Wednesday, May 05, 2010
INSIGHT - Babukar Kashka
This humanitarian disaster, tragically common to all war-torn countries and areas, continues to be ignored.
Apparently, the business of killing people is more interesting for politicians and more lucrative for market-based economies than saving lives. The world spends over 1trillion (R7.4trillion) a year on its war machinery.
To quote Al-Jazeera’s Andrew Wander, who reported on April 19: “Fighting, death and destruction on the streets of the Somali capital is nothing new; but now human rights groups are warning civilian suffering is being fuelled by weapons shipments from the very countries that say they want to bring peace.”
The US government shipped about 40 tons of weapons and ammunition to the transitional government last year to bolster its position in the face of increasingly powerful armed opposition groups like Al-Shabaab, according to Wander.
“The US believes the armed groups fighting to topple the government have ties to al-Qaeda and have been alarmed by their takeover of vast swathes of the country,” he said. “But government forces, and the African Union troops tasked with supporting them, have used the weapons to commit what human rights groups say are clear breaches of the laws of war.”
All this leads to questions about the value of statements by representatives of world bodies, such as the call issued by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees urging parties to the conflict to avoid targeting civilian facilities and heavily populated areas of the capital, Mogadishu, which already shelter more than 300000 internally displaced people. For instance, has the international community reacted so far to the fact that more than 100000 people have been displaced from or within Mogadishu since the beginning of this year?
On top of all this, the UN reports that part of its food aid to Somalia ends in the hands of the so-called “warlords” and local contractors who deliver their profits – or the aid itself – to armed factions.
Ongoing drought and civil unrest in central Somalia has left 70% of the population in the region in need of humanitarian assistance. Deepening drought in northern Somalia is now of particular concern, with nearly 300000 people in need of assistance. And one in six Somali children is acutely malnourished – a total of some 240000 children – the highest acute malnutrition rates anywhere in the world. But does anybody care?
Babukar Kashka writes for IDN, InDepthNews, where this article first appeared