U.N. Shift Called Blow to Limping Somalia Relief Effort : Famine: Replacement of the chief representative has dismayed aid workers facing deteriorating conditions.

NAIROBI, Kenya —  The resignation and replacement of the United Nations’ chief representative in Somalia could set back by months a U.N. relief effort that is already near a standstill, say relief officials reached in the Somali capital, Mogadishu.

“We’re right back to where we were last May,” one aid worker said. Every setback could mean hundreds more deaths every day among famine victims in the stricken country.

The officials were highly critical of the Thursday replacement of U.N. special representative Mohammed Sahnoun by Ismat Kittani, a U.S.-educated Iraqi Kurd who is a former U.N. undersecretary-general and was Iraq’s U.N. representative from 1985 to 1989, at the height of the Iran-Iraq War.

Sahnoun, an Algerian who since April had conducted his own variety of shuttle diplomacy in trying to bring together Somalia’s fractious warlords, resigned this week after being rebuked by Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali for, among other things, criticizing the United Nations’ tardy response to the Somali crisis.

Relief workers in Mogadishu said Kittani might need weeks or even months to attain Sahnoun’s level of confidence among the Somali warlords.

The sudden change has unnerved a relief community facing a further deterioration of working conditions in Mogadishu and elsewhere in the country. “No one here knows anything about this guy at all,” one Western aid official said of Kittani. “But there was a . . . lot of respect for Sahnoun.”

Sahnoun actually leaves his post with few concrete achievements in settling the crisis, which could take the lives of 2 million Somalis through warfare and famine. He earlier won approval from a leading warlord, Mohammed Farrah Aidid, for 500 U.N. soldiers to safeguard relief supplies at the Mogadishu airport and seaport. But since their arrival in the capital in the first week of October, the soldiers have been virtually confined to their tents at the abandoned military compound at the airport.

Aidid has stymied efforts to deploy guards at the ports. Factional violence has closed the airport itself to relief shipments for periods while the soldiers sit, powerless, at one end of the runway.

“We just don’t see them around,” said Rick Grant, a spokesman for CARE, the relief agency that is supervising the unloading of aid ships docking at the port. “They’re not in evidence at all.”

Despite the chorus of praise and regret that has accompanied Sahnoun’s departure, U.N. and relief officials say he was under increasing criticism from aid donors and others for his inability to manage the deployment of the U.N. troops.

“His main job was to get the soldiers in and deployed, but he wasn’t having much success,” one U.N. official said. The respect Sahnoun had earned from Aidid and other warlords may have been overvalued, the same official argued: “He probably had good working relationships with them but it didn’t get him anywhere.” Still, he added, “given their intransigence, I don’t think anybody could have had success.”

For his part, Sahnoun argued Friday that his efforts at gaining the warlords’ trust were on the verge of bearing fruit. “I was beginning to really understand the people of Somalia, and we were really beginning to make some progress,” he said in an interview on the British Broadcasting Corp.

He also complained that interference from U.N. officials was undermining his standing inside Somalia: “It’s important that people feel you are supported by the whole (U.N.) system. Otherwise you won’t be successful.”

But Sahnoun’s relations with his supervisors at the United Nations were also deteriorating, sources say. He was frustrated that he did not report to Boutros-Ghali directly but to James Jonah, a Sierra Leonean in charge of Africa affairs, and Jan Eliasson, head of the newly created humanitarian affairs office.

Jonah had headed two earlier, failed peace missions to Somalia and is widely assumed to be among the U.N. officials Sahnoun criticized in interviews last week as “inexperienced and inept.” Eliasson was in his post for almost five months before personally visiting Somalia, generally regarded as the world’s worst humanitarian disaster.

Sahnoun’s departure comes as graft, extortion and lack of security in Mogadishu and the Somali interior continue to erode international relief. In the battlefront town of Bardera, where relief workers were withdrawn two weeks ago after Aidid’s garrison was overrun by opposing troops, the death rate from starvation and related diseases has soared to 300 people a day; that compares with the 20 daily fatalities just before the attack.

Meanwhile, the United Nations’ highly-publicized “100-day” effort to break the Somali famine by distributing 1,000 tons of food a day is still barely operational, three weeks after its launching.