Hungry Childhood
In the present world Somalia is in a
huge problem. Many people are corrupted by hungry. Children’s are war against
hungry. Following the Somalia’s military withdrawal in the Ogaden War, the
economy was crippled due to disproportionate military spending and looming
foreign debt.
In the face of increasing public
discontent with Barre’s government and the loss of aid from the Soviet Union, Somalia called to the West;
unfortunately for the Somali people, The International Monetary Fund answered. As part of the IMF’s loan protocol,
the borrower country must accept the conditions stipulated within structural
adjustment policies, thus requiring the suspension of public work programs,
investments in education and nearly any outlet which gives priority towards
improving people’s conditions and standards of living.
Structural adjustment programs are
designed to pry countries open to predatory capital, often purging the
authority of national companies over the management of the resources in their
own lands; these schemes of the IMF and other financial institutions are
designed to secure the indebtedness the borrower country to total dependency on
further loans and foreign aid; directly attacking national sovereignty and
practices of self sufficiency which the Somalis gave their lives to protect.
Following the IMF-imposed austerity
measures, Somalia
began to grovel and churn by facing food shortages, record inflation and
currency devaluation, to a point where a simple meal at a restaurant required
paying with bundles of currency notes.
Barre’s increasingly irrelevant
leadership settled further loan agreements with the Paris Club and
International Development Association, which required the Government to sell
off vital public systems, such as the countries’ electricity generators, which
cast Mogadishu into a nightly darkness.
The real causes of impoverishment in
Somali farming communities were caused by deregulation of the grain market,
currency warfare and the influx of foreign food aid.
Such donations were made with the
expectation that Somalia’s
best-irrigated farmlands would be used to harvest fruits, vegetables, oilseeds
and cotton, not for domestic consumption, but for export into lucrative grocery
market shelves in the First World.
Donors were able to take control of
the entire budgetary process by providing food aid because its domestic sale
became the principal source of revenue for the state.
Death baby: Kaltum Mohamed sits beside a small
mound of earth, alone with her thoughts. It is her child's grave – and there
are three others like it. Just three weeks
ago, Mohamed was the mother of five young children. But the famine that has
rocked Somalia
has claimed the lives of four of them. Only a daughter remains. The others
starved to death before Mohamed's eyes as she and her husband trekked to Somalia's
capital, Mogadishu,
in search of aid. Thousands of
parents are grieving in Somalia
and in refugee camps in neighboring countries amid Somalia's worst drought in 60
years. The drought and
famine in Somalia
have killed more than 29,000 children under the age of 5 in the last 90 days in
southern Somalia
alone, according to U.S.
estimates. The U.N. says 640,000 Somali children are acutely malnourished,
suggesting the death toll of small children will rise. Mohamed and her
husband tried to get their children from Somalia's parched south to the
capital, Mogadishu,
in time to receive emergency aid from the few humanitarian organizations that
are operating there. They began their journey in the Lower
Shabelle region, where the U.N. declared famine July 20. AP
Television News found her that day looking after her severely malnourished
children, cradling them in her arms. Her family
belongs to a tribe of pastoral nomads, but all of their livestock died in the
drought. When her children fell ill, she took them to a hospital in the Lower Shabelle but couldn't afford the treatment they
needed. Most aid is not getting to the south where it's desperately needed. An
al-Qaida allied group, al-Shabab, controls much of southern Somalia and
insists that there is no famine. It has banned all aid groups but the
International Committee of the Red Cross. The family's
journey to the capital, one being made by thousands of other Somalis, came too
late. Four of Mohamed's children died en route because of severe malnutrition
and related complications. "Death is
inevitable," Mohamed told AP Television News on Thursday in a makeshift
camp near Mogadishu's
airport, home to hundreds of other displaced people. "But the surprise was
how suddenly I lost my four children in less than 24 hours because of
famine."
Instead of being
able to caress her children, she crouched next to one of their graves and
softly patted and smoothed the mound of earth covering it. She wept, then wiped
away her tears. She still has a daughter to try to feed.
The Muslim holy
month of Ramadan is under way, and the family is fasting daily. Without food,
though, Mohamed doesn't know how they can break their fast at sundown. The
international community must do more to help, she said. Meanwhile,
famine still stalks her. On Wednesday,
the U.N. declared three new regions in Somalia famine zones – including
the camps for displaced persons in Mogadishu.
