COLUMN ONE : Where a Gun Is a Meal Ticket : In starving Somalia, food must pass through ‘the most dangerous port on Earth.’ Supplies are plundered, weapons are everywhere, and jobless gunmen make up relief group ‘security forces.’

MOGADISHU, Somalia —  More than 150 trucks were lined up in front of a makeshift partition of rusting sea containers closing off one end of the port of this crippled, starving capital. Armed men acting--or just posing--as security guards were everywhere, chatting, arguing or shouting at one another in familiar Somali style.

Suddenly, an encounter turned ugly. The hubbub raised an octave; one man was shoved against a container. In a split second, there was the cocking of rifle bolts and the pointing of a dozen muzzles

Not one onlooker bothered to scatter. “Don’t be afraid,” said a CARE International worker, escorting visitors toward the quayside. “It’s common in Somalia. We go through the fire to get to work every day.”

That fight ended quietly, but many at the port of Mogadishu do not. Here, at the spot through which hundreds of thousands of tons of relief food will have to pass if the world is to stave off the starvation deaths of 1.5 million Somalis, an average of five people are killed by gunfire every day.

The section of Mogadishu that includes the port is a scene out of “A Clockwork Orange,” with almost every male on the road, even children, toting weapons. Almost every passing vehicle sports a couple of gun barrels sticking out of its windows.

At the port itself, scarcely a relief ship docks without being looted. In one now-infamous episode in January, mobs emptied a dockside warehouse of 7,000 tons of food in 10 hours, nearly destroying the warehouse in the bargain. “The whole population of Mogadishu was running around looking like ghosts because they were covered in wheat flour,” a relief worker recalled. “It was a free-for-all.”

All this happens despite the presence of an armed “security” force now numbering 1,050 and growing larger by the day.

“This is the most dangerous port on Earth,” said a Western relief official, “and for my agency it’s the most difficult place of the 40 or 50 in the world where we operate.”

He spoke amid the port’s aura of sheer tension. A gridlock of trucks filled the broad Tarmac by the quayside, where two freighters were tied up for unloading; 150 trucks were coming in to haul away a Red Cross shipment just as port authorities were trying to release 20 others kept inside the gates overnight because of violence on the roads after dusk.

The two lead trucks faced each other across a narrow gateway made by shoving aside a sea container with a forklift. A crowd of gunmen, drivers and stevedores buzzed like a nest of angry wasps, and here and there in the mob gunshots rang out.

World Food Program coordinator Roger Carson ducked his head. “Trouble can happen at any time,” he said. “It doesn’t even have anything to do with the congestion.”

Indeed, Mogadishu’s port is a microcosm of the anarchy and violence that have afflicted the entire city and most of the rest of what was once Somalia since rebels ousted longtime strongman Mohamed Siad Barre in January, 1991.

But the breakdown of order in Mogadishu is particularly important because the city and port are the key to feeding the country. “It’s absolutely impossible to take food to reach the needy people because of the lack of security,” said Ali Mahdi Mohamed, the self-declared “interim president” of Somalia, whose forces ejected Siad Barre from the city but now hold only its less-strategic northern section.

Although many Western relief officials and political leaders have recently called for a massive airlift of food to relieve Somalia’s desperate famine, professionals on the ground here say that any airlift would be expensive, cumbersome and limited in capacity compared with an open, functioning port.

With 4.5 million of its 6 million people in dire need of emergency food, including 1.5 million facing imminent starvation, Somalia needs nearly 50,000 tons of food a month for the next year, according to international estimates. In the last six months, emergency shipments have amounted to only 69,000 tons.

The scale of violence, theft and extortion is so great in and around the port that the U.N. Security Council gave its tentative approval July 28 for a detachment of armed international peacekeepers to secure the area. The current plan is for 6,000 troops to be stationed throughout Somalia, including up to 2,000 in Mogadishu alone.

But few people here, Somalis or foreigners, think that would be enough. Even relief workers who consider armed intervention the only way to relieve Mogadishu’s security crisis believe the troops’ arrival will provoke more violence, especially if they come in without the agreement of local warlords. “They might stabilize the port, but there will be a huge loss of life during their deployment,” a U.N. official said.

