Somalis said prayers in mosques along their Indian Ocean coastline for more than 30 000 survivors left homeless and without livelihoods by the tsunami that traversed the sea from Asia, with many wondering what had happened to promised aid, presidential spokesperson Yusuf Ismail said on Monday.
He said services were held in mosques in memory of the 289 people who disappeared when the giant wave slammed into Somalia’s north-east coast a year ago, but the question high in many minds was why more help had not come.
”People are still living in very precarious conditions,” Ismail said. Many victims still do not have homes, with some sleeping on mats in the open and others overcrowding the homes of friends, relatives and clansmen, he added.
People in the Horn of Africa nation wonder why the international community wasted money on an expensive fact-finding mission.
”People say even that money alone could have made some difference,” Ismail said by telephone in neighbouring Kenya.
”Unfortunately the international community, apart from a few organisations, has not responded in the way people were promised to expect.”
Other African victims include 11 dead in Tanzania, two dead in the Seychelles islands and one dead in Kenya.
In Somalia, entire fishing villages were destroyed and about 600 boats were smashed or carried away to sea. Private organisations have provided only a few dozen boats in the year since the disaster hit.
The tsunami was just another in many tragedies confronting Somalia, a nation of 8,2-million that has been without a functioning government since a 1991 coup toppled a dictatorship.
Warlords have carved the country into fiefdoms, and drought, a cyclone and ongoing fighting have left tens of thousands homeless, hungry and beyond safe reach of aid workers. — Sapa-AP