Sunday, July 24, 2011

News Desk: Dry and Tense Days in Somalia : The New Yorker






Life in Somalia, with its twenty-year war, non-functioning government, runaway inflation, and continuing battles with Islamist militants, has not been easy—see William Finnegan’s 1995 Letter from Mogadishu—but two years without rain has made it intolerable. Drought has wiped out approximately eighty per cent of Somali livestock—devastating for a country made upprimarily of nomadic herders.
Four hundred thousand Somalis have already braved unforgiving heat and winds to reach Dadaab, in northern Kenya, which has been called the world’s biggest refugee camp. Tens of thousands are relegated to shacks outside of it, and more than a thousand refugees arrive each day. Pop-up hospitals are overstretched, doctors are begging for more water, food, shelter, and medical care, and aid agencies say they don’t have enough funds to operate. Over the weekend, the Kenyan government asked for international help to relieve the pressure on Dadaab by opening feeding camps in Somalia. A refugee camp on the border with Ethiopia is already full.
Space and resources aren’t the only concerns. Kenyan officials have been reluctant to welcome more refugees due to fears of the Shabaab, a Somali group with links to Al Qaeda that has claimed responsibility for at least four terrorist attacks in Kenya in the last four years. And a Kenyan newspaper is reporting that the new nation of South Sudan is preventing refugees from travelling through its territory in order to reach the Kenyan camp because of its own security concerns.
Aid advocates celebrated when the United Nations began to call areas of Somalia’s humanitarian situation a famine this week. They hope that the use of the word, along with moving photos—images that recall Ethiopia in 1984 or Biafra in the late nineteen-sixties—and video, will persuade donors and the international community to give support.
But, even if you don’t accept Philip Gourevitch’s argument that humanitarian aid often exacerbates Africa’s problems, it’s hard to see how money will solve this one. Due to climate change, droughts are becoming more frequent in East Africa. When I visited Uganda’s Karamoja region a few years ago, the trees were limp and lifeless, the air thick and stifling, and there was no water or vegetables to be seen. Grass sprouted only in patches, rare sparks of green in the rocky ground. Local leaders told me that the people relied on wild fruits, ants, rats, and home-brewed alcohol for sustenance.
As climate change dries the land, the Karamojong, who are pastoral cattle herders armed with AK-47s smuggled in from Somalia, have been fighting over dwindling populations of cattle and increasingly scarce grazing land, among themselves and with their nomadic Turkana and Pokot neighbors. There have been no reports of battles for grazing land among Somalia’s nomads, though as the famine spreads it may just be a matter of time.


Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2011/07/drought-famine-somalia.html#ixzz1Vxnh6a00
somalia.jpg

Life in Somalia, with its twenty-year war, non-functioning government, runaway inflation, and continuing battles with Islamist militants, has not been easy—see William Finnegan’s 1995 Letter from Mogadishu—but two years without rain has made it intolerable. Drought has wiped out approximately eighty per cent of Somali livestock—devastating for a country made upprimarily of nomadic herders.
Four hundred thousand Somalis have already braved unforgiving heat and winds to reach Dadaab, in northern Kenya, which has been called the world’s biggest refugee camp. Tens of thousands are relegated to shacks outside of it, and more than a thousand refugees arrive each day. Pop-up hospitals are overstretched, doctors are begging for more water, food, shelter, and medical care, and aid agencies say they don’t have enough funds to operate. Over the weekend, the Kenyan government asked for international help to relieve the pressure on Dadaab by opening feeding camps in Somalia. A refugee camp on the border with Ethiopia is already full.
Space and resources aren’t the only concerns. Kenyan officials have been reluctant to welcome more refugees due to fears of the Shabaab, a Somali group with links to Al Qaeda that has claimed responsibility for at least four terrorist attacks in Kenya in the last four years. And a Kenyan newspaper is reporting that the new nation of South Sudan is preventing refugees from travelling through its territory in order to reach the Kenyan camp because of its own security concerns.
Aid advocates celebrated when the United Nations began to call areas of Somalia’s humanitarian situation a famine this week. They hope that the use of the word, along with moving photos—images that recall Ethiopia in 1984 or Biafra in the late nineteen-sixties—and video, will persuade donors and the international community to give support.
But, even if you don’t accept Philip Gourevitch’s argument that humanitarian aid often exacerbates Africa’s problems, it’s hard to see how money will solve this one. Due to climate change, droughts are becoming more frequent in East Africa. When I visited Uganda’s Karamoja region a few years ago, the trees were limp and lifeless, the air thick and stifling, and there was no water or vegetables to be seen. Grass sprouted only in patches, rare sparks of green in the rocky ground. Local leaders told me that the people relied on wild fruits, ants, rats, and home-brewed alcohol for sustenance.
As climate change dries the land, the Karamojong, who are pastoral cattle herders armed with AK-47s smuggled in from Somalia, have been fighting over dwindling populations of cattle and increasingly scarce grazing land, among themselves and with their nomadic Turkana and Pokot neighbors. There have been no reports of battles for grazing land among Somalia’s nomads, though as the famine spreads it may just be a matter of time.
Photograph: A Somali family in the Dadaab refugee camp, July 5th. Roberto Schmidt/AFP/Getty Images.


Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2011/07/drought-famine-somalia.html#ixzz1VxnIUsPv

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