Somalia's famine fuels fears of a full-scale war, political instability and a catastrophic humanitarian crisis throughout the Horn of Africa now accentuated by the postponement of this week's donor conference in Addis Ababa, dreads Gamal Nkrumah The militant Islamist Somali militia Al-Shabab has long proved that they will stoop to any murderous depth to entrench their hold on the Somali people. This week they resorted to one of their preferred tactical strategies and evacuated the Somali capital Mogadishu. Fears are mounting that militant Islamist groups in Somalia will return in due course. The international community and continental groupings such as the African Union and the Arab League as well as the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation -- Somalia is a fully-fledged member state of the three aforementioned bodies -- must do more to stem the savagery of Al-Shabab. Somalia has in the heart-wrenching words of a famine victim become a land "where vultures feast". The victims devoured by the vultures in question are not necessarily decomposed bodies of the Somalis that perished in the famine. The political vultures that pitilessly pursue the famished are far more lethal and noxious. If there is a gruesome danger zone in the Horn of Africa emergency aid system, it is the rampant corruption of both donor and recipient nations in the region. The impoverished mainly ethnic Somalis of the Horn are taking a hammering and yesterday's United Nations' conference in Nairobi to raise at least $1.6 billion to help assist humanitarian relief efforts is not exactly a chance to regain lost ground. Emergency meeting such as that at the Food and Agriculture Organisation headquarters based in Rome on Monday will be to no avail if rival regional nations and humanitarian bodies cannot account for the millions of money lost and looted, and not accounted for. But only if public order is maintained can the demoniacal tragedy of the starving millions be rectified. The fiendish wait-and-see tactics only intensifies the sense of impunity among the unscrupulous politicians and policymakers in countries such as Ethiopia and Kenya. It raises the prospect of a confidence-sapping crisis among the victims of famine and bluntly reduces the plight of the victims of famine to a barbarous sideshow. Under such unconventional circumstances, it is perhaps no bad thing to tilt the rules in favour of finding ways to curb the social, political and economic influence of these vultures that are by no means restricted to the religiously conservative zealots. Partly because of the destructive drought and resulting famine, abject poverty has placed a corset on the Somali economy constricting Al-Shabab's capacity to collect sufficient revenue and Islamic taxes from the impoverished people of Somalia. "The humanitarian aid the victims of famine are receiving is insufficient. We are a long way away from deliverance and food security," Moe Hussein, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Somalia advisor and United Nations Coordination officer told Al-Ahram Weekly. The famine in the Horn of Africa is poised to spark a spiral of political instability and violence. The overall effect on the region could be crippling. Hussein had just returned to his base in the Kenyan capital Nairobi from a fact-finding mission to the famine ravaged regions of Somalia. He told the Weekly that he believes the rains that normally fall in September and October will not suffice to ward off the worst impact of the famine. "People are too weak to fill the land and will have to rely on food aid for the rest of 2011 and maybe well into 2012." The deplorable truth is that insecurity in Mogadishu is unlikely to lessen with the ouster of Al-Shabab from the city. Marauding gangsters are still roaming the city and warlords galore are flexing their muscles now more so than when Al-Shabab promulgated strict Islamic Sharia law. Hundreds of thousands of homeless Somalis are streaming into Mogadishu from the scorched and war-ravaged countryside. AU peacekeepers need to protect the displaced people as well as the aid convoys. These are perilously difficult times in Somalia. It is perhaps also against this grim backdrop that news of the AU's decision to postpone a donor's conference scheduled to have taken place this week in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa disheartened and frustrated many Somali victims of the famine. Their hopes were so cruelly dashed as they pinned much hope on moves that would make the international climate more conducive to broadening the global effort to combat hunger, malnutrition and disease in the Horn of Africa and focus world attention on the Apocalyptic catastrophe gripping the region. These are climacteric constraints the Somali people can no longer afford. The AU postponed by two weeks a donor conference designed to raise funds for the famine victims in the Horn of Africa. International, continental and regional organisations are obliged to find better and more effective ways and means to support local Somali decision-making. Ultimately, the bloodthirsty Al-Shabab stranglehold can only be untangled with the consent of the innocent victims affected by its vicious regimen and reign of fear. "The extremists are using desperate measures to achieve their ends through their willingness to use brutal violence during the holy month of Ramadan," a spokesman for the AU's peacekeeping mission warned. After the paralysis of the regional food supply chain caused not simply by the drought but more crucially by political factors, there have been the inevitable calls for a rethink in long-term strategies to halt the endless cycles of famine in the Horn. Just-in-time supply systems, including emergency humanitarian assistance and food aid, simply will not do. However, the governments of the region in conjunction with international donors must attend to means as well as ends. The International Committee of the Red Cross has asked donors for $87 million more. Given the persistent political tensions in the region, both inter-regional and intra- national, perhaps long-term strategies that give a nod to localism must be taken more seriously. The concept of sustainable development should not remain so elusive as far as the Horn of Africa is concerned. "The move comes in response to a situation that is becoming ever more desperate," explains the President of the International Committee of the Red Cross Jakob Kellenberger. He, too, predicted