Somali Militant Beatings Worsen Spiral of Famine as Refugees Flee Drought
Somali Drought, Extortion by Al-Shabaab Rebels Fuel Famine
Paul Richardson/Bloomberg
Abdi Hassan, a camel herder whose left hip and knee were smashed by al-Shabaab militants demanding some of his animals as a tax, lies in a hospital bed at the Ifo Hospital in the Dadaab refugee camp in northeastern Kenya.
Abdi Hassan, a camel herder whose left hip and knee were smashed by al-Shabaab militants demanding some of his animals as a tax, lies in a hospital bed at the Ifo Hospital in the Dadaab refugee camp in northeastern Kenya. Photographer: Paul Richardson/Bloomberg
Osoba Hassan
Paul Richardson/Bloomberg
Osoba Hassan stands outside her makeshift home with three of her children at the Ifo camp in the Dadaab refugee complex in northeastern Kenya.
Osoba Hassan stands outside her makeshift home with three of her children at the Ifo camp in the Dadaab refugee complex in northeastern Kenya. Photographer: Paul Richardson/Bloomberg
Abdi Hassan lies in a hospital bed in the world’s biggest refugee camp recovering from a beating by tax collectors from Somalia’s al-Qaeda-inspired militants who smashed his left hip and knee with rifle butts.
The 20-year-old herder refused to hand over some of his camels to the militants, known as al-Shabaab, or “the youth” in Arabic, who confiscate crops and livestock from civilians to help finance their campaign to overthrow Somalia’s western- backed government. The militants generate $70 million to $100 million a year from taxation and extortion, the United Nations Monitoring Group on Somalia and Eritrea estimated last month.
“Al-Shabaab used us for tax, but those of us who refused were attacked,” Hassan said in an interview at the Ifo hospital in the Dadaab refugee camp in northeastern Kenya. “I resisted and they beat me. Now I can only lie on one side and I need my mother’s help to move.”
With East Africa hit by what the UN says is the worst drought in six decades, threatening 12 million people with hunger, the insurgents’ levies are squeezing an increasingly destitute population, exacerbating Somalia’s spreading famine. Al-Shabaab’s own military and financial power is waning. Last week, it withdrew from Mogadishu, the capital, after defeats by African Union-backed government forces.
The $1 million a month the group once earned by controlling the southern port of Kismayo has dwindled because the growth of piracy off the Horn of Africa nation’s coast has cut the number of vessels visiting the area, said Bronwyn Bruton, a Somalia researcher and former fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Swelling Exodus
In addition, the exodus of farmers is slashing the $500,000 a month al-Shabaab was earning from confiscating a portion of their crops and livestock and trading in charcoal, she said.
More than 184,000 people have fled Somalia so far this year to countries including neighboring Kenya, Ethiopia, Djibouti and Yemen. The exodus has swelled the number of Somali refugees in the region to more than 800,000 and overwhelmed international efforts to deal with them.
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs says donors so far have provided 46 percent of the $2.46 billion needed to deal with the effects of the drought.
Dadaab, which was built 20 years ago for 90,000 refugees, now is a complex of three camps and is home to more than 400,000 people, making it Kenya’s third-largest population center, after Nairobi and Mombasa, according to the 2009 census.
Acute Malnutrition
The U.S.-funded Famine Early Warning Systems Network estimates that 38 percent of the population in southern Somalia is suffering from malnutrition. About half of the country’s 7.8 million people need food aid, 560,000 of them children who are either acutely or severely malnourished, Fewsnet said on its website.
“The worst is yet to come because the drought isn’t likely to end for the next two to three months,” Abubakar Mohamed Mahamud, a field coordinator for MSF, or Doctors Without Borders, a medical charity founded in France, said in an interview in Dadaab. “Even when the rains do come, there won’t be food within a month.”
Al-Shabaab has described the UN’s declaration of a famine in Somalia on July 20 as a “baseless claim” and has blocked most humanitarian groups from operating in areas under its control.
Troops Needed
Somali President Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed has visited three East African countries since al-Shabaab’s exit from Mogadishu, issuing appeals in Tanzania, Uganda and Burundi for more forces to bolster the African Union’s peacekeeping mission there. Only Uganda and Burundi now contribute peacekeepers to the mission.
As the civilians flee Somalia, they face a gauntlet of Al- Shabaab gunmen trying to stop them, says Rahul Oka, an economic anthropologist at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, who has been researching Islamist movements in East Africa for five years.
“They don’t want people leaving their areas because of the tax they take from residents,” he said in a phone interview from Mombasa, Kenya. “A fleeing populace is also seen as a source of loss, that they’re losing the confidence of the people.”
Sexual Assault
Sangabo Hassan’s eldest daughter was raped and all of her family’s possessions were stolen by armed men on their 25-day journey to Dadaab. After abandoning her home near Baidoa, 224 kilometers (140 miles) northwest of Mogadishu, the 40-year-old single mother and her eight children headed for Dadaab.
“They caned us with sticks and took everything we had,” Hassan said in an interview in Dagahaley, one of three camps in the Dadaab complex. “They raped my 18-year-old daughter and they took her away. She has come back and now she is pregnant.”
Sexual-assault cases among refugees arriving in Dadaab have quadrupled from a year ago, according to CARE International.
“The most dangerous period for refugees is when they are on the move,” said Caroline Saint-Mieux, CARE’s emergency team leader in Dadaab. “Women and girls are especially vulnerable to rape, abduction, illness and even death on the journey.”
Those who make it to Dadaab live in an assortment of mud houses, UN tents and “tukuls” -- dome-shaped dwellings made of bent sticks and covered with grass, old blankets, empty food aid bags or plastic. Once registered, they receive enough corn flour, beans, sugar and salt for three weeks, as well as sleeping mats, blankets and cooking utensils.
12-Day Walk
As grim as conditions are in the camp, they are a vast improvement on life in Somalia, said Osoba Hassan, a 42-year-old mother of five who spent 12 days walking to Dadaab from her home in southern Somalia.
“There was no food to swallow and no water to drink,” she said. “We would have to start from square one if we went back and that’s what I’m doing here. It’s better to stay here where it’s peaceful.”
In July alone, 40,434 Somalis reached Dadaab, the most arrivals in a month since the camps were built, according to the UN. With no end in sight to the influx, the UN is constructing a fourth camp in the complex, said William Spindler, a spokesman for the UN Refugee Agency.
“We’re under severe strain from the sheer number of people who are arriving that have stretched the system to breaking point,” he said.
To contact the reporter on this story: Paul Richardson in Dadaab refugee camp, Kenya, at 440 or pmrichardson@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Antony Sguazzin at asguazzin@bloomberg.net.
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