FAMINE! | Humans Dying as Insurgents Block Escape | Millions Facing Starvation | Tens of Thousands Have Already Died

http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/africa/08/03/un.somalia.famine/index.html?hpt=hp_t...

CNN...

SOMALIA'S FAMINE SPREADS TO CAPITAL

Somalia's famine reaches into Mogadishu, U.N. says

By the CNN Wire Staff

August 3, 2011 2:25 p.m. EDT

PHOTO: Internally displaced Somali men and women wait for food-aid to be distributed at a centre in Mogadishu, on July 30, 2011

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

NEW: About 100,000 people recently arrive in Mogadishu in need of help, the U.N. says
U.N. spokesman: Somalis need "our immediate and concerted response"
The United Nations first declared a famine in June
Relief efforts are complicated by the country's civil war

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United Nations (CNN) -- Three more regions of Somalia have now been struck by famine, including the capital, Mogadishu, the United Nations announced Wednesday.

Mogadishu, the Afgooye corridor and the Shabelle regions west of the capital are the latest that "have slipped into famine," U.N. spokesman Martin Nesirky told reporters Wednesday afternoon. The declaration "reflects the massive influx of people into the city in the last two months," he said.

"This latest information also confirms the seriousness of the problem facing internally displaced people in Mogadishu, who require our immediate and concerted response," he said.

The United Nations issued a famine declaration for two districts of southern Somalia in June. The entire Horn of Africa region is facing an extensive drought that has left more than 12 million in need of assistance.

Relief efforts in Somalia have been hindered by the ongoing battle between Islamist rebels and Somalia's transitional government, which holds little sway beyond Mogadishu. The rate of malnutrition in Somalia's rebel-held south is the highest in the world, approaching half the population, U.N. officials report.

About 100,000 people displaced by the fighting have flocked to Mogadishu in recent weeks, according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. More than 3.7 million Somalis are in need of aid, including about 1.3 million children "in urgent need of life-saving interventions." Of those, about 640,000 are acutely malnourished, the office reports.

The rebel movement Al-Shabaab launched a Ramadan offensive Monday amid the spreading famine with heavy fighting reported in the northeastern part of the city, according to African Union officials.

Two soldiers from the AU peacekeeping mission in Mogadishu were killed during a gunfight with the rebels, during which troops killed two apparent suicide bombers dressed in Somali uniforms before they were able to detonate bombs strapped to their bodies.

"In the midst of a famine seizing Somalia, the extremists are choosing to focus on killing, not saving life," said Lt. Col. Paddy Ankunda, a spokesman for the peacekeeping mission. "The extremists are using desperate measures to achieve their ends through their willingness to use brutal violence during the holy month of Ramadan."

Amid the crisis, a senior U.N. official urged Somali expatriates to support peace efforts and contribute to relief efforts Wednesday.

"This is a time of great crisis, but also of rare opportunity. It is a time for everyone to pull together to help those suffering and to work towards a better future for all," Augustine Mahiga, the U.N. special representative for Somalia, said in a letter addressed to Somalis abroad.

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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-14357126

BBC...

31 July 2011 Last updated at 06:30 ET

Somalia famine: African Union calls 'pledging summit'

Twelve million are at risk of starvation as the drought and famine intensifies across the Horn of Africa

The African Union has announced it is to hold a summit meeting to pledge help for the victims of Somalia's drought.

The statement comes after considerable criticism in the African media of the failure of the continent's leaders to help famine victims across the Horn of Africa.

The AU said the pledging conference would bring together heads of state and international donors.

The United Nations says the famine is spreading across southern Somalia.

The African Union statement was made by its deputy chairman, Erasmus Mwencha, during a visit to the AU peacekeeping mission in the Somali capital, Mogadishu.

"I ask the African continent, from the northern cape to the southern cape, to look hard at how they can contribute to alleviating the suffering," said Mr Mwencha.

The AU is planning to hold the conference on 9 August in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa.

His call came as the United Nations warned that the crisis was intensifying, with more than 12 million people in Somalia, Kenya, Ethiopia and Djibouti urgently needing help.

The UN says that tens of thousands have already died and hundreds of thousands are at risk of starvation.

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http://www.latimes.com/media/alternatethumbnails/photo/2011-08/63704764-02221205...

