Operation Restore Hope

No Maryland military units have been alerted for service i Operation Restore Hope in Somalia, according to spokesman for local units and the Pentagon.Col. Howard Freedlander, Maryland National Guard spokesman, said units are updating contingency plans as a matter of prudent planning, just in case. He said the Air National Guard last week completed its tour of duty flying relief supplies from Mombasa, Kenya, to airstrips in Somalia and is not scheduled to return to Africa.Spokesmen at Fort Meade and Aberdeen Proving Ground said none of their units have been put on alert for possible Somalia duty.

Kansas City, Missouri. -- As U.N. troops are plucked from the beach, abandoning Somalia once more to the governance of gun-happy thugs, it is useless to try to put a good face on the failed intervention there. Operation Restore Hope was a waste of lives, a waste of resources, a waste of time.There was no hope to restore.There was no nation to save.We had no clear objective, and no discernible interests there -- either a direct interest, or the more general one of defending the integrity of national borders.

The crew of the USNS Comfort, the Baltimore-based hospital ship that took part in the Gulf War, began preparing yesterday for a Christmastime mission in Somalia as part of Operation Restore Hope.The 42-member crew which maintains the ship in port at the Baltimore Harbor near Canton spent the day repositioning on-board materials and checking engines and other machinery in anticipation of shipping out this week.A request to activate the ship has been made by the U.S. Central Command to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

When U.S. troops rolled ashore in Mogadishu last Dec. 9, they were met by thousands of smiling Somalis, men and boys mainly, who had come to see the military extravaganza that raised the curtain on Operation Restore Hope.Somalia was to be rescued from the famine that had consumed over 300,000 of its sons and daughters. A nation broken into pieces by civil war was to be put together again.On that hot African day, and amid that festive welcome, not too many people could have foreseen what was to come.

The Baltimore-based hospital ship USNS Comfort will not be sailing for Somalia and Operation Restore Hope in the foreseeable future, the Pentagon said yesterday.The decision provoked mixed reaction among medical personnel the Bethesda naval medical center who have been scurrying to update their records and get immunizations against tropical diseases."It was still go" at a 7 a.m. staff meeting yesterday, said Cmdr. George L. Marsh of Poolesville, who would have been assistant director of nursing services aboard the Comfort.

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.

MOGADISHU, Somalia -- What could go wrong? What migh undermine Operation Restore Hope and undo the rescue of Somalia from a famine more disastrous than any other to hit the Horn of Africa in this century?The sense of benign purpose that drove the United States to commit itself to this place is still strong. But among people closer to the scene -- far removed from the air-conditioned military planning rooms where can-do optimism usually prevails -- the questions are a little more urgent, the expectations a little darker.

WASHINGTON -- Maryland voters have been largely silent about sending U.S. troops into turbulent, famine-ridden Somalia, but their representatives are largely supportive of President Bush's action, according to a survey of congressional offices.Most Maryland lawmakers polled after the president's televised news conference said they are behind Operation Restore Hope.But Rep. Helen Delich Bentley, a Republican from Baltimore County, broke with her party's president, saying it was unwise to send U.S. troops into a civil war where the combatants include civilians and children.

ABOARD THE LT. JACK LUMMUS -- Capt. Stan Jones is a strapping guy with a football player's gait and a wad of chewing tobacco in his mouth."People have the wrong idea about Marines," he said. "They think all we want to do is shoot people.""This is what's great, where we get to go out and do something like this, really helping people," he said. "You know, everybody has the fantasy of smacking down the bully who kicks sand on defenseless people. That's what we're going to do in Somalia."The Lummus is a giant floating warehouse.

MOGADISHU, Somalia -- This city has waited and waited for its deliverance. It went to sleep at night still waiting, but certain the Marines would come. And today they did, albeit somewhat strangely at first with all those TV lights to greet them.Sensible of the Marines to have begun arriving before sunrise. This place is hot. The small clumps of eucalyptus and bougainvillea that thrive in its alleys and side streets are limp and torpid. But the people have been agitated by a frenetic expectation.

