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Subject: Horn of Africa's Overlooked Crisis;Torment of Somalia Spills Over Into
Date: Wed, 28 Oct 92 04:28:31 EST
Message-ID: <30.1992Oct28.042831@AmeriCast.com>

Horn of Africa's Overlooked Crisis;Torment of Somalia Spills Over
Into Ethiopia's Ogaden<By Jennifer Parmelee=Special to The Wash-
ington Post=

GODE, Ethiopia - In a crude shelter, armed only with a sack of
wheat and cups of filthy river water, Zeyneb Mohammed battled to
keep her last daughter alive as the child "withered like a maize
plant when there is no rain."

A relief worker appeared at her door and rushed 2-year-old Fatima
to a feeding center, where she was treated for severe malnutri-
tion and diarrhea. But - as has happened with thousands of other
children in this region squeezed by years of drought and neglect,
compounded by the crisis in neighboring Somalia - death and
disease had the edge.

So Zeyneb, 26, did something few outsiders could understand. She
plucked her fading child from the arms of foreign doctors - and
her last chance for survival - and brought her home to die.

"My daughter, she had eyes like two stars. She was beautiful,"
Zeyneb said through a translator, struggling to explain her deci-
sion in the poetic terms used by many Somali-speaking people. Her
surviving child, a 3-year-old boy who appeared thin but alert,
listened solemnly from her lap. "She should die here where it is
proper, with me and with God. I could not stand to see her there
anymore."

Fatima was buried in one of hundreds of makeshift graves, marked
only by scraps of thorny brush, around refugee camps where tens
of thousands of ethnic Somalis fleeing drought and conflict wait
for help that has been slow to arrive.

Once again, the Ogaden, a triangular portion of eastern Ethiopia
that juts into Somalia and mirrors the Horn of Africa's distinc-
tive shape, has been hit with a major humanitarian crisis, the
most acute emergency in Ethiopia today. And once more, the world
has been looking in other directions - to recovery plans for the
rest of battle-scarred Ethiopia, and especially to Somalia, where
anarchy and hunger have reduced an entire population to ruin.

Yet Somalia's torment has flowed over the border into the Ogaden,
whose people share ties of blood, language and trade with those
of Somalia. Aid officials and others familiar with the Somali
crisis say that while the Ogaden has not seen the same large-
scale fighting as Somalia and has fewer people, the level of hu-
man suffering here rivals that of surrounding regions. While
350,000 people are estimated to be in urgent need of food aid in
the Ogaden, compared with 2 million in Somalia, the death and
malnutrition rates are comparable.

On the worst days, according to aid officials, 30 to 40 people -
or about 11 per 10,000 - die in the squalid camps of Gode, where
inhabitants live from one food distribution to the next. In the
camp that is home to the most severely affected, the rate of
life-threatening malnutrition among children is about 65 percent,
a level that one veteran aid official called "an absolute disas-
ter." Tuberculosis is rampant because of a scarcity of medicines
to treat it, while measles and diarrhea have become commonplace
killers.

The afflicted inhabit a landscape that offers little hope: not a
tree in sight, just mile after mile of stumps from generations of
random wood-cutting. As a fourth fruitless rainy season dies
away, clouds that pass overhead seem to promise moisture but
offer only a patch of shade against the merciless sun. Even birds
of prey and scavengers are reduced to pecking for human excrement
around the camps, locals say.

Many of the 30,000 to 40,000 inhabitants of the Gode camps are
people who fled the Ogaden during the 1977 war between Ethiopia
and Somalia and spent the intervening years in refugee camps or
other settlements in Somalia. In early 1991, when the Somali
civil war erupted, they took to the road again. Thousands are re-
fugees from the Somali conflict; perhaps the majority are fleeing
that country's devastating famine.

Though the camp residents have different reasons for being here,
they share in common extreme hunger and what Abdirahman Ugas
Mohammed Qani, local coordinator for the government relief agen-
cy, calls "a total breakdown in the previous way of life."

Drought has killed off about half the livestock in this largely
nomadic territory, according to the South-East Rangelands Pro-
ject. The Somali conflict then began to dismantle what was left
of the Ogadeni economy. Trade routes primarily aimed at Somali
markets were shattered; the price of food and other commodities
soared; and the Somali shilling, which is the main currency here,
collapsed.

The influx of hundreds of thousands of migrants from Somalia was
the final blow to the Ogadenis, who because of their strong clan
structure have taken in thousands of needy relatives.

Relief has been inadequate in quantity and late in distribution -
an assessment undisputed by any of the agencies involved,
although blame is shifted around from one to another.

