#and a few years later obama's executive - again under the auspices of the patriot act - blocked

[thevividgreenmoss]

The basic facts are these: the famine struck the people of south-central Somalia, chiefly farming communities who had long been unable to reap the fruits of their labours because their lands were targeted by better-armed political-military factions. On top of this came onerous taxation policies enforced by the militant group al-Shabaab, war between al-Shabaab and the Ethiopian and Kenyan troops stationed as part of the African Union Mission in Somalia, and corruption in the internationally recognized Transitional Federal Government. The twin triggers for the crisis were a severe drought and a sharp rise in the market price of food – the second wave of the so-called “global food crisis” when Wall Street commodity speculators briefly but calamitously pushed up the international price of staple foods to twice their previous levels.

Over years of working in the most difficult conditions, relief workers in Somalia and neighbouring countries developed a system for predicting food crises: the dourly named Integrated Food Security Phase Classification system (IPC scale). In 2010, the IPC did its job. Maxwell and Majid write: “this crisis was well predicted. [But] a crisis that might have prompted a major food aid response under other circumstances instead simply failed to elicit any proportionate response for a period of nearly ten months”. This was the final factor: emergency aid wasn’t automatic and was obstructed by other priorities.

Humanitarian action is funded case by case, cash in hand. As argued by Daniel Clark and Stefan Dercon in their book Dull Disasters (2016), “This ad-hoc, post-disaster model for financing disasters is hardly worthy of the twenty-first century. In fact it feels distinctly medieval”. Clark and Dercon liken it to benefactors tossing coins to beggars lined up outside a cathedral or mosque, their generosity depending on the coins in their hand and pity in their hearts.

Our disaster relief system isn’t just rudimentary, but dependent on all kinds of other political bargaining. So it was in Somalia: after the IPC warnings, food aid actually dropped by about 80 per cent. The reason was what Maxwell and Majid call a “competing imperative”: the War on Terror. Al-Shabaab had just been designated a terrorist organization and the Obama administration shut down the aid pipeline under the US Patriot Act which prohibits any “material support” to terrorists. This includes assistance inadvertently given, for example if a lorryload of food aid is stolen, or militants manning a checkpoint are paid off to let the life-saving assistance pass. It is a fact of life that food aid pipelines are leaky: some relief finds its way to the pockets of trucking companies, government officials and the armed groups active among stricken communities. But the maxim attributed to Ronald Reagan, “a starving child knows no politics”, doesn’t apply in the War on Terror. For ten months, relief officials in the UN and the US Agency for International Development argued with the US Department of the Treasury and Department of Justice, before the latter agreed a “workaround”. Counter-terror legislation still casts a chill over humanitarian work in Somalia – as well as in Syria, Yemen and previously in Sri Lanka. President Bill Clinton famously apologized for America’s failure to stop the Rwanda genocide. President Barack Obama has yet to acknowledge any commensurate failing in Somalia.

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/humanitarian-effectiveness-starvation-famines-somalia-syria/

“The suffering played out like a drama without witnesses,” said Philippe Lazzarini, UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Somalia, reacting to the findings in a new report funded and commissioned by the UN Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO).

Some 133,000 of the Somalis who perished – about half – were children under five, according to FAO’s Food Security and Nutrition Analysis Unit for Somalia (FSNAU), which carried out the study along with the USAID-funded Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET).

Calling the magnitude of the mortality figures “unsettling”, Mr. Lazzarini said the report confirms “that we could have done more before famine was declared on 20 July 2011” and that it will help ensure “that Somalia never goes through another famine again.”

He added that “warnings that began as far back as the drought in 2010 did not trigger sufficient early action. In the worst affected areas, access to people in need was tremendously difficult.

At the peak of the crises, between May and August 2011, about 30,000 excess people died per month, according to the study.

“An estimated 4.6 per cent of the total population and 10 per cent of children under 5 died in Southern and Central Somalia,” FAO reported. “Lower Shabelle, Mogadishu, and Bay were hardest hit.”

https://news.un.org/en/story/2013/05/438682-somalia-famine-killed-nearly-260000-people-half-them-children-reports-un

#and a few years later obama's executive - again under the auspices of the patriot act - blocked #money transfers to somalia cutting off remittances sent by expats to their families which comprised an enormous percentage of the country's #economic funds :)))))) #first piece above is by a dyed in the wool lib and second is from the UN so of course neither even begin to touch on #the american government's role in fucking ip the country in the first place from HW Bush through Obama and now Trump with cia-led covert op #support for a rotating cast of warlords and the creation of the incompetent and.corrupt TFG in the first place and drone warfare and #organizing invasions of forced from neighboring countries and torture cells and on and on