Airlift For Humanity

For months, the mythical Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse -- Conquest, Slaughter, Famine and Death -- have run wild in Somalia. After 19 months of war and a long drought, 1.5 million of the country's estimated 6 million people face imminent starvation. Only an urgent plea by Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali prompted the U.N. Security Council to authorize a broad plan to break the stranglehold that armed factions have on the African nation. Under its terms, if the Somalis refuse to accept a U.N. force to protect supplies and relief workers, the U.N. "would not exclude other means" of carrying out its mission -- an unprecedented threat.

This week an emergency airlift is to begin delivering food throughout the country, and a technical team will arrive in Mogadishu to assess the needs for a return to peace; 50 cease-fire observers from 10 nations are already in the capital. But the U.N. will not begin distribution of food and aid without the security provided by a 500-man Pakistani battalion, on standby since April. So far General Mohammed Farrah Aidid, one of two rivals destroying the country they would govern, has balked at accepting armed blue helmets.

Boutros-Ghali, an Egyptian, told the Security Council that Africans resented the U.N. rush into "the rich man's war" in Yugoslavia while it showed little urgency in helping Somalia, which a U.S. disaster official calls "the single worst crisis in the world today. People are dying in the thousands daily."

The U.N. plan to divide Somalia into four sectors aims to wrest control of the country from brigands in lawless Mogadishu, where last week a ship loaded with 8,000 tons of food was forced to pay a daily "security fee" of $4,000 until off-loading costs were negotiated. An additional 7,000 tons of food is held hostage in warehouses. But the airlift is only a stopgap. The cure is an end to bloodshed and the beginning of reconciliation.