The Jamestown Foundation has a new article by Sunguta West on the targeting of aid agencies in Somalia. Aid groups in the country are increasingly being attacked and humanitarian operations have largely halted due to security concerns. The dangers of aid work come with the territory, but while most attacks against aid workers worldwide are robberies or mistaken identity, the attacks in Somalia, for political reasons, purposely strike against humanitarians.
According to Shaykh Muhammad: “The UN relief agencies took part in the war that resulted in the defeat of the Islamic Courts Union by giving arms, money and fuel to the forces ranged against the mujahideen… I urge the mujahideen to make relief agencies their main target because they are assisting the enemy. This struggle has started and is yet to be accomplished (Codka Nabadda Radio [The Voice of Peace], July 14; Garowe Online, July 14). [Emphasis Mine]
Insurgencies are contests for the minds and will of the population. In the eyes of insurgents, humanitarian organizations are competitors for the support of local populations. Thus, humanitarian NGOs and IGOs threaten to lose their century old, sacred position of neutrality.
Whether we like it or not, in insurgencies nobody is neutral.
UNOSAT gives us a snapshot of the security situation in Mogadishu since the Transitional Federal Government and Ethiopian forces captured the capital in December 2006. The data comes from news reports from the Shabelle Media Network (SMN), Garowe Online (GO), SomaliNet (SN), East African Standard (EAS), The Nation (Nairobi), Kenya Times, Reuters, BBC, AP, AFP, Washington Post & Aljazeera. I’ll hand it off to UNOSAT for a more detailed description. Click the image for the full map in PDF.
This map provides an overview of the reported security events in Mogadishu since the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) and allied Ethiopian forces took control of the capital on 29 December 2006. Security events have been classified according to the type of weapon used: 1-mortars; 2-rocket propelled grenades (RPG); 3-hand grenades; and 4-small arms. Urban areas with increasing concentrations of security events (”hot spots”) have been highlighted with a color scale increasing from blue to red. This intensity image has also been weighted by the type of weapon used, giving prominence to mortars and RPG-based events. Each point symbol represents a specific event in a given location and time. In those instances when multiple mortar shells fell in a specific area on the same day (e.g. 4 mortars fell at the Airport) a single event point symbol was assigned. The spatial accuracy of most points is within 100m of the true location; however a significant minority of events have large degrees of uncertainly and may be accurate only to within a few kilometers. All security-related information used in this analysis has been acquired exclusively from public media sources. The security events depicted on this map have not been independently verified on the ground nor are they likely representative of all security and humanitarian events in this area. Casualty figures recorded for each security event are also likely to be significant underestimates. All security-related data collection, analysis and map production has been done by UNOSAT to help provide the humanitarian community with a spatial context to the ongoing security events in Mogadishu.
Last week the Danes handed over World Food Programme (WFP) ship escorting duties to the Dutch. Since November, all ships carrying WFP aid have been escorted into Somali ports by European naval vessels (French, Danish, and now Dutch). Prior to the military escorts, three ships with WFP food aid were hijacked by pirates. In one case the crew was held for over 100 days. After the hijackings many shipping companies refused to carry aid into Somalia. Only the guarantee of military escorts allowed the Somali food aid to flow again.
The Somali pirates are a great example of “super empowered individuals“. Just a handful of lightly armed para-militaries were able to disrupt food aid feeding two million Somalis for months. If that is not power, I do not know what is.
My favorite United Nations entity, UNOSAT, impresses us again. This time they have a great map of pirate and hijacking activity off the Somali coast from January to December 2007. Click any image to view the full map.
Michael Odenwald and colleagues interviewed 8,723 Somali combatants to assess their use of khat and other drugs [4]. In total, 36.4% (99% confidence interval, 19.3%–57.7%) of respondents reported khat use in the week before the interview.
From: Bhui, Kamaldeep, and Nasir Warfa. 2007. “Drug Consumption in Conflict Zones in Somalia.” PLoS Medicine 4(12):e354 EP -.