Sexual Violence in Somali Refugee Camps on the Rise

Hargeisa — Cases of sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV), as well as domestic violence, are increasing in camps for internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Hargeisa, capital of the self-declared independent Republic of Somaliland, with social workers attributing the trend to hard economic times made worse by recent drought in the region.

"Numbers of the displaced have increased in recent months, with many families coming to town to escape drought; lack of a police presence within the camps and inadequate lighting have contributed to the increase in some of these cases," Shukri Osman Said, an SGBV coordinator for an NGO, Comprehensive Community-Based Rehabilitation Somaliland (CCBRS), told IRIN at the Stadium IDP camp in Hargeisa.

The Stadium IDP camp, home to an estimated 5,000 families (30,000 people), is one of several IDP camps in Hargeisa where humanitarian organizations such as CCBRS have ongoing programmes aimed at addressing SGBV among vulnerable communities.

According to Said, CCBRS has been running the SGBV programme in the IDP camps since 2006 with funding from the UN Refugee Agency, UNHCR.

"On average, CCBRS handled between 15 and 20 cases of SGBV per month; however, we have noticed that the cases of domestic violence have increased dramatically; in 2011 alone, we had over 500 cases of domestic violence," Said told IRIN. "Our SGBV prevention programme has helped somewhat because the SGBV cases have started reducing; our concern is the rise in domestic violence, which is mostly due to men not coping well with economic hardship and ending up venting their frustration on their wives."

The CCBRS programme, she said, had a component targeting those with physical disabilities and provided orthopaedic aids - such as wheelchairs - to some of the affected IDPs. SGBV coordinators from CCBRS also made home visits for physiotherapy sessions, provided counselling and psycho-social support and referred those requiring specialized treatment and/or legal aid to relevant institutions.

"Most of the victims of SGBV are poor and cannot afford treatment in private hospitals; some cannot even afford the transport to public hospitals, so we help by referring them to the Sexual Assault Referral Centre in the main hospital in Hargeisa," Said told IRIN. "We also refer those requiring legal aid to organizations that help women seek justice."

Hawo Yusuf, a member of the management committee at the Stadium IDP camp, said the committee supported SGBV survivors by helping them be accepted by society. "We help construct shelter for those in need of a place to stay, especially those who become pregnant; we help by tracking and [apprehending] the perpetrators, although our efforts are frustrated when these people are freed without being charged with any offence."

According to UNHCR Somaliland, Hargeisa is home to approximately 85,000 displaced people who have fled their homes mostly from south and central regions of Somalia, due to various reasons, including drought, limited livelihood opportunities and increased violence.

"IDPs often live in difficult conditions, more often than not with limited access to basic facilities such as adequate healthcare, good shelter and clean water and sanitation amenities, ample security as well as employment opportunities," the agency said. "UNHCR engages IDPs in Hargeisa in various projects like solar lighting or animal husbandry that will equip them with the necessary skills to start up their own businesses and provide a better life for their families."

CCBRS is implementing an income-generating project, funded by UNHCR, aimed at empowering woman in the IDP camps. Started in 2008, the project has helped transform the lives of the IDPs by providing them with better livelihoods.

Fouzia Hassan, mother of eight and one of the beneficiaries, told IRIN: "All my children are now in school, thanks to the US$600 grant I received to boost my bread-making business. My business has expanded and I now make between 55 and 65 loaves a day, something I could not have dreamt of doing before the start of this project."

Hassan said she can now take care of her family better: "I can meet their medical bills, I have built a latrine for the family's use and I have installed a water tank, this is now my home. It has changed my life and my family's."

The Rest @ AllAfrica.com

Explosives Captured in Ifo Section of Dadaad Refuge Camp,Kenya

Kenyan police seized landmines and homemade explosive devices Friday in Dadaab, the world's largest refugee camp and site of several attacks and blasts in recent months.

"This is a major breakthrough in our investigations because we have been looking for the source of the explosive materials used here.

• We conducted a raid and recovered nine landmines," said regional police chief Leo Nyongesa.
• "We also recovered other improvised explosive devices,"
•  three women were being questioned.
• The explosives were found in the Ifo section of the Dadaab complex in northern Kenya, home to some 450,000 mainly Somali refugees seeking shelter from drought, hunger and conflict.

Dadaab, some 100 kilometres (60 miles) from Somalia, is in a border region that has seen a surge in attacks since Nairobi sent troops into its neighbour in October to battle Al-Qaeda linked Shebab insurgents.

The attacks are often blamed by the authorities on sympathisers of Shebab militants, who control large parts of central and southern Somalia.

• Gunmen seized two Spaniards working for Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) from Dadaab in October and are thought to have taken them to Somalia.

The Rest @ AllAfrica

A Somali Refuge Camp in Kenya: Misery from Somali Islamists

The lucky ones come with their families, others appear out of the thorn bushes, walking alone. Five hundred Somalis are now arriving at this bleak Kenyan outpost every day.

