Africa News blog
African business, politics and lifestyle
Emerging donors chip away at aid industry’s status quo
By Alex Whiting
Jan 26 (AlertNet) – Where most expat aid workers fear to tread in Mogadishu, recently arrived Turkish aid workers have been driving in the streets, swimming in the sea and praying in local mosques.
Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan visited Somalia in August, the first head of a non-African state to do so for nearly 20 years. The Turks have since opened an embassy, started work on the international airport, offered Somalis university places in Turkey and made plans to build a new hospital.
“Turkey is an animating force in Somalia … The people honestly love them,” said Mustakim Waid, who worked in Mogadishu for the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) — the second-largest intergovernmental organisation after the United Nations.
From Turkey to Brazil, India to Saudi Arabia, a growing number of non-Western donors are bringing fresh funds, a different mindset and their own experience of managing natural disasters to the global humanitarian aid scene.
Until recently most emerging donors focused their aid on their own regions. Some, like India, China and Brazil, were also major recipients of international humanitarian aid.
Rape, corruption in camps blight lives of Somali
By Abdi Sheikh
MOGADISHU, Jan 26 (AlertNet) – Nurto Isak’s food rations are feeding her, her three children, and — she suspects — the militiamen guarding the camp in Mogadishu where she and other uprooted Somalis have taken refuge.
The city is host to more than 180,000 internally displaced people (IDPs) who, like Isak, have fled a killer combination of conflict, drought and hunger back home.
Many risk long, difficult journeys to reach the capital, their sights set on the numerous aid agencies that have set up relief operations to hand out food and treat malnutrition there.
Yet many people at various IDP settlements in the war-torn city complain that food aid is not reaching them and accuse local aid workers working for international and Somali NGOs of taking it to line their own pockets.
“Half of the rations intended for our camp is given to the warlord whose militia are said to be guarding us,” Isak told AlertNet (www.trust.org/alertnet), a humanitarian news service run by Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Operation Somalia: The U.S., Ethiopia and now Kenya
By Aaron Maasho
Ethiopia did it five years ago, the Americans a while back. Now Kenya has rolled tanks and troops across its arid frontier into lawless Somalia, in another campaign to stamp out a rag-tag militia of Islamist rebels that has stoked terror throughout the region with threats of strikes.
The catalyst for Nairobi’s incursion was a series of kidnappings by Somali gunmen on its soil. A Frenchwoman was bundled off to Somalia from northern Kenya, while a British woman and two female aid workers from Spain, abducted from a refugee camp inside Kenya, are also being held across the border.
The incidents caused concern over their impact on the country’s vital tourism industry, with Kenya’s forecast 100 billion shillings or revenue this year expected to falter. The likes of Britain and the United States have already issued warnings against travel to some parts of the country.
Kenyans have so far responded with bravado towards their government’s operation against the al Qaeda-linked al Shabaab group. Local channels regularly show high approval ratings for the campaign, some as high as 98 percent.
“The issue of our security is non-negotiable,” one commentator told a TV station in the wake of the announcement. Another chipped in with: ”We’ve been casual to the extent of endangering our national sovereignty. Kenya has what it takes to get rid of this dangerous threat once and for all.”
useless and insensitive comments ,AU esp Uganda and Burundi were not motivated to deploy their troops in war torn somalia because of money as somebody put it ,it was a pan AFRICAN spirist of the presidents of UG and Burundi , and the human heart to save our brothers and sisters including innocent children .UG and Bur are paying a high price that cant be compared with any material thing. the world shd wake up to the reality that somalia needs every bodys concern and assistance.
Why is the world ignoring Somalia?
I’m blogging from the African Union’s annual summit in Addis Ababa and can see the Somali delegation from where I’m sitting. They’re mingling right now, cups of coffee and croissants in hand, pressing the flesh and smiling and joking with leaders and ministers from all over the continent and beyond. Delegates are responding warmly to the men who represent a government hemmed into only a few streets of the capital Mogadishu as they fight an increasingly vicious Islamist rebellion.
But you get the sense the other delegates are responding so warmly to compensate for something: The fact that the Somalis are here looking for help and nobody is really willing to stick their neck out and give it to them.
Somalia’s strife — as well as the conflicts in Sudan and DR Congo — have dominated the agenda at these summits for years now. But there’s something different about this year. The African delegates seem confused – really genuinely confused – about why the international community is dragging its heels.
When Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero — a guest at the summit – stood up on the opening day he made some of the most dramatic remarks any world leader has made on the Horn of Africa country.
“If we do not support the transitional government more, Somalia could become a place that could destroy humanity,” he said. “The proper response is a strong response from the international community, led by the U.N. Somalia is suffering.”
Strong stuff, but Zapatero didn’t offer any real help. African leaders will have taken heart, though, from the fact that he seemed to be pushing the UN to send in peacekeepers — something the African Union, with its beleaguered force of 5,000 under constant attack in Mogadishu, has been crying out for.
After Zapatero, UN Secretary General, Ban Ki Moon took the podium.
For more in-depth news about Africa, you may want to visit Newstime Africa http://www.newstimeafrica.com – We cover the whole of Africa
I saw movie called “Loard of Wars” it is on same lines. Where Nicholas cage is trader of arms ammunation selling to both parties.
Stormy seas ahead for the pirates?
A new spate of attacks on shipping has made it quite clear that Somali pirates are not going to stop their activities just now, even though military operations by the United States and France have killed five of the buccaneers.
The international naval flotilla is stretched to protect the thousands of ships that use the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean.
Another reason for the pirates’ boldness is believed to have been the onset of good weather, which favours the small speed boats they use to stalk the lumbering merchantmen.
But if the navies’ capabilities are limited by the vast sea area they have to cover, the pirates may soon face a more compelling reason to rein in their activities, as my colleague Abdi Sheikh in Mogadishu reports.
