NAIROBI, Kenya — To save themselves, Rahmo Ibrahim
Madey and three of her children escaped on foot this month from southern
Somalia’s Bakol region — a drought-racked land controlled by the
Islamist militants of al-Shabab.
Less than 20 miles from their destination, the
government’s makeshift refugee camps in the battered capital of
Mogadishu, Madey’s 1-year-old daughter, Fadumo, died of starvation.
Days later at a camp in northern Mogadishu, under a
shelter of plastic sheets and castaway fabric, the 29-year-old mother
spooned small helpings of porridge into the mouth of her 4-year-old
daughter, Batulo.
“She is dying,” Madey said, knowing she could do
nothing. The porridge was the family’s last bit of food, and it made no
difference for the girl. She died within minutes.
This camp, built around government buildings whose
shell-scarred ruins give evidence of Somalia’s long civil war, is
crowded with some 2,000 people, and more arrive every day. Many bring
tales of loss and suffering, like Madey.
They are refugees not just from persistent drought
but from Somalia’s war, and they represent just a few of the estimated
10 million people facing severe thirst and hunger in the Horn of Africa —
parts of Somalia, Kenya, Ethiopia and Djibouti.
Al-Shabab, which has been fighting the Somali
government for years, had sharply limited the presence of aid agencies
in regions of the country it controls. Days ago, the group announced it
was lifting the ban, but no one could be sure how much help would arrive
or how soon.
“It’s obviously good news, but it takes some time
before we’re on the ground. There are logistical pipelines that need to
be set up,” said Gabriella Waaijman, East Africa regional head of OCHA,
the United Nations body that coordinates humanitarian help.
Every day now, she said, about 1,500 refugees are
pouring into aid camps in Ethiopia, while another 1,500 are struggling
to make their way toward camps in Kenya. Almost all the current refugees
are Somalis, she said.
“The main reason we’re seeing so many coming across
the border into Ethiopia and Kenya is we couldn’t reach them where they
live,” Waaijman said.
At Dadaab in northeastern Kenya, whose three camps
together make it the largest refugee complex in the world, some 372,000
refugees jostle for space in a complex built in the early 1990s to hold
just 90,000.
With 1,300 new arrivals every day, the
50-square-kilometer complex “is effectively the third largest city in
Kenya,” said Stephen Gwynne-Vaughan, director of the aid agency CARE
International in Kenya. “And if you look on a map it’s not even there.”
Most of last year, he said, the influx of refugees
was a more manageable 4,000 people a month. Last month, he said, the
numbers had risen to above 1,000 a day. The Kenyan government gives the
refugees only temporary asylum, though this asylum can last for decades.
A tiny few are relocated to Western countries.
He called the crisis in the Horn of Africa “probably
the worst humanitarian disaster” in the world. He said that some parts
of Kenya have seen less than a tenth of their average rainfall over the
last two seasons. Many people had not fully recovered from an earlier
two-year drought, ending with the rains of 2009, when the current
drought struck.
People walk for days to reach the camps, and they are
most vulnerable to starvation, thirst or attack en route. There are
reports of people leaving their children in the bush along the way
because they are too weak to go the distance, he said, but these reports
are difficult to verify.
“This is a protracted emergency,” Gwynne-Vaughan said. “All that distance in between is where they’re most likely to be killed.”
Many Somalis are pastoralists who for years followed
their animals from dry land to better grazing land — often venturing
into Ethiopia and Kenya — but the fighting in Somalia, tighter borders
and clashes over disputed land have altered migration patterns.
“They’re left with few options,” Gwynne-Vaughan said.
“Certainly there’s no single easy solution. The ultimate solution is
peace in Somalia. That’s out of our control.”
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