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Somalis Waste Away as Insurgents Block Escape From Famine
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
Published: August 1, 2011
PHOTO: A malnourished child at Banadir Hospital in Mogadishu, Somalia. More than 500,000 Somali children are verging on starvation.
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Amid Famine, Dangers Hinder Aid to Somalia
MOGADISHU, Somalia — The Shabab Islamist insurgent group, which controls much of southern Somalia, is blocking starving people from fleeing the country and setting up a cantonment camp where it is imprisoning displaced people who were trying to escape Shabab territory.
Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
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The group is widely blamed for causing a famine in Somalia by forcing out many Western aid organizations, depriving drought victims of desperately needed food. The situation is growing bleaker by the day, with tens of thousands of Somalis already dead and more than 500,000 children on the brink of starvation.
Every morning, emaciated parents with emaciated children stagger into Banadir Hospital, a shell of a building with floors that stink of diesel fuel because that is all the nurses have to fight off the flies. Babies are dying because of the lack of equipment and medicine. Some get hooked up to adult-size intravenous drips — pediatric versions are hard to find — and their compromised bodies cannot handle the volume of fluid.
Most parents do not have money for medicine, so entire families sit on old-fashioned cholera beds, with basketball-size holes cut out of the middle, taking turns going to the bathroom as diarrhea streams out of them.
“This is worse than 1992,” said Dr. Lul Mohamed, Banadir’s head of pediatrics, referring to Somalia’s last famine. “Back then, at least we had some help.”
Aid groups are trying to scale up their operations, and the United Nations has begun airlifting emergency food. But many seasoned aid officials are speaking in grim tones because one of Africa’s worst humanitarian disasters in decades has struck one of the most inaccessible countries on earth. Somalia, especially the southern third where the famine is, has been considered a no-go zone for years, a lawless caldron that has claimed the lives of dozens of aid workers, peacekeepers and American soldiers, going back to the “Black Hawk Down” battle in 1993, spelling a legacy that has scared off many international organizations.
“If this were Haiti, we would have dozens of people on the ground by now,” said Eric James, an official with the American Refugee Committee, a private aid organization.
But Somalia is considered more dangerous and anarchic than Haiti, Iraq or even Afghanistan, and the American Refugee Committee, like other aid groups, is struggling to get trained personnel here.
“It is safe to say that many people are going to die as a result of little or no access,” Mr. James said.
This leaves millions of famished Somalis with two choices, aside from fleeing the country to neighboring Kenya or Ethiopia, where there is more assistance. They can beg for help from a weak and divided transitional government in Mogadishu, the capital. Just the other day there was a shootout between government forces at the gates of the presidential palace. “Things happen,” was the response of Abdiweli Mohamed Ali, Somalia’s new prime minister.
Or they can remain in territory controlled by the Shabab, who have pledged allegiance to Al Qaeda and have tried to rid their areas of anything Western — Western music, Western dress, even Western aid groups during a time of famine.
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http://current.com/shows/upstream/93350473_famine-in-somalia.htm
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Somalis Waste Away as Insurgents Block Escape From Famine
By JEFFREY... more
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U.N. declares famine in southern Somalia
By Robyn Dixon | 2:19 p.m.
To declare a famine, child malnutrition must be at 30% or higher, daily deaths at two per 10,000 people and people are not able to access food and other basic necessities.
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U.N. declares famine in southern Somalia
Famine, a highly technical term, means that the rate of child malnutrition and deaths in two areas of southern Somalia, a country riven by fighting and drought, has risen. Agencies appeal for aid.
PHOTO: Eleven-month-old Abdifatah Hassan, suffering from severe malnutrition, is cared for at a hospital run by Doctors Without Borders at a camp housing Somali refugees in Dadaab, Kenya. The United Nations officially declared famine in two regions of southern Somalia, saying child malnutrition rates exceed 30% and as many as six children age 5 or younger are dying daily. The region is suffering its worst drought in 60 years and tens of thousands are feared dead.
(Roberto Schmidt / AFP/Getty Images / July 4, 2011)
By Robyn Dixon, Los Angeles Times
July 20, 2011, 2:19 p.m.
Reporting from Johannesburg, South Africa—
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For months, people have been trudging out of the desert, leaving their dead children behind and carrying those who have managed to survive. On Wednesday, the horror of hunger and death unfolding in the Horn of Africa officially got a name: famine.
It's actually a very technical term — unless you're one of those walking for weeks in a last-ditch hope to save your family.
For the United Nations to declare a famine, as it did at a news conference in Nairobi, child malnutrition must be at 30% or higher, daily deaths at two per 10,000 people and people are not able to access food and other basic necessities.
According to Unicef, the U.N. agency that focuses on children, the rate of child malnutrition rate in southern Somalia has doubled in a single month; in some places it has reached 55% and infant deaths have increased to six per day.
