(Jonathan Gornall)
The word “famine” has a natural ring to it – an inevitable act of nature, if not God, in which harsh climates, poor soils and droughts conspire to upset the fragile equilibrium of lives balanced precariously on the nutritional high-wire of subsistence farming.
But a little over two years since the UN officially recognised the pitiless 18-month famine that between September 2010 and April last year took the lives of 250,000 Somalians, half of them children under 5, it seems increasingly clear that nature, or God, cannot alone be held responsible for the catastrophe.
The estimate of the total number of lives lost was published in May as part of a report commissioned jointly by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation and the US-sponsored Famine Early Warning Systems Network.
The authors estimated that between 244,000 and 273,000 people died in the “food security emergency” – not so much an example of UN-speak as a deliberate specificity of semantics.
“Our study,” they wrote, “was not designed to clearly attribute portions of this death toll to any single cause, such as epidemics or high food prices. Rather, our estimates should be viewed as the combined impact of drought, reduced humanitarian assistance, high food prices and civil strife in the affected regions, and the downstream consequences of the above factors (such as disease epidemics), all in a context of persisting and/or worsening insecurity.”
The famine, in other words, was largely avoidable, which means that someone, somewhere, bears responsibility for those 250,000 deaths.
For Andrew Seal, of University College London’s Institute for Global Health, who has spent 15 years studying malnutrition in Africa and Asia, the Somalian crisis need not have been anything like as bad as it was.
For one thing, had Somalia been a country at peace with itself, he said, “my guess is that [famine] would not have [occurred], because I think western donors would have responded earlier and in a more effective way”.
But most significantly, “because of its history of insecurity and famine, Somalia has been one of the most surveyed countries in the world”.
In May last year, a few months after the famine was deemed to have ended, the UN secretary general published a report addressing “the need to build systems to support data-driven humanitarian decision-making and the need to broaden and deepen partnerships for humanitarian response”.
And yet, says Mr Seal, “the Somalian famine was a counterpoint to that report, where there was a lot of data there, being generated almost in real time, and yet all the decisions weren’t made in a timely way”.
In short, he concluded in a paper he co-authored in April this year, the famine most certainly did not occur because data were not available and it was impossible to predict.
That was also the message of a paper published in July last year by Chatham House, the independent UK think tank.
“The 2011 Somalia famine should not [have] come as a surprise,” wrote Rob Bailey, a senior research fellow at Chatham House who focuses on food security.
“Early warnings of the impending catastrophe accumulated over the course of the preceding year, yet the humanitarian system remained dormant.
“Had donors and agencies mobilised sooner, early interventions could have been undertaken to protect livelihoods and prevent the downwards spiral into destitution and starvation.”
So what went wrong? The answer, according to Mr Bailey, is a disturbing one: while aid institutions matter, “politics matter most”.
The largest donors of aid to the region are the US and Europe, and the origins of the tragedy, observers such as Mr Bailey believe, can be traced to western political policies in a region that has served as an ideological battleground since the Cold War.
Today the entity competing for hearts and minds on the ground in the Horn of Africa is not the Soviet Union but Islamist extremism, in the form of the militant group Al Shabaab, which controls a large portion of southern-central Somalia.
“Ultimately, early action at scale depends upon a political decision to release funds early,” wrote Mr Bailey. “However, political decision-making prioritises foreign policy and domestic considerations over humanitarian need.”
Aid, in other words, is all too frequently a tool of foreign policy – and what happened in Somalia in 2011 provided a “stark example” of this.
Delay in getting food aid to those who needed it most was “an obvious and inevitable consequence of donor anti-terror strategies designed to prevent the capture of humanitarian aid by the Islamist organisation Al Shabaab, the de facto administration in the famine-affected areas”.
Al Shabaab – full name Harakat Shabaab Al Mujahidin – is on the United States’ list of foreign terrorist organisations.
According to the US government’s National Counterterrorism Centre, Al-Shabaab is “is affiliated with Al Qaeda and is believed to have trained and fought in Afghanistan”, and in February 2008 was designated a foreign terrorist organisation by the US government.
The designation remains very much a live one. Last year, rewards of up to US$5 million (Dh18.3m) were posted for several of the organisation’s members by the US Rewards for Justice programme.
And on August 8 this year, a Saudi-born US citizen and a Kenyan national were indicted in Miami, charged with “conspiring to provide, and attempting to provide, material support” to three designated terror organisations, including Al Shabaab.