“The sea is calm now, but by May it will be terrible to sail on the Indian Ocean,” said Somali pirate Farah Hussein.
“Our attacks on ships will probably decrease in the coming month. But we might move to the Gulf of Aden to continue our mission,” he told Reuters by telephone.
If the pirates have to confine themselves to the Gulf of Aden, it should be easier for the naval flotilla to catch them, shouldn’t it?
I think that the boats that pass though troubled areas should be equipped with weapons to defend themselves
Somalia’s new chance
How times change. Somalia’s new Islamist president has been feted in Ethiopia, whose army drove him from power two years ago – with Washington’s backing – when he headed a sharia courts movement.
Sheikh Sharif Ahmed was greeted with a standing ovation from African Union leaders at a summit in Ethiopia, which pulled the last of its troops out of Somalia last month, leaving the government in control of little beyond parts of Mogadishu. The hardline Islamist al Shabaab militia control much of the rest of southern Somalia.
Somalia was far from being a prominent front in former President George W. Bush’s “War on Terror”, but the reverse Washington suffered there appears to be among its most dramatic. Meanwhile, the past two years have brought at least another 17,400 civilian dead in Somalia and more anarchy that has fuelled a wave of piracy.
Ahmed’s former administration was marked out by both the United States and Ethiopia as being little different to Afghanistan’s Taliban. Hardline members of the group were accused of links to al Qaeda. Now he is widely described by the international community as a “moderate” and he himself has welcomed the new U.S. stance as positive.
“One can say that the U.S. position towards Somalia has become honest,” he told the Egyptian newspaper el-Shorouk. “In the framework of the Djibouti negotiations, America has become a force which supports peace.”
But Somalia’s new president, chosen by parliamentary vote at the weekend, must now face the al Shabaab militia who grew out of the armed wing of the sharia courts movement but later split with him. Al Shabaab have vowed to fight and highlighted his support from “non-believers”.
To try to bolster Ahmed, Tanzania’s President Jakaya Kikwete, the African Union chairman, called for U.N. troops to join the 3,500-strong AU peacekeeping force in Somalia. Right now, they cannot do much more than to try to defend themselves.
Am sorry to disappoint you and and the many well-wishers from the Abgals, but Like the previous 14 govts, which corrupt UN and EU dipolmats, put together in foreign lands, Mr shraif’s govt is very unlikely to bring peace to southern Somalia. In fact, it is even unlikely to bring peace to the capital let alone the whole of the south. Although,rarely mentioned by Rueters and other western media outlets, the problem in somalia is mainly in the south and central regions which are inhabited by the Hawiye tribe. In reality, the conflict in southern somalia, is a war within the various clans of this tribes, some which have suddenly embraced radical islam as veil to hide their clans’ agenda. It is high time that world leaves southern somalia to its people. The so called AU forces are totally ineffecive and soon or later they will withdraw, just as Ethiopean did this month.
Which way will Somalia go?
The withdrawal of Ethiopian troops from Somalia has left a nation beset by conflict for nearly two decades at a crossroads.
Ethiopia invaded to oust Islamists from the capital, but insurgents still control much of southern Somalia and more hardline groups that worry Washington have flourished during the two-year intervention.
The United Nations is unlikely to send peacekeepers to replace the Ethiopians. Africa is struggling to send more troops to help the 3,500 soldiers from Uganda and Burundi protecting key sites in the capital.
Some analysts say sending an international force would be counterproductive anyway as it would simply replace the Ethiopians as the hated foreign invader and maintain support for the most militant insurgents.
But without more African peacekeepers deploying soon, it seems unlikely the small and largely ineffectual existing force will remain with a weak mandate to face attacks from insurgents.
While a power vacuum may result in even more violence, some Western diplomats in the region hope it will spur the feuding Islamist opposition groups to settle their differences and work towards forming a broad-based, inclusive government.
They also hope the departure of the Ethiopians will deflate the insurgency and marginalise hardline groups imposing a strict version of Islamic law traditionally shunned by many Somalis.
to David:
i suppose, giving independence to Somaliland would only foment irredentist moods among the Somalis living elsewhere. An independent Somaliland may once be recognized by some pro-western government in the South, though in no way by people in the South.
What hope for Somalia?
Fighting in Mogadishu. Kidnaps of foreign aid workers. Hijacks by pirates. Africa’s worst humanitarian crisis.
The news from Somalia seems to be relentlessly negative, writes Reuters Somalia correspondent Guled Mohamed. So it has been for the best part of 17 years since warlords overran the country in 1991 to usher in the modern period of chaos in this part of the Horn of Africa.
African Union peacekeepers have been unable to stem the violence; peace initiatives come and go with little impact; and the 14th attempt to restore central government is struggling as the Ethiopian-backed Transitional Federal Government finds itself up against a resilient insurgent movement including former members of the Islamic Courts Union that briefly held Mogadishu for six months in 2006.
However, tales of hope, entrepreneurship and solidarity abound among Somalia’s 9 million people.
How do you think Somalis can move forward? Can the diaspora wield its economic power to help? Has Ethiopia’s military intervention helped or hindered? Do the Islamic Courts represent the people as their fighters say? How can the world help, or should it just stay out and let Somalis sort things out themselves?
Have your say …
I say on open seas impose a law similar to Texas’s Castle Law. Arm the ships and handle the pirates as they want to handle you. Leave them floating, sharks gotta eat too. The millions being paid out would more than cover armed personel and or anti piracy equipment. These people could care less about you, me, or anything but money. Even the elders look up to these criminals. If the shipping companies would start throwing a little lead at them,things would change. They know that the worst thing they have to face is a firehose. Big Deal!!