Yet the global response has been dismal. An appeal late last year for $535 million to address the need is still more than $250 million short. Officials hope the famine declaration will help focus global attention on the Horn of Africa.
Across the country, about 3.7 million people, half the population, are facing starvation, with an estimated 2.8 million of them in the south. The agency says another 6.3 million in other countries in the Horn of Africa affected by hunger.
It's the worst African hunger crisis in 20 years, according the Rozanne Chorlton, Unicef's representative on Somalia. The last time things were this dire in Africa was 1991. Then, as now, it was in Somalia.
The U.N. famine declaration Wednesday formally covered two regions of southern Somalia, Bakool and Lower Shabelle, where farmers' crops failed and their livestock died. Malnutrition rates exceed 30% and more than six children age 5 or younger are dying daily in some areas. But in coming months, neighboring regions will inevitably fall into famine too, said Mark Bowden, the U.N. humanitarian coordinator for Somalia.
U.N. and non-governmental agencies are appealing for $300 million in the next two months to increase their operations in the worst-hit areas.
If it seems extraordinary that millions of Africans can be facing starvation in 2011, despite the focus of a raft of humanitarian agencies and their early-warning networks, it is, Bowden said.
Part of the problem is that many donors had written off Somalia as too hard, he said in a telephone interview. Aid agencies must grapple with a long-running civil conflict and Somalia's extremist Shabab militia, which controls much of the south, where the worst hunger is.
"We have good warning systems, but we don't always listen to them, particularly if we put some countries in the too-difficult-to-deal-with basket," Bowden said.
Two decades with no government and the failure of successive efforts to restore peace have left donors cynical. The country's global reputation for piracy and mayhem have done it no favors.
The 1991 Somalia famine occurred after civil war destroyed agriculture and clan warlords hijacked humanitarian aid, leading to the U.S.-led Operation Restore Hope. That resulted in bloody fighting with militias in Mogadishu portrayed in the book and film "Black Hawk Down."
But Bowden, who recently met Somali refugees walking to Ethiopia, said the problem today was mainly one of successive drought, compounded by global warming.
"They are victims of drought. They are also victims of climate change. They're people who have lost everything after years of successive drought."
The situation is complicated by the Shabab, which in the past has imposed informal taxes on humanitarian agencies, limited their access, and demanded they send female staff home. The World Food Program withdrew early last year from areas controlled by the Shabab because of security threats and unacceptable working conditions. It recently announced it would resume it work there if conditions allowed.
Aid agencies have been negotiating access with local leaders, but security remains uncertain.
"We need predictability," Unicef's Chorlton said in a telephone interview. "The important thing is that those who are there [in Somalia] should be able to act unhindered to deliver the services to children and families that are so desperately needed."
Unicef has doubled its food, health and water programs in Somalia, she said.
"Somalis have always helped each other to cope in times of crisis, and they have been incredibly resilient over the years. I think what has not been quantified is that people's resistance has been so undermined over the last year, it's no longer adequate to the task," she said. "The issue is now we need donors to massively increase their contribution."
.U.N. declares famine in southern Somalia
By Robyn Dixon | 2:19 p.m.
To declare... more
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For three years, critics of AFRICOM have charged that it serves to militarize U.S. foreign policy in the region, as opposed to aid and diplomacy. Carl Bloice at the Foreign Policy in Focus blog Focal Points.For three years, critics of AFRICOM have charged that it serves to militarize U.S.... more
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Djibouti's President Ismail Omar Guelleh is warning that Somalia's Western-backed transitional government may not survive the intensified conflict with armed insurgents.
Guelleh appeared before the United Nations Security Council in New York to plead for action, saying “I cannot see how we can avert the possibility of Somalia's plunge into an avoidable disintegration.”Djibouti's President Ismail Omar Guelleh is warning that Somalia's... more
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The French Territory of the Afars and the Issas became Djibouti in 1977. Hassan Gouled Aptidon installed an authoritarian one-party state and proceeded to serve as president until 1999.
Unrest among the Afars minority during the 1990s led to a civil war that ended in 2001 following the conclusion of a peace accord between Afar rebels and the Issa-dominated government.
In 1999, Djibouti's first multi-party presidential elections resulted in the election of Ismail Omar Guelleh; he was re-elected to a second and final term in 2005.
Djibouti occupies a strategic geographic location at the mouth of the Red Sea and serves as an important transshipment location for goods entering and leaving the east African highlands.
The present leadership favors close ties to France, which maintains a significant military presence in the country, but is also developing stronger ties with the U.S.
Djibouti hosts the only U.S. military base in sub-Saharan Africa and is a front-line state in the global war on terrorism.
The French Territory of the Afars and the Issas became Djibouti in 1977. Hassan Gouled... more
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