A new generation dying in Somalia's famine

The UN’s statistics are appalling. Tens of thousands of dead Somali children, 3.7 million people in urgent need of help. The “f” word – famine – back in Somalia after a twenty year absence. Last time hundreds of thousands died. And now a new generation is dying in their place.

A scandal for the 21st century, in a country so dangerous to report from that its mounting death toll still lies largely hidden from the outside world.

The UN could be accused of calling the world’s attention to this famine too late. I think that’s unfair. The UN is good at statistics. The statistics were assembled as they regularly are, and turned out to be so unbelievably terrible – at least 6 infant deaths per 10,000 people – that they had to be sent away to America to be double checked.

It was Islamist militants who turned the worst drought in decades into a man-made disaster by effectively banning aid agencies from the Somali famine zone for well over a year. And it was foreign governments who refused to give the UN the hundreds of millions dollars they are still begging for.

This is a perfectly awful storm: the eurozone in crisis, the Gulf states failing to heed the calls for help from their Muslim neighbours and, to the irritation of some UN officials, the Americans launching drone strikes in a covert war inside Somalia because they fear the country is al-Qaeda’s next front line.

The Americans have labelled Somalia’s Al Shabaab movement as terrorists, which means it breaks US sanctions to feed starving people in Al Shabaab areas without a special licence from the US Treasury.

The British also outlawed Al Shabaab 16 months ago under the 2000 Terrorism Act. This means that if UK aid is systematically diverted to the militants, British law has been broken and the funding has to be stopped, though if aid is stolen at gunpoint this can be dismissed as an isolated act of theft.

The Home Office helps adjudicate in these cases. The fact that we don’t hear about them reveals how very sensitive the subject of aid diversion is.

Read more: UN declares famine in Somalia

For which hard-pressed British taxpayer wants to hear how their money might be mis-spent? Who would give to the current Disasters Emergency Appeal if they thought some of their money was missing its target?

I should stress that most aid is on target, most of the time. But there is a conspiracy of silence in the aid world. Admissions of failure are few. That keeps the public’s money flowing, it keeps the aid workers busy and it saves lives too.

Britain has proved the biggest donor to Somalia so far. £25 million was committed for aid projects inside Somalia last weekend on top of £30 million for this year.

Andrew Mitchell, the Minister in charge, is sticking his neck out: twisting the arms of the Americans, calling the response of other governments “derisory” and “dangerously inadequate”. In the meantime, all too aware of the potential blowback from a policy which could come back to haunt him.

Imagine the tabloid headline Mr Mitchell could wake up to any time soon: UK taxpayers feeding al-Qaeda militants”.

At the very time when Conservative policy is supposed to be putting a rising and controversial foreign aid budget at the service of Britain’s national security.

Yet in spite of the risk, Mr Mitchell’s department feels the greater risk would be complicity in the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent children.

That is why he is now thinking of giving the UN World Food Programme money for the first time in 3 years, for the first time since a Channel 4 News investigation revealed how WFP aid to Somalia was being diverted.

The UK donation being talked about is small, up to £3 million. And there’s widespread agreement here in the aid hub of Nairobi that WFP is a creature transformed, much more heedful of its donors and careful about how its aid is now delivered.

Mark Bowden, the UN’s humanitarian chief in Somalia, told me today that he is refusing to pay the militants the taxes they seek as a condition of letting major aid agencies like WFP back in.

“We have done our utmost to reduce the risks,” Mr Bowden says, urging the world to what he calls “exceptional action”. Other aid workers have assured me that their operations can be scaled up with minimal interference.

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Yet food convoys and aid flights remain at the mercy of militiamen who cannot be trusted. Southern Somalia is so dangerous that the only people who can police the aid deliveries are the aid organisations themselves, who might have a vested interest in not reporting to their donors what goes astray.

Delivering aid in conflict zones is always a dangerous business. Even if the UN gets the money it wants, there are doubts it can rise to the challenge in Somalia quickly enough, or indeed if Shabaab will let it.

Yet the UN must be given the chance to succeed, because the alternative doesn’t really bear thinking about: tens of thousands more dead children.

Follow Jonathan Rugman on Twitter: @jrug