Somalia Faces Worst Humanitarian Crisis in 18 Years

Source: Bloomberg

By Jason McLure

Aug. 25 (Bloomberg) — Somalia faces its worst humanitarian crisis since civil war began in the country 18 years ago, with half of the country’s population in need of emergency aid, a United Nations food-security agency said.

About 3.8 million people need assistance because of escalating conflict and drought, up from 3.2 million six months ago, the Kenya-based Food Security and Nutrition Analysis Unit, or FSNAU, said in a report on its Web site yesterday.

“This signals a serious deterioration in the emergency food security and nutrition situation from earlier this year,” Cindy Holleman, a technical adviser to the program, said in the report. “More worrying is that the escalating fighting and conflict is occurring in the same areas where we are now recording the greatest problems of food access and malnutrition.”

Islamists opposed to Somalia’s President Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed began an offensive in the capital, Mogadishu, in May to expand their authority beyond most of southern and central parts of the country captured by the rebels following a two-year war. Somalia hasn’t had a functioning central administration since the overthrow of former dictator Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991.

The number of people forced from their homes by the fighting has also increased, the FSNAU said. An estimated 1.4 million people are internally displaced, mainly in central and southern Somalia, up from 1 million six months ago. An additional 255,000 have been without homes for so long that they are defined as “protracted” displaced people.

One in five Somali children is malnourished and 70,000 are “severely malnourished,” meaning they risk death without specialized medical care, the report said.

There is a risk of a “further deterioration in the humanitarian situation depending on the extent of the fighting in the coming weeks and months,” it said.

The figure of 3.8 million people in need of emergency aid is more than double the 1.5 million reported by the UN in October 1992, a situation that triggered “Operation Restore Hope,” a two-year mission involving as many as 33,000 U.S. and UN forces.

That mission ended shortly after the downing of two U.S. helicopters in Mogadishu in October 1994, an incident made famous by Mark Bowden’s book “Black Hawk Down.”

FSNAU is managed by the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization, according to its Web site.

To contact the reporter on this story: Jason McLure in Addis Ababa via Johannesburg at pmrichardson@bloomberg.net.