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Guns, warlords and

edgy thugs doom Somalia

BARDERA(Somalia): "Come back after the year 2000. We might be ready to stop fighting by then."

Little that happened during a 36-hour tour of Somalia with European humanitarian affairs commissioner Emma Bonino challenged this pessimistic judgment by one of the broken country's journalists.

Bonino, who holds the purse-strings of the European Union's humanitarian aid budget, was the most senior foreign official to visit Somalia since U.N. troops left 13 months ago after they utterly failed to keep the peace.

Her first trip to the country, which has had no central government since 1991, was a public relations disaster for the self-proclaimed president, General Mohamed Farah Aideed.

Aideed, camped in the town of Baidoa to enforce his tenuous control, was disobeyed by lieutenants in his stronghold in southern Mogadishu who refused to allow Bonino to visit.

Bonino and her aides saw pockets of relative peace in the provincial towns of Belet Weyne and Bardera during the Thursday-Friday visit. But they had a nasty taste of Somali anarchy in the port of Kismayo and arrived in the capital Mogadishu in the middle of the city's worst clan fighting for months.

By Friday night, witnesses reckoned 75 people had been killed in two days of fighting between Aideed's militiamen and those of his former ally, Osman Ali Hassan Atto.

"In some zones of this country, no-one is in charge," Bonino, stating the obvious, told reporters in Bardera.

"If I had to advise the European Commission to start a real, traditional aid programme I would advise 'not yet'," she said, speaking shortly after her convoy was twice held up by shooting incidents near Kismayo's airport.

Wearing jeans and smoking continuously, the straight-talking Italian is not the kind of female Somalis are used to. But faced with the representative of the last donor governments ready to spend money here, the traditionalist males she met kept any critical thoughts to themselves.

"We are welcoming you because we know the world community will not forget us," said a clan elder in Kismayo with a degree of assurance that is belied by the facts.

Most of the world is more than ready to forget Somalia and its six million benighted people. The U.N.'s peacekeeping operation was a blood-stained mess and many aid projects around the country are suspended because of security risks.

Yet the European Union is funding emergency food and medical aid and is seriously considering a three-year "rehabilitation programme" worth $60 million.

Why?

The simple answer is human solidarity. The foreign relief agencies still working in Somalia refuse to accept that a whole people must pay for the sins of a few warlords.

Bonino is pushing the idea of "emergency rehabilitation" as a more cost-effective aid strategy than pouring food and drugs into a bottomless pit.

Europe's money should be spent on small development projects in safe areas. She says it is pointless to equip a hospital without ensuring it has a water supply. It is better to treat Somalia's millions of camels against disease than rush tons of food to the country if they die and famine ensues.

"I know it's not written in the book," she said, referring to her approach. "But on the ground it is real prevention."

The snag is that nobody knows when a peaceful corner, like Bardera, could be sucked into the conflict between Aideed and a growing coalition around his north Mogadishu rival, Ali Mahdi Mohamed.

And the countless guns in Somalia, carried by virtually every young male in some communities, guarantees insecurity for years to come.-Reuter