[wvns] Somalia: Africa's worst crisis
Somalia descends into Africa's worst crisis
By Shashank Bengali
McClatchy Newspapers
Thu Dec 13, 2007
AFGOYE, Somalia — A year after the U.S.-backed Ethiopian army toppled
a hard-line Islamist regime in Somalia , the country has become
Africa's worst humanitarian catastrophe.
Some 200,000 refugees, mostly women and children, have fled from a
pro-government offensive to makeshift camps along a 10-mile stretch of
sun-baked asphalt that leads from the seaside capital of Mogadishu
toward the inland town of Afgoye. The crisis is brutal on young people.
One night last month, Fatima Sheikh Ali awoke to the deafening crash
of mortar rounds on her neighbor's roof. Shrapnel blasted through
Ali's tin-walled home in Mogadishu , and sent her 13-year-old
daughter, Muna, into her arms, quaking.
Sometime in the chaos of that night, Muna stopped speaking. In an
overcrowded encampment of sand and scrub a few miles from the capital,
where the family now lives among thousands made homeless by the war,
Muna silently collects firewood and looks after her siblings, a
worried gaze fixed in her almond eyes.
"She is traumatized," her mother said, and a warren of women who'd
gathered around her murmured sympathetically. A nurse with the Somali
Red Crescent Society said, "There is nothing to be done. It is a very
sad story."
The conflicts in Sudan's Darfur region and in eastern Congo may have
displaced more people, but international relief efforts in Somalia
have faltered in the face of violence that's emptied entire
neighborhoods in Mogadishu .
Most displaced Somalis, such as Muna's family, live in dome-shaped
huts fashioned out of spindly tree branches and covered with tattered
swatches of fabric or plastic. They sprout from the sand like
multicolored mushrooms along the road from the capital.
The United Nations Children's Fund said last week that one-quarter of
the refugees around Afgoye were younger than 5. Both sides are using
older boys as combatants, and girls who venture out of the camps risk
being raped by freelance militias, the agency said. "Things are now
getting absolutely worse," said Christian Balslev-Olesen, the UNICEF
representative for Somalia . "There is a dirtiness to this war.
Children are a real target."
Fewer than 1 in 10 Mogadishu children attends school now. Muna and her
siblings aren't among the lucky ones. Their southern neighborhood of
Hodan has seen near-daily fighting as Somali government troops and
their Ethiopian allies hunt for insurgents amid the low, whitewashed
storefronts.
The restaurant where Muna's father worked as a waiter has been closed
since March, when its owners fled the city. Most of their neighbors
also have left. "There is no movement in the streets, no work, hardly
any food," said Ali, Muna's mother, who has six other children. "The
only sound is the whistling one," she said, a term that Somalis
sometimes use to describe the rockets that whiz over their rooftops at
night.
Local groups estimate that 6,000 people have died in the fighting this
year. Traveling Somalia's roads is fraught with danger once again. Aid
groups and former residents say that Somali government forces, far
from ending militia rule, are starting to behave like militias themselves.
Checkpoints have popped up throughout southern Somalia , with
government soldiers and allied militiamen demanding payments and
harassing civilians and relief workers. According to UNICEF , sick
children and pregnant women often are turned away at checkpoints. In
some areas, trucks carrying food and other humanitarian aid have to
pay tolls of $500 each, U.N. officials said.
Last week, Somalia's internal security chief closed airstrips and
ports outside Mogadishu for several hours, leaving nearly 4,000 tons
of emergency food aid stuck aboard U.N.-chartered ships floating in
the sea. "There is complete chaos and lack of coordination," said Eric
Laroche , the head of the U.N. relief effort.
By making the payments, Laroche acknowledged, "we are creating rich
people who are going to be warlords in the future. But that is the
tradeoff." Amid one of the poorest harvests in southern Somalia in
years, he said, the influx of food aid over the past month seems to
have forestalled widespread malnutrition in the camps. For ordinary
Somalis, the government checkpoints are often scenes of terror.
Shukri Mohammed , a weary-faced woman who walked three days on bare,
swollen feet to reach the safety of a camp last week, said she was
stopped as she left Mogadishu with her seven children. The poor widow
had nothing in her pockets, not even a cell phone. That seemed to
annoy the uniformed men at the roadblock.
"Because they didn't get any money from me, they hit me," she said,
her 2-year-old son cradled in a ratty blanket tied around her neck.
"They used the backs of their guns. They used sticks." She pulled back
her pink shawl to show bruises on her arm.
On her first night in the camp named Mustahil, she stored the few
items of clothing she'd brought in another family's hut. Then she and
her children fell asleep on the sand under an acacia tree.
