In Somalia, Dirt Roads Lead to a Slow Death : Hunger: Isolated villagers, suffering from ‘highway bias,’ are still starving because aid can’t reach them.

The convoys filled with food hurtle down the nearest paved road and do not stop. U.S. military helicopters crisscross the sky but have left only litter.

With almost 300 million pounds of food aid having poured into Somalia in the past nine months, still the people of Gelway are starving, eating leaves, sucking sap from trees and scrounging insects and whatever else they can find to eat in the savanna around them.

Children’s bellies are distended, their hair has fallen out or turned orange from malnutrition, and they are desperately hungry.

All of this is not supposed to be happening. For almost two months now, Operation Restore Hope has brought the enormous resources of U.S.-led military forces, along with U.N. agencies and private charities, to bear on Somalia’s killer famine.

But in this war-ravaged village of inland Somalia, linked to the outside world by a treacherous, unpaved track that takes three hours to negotiate in a Toyota Land Cruiser, the people have seen little so far to give them hope. And they say the inhabitants of 16 neighboring settlements fare no better.

“Our lives are so hard. We eat the leaves that you see on the trees,” one Gelway man said wearily.

“For two years, we have been eating grass, ants, anything,” another added.

In Bur Acaba, the nearest town 56 miles to the northeast, the elders sputter with bewilderment and indignation that their barren, desert-like region has seemingly been left to fend for itself.

“There are so many places where there is starvation, where people are still dying,” a district commissioner, 74-year-old Sheik Osman Jaawari, declared as other elders nodded their assent. “Yesterday, we went to three of our 367 villages. In those three, 450 people are near death.”

How could this be happening? Nina Winquist, a spokeswoman in Somalia for the International Committee of the Red Cross, acknowledged that there is an “urban bias, a highway bias,” that determines which Somalis receive the first and most relief aid.

Supplying isolated villages on hard-to-negotiate roads is logistically very difficult, Winquist said. “We are people with cars,” she said.

Ironically, the U.S.-led military intervention in December may have actually worsened the lot of the Gelway villagers and their neighbors. When the Marines and U.S. Army landed, they drove the heavily armed bandits and looters out of cities like Mogadishu and Baidoa into the countryside, making relief work in those areas even more dangerous.

“In Somalia, there was this intervention just when the NGOs (non-governmental aid organizations) were going to the villages. It delayed the process,” said Michelle Demare of the French relief agency Action Internationale Contre la Faim (International Action Against Hunger), which runs two emergency feeding kitchens for the malnourished in Bur Acaba.

Whatever the underlying reasons, right at the time a massive citywide free-food distribution program was gearing up in the already glutted capital of Mogadishu, one could still see terrible cases of malnourished children in this village about a 5 1/2-hour drive away.

One emaciated 6-year-old’s upper arms are so scrawny that an adult can almost wrap his index finger around them. The hands of a 13-year-old who is the size of a healthy child six years younger are covered with white, pustulant sores.

Some youngsters have greatly ballooned bellies, a dangerous sign of the advanced stages of malnutrition. One boy who is almost 9 has lost so much weight that his ribs press tightly against his skin and his heart can be seen beating in his chest.

Fatima Osman Adan, a young mother with five children, was trying to nurse her 2-year-old, but the milk would not come to her withered breasts. She spent the past two days in the bush hunting for leaves, grubs and anything else she could eat.

Death comes often. Late last week, when two American reporters visited, a 95-year-old had just died. Of what? the journalists asked. The villagers touched their throats with their fingers. Of lack of food.

The previous day two people had collapsed and died while searching for leaves in the bush. The day before, two children and a woman died. The bush around Gelway is dotted with skeletons and skulls.

At the sight of foreign visitors, the surviving villagers, many dressed in dusty rags, gathered in a clearing of beaten red earth to tell their story. At the uncommon appearance of a car, a group of two dozen women and children sat down in the shade of an aspen tree and waited for what they hoped would be food.

A child whose forehead was covered with sores brought an earthen bowl filled with a runny bright-green paste--a sort of cold soup made from well water and crushed leaves. The taste was bitter and vile. It is now the daily fare of the people of Gelway.

