A Picture Is Worth Thousands of Lives--If It Gets on Television; Just Ask Somalia : Africa: Humanitarian disasters are political failures and, as such, can be prevented only if sensitive political issues like sovereignity are resolved.

NEW YORK —  When I visited Somalia in the summer of 1991, I knew the world was turning a blind eye to a serious humanitarian crisis. But I didn’t write about it. The “hot” news then was the collapse of the Men gistu government in Ethiopia. When that story faded, South Africa returned as the topic of choice.

Today, death in Somalia is “hot” news. A huge, international relief operation is under way. But the spotlight has come too late for countless thousands of Somalis. And even as the focus on Somalia sharpens, hundreds of thousands, mostly children, are dying out of sight of the cameras in Mozambique, Sudan and other parts of the continent.

Could the tragedy in Somalia have been prevented? Can something be done to head off similar tragedies from occurring elsewhere? Yes. But the solution to humanitarian disasters does not lie in the kinds of institutional reforms that are being debated at the United Nations.

More special envoys, greater interagency coordination, larger and better-trained peacekeeping forces, and more sensitive early-warning mechanisms are certainly needed. But, by themselves, these reforms will not significantly improve the way the international community responds to civil wars and famines.

What’s more crucial is the recognition that failures to anticipate and prevent humanitarian crises are political, and thus require a political solution. Put bluntly, most of the world’s political leaders don’t regard such horrors as Somalia as high-priority concerns. Instead, they perceive them as public-relations problems that have to be managed if, and only if, they happen to catch the public’s eye.

This may seem a harsh judgment, but no other explanation can account for the consistent way in which senior officials in the Bush Administration and other governments have responded to the plight of the Kurds, the Bosnians and now the Somalis. In all these cases, the pattern has been the same:

As officials carry on their diplomacy and war-making, early reports of suffering are largely ignored. Then, shocking photos of the displaced, dead and dying appear on the nightly news, images that pique the sympathy and outrage of public opinion in the United States and Europe. Suddenly concerned politicians begin uttering appeals for urgent action; experts are asked to explain what went wrong.

Expensive, often ill-conceived (but always highly visible) relief operations are launched. Tinkerers propose institutional reforms. Then, usually imperceptibly, attention shifts to other issues, and the urgent need for institutional reforms slackens. Inevitably, a new disaster raises its head in another ignored corner of the world, and the cycle starts anew. Unfortunately, this pattern is not new.

In the mid-’80s, politics blocked an early response to the devastating famine in Ethiopia--and hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians died as a result. Catholic Relief Services and similar agencies began, in late 1982, to issue famine warnings. By the summer of 1984, large numbers of people were already starving, but the Reagan Administration continued to pay little attention to the crisis. The Administration’s public posture changed dramatically, however, after an NBC News broadcast of starving Ethiopian children.

Despite the lessons everyone claimed to have learned from the Ethiopian experience, world leaders seem to have been caught largely unawares of the crisis unfolding in neighboring Somalia.

In January, 1991, rebel forces invaded Mogadishu, the capitol of Somalia, and forced President Siad Barre to flee. Until the end of the Cold War, Barre had been one of the main African beneficiaries of U.S. aid and a major recipient of U.N. relief assistance. When Barre fled, so did the American and U.N. officials who had occupied many of Mogadishu’s best residences. A handful of relief workers from the International Committee of the Red Cross, Medecins Sans Frontieres and other non-governmental organizations remained to cope with the crisis.

As Somalia descended into chaos, Washington and the rest of the world turned their backs on the suffering. Pleas for international action were rejected on the grounds that there was no established governmental authority that could receive assistance and that the situation was too dangerous to fly in U.N. or other personnel.

But once images of starving Somali children began regularly appearing on the nightly news last August, the Bush Administration’s interest in Somalia suddenly quickened. As Republicans gathered in Houston to renominate George Bush for President, U.S. military planes were dispatched to East Africa to assist in U.N. relief efforts already under way. Had Washington--and the rest of us--paid attention to Somalia in early 1991, and had the hard political choices been confronted then, hundreds of thousands of lives could have been saved. And the cost of the operation would have been far less than what it will be today if the current initiatives are to succeed.

How can this cycle be broken? For starters, our political leaders (and our experts and pundits) must be held accountable. That means remembering the ways in which their past action or, as is more often the case, inaction allowed the crises to develop. It also means refusing to allow them to get by with rhetoric that plays the right emotional chords but offers few answers. Most important, it means not allowing them to define the policy agenda narrowly, hence avoiding public debate over crucial issues.

It is also time to recognize that the problems of war and famine in Africa, as elsewhere, cannot be addressed in an ad hoc, incremental manner. Pretending, as most of the foreign-policy Establishment now does, that U.N. reform and stronger peacekeeping mechanisms can prevent future Somalias is a mistake. Two more radical reforms are required.

First, the norms in the U.N. charter that preserve the sovereignty of territorially defined states must be revised. The limits these norms impose on international intervention in “domestic affairs” were a major cause of the slow, uneven responses to the Somalia crisis. Countless Somalis starved to death while U.N. officials maintained the fantasy that a state called Somalia existed and that thugs were legitimate negotiating partners. The United States should take the lead in calling for a revision of international norms that put the privileges and conceits of officials above the rights and needs of people.

Rather than build new bureaucracies, the United States should be searching for ways to strengthen the capacities of local communities, indigenous relief groups and non-governmental organizations to respond to emerging humanitarian crises. A host of such organizations were on the ground in Somalia long before the country became a cause celebre. But they were desperately short of resources. Somalis died by the thousands waiting for political hearts to be moved.