UN races food to hungry Somali refugees

DOLO – The United Nations will airlift emergency rations this week to parts of drought-ravaged Somalia that militants banned it from more than two years ago – a crisis intervention to keep hungry refugees from dying along what an official calls the ‘roads of death.’

The foray into the famine zone is a desperate attempt to reach at least 175 000 of the 2.2 million Somalis whom aid workers have not yet been able to help.Tens of thousands already have trekked to neighbouring Kenya and Ethiopia, hoping to get aid in refugee camps.Some – like Isaac Bulle and his family – have nearly nothing left.’I hope we can cross to Ethiopia, but if we can get help here, we will stay here,’ said Bulle, who travelled with his two wives and 14 children for 25 days by donkey cart to reach this border town. ‘Our aim is just to get food. Not to leave the country.’Restarting the aid effort is a huge challenge for the World Food Programme, whose workers were previously banned from the region by the al Qaeda-linked militant group Shabaab. Fourteen WFP employees have been killed in Somalia since 2008. The new feeding efforts in the four districts of southern Somalia near the border with Kenya and Ethiopia could begin by tomorrow, slowing the flow of tens of thousands of people who have fled their homes in hope of reaching aid.The UN says two regions of Somalia are suffering from famine and that 11 million people are in need of aid. But as of August 1, the UN is set to declare all of southern Somalia – including Dolo – a famine zone.In Rome, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation said a coordination conference would be held today in Kenya.The UN is pressing its efforts to gather $1.6 billion in aid in the next 12 months, with $300 million of that coming in the next three months.WFP executive director Josette Sheeran visited hunger zones in Somalia and Kenya in the last week. She recounted how refugee mothers told her they had to leave children behind to die on the road because they were too weak to walk farther, underscoring how urgently aid is needed inside militant-controlled areas.’We feel an imperative to try to get closer however we can. Humanitarian aid at scale cannot get into hard-core areas of (militant) control, but you build up the ability for people to come out in different directions and get the aid they need,’ she said.But if the refugees are dying before they can reach the food, ‘this is a new dimension to the problem. … These are becoming roads of death,’ Sheeran said.WFP officials, though, admit the difficulties they face in Somalia, and say some corruption of food aid could take place. Stefano Poretti, the Somalia country director for WFP, says there are enough controls in place to ensure it ‘will reduce the risk of misuse.’ – Nampa-AP