Without more aid nearly 300 000 people, now subsisting on leaves and roots, will starve early next year, reports David Gough from Xuddur
The threat of famine hangs over war- torn southern Somalia, for the second time in six years. The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) says as many as 300 000 people are at imminent risk of starvation.
Edward Kallon, the WFP’s programme co- ordinator for Somalia, said: “The situation is critical and WFP has no option but to divert all available resources to saving lives in Bay and Bakool.”
Kallon added that if the international community did not act immediately, there would be severe famine in the area early next year.
Bay and Bakool, the traditional breadbasket districts of Somalia, are worst hit, with food shortages brought on by a civil war that has displaced a large number of people. Floods early in the year and the failure of recent rains have combined to worsen the crisis.
This area was worst hit by the famine of 1991/1992 which killed 350 000 people. Operation Restore Hope, a military intervention led by the United States, was designed to ensure safe distribution of food aid, but ended in expensive failure.
Since 1991, when the dictator Mohammed Siad Barre was forced to flee the country, Somalia has been without a central government and is ruled by militias who fight each other for regional control.
Like the famine in southern Sudan, Somalia’s food shortages are mostly man-made. “We are very worried by the parallels that we are seeing with the Bhar el-Ghazal region of southern Sudan this time last year, as well as the Somali famine of 1992,” said Brenda Barton, an information officer with the WFP.
The town of Xuddur, the largest in Bakool, was captured by the Rahawayn Resistance Army (RRA) on October 29 following three years under the control of Hussein Aideed’s Somali National Alliance (SNA) militia. Most of the 25 000 inhabitants fled when the SNA arrived, and have spent three years in hardship in the bush nearby.
News of the RRA’s capture of Xuddur spread fast and hordes of refugees as far away as neighbouring Ethiopia have arrived back in the ruined town in the past three weeks.
A UN security and food assessment mission last week found people with no livestock in an area where little or no cultivation has taken place for three years. For the time being people are surviving by eating wild plants, but once the limited supply of seasonal vegetation runs out they will be in a desperate situation.
Habiba Abdullahi (20), a war widow, left her two young children with friends in the Ethiopian refugee camp of Doolow, where they have been living for three years, and walked for eight days to reach Xuddur. “I was very happy to hear the news that Xuddur had been recaptured and wanted to rush home immediately,” she said, as she sat outside a tea shop, eating from a bag of bitter-tasting leaves that she had gathered that morning.
“But now that Ihave arrived I am very worried to see that there is so little food here. If I bring my children back, what will we eat? Please tell the world that we are hungry.”
In the nearby town of Madayta, the situation is reported to be even worse. Hussein Mohammed (39), a village chief, said he had come to Xuddur looking for food.
He had left his wife and six children behind. “They were too weak to walk,” he said.