Mustahil is one of the newer camps outside Afgoye, but in just over
three months some 6,000 people have gathered here. One of the elders,
Kahiye Yusuf Ali, a lean man whose henna-stained beard glowed a deep
orange, said they hadn't received any U.N. food rations yet. "The
children are growing skinnier," he said, pointing at a gaggle of boys,
all elbows and knees.
A few hundred yards away, in the Jimcaale settlement, Muna's mother
complained that the rations weren't enough for a family of nine. She
sighed. Blasted by rains, their hut was starting to wilt, and her
husband was out in the midday heat looking for more wood. She ripped a
strip from an empty sack of grain and tied some loose branches
tighter. A few feet away, Muna hid her face behind a pale green shawl
and kept watch over her young brothers.
"The fighting is different now," her mother said, talking as she
worked. "Now it is everywhere. The shelling comes from all sides."
Here, she went on, they felt safe. Maybe in a few weeks they could
return home. "If the Ethiopian troops leave Mogadishu , things will be
fine," she said. Muna, standing beside her, didn't utter a word.
A slide show on Somali refugees:
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/216/gallery/22979.html
___________________
Dear Friend of Somalia:
Below please find a communique on Somalia that came out on a two day
conference held on November 30 & December 1, 2007 in Washington DC
area. Hope you will be able to use the communique in your research on
Somalia and/or for educational purposes. As you will see in the
communique, this conference has united Somali organizations in North
America, so they can unite and solidify their voices to better help
Somalia/Somalis.
With respect,
Sadia
===
2nd NORTH AMERICAN SOMALI DIASPORA CONFERENCE
Raising awareness on the plight of the Somali people and solidifying
the efforts of North America Somali Diaspora Organizations
WASHINGTON DC -- DECEMBER 4, 2007: From November 30 to December 1,
2007 a major conference was convened in the Washington DC metro area.
The conference was attended by a large number of North American
Somali organizations and individuals. After intensive issue-oriented
consultations and debates, the attendees decided unanimously to urge
all Somalis and the international community to act on the following
recommendations:
A. For Somalis:
Transcend tribal and regional divisions while embracing national
identity and unity as our guiding principles
Promote the principle of tolerance, fairness, and that injustice to
one is injustice to all
Play an active and a positive role in bringing lasting peace to our
homeland by joining forces with "Somali Cause"
Develop an all-inclusive, competence based system for post liberation
governance to avoid the return of warlordism and chaos
Increase universal awareness on the plight of the Somali people
brought about by the occupation and tyranny
B. For the International Community, particularly the United Nations
Security Council, the United States Government, the European Union,
the Arab League, the African Union, and the Organization of the
Islamic Conference:
Demand the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of Ethiopian troops
from Somalia
Compel the Ethiopian forces and the Somali Transitional Federal
Government (TFG) to immediately cease shelling civilian areas and to
stop denying food aid to the displaced people
Replace the Ethiopian troops with forces from Muslim & non-frontline
African states, equipped with a clear mandate
Provide urgently needed humanitarian assistance to the over one
million internally displaced people (IDP) in Somalia , especially in
and around Mogadishu
Demand the immediate halt of the rampant human rights abuses, the
closing of independent media, and the arrest of journalists
Facilitate an all inclusive reconciliation conference in a neutral and
safe environment
Respect the unity, sovereignty and territorial integrity of Somalia
while addressing the legitimate grievances of regions
Establish an international criminal court for Somalia to rigorously
investigate and prosecute war crimes and human right s violations that
have been committed by any party against the civilian population
Demand the immediate release of all political prisoners and victims of
widespread arbitrary detention
The main objective of the conference was to forge a united front to
peacefully free Somalia from occupation and oppression, and to bring
lasting freedom and democracy to the Somali people. As a result, an
impressive array of Somali organizations and individuals joined forces
and formed Somali Cause, a first of its kind of union of Somalis
across tribal and regional affiliations.
Somali Cause was founded by the following organizations:
1. Alliance for Peace and Development (AFPD), Columbus , OH
2. Baltimore Somali Community, Baltimore , MD
3. Greater Boston Somali Community, Boston , MA
4. Somali American Peace Council (SAPC), Washington DC
5. Somali Canadian Diaspora Alliance (SCDA), Toronto, Canada
6. Somali Diaspora Network (SDN), Fairfax , VA
7. Somali Institute for Peace and Justice (SIPJ), Minneapolis , MN
8. United Somali Diaspora (USD), Minneapolis , MN
We invite and encourage all Somalis and people of conscience to join
with us in bringing justice, peace and stability to Somalia .
To join Somali Cause or for more information, please email us at
info @ somalicause.org or call us at (202) 285-0780 or mail us at 1425
K ST NW STE 350 Washington DC , 20005-3514
Contact Person: Abdulkadir Abdirahman, Somali Cause, Chairman
*********************************************************************
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