SADIA ABDI Mahdi’s gaunt face looks haunted, haunted by hunger and haunted by the horror of what she has witnessed on her way here to a makeshift camp near Somalia’s border with Ethiopia.
She stares listlessly ahead as her eight children sprawl, some sleeping, others crying, on a piece of sacking on the ground. The baby she holds in her arms clasps the black cloth of her shawl tight as he suckles at her withered breast. His face is wrinkled, his body shrunken.
Sadia can barely summon the energy to speak so her husband Yusuf tells the story of how they got here, and why.
“The place we left is nothing but parched land dotted with the carcasses of our animals, dried-out river beds, and skeletal women and children unable to move and unable to leave like we did,” he says. “For three years the rains have failed us. We are pastoralists, we used to be able to feed ourselves with our own food, but now there is nothing.”
He says they had little to sustain them on the 370km journey here but adds they were at least lucky enough to hitch a ride in a van. Others have walked here in sad processions, with babies or a few possessions strapped to their backs. Some were forced to abandon by the roadside relatives too weak to take another step.
Yusuf frets about his wife. “She has pains all over her body and she isn’t producing enough milk to feed our baby. But thank God we are now close to the refugee camp on the border. We will get help there.” He uses the word “famine” to describe the calamity that has befallen the part of Somalia’s southern belt he calls home. From today, the UN will do the same after assessing field data showing some three million in Somalia need emergency help. In some areas, one in 10 children is at risk of starving to death, according to the Red Cross.
Somalia’s famine is a tragedy, the result of climate change, rising food prices and the instability that has wracked the country for decades. Yesterday, Ireland’s former president Mary Robinson returned to Somalia almost 20 years after she travelled there to highlight another famine. Then, she called on the world to act, calling the crisis an affront to humanity.
Many fear this time it will be even worse, given the famine is unfolding several months before the rains, if any, are due to fall.
Furthermore, the presence of al-Shabaab in some of the most stricken areas has prevented aid from getting through, though the group recently pledged to allow relief agencies “with no hidden agendas” greater access to rebel-held territory. “We have never experienced a situation as bad as this. This is much more severe than anything in the past,” says one overwhelmed local health worker.
Mrs Robinson, after hearing Sadia and Yusuf’s story and meeting dozens of desperate mothers clutching severely malnourished babies with bulbous eyes and jutting ribcages at a ramshackle Dollow health centre funded by Trócaire, grew emotional as she recalled her 1992 visit. “I have never been able to get Somalia out of my system since then. I look around today and I see this yet again . . . It is devastating that so little has changed for the better,” she said.
Nearby, a handwritten welcoming sign pinned to the wall of the centre reads “Somalia needs you and the whole world today”. Mrs Robinson said the international community, by neglecting Somalia over the last two decades, had contributed to its many woes. “We need to have a real sense of urgency . . I do feel this [crisis] is not only an affront, it is unacceptable in the 21st century. We have the capacity to provide life-saving food and water. It is contrary to human rights ideals, contrary to our whole human instinct, that this happens.
“We need to see what the opportunities are to make this crisis the very last time that Somalia will be a victim of this kind of catastrophic food crisis that becomes a famine and then becomes a devastating loss of life.”