Somalia's Prime Minister Lashes Out At Failed Relief Efforts For Drought Victims

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Special to the NNPA from the Global Information Network

Following a quick tour of the camps for drought-displaced people, Somali Prime Minister Abdiweli Mohamed Ali snapped when viewing the starving, dying population of mostly women and children.

[Aid agencies] get money claiming they will help Somalia, yet the people who arrived at Mogadishu were dying of hunger and that is absolutely unacceptable, he said grimly.

Nearly 170,000 Somalis have fled to already crowded refugee camps in neighboring Kenya and Ethiopia since January, according to U.N. figures recently released. In Kenya, about 1,300 Somalis are arriving daily; an average of 1,700 are entering Ethiopia.

Complicating the survival strategies, the U.S. Treasurys Office of Foreign Assets Control has issued rules barring the spending of U.S. government money on projects if it might materially benefit a listed terror organization, including Al Shabab, an Islamist group linked to Al Qaeda that controls most of southern Somalia, the area worst hit by the current Horn of Africa drought.

Since the Treasury rules came into force in 2009, U.S. aid to Somalia once the largest share of all world donors plummeted by 88 percent, from $237 million in 2008 to $20 million in 2011.

"Aid is not flowing to where people are. It is flowing to certain centers and people have to walk sometimes days to get there and unfortunately not everyone makes it," said U.S. based Horn of Africa expert J. Peter Pham

As thousands of Somalis walk days and sometimes weeks to reach the refugee complex known as Dadaab, young, lifeless bodies lay abandoned by their parents on the sandy paths which have been called "the roads of death."

In other cases parents perish during the journey, leaving children in the wilderness, alone.

The U.N. says it plans to start airlifting emergency rations into parts of drought-stricken Somalia this week.

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