Tuesday, July 15, 2008
A statement from the UN Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator for Somalia Mark Browden said attacks on United Nations and Non-Governmental Organizations working in the Horn of Africa was intolerable.
"It is intolerable and incomprehensible that humanitarian workers striving to save lives and alleviate human suffering in one of the most difficult environments in the world are being targeted and killed," Bowden said in reaction to the killing of two Somali nationals employed by humanitarian NGOs in Mogadishu on Friday.
The attacks on humanitarian workers came less than a week after the brutal murder of the officer in Charge of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) in Mogadishu.
The recent killings bring to 19 the number of aid-related workers killed in Somalia this year.
"It is also very worrying that the general level of violence in large parts of Somalia has been constantly rising this year and has reached unacceptable levels of civilian casualties," Browden said.
The United Nations, for its part, is urgently taking measures to ensure the protection of its staff working in Somalia while at the same time allowing them to carry on with their vital humanitarian work. These measures involve prioritization of essential operations.
"What I must emphasize once again is that we, as humanitarians, depend on the Somali people to assist us in getting the assistance through. Somali communities have been very supportive of humanitarian work in the past. We ask them to redouble their efforts to provide an environment in which aid and services can be delivered," said Bowden.
Suspicion for the attacks has fallen on a hardline Islamist opposition faction based in Eritrea, which rejected a peace deal signed last month in Djibouti between the Ethiopia-backed government and a more moderate opposition faction.
The hardline Islamists, along with a militant Somali group called the Shabab, have vowed to continue fighting until all Ethiopian troops leave Somalia.
Ethiopia's military intervened in Somalia in late 2006 to remove Islamists from power and to install the country's secular government in its place.
That move sparked a bloody, Islamist-led insurgency, which has left thousands dead and more than 1 million people displaced.
Source: Xinhua, July 15, 2008