Agencies should not risk public support by exaggerating the extent of their aid activities in the Horn of Africa, writes DAVID ADAMS
ON AUGUST 18th, Timemagazine carried an article I read on its website, "Somalia: A Very Man-Made Disaster", by Alex Perry, Time's Africa bureau chief. Perry blames the United Nations for not reacting early enough to a rapidly deteriorating drought situation in the Horn of Africa, thus exacerbating the subsequent famine in Somalia. He also accuses some aid agencies of pretending to be reaching more starving Somalis than they actually are.
Despite being alerted to the developing crisis last September, the UN waited 10 months before launching an appeal and declaring a famine. Surely it was aware that Somalis are the worst-placed people in the Horn of Africa to cope with severe drought and food shortages? There hasn’t been an effective central government in Somalia for two decades, and much of the country is controlled by the al-Qaeda offshoot, al-Shabab.
Human Rights Watch reports that, among much else, al-Shabab taxes populations for allowing them access to water, and severely restricts the cultivation of crops by forcibly recruiting men and boys. It refuses access to most western aid organisations, among them the World Food Program, the only agency capable of tackling the current famine.
Why did the UN not try to reach the people in al-Shabab regions long before the situation became critical? By the UN’s own admission, aid is reaching only 20 per cent of the almost three million Somali people now in dire need.
It isn’t the fault of non-governmental agencies that 80 per cent of starving Somalis are going without aid. They began warning of the developing crisis in the Horn of Africa last year. However, Perry is surely right to claim that some are giving the impression they are achieving more in Somalia than is the case.
He identifies one charity, Oxfam, that claimed to be reaching hundreds of thousands of people, but when challenged admitted that it doesn’t actually distribute food and has no staff in the famine area. Others are intimating lack of funds is their main problem.
Sufficient funding is of course vital, but all the money in the world will not feed people that you cannot get to. While some aid agencies, including some Irish agencies, are operating effectively in Somalia, when others claim to be “working in Somalia”, what does it mean? Perry writes that nearly all western aid workers stay in a “sandbagged, razor-wired base on the beach attached to Mogadishu airport that, sealed off from the city and patrolled by armed guards, is effectively hardly part of Somalia at all”.
He spoke to refugees at a camp 200 metres from the airport who were still waiting for food three weeks after the famine was declared. Again, it is not the agencies’ fault they cannot operate effectively. But if by “working in Somalia” they mean handing food and medical aid to local people or groups, trusting that it will be distributed properly and not stolen, they should make this clear.
There is enough excellent work being done at refugee camps in countries bordering Somalia (and presumably now in Mogadishu) without risking public support by exaggerating. Most of the Somali people who cannot be reached are in the al-Shabab-controlled south, where USAID has estimated 29,000 children under five died from malnutrition and related illnesses during July. This figure raises an obvious question: even allowing for extrapolation, how is USAID, without access to the south, able to tell how many children died there last month?
A brutal organisation, al-Shabab is partially to blame for the severity of the famine, and the resulting deaths and misery. However, it isn’t wholly to blame, although it suits a lot of interests to pretend that it is. What passes for a government in Somalia has not been alone in stating that support for al-Shabab will evaporate because of the famine.
Various western spokespeople have echoed this view. The latter have also been briefing heavily that the Black Hawk debacle of 1993 (when 19 US soldiers were killed in Mogadishu) is why the US (and therefore the UN) will not consider a military operation to get aid to Somalia’s starving millions, but will stick with the present woefully inadequate contingent of African Union troops.
In truth, there is too much briefing about the “Black Hawk effect” for it to be believable. Since when did a humiliation stay the US’s hand, rather than have the opposite effect? The risk of losing whatever kudos it has earned in the Islamic world by supporting the Arab Spring uprisings is a much more likely cause for US/western reticence in this matter.
Instead of intervening militarily in yet another Muslim country, the major powers will concentrate only on helping those who can make it to refugee camps on the fringes of the famine, ignoring the 80 per cent who are not receiving aid, and let al-Shabab carry the can for the eventual death toll.
Aid organisations need to be careful that in boasting of (or inflating) achievements in Mogadishu, rather than highlighting massive humanitarian failings across Somalia, they do not become inadvertent allies in a grand deception. What price a recasting of the “Great Satan”? In all probability, many hundreds of thousands of Somali lives.
Such can be the brutal nature of international politicking.