From: hrcoord@igc.apc.org (Human Rights Coordinator)
Newsgroups: soc.rights.human
Subject: Re: News stories on African Famine
Date: 14 Sep 92 21:27:00 GMT
Nf-ID: #R:cdp:1476700469:cdp:1476700470:000:3556
Nf-From: cdp.UUCP!hrcoord    Sep 14 14:27:00 1992


/* Written  9:28 am  Sep 14, 1992 by jnr in cdp:hunger.general */
09/14 Somalia's starving fight, gunmen kill for food
By Jonathan Clayton   

BARDERE, Somalia, Sept 14, Reuter - Habiba waited patiently most
of the morning to pass through the narrow entrance into the
feeding centre.   But when her turn came, the crowd behind her
surged and she stumbled and fell.   She was too weak to regain
her footing and her withered three-year-old daughter Marion was
knocked from her back. The two emaciated bodies disappeared under
a sea of legs.   Panic gripped people outside. Fearing they would
lose their place in the queue, more forced their way through the
narrow door. Many fell in a mound of writhing bodies.   "On one
side of the door is life, the other death," said an aid worker in
this famine-hit town in southwest Somalia.   

Guards wielding sticks and the stems of stripped-down umbrellas
beat back the jostling crowd and fastened the door shut again.
Others frantically pulled bodies off the ground.   At the bottom
of the heap, mother and daughter were bloodied and bruised. The
only members of their immediate family still alive, they had
survived another day.   Eyes glazed, Habiba recalled her husband
Siad Osman died long ago -- in the early days of what is called
the "world's worst humanitarian crisis." Their sons succumbed one
by one on the long trek to Bardere.   Food, or even the promise
of it, sets the starving at each other's throats in Somalia.
Gunmen kill to control it. Rumour that something to eat has
arrived somewhere makes people trek for miles under a baking sun.
Some make it, many do not.   

Bodies litter the roadside on the way from the dirt airstrip a
few miles outside Bardere. Skeletal survivors lurk around the
entrances to demolished buildings.   Even if they reach feeding
centres such as the one found by Habiba and her daughter on the
banks of the muddy Juba river, only the lucky ones are admitted
-- some are deemed too close to death to merit feeding.   

Donated food is starting to pour into Somalia but aid workers
fear the scale of the tragedy could be even greater than their
intial estimate that two million were at immediate risk of
starving.   As more and more parts of the country are opened up
they fear a disaster of unparalelled proportions is laying in
wait.   "Those that cannot walk and the very, very weak are
remaining in the villages. There the death rate is very, very
high," said doctor Ayub Sheikh Yerow.   

In Baidoa, about 120 miles (200 km) northeast and at the centre
of Somalia's famine agony, Irish nurse Annita Ennis agreed.
"Things are still very bad, we need to get out to the villages,"
she told Reuters.   Ayub, who works for the United Nations,
opened the first feeding centre in Bardere a few months ago.   He
found a town destroyed by fighting between former rebels and the
remnants of the army of former dictator Mohamed Said Barre.  
Siad Barre was forced out of the capital in January 1991. He took
refuge in the southwest as his country disintegrated into tribal
chaos. In April, he was driven into neighbouring Kenya by the
forces of the country's most powerful warlord, "General" Mohamed
Farah Aideed.   Aid workers were staggered by what they found in
Bardere.   Ayub said: "65-70 per cent of the children are
severely malnourished. That means they are less than 70 per cent
of the weight they should be."   He now runs four feeding centres
in the town, each catering for some 3,000 people. The death toll
has come down from more than 30 a day to between 10 and 12.
Newsgroups: soc.rights.human