Somalia Now Laboratory for Relief Efforts : Africa: The starvation and dying have abated. But the question remains whether outside aid can restore the nation’s self-sufficiency.

Three hundred strong, people whose country has vanished, they marched down a sun-blasted road one morning to the tootling of saxophones to celebrate a unique revolution in Africa, one that hasn’t yet had a victor.

Two years ago, Somalia’s dictator, Mohamed Siad Barre, was toppled from power and then fled abroad. To mark the anniversary, a tiny part of Mogadishu’s populace met at the crumbling review stand where Siad Barre used to gaze proudly on his army and listened to speeches and music.

A blind poet named Tabatabo (the Groper) offered the most piercing vision.

“We are going to see law restored,” Tabatabo proclaimed from atop a flatbed truck, sweat streaming down his lined face and his unseeing eyes gleaming white. “We are going to raise up our flag again. We are trying to start a new history.”

For many of the Somali poet’s compatriots, the old history has been unspeakably cruel. For most of the two years that followed Siad Barre’s ouster, rival warlords and their clansmen fought each other for power in this East African land while up to 350,000 people, and perhaps more, starved to death.

Somalia, it is said, became like a pot smashed into a thousand shards. It ceased to exist as a nation.

Now this strip of semi-desert jutting into the Indian Ocean and the Gulf of Aden has become a ward of the world, a crucial test laboratory for the combined use of U.N.-blessed military might and relief aid.

“Here we are charting new waters that in the future will be used to guide the defense of human rights,” said Philip Johnston, acting U.N. coordinator for humanitarian assistance.

But serious problems have accompanied the general triumph of foreign efforts to stop the starvation and dying. Last month’s flare-up of violence was the most dramatic example. U.S.-led forces used tanks and heavy weapons during rioting in Mogadishu that left several Somalis dead and about five U.S. Marines wounded. The United Nations, notably, has so far proven itself woefully inadequate to the numerous demands placed on it.

And although the outside world this year is expected to donate something like half a billion pounds of food to the Somalis, its generosity when it comes to footing the bill for reconstructing their country is still questionable.

On Saturday, donor countries meeting in Ethiopia agreed to meet most of a U.N. appeal for $166.5 million in assistance for both food and rebuilding Somalia, but many contributors withheld major pledges, warning Somalis that continuation of aid will depend on whether order can be restored in the country.

At the final session of talks on aid in Addis Ababa, donors pledged approximately $130 million, of which about $30 million would come from the United States, news agencies reported.

But Somalia may need more. For there is not only hunger and devastation in Africa’s Horn, there is a yawning void.

This land, almost as large as Texas, now has no postal or telegraph or telephone service, public school system, customs service, airline, foreign ministry or functioning government or administration. Most people are without electricity.

“Nothing now works, just the municipal waterworks,” said Ali Hasa Mohamed, 47, whose family-owned theater here stopped showing Italian war movies and closed last year because of rising violence and lawlessness.

Emergency relief is just the start of what U.N. agencies and foreign governments and charities envisage. For this country of mostly nomadic camel herders and goatherds that won independence 33 years ago after being ruled by Italy and Britain is a socioeconomic basket case.

“I believe the Somalis will need 10 years to rebuild a government,” Abdullai Anis, 25, who became a tailor after he stopped being paid for teaching school and his class melted away, mused in his Baidoa market stall.

“In the meantime,” Anis asked a visitor, “can the Americans give us a hand?”

When U.S. Marines and Army troops participating in Operation Restore Hope landed on Mogadishu’s shores in December, they found a place so devastated that it reminded some soldiers of what South Florida looked like when they came to its aid after Hurricane Andrew. “The water was polluted, the infrastructure was destroyed,” Army Lt. Col. Steve Ritter said.

A police force must be re-created, local administrations set up in the smaller cities and villages, a health care network put in place and a veterinary service reorganized--a crucial function in a land where livestock is the economic and social bedrock of life.

Schools from the first through eighth grades must be reopened and thousands of jobs created.

“If we don’t provide work for all jobless and for the people who are now living by thieving, no amount of military might is going to work to create stability here,” Johnston warned.

To lay the basis for a new Somalia, Johnston has overseen the drafting of a 10-point program designed to carry Somalia through December.

But the nine-month program is only a stopgap measure. The U.N. Development Program will next draw up a five-year blueprint of how the world can assist Somalia through 1999. For the rest of the 20th Century, Somalia will remain a ward of the world.

Ismat Kittani, the U.N. secretary general’s special envoy here, was recently asked why, with all of Africa’s problems, including civil wars in Angola and Mozambique and famine in Sudan, the world should consent to plow huge sums into rebuilding Somalia. “You are reading my mind,” the Iraqi diplomat answered with a smile.

But Kittani, who has since left his Somali post, said that discussions at U.N. headquarters in New York now envisage what could be an even larger U.N. military presence here than in Cambodia, with 20,000 troops, as well as 4,000 Americans largely involved in logistics.

The reason, in part, is symbolism. U.N. peacekeepers in the Balkans have been humiliatingly ineffective in stopping ethnic bloodshed, whereas in Somalia, the United Nations for the first time has given its imprimatur to a military operation designed to end the deaths of civilians by starvation.

Somalia marks a “historic shift” toward a more muscular strategy for protecting the lives and liberties of innocent people, declared James P. Grant, executive director of the U.N. Children’s Fund, known as UNICEF. But restoring hope here doesn’t come cheap.

According to recently departed U.S. special envoy Robert B. Oakley, the United States will have spent something like $600 million by the end of March for doing the lion’s share of the work in the military coalition it put together to protect Somali relief operations, with every additional 30 days costing U.S. taxpayers between $150 million and $200 million more.

For the rail-thin, plain-spoken diplomat from northern Louisiana, the No. 1 frustration was the slowness of the United Nations in assuming control of a multinational security force to allow the gradual pullout of the bulk of the U.S. service personnel here.

Internal critics cite as evidence of the United Nations’ failings the scant activity here of its Food and Agriculture Organization, which has only an eight-person office in Mogadishu and is only now starting a survey on the prospects of rebuilding Somali agriculture. “I see millions coming in for relief, and I don’t have $5,000 to spend in Nairobi on livestock vaccine,” FAO executive Talib Ali complained.

Although two-thirds of Somalia’s export income used to be earned through the sale of sheep, camels, goats and cattle, Ali says the focus of public and private assistance here is almost solely on reviving crop agriculture.

Relief organizations now predict that emergency food relief can be ended in Somalia as early as the end of summer, provided that the weather is favorable for a good grain harvest.

But the country’s long-term prospects--and the speed with which U.S. forces can withdraw--depend not just on the food supply but also on the ability of Somalis to come to some sort of political compromise as rebuilding starts.

Even if stability is restored, Somalia’s needs will remain enormous. Even before the famine, Somalia imported about a third of its food and was dependent on foreign assistance, including more than $1 billion pumped in by the United States, to bolster a regional counterweight to Ethiopia’s former Marxist rulers.

The Moscow bureau’s Dahlburg was recently on assignment in Somalia.