From: Yemane Natnael (yemane_natnael@yahoo.com)
Date: Sun Jul 20 2008 - 13:45:01 EDT
(NYT) Somali Killings of Aid Workers Imperil Relief
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
Published: July 20, 2008
NAIROBI, Kenya — At a time of drought, skyrocketing food prices,
crippling inflation and intensifying street fighting, many of the aid
workers whom millions of Somalis depend on for survival are fleeing
their posts — or in some cases the country.
They are being driven out by what appears to be an organized terror
campaign. Ominous leaflets recently surfaced on the bullet-pocked
streets of Mogadishu, Somalia’s
ruin of a capital, calling aid workers “infidels” and warning them that
they will be methodically hunted down. Since January, at least 20 aid
workers have been killed, more than in any year in recent memory. Still
others have been abducted.
The deliberate assault on aid workers
is a chilling new dimension to the crisis in Somalia that has unfolded
over the past 17 years but has grown increasingly violent as outside
forces, including the United States military, have turned a civil war
into a more international conflict.
United Nations officials are especially worried by the recent attacks because they say
Somalia is heading toward another full-blown famine. Without
professional workers to distribute food or tend to the sick, the
country could sink into a catastrophe reminiscent of the early 1990s,
when hundreds of thousands of people starved.
“This couldn’t be happening at a worse time,” said Peter Smerdon, a spokesman for the United Nations World Food Program.
The
attacks on aid workers — including Westerners, Somalis working for
Western organizations and Somalis working for local groups — have
escalated this month. Two weeks ago a high-ranking United Nations
official was shot as he stepped out of a mosque. Last Sunday, a
trucking agent in charge of transporting emergency rations was killed.
On Thursday, three elders who were helping local aid workers distribute
food at a displaced persons camp were shot to death while drinking tea.
In response, the United Nations is pulling some employees out of
dangerous urban areas and cutting back on operations across the
country. Somalia needs hundreds of millions of dollars of emergency
aid, but donors are getting skittish because the attacks on aid workers
threaten to make relief projects untenable.
A plane with at
least a dozen Somali aid workers left Mogadishu on Friday. Several
workers said it was the leaflets that scared them away.
“These people are serious,” said one Somali aid professional who is now hiding with her family outside Mogadishu.
The
leaflets were tacked onto walls and scattered on streets in Mogadishu
about 10 days ago. “We know all the so-called aid workers,” they read.
“We promise to kill them, wherever they are.”
Abductions are also increasing. Seventeen aid workers have been kidnapped this year, with 13 still in captivity.
It is not clear who is behind the terror campaign or if it is connected
to previous assassinations of journalists and intellectuals. The
leaflets and accompanying e-mail messages sent to several aid
organizations seem to signify a new degree of organization.
Some of the warnings were signed by a little-known group called the Martyrs of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,
which takes its name from the notorious Jordanian terrorist killed by
American forces in Iraq in 2006. The group said the aid workers were
conspiring with “infidels,” and Western diplomats said the killings
might be intended to make Somalia seem so chaotic that Western
countries would abandon it.
But several factions of Somalia’s
Islamist movement, which is fighting an intense guerrilla war against
the government, have condemned the attacks.
Sheik Muktar Robow
Abu Monsur, a leader of the Shebab insurgent group, said Islamic
militants were actually guarding food convoys. United Nations officials
have mixed feelings about the Shebab, saying that some factions are
violently anti-Western while others recently helped free two kidnapped
aid workers.
Some Western security analysts theorize that in
the violent murkiness that has overtaken the country, unsavory elements
within the Somali government may be killing aid workers to discredit
Islamist opposition groups and draw in United Nations peacekeepers, who
may be the government’s last hope for survival.
The government admits that it desperately needs peacekeepers. But it denies that it is attacking aid workers to get them.
“It’s
obvious who’s doing this,” said Abdi Awaleh Jama, a Somali ambassador
at large. “It’s hard-liner Islamists who hate the West. They are forces
of darkness, not forces of light.”Whoever the culprit is, the ramifications are huge. Somalia is
perennially needy, with some of the highest malnutrition rates in the
world. Aid work has never been easy, because of security issues, and
Western aid workers have mostly stayed out of Somalia for years,
entrusting emergency relief and development work to local staff members.