Los Angeles Times...

Thousands of desperate refugees have made the Dadaab complex the world's largest such camp — and most visible reflection of the drought afflicting more than 10 million people in the Horn of Africa.

Famine in Africa

By Christopher Goffard, Los Angeles Times

August 2, 2011, 9:01 p.m.

Reporting from Dadaab, Kenya—

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The people mass outside the gates hundreds deep and eerily still, many squatting in the red dirt holding emaciated children. They wait for water and medicine. But most of all, they wait for an open spot at the world's largest refugee complex.

The worst drought in decades has blistered large parts of the Horn of Africa, turning it into a hellscape of deserted villages and dead rivers. The United Nations says 12 million people need emergency aid.

Those hardest to reach are in Somalia, where a quarter of the country's 7.5 million people are on the move. Help has been blocked by Shabab, a militant group linked to Al Qaeda, which controls some famine-stricken areas and is suspicious of foreign aid agencies.

The result is streams of refugees, struggling miles through dry desert wind and fine, sleeting sand in search of sanctuary.

Every day, more than 1,000 of them — an estimated half are malnourished children — arrive at the gates of the Dadaab refugee complex in northeastern Kenya. The 19-square-mile sprawl, created in the early 1990s to accommodate refugees fleeing political chaos in Somalia, now holds 372,000 people, more than four times its original capacity.

Waiting outside the camp gates one recent morning, Ali Hulbale, 30, said he arrived with his wife and children two months ago but had yet to be registered for camp services. So he lives on the outskirts, amid countless squatter huts built of sticks and ragged cloth.

Hulbale had been an important man in his village in southern Somalia, with 60 goats and 50 cows. Then the river shrank to a trickle and his livestock began to sit. That meant they had days to live.

He waited until the last was dead, three months ago, before making a desperate 25-day pilgrimage across the bandit-plagued Somali desert to the border, then struggled 50 more miles to Dadaab.

The onrush of refugees has created a backlog of 17,000 people and growing who can languish for months before they are registered, said Alexandra Lopoukhine, a spokeswoman for the aid agency CARE International.

Lopoukhine said the vast majority of new arrivals are women and children. Men stay behind with the dying livestock, trying to protect the precarious family wealth.

Some of the refugees are being sent to a tented camp extension, but the aid group Doctors Without Borders has complained that it lacks a hospital and does not meet "minimum humanitarian standards."

Another more permanent extension has been built to accommodate 40,000 to 60,000 refugees, with neat rows of brick buildings and a secondary school with a freshly painted turquoise roof.

The U.N. said the first group of refugees recently moved into the new facility, despite the reluctance of the Kenyan government to see another camp take permanent root.

Kenyan officials have described the presence of so many refugees — many of whom never leave — as a security threat.

Security is also a constant worry for those living at Dadaab, whose red sand is scattered with the bones and carcasses of animals. Bandits lurk in the surrounding desert, and some aid workers suggest that Shabab has been recruiting fighters in the camps for the militia's battle against Somalia's wobbly transitional government.

Women venture to the camp outskirts to forage for firewood, and return bowed under the big bundles lashed to their backs. They run at the sight of official-looking vehicles. Stripping the trees has angered local Kenyans.

The U.N. has been able to deliver food to Mogadishu, Somalia's war-battered capital. But "we're not able to get much further than that," said Matthew Conway, a spokesman for OCHA, the U.N. body that coordinates humanitarian response. Conway said the U.N. was considering airdrops of food, and was appealing to Persian Gulf states and Islamic agencies in the hope they would find success where Western groups have not.

Hulbale said that as drought destroyed his village, the community prepared to go to the countryside and perform a ritual asking God for rain. He said the Shabab forbade it. "They wanted us to pray in a mosque," he said.

He said he served as an intermediary between his village and Western aid agencies, but that the Shabab insisted that the Western agencies had a secret agenda and forced them out. "We tried to talk to them but they never listened," Hulbale said. If you tried defending the Westerners, he said, "they treat you as an unbeliever. They say you are one of them."

On his journey to the camp, he said, three children of other families died of hunger and were buried in the desert. Bandits stole his cellphone and, when they could find no money, set fire to the donkey cart bearing the family's clothes and blankets. Other families spoke of having to fend off hyenas and lions with sticks and machetes.

