Mahony Sees Signs of Hope in Somalia : Relief: Cardinal tells of a new sense of security in African nation. But he also decries the alarming supply of weapons.

As the sun set on the battered Somali town of Baidoa one day this week, 100 U.S. Marines gathered around Los Angeles’ Cardinal Roger Mahony for an evening Mass.

“You fellows should understand how this is playing back home,” Mahony told the Marines, many of whom came from Oxnard, Mission Hills and other cities in the cardinal’s own archdiocese.

“You’re helping these people. And you really should be proud of that. It’s having an enormous positive impact,” he said.

Everyone wants to help the starving people of Somalia, Mahony added, “and you are our stand-ins.”

Mahony, who left for Los Angeles today, toured the gutted city of Baidoa for three days this week, holding orphaned children, talking to Somalis and watching relief workers go about the difficult task of feeding the starving.

In Baidoa, about 160 miles northwest of Mogadishu, 70 people die daily of hunger and tens of thousands have been displaced by famine and war.

Mahony also visited feeding centers in outlying villages, negotiating the many ad hoc roadblocks in the countryside with Catholic Relief Services (CRS) officials as well as Somalis toting automatic weapons.

In an interview in Nairobi, the cardinal said he saw many small signs of hope. A new sense of security has made relief work in surrounding villages easier and safer, he said. For the first time, the Catholic relief agency is planning to send its workers for overnight stays in some of the 14 villages where it operates feeding centers. And, more important, the new climate has encouraged many Somalis to return to those villages, in time to harvest crops later this month.

With the Marines now occupying Baidoa and escorting some relief convoys into surrounding areas, the message to bandits who once terrorized residents “has been loud and clear,” Mahony said. “And many people are going back to the villages.”

But the cardinal saw grounds for pessimism too.

“The international arms trade shows itself so vividly in a situation like Somalia,” Mahony said. “Somalia is an example of how the arms race is diminishing whole countries.”

The former Soviet Union provided many of those guns, but the United States, which replaced the Soviets as Somalia’s chief ally in the mid-1970s, also legitimized the use of armed force. In 1990, the country’s president, Maj. Gen. Mohamed Siad Barre, was driven from office by heavily armed rebels. The ensuing civil war devastated the countryside and gave rise to hundreds of armed gangs that still prey on defenseless farmers.

“The world is flooded with this enormous supply of arms, when what we need is food for people,” Mahony said.

In addition to the proliferation of weapons, Mahony said he was struck by the lack of social, educational or governmental structures in the country.

“You can’t really call it a nation,” he said. “I don’t think the world has seen anything quite like Somalia in the past 100 years.”

Mahony planned his trip to Somalia long before the United States offered to send troops for Operation Restore Hope, the U.N.-approved mission that was launched Dec. 9. A former member of the Bishop’s Committee on Migration and Refugees, Mahony had traveled extensively in Africa. And he said he wanted to see relief workers in Somalia “to tell them, ‘You’re doing something beautiful, which is the work of Christ.’ ”

What he saw in Baidoa was a “wonderful commitment by the care-givers,” he said. “They work with practically nothing and create miracles.”

At the Baidoa hospital, Mahony met doctors and nurses who performed surgery 15 to 25 times a day. While he was there, a man arrived with severe injuries caused when a farm plow hit a land mine on a road near town.

“He had gaping holes in his chest,” Mahony said. A young American doctor, operating without modern surgical tools or anesthesia, began digging the metal from the man’s chest. A single life was saved amid so much dying.

“These doctors and nurses are making things happen for people who have nothing to start with,” Mahony said.

Later, he visited a feeding center run by the Irish aid agency Concern. Dozens of emaciated children there would die if not for the agency’s food.

“They were the children in the pictures we have seen in the States,” he said.

Mahony picked up one boy, an orphan.

“There was no way he was going to let go of me,” the cardinal said. “These kids just crave love and affection.”

Outside the feeding center, the cardinal met a Somali man and his son who had just arrived from the countryside. The boy was 4 1/2 feet tall and looked to be 8 or 9 years old. It turned out that he was 17 and so malnourished that he would have died within days.

The Concern workers took in both the boy and his father.

In the villages around Baidoa, Mahony watched Catholic Relief Services workers feed thousands. In those centers, CRS works with local elders to register families; the sorghum that feeds them is apportioned according to need. The workers always bring extra food, which is given to families that the town elders have identified as the most needy.

Because of the lowly status of women in Somali society, relief workers divided the families into separate lines, one for men and one for women. If the relief workers used a single line, they said, the women always would allow the men to go first.

Mahony, 56, said he arranged his visit quietly, partly out of fear that residents of the predominantly Muslim country would feel threatened by the presence of a Catholic cardinal in their midst.

“I didn’t want them to think I had come to proselytize,” he said. And, to avoid any misunderstanding, he exchanged his clerical collar for a sport shirt and khaki pants while in Baidoa.

But he said he was heartened by the respect local religious leaders had for the international Catholic relief agency. A group of Muslim mullahs in town recently approached Catholic Relief Services, he recounted; they were seeking help in repairing the roofs of mosques damaged in the country’s civil war. “They’re going to help the mullahs, and I think that’s a great idea,” Mahony said.

Despite the presence of U.S. and foreign forces in the country, and the first attempts at political reconciliation among some clan leaders, the country remains in a state of near-anarchy. And Mahony left with plenty of concern about the future, primarily about the willingness of Somalis to rebuild their country.

Somalia’s leaders will need “the will to start over, to rebuild,” Mahony said. “That is one of the crucial issues, motivation.”

Foreign governments must encourage Somali self-reliance, Mahony said, to avoid creating a welfare state. And he said the United Nations may need to impose a coalition government, if all attempts at reconciliation fail, to ensure stability and a basis for resurrecting the country.

“The clan animosities run deep in Somalia,” Mahony said.

But, he added, he detected a genuine desire for reconciliation and peace.