From: Berhane Habtemariam (Berhane.Habtemariam@gmx.de)
Date: Tue Oct 06 2009 - 17:08:06 EDT
'Somalia single largest humanitarian crisis'
Tue, 06 Oct 2009 07:17:54 GMT
http://www.presstv.ir/photo/20091006/fazaeli-fatemeh20091006091830812.jpg
Over 3.6 million people in Somalia are in desperate need of aid, where
droughts and unabated violence rule the country.
Somalia presents the single largest humanitarian challenge in the world,
where food crisis, droughts and violence continue to devastate the country,
a leading aid group says.
Over 3.6 million people, or half of Somalia's population, are currently in
desperate need of aid, International aid organization, Oxfam GB, reported on
Monday.
"In terms of numbers of people, access to any form of social welfare or
livelihood choices, and the apparent intractability of it (the conflict in
Somalia), it is the most pressing concern in humanitarian terms that we have
globally," Oxfam GB's humanitarian director Jane Cocking told Reuters.
Adding to the crisis are over 1.3 million internally displaced people and
another half a million refugees who reside in impoverished camps in
neighboring Kenya and Ethiopia.
However, even as conflicts rage within the Horn of Africa nation, both
private and government donors are reluctant to throw money in a state as
disorganized as Somalia, where a weak UN-backed interim government struggles
to retain a bloody insurgency, Oxfam added.
The London-based organization stressed that in negotiating the fifth year of
drought in East Africa, one in six Somali children face acute
malnourishment.
"That is, in the UN's terms, a crisis ... But because it's been a similarly
awful picture for such a long time, the crisis warning bell no longer
produces the fire brigade," Paul Smith-Lomas , Oxfam GB's east Africa
director said.
Oxfam also noted that limited access to civilians caught in the conflict
zones in Somalia has forced the organization to rely more on local partners.
In Somalia, scores of aid workers and journalists have been kidnapped,
killed or otherwise targeted since the central government collapsed in 1991.
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