UN Feeds Thousands of Drought-Hit Somalis

JEDDAH, 26 December 2003 — United Nations World Food Program’s director for Somalia disclosed that his agency has fed thousands of starving Somalis over the last three weeks. “We have managed to reach nearly 77,000 people affected by the most severe drought in the region for more than 20 years. We targeted those least able to cope — malnourished children, the destitute, the disabled and the aged,” he said in a statement.

The statement said that WFP has delivered 732 tons of mixed food commodities, enough to last a month, to 39 villages in the Somaliland region — 15 of them through the northeastern region of Puntland. But the worst affected regions, Sool and Sanaag, are in the north of the country.

It also noted that the humanitarian access to the northern regions has been guaranteed following extensive discussions of security issues between WFP and regional administrations.

“Thirty-two of the 39 villages we assisted were hit by rain which fell too late to relieve the food situation. The downpour brought temporary relief to water shortages, but 80 per cent of the livestock had already died.”

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Kenya has announced that it would bring together all the Somali faction leaders for new talks on Jan. 9 in an effort to kickstart the country’s peace process, a Foreign Ministry statement said on Tuesday. Kenya has been hosting the present round of Somali talks since October last year. The talks have been hampered by the walkout of the Transitional National Government President Abdi Qassim Salad and other faction leaders. They have vowed to organize parallel peace talks in the capital Mogadishu.

The Kenyan statement said that Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, who is the current chairman of Inter-Governmental Authority on Development — an East African body — would open the meeting. IGAD is sponsoring the ongoing Somali and Sudanese peace talks in Kenya. It noted the opening ceremony would be held in Nairobi but did not release the site of the later meetings.

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Mohammed A. Warsame, a Canadian citizen of Somali descent, who was recently arrested in Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States after he was accused of associating with the Al-Qaeda terrorist network, has been flown to New York, press reports said on Wednesday. His lawyer Dan Scott said he was with Warsame at the Hennepin County Jail when federal marshals came to take him away. He said he assumed authorities planned to fly Warsame directly to New York but didn’t know for certain.

According to news reports, Warsame’s case has been shrouded in secrecy since his arrest on Dec. 8. He hasn’t been officially charged with a crime but has been linked to terror suspect Zacarias Moussaoui, who was also arrested in Minneapolis two years ago.