In somalia, a 'forgotten crisis'

There is a sense of overwhelming hopelessness just stepping into one of the eating centers about here and visual perception dozens of women posing with listless babies in their laps, snapping their fingers, trying to get a spark of life out of their dying kid.

Little eyes close. Wizened one-year-olds battle to breathe. From the door, you can see the hereafter of Somalia fading away.

While the audaciousness of a band of Somali pirates who late hijacked a ship full of arms has grabbed the world's attending, it is the slow-burn suffering of 1000000 of Somalis that seems to go about unnoticed.

The agony is not new. Or particularly surprising. This state on the edge of Africa has been slow, but inexorably, sliding toward an abyss for the past year and a half, or some would argue, for the past 17 years.

United Nations functionary have called Somalia "the forgotten crisis."

The causes are shift, unemployment, drought, inflation, a squeezing on global food terms and a war that will not end. Fight between Somalia's weak transitional government and a determined Islamist insurgence has been warming up in the past few weeks, drive thousands from their homes and film editing people off from food. The infirmary wards here are one index of the struggle's strength.

"In the past two calendar month," said Dr. Mohammad Hussein, "our patients have doubled."

In Aug, they had 200 women lined up every day with emaciated babies. Today, it is 400.

More than three 1000000 people, about half of Somalia's population, now need exigency rations to survive. Nobody seems to like it. Many say they feel humiliated.

"That's all we talk about - when will the next press release come," said Zenab Ali Osman, a grandma raising her girl's children.

Before fighting drove her from Mogadishu, the capital, to Afgooye's endless refugee camps of gumdrop-shaped huts made from plastic bags and in some cases soiled T-shirts, Osman used to wash clothes. In a good day, she would make the equivalent of 80 cents.

That is what the civil war has done to the economy, leaving so many people to survive off pennies. But out on the high seas, it is a different story. Pirates thriving off this same lawlessness are making millions of dollars by hijacking ships in Somalia's unpatrolled waters and demanding hefty ransoms to free them. On Sept. 25, a band of pirates seized a Ukrainian freighter full of tanks and other weapons bound for Kenya.

The pirates are asking for $20 million, an unfathomable amount here. Negotiations are still going on, and the likely price will probably be closer to $5 million.

On Friday, Sugule Ali, a spokesman for the pirate group, threatened to blow up the ship in three days if no ransom was paid, The Associated Press reported from Nairobi. He said the pirates met Friday and decided they would blow up the ship, along with themselves and the crew, if they did not get the ransom.

No one wants to pay the pirates, but giving in may be the safest way out.

"I pray to God they are caught," said Dhuho Abdi Omar, a mother who was waiting at a feeding center in Afgooye with her two-year-old girl, who had not eaten for two weeks. "These pirates are blocking our food."

Not everyone agreed. Many young men in the camps seemed to lionize the gunmen of the seas.

"They're tough guys," said Mohammed Warsame, 22. "And they're protecting our coast."

The pirates have said as much, insisting that they hijack ships in response to illegal fishing and dumping.

"They're our marines," said Jaemali Argaga, a militia leader.

Somalia has not had any marines, or national army or navy to speak of, since the central government imploded in 1991. Clan-based warlords carved the country into fiefdoms, preying upon the population. People eventually got fed up and, in the summer of 2006, a grassroots Islamist movement drove away the warlords.

But Ethiopia and the United States accused the Islamists of sheltering terrorists and in the winter of 2006, Ethiopian and American forces ousted the Islamists. The result today is vicious fighting between the weak government forces and Ethiopian soldiers on one side and Islamist guerrilla fighters, backed up by businessmen and war profiteers, on the other. Civilians are often caught in between. Thousands have been killed in the past year and a half.

Many aid workers have fled. The United Nations World Food Program is one of the last organizations with a large staff inside Somalia. Denise Brown, the deputy country director, said the environment is increasingly hostile. And desperate.

A mob of hungry people besieged a convoy of 35 UN-chartered food trucks moving through Mogadishu two weeks ago. The people stripped the trucks clean, looting more than 2 million pounds, or 450,000 kilograms, of food.