Somalia facing 'fresh hunger emergency'
Poor rains and continuing conflict in Somalia are threatening the recovery from last year’s famine, the charity Save the Children has warned.
This could put hundreds of thousands of children at risk of hunger again.
The charity called for an urgent increase in aid as a huge number of families in Somalia are still unable to cope with the effects of drought.
Last year, East Africa was hit by the region’s worst drought in 60 years and many thousands of people died.
Amid insecurity, more Somalis cite difficulties sustaining themselves
Conflict is normally cited by displaced Somalis as the main reason for flight, but in recent weeks we have seen an increase in IDPs and refugees also citing difficulty in providing for themselves. Over the past seven weeks we have registered some 6,000 Somalis who have cited such difficulties – usually arising from meager seasonal rains and resulting food insecurity. The majority are from Somalia’s Bay, Lower Juba and Bakool regions. Read more…
Johns Hopkins School of Public Health: Crisis in the Horn of Africa
April 11, 2012
4 p.m. ET
Students of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health will host a panel discussion on the human rights crisis in Somalia. The presentation is part of the annual “Faces of Africa Week”, a weeklong public health focused program. ReACH (Raising awareness for the Crisis in the Horn) will feature an expert panel and will be moderated by Robert S. Lawrence, MD, professor and director of the Center for a Livable Future at the Bloomberg School of Public Health.
The discussion will be available on the web at http://www.jhsph.edu/REACHFOA2012. Questions can be submitted to the panelists via Twitter using the tag #REACHFOA2012 or on Facebook at http://on.fb.me/ReACH2012.
Somali Refugees: Ongoing Crisis, New Realities
Newly released report from Refugees International.
The United Nations has declared that famine conditions in south-central Somalia no longer exist. But the ongoing conflict in the country, coupled with a precarious food situation, will keep large numbers of Somali refugees from voluntarily returning anytime soon – this despite the rising insecurity in refugee-hosting areas of Kenya and Ethiopia. This insecurity poses a serious threat to protection and services for refugees. However, it also provides an opportunity to shake-up the unsustainable way that agencies have delivered services for decades. Despite security restrictions on access, donor governments must maintain their level of focus and funding for refugee operations in the region.
Somalia: Measles Takes its Toll
Measles is sweeping unchecked through parts of southern Somalia. The disease is highly contagious and unvaccinated children are at great risk, especially if they are also malnourished. The war in southern Somalia is a key factor contributing to ongoing widespread malnutrition, low vaccination coverage, and lack of access to health care services. All of these factors aggravate the spread and severity of diseases like measles.
In some Doctors Without Borders programs, the number of measles cases has sharply increased in recent days and weeks. Many patients arrive in severe condition.
“Over the last weeks, we diagnosed and treated over 300 patients for measles—mainly children—in the towns of Haramka and Marere in Lower Juba Valley,” said Silvia Colona, Doctors Without Borders’s project coordinator for southern Somalia. “We also set up a measles treatment unit in the city of Kismayo last week, and it filled up immediately with critically ill children.”
Somalia 2011 © Martina Bacigalupo
A four-year-old boy suffering from measles and malnutrition waits for his medicine in Banadir hospital in Mogadishu.
European Court censures Italy over African migrants
The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that Italy violated the rights of Eritrean and Somali migrants by sending them back to Libya.
The 13 Eritreans and 11 Somalis were among a group of about 200 people who left Libya on three boats in 2009. Two of the 24 have since died.
The court ordered Italy to pay each migrant in the case 15,000 euros (£13,000; $20,000) in damages.
UN to bolster Somalia peacekeeping force Amisom
The UN Security Council is to vote to increase the African Union peacekeeping force in Somalia by more than 5,000 soldiers, diplomats have said.
The resolution will increase the number of troops in the country to 17,731 from its current level of 12,000.
In Somalia, Ethiopian troops are advancing on the strategic central city of Baidoa, held by al-Shabab militants.