These are areas where the highest rates of malnutrition and mortality are
taking place. Nancy Lindborg,
an official with the U.S.
government aid arm, told a congressional committee in Washington on Wednesday that the U.S. estimates
that more than 29,000 children under the age of 5 have died in the past 90
days. That number is based on nutrition and mortality surveys verified by the
U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
A U.S. official
noted Thursday that the U.S.
said this week it would not prosecute legitimate aid groups trying to assist
Somalis suffering from famine in areas under al-Shabab control. Such
prosecution would have been possible under U.S. anti-terrorism laws, but
getting groups to go into a part of Somalia controlled by a brutal,
hardline Islamist insurgency is another matter. The official,
Jon Brause of USAID, told journalists in Nairobi,
Kenya, that
there hasn't been a dramatic increase in assistance flowing to Somalia after
the announcement because it's so difficult to access al-Shabab-controlled
territory.
No U.S. law
specifically prevents aid to southern and central Somalia, where the U.N. food agency
says it cannot reach 2.2 million Somalis in areas under al-Shabab's control.
But bribes, tolls and other typical of costs of doing business in the largely
lawless and chaotic country could have been punishable after the State
Department declared al-Shabab a terrorist organization in 2008. "We
understand that some assistance may accidentally reach al-Shabab and we are
reassuring people they will not suffer prosecution if that happens," said
Bruce Wharton, the deputy assistant secretary of state for African affairs. Wharton signaled
that the U.S.
believes some inside al-Shabab might be more amenable to letting aid in than
others. "We do not
believe al-Shabab is a monolithic organization," he said. "There are
degrees of Shabab-ness, if you will, and we think it's important to find ways
to get food to people, including people who are in al-Shabab controlled
territories."
Somalia Current
Situation: The country is under Al-shabab rule, except
Somaliland, Puntland and parts of Mudug (Galmudug Administration) and Galgadud
(Ahlu Sunah WA Jama’a) regions. The military garrisons at the port, airport and
Villa Somalia under AMISOM does not have any significant political or security
relevance, but instead plays a major propaganda role for Al-shabab agitation
and recruitment. Al-shabab continues a sustained military offensive against the
TFG and AMISOM. The main artery road (Maka Al Mukarama) linking Aden Abdulle
Osman International
Airport and Villa Somalia is now
a battle zone, and civilian transportation is unable to pass. The President,
the Parliament and the cabinet live within only a few blocks guarded by AMISOM.
The military units trained in neighboring countries for the TFG are
disintegrating because of a lack of maintenance and leadership. Most of them
joined Al-shabab as an already trained fighting force. There are two
substantial elements that significantly compound this complex situation. First,
TFG has neither the necessary financial means nor military force to defeat
Al-Shabab, while AMISOM does not have the mandate to engage AL-Shabab outside
of its garrisons in Mogadishu.
Secondly, paradoxically the UN arms embargo on Somalia prohibits arming of any
Somali entity. The winners of the embargo regime are those who do not abide by
it, namely Al-Shabab and associates.
The Ugandan and Burundi
peace keeping force, with its restricted mandate, is only able to hold on to Mogadishu airport and
port at the cost of heavy civilian casualties and displacement. They are no
match for the guerilla and suicide tactics of the Al Qaeda trained and
re-enforced Al-shabab fighters. Al-shabab is increasing recruitment and
training of fighters by the day. All the population centers (cities, towns,
villages) in the south and central Somalia are effectively under
Al-Shabab. Estimates of several hundred to several thousand foreign fighters
and experts from Al-Qaeda and other radical groups enhance the ranks and the
fighting quality of Al-Shabab. Economically, in the last rainy season,
Al-shabab reached another milestone. In the agriculturally fertile south Somalia, they
have harvested a record amount of agricultural produce which indicates their
ability to move towards self sustainability.
Now it’s obvious that the current peace keeping status of AMISOM, in three Mogadishu garrisons (the
main Mogadishu Port, the Airport, and Villa Somalia), is
not peace keeping, and this situation is not sustainable. The civilians are
increasingly victimized. Al-shabab gets stronger by increasing the number of
men in its ranks and the Ugandan and Burundian forces will be more frustrated
and will act indiscriminately against the population of Mogadishu. At this time, there is no peace to
keep in south-central Somalia.