Friday, November 17, 2006
As forces loyal to the weak government and powerful Islamist movement gird for full-scale conflict that many fear could engulf the wider region, some 50,000 Somalis have been displaced by devastating and deadly floods, it said.
“According to technical agencies, Somalia could experience the worst floods in a 20- to 50-year period,” the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said in a statement released in the Kenyan capital.
“Contingency planning for a worst-case scenario of concurrent floods and widespread conflict is ongoing,” it said, adding that parts of Islamist-held southern and central Somalia are currently uninhabitable due to flooding. The town of Beledweyne, about 300-km north of Mogadishu has been underwater since November 10, forcing 50,000 people from their homes, marooning another 15,000 and affecting 10,000 in nearby villages, it said. “As the water surge flows downstream, conditions ... are expected to get worse,” OCHA said.
Witnesses and local officials have said that at least 43 people have drowned, including several in Beledweyne, in raging flood waters since late October when torrential downpours first caused rivers to burst their banks.
The bulk of the dead are in the Bardheere, Lower Shabelle and Gedo regions, all controlled by the Islamists who seized Mogadishu in June and now hold almost all of southern and central Somalia, they said. South of Beledweyne, in Jalalaqsi district, OCHA said it had reports that 19 villages had been abandoned due to floods, leaving about 1,000 families homeless.
It said some 2,000 hectares (4,940 acres) of cropland and 4,000 hectares (9,900 acres) of farmland, including pasture, had been destroyed in Jalalaqsi.
In the Islamist-controlled Lower and Middle Juba regions, south and west of Mogadishu, OCHA said 40 villages had been completely inundated but no casualties had been reported.
Relief efforts have been hampered by flooded roads and the military build-up and complicated further by a ban on flights to and from Somalia imposed by neighbouring Kenya this week for security reasons, it said.
Source: AFP, Nov 17, 2006