"It is peaceful here," Hulbale said, waiting outside the camp gates. "There is no gunfire.

"But we are starving."

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http://current.com/shows/upstream/93350473_famine-in-somalia.htm

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Link to original submission

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CONTINUED...

PART TWO...

Much of the Horn of Africa, which includes Kenya, Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Djibouti, has been struck this summer by one of the worst droughts in 60 years. But two Shabab-controlled parts of southern Somalia are the only areas where the United Nations has declared a famine, using scientific criteria of death and malnutrition rates.

People from those areas who were interviewed in Mogadishu say Shabab fighters are blocking rivers to steal water from impoverished villagers and divert it to commercial farmers who pay them taxes. The Shabab are intercepting displaced people who are trying to reach Mogadishu and forcing them to stay in a Shabab-run camp about 25 miles outside the city. The camp now holds several thousand people and receives only a trickle of food.

“I was taken off a bus and put here,” said a woman at the camp who asked not to be identified.

Several drought victims who have succeeded in making it to Mogadishu said that the Shabab were threatening to kill anyone who left their areas, either for refugee camps in Kenya and Ethiopia, or for government zones in Somalia, and that the only way out was to sneak away at night and avoid the main roads.

A few years ago, the Shabab began banning immunizations, deeming them a Western plot to kill Somali children. Now countless unvaccinated children are dying from measles and cholera as tens of thousands of malnourished, immunity-suppressed people flee the drought areas and pack into filthy, crowded camps.

The other day, Kufow Ali Abdi, a destitute herder who lost all his cattle, trudged out of Banadir Hospital, gently carrying a small package in his arms wrapped in blue cloth. It looked almost like a swaddled newborn but it was the opposite. It was the body of his 3-year-old daughter, Kadija, who had just succumbed to measles.

“I just hope they can save the others,” he said, referring to his two remaining children, down to skin and bone.

The magnitude of suffering could shift the political landscape, which has been dominated by chaos since 1991, when clan warlords overthrew the central government and then tore apart the country. The Transitional Federal Government — the 15th attempt at a government — is trying to assert itself and beat back the Shabab, and the famine and attendant relief effort could mean an enormous opportunity.

“It could be a face-lift for them, an opportunity to deliver services and show they are committed,” said Sheik Abdulkadir, a militia leader. “But if a lot of people die here, people will say it’s the government’s fault.”

The famine could affect the Shabab as well, deepening the fissures in their organization. Shabab leaders are now beginning to cut their own deals in the face of mass starvation. Unicef recently delivered a planeload of food and medicine to Baidoa, a Shabab stronghold. In Xarardheere, another Shabab-controlled town and a notorious pirate den, a Shabab commander said in an interview on Saturday that he would welcome Western aid organizations despite the anti-Western policies imposed by his leadership, which has been hit by the deaths of several prominent figures recently.

Sheik Yoonis, a Shabab spokesman, said in an e-mail that the declaration of a famine was “an exaggeration.” He said that Shabab fighters were not imprisoning people in the camp, but that the people were attracted to it by “this sense of serenity and security.” He also denied that the Shabab were diverting river water or scaring away aid agencies.

Still, many aid organizations are reluctant to venture into Shabab areas because of the obvious dangers — the Shabab have killed dozens of aid workers — and because of American government restrictions. In 2008, the State Department declared the Shabab a terrorist group, making it a crime to provide material assistance to them. Aid officials say the restrictions have had a chilling effect because it is nearly impossible to guarantee that the Shabab will not skim off some of the aid delivered in their areas.

Even United Nations contractors have been accused of siphoning food aid, resulting in extensive investigations and cuts in life-saving assistance.

Western aid agencies are now trying to work through Islamic and local organizations as much as possible, but the Somali partners do not usually have as much technical expertise. And heavy fighting has erupted in Mogadishu again, making it dangerous even for Somali aid workers.

“Somalia is one of the most complicated places in the world to deliver aid, more complicated than Afghanistan,” said Stefano Porretti, who heads the World Food Progam’s efforts in Somalia and recently worked in Afghanistan.

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Mohammed Ibrahim contributed reporting.

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