From: Dorothy Morse <dmorse@igc.apc.org>
Newsgroups: alt.activism
Date: 27 Aug 92 19:14 PDT
Subject: Re: SOMALIA action materials and news
Nf-ID: #R:cdp:1296500303:cdp:1296500316:000:3112
Nf-From: cdp.UUCP!dmorse    Aug 27 19:14:00 1992


Concerning the flights "seen on CNN."  If these were US military flights,
I believe they were going to Kenyan refugee camps, near Wajir, and not
into Somalia.  The first US flight into Somalia proper is supposed to begin
tomorrow, I am told by a reporter of my 'hometown newspaper' (concerning
which more later).

There was a flight Saturday that delivered, I believe, 10 tons of split peas
to a Kenyan refugee camp.

There was also a flight into Somalia made by the World Food Program, I believe
on a UN plane, carrying about 18 tons of high-protein biscuits into Baidoa.
The World Food Program plans to airlift 5000 tons to rurual centers.

According to Trevor Page, newly appointed head of the World Food Program of
the UN, the country needed 400,000 tons of food this year.  (Please note
that the ICRC has increased its monthly estimate to 60,000 metric tons a month,
making 720,000 metric tons a year.)

The point of this post is that to say "food is being sent" so quit bothering
people with your faxes is, in my opinion, too superficial an approach.

Food has always been being sent to Somalia.  The question has been, how
much food is being sent.  We have repeatedly seen from any number of
postings and quotations from relief workers that the strategy the aid
agencies want is to "flood the country with food."  One planeload
to a refugee camp does not do that.  It may make a reassuring image on TB
but it is not a real assurance that the situation is being taken care of
and we can all write a check to the ICRC and forget about communicating
with the government.

The history to this point is, in fact, that the situation has not been
well taken care of.

Jane Perlez of the New York Times interviewed Trevor Page, and her story
was published in the Anchorage Alaska Daily News, where I happened to see it.
The story dates from August 16.

BAIDOA, SOMALIA.--The famine in Somalia could have been mitigated if the UN
had dispatched relief flights months ago, instead of relying on a small
crew of juniort staff members in the country, a senior UN official says.

"It's so bad because we've let things simmer without paying proper attentio,"
said Trevor Page, the newly appointed head of the World Food Program in 
Somalia.

"We've had inexperienced people who don't know what they're seeing, who don't know what the 

know what the implications are, and didn't blow the whistle."

Page, who has worked for the UN agency for 30 years, and who directed all
the emergency programs in the 1980's, said he had not seen such human
suffering since the Biafra famine of thelate 1960's and the Bangladesh
crisis of 1971.  "But in those places we were much better organized,"
he said.

_______

I also read tonight a quote from the commander of the Pakistani forces
(the 500 peacekeepers already approved, who will, according to Allen Wheat's
office, probably arrive on Labor Day), Imtiaz Shaheen, who said that
things should never have been allowed to go so far--that something should
have been done months ago.  As a Pakistani army officer, Shaheen is probably
not a "bleeding-heart."


Please see next post.

Newsgroups: alt.activism,soc.college,talk.politics.misc