From: RCIRIT%DENVER@VAXF.Colorado.EDU (REMZI CIRIT)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.turkish
Subject: Somalia New-3
Date: 30 Dec 1992 01:06:41 -0600
Organization: UTexas Mail-to-News Gateway
NNTP-Posting-Host: cs.utexas.edu

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                                                  Fwd by Remzi Cirit
SOMALIA-SHAMBLES

By MORT ROSENBLUM
AP Special Correspondent  Copyright, 1992.
The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

     MOGADISHU, Somalia (AP) -- Stripped of their killing gear, the
Darth Vader war wagons are harmless heaps. The roadside burial mounds
level off with the rains. Doors once bolted in fear now open, more
every day. In a moldering hut under the papayas at the United Somali
Congress compound, a sort of government seat for one of Mogadishu's
warlords, a green computer screen blinks.
     Slowly, people are picking up the pieces. But very slowly.
Despite touches of normalcy, Somalia is in such shambles that those
who try to help find the country in a league with Humpty Dumpty. "It
may never be put back together again," said James Fennell, a CARE
veteran, explaining how betrayal and bloodshed among clans had rent
the fabric of Somali society.
     Seifulaziz Milas, a Mozambican sociologist with the United
Nations, was slightly more hopeful: "Somalia could rebuild itself,
but not any time soon." While the world looked elsewhere, a half
million Somali children died or starved past the point of mental
recovery. The ruling class is dead or in exile. Somalia, in the sense
of a nation, is gone. Now, Fennell said, outsiders must focus on the
various pieces: getting farmers home to villages; reopening schools;
turning on power and water; sweeping the streets of teen-age killers
and other riffraff. Toward this limited goal, some signs are
encouraging.
     The fall's rains were good, filling catchments and soaking
parched fields which have sprouted lush grain. Donated seed and tools
are trickling out to farmers. A few former traffic cops in Mogadishu
are back at work in hopes that someone will finally pay them. Somali
exiles are venturing home to trade, bringing cigarettes and spare
parts. Donkey convoys carry garbage to be burned. Pharmacies are
opening with the rudiments of medicine. Where Islamic mullahs have
taken charge, kids carry schoolbags instead of AK-47s.
     Mogadishu's water is back on. A tiny clan fought 11 battles over
two years to control the city's pumps. The U.N. refused to compensate
them; they refused to turn the valves. After months, the U.N. agreed
that clan members would be paid to run the waterworks.
     Along the Green Line between north and south Mogadishu, the
well-connected and well-protected are restoring buildings among the
blackened ruins of the gracefully arabesque whitewashed downtown. If
a tenuous peace among clans can hold, the Green Line may disappear.
     Many of these developments are because Somalis are fed up with
craziness and want something more. Some can be traced directly to the
arrival of U.S. Marines, followed by other U.S. and multinational
forces. World attention, at long last, has settled on Somalia. The
media, along with the aid industry, is also pumping cash into the
economy. Television and print coverage of Operation Restore Hope, in
its first stages, should cost about $20 million, as much as the
largest relief agency, CARE, spent here over the year, Fennell said.
     The sudden income is a mixed blessing. As people still die by
the thousands for lack of a handful of food, and entrepreneurs are
pocketing millions of dollars by cornering the market on essentials
such as fuel and food staples. Free-spending foreigners have
distorted an already shapeless economy.
     At Mogadishu airport, a porter hefted a visitor's bag 200 feet
to a taxi. Handed a dollar bill, he threw it on the ground. "That is
no money in my country," he said. He wanted $20. At the Islamic
orphanage in Baidoa, the visitor gave $20 to the administrator, who
beamed as though given an extra month's budget.
     Supplies range from short to non-existent, and profiteers gouge
outsiders who pay any price. In Baidoa, gas is $40 a gallon and
rising. But Somalis who benefit from foreign cash are a scant
fraction of the 6 million people who survived the war and famine and
now must try to shape themselves into a functioning society.
     In urban areas, swarms of people amble the streets in search of
an odd job to help them scrape by another day. With neither industry
nor government running, the prospect is dim.
     In the countryside, farmers sit idly by cleared and watered
fields, waiting until relatives, or relief workers, come through with
enough seed and a hoe so they can get back to work. Everywhere in
between, herders follow their camels back toward their traditional
wild pastures, trusting Allah more than the Marines to keep the
peace.
     Before Somalia imploded, two-thirds of its export earnings came
from livestock. But the fighting wrecked veterinary services, closing
the crucial Persian Gulf market because of the fear of rinderpest, an
infectious livestock disease. What happens next depends on how much
foreign troops can scatter bandit gangs and whether principal clan
leaders can find common ground for any sort of lasting government. It
is anyone's guess. For the present, the signs can be read in any way.
The road to Baidoa is dotted with a dozen makeshift roadblocks, grim
little checkpoints of junk metal and old tires. Last week, someone
decorated one with purple boughs of bougainvillea. For travelers who
had seen the road in another time, it was a cheery note of hope. Two
days later, the deep purple had faded in the sun to a crisp brown,
and most of the petals had dropped to the ground.


