DADAAB, Kenya (AP) — Hundreds of thousands of Somali children could die in East Africa's famine unless more help arrives, a top U.S. official warned Monday in the starkest death toll prediction yet. To highlight the crisis, the wife of Vice President Joe Biden visited a refugee camp filed with hungry Somalis.
Jill Biden is the highest-profile U.S. visitor to
East Africa since the number of refugees coming across the Somali border
dramatically increased in July. Biden, who traveled to the camp in a C-130
military transport plane, said she wants to raise awareness and persuade donors
to give more.
"One of the reasons to be here is just to ask
Americans and people worldwide, the global community, the human family, if they
could just reach a little deeper into their pockets and give money to help
these poor people, these poor mothers and children," said Biden, who met
with two Somali mothers and their eight children.
As a long convoy of SUVs drove through the sand to
bring her to the camp, small wildebeests scurried off to the side and women
tended a herd of goats. Biden was then taken on a tour of the refugee camp by
personnel.
"There is hope if people start to pay
attention to this," said Biden, who also met with Kenyan President Mwai
Kibaki and Prime Minister Raila Odinga.
A drought has turned into famine because little aid
can reach militant-controlled south-central Somalia, forcing tens of thousands
of Somalis who have exhausted all the region's food to walk to camps in Kenya,
Ethiopia and the Somali capital of Mogadishu.
Washington is preparing to announce roughly $100
million in new famine aid, two U.S. officials who could not be identified
before the official announcement said.
USAID administrator Raj Shah, who accompanied
Biden, said hundreds of thousands of children could die from the famine. Shah
said the world has a unique opportunity to save tens of thousands of children's
lives by expanding humanitarian activities inside Somalia, though he noted that
it would be a challenge for aid providers to get into al-Shabab-controlled
south-central Somalia.
Given the camp's proximity to the uncontrolled and
sometimes dangerous Somali border, a well-armed security team, some carrying
sniper rifles, had secured the camp where she visited.
More than 29,000 children under the age of 5 have
died in the last 90 days in southern Somalia alone, according to U.S.
estimates. The U.N. says 640,000 Somali children are acutely malnourished,
suggesting the death toll of small children will rise.
The famine, Shah said, is the result of the a
drought being superimposed on an environment where the government could not
protect its own people.
Aid is only reaching about 20 percent of the 2.6
million Somalis who need it, Mark Bowden, the U.N.'s top humanitarian official
for Somalia, said on a visit to Mogadishu on Monday. The situation is better in
the Somali capital, where about half the city's 600,000 inhabitants are
receiving aid, he said. Still, camps in Mogadishu for displaced people are
among the five declared famine zones in Somalia.
Transport and security are the two main problems,
he said, and it is unclear what the effect will be of the withdrawal of
Islamist insurgents from their bases in the capital on Saturday. The city is
awash in gunmen and there have been several shootouts at aid distributions
recently. At least 10 people have been killed.
"An absence of conflict does not mean that
there is security here," he said. "There's always been factions and
militias."
A senior U.S. official traveling with Biden said
the U.S. believes it is too early to tell what al-Shabab's intentions are, but
that the reported withdrawal could be a sign that more aid could soon reach
those in need.
Former Senate majority leader Bill Frist, who also
joined Biden on her trip, said that even though Americans are focused on
domestic financial troubles, Americans still will dedicate money to worthwhile
international programs like health issues. Frist, a medical doctor, noted that
measles outbreaks are being seen in Somali camps, but that such outbreaks can
be controlled through modern medicine.
In other developments, the U.N. refugee agency on
Monday flew 31 metric tons of shelter materials into Mogadishu, the first UNHCR
aid flight into Somalia's capital in five years. A spokesman, Andrej Mahecic,
said more flights will follow in coming days because aid deliveries by land and
sea were too slow to cope with the dramatic influx of famine refugees to
Mogadishu.
UNHCR says some 100,000 people have fled to the
capital in the past two months.
In violence just outside Mogadishu, two witnesses
told The Associated Press that a militant car bomb exploded prematurely,
killing the driver of the vehicle.
Lt. Col. Paddy Ankunda, the spokesman for the
African Union force in Mogadishu, attributed the premature blast to al-Shabab
losing many of its more competent bomb-makers to fighting that raged in Mogadishu
all year. Ankunda said there have been five premature detonations this year
from militant bombs.
Associated Press writers Katharine Houreld and Abdi
Guled contributed to this report from Mogadishu, Somalia.
Copyright 2011 The Associated Press.
(AP
Photo/Jerome Delay)
