Friday, September 28, 2007
In the heart of this dust-swept town where scarce bougainvillea brighten faded house fronts, Kalagoy camp is home to some 400 families, most of whom fled clashes raging in Mogadishu.
Some have remained in limbo for six months, among an estimated 83 000 Mogadishu residents who have found shelter in the relative peace of the Lower and Middle Shabelle region - a zone northwest of the capital known as the country's breadbasket.
At a World Food Programme distribution this week carried out under surveillance by Somali policemen slouched in the back of pick-up trucks, rifles propped on their knees, 18-year-old Ubah Yusuf Abdi told her story.
Standing next to a bag of corn three times her weight, she said she fled her southern Mogadishu neighborhood "five months and 20 days" ago.
"There were many shells. One of them hit a house near ours and some people were wounded. We sent a message to relatives in Jowhar and they told us to come here," she said. "It's peaceful here. There is no problem."
Local acting governor Hussein Hassan Mahmud confirmed that many of those flocking to Jowhar were from the capital, where Ethiopian-backed government forces are battling an Islamist-led insurgency.
"Throughout the region, it's peaceful, that's why people are fleeing from Mogadishu to here, because for them, it's a safe haven," he said.
"There was heavy fighting all the time. We could not go outside, we could not get food or fetch water," said another 18-year-old, Fatuma Ali Adow, who walked five days to reach Jowhar.
Nearby, hundreds of locals arrive to pick up food rations, not victims of the violence that has wracked this country for 16 years but of drought and floods that have undermined their livelihood.
The Shabelle usually produces enough maize, rice and sorgho to feed the entire Horn of Africa country but this year's production is expected to be the lowest in 13 years.
"For the last seven or eight years, we have had problems of drought and flooding, without rain," said Mohamed Helowli, an elder from Gedo Barkan village.
"We are under the floods" again, he said, after bursting rivers flowing down from neighbouring Ethiopia - hit with weeks of torrential rain - inundated their fields.
With such seemingly endless calamities, the Somali government, the international community and aid agencies have all warned that an acute humanitarian crisis could take hold in Somalia if nothing is done.
"Years of conflict, years of inflation, years of drought, years of floods. People are extremely resilient but there is a limit below which they just can't cope anymore," said WFP's Somalia chief Peter Goossens.
"I think what you see is a larger and larger part of this population inching towards that line," he said.
Though Goossens said "fund raising is actually pretty good for Somalia", the problems never stop.
"What you now see happening is that every year, you have a larger group of people who can't cope. Every year this program is growing," he said.
"So far we have been able to keep up with the growth of this programme but there must be a limit too somewhere."
Somali aid worker Hawa Mohamed Moallim saw an end to war as the only hope for ending people's misery. "If peace comes back, it will get back to normal," he said.
Source: AFP, Sept 28, 2007