From: darice@yoyo.cc.monash.edu.au (Fred Rice)
Subject: People of Somalia Could Use Your Help
Organization: Monash University, Melb., Australia.
Date: Fri, 24 Jul 1992 07:04:44 GMT


The people of Somalia are literally on the edge of mass
starvation.  Today, while you eat your breakfast, lunch, or
dinner, please also think of those in Somalia who are starving
at this very moment.  The great majority of us have some
excess money - please donate what you can to the Red Cross or
other relief agencies to help the people of Somalia to
survive.

Internet and Usenet have helped us all to realize how much we
all have in common, despite our different nationalities and
cultures.  Please remember your brothers and sisters in
humanity in Somalia, who at this moment could really use your
help.

Somalia is a country located in the "Horn of Africa."  It is
bordered on the west and south-west by Ethiopia and Kenya, and
on the north and east by the Gulf of Aden and the Indian
Ocean.  Roughly half the population of Somalia lives
permanently in settled communities, while the other half are
nomadic.  Somalia's economy is based mostly on agriculture, in
particular livestock-raising; Somalia has few mineral
resources.  Some of the cultural activities of the Somali
people are poetry, folk dancing, the performance of plays, and
singing.  (Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica.)

-- Fred Rice
(please email me at: darice@yoyo.cc.monash.edu.au)

The following is newspaper article on the threatened famine in
Somalia.  It was published in "The Age," a Melbourne
newspaper, Tuesday 21 July 1992, but is originally from the
"New York Times."

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         FAMINE THREATENS TO KILL ONE-THIRD OF SOMALIS

By Jane Perlez, Baldoa, Somalia, Monday.

In the damp, grey dawn in this remote Somali bush town, 25,000
men, women and children, their ribcages protruding, their eyes
listless, shuffle with their last bit of stength towards
outdoor kitchens for a scoop of corn and sugar gruel.

Hundreds, too feeble to eat, die while they wait, and their
bodies are hastily lowered into fresh graves hacked in the red
soil.

According to Mr Geoff Loane, the Red Cross relief coordinator
for Somalia, about 7000 people have died of hunger in the last
month in Baldoa, a town with a fluctuating population of about
40,000, 240 kilometres northwest of the capital, Mogadishu.
Many more died the month before and the death toll is similar
in half-a-dozen other rural Somali towns.

Red Cross officials believe about one-third of Somalia's
people, estimated to number between 4.5 million and six
million, are likely to die in the next six months unless more
food is pumped into the country.

"Here is hell," said Mr Loane, who worked in Ethiopia during
the 1984-85 famine.  "I thought I would never see Ethiopia
again, and I didn't think we would allow it to happen again."

An arid land on the eastern edge of the Horn of Africa,
Somalia has been torn by fierce fighting between rival
militias since its president of 21 years, Mohammed Siad Barre,
was ousted in January 1991.

The warfare has driven people from their homes and fields,
destroyed agriculture and caused desperate hunger across the
nation.  Further, the intense fighting has made delivering
food to the starving people extremely difficult and dangerous.

The Red Cross is managing its biggest operation ever, a $100
million sea, air and land project to deliver food to Somalia,
but the extent of the disaster has staggered even experienced
relief officials.

During the Ethiopian famine in 1985, about one million of the
country's 40 million people died.  The director-general of the
Red Cross, Mr Peter Fuchs, said in a telephone interview from
Geneva that Somalia might well suffer more.

"Unless we step up our efforts, one-third of the people are in
acute danger of disappearing," Mr Fuchs said.  "Those we are
reaching can just survive.  They are not out of danger."

A drought parching a great swath of eastern African, including
Ethiopia and Kenya, has brought the threat of famine to other
countries in the region but none also faces war.

In late May, the Red Cross started open-air kitchens in
Mogadishu.  There are now more than 200 of these in the
capital and another 200 scattered in the countryside, serving
about 500,000 people every day.

But even in Mogadishu, where the food situation has improved
and is better than in the countryside, people are dying as
they wait to be fed.  Mr Nuro Gutale Guled, the head of one of
the kitchens in Mogadishu, said: "I had two people die here
yesterday."

The Red Cross is trying to arrange safe passage from marauding
gangs for food to the Red Cross kitchens.  The supervisor of
the Baldoa kitchen, Mr Mohamed Betar, pointed to about 20
graves in a field across the road.

"Every kitchen has its graveyard," he said.  "This is the
second graveyard for this kitchen.  Every day, we have people
dead at every kitchen.  These are the known ones.  Others die
on the way into town, or in town."

By noon, the weakest of the thousand or so people who were
waiting for food at Mr Betar's kitchen were called to eat.
There was some shoving as corn gruel was heaved out of the
vats and dumped into a variety of containers held by the
hungry: the corner of a shawl, a tattered tin cup, a plastic
bag, even a hat.

The land around Baldoa is usually the granary of Somalia; at
this time of year, the fields should be green with shoulder-
high sorghum.  But fighting between militias affiliated with
Siad Barre and General Mohamed Farrah Aidid has pushed farmers
off their land and made the delivery of seed to sow the
pastures impossible.

The anarchy and looting has pushed tens of thousands of people
into the town, and the war, coupled with the drought, has
destroyed the roots of the nation's agriculture.

About 25 per cent of the cattle and untold numbers of the
country's millions of camels have died, according to Mr
Hussein Iman, the former head of planning for the Agriculture
Department, who now works for the Red Cross.

Somali society, largely nomadic and dependent on the trading
of cattle, camels and sheep, has completely broken down,
according to educated Somalis who have remained in the
country.

There was a glimmer of hope yesterday as a senior UN
representative in Somalia said he had reached an agreement to
allow 46 unarmed UN military observers to go to Mogadishu this
week to monitor a fragile ceasefire and thus hasten the
delivery of relief.

The representative, Mr Mohammed Sahnoun, said General Aidid
had dropped his objections to the small peace-keeping force.
General Aidid had claimed that the UN helped fly in money and
uniforms to a centre north of Mogadishu, but the UN denied the
allegation.

                                        - New York Times
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