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MICHELLE SHEPHARD, NATIONAL SECURITY REPORTER for the ‘Toronto Star’, has a heart-wrenching, enlightening report posted on http://somalia.thestar.com/, titled “Somalia – Where Famine is a Crime”

A couple of extracts highlight not only the health and starvation issues but also the political agendas that so commonly complicate human tragedy situations, agendas that severely hinder solutions and also engender suspicions of ulterior motives, at least in my mind.

“MOGADISHU—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.” 

“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.”

I believe it needs to be read world-wide to ensure the public get an un-biassed picture. The Somalian people are suffering and it is not clear why, droughts – yes, but that is far from the whole story. One wonders if the authorities really care, what they are actually fighting for?  Far too many questions have been publicly unanswered. Warning bells ring when I read about “UN ‘roadmaps'”.

Read Michelle’s article here.

Related articles

• Somalia: Military Reform Cannot Succeed Without Political Progress (sahelblog.wordpress.com)
• Mahamoud Nur – The Mayor of Mogadishu (africaunchained.blogspot.com)
• On the Bombing in Mogadishu, Somalia (sahelblog.wordpress.com)
• NUSOJ Commemorates International to End Impunity (appablog.wordpress.com)
• Al Shabab not the only guilty party in Somalia’s famine, violence (csmonitor.com)