UN aid group ready to work with al-Shabab

[ManofthPeephole]

The UN World Food Programme would welcome any assistance from the hardline Muslim group al-Shabab to help avert a humanitarian disaster in the Horn of Africa, a spokesman has told Al Jazeera.

Al-Shabab has already lifted a ban on humanitarian agencies supplying food aid to millions of citizens amid one of the region's worst droughts in 60 years.

According to the World Food Programme, the number of people in the Horn of Africa who need food assistance is expected to rise toabout 10 million in coming weeks, as the drought takes its toll.

David Orr from the World World Food Programme told Al Jazeera that 1,000 refugee families a day from Somalia were flooding into the Kenyan town of Dabaab.

"We're assisting thousands of Somali refugees in the Dabaab camps, but if we need to enter south Somalia, we need to work with al-Shabab," said Orr.

"We're not operating in the al-Shabab areas of the south, which is a conflict zone, but if we get the security clearance from the United Nations and our donor approvals, then we're prepared to go."

Orr's comments are the strongest indication yet by the UN World Food Programme that it is ready to work with al-Shabab since the agency was forced to pull out of southern Somalia in 2010 because of threats made against its staff by the group.

Al-Shabab, which is connected to al-Qaeda networks in Africa and the Gulf, controls the majority of Somalia, including around half of the capital, Mogadishu.

In the past, they have said food aid creates dependency, but they have also used aid for themselves and charged foreign organisations high fees to operate.

continued @ link:

UN aid group ready to work with al-Shabab - Africa - Al Jazeera English

 

[ManofthPeephole]

Last week Secretary Hillary Clinton’s office at the State Department announced that the U.S. was willing to send humanitarian aid to Somalia despite the fact that much of the country is under the control of Al Shabab, a ragtag bunch of grifters and militants, some of whom have ties to Al Qaeda. Somalia is bearing the brunt of the worst famine and drought in 60 years—the worst since Africa’s colonial period. Ten million people who live on the knobby spit off the East African coast called the Horn are suffering the famine’s effects: starvation and death. Somalia is bearing the brunt of this crisis, especially the nearly 3 million people who live in country’s south. The death toll could easily surpass that of Ethiopia in the '80s, which left 1 million people dead.

State Department intervention could spur the international community to act. But sadly, Clinton’s announcement is meaningless thanks to a bureaucratic snafu within the U.S. government. In 2009 the U.S. spent roughly half as much in food and disaster aid to Somalia ($130 million) as it did in military assistance ($246 million) not including CIA programs, such as drones. Yet thanks to a gnarl of red tape between the State and Treasury departments, it’s currently illegal for America to provide southern Somalia so much as a cup of rice or a bag of corn, due to the vagaries of an ill-defined law against providing material support to terrorists.

continued @ link: Somalia Drought: The Law That Is Preventing U.S. Aid - The Daily Beast