GUNMEN LOOT FOOD AS TROOPS LEAVE

By Aidan Hartley

     MIIDOW, Somalia, Dec 17, Reuter - Somali gunmen began looting
relief food minutes after the departure of U.S. and French troops who
escorted it to starving bush villages on Thursday. On their first
mission into the villages surrounding Baidoa, the inland town where
they arrived on Wednesday, U.S. Marines and French legionnaires
accompanied a convoy of 10 trucks carrying grain for the relief
agency CARE.
     Troops in four armoured vehicles and trucks mounted with missile
launchers and machine guns, backed by a Cobra attack helicopter,
delivered the food to four villages up to 24 km (15 miles) northwest
of Baidoa. But within minutes of the convoy moving on, Reuter
reporters saw armed men move in to start removing bags of grain from
village hut stores. It was this sort of incident that led to the
U.S.-led armed intervention in Somalia to protect famine relief, and
it was an indication of the problems the eventual 35,000-strong force
will face in the gun-swamped country.
     In the hamlet of Musibe, Reuter photographer Yannis Behrakis
said he saw several men, one carrying a gun, in a pick-up truck piled
with bags of food 10 minutes after the troops left. The pick-up
quickly drove away. "Some villagers came running, waving their hands
for help. They said the men had come to loot the food the Americans
had just brought," said Behrakis.
     In nearby Miidow village, this reporter saw a gunman near the
village food store which had just been filled with a truckload of
grain delivered about 30 minutes earlier under armed guard. The man,
carrying a semi-automatic rifle, ran off when he saw the reporter's
approaching car. A woman stood nearby shouting in Somali and
villagers looked agitated. Sidow Ali, who said he was an elder of the
village, told Reuters through a translator the man was from a gang
which had come to loot food.
     "He wanted to take 10 bags of food. When he saw your vehicle he
ran away...he was waiting for his friends," Sidow Ali said.


SOMALIA-NEXT FAMINE

Copyright, 1992. The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
By MORT ROSENBLUM

     AFGOI, Somalia (AP) -- In a headlong rush to save people, aid
workers have neglected the animals and the farms, exposing Somalia to
a potentially worse catastrophe next year, agriculture experts warn.
Already, sleeping sickness and rinderpest are killing cows that
managed to escape rustlers during two years of war. No one sprays the
deadly tsetse fly. Veterinary services have collapsed. "They just
forgot the animals," said Omar Ali Ainanshe, a British-trained
veterinarian whose drug stocks are down to some human pain pills.
"Somalia is finished without its livestock."
     At the same time, irrigation canals off the Shebele and Juba
rivers are choked with mud. Relief agencies are reaching only a small
fraction of farmers with seed and tools for the coming rains. "There
is no coordination, no systematic coverage to get seed to villages,"
said Hassan Khalifa of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.
"Without it, they can plant nothing." Khalifa, a Sudanese agronomist
with 30 years' experience, works with a Kurdish livestock expert,
Talid Ali, at FAO's tiny mission in Mogadishu. Both have received
only modest promises of funding. "You can feed people now, but if you
don't save their animals and crops, what do they eat next?" Ali said.
"Two-thirds of Somali exports are livestock. Without this, there is
no income."
     The International Red Cross, spotting the problem early, set up
feeding centers early this year in this bustling crossroads on the
Shebele, just west of Mogadishu.
     "We felt that farmers had to keep up their strength," said Horst
Homborg of the Red Cross. "And we also wanted to attract people back
to the farms so they did not settle in the city." Other agencies
agree. "The most important thing now is to get people back to their
fields so they have food in June and don't have to move again," said
James Fennell of CARE in Baidoa. Before the September rains, the Red
Cross distributed seed to 250,000 Somali farmers, and other voluntary
agencies reached scores of thousands more. Corn and maize should be
harvested next month.
     But Khalifa said the donors need a massive program now so that
farmers can plant before the longer rainy season which begins in
June. He needs at least $3 million and cannot get it. "We must
coordinate," he said. "Agencies want to help, but some know nothing
about Somali agriculture." He said one agency imported the wrong kind
of seed, which can weaken local varieties.
     For Ali, saving the livestock is an even greater priority. He
estimates that $28 million is needed urgently to set up animal health
facilities and vaccinate cattle against rinderpest. Nearly 80 percent
of all Somalis depend on camels, cattle, sheep or goats for their
livelihood. During drought, families survive on milk, meat and the
cash they earn from selling their animals.
     An outbreak of rinderpest could deplete Somali herds and spread
to Ethiopia and Kenya, he said. Since tsetse have not been sprayed
since 1988, he added, cattle are dying fast from sleeping sickness.
In Afgoi, the crisis is clear. Over the last two years, more than
half the cattle in the region were lost to drought, disease or theft,
according to Ainanshe.
     Drugs can prevent and cure cattle of sleeping sickness, but none
are available. "I have had nothing for seven months," the
veterinarian said. "No rinderpest vaccine since 1990." At the
livestock market here, herders find the animals offered are in bad
shape, and they are getting worse. Ali Haj Mohamed lost 40 camels to
sleeping sickness in the last year. His last 100 suffer from a skin
disease he cannot treat. Ainanshe knows why: Herders use the wrong
drug for ticks. There is nothing else. Dore Bale Alim, now who looks
75 at 60, dropped quickly from rich to well-off, and he is plummeting
toward ruin.  Before the fighting started, he had 150 cattle. He lost
40 to sleeping sickness. More died for lack of grazing. He had to
sell some to survive. Rustlers took a cut. "Now I have 50 head," Alim
said. "If things continue as they have, I will be down to zero. Then
we will starve."


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Posted by Bernhard Helander in Uppsala, Sweden.