The same anti-terror legislation that netted these two men is “also having a significant impact on humanitarian action”, according to a report published by the London-based Overseas Development Institute in October 2011.
Funding from donor governments such as the US, whose USAID programme invests billions of dollars around the world, “is increasingly being made conditional on assurances that it is not benefiting listed individuals or organisations”.
USAID is also joined at the hip with the US department of state, with which, in the words of the organisation’s performance plan for this year, it shares strategic goals “that respond to key US foreign policy and national security priorities”.
Those goals were recently amended, making it clearer than ever that aid is a tool of US home-defence and foreign policy.
Strategic goal number one used to be “achieving peace and security”. Now it is to “counter threats to the United States and the international order, and advance civilian security around the world”.
American and European humanitarian agencies risk prosecution under anti-terror laws if their aid is deemed to have helped the “wrong” people.
Meanwhile, says the ODI report, government pressure on US agencies to vet partners and agencies in local communities has proved “a requirement that is invariably seen as invasive and accusatory by locals.
“As noted by one commentator, ‘through complying [with] national legislation, US[-funded] organisations are seen by partners on the ground as endorsing the political view of the government … particularly in its conception of terrorism and who deserves assistance’.”
The consequences of this – for donors and the people they help – became clear in 2008, when US organisations CARE and the International Medical Corps were expelled from Al Shabaab-controlled areas in Somalia for allegedly gathering intelligence that led to the death of one of the organisation’s leaders in a US air strike.
Al Shabaab – or, at least, elements under its jurisdiction – continues to shoot itself in the foot. Over the past two decades, 16 workers from the medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) have been killed in Somalia, and on August 14 it finally announced it had had enough and was closing down its entire medical programme in the country.
It was a decision that, in the words of MSF president Dr Unni Karunakaras, “sent shock waves through political and humanitarian communities” – and deprived of badly needed medical help the 50,000 or so people who had been treated by the organisation every month.
In Somalia, “delay was an obvious and inevitable consequence of anti-terror strategies”, according to Chatham House.
But shockingly, its report suggests, “a more troubling interpretation” of what happened was that the delay “was a political strategy in and of itself”, designed to destabilise Al Shabaab – an organisation under which, incidentally, the region it controls enjoyed a bumper harvest in the spring of 2010.
The UN declared famine in two regions of south-central Somalia on July 20, 2011, adding four more regions over the next two months.
During August 2010, says Chatham House, early-warning systems had “flagged the impending tragedy with increasing urgency”, with the Famine Early Warning Systems Network and the Food Security and Nutrition Analysis Unit producing 78 bulletins and 50 briefings for agencies and donors.
Yet throughout the crucial period, as thousands slipped inexorably towards their deaths, funding “remained essentially flat”, as did the amount of money requested by agencies.
There is, says Mr Seal, no evidence of a deliberate decision in Washington, London or Brussels to withhold or delay aid to Somalia, though “it remains a very important question that has not been answered. What we do know is that there was a lot of concern expressed at the early-warning information at Nairobi [UN] level, that that concern was fed up through the system to Brussels and elsewhere, and that then there was not a timely response.”
He is not particularly hopeful that severe food crises will not return to Somalia, a country whose political landscape remains complex and factionally riven.
There are, he says “lots of possibilities about where things could go from here”, and none of them appear particularly hopeful.
That said, “one could imagine that the critical thing for the US is that they now have a government in power in Mogadishu which they support in broad terms and Al Shabaab is no longer seen as the de facto government in southern Somalia. In that sense, everything has changed for the US – their objective arguably was achieved.”
For the humanitarian system, he says, “the challenge is how to try to insulate itself better from the political agendas of donors”.
That’s difficult when certain donors – the US and the EU – are so important, but “it’s interesting that you’ve now got new players in the game – Turkey, China and others, such as the Gulf states. They are increasingly important as donors and some of their aid will not go through the same systems, perhaps, as US and EU aid does.”
Such plurality in the system is “potentially a good thing, but of course one would hope that all donors would aspire to the principals of good humanitarian donorship, which many of them are signed up to, including the US, and ensure that aid is targeted according to need”.
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*Originally published on TheNational, on Aug. 26, 2013, titled “How politics killed 250,000 in Somalia”, authored by Jonathan Gornall
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