the road, waving, singing and ululating.

Most of the armed gangs that relief workers complained had run roughshod over Baidoa, pilfering food and attacking their workers, either melted away into the bush or hid their weapons long before the Marines rolled into town. “The weapons are hidden and they’ll stay hidden until these Marines leave town,” said Russ Kerr, a vice president of the aid agency World Vision, which is based in Monrovia, Calif.

A veteran U.N. official in Baidoa said Wednesday that the largest clan militia force had left town several days before, consolidating its weapons in a compound 20 miles outside the city. Within hours of the U.S. Marines’ establishing a new military base at Baidoa’s weed-choked airport, food convoys again moved through streets that were--for the first time in at least two years--free of firearms, save for those carried by American troops or French Foreign Legion forces. They are the new law in town.

Oakley said two four-truck convoys that rolled Wednesday were a symbol, linking the massive military operation to its humanitarian mission. He added, “Two relief convoys already are moving out from Baidoa into the countryside.”

But Peck later confirmed that Marine-escorted convoys carried food only from the airport to an orphanage in the city and to a suburban feeding-center warehouse. These were operations that relief agencies such as CARE have conducted almost daily in Baidoa and nearly a dozen other rural towns for months now.

“The real test isn’t moving this food around the cities. It’s getting food out of the town centers and into the villages that have been too dangerous for us to reach,” said one U.N. relief official. “People don’t seem to understand that we’ve been doing these things all along. It’s just that the armed thugs and clan armies have been stealing some of it and extorting money all along the way. The food is moving as it always has; it’s just costing us less.”

In another move Wednesday that should help cut the cost of moving food and which officials hope will set important precedents for the relief effort, the U.N. World Food Program began airlifting from Ethiopia to Mogadishu the first 20 of 100 trucks, lent by the Ethiopian government for three months. The trucks will be used to carry 300 tons of food per day to Baidoa from Mogadishu’s port, beginning as early as Saturday.

That convoy would be the first in which the United Nations would employ its own vehicles on a route that has been controlled by a cartel of powerful Mogadishu warlords; they have charged exorbitant shipping rates that grossly inflated the cost of feeding Somalia’s hungry.

“Among the reasons we’re (creating U.N. convoys) is to put pressure on the trucking industry here,” said Paul Mitchell, World Food Program spokesman in Somalia. The goal, he added, is “to create a new, real trucking industry here in Somalia.”

So powerful is the heavily armed trucking cartel in Somalia, Mitchell said, that the weekend Mogadishu-to-Baidoa convoy may prove the most challenging mission yet for its American and French military escorts.

The United Nations has gone so far as to fly in Ethiopian drivers along with their trucks, anticipating that fearful Somalis would balk at helping to break the cartel. The presence of the outside drivers, however, may anger many here and fuel the bitterness that grew between Somalis and Ethiopians during their brutal border war of the late 1970s.

Meantime, Mogadishu, a city where assault rifles remain a constant presence on the streets, “is still not a safe place to live,” Peck said. “It’s getting safer. But there are people out there who like to shoot at people just for the fun of it, it appears.”

Assessing the broader impact of the U.S.-led military intervention at the end of its first phase--which included establishing a forward supply base in Baidoa after securing the capital’s port and airport--Oakley said the U.S. Marines had moved faster than anticipated.

He expressed optimism about the prospects for a negotiated disarmament of the warring militia, before “unified forces” here would be forced to launch a house-to-house campaign to confiscate weapons.

Responding to the many requests from ordinary Somalis that the Marines disarm the militias and thugs who have terrorized them for two years, Oakley said, “There are at least an equal number with guns who don’t want the mission expanded.” But he added, “We believe that, in cooperation with the Somali leadership, a reasonable, credible program of arms control and reduction can take place.

“There will be a number of different elements,” he said. “I’m not going to spell them out now. . . . But I would be surprised if there were not concrete, visible steps taken before to long to show that the Somalis, more than anyone else, want to bring the threat of weapons under control.”