They join a population of 267,000 and counting, in a facility built to shelter just 45,000. While the world has been captivated by the high seas drama of Somalia's pirates, this human tide has swollen the ranks of Dadaab, turning it into the world's largest refugee camp.

The new arrivals sit in their hundreds under a makeshift tarpaulin, trying to keep perfectly still in temperatures that reach 40C in the shade.

It speaks volumes for the horrors unfolding in Somalia that people will abandon their homes, risk arbitrary arrest, death or starvation to reach the desolate welcome on offer in this corner of northern Kenya.

These people are proof of the human cost of the accelerating collapse of Somalia, yet their fate attracts nothing like the global interest that surrounds Somali piracy and its threat to commerce.

The UN refugee agency (UNHCR) that runs Dadaab urgently needs new money from international donors and new land from the Kenyan government.

Neither has been forthcoming. The annual budget for this camp is $19m (£13m) – roughly half the annual operational cost of a single warship patrolling the

Indian Ocean in search of modern-day Blackbeards.
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The story of Dadaab is in some senses the story of modern Somalia. Its three camps:

• Hagadera,
• Ifo
• Dagahaley, were built to house those who fled when the last functioning central government – that of socialist dictator Siad Barre – collapsed in 1991.

The camps soon reached their initial capacity and as the mother country just 50 miles to the north has sunk deeper and deeper, so the number of refugees has risen and risen.

An entire generation of children has grown up knowing Dadaab as their only home. There have been 14 failed governments since then, Somalia is in a state of anarchy and Dadaab is facing an extraordinary influx.

Last August the land ran out and the UN had to declare the camps full. It has not stopped the desperate masses arriving.

Somalia is a country surrounded by political walls.

Its land borders with Ethiopia and Kenya have been closed to protect their countries from the Islamic militias on the other side. In reality the only effect of the closures has been to make it even harder for people like Osman Hussein Bare to flee. With his family seated in a tired circle around him, the middle-aged man stands to tell his story with some dignity.

"There is war in Somalia," he explains. "A lot of bullets; day and night they are fighting in the place."

• A farmer from a village close to the coastal city of Kismayo, Mr Bare found his life taken over by the emergence of the powerful Al-Shabaab militia.
• The breaking point, which sent him trekking for two nights across a sealed border to another country, came when the militants began to dig up the remains of religious leaders from Islamic sects they considered their rivals.
• "The way they rule I cannot live under them," he said.
  

Amina, 22, was not one of the lucky ones. She was separated from her family and has arrived alone from Kismayo. During her fortnight's journey to reach Dadaab she was badly beaten twice, once by militiamen and once by Ethiopian soldiers. She says: "I'm a woman, I'm vulnerable and there's no government to protect me."

By midday at the UNHCR's registration office at Dagahaley camp, a state of organised chaos prevails. Lines of worn and exhausted people queue in all directions; young children howl as they are given basic vaccinations.

The prize on offer is a ration card. Outside the high fence faces and fingers push against the wire, some desperate, some curious.

• "Some people will have to come back tomorrow," Andy Needham from UNHCR explains. Registration means access to basic food and a rudimentary kit to build a shelter.
• There is no more land to give so people must find relatives or friends already inside the swollen camps to accommodate them.

After a week in which the first attempted hijack of a US ship off the coast of Somalia propelled the troubled nation to the top of the news agenda, it is the image of a shoeless young Somali, armed with a rocket launcher and shielded by a foreign hostage, that has remained with much of the world.

In fact, the hundreds of thousands of Somalis in Dadaab are as much victims of those pirate gangs as the foreign sailors captured in the Gulf of Aden. Food supplies to the camps were delayed by this week's surge of hijackings and the refugees' rations have been cut by one third.

A recent report on Dadaab by Oxfam described conditions as "conducive to a public health emergency".

The outlines of that are clearest at the N-0 encampment which lies on the fringe of the Ifo facility. It is known to regular visitors as the "end of the world".

There are no buildings here, just white UNHCR tents and balloon-shaped shelters that refugees have built from sticks and bits of plastic.

Everything has been blasted by red dust and nothing grows here but the ragged, thorned acacia trees.

• The shelters are packed so tightly together there is barely room to walk between them.
• A fire here would have no natural barriers and the consequences would be devastating.
• Yet each night hundreds of families cook on open hearths, there is no other choice.

This is just one of the nightmares that is haunting David Kangethe, a programme manager for Care International, the agency struggling to deliver basic services like water, sanitation and rubbish collection.
"Refugees are building everywhere.

This place is a matchbox, if you lit it up it would just burn," Mr Kangethe sighs. There are chronic water shortages, sanitation facilities are overwhelmed and diseases like cholera are rife.

The need for new land is acute but so far the Kenyan government has dragged its feet, citing complaints from the local community that they are being overwhelmed by the number of refugees.

Some 70,000 people live in the surrounding area, mainly animal herders who fear the loss of grazing land and scrub forest.

