The prospect of peace in Somalia, after 16 years of violence and bloodletting, receded further this month, even as President Abdullahi Yusuf’s transitional federal government prepared to hold talks with adversaries to draw a road map to a comprehensive peace settlement.
Nairobi-based international humanitarian organisations estimate that more than 2 000 people, mainly civilians, have died in the latest flare-up.
United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) official Catherine Weibel said humanitarian concerns in Mogadishu, the epicentre of the Somali conflict, had been exacerbated by rising insecurity that cut off supplies and precipitated a health crisis.
“We are finding it difficult to access warehouses where supplies are kept because of the fighting. The roads in the capital have been sealed off and people, especially children, women and the disabled cannot escape the fighting,” Weibel said.
At the weekend, AU troops deployed in Somalia were insufficient to repel the well-armed insurgents and restore law and order in the capital.
“We’ve food in our warehouses in Mogadishu, but we cannot access it because of insecurity. We’ve been forced to withdraw workers because of intensified fighting.”
Weibel said the UNHCR was in talks with Nairobi to allow thousands of stranded refugees to cross the border to refugee camps in northern Kenya. The border was closed last December because of terrorism threats.
“We hope Kenya will allow the new refugees to reach camps in the north to facilitate the distribution of supplies,” Weibel said. However, the country’s foreign ministry officials have been cagey about the possibility of letting more refugees in to camps that still host between 200 000 and 300 000 people who did not return home after the Kenya-mediated Somali peace agreement was signed in 2003.
In a statement, Unicef Somalia representative Christian Balslev-Olesen said the situation in Mogadishu had been dire since December, when more than 200 000 people were reported to be on the move to escape the conflict.
“Hospitals are overflowing with casualties and health centres are dealing with an increasing number of cases of acute water diarrhoea.”
After the AU dispatched 1 200 peacekeepers to Somalia in March, it was expected that additional troops would be provided to buttress interim government forces as the first step to ending the two-decade-old chaos in the country.
But delays and insufficient financial resources to deploy another 8 000 soldiers in Somalia have created loopholes that have been seized by the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) to wreak havoc in the country.
Ethiopian-backed government forces have responded with ferocity to try and flush the insurgents out.
A Somali civil-society organisation, Elman Peace and Human Rights Organisation, estimated that more than 500 000 people, nearly half of Mogadishu’s population, had left the capital by April 22.
Independent sources said hundreds of families pay up to $100 to militia to “rent tree shade” for shelter.