Somalia Famine: - Al Shabab Leadership or America’s State Department is to blame?

Somalia Famine: - Al Shabab Leadership
or America’s State Department
is to blame?
     By Abdikarim H. Abdi Buh
July 25, 2011

“When the Somalians were merely another hungry third world people, we sent them guns. Now that they are falling down dead from starvation, we send them troops. Some may see in this a tidy metaphor for the entire relationship between north and south. But it would make a whole lot more sense nutritionally -- as well as providing infinitely more vivid viewing -- if the Somalians could be persuaded to eat the troops”.
Barbara Ehrenreich

The above quote from the renowned author and columnist is as true today as it was back then. The country is awash with soldiers and security operatives from both sides of the divide – CIA secret prisons, Al Qaeda operatives, TFG army, the Al Shabab islamist insurgents, explosives sniffer dogs, drones, pirates, AU troops and confused humanitarian agencies. This lethal cocktail of antagonistic forces, in the absence of a strong national government in place, is bound to generate humanitarian crises of epic proportion because of the simple fact that the battle ground isn’t an empty recreational space but at the heart of densely populated regions of a stateless country.

The U.N didn’t take lightly the decision to evacuate their staff and suspend the food aid programme for about a million people in Southern Somalia in May 2010.  Al Shabab militants, among the 48 aid workers killed over two years, is accused to have directly assassinated four of WFP staff, looted WFP offices and equipments, barred women aid workers from discharging their duties, demanded protection money and etc. In the face of such untenable requirements from the armed Islamists, the UN staff tried their best to resolve the anxiety through community level talks.  The staff engaged village elders and other local notables to bridge the gap but the intransigent Al Shabab leadership bluntly refused to give security guarantees to aid workers on the grounds that the aid workers, in their paranoid mind, are spies and Christian missionaries in disguise.

U.S Policy on food aid needs to be responsive in emergency situations

Al Shabab’s misadventures and narrow mindedness attracted the wrath of the US government, the prime humanitarian food donor, after they went public in declaring that they are part of Al Qaida terrorist network.  The U.S in line with its policy towards terrorism withheld half of its funding last year and demanded assurances from Mr. Mark Bowden, the UN’s Humanitarian co–ordinater based in Nairobi that supplies weren’t being diverted to Al shabab and other armed militants. This further complicated the already messy humanitarian situation in Somalia – only two- thirds of the 900 million dollar needed for Somalia was raised.

To accommodate the U.S goverment, U.N aid agencies and other groups that provide humanitarian assistance in Somalia spent months last year in talks with US officials over how to reasonably monitor the aid distribution in the country. Investigations launched by WFP concluded that there was no evidence of diverted food aid to Al Shabab but even that didn’t go well with the American state department.  Officials at the U.S. Agency for International Development, the government's humanitarian aid arm, shared the United Nations' concerns and wanted to resolve the dispute; but the U.S. restrictions appear to stem from higher levels of the administration.

Mr. Bowden out of frustration said in February this year “the United States has asked U.N. agencies to enact impractical measures, which he said could further hinder aid delivery.”  For much of the last ten months, Mr. Bowden was raising the issue of impending famine in Somalia at every venue to draw the world's attention to the plight of the captive people of Somalia.

It seems easier for the UN humanitarian coordinator to move mountains than to convince the US politicians to modify and rationalize their stance on humanitarian aid to the destitute and hungry nation that is facing a calamity of apocalyptic proportion. This tragedy is the consequences of a two decade old misplaced U.S short –term policies towards Somalia, and not the U.N, which has brought Al Shabab and its likes to the forefront of the Somali Politics. Watch the two discussions on Somali Famine

 U.S. policy toward Somalia has wavered between engagement and neglect throughout the last two decades that Somalia was without central government. A humanitarian crisis drew American troops into the country in 1992 and opened VOA Somali service for U.S intervention propaganda. But after the Black Hawk fiasco, America pulled out and shut down the station too. The Sept. 11, 2001, attacks heightened the U.S. concern that failed states could spawn terrorism.  In 2006 the United States backed and provided support to disreputable warlords in Mogadishu to fight terrorism on their behalf.

As a result of these policies, Somalia fell into the hands of the Islamic Courts Union, which promised more law and order and in reality delivered it within six months.

The U.S drafted in Ethiopian army in December of the same year and VOA Somali Service was launched again in 2007 to dish out propaganda in support of the Ethiopian occupation army. The Ethiopian army quickly drove the moderate Islamists out from Mogadishu but after two years of relentless war the Ethiopians was defeated and out of the imprudent U.S policy came a more lethal hardliner front called Al Shabab Islamists. Al Shabab and the other Islamists fighting against the Ethiopian occupation were getting the unreserved support of the Somali people as they were back then regarded as national liberation forces.

The US has a moral responsibility to open the food aid pipeline and if need be to bomb the Al Shabab militants to submission or to shelf this impracticable monitoring requirement. Colonel Qadafi was alleged to have killed 800 civilians when NATO took action but in contrast  Al Shabab killed 10,000 civilians through starvation and are holding 3.5 million others to ransom and yet the response the humanitarian coordinator gets from the giant US government is “Mark Bowden's criticism is misplaced," as State Department spokesman Philip J. Crowley said. The real blame falls on al-Shabab, which is setting up checkpoints and denying the delivery of food to the Somali people." Continued