Understanding why requires a look at the existing mode of life in the port and its environs.

After more than 18 months of civil war and two years of drought, relief is the only economic activity left in Somalia. Mogadishu itself is split along an east-west line, with its north and south controlled by Mahdi and Gen. Mohamed Farah Aidid, two mutually mistrustful factional leaders.

Power and water supplies have long since been destroyed and much of the housing ruined in factional fighting from last November through March. The only easily available commodity on the street is weaponry, left over from the years in which first the Soviets and then the Americans kept the Somali army fully armed. Mahdi has succeeded in getting most guns off the street in his relatively compact stronghold of north Mogadishu, but the populace is by no means disarmed.

There are few beggars on the street--in Mogadishu a gun, not an upturned palm, is a meal ticket. But the back alleys of the city harbor thousands of the destitute, most of whom have fled warfare and drought in the west and south of the country.

Some lie spent and emaciated on the main streets as Land Cruisers flying blue U.N. flags or fluttering Red Cross pennants speed past, their occupants trying to hold back the disorder enough to get a few thousands tons of food into town.

The inflow of Somalis has turned Mogadishu into a refugee camp of 1 million people, more than twice its prewar size. Most of them, particularly women, children and the elderly, are slipping down another rung in existence, for relief observers say a considerable amount of looting takes place after bags of food are distributed to such families, who are then robbed at gunpoint.

“These people can’t keep their food for more than one hour or two,” a U.N. development worker said.

Graham Roberts, logistics coordinator for CARE International at the port, observed that “in the absence of any government, communications, electricity or economy, relief is seen by the ordinary people in the street as the only means to employment.”

Because unemployed gunmen are a constant threat, relief groups here have absorbed them into their “security forces.” The United Nations and every relief agency has a cadre of armed guards or mobile howitzers simply to move around town. In January, the port security force was 250 men, mostly police held over from the prewar regime. Now it is 1,050, most affiliated with Aidid.

The port gunmen receive daily rations of food for their families and a cash stipend to protect incoming supplies. The cash payments alone come to more than $5,000 a day for the United Nations’ World Food Program, the largest importer of relief food.

But none of this makes the port secure. The most successful, recent unloading of a shipment occurred last March, when 95% of a Romanian ship’s cargo made it to relief-distribution centers. That was the first relief food to arrive in port since the outbreak of fighting in November, and “the situation has steadily deteriorated since then,” one official said.

Things are particularly bad when a “high-value” shipment comes in, such as cooking oil, sugar or milk. The most troublesome such delivery arrived in port June 5: 4,250 tons of individually wrapped packs of oil, flour and sugar--the “personal gift” of King Fahd of Saudi Arabia.

The 167,000 “gift packs,” as local relief workers call them derisively, were so easy to steal they functioned as a “thug magnet.” Security had to be so tight that the unloading took 3 1/2 weeks compared with the five days needed for any other shipment of that size. Worse, the process so overwhelmed the port that most of the 6,800 tons of other urgently needed relief food that landed in July has yet to be distributed.

In any event, keeping the gunmen fed and paid is no guarantee against further extortion. Last week, a French ship arrived with 2,005 tons of milk powder and wheat flour. A dockside sling deposited one load on the wharf during a photo opportunity for Bernard Koushner, France’s visiting humanitarian minister. But the next day, Aidid’s men promised to block further unloading unless the French donated 60 tons of the cargo “toward port security.”

“We agreed--we didn’t have a choice,” a relief official said.

The presence of so many guns in the hands of undisciplined men makes the port hazardous. Most of the 40 or so gunshot wounds treated daily by local hospitals come from the port; many of the incidents occur in the afternoon, when gunmen lose their inhibitions after a day of chewing khat, the mild stimulant plant that is the Somali national drug.

Still, the port itself is only one aspect of the problem of moving food into Somalia. The most dangerous moment comes when the food goes on the move. Relief convoys are so commonly ambushed that foreign relief agencies have long since stopped monitoring their progress to their destination. Somalia’s welter of mutually resentful clans, subclans and families ensures a high level of suspicion that someone is getting more than his share. “The famine hasn’t changed things enough for the clans to allow food to get to any clan but their own,” a U.N. observer said.

