Famine in Somalia

On July 20th 2011 the United Nations (UN) declared a famine in southern Somalia. Amongst people who know what it means the word "famine" is not used lightly and this is the first famine that has been declared in Africa since 1991. Sadly though it is no surprise that a famine has been declared in Somalia.

If you've seen the film "Blackhawk Down" you may know that the United Sates military were forced to intervene in Somalia in the early 1990's. What you might not know is that this operation was launched to provide security for the UN as they tried to provide food aid to the victims of Africa's last famine. This mission failed and since then Britain has been doing everything in it's power to make the situation worse by trying to impose a government that few people in Somalia want and using aid charities as a cover to supply various armed groups who want to fight that government. In the immediate term this has been done to secure smuggling routes that control the flow of so-called blood diamonds and other minerals out of the nasty civil war that is currently ongoing in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In the longer term Britain hopes to divide Somalia into three easy to control sections with Somaliland in the north, central Somalia in the middle and southern Somalia in the area south of the Bakool region around the capital Mogadishu.

Obviously amid all this fighting and geo-political scheming normal life in Somalia has become all but impossible leading to most of the population of around 7 million either being in famine or at the point of famine for most of the last twenty years. The situation was made much worse in early 2010 when al-Shabaab - who are the closest thing Somalia's got to a popular government - banned aid charities from the country due to the fact they were deliberately supplying groups who were fighting al-Shabaab. This prompted the United States to proscribe al-Shabaab as a terrorist group making it illegal for American aid agencies or American funded aid agencies like the UN to operate in Somalia. As a result no-one has been able to get an accurate picture of the humanitarian situation in Somalia since May 2010.

What's happened recently to trigger the famine declaration is that the East Africa Food Crisis http://watchitdie.blogspot.com/2011/07/east-africa-food-crisis.html has caused a large flood of refugees to cross from Somalia into neighbouring countries such as Kenya. Under pressure from the UN this has prompted al-Shabaab to lift their ban on aid charities and given the UN the confidence to re-enter Somalia and assess the situation.

Within days the UN found around 3.7 million Somalis to be without access to the basic essentials for life such as food and water, more then 30% of children to be suffering from acute malnutrition and that this malnutrition was causing more then six people per 10,000 to die every day. This left the UN with little choice other then to declare a famine and ask for US$300 million to sort out the mess.

That huge task is not going to be made any easier by the fact the current UN Co-ordinator for Humanitarian Affairs in Somalia is a Brit called Mark Bowden who seems more intent in causing trouble then making the situation any better. As Mr Bowden shares my family name I have to point out that he in no way speaks for me and the co-incidence is probably best ignored. Sadly I also have to warn people against donating money to Britain's Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) East Africa appeal because you would do more to help if you simply took your money and set fire to it rather then giving it to them.

However if you do have spare cash and you want to help the people of Somalia and East Africa you should donate too;

Unicef; http://www.supportunicef.org/site/pp.asp?c=9fLEJSOALpE&b=7542627

or the UN's World Food Program; https://www.wfp.org/donate/fillthecup?icn=homepage-donate-cup&ici=big-button-link