From: Jim Rosenfield <jnr@igc.apc.org>
Newsgroups: soc.culture.african
Date: 05 Oct 92 21:37 PDT
Subject: 9/27 Wire stories on hunger
Nf-ID: #N:cdp:1471700153:000:6480
Nf-From: cdp.UUCP!jnr    Oct  5 21:37:00 1992


/* Written  9:45 am  Sep 27, 1992 by jnr in cdp:hunger.general */
/* ---------- "9/27 Wire stories on hunger" ---------- */
 
UPn  09/27  Aid overwhelmed by scale of starvation in Somalia

By MICHA ODENHEIMER

BAIDOAH, Somalia (UPI) -- Thousands of starving Somalian
villagers from as far as 100 miles away have flooded into this
mid-sized town on the Horn of Africa, filling the streets with
their dead and dying.

Feeding centers run by the International Red Cross and other aid
agencies have been unable to stem the tide of death. Up to 300
Somalians die of malnutrition in Baidoah each day.

As hundreds of refugees from the famished countryside pour into
the town each day, Western aid agencies have begun a frantic
effort to reach villagers in the remote outback with food, seeds
and medicine before they, too, take the road in search of food.

When three volunteers from GOAL, an aid agency based in Ireland,
arrived recently in Alumumi, a small village 15 miles south of
Baidoah, the elders took them to the edge of town, away from the
press of emaciated women and children who crowded around their
jeep.

"We cooked our last food four days ago," the elders said. The
villagers had managed to barter some sacks of wheat flour about
three weeks earlier but, before that, there had been no food in
town for a month.

"We ate shoe leather and roots. We tried to hunt for gazelle, but
there are none to be found. The rainy season is two weeks away,"
the elders continued. "And we don't have seeds. Please, please,
could you help us get seeds?"

When the GOAL volunteers asked the villagers to set aside the
weakest, thinnest children and adults for a supplementary feeding
program that would begin the next day, 70 children were brought
forward.

But when the volunteers returned the next day with the food -- a
porridge of high energy powder, beans, rice and grain -- hundreds
of emaciated men, women and children began to emerge from every
corner of the ruined village.

"Where did these people come from?" the villagers were asked.
"Why were they hiding?"

"Shame and weakness," one of the Somalis answered. When the
weakest of the men and women began to eat, their bodies, which
have lost the capacity to absorb food, react with diarrhea or
vomiting. Still, they hungrily return for more.

At Hagarka, a larger village 12 miles farther south, the market
-- a dusty square the size of a football field -- was filled with
merchants and villagers. Rice, flour, sugar, soap and even meat
was available for anyone with money.

But in one corner of the market, a frenzied crowd gathered around
a disputed sack of flour and were tearing it to pieces. A man
with blood flowing from a deep gash on his face was thrown back
from the crowd. In the center of the fray, an old woman grabbed
for the spilling flour with one hand while scratching at her
competitors with the other.

In the village of Gafgudud, the Red Cross had dropped off sacks
of rice a week earlier and the elders organized a daily public
feeding. It was not enough to satisfy some villagers who,
desperate with hunger, clawed at each other as they scraped the
vats for the last grains of rice.

A small child sifted through the ashes near another vat,
searching for grains of rice that might have fallen into the
fire.

The village chief was apologetic and ashamed of the fighting. The
people were tired, desperate and starving, he said. If GOAL came
to the village, he said, the villagers would arrange everything
-- firewood, women to cook the food and guards to ensure there
would be no fighting.

The famine started 18 months ago when soldiers of former dictator
Siad Barre passed through following a popular uprising in
Mogadishu, he said. As they were chased toward Kenya, he said,
the soldiers stole camels and cattle, destroyed houses, killed
many men and raped their women.

Six months ago, Barre's soldiers passed through again on a push
that took them to within 30 miles of Mogadishu. This time, they
took whatever grain and sorghum the villagers had managed to
store, as well as all the seeds for planting, the chief said.

There is food in Baidoah, where much of the population of
villages like Gafgudud and Alumumi have gone. Lines of hungry
people begin forming before dawn outside the feeding centers set
up by the Red Cross and other agencies. Most have spent the night
on the street, as close as possible to the feeding centers,
huddled in thin shawls against the night wind.

Many are alone or with their last living relative -- mothers with
a single child, orphaned children, a man with an infant. Amid all
the despair the most heartbreaking sights are the children who
are alone and lost, squatting in the dirt or shivering against a
wall.

Barreling down the long main street of Baidoah come the men with
the guns, riding pickup trucks armed with machine guns,
anti-aircraft guns or small cannon mounted on metal crossbars
welded to the roof. These are the armored cavalry of the Somali
military.

Somalians call the jury-rigged battle wagons technical cars.
Visiting journalists call them "Mad Maxes" after the
post-apocalypse movie.

The soldiers are as ragged as their vehicles. They have no
uniforms. They are paid rice, if at all. Some are as young as 14
years.

In the early afternoon they begin to chew qat, a narcotic leaf to
which many Somalis are addicted. As the afternoon progresses and
the drug takes effect, the men become wilder and more aggressive.

Baidoah has not been divided into sections by rival factions as
Mogadishu has been, but there is a deep, underlying tension.

The residents of Baidoah, and the surrounding villagers who have
come in search of food, are members of the Rahaween clan. The
soldiers are affiliated with Gen. Muhammed Farrah Aideed, who
belongs to the Habr Gadr, a sub-clan of the dominant Hawiye clan.

The Rahaween have their own political party, the Somali
Democratic Movement, which is loosely allied with Aideed's United
Somali Congress. They resent the unruly soldiers who have come
from Mogadishu to ensure security.

The Rahaween are one of the only clans in Somalia that works the
land. Most other tribes are nomadic shepherds. Perhaps because of
this the Rahaween are far less warlike than most Somali clans.

"This is how it is," a middle-aged Rahaween said. "The meek and
the weak get their faces pushed in the ground." 
---------------------------------------------------------------
Used with permission of United Press International


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