History Suggests That Somalia Is Suffering a Seemingly Endless Ordeal : Africa: Decades of warfare, prolonged drought and overpopulation are the chief culprits, experts say.

Gangs of thin young men armed with AK-47 assault rifles race down drought-parched roads in Land-Rovers mounted with machine guns.

Emaciated women and children languish in the burning desert sun, starving, while truckloads of rice and flour pass them by. Disease and death stalk wretched refugee camps.

That was 1981 in Somalia. Today, the same scenes are replayed for U.S. troops in their unprecedented race against time to deliver food to starving Somalia.

Why is so much of the Horn of Africa such a perpetual setting for human suffering? Why so many humanitarian missions over so many years?

Decades of warfare, prolonged drought and overpopulation are the chief culprits, say experts about the chaotic region that includes all of Somalia, Ethiopia and Djibouti, southern Sudan and northern Kenya.

Wars--clan, ethnic, religious, civil and international--also have created what has been called the world’s worst refugee problem. The United Nations estimates that Ethiopia and Somalia together shelter more than 1.3 million refugees. More than 70% are ethnic Somalis.

“It’s really a combination of things. One is the environment,” geographer H.J. de Blij of the University of Miami said. “You’re dealing with an area with a very, very sensitive ecological balance. The slightest disturbance of that balance is going to create loss and human misery.”

Although statistics from war-plagued eastern Africa are not available, reports indicate that major portions of the continent are in the midst of a cycle of below-normal rainfall that has lasted nearly 25 years.

“It’s probably the worst drought of this century down in Zimbabwe, Zambia, Botswana, Mozambique and parts of northeastern South Africa,” meteorologist David Miskus of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said.

Called the jiilaal in Somalia, the drought is terrifying, and warfare magnifies its effects.

During the short rainy season, people in dry areas collect water in reservoirs dug out of the ground. But these are susceptible to sabotage by rival groups, such as Somalia’s fierce clan families.

Before the last Somali government fell in 1991, troops under President Mohamed Siad Barre destroyed water holes in rebellious areas.

Ethiopia’s 30-year civil war, which in May, 1991, resulted in future independence for the breakaway province of Eritrea, exacerbated the effects of famine and made relief efforts difficult.

Currently, rebel and government forces are hampering aid operations in Sudan. A protracted civil war there between the Arab-Muslim north and the black African, animist and Christian south threatens a disaster as great as Somalia’s.

The International Committee of the Red Cross is staging its largest-ever food and medical relief mission in Somalia, exceeding its effort during the 1984-85 Ethiopian famine.

The Horn of Africa--so-called because of its prong shape where the continent’s easternmost edge juts into the Indian Ocean--was also a theater of the Cold War. The two superpowers contested for influence by backing one country and then another. A lethal legacy is the abundance of U.S.- and Soviet-made weapons still in the volatile region.

A Somali invasion of Ethiopia in 1977 prompted the Soviet Union to switch its support to the Ethiopians. The United States and its allies subsequently began pouring arms into Somalia.

With the Soviet Union’s collapse, the United States stopped supplying weapons. Libya then took over.

Along with war and drought, the third horseman of the African apocalypse has been overpopulation.

Since the drought of the early 1980s--when pictures of starving children with flies in their eyes moved the world--Somalia’s population has more than doubled, from 2.5 million to more than 6 million. Neighboring populations also have risen dramatically.

But economies have not.

Somalis are mostly nomadic herders. Camels, cattle, sheep and goats account for 62% of their meager exports. The only significant commercial crop is bananas, which are exported to Italy--once a colonial ruler in Somalia--and the Middle East.

Barring discovery of minerals, a U.S. Commerce Department report concluded, “Somalia will remain one of the world’s poorest countries for the foreseeable future.” The World Bank ranks Somalia and Ethiopia among the four poorest.

Even when superpowers aren’t dueling, tribal groups are competing for water and grazing land.

“On the basis of kinship ties, Somalis move their animals from place to place where grass is predicted,” American anthropologist Norman N. Miller said. “They’ve really got to have open access. They’re willing to be violent, and violence occurs traditionally around water wells.”

Clans have always played a major role in Somali society, which has been likened to the ancient Hebrew patriarchal society of Abraham. Although Somalis speak the same language and are nearly all Sunni Muslims, they are split into six major modern clans that are divided into hundreds of subclans and thousands of smaller family groups.

“The pastoral clan organization is an unstable, fragile system, characterized at all levels by shifting allegiances,” Somali-born history professor Said S. Samatar of Rutgers University said. “Power and politics are exercised through temporary coalitions and ephemeral alliances of lineages.”

The Siad Barre government tried to manipulate clans, rewarding some and brutally repressing others. The 21-year regime was toppled in 1991 after a battle in the capital, Mogadishu, between government forces and rebels composed of Hawiye clansmen. This clan now fights others for power.

Past border disputes between Somalis and their neighbors have disrupted food and water supplies. Because of the colonial-era division of the Horn region, several hundred thousand ethnic Somalis now live in Kenya and about 3 million in Ethiopia.

The Siad Barre regime’s unsuccessful 1977 attempt to retake the Ogaden desert from Ethiopia did not end Somalia’s claims. The area remains in turmoil.

Many experts despair of finding any lasting solution to the seemingly endless suffering in Somalia.

“There doesn’t seem to be any long-term solution,” De Blij said, “short of transporting millions of Somalis out of there and leaving enough living space for the people and cattle that remain.”