[The Economist, July 18th 1992]

FOOD is being brought to Mogadishu docks and airport but a lot of it fails to reach people who are dying of hunger, possibly at the ghastly rate of several thousand a day. Deliveries of food and medicine since the ceasefire in March (at least 20,000 tonnes by boat) are hardly adequate for the city's 1.2m people, let alone for the even hungrier people in the interior. The UN World Food Programme, the International Committee of the Red Cross and other agencies have performed miracles in dodging a path for the relief through the lethal anarchy of Somalia. Yet much of this precious supply is stolen on the way to the city. Nobody, yet, has found a way of protecting it.

The ceasefire arranged four months ago between the rival warlords, Ali Mahdi Muhammad (who controls the northern part of the city) and Muhammad Farah Aydeed (who controls the southern part), is shakily holding. But their continued rivalry prevents the United Nations, which under normal rules can intervene militarily only with the consent of the national government, from sending guards to protect the stuff it supplies. General Aydeed, having declined to let the UN send armed guards, is now rejecting a proposal to send even unarmed escorts and observers. He accuses the UN of bias because an aircraft that it had chartered was later used to deliver currency (possibly counterfeit) and military goods to Mr Ali Mahdi.

So the streets continue to be ruled by roving gunmen in their aviator sunglasses, high on the intoxicating weed khat. Some hooligans steal food at gunpoint; others buy it with money raised from the relief agencies for "protection", which is just about the only money paying job in town. The civil war that followed the overthrow of Siad Barre in January 1991 has led to the utter collapse of all vestiges of civilian authority. Mogadishu hospitals treat around 20 people with gunshot wounds a day, most of them teenage boys. Nobody is safe.

Mogadishu's docks and airport are still (despite stiff competition) probably the world's most dangerous. Looting of medical supplies and food at the international airport have forced the relief agencies to use an inconvenient airstrip. It is no easier to get goods in by boat. The young men who form the security teams at the docks may themselves rob the shipments. The convoys of lorries taking the food to distribution centres are escorted by men in jeeps armed with assault rifles and roof mounted anti aircraft guns. The convoys are routinely looted, often by the escorts themselves.

Yet all unarmed Somalis depend on the food that does get through. The Red Cross brings a meal of rice a day to 500,000 people, and is appealing urgently for money to double the amount of relief it can offer. Many of its customers are nomads who travelled to Mogadishu when their livestock was ravaged by soldiers Siad Barre's, they invariably say.

Many women saw the slaughter of their husbands and sons as well as their camels and goats. The civil war stranded Somalia's rural population for months without food. One young widow from the bush has lived for the past five months in a hut of chicken wire and dried leaves, watching three of her five children starve to death. Even the intensive health centres, 16 of which are run by Save the Children, can offer their patients only 900 calories a day, less than half the normal minimum food requirement.

In Mogadishu a third of the emaciated children in the health centres are called "severely" malnourished; outside Mogadishu, where Médecins sans Brontières runs six clinics, two thirds are rated severe. The relief agencies are now reaching hungry people in the interior, forestalling their trek to Mogadishu. For example, UNICEF, the United Nations children's agency, now has feeding centres in previously inaccessible Baidoa, and in the Kismayu region. In the north it is trying to restore water supplies.

The non governmental relief agencies remain deeply critical of the United Nations for not doing more. A common accusation is that the UN, after the tortuous negotiations that brought about the ceasefire and the neutralisation of the port, became overwhelmed by the scale of the problem and the intransigence of factional politics. One doctor expresses the general dissatisfaction: "Non intervention is very well respected by the UN SO far as Somalia is concerned." This may be unfair on the UN workers on the ground. But behind the anger is the well founded belief that the permanent members of the UN Security Council are preoccupied with the Balkans, and inclined to put the even more horrible tragedy in Somalia out of their minds.