Washington.--It began six months ago under the platitudinous code phrase, "Operation Restore Hope," this U.S. military venture to stop the starving, the maiming, the murdering in the pitiable East African nation, Somalia.It has turned out to be just another "killing field" monstrosity, in which soldiers flying the United Nations flag kill women and children, and tens of thousands of Somalis cry out in hatred of the United States.I am not bashful about saying that in my column of last Dec. 6, I warned that the United States was entering a dangerous and "entangling alliance" with the United Nations by sending an invasion force into Somalia that much of the world eventually would see, not as humanitarian, but as a murderous Trojan Horse.

BARDERA, Somalia -- The main street is quiet.No babies cry.Only a handful of children, all boys, play in the road, using sticks and rocks for toys.Today, when U.S. Marines plan to arrive at this southwestern outpost in Somalia's hardest-hit famine zone, they will find silent testimony that, for many children here, help comes too late."

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.

MOGADISHU, Somalia -- It must have been an impressive building at one time, with its graceful Moorish arches repeating themselves along the gleaming white facade, beneath the straight line of the roof. It was obviously a place where important work went on.It still does. Within, there is now a school where children are rescued from the perverted idea of freedom that prevails today in Somalia.Tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers plus all of the civilizing mechanisms that the United Nations can bring to bear over the years to come cannot do what those behind the wall will be called upon to do -- to re-create in Somalia a stable government and economy and a secure environment for the people here.

BONN, Germany -- Chancellor Helmut Kohl announced yesterday that he wants to send up to 1,500 German soldiers to Somalia early next year to help the U.S.-led international relief effort there, the first time since World War II that German ground forces would be sent outside NATO's territorial confines.Deploring endless legalistic discussions about whether the 1949 TC constitution allowed the deployment of German troops beyond NATO territory -- an impasse that prevented Germany from taking part in the military operation against Iraq last year -- Mr. Kohl asked his coalition government yesterday to take action.

WASHINGTON -- At the end of the 20th century, an era marked by space exploration, computer wizardry and test-tube babies, the status of the human race may more accurately be reflected in a sobering statistic: 786 million people -- almost one in every six -- are suffering from acute or chronic hunger. More than 1 billion more face various forms of serious malnutrition."Hunger and malnutrition remain as the most devastating problems facing the majority of the world's poor. Despite general improvements in food availability, health and social services, hunger and malnutrition exist in some form in almost every country," concluded a recent survey by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.

BETHESDA -- One after another, the doctors, nurses, hospitalmen and lab technicians lined up yesterday to get their shots -- immunization against yellow fever, malaria, cholera and any other exotic ailment lurking in Africa.Anticipating imminent orders to Somalia for Operation Restore Hope, the Naval Medical Center began processing the 450 to 500 medical and support personnel who would staff the hospital ship USNS Comfort. Medical, dental and pay records were updated, and provisions made to care for families left behind.

In the end, it was the pictures that compelled us to act: th fly-ridden faces of dying babies too weak to open their eyes, the starving bodies of 30-pound teen-agers with limbs as fragile as sticks, the walking skeletons of men and women whose blank eyes no longer convey even the slightest flicker of a life force.In the end, it was not possible to look upon such pictures without thinking: This is the worst life can get.And, in the end, it was not possible to turn away, to do nothing in the face of such suffering.

BAIDOA, Somalia -- Five months ago this was a town full of skeletons, the staggering ambulatory kind, and the supine and torpid, the light of life visibly disappearing from their eyes. The living population was losing ground to the recent dead.Most of the infants were dying off; the adults fell down dead in the road and were buried in shallow graves on the margin.There seemed to be no end to it. Baidoa swelled from a town of 7,000 into a crowded camp of some 30,000 wretched souls. And day by day more and more of the desperate starving stumbled in from the surrounding scrubland.

BAIDOA, Somalia -- Twenty-three months after government troops sacked this town in their desperate quest to crush a tribal rebellion, the ravages of starvation can be seen everywhere.In the eyes of the little girl in black rags who stood on a street corner yesterday, holding out an empty bowl.In the silent rows of women and children, nomads who trekked in from the bush and now slump along the bomb-cracked earthen roads, some no more than stick figures, others with distended stomachs.And at the Alamin compound, where 600 youngsters left orphaned by former President Mohamed Siad Barre's butchery listlessly studied the Koran, scarcely noticing U.S. fighter-jets buzzing in sorties above.