Monday, November 28, 2011

SOMALIA: Where famine is a crime is a crime

BY MICHELLE SHEPHARD
NATIONAL SECURITY REPORTER

The medical chart Abdisalam Osman’s mother uses to flick away flies says her youngest son suffers from acute malnutrition and the measles. A chest X-ray will soon reveal he also has tuberculosis.

When he arrived at Mogadishu's Benadir Hospital, 3-year-old Abdisalam weighed only 14 pounds. Each laborious breath made his tiny rib cage stick out even farther.

He lies beside his mother, unable to cry; all his energy reserved for his weak gasps.

“A 50-50 chance,” says Dr. Shafie Mohamed Jimale, gently touching the little boy’s emaciated arm. The 30-year-old Somali pediatrician, trained in Sudan, became a father two months earlier; his son was born at the height of the famine that is mainly killing children.

Many of his patients have died. About 50-50.

When Somalia’s famine was declared in July there were emergency calls for help and shocking statistics: 29,000 children had died in the worst drought in 60 years.

A global relief effort has helped save some. Last Friday, the United Nations Food Security and Nutrition Analysis Unit downgraded famine declarations for three southern regions, thanks to the rains that have finally come and emergency food aid.

But the UN warns that 250,000 are at risk as cholera, malaria and other diseases spread through crowded hospitals and camps. Tens of thousands of others still face starvation.

This famine should not have come as a shock. And if its roots are not understood and the world looks away again, Somalia’s cycle of despair — corruption, starvation, war, death — will continue, dragging children like Abdisalam into its abyss.

So what caused the famine?

Back-to-back droughts killed the livestock and destroyed the farms throughout the Horn of Africa, like the one Abdisalam’s family tended.

The southern region of the country is also warring with Al Shabab, the militant Islamic group that has pledged allegiance to Al Qaeda, and starved its own people by blocking outside foreign aid.

These are the easy answers.

These are the hard ones: Somalia’s rampant and criminal government-corruption; a war on terror at the expense of aid; and a lucrative crisis industry that spends millions that Somalis will never see.

This is why this country has topped Foreign Policy’s index of failed states for the last three years and why a drought that affected the entire Horn of Africa became a famine only in Somalia.

The scope of the tragedy is overwhelming. Last Friday’s UN announcement on easing famine conditions did not include Mogadishu. The city remains a famine zone.

Tents made of sticks and cloth, pitched between dilapidated buildings, house the starving and desperate. The sea of people in the camps ripples endlessly. It is difficult to get an accurate estimate, but it is believed that more than 100,000 have arrived since July.

Water is still scarce and largely contaminated. Mounds of human feces dot walkways between the shelters. Security is a problem. Rapes and abuses have been reported. Few foreign aid groups have come, with the exception of the Turks, who have taken over a large region of the city now called “Little Istanbul.”

Across the street from Tarabunka, a sprawling camp of more than 16,000, the graveyard is already near capacity. Ali Kafi, one of the farmers-turned-gravediggers, says he hunts untouched patches of red earth to find burial plots. Before 10 on one October morning, three babies and a young woman, nine-months pregnant, were buried. It was a typical day.

The good news for Mogadishu is that there are few visible remnants of the Shabab, which has waged war against the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) for nearly three years.

Weakened themselves by the famine and claiming to withdraw for “tactical” purposes, hundreds of Shabab fighters abruptly left the capital this summer.

This is why Abdisalam’s family trekked here from the south, believing there would be help in Mogadishu from the TFG, the UN-backed parliament of 550, propped up by a 9,000-member African Union peacekeeping force of Burundian and Ugandan soldiers.

The TFG had an opportunity to repair its badly damaged reputation and make the famine a priority. That didn’t happen.

As people began to starve earlier this year, the country’s president and its parliamentary speaker — President Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed and Speaker Hassan Sharif, who are known as the “Two Sharifs” — were locked in a dispute, trying to shore up political support as they debated at conferences in Djibouti, Kenya or Uganda.

“They say the fish starts rotting from the head,” says Abdi Rashid, an analyst with the International Crisis Group. “At the height of the famine, there was a president who was busy holding meetings with clan elders, not talking about the famine, but about the struggle with the speaker of parliament.”

But the “Two Sharifs” are not the only members of the TFG accused of political gamesmanship or corruption.

One senior TFG official says he is disgusted with his government’s continued focus on politics and power.

“What are we doing?” he asks. “People are dying and we’re focusing on passing a road map?”

The “road map,” brokered by representatives with the United Nations, is intended to move the government beyond being transitional to drafting a constitution and holding parliamentary elections on Aug. 20.

Ken Menkhaus, noted American analyst on Somali affairs, calls this “a case of rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.”

Rashid agrees, saying he has abandoned any hope he once had for the TFG.

“The TFG is beyond the pale,” says Rashid. “It will fail and it will fail miserably. People who are at the helm of affairs at the TFG are not people who are interested in anything beyond their own interests.”

But Rashid also questions those who provide aid — the UN-funded groups and non-government organizations that have managed to ease the famine conditions now, but have wasted millions in Nairobi and have little presence in Somalia.

