POLITICS-SOMALIA: UN Urges Action as Hunger Looms

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Aug 18 1999 (IPS) - Five years after UN peacekeepers abandoned a disastrous mission to relieve suffering in Somalia, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan says that the United Nations must play a larger role in helping the Somali people.

Annan says that the United Nations should “do more to help bring about national unity and the restoration of a national government in Somalia.”

In particular, some UN programmes and agencies should be relocated to Somalia, after several years of operating outside the country, while a trust fund should be set up to support the Somali peace process, Annan says.

His recommendation for an enhanced UN role in Somalia, in a report issued Wednesday to the 15-nation Security Council, came as UN aid workers warned that mass hunger was on the rise again in the badly-fragmented East African nation.

“In the southern and central regions, more than one million people are facing serious food shortages and 300,000 of them are currently in need of food aid,” Annan observes. “Their long-term food security situation is alarming and likely to deteriorate as a result of ongoing insecurity and poor prospects for the current harvest.”

Last month, UN officials issued an alert requesting 17.5 million dollars to cover the food needs of central and southern Somalia until the end of this year. So far, however, there has been a “weak donor response” to the crisis in Somalia, which has lacked a central government since the 1991 ouster of dictator Mohammed Siad Barre, says Annan.

Although donors have traditionally responded to “the terrible images of famines,” support for conflicts that no longer are the focus of media attention has waned, UN Under-Secretary-General Sergio Vieira de Mello warned last week. Somalia, he says is one of the countries hurt by the lack of media and public interest.

More importantly, Somalia has presented a dilemma for UN officials ever since more than 100 UN peacekeepers – and perhaps as many as 10,000 Somalis – died in 1993.

That was the year when the UN Operation in Somalia (UNOSOM) clashed with Somali factions in a failed attempt to capture a faction leader in the capital, Mogadishu.

The UN failure embarrassed the United States, which had operated its own Rapid Reaction Force in coordination with UNOSOM efforts, and it quickly pulled out US troops who were ambushed in Mogadishu in October 1993.

he following year, UNOSOM ended its assignment, leaving only a smattering of aid workers to deal with the crisis in Somalia.

The country’s problems have not decreased with time, Annan says in his report. “Little or no development has taken place in Somalia for ten years,” he wrote. “Indeed, the country’s development process has gone into reverse…On almost all development indicators, Somalia ranks among the poorest and most deprived countries in the world.”

Since the central government fell in 1991, most Somali children have lacked any health care or schooling, government infrastructure has been looted, and many basic services – like communications and electricity – are not available to the general public, Annan says.

The situation has stabilised in northwestern Somalia, where Mohammed Ibrahim Egal has set up the state of ‘Somaliland,’ and in the northeast, where Col. Abdullahi Yusuf has established the state of ‘Puntland.’

Neither state is recognised as independent by the international community, and UN efforts remain directed at maintaining a united Somalia.

According to Annan, therre still is heavy conflict in central Somalia, including Mogadishu and the surrounding Benadir region, where efforts last year to set up a regional administration and police force – paid for by the Libyan government – have foundered in recent months.

Clan fighting returned to Mogadishu this March, Annan observes, and the police force was disbanded after Libya’s financing for the first six months of its existence ended.

Two Somali warlords, Ali Mahdi Mohammed and Hussein Aideed, have both told UN officials that they intend to re-establish the Benadir administration and police force.

Nevertheless, large amounts of Somalia remain as divided by clan fighting as they had at the start of the country’s crisis in 1991.

Annan says that two neighbouring countries, Ethiopia and Eritrea – which have fought a year-long war with each other – have both been accused of supplying arms to Somalia, despite a UN arms embargo. (Both Ethiopia and Eritrea deny reports that they have armed Somalis, and there are no UN forces in Somalia to confirm the charges independently.)

Despite the UN description of Somalia’s needs, Annan’s recommendations – including a review of UN work in Somalia, the creation of a trust fund and the relocation of key UN agencies from nearby places like Nairobi to Somalia – are relatively minor.

In part, that reflects the awareness that the 1993 failure of UNOSOM’s “nation-building” efforts are still likely to diminish Western support for a large-scale UN operation in Somalia. Also, few diplomats believe Somalia’s current level of fragmentation allows any ambitious programme of reconstruction to be achieved.

“Despite eight years of stateless existence, it can be said that Somalia is still not at a stage where the political situation is ripe for a quick solution,” argues the Intergovernmental Authority on Development, one of the African bodies entrusted with Somalia’s reconstruction, in a report this month.