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Mark Bowden, the UN Humanitarian coordinator for Somalia warned that drought and conflict affected over three million people, half of which suffer from “acute food insecurity” and needed regular humanitarian assistance to simply survive. Calling for a “critical need “ in funding continuity, Bowden added that a widening of the crisis could see refugees spill over the frontier to neighboring states such as Kenya and Ethiopia.
UN official stress that $689 million is needed for 2010; yet funding from traditional donor states such as the United States is being withheld until an unsettled political situation on the ground clarifies. Humanitarian assistance often falls into the hands of terrorist groups, many of them hard-line Islamic fundamentalist factions.
The United Stated Agency for International Development (USAID) long a stalwart giver to the impoverished region says “the situation in Somalis remains highly fluid. Since 1991, Somalia has essentially been a collapsed state.” Sadly that’s putting it mildly.
Nonetheless in 2008 the USAID allocated $319 million in assistance through local and UN agencies. The lion’s share of the assistance goes to food aid and refugee assistance.
Other major donors include the European Union.
Besides “donor fatigue,” Bowden stressed there’s a “downturn in humanitarian assistance globally.” He conceded that key donors such as the U.S. were holding back assistance fearing that it would fall into “the hands of extremists.”
Still in the midst of this grim report there a glimmer of good news. According to a UNICEF representative, “By the end of 2009, 1.5 million children and one million women of child-bearing age, would have been immunized against tetanus, and more than one million people were given access to safe water.”
Still it is Somalia’s simmering security situation or lack of it which determines the near to medium term future. The UN’s anti-drug czar Antonio Maria Costa told the Security Council, that “Mainly because of the dramatic situation in Somalia, the region is becoming a free economic zone for all sorts of trafficking drugs, migrants, guns, hazardous waste and natural resources, in addition to having the world’s most dangerous waterways because of piracy.”
Islamic fundamentalist militias flourish on the one hand while other armed militants have carried out widespread and lucrative piracy of international waters seizing and often ransoming merchant ships from around the world. Though the continuing pirate threat off the Horn of Africa has grabbed international headlines and has brought a international military response, it is still unclear to what degree various armed factions are criminals or part of larger terrorist webs.
Al Shabab militia, an outgrowth of the Islamic Courts movement, presents a particular threat to Somalia’s fragile central-government. U.S. intelligence views the militants as a local Al Qaida proxy.
Clearly Somalia represents a cauldron of conflict where the combination of drought, famine, civil conflict have since horribly morphed into permanent refugees, a lucrative narcotics trade, Islamic militias, and Somali-based pirates. Needless to say the international community is both weary and wary of the unstable situation.
There’s no question that humanitarian supplies are desperately needed. As the UN’s Mark Bowden warns, “The main message that we have is that the potential humanitarian funding crisis is life-threatening, it threatens a large proportion of the population.” The bigger issue becomes whether it is the responsibility of the United States and other donors to continue to aid a country whose many armed factions are a key cause of the continuing crisis?
John J. Metzler is a U.N. correspondent covering diplomatic and defense
issues. He writes weekly for WorldTribune.com.
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