Somalis seek safety outside capital

By KATHARINE HOURELD, Associated Press Writer

20 November, 2007

AFGOYE, Somalia - After the last of Faduma Guled Awale's three brothers was killed in the Somali capital in October, the mother of 10 fled Mogadishu, walking through the night with her children and carrying nothing but the clothes they wore.

"We had no time to collect our things," she said. "We had to carry the youngest. She's only 4."

It took them two days of slipping through the mud to reach relative safety in Afgoye, about 20 miles to the east of Mogadishu.

The once-sleepy fruit-growing town is now swollen with around 200,000 Somalis seeking refuge from the capital.

Fighting between Islamic insurgents and a government backed by troops from neighboring Ethiopia has forced 1 million people from their homes, many to Afgoye, the U.N. refugee agency said Tuesday.

Most of Afgoye's fruit groves have been stripped of their branches as thousands of makeshift huts mushroomed. Awale is lucky — she eventually received plastic sheeting from an aid agency to use as a roof. Her neighbors use lengths of sodden fabric strung over twigs, huddling together for warmth in the mud. More are arriving everyday.

Top U.N. officials have described Somalia as Africa's worst humanitarian crisis.

The harvest here is the worst it has been for 13 years. Acute malnutrition rates are nearing 20 percent among children under 5, although the latest figures, released on Tuesday, show a slight improvement. That's well above Darfur, which hovers a few points below the emergency threshold of 15 percent. Basic food staples have tripled in price.

Last week, an aid worker in Afgoye was shot dead, and on Sunday four civilians were killed by a grenade blast. There have been several bomb attacks on the road to the airstrip targeting government troops, who operate a roadblock extorting money from those fleeing the violence.

"Somalia has been a forgotten emergency for so many years," said Eric LaRoche, head of the United Nation's aid efforts in Somalia. Fewer "people are affected than in Darfur, but the crisis is more severe."

The situation is complicated by regional politics. There's been no functioning government here since warlords overthrew a dictator in 1991. The current transitional government, widely seen as corrupt and lacking any control, is supported by Ethiopia, one of America's staunchest allies in the war on terror but which has been accused of widespread human rights abuses.

On the other side, Islamic insurgents are supported by Ethiopia's archenemy Eritrea, which is encouraging them to widen their support by reaching out to disaffected Somali opposition politicians and the diaspora. Diplomats say that Western policy is driving disaffected Somalis into the arms of Islamic extremists, some linked by the U.S. to al-Qaida.

The wrangling is a world away from the sodden huts in Afgoye, where humanitarian workers are struggling to stave off the deadly onset of cholera and diarrhea that comes from so many people packed so closely in the mud.

Fatuma Moussa, whose four daughters are sharing a shelter with three other neighbors after they arrived on Sunday, says she has never lived in such terrible conditions.

"Look at us in the open, we are exposed like animals," she says disgustedly. But, she concedes, it is better to live like animals in Afgoye than die like her neighbors in the capital.