Three months of famine in southern Somalia

The death of one of the world’s worst tyrants on Thursday made it impossible for me to report that we are now three months on since the UN declared a famine in southern Somalia.

The UN believes tens of thousands of Somalis may have died, more than in the entire eight months of the Libyan civil war.

Clearly the British public are emotionally engaged with this emergency – they’ve raised over £70m for the hungry of the Horn of Africa, the biggest total of any Disasters Emergency Committee campaign for Africa. Fantastic news but…..

How is the aid effort going on the ground?
Donor governments have, in the words of one UN official in Nairobi. “stepped up to the plate like never before” but “we are still not hitting big numbers of people”. She says maybe 55-65 per cent of Somalia’s most hungry are being fed, with most aid agencies “not scaling up” to the disaster in the worst-affected areas which are held by Islamist Al Shabaab militants.

Why isn’t the aid world scaling up?
a) The militants have banned aid agencies which weren’t already there from coming in, though exceptions are made for Islamic charities. The world’s biggest aid agency, the UN World Food Programme, is still banned, though Unicef and the International Committee of the Red Cross are doing all they can to take up the slack. I am told government forces have periodically prevented foreign nationals from branching out from Mogadishu, in what looks like a “scorched earth” policy against the militants.

b) The militants are restricting which airports can receive aid flights, they are preventing new projects from starting up and they are demanding taxes from the NGOs. “There’s constant pressure,” says Joe Belliveau, operations director of Medecins Sans Frontieres. “They ask for taxes. We don’t pay them. They don’t allow us to bring in international experts.” MSF has 6 projects in Shabaab-controlled areas. It would like to double or triple that, but the militants have not so far said yes.

c) The work is dangerous. Two MSF aid workers, Spanish nationals, were kidnapped last week in Kenya. “Al Shabaab have denied it,” says Mr Belliveau. “We do not know where the two people are or who took them or why.” The other unsung heroes of this disaster are the Somali aid workers who have stayed in country and face the risk of extortion or attack every day.

d) Because the UK and US make it illegal to assist terrorist organisations, aid agencies are scared of doing business with Al Shabaab. Some of the international aid effort has in effect been criminalised. According to Samir Elhawary of the Overseas Development Institute, the US suspended over $50m of aid for South Central Somalia in 2009. The US contribution has since gone up and the UK is also trying to be pragmatic, but because Al-Shabaab is being attacked by US drone strikes, the militants are becoming ever more resistant to and suspicious of western humanitarian intervention.

e) A week ago the Kenyan army in effect invaded southern Somalia, in response to a spate of kidnappings, including that of Judith Tebbutt, a British tourist whose husband was murdered. The Kenyans are also fed up with housing the world’s biggest refugee camps and would rather a “safe haven” existed inside Somalia where the hungry could be fed. Aid workers I’ve spoken to seem overwhelmingly opposed to the idea.They fear the Kenyans will be sucked into Somalia’s civil war, which will make it even more dangerous for civilians and aid workers alike.

What about Mogadishu?
The risk is that the Somali capital, along with parts of Kenya and Ethiopia, become the “easy hits” of this emergency. With agencies pouring in people and resources just because they can. As one senior British official puts it, the aid effort “should be on the basis of need, not just of capacity”. When I reported a couple of months ago that most of the aid was not going where it is needed most some aid agencies were enraged; they all claim they want an honest debate with the British public about the hazards of spending the public’s money wisely; but they are also terrified that bad publicity will disrupt the flow of money.

Read more: Mogadishu – caught between famine and war

And the overall picture in Somalia?
“We have stemmed the rate of deterioration,” one UN official told me. Though she couldn’t rule out that the size of the famine zone might increase. The great unknown in all this is to what extent Islamic charities and funding from the Gulf States and Turkey could alter the equation; other aid agencies complain that they are not being told precisely how and where the money is being spent.

And the rain?
It has started raining heavily. “It is good in the sense of the harvest,” says Aburahman Sharif of the UK Muslim Charities Forum, “but if there is water there is also the risk of the spread of disease”.

What could we do differently?
Decriminalise Al Shabaab and engage with them. Is that going to happen while they blow up civilians, claim allegiance to Al Qaeda and are implicated in the kidnapping of foreigners? No, it isn’t.

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