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UN
warns Somali crisis could rival
'92-93 famine
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 NAIROBI(July
16,2008) - The
killing and kidnapping of aid workers in Somalia threatens to wreck
all attempts to resolve a humanitarian disaster that could soon rival
its famine in the early 1990s, the United Nations warned on Tuesday.
Most aid agencies are discussing suspending their operations in areas
hit by mounting insecurity and a wave of assassinations that has targeted
senior local humanitarian workers.
Relief is still getting through, but the U.N. World Food Programme
(WFP) said the surge in violence was threatening the entire humanitarian
response to the emergency.
"If we or our partners cannot operate on the ground because they
are being shot or kidnapped then assistance will not be distributed,"
WFP spokesman Peter Smerdon told Reuters.
"If sufficient assistance cannot be delivered ... in the coming
months, parts of southern and central Somalia could well be gripped
by a disaster similar to the 1992-1993 famine."
Hundreds of thousands died then.
Since the start of last year, more than 8,000 civilians have been
killed in fighting after Ethiopian troops helped the interim government
drive an Islamist movement out of Mogadishu.
One million Somalis have been forced from their homes by the latest
bloodshed, and their dire situation is worsened by banditry, drought,
high food and fuel prices and inflation.
The latest victim was an employee with a trucking company working
for WFP who was killed on Sunday by militiamen manning a checkpoint
near the southern town of Buale. That was the fifth such murder this
year of WFP-contracted transport workers.
Four foreign aid workers -- two Italians, a Kenyan and a Briton --
are being held hostage in the Horn of Africa nation.
But it is the recent assassinations of senior local aid officials,
combined with the appearance of threatening leaflets, that have stoked
fears to even higher levels.
On Friday, men armed with pistols shot dead the deputy head of a German
charity and another local man working for a WFP partner group. A week
earlier, gunmen had killed the local head of the U.N. Development
Programme (UNDP) in a similar attack.
Suspicion for the killings and kidnappings usually falls on the al-Shabaab,
Islamist rebels waging an Iraq-style insurgency against the government
and its Ethiopian allies.
But there is confusion over the identities of those behind the recent
murders. Leaflets circulated in the Shibis area of the capital last
week threatened local aid workers with death if they did not publicly
resign from the jobs.
Although supposedly from an insurgent group, they used no Islamist
phrases. The leaflets mentioned the army of al-Zarqawi, which has
not been seen in any Shabaab messages.
The Islamists have accused government hardliners of ordering the latest
killings to spur the international community into sending a robust
peacekeeping force to help it stay in power.
Somali officials hotly deny that. |
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