Even before the death threats and assassinations, Somali aid
professionals were struggling to reach the 2.6 million people who need
assistance. But that number could soon swell to 3.5 million, nearly
half the population. Rainfall has been scant this year. The fall
harvest is expected to be disastrous. And some United Nations officials
are predicting a major famine within weeks.
“There’s going to be deaths,” Mr. Smerdon of the World Food Program said. “It’s just a question of how wide-scale.”
Somalia’s
ills are part of a bigger crisis sweeping the drought-prone, war-prone
Horn of Africa. With global food prices rising faster than they have in
decades, millions of people who were just getting by can no longer
afford rice, wheat or other basics..
Among the hardest hit are
those in Somalia’s dilapidated cities, like Mogadishu, where prices
have shot up by as much as 500 percent and where people depend on
buying food instead of growing it. But Mogadishu has become a nightmare
for aid workers — and just about everyone else. Suicide bombs, roadside
bombs, mortar attacks and wild street battles are the norm. Even
traveling the few miles from the airport to the main hospital is a
life-and-death gamble because the road is so heavily mined.
“Nobody knows where is safe,” said Mark Bowden, the coordinator of United Nations humanitarian operations for Somalia.
He
said that the United Nations was trying to talk to insurgents. “But the
people you can talk to,” he said, “are not the people you need to talk
to.”
Somalia has been a killing field since 1991, when clan
militias brought down the central government and carved the country
into fiefs. Warlords fought over every port, fishing pier and telephone
pole that could turn a profit.
In the summer of 2006 an Islamist
movement ran the warlords out of Mogadishu and established control over
much of the country. Mogadishu was peaceful for the first time in
years. But the United States and Ethiopia accused the Islamists of
being connected to Al Qaeda.
In
December 2006, Ethiopian troops invaded. The Ethiopians, backed up by
American intelligence and airstrikes, pushed out the Islamist forces
and installed Somalia’s weak transitional government in the capital.
But
the Islamists have regrouped. They have received help from foreign
jihadists, Western diplomats say, and embraced hit-and-run tactics.
The American military has continued to hunt down terrorist suspects and
has launched several airstrikes in Somalia, stoking more anti-Western
feelings, including against aid workers.
Meanwhile, Mogadishu
has been consumed by urban warfare that in the past 18 months has
killed thousands of civilians, displaced more than a million and
leveled entire city blocks.
United Nations officials are trying
to broker a truce. In June, one Islamist faction agreed to a
cease-fire. But it does not seem to mean much, because the violence
continues to rage.
At first, the killings of the aid workers
seemed to be a mistake, a case of wrong place, wrong time. In January,
three staff members of Doctors Without Borders were killed by a roadside bomb in southern Somalia. Some Western
security analysts initially thought the bomb had been intended for
someone else.
But as the weeks passed and more aid workers were
cut down, including four drivers hauling emergency rations for the
World Food Program, it was clear there was a pattern — and a message.
“It’s unprecedented,” Mr. Smerdon said.
There
is no exact figure for the number of aid workers in Somalia. The United
Nations employs about 800 for projects in Somalia, and the
International Committee of the Red Cross several hundred. Counting
local groups, there are probably several thousand people involved in
health, food, education and other aid work.
To better protect the
aid community, United Nations officials are scrambling to raise money
for more planes, more radios and more security guards.
But Jurg Montani, who leads the Red Cross delegation to Somalia, said donors were becoming more reluctant to contribute.
“They’re asking how long can we go on if humanitarian workers are getting kidnapped and killed?” he said.
Mr.
Montani said that the country had always been one of the hardest places
in the world to work. In Somalia, he said, “you don’t do what you need
to do; you do what you can.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/20/world/africa/20somalia.html?em&ex=1216699200&en=169b73f4f5ebae58&ei=5087%0A
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