From the Field - Messages from Aid Workers in Somalia

by Michael Bear

category: Humanitarian Relief

Published November 09, 2008 @ 01:36PM PT

Following today's earlier post, wanted to run two messages I recently received from NGO friends working on Somalia, to give a sense of what it's like trying to work in a country which makes Mad Max - or your average Bruegel or Bosch painting - seem like a veritable paradise.

First message:

"The few opportunities we had for getting things done are slipping away - regardless of how much we try to 'think outside the box.' We have sacrificed so much from the point of view or our humanitarian principles and placed such incredible pressure on our Somali colleagues, that we have lost the capacity to see things how they really are.  Looking at the international response to the Congo is very interesting.  Compare it to the international response to Somalia...

As aid workers, we struggle to get our headquarters to understand how dangerous it is as if it is incomprehensible to many that the face of an aid worker and the flad of an NGO is no longer enough to secure access and the broad acceptance we have enjoyed in the past.

To read more, see below:

How did it get this far?  To be honest, I don't know where to start but it is certainly necessary that the 'aid community', the label that covers everything but means very little, look at how little space we have left within which to operate.  It begs the questions, is it that we no longer have enough to offer?  Is it that communities are so confused and weak, scared and exhausted that they can no longer negotiate for NGOs against those who have becoming massively powerful and apparently fearless, lawless and devoid of compassion?  Is it that our 'independence' as non-governmental has been eroded and we are as bag a part of the problem as the solution?  Is it better to do nothing than to do more harm?

Somalia is facing a massive humanitarian catastrophe but yet it seems that the more NGOs try to operate as close to the business as usual model, the more damage we do and the more access shrinks.  This is tragic beyond belief and possibly the most awful and complex situation the 'aid community' have had to face for a very long time.  Is there the capacity to try and face the reality of the situation and then look at how we can possibly do something that isn't going to make things even worse?  I don't know but it seems we are rapidly running out of time."

Second message, from another friend working on Somalia:

"Somalia, the completely forgotten and totally ignored crisis – unless an aid worker gets killed, international aid agency is threatened, or a ship with rich westerners or western weapons is hijacked.  The Enough Project and many others have done a great job of keeping Darfur on the front burner, Iraq/Pakistan/Afghanistan is covered by the news (albeit with a bias) and the situation in Ethiopia is also getting press. 

However, there continues to be little attention paid to the impact of the last 2 years of fighting the Global War on Terror [GWOT] in the Horn on Somalia and the Somalis themselves:  Mogadishu has become a ghost town, with an estimated 10,000 civilians have been killed in the fighting (it is unclear how many have died due to lack of food, medical care, etc), the south/central part of the country is rapidly heading towards a major crisis reminiscent of the situation in the early 1990s, and Somalia is further away from stability than it has ever been.   

While the Islamic Courts Union [ICU] was not perfect, by any stretch of the imagination, they were most certainly not a Somali form of the Taliban – there is no history in Somalia of support for Wahabism (while in Afghanistan the roots of Wahabism date back to the 19^th century), the ICU successfully challenged the power of the warloads (as opposed to the Transitional Federal Government [TFG] which included them in the government), and the Somalis themselves were starting to put limits on the restrictions they would accept from the ICU (based on the more moderate form of Islam has historically been practiced in Somalia). 

As noted by the BBC in one of its reports – under the ICU, there was a marked drop in piracy along the Somali coast, as they would not stand for it, and during the six months that the ICU controlled Mogadishu, the road blocks and checkpoints came down, weapons disappeared from the streets, and for the first time since the fall of Siad Barre, people could freely move around all of Mogadishu.  Rather than welcoming the ICU as a force that was capable of establishing a modicum of law,  order and stability in South/Central, the Ethiopians (with US support) under the guise of the GWOT have managed to plunge Somalia into an even greater political, security and humanitarian crisis.  I must say, what has happened over the past two years in Somalia is a textbook example of how not to win the hearts and minds of people in the GWOT !"

[Bruegel - The Triumph of Death]