Tiskane izdaje
DOLO, Somalia - Is the world about to watch 750,000 Somalis starve to death? The United Nations' warnings could not be clearer. A drought-induced famine is steadily creeping across Somalia and tens of thousands of people have already died.
The Islamist militant group the Shabab is blocking most aid agencies from accessing the areas it controls, and in the next few months three-quarters of a million people could run out of food, United Nations officials say.
Soon, the rains will start, but before any crops will grow, disease will bloom. Malaria, cholera, typhoid and measles will sweep through immune-suppressed populations, killing countless malnourished people.
In a way, this is all déjà vu. In the early 1990s, Somalia was hit by famine, precipitated by drought and similarly callous thugs blocking food aid. But in the 1990s, the world was more willing to intervene. The United Nations rallied behind more than 25,000 American troops, who embarked on a multibillion-dollar mission to beat back the gunmen long enough to get food to feed starving people.
At a famine summit meeting in mid-September in Nairobi, Kenya, Ethiopia's prime minister, Meles Zenawi, proposed to forcefully establish humanitarian corridors, so that food aidcould be delivered to Shabab-controlled areas. Few Western donors were enthused.
"There's no mood for intervention," said one American official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "People remember what happened in the 1990s. ‘It doesn't work' was the conclusion."
Foreign military force, analysts say, has never succeeded in solving Somalia's problems. This famine is not just about the Shabab's blocking food aid. It is about a broken state and the human wreckage it is causing.
Take Mogadishu, the capital. The Shabab pulled out in August, leaving Somalia's transitional government in control. But government "control" does not translate into a smooth aid operation. Instead, soldiers have looted aid trucks and shot starving people.
Somalia's politicians have been too busy squabbling with one another to build institutions like a functioning health ministry or a sanitat ion depar tment that would help drought victims.
Some of the informal clusters of people in Mogadishu camped out for aid are already breaking up, and it is not clear where the displaced people are trudging to. Many aid agencies - and Western militaries - are justifiably wary of this environment, and so far the response to the faminehas been well short of what is needed to stem the crisis.
"I don't think that there's a case to be made that the famine can be mitigatedthrough military intervention," said Bronwyn E. Bruton, a democracy and governance expert who wrote a provocative essay published by the Council on Foreign Relations urging theWest to withdraw from Somalia.
"Theft, corruption and violence are endemic," he added "The problem extends past Al Shabab to anybody with a gun."
In Somalia, there are many of them. In the 1990s, the United Nations urged American forces to disarm the warlords and their flip-flop-clad militias. Instead, the United States opted for a narrowly-scoped intervention, then hastily withdrew after 18 servicemen were killed. According to a study by the Refugee Pol icy Group, the American-led operation saved around 110,000 lives, while 240,000 were lost to the famine.
The study shows famine casualties tend to come in two spikes: one at the onset of the crisis, before the bulk of aid arrives; the other when the rains come. For the current famine, analysts are now bracing for possibly hundreds of thousands of deaths.
"We've lost this round," said Ken Menkhaus, a political science professor at Davidson College near Charlotte, North Carolina. "The numbers are going to be horrifying. We're too late."
Bodies are depleted by months of malnutrition and stress. Many Somalis, as evidenced by the throngs of half-living people stumbling into the camps in Mogadishu or the ones here in Dolo, a little town on the Ethiopian border, are too far gone.
"One or two people are surviving from each family," said Lul Mahamoud Ali, a mother of four who recently arrived from a famine-stricken village.
Because of what happened in the 1990s, the American government has helped set up the Famine Early Warning Systems Network, which tracks everything from rainfall to the price of goats to forecast famines worldwide. This has helped aid groups preposition food in Somalia and prepare for the deluge of refugees, though it seems that few anticipated just how bad this famine would be.
Another lesson learned was how to feed people. The approach in the 1990s was to flood Somalia with food aid, which empowered militias, set off conflict between them, and created a criminal network of war profiteers who stood to make millions off looted grain. This time around, the World Food Program and others are still handing out food, but more aid agencies are turning to cash or to food vouchers.
Recently, Chris Smoot, an official with the World Vision aid group, arrived in Dolo with a thick book of food vouchers. He presented them to the young district commissioner, who sat in a twig hut and revealed that he had little experience in dealing with emergencies.
Twenty years after the central government collapsed, this is the story across so much of Somalia. And given the world's limited interest in a major intervention, that is not likely to change anytime soon.