Rashid calls this the “crisis cottage industry,” which has exploded in the two decades since Somalia’s government collapsed. Pricey conferences, facilities, salaries, studies and projects — all concerning Somalia and all held in Nairobi.

“This is part of the saddest aspect,” says Rashid.

“You have a massive industry that has grown around the crisis … Sometimes it’s foolish interventions, or naïve, ill-informed approaches. I don’t think there’s a grand conspiracy by the NGO community to keep Somalia the way it is, no. A lot of the defective policies are because no one wants to do the hard work, the right things,” says Rashid.

“Everyone wants the short-term. Budgets are short-term. Government policy is short-term. This is part of the problem.”

This is why Abdisalam suffers.

The road that runs between Villa Somalia and the Benadir Hospital, where Abdisalam lies, is clogged with cars and trucks carrying cargo that defy gravity. The loudest horn and biggest guns rule. Only solo drivers are given wide berth for fear they are suicide bombers — the Shabab’s preferred method of attack.

Villa Somalia, also known as the White House, is the elevated and fortified compound in the centre of the city where the “Two Sharifs,” the prime minister and a handful of MPs conduct business.

It is also where millions of dollars have gone missing in the seven years since the TFG was first created.

Matt Bryden, who heads the UN Monitoring Group on Somalia and Eritrea, argues it is no longer simply corruption when hundreds of thousands have died as a result of this stolen aid. It is a war crime.

Both the Shabab and TFG must be investigated and held accountable, Bryden wrote in a paper last month for Enough Project, a Washington-based program at the Center for American Progress.

“It may seem unrealistic today that leaders of Al Shabab would ever face trial, but the same could have been said about the leaders of the Khmer Rouge or Bosnian Serbs,” Bryden wrote.

“And those who have undermined and brought shame upon the TFG and its affiliates by commodifying their own people, using them as lures for personal profit, are no less guilty and more readily accessible to the reach of international justice.”

Corruption may be endemic in any country that has not had a functioning government for years, but the scale alleged in Somalia is staggering.

A May financial audit alleged that between 2009-2010, more than $70 million in donor assistance from the U.S., Libya, Sudan, UAE and elsewhere had gone missing.

Another $300 million in internal revenues from taxes, port duties and the telecommunications industry was also misused, according to the audit compiled by the Public Finance Management Unit, a government watchdog. And a combined total of almost $1.5 million was reported missing from the offices of the president and parliamentary speakers.

Government officials slammed the report as “mere speculation.”

Prime Minister Abdiweli Mohamed Ali, a Harvard-educated economist who has lived most of his adult life in the U.S., is Somalia’s newest prime minister — the third in two years.

He was appointed in June, after the report was released, and he is tired of talking about corruption. “Total garbage. (The audit) was rubbish,” he said in his office at Villa Somalia.

He said the report’s author, Abdirazak Fartaag, worked in his predecessor’s office and had an axe to grind.

Fartaag could not be reached for comment but told the Associated Press, “If the government says I am lying, let them open their records.”

The audit is not the only report of past corruption. Among the findings contained in the 417-page UN Monitoring Group report released in July is the fact that most of the Shabab’s ammunition came from African Union forces.

“Ammunition continues to leak from the custody of TFG and militia commanders to the illicit market,” the report states.

Simply put, this means that AU ammunition is ending up on the illegal market. Which the Shabab is purchasing. Which means the Shabab is fighting AU forces with their own bullets.

Since taking office, Abdiweli said he has established an anti-corruption commission but insists the greater battle is fighting the perception of corruption.

“Once something is said others will repeat it again and again and it becomes a reality,” Abdiweli says. “The issue of not trusting the government, the issue of corruption — I’m not saying there’s no corruption, but we’re not the government of thieves that’s for sure.”

There are honest brokers within the TFG. But until past crimes are investigated, no one will be trusted. Others say the corruption is so endemic that even those with good intentions are powerless. And it hasn’t stopped.

An investigation by the Associated Press this summer found thousands of sacks of food aid that had arrived in Mogadishu — clearly stamped UN World Food Program, USAID, and the Japanese government — were leaving the port, under the TFG’s control, bypassing the camps and being sold for profit.

Following the report, the WFP acknowledged it was investigating food theft.

But this was not the first time the WFP had heard of this crime. In 2009, as the UN was warning of a humanitarian disaster of “near-famine conditions,” London-based Somali journalist Jamal Osman documented stolen WFP aid.

In 2010, a UN report to the Security Council condemned the program’s failure to tender distribution contracts. Like many large aid organizations, the WFP does not base its own staff members in Mogadishu or southern Somalia, citing security concerns, but hires local contractors.

“For more than 12 years, delivery of WFP food aid has been dominated by three individuals and their family members or close associates,” the UN report stated.

“In 2009, these three individuals secured 80 per cent of WFP delivery contracts as part of the WFP transportation budget of approximately $200 million … these three men have become some of the wealthiest and most influential individuals in Somalia.”