The result is that the World Food Program estimates that as much as 80% of the food distributed in Mogadishu this year has been diverted from feeding centers and distribution points for the starving multitudes. The city’s warlords may be stockpiling it against the day when their four-month cease-fire breaks down. Much of it is certainly going into warehouses owned by prominent merchants, who pay off the convoy escorts to shanghai their own cargoes.

By near-unanimous consent, the greatest obstacle to improving security in the port and the region is Aidid. He claims to control as much as 90% of Somalia, but this is pure bluster. His only clear authority is over the part of Mogadishu with the port, international airport and most relief agencies; he, thus far, has chosen to demonstrate his power chiefly by promoting anarchy.

Aidid has refused to countenance the intervention of armed U.N. troops in Mogadishu, in contrast to Mahdi, who says he would welcome an armed force. Aidid’s argument is that armed intervention would compromise Somali “sovereignty,” a concept of little more than metaphysical heft in a land of such widespread disorder. But he backs up his point with a scarcely veiled threat to subject incoming troops to attack.

“In Mogadishu there are 30,000-40,000 armed men,” said Mohamed Noor, Aidid’s representative on a joint committee that allocates relief food between north and south Mogadishu. “So even 500 or 1,000 foreign peacekeepers is a drop in the ocean.”

Aidid, instead, wants the United Nations to train as many as 6,000 Somali police to keep order, a step that many U.N. officials fear would strengthen the hand of an illegitimate warlord.

Many people here believe their deployment would have to be a military operation and that the troops would have to function for months, if not years, as an occupying force. They would almost certainly come under attack by the displaced armed guards at the port, as well as family and clan members. At least three armed clans operating in south Mogadishu owe only minimal loyalty to Aidid, so even his agreement might not be sufficient to ensure cooperation.

Yet few relief workers here can conceive of a way to move supplies into the interior without what amounts to a military takeover of Mogadishu.

Describing the ambivalence of his colleagues in the aid community, one prominent aid worker put it this way: “On the one hand you feel it’s essential to protect the relief supplies. On the other you feel that it’s going to result in a blood bath.”

How to Help Somalians

Here is a list of telephone or fax numbers and addresses of the U.S. offices of some of the international or U.S. organizations providing relief to Somalians, including refugees in Kenya and elsewhere. Africare 440 R Street NW Washington, D.C. 20001 (202) 462-3614 Air Serv International Box 3041 Redlands, Calif. 92373 Fax (714) 793-0226 American Friends Service Committee 1501 Cherry St. Philadelphia, Pa. 19102 (215) 241-7141 American Red Cross Box 37243 Washington, D.C. 20013 (800) 842-2200 Care International 660 First Avenue New York, N.Y. 10016 (212) 686-3110 Church World Service Box 968 Elkhart, Ind. 46515 (219) 264-3102 Doctors Without Borders USA 30 Rockefeller Plaza, Suite 5425 New York, N.Y. 10112 (212) 649-5961 International Medical Corps 5933 West Century Blvd. Suite 310 Los Angeles, Calif. 90045 (310) 670-0800 Lutheran World Relief 390 Park Avenue South New York, N.Y. 10016-8803 (212) 532-6350 Presiding Bishop’s Fund for World Relief-Episcopal Church 815 Second Avenue New York, N.Y. 10017 (212) 867-8400 Save the Children Fund 54 Wilton Road Westport, Conn. 06880 (203) 221-4100 UNICEF 331 East 38 St. New York, N.Y. 10016 (212) 686-5522. U.S.A. for U.N.H.C.R. 1718 Connecticut Avenue NW Washington, D.C. 20009 Indicate correspondence and donations for Somali assistance (202) 387-8546 World Concern Box 33000 Seattle, Wash. 98133 (206) 546-7201 U.N. World Food Program DC-1 1 United Nations Plaza New York, N.Y. 10017 (212) 963-8439 World Vision P.O. Box 1131 Pasadena, Calif. 91131 (800) 423-4200 Source: Associated Press