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Text File | 1993-04-08 | 5KB | 111 lines

                                                                                AMERICA ABROAD, Page 35

Dealing with Anti-Countries


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.