One of the three rich men, Abukar Omar Adaani, is widely regarded as a Somali kingmaker. Adaani is credited with elevating President Sharif from little-known teacher to the country’s president. But like many of Somali’s businessmen, Adaani’s allegiances are fleeting.

The 2010 UN Security Council report stated Adaani had been rebuffed by Sharif after he was appointed president in 2009. He failed to award Adaani the power he sought or “compensation that (Adaani) reportedly valued at $50 million.”

According to the report, the jilted Adaani went on to bankroll the Shabab. While he purportedly supports the Shabab’s ideology, the shift was also about money. The Shabab controls most of Somalia’s lucrative southern ports, including the vital Kismayo port.

Now some speculate Adaani has found a way to recoup his investment through the seaport manager in Mogadishu, Sayid-Ali Moalin Abdulle. According to his own testimony to the UN Monitoring Group, Abdulle is a relative and longtime Adaani employee, something the TFG would have known when appointing him.

In July, the UN report accused the TFG of being “complicit” in allowing goods to fall into Shabab hands in Kismayo: “(M)ost commercial motor vessels transporting goods to the port of Mogadishu discharge only part of their cargoes in order to deliver the remainder to Kismayo … with the full knowledge of the Mogadishu port authority.”

Adaani could not be reached for comment.

Abdisalam Osman was born into war in 2008, in Lower Shabelle, southwest of Mogadishu.

The flat land, which borders the Indian Ocean, is perfect for farmers, like Abdisalam’s family.

Most of Abdisalam’s five siblings had been born amid violence, since Somalia has been experiencing one conflict or another since the government collapsed in 1991. But even by Somalia’s standards, 2008 was bleak — the second year of a war in which Ethiopian forces, backed by the U.S., fought against an Islamic group.

It was during this war that Al Shabab (meaning “the youth”) rose to power. The group’s popularity soared, as Somalis rallied in a patriotic battle against its longtime rival neighbour. By the time Ethiopia withdrew in 2009, the Shabab was a fighting force, imposing its strict Al Qaeda-influenced doctrine.

When Abdisalam was born on his father’s maize farm, counterterrorism officials in Washington listed the group as a foreign terrorist organization. It would have devastating consequences in Somalia.

Two years of war had displaced thousands but as the humanitarian crisis worsened, the U.S., Somalia’s number one donor, suspended $50 million in USAID funding, concerned it may benefit the Shabab.

Aid groups trying to operate in Somalia had always been forced to pay “taxes” to warlords or clan leaders to ensure their safe operation. But after the war, it was the Shabab who controlled the south and most of Mogadishu. The U.S. terrorism sanctions meant aid workers could be charged if support — inadvertently or not — went to the Shabab.

Mark Bowden, the UN’s humanitarian coordinator for Somalia, accused the U.S. administration of fighting its war on terror with aid. “We’re no longer involved in a discussion about the practicalities of delivering humanitarian assistance,” he told reporters in early 2010. It is “an issue of where assistance can be provided on political grounds.”

Arab aid groups — stinging from post 9/11 incriminations — were wary.

The Shabab compounded the suffering by banning the World Food Program and imposing “conditions” on aid groups, including a $20,000 “tax” every six months and the dismissal of all female staff.

All this happened before the first drought hit last fall. When the crops and livestock died and people began to starve, there were few agencies with the ability to provide emergency aid.

Everyone was in Nairobi, where, Rashid says, a “crisis cottage industry” thrives.

When spring’s rainy season failed, too, the food shortage was catastrophic. In July, the UN declared the Lower Shabelle one of two famine zones.

The Shabab, with its own members starving and struggling for funds, was at its weakest in years and pulled out of Mogadishu in August.

As a counterterrorism strategy, starving the Shabab of revenue proved a success.

But withholding aid also starved the people — like Abdisalam and his family.

Although the U.S. administration has vehemently denied that counterterrorism measures contributed to the famine, the U.S. issued new guidelines in August to “clarify that aid workers… are not in conflict with U.S. laws and regulations.”

Still, there is confusion, says Joe Belliveau, operations manager in Somalia for Médecins Sans Frontières. “The bottom line is that it certainly does not encourage humanitarian action,” Belliveau says. “It’s fine to say that these conditions are lifted and maybe that will help in the short term, but the fact that those laws are on the books remains a major deterrent.”

Abdisalam is defying the odds that have conspired against him — the war against the Shabab, corruption, ineffective aid groups and a famine that the world failed to stop but is now trying to ease.

The nutrition supplements provided by the hospital have made him stronger and TB medication has calmed his breathing.

“He’s a fighter,” said Jimale, the doctor who has volunteered at the city-run Benadir Hospital for the last two years.

Abdisalam was discharged from the hospital three weeks ago and Jimale said the little boy’s odds of survival had increased to more than 80 per cent.

But Abdisalam and his family haven’t returned home. The rains may have come and eased the drought, but a Kenyan-led offensive to fight the Shabab has left the region war torn again.

Abdisalam now lives in one of the camps, just one of thousands getting by, waiting for help.

Source: The Star

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