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Subject: Warlords Feed Famine; Feud Cuts Lifeline to Somali Aid Station<By Keith B.
Date: Fri, 30 Oct 92 04:28:31 EST
Message-ID: <7.1992Oct30.042831@AmeriCast.com>

Warlords Feed Famine; Feud Cuts Lifeline to Somali Aid Station<By
Keith B.  Richburg=Washington Post Foreign Service=

BAARDHEERE, Somalia - In this famine-stricken town, which has be-
come the tarnished trophy of warring generals, the only available
jobs are for gravediggers.

Fifteen of them work in shifts, digging hundreds of holes under
the scorching sun for a few Somali shillings and a handful of
food. They start early in the day, collecting the corpses of
those who have died overnight so they can be wrapped before
decomposition begins.

On Monday, 253 people died, mostly old people and children wasted
away from starvation and disease. That figure is close to the
average daily death toll here since Oct. 13, when this dusty,
landlocked town - with no strategic significance - emerged as the
center of a brutal clan conflict.

Baardheere's 18,000 longtime and recently arrived residents have
been made to suffer because of the anarchy gripping Somalia. The
battle for this town of thatch shacks, tents and bombed-out
masonry buildings has to do with power, prestige and personal
pique.

One warlord held the town, then another came and snatched it
away. Now the first warlord says he wants to take it back. Relief
workers are afraid to come in and feed the starving until the
feud is settled.

"I'd like to wait and see what happens," said Bob Allen, the
Baardheere team leader from CARE Australia, which evacuated when
guerrillas seized the town Oct. 13. "But every day I wait, 300
people die. How long do I wait?"

When aid workers set up operations in Baardheere in early Sep-
tember, the town was the regional headquarters of powerful war-
lord Mohamed Farah Aideed, and the daily death rate from starva-
tion and disease was about 200 daily. In the course of a month,
through a major food airlift and feeding program, the rate was
reduced to about 50 - a success by the standards of other hard-
hit Somali towns.

But late in September, Aideed decided to relocate his base, mov-
ing from Baardheere back to the Somali capital, Mogadishu, where
he arrived to a tumultuous homecoming.

"The moment he left this town, his forces left with him," said
Walid Musa, the chief of United Nations humanitarian operations
in Somalia. Three weeks after Aideed's departure, the remnants of
ousted dictator Mohamed Siad Barre's old army seized Baardheere
after a brief, listless firefight.

Among the town's newest conquering warlords was Siad Barre's
son-in-law and defense minister, Gen.  Mohamed Said Hersi Morgan,
who was responsible for suppression of an insurrection in the
north of the country in the mid-1980s.

Morgan and Aideed are enemies in the battle for what remains of
Somalia. Aideed sees himself as a liberation fighter against the
old Siad Barre dictatorship, and the new strongman around whom
Somalia should be reconstructed. Morgan and his ally Gen. Ahmed
Warsame are representatives of the old order.

While supporters here deny that the two generals want to bring
Siad Barre back, their spokesmen in Nairobi stalk the offices of
foreign correspondents handing out press releases and claiming
that Siad Barre, in exile in Nigeria, is the driving force behind
Morgan and Warsame.

Aideed considered the loss of Baardheere a personal affront, an
embarrassment to his credibility and a direct challenge to his
claim of being Somalia's most powerful warlord. Until Sept. 19,
when he returned to Mogadishu, Aideed had made Baardheere his re-
gional headquarters.  When foreign reporters had come here to
visit Aideed at a converted villa he used as his command center,
he said he controlled 11 of Somalia's 18 regions, and that inter-
national agencies wanting to work in Somalia, including the Unit-
ed Nations, first had to talk to him.

"It is a psychological defeat for him and his people that he has
lost this place," said Musa Bungudu, a U.N.  worker from Nigeria.

Now Aideed is amassing troops, vehicles and heavy weapons on the
highway near the town of Baidoa, about 100 miles away, preparing
for what he vows will be a new offensive to retake Baardheere.
When humanitarian groups asked Aideed to hold off his assault be-
cause of the thousands of innocent, starving noncombatants here,
he replied that the United Nations should load up the civilians
and truck them to the area already under Aideed's control.

Now Baardheere is waiting for Aideed. And starvation proceeds.

"The fact that Aideed is announcing his intention to come here
must be taken seriously," said Musa, who was here on a brief
visit from Mogadishu, trying to negotiate among factions in the
town for a resumption of relief efforts. He acknowledged that all
of his efforts at negotiation were moot if Aideed decided to at-
tack.

Since Morgan's forces seized the town, only one relief flight has
landed in Baardheere, a German military transport that came in
Oct. 23 with nine tons of milk and cornmeal. Someone fired a
grenade toward the aircraft. The plane was not hit, but other re-
lief agencies became convinced that Baardheere under warlord Mor-
gan was not safe.

Still, more starving Somalis are reaching Baardeere than are dy-
ing here, so the population is swelling by about 1,000 each day.
The town has been surviving on that single planeload, with no
other relief flights planned. "We badly need food," said Hassan
Mohamud Mohamed, head of the local relief committee. The supply
from the German plane will be exhausted in a few more days, he
said, and after that, "many more people will die."

Already, skeletal figures move along the roadsides, while the
dead and dying lie in makeshift tents, too weak even to join the
food lines for gruel. As in Baidoa, Merca and other towns that
have seen this widespread starvation, the stench of death hangs
heavy in the air.

The difference in Baardheere is that the situation here was not
so bad just one month ago. There was hunger, there was brutality
- starving people were being beaten in food lines - but there was
some food coming in.  When a CARE office opened here, the German
and Canadian air forces, along with private charter planes from
the Mombasa-based Southern Air Transport, had daily flights ar-
riving. CARE Australia, under Allen, set up a tent city feeding
center that is still known as "Australian Bob's."

Now the camp has become a sprawling vision of death. The bodies
"start decomposing very quickly because of the rain, and because
there's no protein in the bodies," explained U.N. worker Musa,
who organized the gravedigging teams last week by paying them out
of his own pocket.

Old people, women and children wander about aimlessly, clutching
empty metal bowls, surrounding any foreigner, hoping that the
strangers are bringing food. Hollow-eyed infants, naked or wear-
ing just the tattered remains of cloth, wander around large empty
cooking urns, picking in the dirt and scraping the large pots
with dirty fingers in search of any crumbs left behind.

Because this town is surrounded by hostile military forces, and
roads are virtually impassable because of mines and general
disrepair, the only way to bring in food is by plane. Airdrops
are possible but not practical, aid workers said, since food
dropped by parachute usually ends up in the hands of the strong-
est - which means young thugs with guns.  In addition to the fam-
ine, dirty water from a filthy river nearby is said to be causing
widespread disease among people whose bodies are too frail to
fight off infection. "The water supply is killing people," said
Allen. He said a new water filtration system could be installed
in about two days, and the equipment and the technical team are
sitting in Mogadishu waiting to begin work - as soon as the bat-
tle for Baardheere is over.<02:09 10-30C9999-----

Copyright 1992, The Washington Post.  This story is from the
Washington Post's Capitol Edition On-Line and is not to be ar-
chived or redistributed.

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