MEDIAWATCH: Somalia heads for crisis

Violence has raged in Somalia since U.S.-backed Ethiopian troops entered the country in December 2006, and news organisations are cottoning on to warnings the country is plunging further into chaos.

U.S. magazine Newsweek sounds the alarm with a report that humanitarian conditions are deteriorating dramatically, in part due to difficulties getting aid into the country.

Six aid workers have already been killed in Somalia this year, and just 2,000 humanitarian staff work there - six times fewer than in Sudan's Darfur region.

"I truly believe this is the worst humanitarian crisis on the continent, possibly in the world," Philippe Lazzarini, the United Nations' top humanitarian official for Somalia tells the magazine.

A Somali boy walks along a deserted street that was once one of the busiest in the Somali capital Mogadishu. REUTERS/Omar Faruk

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) echoes these fears.

The conflict is intensifying due to heavy waves of violence in the Mogadishu and beyond, adding to numbers of people already displaced, the ICRC says. Three years of inadequate rainfall and a sharp rise in the cost of living mean many displaced families are living on less than one meal a day and have to spend increasing proportions of their meagre income on drinking water.

"These families are enduring the extremities of suffering," Daniel Gagnon, a ICRC relief specialist in Somalia, says. "The living conditions are shocking. In some places, food, water, essential household items, and sanitation facilities are scarce or non-existent."

Backed by Ethiopian troops, Somalia's interim government is battling an Iraq-style insurgency after ousting Islamists from the capital Mogadishu. A million people are believed to have been displaced by violence, and 1.4 million are facing a humanitarian emergency.

The declining situation shows how far the U.S.-backed Ethiopian intervention is worsening conditions in the country, according to a commentator writing for Canada's Globe and Mail newspaper.

"After more than a year of occupation, the picture is one of assassinations, bombings, looting, media repression and systematic displacement. Worse, there is no end in sight to the quagmire," the commentator says.

The Ethiopian presence is radicalising more Somali insurgents, and the international community must do more to initiate a "Somali-owned peace process", the paper writes.

Somali news website Garowe Online says the U.S. strategy in Somalia is failing. Pointing to recent U.S. cruise missile attacks against suspected Islamist insurgents in the southern Somali village of Dobley, the site says that rather than strengthening the position of the country's Ethiopian-backed Transitional Federal Government (TFG), the assaults are likely to weaken the government's position.

"The argument could easily be made that such pre-emptive acts weaken, not strengthen, the already fragile TFG position in Somalia," it says.

"Anti-government groups leading the muqawama (meaning "resistance" in Arabic) insurgency find new recruits on a daily basis, because they can point to inexcusable acts like the bombing of civilian homes in Dobley to rightly or wrongly portray the TFG as a government created by foreign powers to repress Somali liberation."

Meanwhile, South Africa's Mail and Guardian newspaper writes that street children living in Somalia's capital are among the country's most vulnerable groups.

"War and poverty have thrown thousands of children on to the streets of the Somali capital, leaving them in the crossfire of one of the world's most brutal guerrilla wars and exposed to disease, drugs and sexual violence," writes the paper.

In the volatile area around the capital's Bakara market, clusters of children as young as eight gather to raid the city's rubbish bins, gathering plastic bottles and bags to sell on. The U.N. estimates that there are around 5,000 street children in the capital, and school is a distant hope for many.

Mustafa Daud, a boy of 12 years old, told the paper he would one day like to become a doctor or a successful businessman with hundreds of people working for him.

"It must be nice to be rich and loved by everyone."

But in the midst of the hazardous conditions of Bakara market, businesses are still finding novel ways to survive, as Reuters reports.

In the capital's precarious market area, an entrepreneur and an aid group are attempting to revive Somalia's economic prospects by producing some of the world's highest quality sesame seeds. Together the two have built a small plant to process the oilseeds, helping Somali farmers to triple their profits by bringing their sesame up to international standards.

Now Somali farmers will be able to process their own sesame seeds, rather than sending them to other countries.

SOURCE: Reuters, March 12, 2008

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