DEVELOPMENT-SOMALIA: Under Attack from Starvation and Disease

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Moyiga Nduru

NAIROBI, Feb 3 1998 (IPS) - Disease and famine are wreaking havoc in parts of Somalia, prompting clan leaders and relief agencies to appeal for emergency assistance for affected communities there.

“People and livestock are dying of starvation and diseases. There is no food, no medicine,” Hassan Farah Hujale, an elder from the Middle Juba region, on the border with Kenya, told IPS here on Tuesday.

He said the hardest hit areas were the six regions — out of the country’s 18 — that are located on the border with Kenya. Flooding in the six has severely affected one million people.

“The floods have killed 2,112 people and 33,500 head of livestock and destroyed 31,000 tonnes of food stocks and crops planted on 60,000 hectares of farmland,” according to the latest report by the Nairobi-based Somalia Inter-Agency Flood Response, which coordinates relief aid to the affected areas.

“Most of the people dying are from Lower and Middle Juba and parts of Gedo on the border with Kenya,” said Hujale. “Those people can’t reach the market centres to buy food. They have been cut off by the flooding.”

Ailments such as haemorrhagic fever, spread by infected biting insects, have also been reported in the flooded areas.

The floods, which began in mid-October, have been caused by abnormally heavy rains blamed on the effect of El Nino, the warm ocean current that disrupts weather patterns in various regions of the world.

The UN World Food Programme (WFP) estimates the flood victims in Somalia will need an additional 15,000 tonnes of food aid this year. Somalia’s projected food production is expected to drop from 95,000 to 35,000 tonnes in 1998, according to the WFP.

Last week, the UN body warned that unless donors provided new funding it would be forced to halt emergency airlifts and airdrops of food and other vital supplies to 1.1 million people cut off by floodwaters on both sides of the Kenya-Somalia border.

The WFP estimates that it would cost 12 million dollars to deliver an additional 16,000 metric tonnes of aid by air between now and the end of March. It had called on donors to make pledges immediately to avert the suspension of the air operations at the end of last week.

The WFP said it initially asked donors to support an operation lasting only two months because it had been expected that the rains would taper off in mid-December and that conditions would return to normal by early February. Instead, the rains continued for another month.

“The situation remains very critical in Bay and Bakool (southern Somalia). People are reported to be without sufficient supplies and in urgent need for assistance. Many villages and towns are still isolated or under water, roads and markets not yet open,” said the Somalia Inter-Agency Flood Response.

The WFP, which has already spent most of the 5.8 million dollars given by the international donor community to provide logistical support for the massive aid operation, said a growing number of flood victims will need emergency assistance at least until the end of March.

Figures provided by the WFP show that from the beginning of the operation in mid-November until Jan 18, a total of 4,865.12 metric tonnes of food — including maize, beans, sorghum, wheat and vegetable oil — was distributed to just under 400,000 people in the flood-affected areas in south Somalia.

This is not the first famine to hit Somalia. In 1991-1992, some 300,000 people died of starvation and famine-related diseases as a result of the fighting between rival clans following the ouster of ex-dictator Siad Barre in 1991.

The civil strife prompted an ill-fated U.S/U.N. intervention, but Washington withdrew its troops — which made up the majority of the 30,000 sent there — in 1994 after supporters of the late General Mohamed Farah Aideed killed around 60 U.S. soldiers. In March 1995, the United Nations also pulled out, leaving Somalia at the mercy of its warlords.

But southern Somalia, where refugees have been returning from Kenya since 1992, has been enjoying relative peace compared to the capital Mogadishu, where Somalia’s warlords have been trying to impose their presence.

“Our area is peaceful,” said Hujale, who was a former director general of the ministry of justice and religious affairs before the fall of Barre’s regime in 1991. “There is stability 100 percent. You can go anywhere, any time and nobody harasses you.”