What is needed, according to aid workers, are three to four new camps but negotiations with Nairobi have remained deadlocked.

UNHCR has looked at what it would cost to give people the basic minimum living standard. The answer is $92m and an urgent appeal has been issued.

The response has been a near-deafening silence. The UK offered £2m in new money last week. Similar small pledges are trickling in but observers believe donors are waiting for a major crisis to break out before taking real action. That may happen very soon.

"If the numbers continue to increase we're headed for a crisis," says Mr Kangethe of Care.

In the meantime anti-piracy efforts will continue to dominate thinking in regard to the Somalia situation.

Gerry Simpson from the New York-based Human Rights Watch says the equation is simple: "When commercial interests are at stake there's money. When it's women and children there is not."

Survivors' stories

Ahmad Abdullahi Hussein

I was part of a militia that was fighting against al-Shabaab. We had to fight them. At night I was attacked in my home. I managed to go from the window. Later I found my wife was killed and only my two children Anisa and Abdulmalik were alive. The others were dead. I couldn't do anything. No-one can do anything against them.
I brought my children here to find my mother. She is in Hagadera camp, I want to be reunited with her. The children have no mother, they need mine.

Habib Waleda

In Mogadishu bombs were coming down from the sky and hitting houses. When the mortar hit my house we all just ran away. We were separated. I had nine children. Now I don't know where my husband is or where eight of my children are. I looked for them in Mogadishu but they don't have a telephone. It's impossible to find them. I found a taxi and I offered to give him the small money I had. I gave him $150 and I told him I didn't have any more money. He brought me near to the border. I don't know where they are. All I have is to hope they are coming.

Mohamed Ali

I am 70 years old. I fled from a town called Barra. I have lost my wife and my two children. I think they have gone to Bosasso, but I have not seen them for a year. I had to walk for 15 days through the desert. It was hard for me to walk because I am blind.

I had to stop and ask people for a little food along the way. Even if I go out and walk on the streets now a member of my family could walk by me and I would not see them. I have to hope that they will see me.

The Rest @ The Indepenat (UK)

Steve Bloomfield in Nairobi

SOMALIA'S FRAGILE government appears to be on the brink of collapse. Islamist insurgents now controls large parts of southern and central Somalia - and are continuing to launch attacks inside the capital, Mogadishu.

• Ethiopia, which launched a US-backed military intervention in Somalia in December 2006 in an effort to drive out an Islamist authority in Mogadishu, is now pulling out its troops.
• Diplomats and analysts in neighbouring Nairobi believe the government will fall once Ethiopia completes its withdrawal
• Plans have been made to evacuate government ministers to neighbouring Kenya.

A shipment of Ethiopian weapons, including tanks, left Mogadishu port last month as part of the withdrawal.

• Bringing the equipment back to Ethiopia by land would have been impossible - analysts believe Ethiopian troops and their Somali government allies control just three small areas in Mogadishu and a few streets in Baidoa, the seat of parliament.
• There are now estimated to be just 2500 Ethiopian soldiers left inside Somalia, down from 15,000-18,000 at the height of the war.
• Violence and insecurity have made it almost impossible for aid to get through, and 24 aid workers have been killed in Somalia so far this year.
• A recent shipment of food aid needed a military escort to navigate Somalia's pirate-infested waters. But within hours of the food being unloaded in Mogadishu's port most of it was stolen by gun-toting gangs.
• Oxfam, Save The Children and 50 other aid agencies working in Somalia last week said the international community had "completely failed Somali civilians".
• As the crisis worsens thousands are trying to leave the country every week. Around 6000 people are now crossing the border into Kenya every month - despite the Kenyan government's decision to close the border.
• Some are arriving at the overcrowded Dadaab refugee camp in eastern Kenya, which is now one of the largest refugee camps in the world with nearly 250,000 people.
• Others try to leave by sea, travelling to the northern town of Bosasso and paying $100 to people smugglers who ram more than 100 people onto a small fishing boat and set sail for Yemen. Many do not make it. Smugglers last week forced 150 people off the boat three miles off the Yemeni coast. Only 47 made it to shore.

Attempts to find a political solution have stalled. The UN claims progress has been made, citing an agreement signed in neighbouring Djibouti by the Somali government and the opposition Alliance for the Reliberation of Somalia (ARS).

But the deal has been signed only by the moderates on each side: Prime Minister Nur Adde and the ARS's Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed.

The Islamist leaders they were so keen to oust are the same ones they are now engaged in negotiations with. US officials have met both Sheikh Sharif and the more hardline Sheikh Aweys in an effort to find a peace deal.

Meanwhile, in Somalia, the Islamists taking control of towns and villages across the country are considered far more extremist than Aweys. "They are real international jihadis," said one Nairobi-based diplomat. "The Americans' fear of al-Qaeda in Somalia is becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy."

The Rest @ The Sunday Herald