Now pitiful figures file silently past its sun-baked Italianate buildings, drawn by news that food is there. Merca, on the coast, is still a beautiful town of 18th-century Arab buildings, where the Italian expatriates used to take their holidays. Now an Italian doctor feeds the thousands of emaciated wanderers. But wealthy Somalis ignore the starving strangers. In this terrible anarchy, not only are children left to die but warlords and their gunmen commandeer the food sent to save them.
Food is a strategic weapon and armed gangs have seized aid shipments.
UN officials have had to recruit the gunmen as ''guards'' in effect, paying protection money to save food for the hungry. The UN is trying to restore control, but two of its unarmed soldiers were shot and badly wounded in the preliminary to a looting raid on an aid shipment on Friday. For over a year, according to aid agency sources, the SSDF tolerated a fundamentalist group controlling the region's main port, Bossaso. They proved to be honest and efficient workers and Bossaso became the focal point for fundamentalists from all over Somalia. In January 1992, however, a visiting Unicef doctor was killed and a representative of another agency, Care, wounded while eating supper in Bossaso.