UN stops food aid to 1 million in southern Somalia

GENEVA — The U.N. food agency is stopping aid distribution to about 1 million people in southern Somalia because of attacks against staff and demands by armed groups that aid organizations remove women from their teams, the agency said Tuesday.

The World Food Program is moving staff and supplies to northern and central Somalia from six areas in the south that are largely controlled by the al-Shabab Islamist group, said Emilia Casella, a WFP spokeswoman. The U.S. State Department says al-Shabab has links to al-Qaeda.

“Up to a million people that have been dependent on food assistance in southern Somalia face a situation that is particularly dire,” Casella told reporters in Geneva.

Al-Shabab controls up to 95 percent of the areas affected, she said.

Somali government spokesman Abdi Haji Gobdon called WFP’s decision “very, very sad news.”

“But we understand who is behind the country’s problems. It is the opposition,” said Gobdon. “We are hopeful that WFP will resume their operations as soon as possible, and not leave those suffering people to their fate,” he said.

At least four of WFP’s staff have been killed over the past 18 months, and militants threatened and attacked three of its offices in the south.

Armed groups have also increasingly been demanding that the WFP and other aid groups remove women from their staff and pay tens of thousands of dollars in protection money to guarantee the aid workers’ security, said Casella.

The agency had tried to resolve the demands of armed groups through meetings with village elders, but was unable to win the necessary guarantees for the security of its staff and protection of its humanitarian work, she told The Associated Press.

“It’s up the armed groups who control that area to provide the assurances that our staff will be safe and that humanitarian principles will be maintained,” Casella said.

“We are hoping we can return, so we consider it a temporary situation.”

In the meantime, the WFP is preparing for the possibility of large numbers of hungry Somalis moving from the south to other parts of Somalia and to neighboring countries.

Shamso Omar, a mother of seven children living in a camp for displaced persons in the southern town of Baidoa, said she had been living on food aid for the past two years.

“If they stop it is a bad news for us,” she said. “There is no other option but to move to the areas the agency is willing to operate.”

Abdulahi Awnur, a father of eight who lives in a camp in Jilib, another southern town, described the militants’ action as “indirect killing.”

“We have been forced to flee from our houses and depend on food aid and now it is finished that means the armed group here do not want us to live,” he said.

Adrian Edwards, a spokesman for the office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, which has operations in neighboring Kenya, said the agency is closely watching the situation amid concerns that Somalis might head for the border.

Tens of thousands of Somali refugees already live in three overcrowded camps on the Kenyan side of the border.

The World Food Program supplies aid to some 3 million people in the war-torn country, which is also struggling with drought and produces only a third of the food it needs every year.

The Horn of Africa nation has not had an effective central government since warlords overthrew dictator Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991. The warlords then turned on each other, plunging Somalia into anarchy and chaos.

Associated Press Writers Mohamed Olad Hassan in Mogadishu, Somalia and Malkhadir M. Muhumed in Nairobi, Kenya, contributed to this report.