Somalia has turned into Africa’s worst humanitarian catastrophe

By SHASHANK BENGALI

 

AFGOYE, Somalia | A year after the U.S.-backed Ethiopian army toppled a hard-line Islamist regime in Somalia, the country has become Africa’s worst humanitarian catastrophe.

 

About 200,000 refugees, mostly women and children, have fled from a pro-government offensive to makeshift camps along a 10-mile stretch of sun-baked asphalt that leads from the seaside capital of Mogadishu toward the inland town of Afgoye.

 

The crisis is brutal on young people.

 

One night last month, Fatima Sheikh Ali awoke to the deafening crash of mortar rounds on her neighbor’s roof. Shrapnel blasted through Ali’s tin-walled home in Mogadishu, and sent her daughter, Muna, 13, into her arms, quaking.

 

Sometime in the chaos of that night, Muna stopped speaking. In an overcrowded encampment of sand and scrub a few miles from the capital, where the family now lives among thousands made homeless by the war, Muna silently collected firewood and looked after her siblings, a worried gaze fixed in her almond eyes.

 

“She is traumatized,” her mother said.

 

The conflicts in Sudan’s Darfur region and in eastern Congo may have displaced more people, but international relief efforts in Somalia have faltered in the face of violence that has emptied entire neighborhoods in Mogadishu.

 

Most displaced Somalis, such as Muna’s family, live in dome-shaped huts fashioned out of spindly tree branches and covered with tattered swatches of fabric or plastic. They sprout from the sand like multicolored mushrooms along the road from the capital.

 

The United Nations Children’s Fund said last week that one-quarter of the refugees around Afgoye were younger than age 5. Both sides are using older boys as combatants, and girls who venture out of the camps risk being raped by freelance militias, the agency said.

 

Fewer than 1 in 10 Mogadishu children attends school now.

 

Muna and her siblings aren’t among the lucky ones. Their southern neighborhood of Hodan has seen near-daily fighting as Somali government troops and their Ethiopian allies hunt for insurgents amid the low, whitewashed storefronts.

 

Local groups estimate that 6,000 people have died in the fighting this year.

 

Traveling Somalia’s roads is fraught with danger. Aid groups and former residents say that Somali government forces, far from ending militia rule, are starting to behave like militias.

 

Checkpoints have popped up throughout southern Somalia, with government soldiers and allied militiamen demanding payments and harassing civilians and relief workers.

 

According to UNICEF, sick children and pregnant women often are turned away at checkpoints. In some areas, trucks carrying food and other humanitarian aid have to pay tolls of $500 each, U.N. officials said.

 

Last week, Somalia’s internal security chief closed airstrips and ports outside Mogadishu for several hours, leaving nearly 4,000 tons of emergency food aid stuck aboard U.N.-chartered ships floating in the sea.

 

Source: Kansas City, December 13, 2007