that the disruption in food supplies would last until the end of the year. "Hundreds of thousands of Somalis face life- threatening food and water shortages," the Red Cross chief noted. Kellenberger stressed that unless the international community is galvanised into serious action then the situation will worsen and that is tantamount to mass starvation and genocide. "Urgent humanitarian assistance is crucial to alleviate the impact of the drought which has deprived people from water and sanitation, health, basic food and nutritional needs," read an AU statement. And while the world is watching the humanitarian disaster unfold in Somalia, the situation in neighbouring Ethiopia and Kenya is fast worsening. Indeed, this week the UN has classified the Kenyan food crisis as one notch from famine. "The food security situation in northeastern Kenya in areas adjacent to the Somali border is bad enough," the UNDP's Hussein told the Weekly. However, he added that it is not half as bad as the prevailing conditions in Ethiopia's Ogaden region inhabited in the main by ethnic Somalis and in southern and central Somalia. Better organised water systems, land and markets in the northern autonomous regions of Somaliland and Puntland are marginally less unsatisfactorily. They are less poorly precisely because of the improved security situation in these regions in spite of the fact that the drought is as severe as in southern and central Somalia if not more so. The images of the dead and dying Somalis horrify the world. Nevertheless, suspicions are mounting that the global climate changes are not alone to blame. Analysts are now pointing accusing fingers on the very international humanitarian assistance groups that are supposed to rescue the Somali people from famine. "The World Food Programme, one of the UN's biggest aid agencies, has a very nasty history in Somalia," says Thomas Mountain, perhaps the only independent Western journalist living and reporting from Eritrea since 2006. Western nations, Mountain believes, are turning a blind eye to their political allies in the Horn of Africa. "While some 10 million Somalis living in the Ogaden in Ethiopia are the victims of a drought and food aid blockage the WFP remains silent, complicit in genocide," Mountain insists. The Ogaden region is ravaged by political unrest with ethnic Somali groups struggling for national determination and secession much to the chagrin of the Ethiopian authorities. The Ogaden Liberation Movement and other separatist ethnic Somali groups in eastern Ethiopia are trying to assert control of the vast, arid, drought-prone and sparsely- populated region that is administratively part and parcel of Ethiopia. United States Vice President Joe Biden's wife Jill is currently on a tour of Daadab camp in northeastern Kenya to assess the humanitarian crisis there. It is doubtful that she will be welcome in neighbouring Ogaden since her personal security cannot be guaranteed and Washington would not want to attract too much public attention to atrocities taking place in a politically volatile region of one of its closest African allies. Opposition activists among Ethiopia's large immigrant community in the US are drawing attention to the contradictions in spite of repeated claims by the Ethiopian authorities that the country is facing foreign conspiracies designed to sow sectarian and ethnic strife. Ethiopian opposition activists retort that the authorities in Addis Ababa are deliberately stoking sectarian and ethnic tensions to raise the spectre of sectarian chaos in peripheral areas such as Ogaden. Under such convoluted political complexities it is no surprise that the AU decided to postpone the Addis Ababa donor conference. Developments within Somalia itself highlight the volatility of the political situation in the country. "The extremists are using desperate measures to achieve their ends through their willingness to use brutal violence during the holy month of Ramadan," claimed a spokesman for the AU's peacekeeping mission in Somalia, AMISOM. "The Somali government welcomes the success attained by the Somali government forces backed by AMISOM who defeated the enemy, Al-Shabab." Somali President Sheikh Sharif Ahmed was quoted by Reuters as saying that the militant Islamist group has been routed once and for all. The Somali Transitional National Government (TNG) is collaborating closely with the AU peacekeeping forces, primarily Ugandan troops, in order to stamp out resistance by the militant Islamists. Al-Shabab launched a Ramadan offensive, but was rebutted by a powerful combination of government forces, AU peacekeepers and militias loyal to Ahl Al-Jamaa wal Sunna, a moderate Islamist group of mainly Sufis. In the aftermath of the routing of Al-Shabab, the Somali government declared Mogadishu "Free Territory". Moreover, the most important Somali clan in and around Mogadishu, the Hawiya, openly declared their unconditional support for the TNG. The Hawiya traditional elders' council on Sunday warmly welcomed the forced expulsion of Al-Shabab from the Somali capital. It is still unclear whether the "tactical withdrawal" of Al-Shabab from Mogadishu, as the militant Islamists purport, will actually mitigate the long-term effects of food shortages on Somalia. AMISOM peacekeepers and TNG spokesmen reported that the retreating Al-Shabab headed towards the Lower Shebelle and Middle Shebelle regions, respectively south and north of the Somali capital. Moreover, military observers noted that the last of Al-Shabab militiamen to leave Mogadishu hastily vacated the Suuqa Xoolaha, the main market serving northern Mogadishu. They also reported that intense clashes erupted between the retreating Al-Shabab and AMISOM and TNG forces in the districts of Bondhere, Howl Wadaag and Wardhigley. A particularly painful symbolic blow for Al-Shabab was when they were forced out of Mogadishu Stadium. Al-Shabab, a youth-led militant Islamist protest movement that models itself on Afghanistan's Taliban, is not yet a spent force. They are widely expected to highlight their resistance to what they see as secular rule by a series of high-profile hit-and- run terrorist attacks that are likely to rock the Somali capital in the months ahead. Their strategy threatens to inject new momentum into their jihad to impose their version of militant Islam over the whole of Somalia. Where that leaves the starving and malnourished millions in Somalia remains a calamitous mystery.