British Prime Minister David Cameron told the BBC the threat from al-Shabab was “substantial”.
He was speaking ahead of an international conference on Somalia to be held in London.
“It is based on the fact that al-Shabab is an organisation that has now explicitly linked itself to al-Qaeda, and it encourages violent jihad not just in Somalia but also outside Somalia,” Mr Cameron said.
Rape, corruption in camps blight lives of Somali
“Three armed men in government uniform came into the camp. The strongest one shone a powerful torch in my eyes, he strangled me and then raped me in front of my crying kids,” she said.
Mohamed, a widow, said she waited for sunrise before making her way to a nearby clinic only to be told there were no doctors.
“Later the camp leaders brought me some painkillers. Now I’m OK but I do not know what diseases I caught from the rape. I have nowhere to go for a check-up,” Mohamed said. “We live in these makeshift shelters. We have no aid agency or government to protect us at night. We are at God’s mercy.”
Isak also said rape was common in her camp.
“They rape even mothers at gunpoint at night — and we are threatened to death should we disclose it,” she said. “The makeshift shelters have no lockable doors, so these men just come in at night and lie on you.”
Somalia food crisis recovery will take two years – ICRC
The food crisis in Somalia is no longer at emergency levels but the needs remain “huge” and it will take at least two years for the country to recover, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has said.
Malnutrition rates in some areas of the drought-hit Horn of Africa country have improved, the ICRC said, but the charity warned an ongoing conflict between the Kenyan army and Islamist al Shabaab rebels could precipitate the situation.
“The food crisis (in Somalia) has probably now stopped,” Daniel Duvillard, head of operations for the ICRC in the Horn of Africa, told AlertNet. “There are still huge needs of course. Rains were quite good but one good harvest won’t solve the problem for the Somali people,
“In some areas you can see there has been an improvement in terms of malnutrition rates. The only question mark is the impact of the military offensive against al Shabaab now but it is too early to assess,” he said.
A deadly combination of war and drought has left the chaotic nation at the epicentre of a hunger crisis affecting 13 million people across the Horn of Africa. Tens of thousands of Somalis have died from famine, which was declared in July.
Somalia fears as US Sunrise banks stop money transfers
The largest bank which lets Somalis in the US send money back home is due to close this service, raising fears for the famine-hit country.
Sunrise Community Banks said it would halt the money transfers to comply with US laws on financing terror groups.
US-based Somalis are believed to send about $100m back home each year - largely from Minnesota.
The Somali government estimates that annual remittances are $2bn - about one-third of the country’s income.
It has urged Sunrise to delay its 30 December deadline for closing the accounts of the Minnesota-based Somali money transfer businesses, known as “hawala”.
Somalia: A Look Back
Ibn Battuta is one of history’s great explorers. He set out from his native Tangier in 1325, when he was just 21. By the time he returned home for good almost 30 years later, he had covered some 120,000 km and nearly every part of the Islamic world.
What makes me so astonished is to read about this great scholars account of his visit to the Somali coastal capital Mogadishu in 1331. He paints a picture of an exotic, vibrant and rich nation which played a vital role in world trade.
Mogadishu is a very large town. The people are merchants and very rich. They own large herds of camels…and also sheep. Here they manufacture the textiles called after the name of the town; these are of superior quality and are exported to Egypt and other places.
Just makes me wonder what happened to this Somalia? (Graphics|Text)
Just in: Famine has spread into Somalia’s Bay Region which means that 750,000 people face imminent starvation.
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Somalia famine: UN warns of 750,000 deaths
“In total, 4 million people are in crisis in Somalia, with 750,000 people at risk of death in the coming four months in the absence of adequate response,” the UN’s Food Security and Nutrition Analysis Unit (FSNAU) says.
Surely this statement alone should send shockwaves across the globe. This crisis has the potential to claim more lives than the 2005 asian tsunami, 2010 Haiti earthquake and the 2011 Japan earthquake and tsunami COMBINED.
