Famine in Somalia
Somalia could relive the devastating famine that claimed 300,000 lives in the early 1990s unless emergency relief arrives soon, a senior United Nations official warned yesterday.
Christian Balslev-Olesen, the UN's acting humanitarian coordinator for Somalia, said that the worst drought in more than a decade had left 2.1 million people in urgent need of aid. Assistance was being severely hampered by a lack of funds and "the most difficult operating environment for any emergency situation globally".
"Children are not dying in front of television cameras yet, but experience tells us that this is not far away," he said. "I don't think people realise how close we are to seeing this happen."
Mr Balslev-Olesen was speaking in Nairobi after the launch of a $327m (£187m) emergency appeal to donors.
The drought affecting Somalia is being felt across much of east Africa and the Horn - including Kenya, Ethiopia and Djibouti - where 11.5 million people now require food aid. But aid workers say that Somalia faces the gravest risk of disaster if the rains that normally fall from April to June fail as predicted.
The country has been without an effective government since the dictator Mohammed Siad Barre was overthrown in 1991. As rival clan warlords fought to fill the vacuum the following year, hundreds of thousands of people died in a famine brought on by the fighting. An ill-fated UN mission, led by the US, helped end the famine but not the fighting.
Since then, years of conflict have seen the country sink to the bottom of the development tables. Even before the current drought, child mortality and malnutrition rates were among the highest in the world.
Today there are few structures in place to deliver aid. The continuing insecurity, including looting, extortion at roadblocks, and kidnappings, has prevented all but the hardiest of humanitarian agencies from operating in many areas. The UN is not immune to the danger: last year Somali pirates hijacked two ships carrying World Food Programme rations.
So far, cattle have been the major casualty of the drought. But the UN says many Somalis' coping mechanisms are exhausted after three years of failed harvests. About 300,000 people, mainly in the south of the country, have abandoned their homes in search of food and water in recent months. Last week the UN's food security analysis unit in Somalia warned that it was bracing itself for "a major humanitarian catastrophe, including the death of potentially thousands of people and widespread displacement".
Mr Balslev-Olesen said the drought presented a major threat to the transitional federal government of President Abdullahi Yusuf, which met on home soil for the first time last month in the southern town of Baidoa. "We are in a very important process of rebuilding Somalia which will be immediately undermined if there is a humanitarian disaster."
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