Ben Parker, a spokesman for the United Nations Emergency Preven-
tion and Preparedness Group in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capi-
tal, said that while 5,000 metric tons of emergency relief a
month have been targeted for the Ogaden, deliveries over the past
eight months rarely have reached 2,000 tons.

Most relief aid must be flown in because of security problems on
the region's roads. And the rations are what Parker called
"rock-bottom": just 27.5 pounds of wheat per person per month -
an average of 1,460 calories a day - without oil or salt or milk
to cook it with.  The low point was a 43-day gap between food
distributions in September and October that left the newest ar-
rivals in particularly desperate straits.  Admittance procedures
at some feeding centers were cumbersome and slow, and there was
not enough clean water to meet demand.

"There was food in the warehouses, but it wasn't being distribut-
ed. It was unconscionable," said a U.N. official who spoke  on
condition of anonymity. "And then there is the simple fact that .
. . none of us was prepared for such a crisis. And we should have
seen it coming, because it happens year after year after year."
The government's Abdirahman, who was out of town when he was ex-
pected to direct September's food distribution, blames security
problems for the 13-day delay. U.N. officials blame themselves
for not pushing harder when, in the words of one of them,
"government response is ineffectual." Two nongovernmental organi-
zations, Concern and Doctors Without Borders, have accused all
involved of inefficiency and slow response.

What is not disputed is that the Ogaden simply was not a priority
for any group, including the Ethiopian government, despite the
acute emergency. The director of the government's Relief and
Rehabilitation Commission, Simon Mechalle, astonished reporters
and aid officials last week by asserting that "only one or two a
week" were dying in Gode's camps.

In fact, when severe malnutrition rates among children shot up
from 35 percent to 64 percent in one month, hundreds of children
were crowded into intensive feeding centers, many of them dying
on the spot.

At one feeding center recently, a Belgian doctor consoled a tiny,
shriveled child whose forehead was burning with fever, her eyes
hollow with hunger. Her mother pulled away a blanket to show the
child's rectum protuding in a red mass of tissue. "It's pro-
lapsus, a case of muscle-wasting," explained Benoit Beelaert, the
doctor. "The muscles become so weak from malnutrition that they
cannot hold the rectum inside. The whole body starts to col-
lapse." At another site, a team of down-to-earth Irish nurses,
alongside their Somali aides, cajoled emaciated Somalis into
downing milk and biscuits. Some children were so weak that they
could not tolerate a sip of water or a bite of a vitamin-
fortified biscuit - "too much nutrition" for their depleted sys-
tems, a nurse said.

But the nurses, affiliated with the aid group Concern, rejoice in
small triumphs. Abdi, a 7-year-old who one day before could not
stir from his back, leaned against his grandfather as he was fed
rehydration solution through a tube in his nose. Another girl who
had vomited liquid the previous day was able to take small sips
of milk. A third child, little more than skin and bones, offered
one of the rare giggles among this frail group of children when
praised for drinking a cup of water.

"We lose them very quickly," says Concern's Paul Anticoni. "But
the good thing is that they can come back quickly too."

The outlook for aid also is improving. Airlift and truck
deliveries of food are more frequent, with U.N. officials saying
they hope to bring in 5,000 tons of food for November, while Doc-
tors Without Borders and Concern have beefed up emergency staffs.
But most of those who have been involved in crises here over the
years agree that food aid, while urgently needed, is only keeping
people alive for an uncertain future.

"There has been no defined, sustained approach to this problem in
the Ogaden by the international community or by the government,"
said Nick Southern, head of Save the Children-U.K. in Ethiopia.
"People down there are finding the whole context of their lives
crumbling around them. It will take real affirmative action -
something spiritual - to find a long-term solution."

The destruction of the nomadic way of life in the Horn of Africa
by drought and war and even modern lifestyles is only beginning
to be understood. A majority of Somali refugees interviewed re-
cently said they would never return to their pastoral way of
life.

Hussein Shero Abdi, 60,  recalled having 63 cows and 80 camels
before "the world exploded, and I lost every one of them. Some
died, some were looted."

Now, he and his seven children survive on one meal a day based on
wheat rations, and they discuss how they could escape their
misery by learning to farm or ply a trade in town. "It was a free
and independent life we had back in Somalia, and I loved it,"
Hussein says. "But what good is it to dream about it? There is
nothing to go back to."02:22 10-28C9999-----

Copyright 1992, The Washington Post.  This story is from the
Washington Post's Capitol Edition On-Line and is not to be ar-
chived or redistributed.

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