America Abroad

By Strobe Talbott

FINALLY, ON HIS WAY OUT THE DOOR OF THE OVAL OFfice, George Bush is getting serious about Somalia. In the way the U.S. is now responding, the President is affirming an important principle: once a country utterly loses its ability to govern itself, it also loses its claim to sovereignty and should become a ward of the United Nations.

For nearly two years, while as many as half a million Somalis starved to death, the international community sought consent for famine relief from the leaders of warring clans, as though they represented their people's interests. In fact, these Mad Max characters have been conducting an experiment in anarchy. They have proved that there is an even worse fate for a nation than the most dictatorial regime imaginable, and that is the absence of any regime at all.

The implosion of civil authority in Somalia has created a black hole that sucks in help from the outside and crushes it before it can do much good. Convoy drivers hijack their own cargoes. Relief workers, many of them volunteers and all of them unarmed, have been subjected to death threats, shakedowns, looting and kidnapping. "To send workers out there without defending them is immoral, pure and simple," said Frederick Cuny, an American disaster-management consultant.

Somalia is not just a humanitarian disaster but a threat to peace in the region. Refugees are pouring into Kenya and Ethiopia, straining the fragile social, political and economic structures there. Until recently, the world seemed barely to care. The Horn of Africa is no longer the cockpit of East- West competition that it was during the cold war. In this respect too, Somalia has been a black hole -- a dark spot in the universe of the big powers' strategic concerns.

As with the Iraqi Kurds in the spring of 1991, it was only after the media steadily bombarded Western sensibilities with images of starving Somali children that the U.S. and other governments stopped dithering and began to act. Says Brian Urquhart, a former Under Secretary-General of the U.N.: "Apparently we have to wait until TV and the press drive the world to take police action in these places."

That point finally came last week with the U.N.'s action. But even if the security of the famine-relief operation is assured, Somalia will still be an anti-country: the victims of the warlords will merely be better fed.

The logical and necessary next stage is for the U.N. to step in and run Somalia until there is once again a functioning government. There is a name for such an administration: trusteeship. There is authority for it under the U.N. charter as well as a mechanism within the bureaucracy called the Trusteeship Council. In Cambodia, the U.N. is already overseeing the government in Phnom Penh while it tries to disarm the warring factions and prepare the ground for elections next year.

One difficulty with trusteeship is the word itself. Especially in Africa, it smacks of the white man's burden. After World War I, several of Germany's holdings in Africa became League of Nations mandates and then, after World War II, U.N. trust territories; but in reality they remained European colonies until they gained independence in the '60s.

One of Bush's closest advisers envisions making Somalia an international "protectorate"; some U.N. officials speak of "receivership." Olara Otunnu, the former Foreign Minister of Uganda who is now president of the International Peace Academy in New York City, suggests the term "transitional arrangement," since that would underscore the temporary nature of the takeover. He believes that the U.N. as a whole might accept the idea of superimposing itself on a member state "as long as it is seen as necessary to restore what has been lost -- namely, Somalia's status as a sovereign and independent country -- rather than as taking that status away."

Finding a euphemism for trusteeship is the only easy part of the task. The costs and risks are high. But so are the stakes. Somalia is humanity's burden. In addition to being an immense tragedy in its own right, the situation there is a paradigm of the tribal divisions that are proving to be the bane of the post-cold war era, and a challenge to our ability to cope with similar situations elsewhere. There are going to be plenty. In addition to Cambodia, there are at least two other cases where politics has given way to chaos. One is Liberia, which could turn out to be worse than Somalia since one-quarter of the population has already fled into neighboring states. The other is Bosnia- Herzegovina, where U.N. peacemakers would have to fight Serbian tanks and heavy artillery.

In Somalia, by contrast, the enemy consists mostly of Toyota Land Cruisers manned by boys and mounted with recoilless rifles. If the U.N. cannot combat that threat to the new world order, then there will be no such thing.