This village, built in the lee of an enormous rock that rises abruptly from the Somali plain, once was home to between 7,000 and 8,000 people. Eight months ago, the village was sacked as the troops of toppled Somali dictator Mohammed Siad Barre vainly tried to regain power.

Now, because of the wartime destruction and famine, only 550 villagers are left here, 200 of them children. To hide from marauding looters, many other villagers have run away into the bush, where they often starve to death in solitude.

Gelway’s people say they are now so weak they cannot repair the huts of thatch and interwoven branches that were destroyed by Siad Barre’s forces. “From morning to night, we hunt for food,” said Hasan Murow Osman, 48.

The village is not totally forgotten: Twice now its inhabitants have received enriched biscuits that some villagers vaguely say came from “the man from UNICEF.” But it is not enough to arrest the famine. The last shipment a week ago worked out to seven biscuits per person.

On Friday, an Australian army reconnaissance patrol came here for the first time, causing a spasm of hope. When the villagers saw the white men with their sleek carbines, they thought the guns somehow contained food, they said.

The Australians, who are safeguarding relief operations in the inland region of Baidoa, were accompanied by a U.S. military helicopter. The villagers said they gathered in the clearing and waved to the chopper, hoping it had brought food.

All the crewmen tossed out were four empty cartons that had contained imported spring water, the villagers said.

Gelway in microcosm shows how much of Somalia’s suffering may also be a result of its people’s fatalism and unwillingness to help others. Herds of camels often saunter by the village but are the property of herders from Baidoa, who belong to a different clan than the more peaceful farmers of the village and feel no compulsion to help a social underclass they despise.

“We are not powerful enough to steal those camels. The herdsmen have guns; we do not,” the villagers say.

A month ago, Ukorow Hasan Talles, 41, braved the risk of bandits and walked up the sandy track to Bur Acaba to tell the world of his village’s plight. It was then he met the “man from UNICEF.” The unidentified man, probably a worker for a Western private charity, told Talles to canvass the bush and assemble people in Gelway so they could be fed.

Talles is still going about the job, although the aid from outside has so far been almost nonexistent.

“We have heard that all Somalis have gotten clothes and food,” said Ibrahim Saetow Osman, a white-bearded 60-year-old with burning eyes who lost both wives and three of his five children in the famine. “All Somalis except us.”

Bur Acaba lies on the main road from Mogadishu to Baidoa, the center of the southern and central regions of Somalia that were the most devastated by drought and famine. Every day, truck convoys roar along the highway, bringing foreign food relief inland from the port at Mogadishu.

About a week ago, Sheik Jaawari, the commissioner from Bur Acaba, decided to mass his town’s population at the side of the road to show the convoys they were driving right by hungry people.

One hundred people walked out from Bur Acaba to stand patiently in wilting sunshine and heat. “None of the cars stopped,” Jaawari said.

Winquist and other aid officials acknowledge that despite the importance of their efforts, some needy Somalis may be falling through the cracks because of the plethora of different organizations involved and the sheer magnitude of the task.

The private charities meet weekly in Mogadishu to try to parcel out responsibilities and cope with new problems. “Although we talk about the importance of coordination, sometimes it’s not good enough,” the Red Cross spokeswoman said.

“I’m sure there are many other places where people are forgotten,” said Demare of Action Internationale. The French group has known for weeks of Gelway’s plight, but Demare said the road there is so poor that only small quantities of food can be brought in without a major commitment of motor transport now being used elsewhere.

Action Internationale, which has taken upon itself the job of getting emergency assistance to some of the most remote locations in Somalia, now plans to ship large quantities of cooking oil, salt and wheat to Gelway by next Saturday or Sunday, Demare said Saturday.

Seated here on the ground, her lined face etched with sorrow, Malaika Adan Mohamed, 65, cradled one of her grandchildren in her arms. The child’s father, Mohamed’s son, is now dead.

“Always the Europeans come here and say that after a week, there will be food,” the Somali woman said skeptically. “And we wait.”