Baidoa

WASHINGTON -- Much of the U.S. food aid going to famine-ravaged Somalia is corn and sorghum, which were chosen because they are less likely to be stolen by roving bands of armed thugs because Somalis don't much like them, according to President Bush's aid coordinator.Andrew Natsios, assistant administrator of the Agency for International Development, said yesterday that the grains are ideal for free food distribution because they are nutritious enough to alleviate hunger but are not popular enough to command high black market prices.

MOGADISHU, Somalia -- As a $3 billion humanitarian mission winds down, Somalia is sliding into anarchy again. Looters descend unchecked over relief shipments. Armed teen-agers hijack food convoys. Aid workers move in armed trucks to avoid being kidnapped.In short, the country appears to be caught up in the same spiral that earlier led to starvation, media attention and, ultimately, the intervention of 24,000 U.S. troops.This time, few seem to care.Relief agencies are leaving and, in some cases, diverting resources to Rwanda.

It was a hot, windy August day when I visited a Somali village named Baagay, a site where Catholic Relief Services is distributing food and agriculture tools to hundreds of people who have survived the worst of their country's violence and famine. I stood there with dirt in my eyes, mouth and nose, trying to get some sense of how these people could live through such civil strife and destitution.Then a beautiful woman, wearing brilliantly colored African garb, penetrated through the dust and pointed at a leg sore, over an inch in diameter, which had puffed her entire foot with infection.

Ahmad Robeleh and his wife, Khatra, watch the television coverage of Operation Restore Hope differently from most of their neighbors in Towson.They are horrified by the pictures of starving Somalis. They also hope to see relatives alive, yet they are fearful of seeing them among the victims.The Robelehs, like other Somalis interviewed last week, are appalled at events in their ravaged East African homeland. They are grateful to the United States for undertaking Operation Restore Hope.Almost all have relatives still in Somalia.

Massive aid is headed to Somalia, where as many as 1.5 million people -- most of them children -- face starvation. No one knows whether the aid will arrive in time.Richard O'Mara, The Sun's London correspondent, spent 10 days in Somalia and Kenya. He traveled to Mogadishu, Baidoa and Berdera in Somalia, and to Nairobi in Kenya. He interviewed heroic relief workers, angry ship captains, gunmen and their commanders, and he saw death everywhere.His report appears tomorrow in The Sunday Sun.

MOGADISHU, Somalia -- The transitional president of Somalia narrowly escaped assassination yesterday when a car bomb exploded as he left a converted grain silo that serves as the nation's makeshift parliament. President Abdullahi Yusuf was unharmed. However, eight people, including his brother and several security guards, were killed by the blast in Baidoa, the nation's provisional capital. The attack marked the second-consecutive day of bloodshed in the Horn of Africa nation, which has been without a functioning government since 1991.

NAIROBI, Kenya -- The highest-ranking American official to set foot in Somalia in more than a decade returned from a trip there yesterday conceding that there were "significant problems" but saying that "we have to have faith in the people of Somalia." The official, Jendayi Frazer, assistant secretary of state for African affairs, spent five hours in Baidoa, Somalia, meeting with top officials of the Somali transitional government, which has been struggling to gain control of the country.

BAIDOA, Somalia -- A Somali version of "Calvin and Hobbes is the most popular part of the American operation to win over the hearts and minds of Somalis.The cartoon strip, in a daily Somali-language paper published by the Army's 4th Psychological Operations Group, features a young Somali camel herder named Elmi and his loyal camel, Mandeeg."People like to read a conversation between two people, so we read Elmi and Mandeeg first," said Abdi Hamid, a 19-year-old Baidoan.In one recent strip, Mandeeg the camel suggested that guns in the hands of so many people were dangerous to everybody.

MOGADISHU, Somalia -- In a bold and risky rebuke to both the Clinton administration and Somalian warlord Mohamed Farah Aidid, United Nations Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali defied even his own staff's security warnings yesterday to visit the once-starving town of Baidoa and the Somalian capital, where angry demonstrators burned tires and waved cow skulls to protest the visit.But the secretary-general never saw the protests.In fact, Mr. Boutros-Ghali never left the heavily fortified Mogadishu airport during his secretive two-hour stop in the capital, where not even the news media knew of his presence until after he departed for Nairobi, Kenya.

MOGADISHU, Somalia -- The French Foreign Legion drew th first blood of Operation Restore Hope yesterday in a confrontation that left two Somalis dead.A truck carrying Somalian gunmen tried crashing through a checkpoint manned by French legionnaires. The legionnaires opened fire. The truck slammed into a concrete wall. Between the shooting and the wall, two Somalis were dead and seven injured.The French say the Somalis fired first."If the dead men were gunmen, it is good for Somalia," student Hassan Aden told Reuters.