Pyrrhic victory in Somalia – humanitarian catastrophe seems now unavoidable

The Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV) warned on Thursday that the continuing fighting in Somalia will most likely produce a humanitarian catastrophe. Almost all the aid organisations have had to stop their work although in the Somali regions bordering on Ethiopia almost 25 percent of the population was undernourished before the Ethiopian army marched in. "Aid workers expect as a result of the fighting 200,000 new refugees, most of whom will look for refuge in Kenya, the neighbouring country to the south”, said the GfbV Africa expert Ulrich Delius. In the past three days already more than 40,000 people have fled from the front. "The civilian population is today already the great loser of this new war in the Horn of Africa.”

After years of drought and now torrential rainfall in recent months the war is threatening a large proportion of the civilian population. Aid workers from many countries had the greatest difficulty to feed the 168,000 refugees from Somalia, who had already before the outbreak of hostilities sought refuge in the north of Kenya. In Somalia itself 1.4 million people are at present dependent on humanitarian aid. This number will now rise dramatically. The infrastructure is so weak that many people can only be reached by air. But on account of the fighting the World Food Programme of the United Nations has temporarily had to be discontinued.

In many regions the food prices have on account of the heavy rains risen by 20 percent since October. "So it will be increasingly difficult for the people to feed themselves and soon they will be dependent on aid from abroad,” warned Delius. "This is a man-made catastrophe, for which those responsible must be brought to justice, since they are playing with the lives of tens of thousands. So the invasion of Ethiopian troops into Mogadishu will be a Pyrrhic victory for the people of the region since it will bring only new fighting and more suffering for the civilian population.”