Somalia's Other Crisis Victims Forgotten

Osman, who has lived in an improvised refugee camp in Mogadishu since fighting chased him from his home 13 years ago, saw none of that aid.

"Everyone is always talking about Hafun. But what about everyone else?" asked the worry-worn father of seven, who has lost five other children to war, hunger and disease. "We need help too."

The Dec. 26 tsunami, which humanitarian workers say killed more than 100 people and affected up to 30,000 others here, was the latest in a long list of calamities to befall this semi-desert land, with its clan-based fiefdoms and dueling warlords.

Drought, cyclones, bloodshed and war have killed hundreds of thousands over the past 14 years, sending the survivors fleeing time and again.

In Mogadishu alone, some 250,000 displaced people fill every corner of bullet-pocked government buildings, abandoned schools and factories, and the broken shells of homes piled with rubble. Others live in tin shack and cardboard hut villages along the bomb-cratered and rubbish-strewn streets.

With no government or aid agencies to help them, most can turn to only their equally impoverished fellow clan members.

Somalia has had no central government since clan-based faction leaders united to overthrow dictator Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991. The factions then turned on one another in a bloody and ruinous campaign for hegemony.

Their heavily armed militiamen have chased foreign aid workers from Mogadishu and large parts of the rest of the country. Most U.N. agencies and other humanitarian groups, whose members have been kidnapped and killed, now run their Somalia operations from neighboring Kenya.

A Somali government-in-exile also is in Kenya, where officials considering a return said Wednesday they would need $77.3 million to relocate, rebuild district and regional administrations and launch efforts to reconcile the country.

Somalia's transitional government officials plan to begin relocating to the Horn of Africa nation on Feb. 21, "but all depends on the way the donor community supports us," Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi said in the Kenyan capital.

When fighting engulfed Osman's central Somalia village in 1992, he walked six days with his family to reach Mogadishu. Two children died along the way. The day they finally reached the former capital, a daughter was hit by a stray bullet and partially paralyzed.

The family found a degree of security in the ruins of an old Coca-Cola factory, where hundreds of families have patched together dome-shaped huts out of sticks and cardboard. Occasional gunfire crackles in the distance, but clan elders have shielded the camp from the worst of the bloodshed.

"Some aid agencies used to come here and bring us rice, maize and sometimes dates," Osman told a reporter, as a listless child showing signs of malnutrition dozed on his knee in the suffocating heat. "But you are the first foreigner I have seen in at least two years."

The autonomous region of Puntland, which took the brunt of the tsunami, had been spared much of the violence of the past 14 years.

But a four-year drought has decimated the vast herds of camels, cows, sheep and goats that sustain the region's nomadic tribes. In October, a cyclone struck, sending temperatures plummeting and killing many of the surviving animals.

The crisis has drawn thousands of nomadic herders to interior towns like Gardo in search of food, water and other help from their clansmen. Every day, more families arrive, pitching their huts in an ever-expanding camp on the dusty edges of town, 375 miles northeast of Mogadishu.

Ahmed Said Ahmed said he once owned 300 sheep and goats.

"I was one of the luckiest and I only have 10 left now," he said, sheltering from the sun inside a newly erected hut. "We were getting some assistance here from international organizations. But when the tsunami hit, that overshadowed everything else."

The World Food Program was feeding some 120,000 people in Puntland, but the tsunami forced the agency to temporarily divert food to devastated coastal villages.

While supplies are being replenished, Ahmed doubts his people will ever get the attention lavished on Hafun.

Osman is putting his hope in the fragile government now in exile, formed after more than two years of intricate negotiations between warlords, clan elders and civil society leaders.

"We need a government to bring us peace," Osman said. "Maybe if Mogadishu gets a little peace, the international aid agencies will come to help us."