Somalia - Things Are About To Get Far, Far Worse

by Michael Kleinman

Published November 13, 2008 @ 03:29PM PST

[Shabaab propoganda film - Footage from nationalpost.com]

On Wednesday, Somali insurgents captured the port city of Merka, 50 miles south of Mogadishu, after Government troops fled without firing a shot.  Which would pass for just another day in the hell that is southern Somalia, except for the fact that Merka happens to be one of the main ports for humanitarian supplies entering the country.

According to the New York Times, "more than 24 million pounds of food passed through the port in October alone, feeding as many as 850,000 people."

Which raises the question - will the insurgents allow food supplies through?  Or, put another way, what happens when almost a million people begin to starve?

The port was captured by the Shabaab - the most extremist of all Somali insurgent group.  The same group that earlier this month buried a thirteen year-old girl up to her neck and stoned her to death for being raped.  (Technically, the charge was adultry.)

Perhaps not surprising, the Shabaab have threatened humanitarian organizations as well, forcing CARE and International Medical Corps to suspend operations in part of southern Somalia last month.  The suspension of CARE's activities alone affected almost one million people.  The Shabaab are also suspected of carrying out the suicide bombing of a UNDP compound in Somaliland on October 29th.

(Overall, thirty-three humanitarian aid workers have been killed in Somalia so far this year.)

So, it's hard to be overly optimistic that the Shabaab will allow the UN food shipments through the port to continue.  The New York Times reports that Somali UN staff in Merka are "trying to speak to the new Islamist authorities about continuing the life-saving operations."

For more information, see below:

To give a sense of the unfolding humanitarian crisis in the country - half of Somalia's population (3.25 million) is now in need of humanitarian aid, a 77% increase since the start of 2008, while 180,000 childen under the age of five in South and Central Somalia are acutely malnourished.

Over 100,000 people fled Mogadishu between August and November.  All together, 1.3 million Somalis are now homeless - 400,000 of whom are huddled in the Afgooye camps alone.

To get a sense of what it's like to be an aid worker in Somalia, see here.

To see how the pervasive insecurity has affected how NGOs operate, see here.

And, finally, for the most recent UN OCHA Somalia Humanitarian Overview, see here.

Over a year ago, John Holmes, the UN Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs / Emergency Relief Coordinator, declared that "in terms of numbers and access to them, Somalia is a worse displacement crisis than Darfur".  Those who thought that Somalia hit bottom in 2007 have been rudely surprised by 2008, when fighting between insurgents and the Transitional Federal Government (supported by Ethiopian troops) has created perhaps the world's worst humanitarian catastrophe.

Random quote: "We travel not for trafficking alone / By hotter winds our fiery hearts are fanned / For lust of knowing what should not be known / We make the Golden Journey to Samarkand" (James Elroy Flecker, The Golden Journey to Samarkand)