A Famine We Made?

By late June and early July, when their goats were all gone and the last of their cows sank to their knees and died, the men told their families it was time to leave. In Daynunay, Haji Hassan and his children packed up what they had — a few rags, plastic bottles, some old cooking pots — and set out for Mogadishu, 155 miles to the east. At every village they passed, their small group grew, first to a column of hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands, as millions across southern Somalia abandoned their homes. With little water and only leaves to eat, the young and the old quickly perished: one of Hassan’s grandsons was buried where he dropped. Bagey Ali, 50, who walked 185 miles from Qansax Dheere, says he saw seven people “just sit down and die.” When his children would start fading on the 310-mile trek from Baoli, Bishar Abdi Shaith, 60, carried them on his shoulders. “When I realized they were dead, I would lift them off and bury them there, on the way.” He lost two boys and three girls that way.

A mass exodus, an emptying of half a country, is an unprecedented, biblical event. What triggered it? The immediate cause was drought. Rains failed last October in East Africa, then again in April, and by early August, the U.N. was putting the number of people at risk from hunger in Djibouti, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Kenya, Somalia and Uganda at 12.4 million.

(Watch a video of how a drought became a famine in Somalia.)

Southern Somalia was in famine. A full 2.8 million people, 63% of the region’s population, were either starving or at risk of it. The number of Somali children with severe acute malnutrition — near death — was 170,000; 29,000 had already died. Even those figures were probably underestimates. Iffthikar Mohamed, country director for Islamic Relief (which, unlike the U.N., has staff inside the famine), said his teams found mortality and malnutrition rates at least twice as high. Senior relief managers tell TIME there is no chance of preventing 100,000 Somalis, perhaps more, from dying in the next few weeks.

How did this happen? Could it have been stopped? And how is it that millions of Somalis were so sure that no help was coming that they took their families on a death march across the desert? The answers reveal how a war between Islamic militants and the U.S. and its allies led directly to human catastrophe.

Southern Somalia is part of the Sahel, the band of drylands that runs across Africa below the Sahara. Half a century ago, rainfall was sparse, but droughts occurred only once a decade. Today they come every two years, and in areas where El Niño and La Niña also disrupt the seasons, there haven’t been good rains for 10 years. This is climate change now — severe and lethal. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization says this year’s drought is the worst since 1950 — 51, and the successive rain failures mean an area the size of France has become desert in 50 years.

But drought just sets the conditions for famine; only man ensures it. The southern U.S. is in drought, but Americans aren’t starving because they have enough government and wealth. Likewise, one reason we are not seeing a repeat of the 1984 Ethiopian famine, in which a million people died, is that much of East Africa has progressed since then. Also, aid workers are now better at saving lives. An early-warning system first predicted East African food shortages 11 months ago; food aid has become more sophisticated and includes medicines and high-protein nut pastes; and improved disaster mitigation is matched by better prevention. Schemes like the U.S.’s $3.5 billion three-year program Feed the Future push ever more money into projects like irrigation and food warehouses that raise people’s ability to feed themselves.

The big difference between Somalia and the rest of East Africa is war. Somalis have been fighting one another and have lived without a central government for 20 years. Perhaps a million people have died. One symptom of this lawlessness is piracy. Another is the rise of Islamists advocating strict Shari’a, none more dangerous than al-Shabab, or “the Youth,” which is allied with al-Qaeda. For four years, al-Shabab has battled the official Transitional Federal Government (TFG).

(See pictures of the government laying claim to Mogadishu.)

The U.S. is the key international player. Since the 1993 battle known as Black Hawk Down, when 18 U.S. troops died during an intervention to support a U.N. mission in an earlier famine, few Americans have set foot in Mogadishu. But the U.S. has assassinated several Islamist leaders inside Somalia using Predator drones, cruise missiles fired from warships and, once, a helicopter gunship. Also, the U.S. bankrolls the unelected TFG.

In spite of such labors, al-Shabab was ascendant a year ago. It seemed set to take Mogadishu and announced its international debut in July 2010 with twin suicide-bomb attacks in Uganda, which killed 76 people. By then another U.S. initiative was starting to bite. In 2008 the State Department listed al-Shabab as a terrorist organization, making aiding or abetting it a serious crime. Al-Shabab was stealing aid to feed itself and to sell. Theft of aid is a routine occurrence, but when al-Shabab was designated a terrorist group, it meant that U.S. officials and foreign aid workers whose actions benefited al-Shabab, even unwittingly, would be penalized.

See pictures of the pirates of Somalia.

Aid as a Weapon
By late 2009 the U.S. was withholding about $50 million in food aid from al-Shabab territory. By early 2010 the U.S. was in a standoff with aid workers, requiring them to refuse to pay the tolls al-Shabab demanded if they wanted U.S. funding. For its part, al-Shabab expelled the World Food Programme (WFP) in January 2010, saying that food aid created dependence and that the organization was a U.S. proxy. In effect, southern Somalia was largely without aid and lacked a reliable network through which to move emergency supplies in the event of a disaster. Warning of a crisis, Mark Bowden, U.N. humanitarian coordinator for Somalia, accused the U.S. of fighting its war with aid. “We’re no longer involved in a discussion about the practicalities of delivering humanitarian assistance with proper safeguards,” he told reporters in February 2010. It had become “an issue of where assistance can be provided on political grounds.”

On its narrow terms, U.S. strategy succeeded. Al-Shabab has been severely weakened by a combination of famine and the loss of Middle Eastern funding since the political turmoil there. On Aug. 6, it withdrew from Mogadishu. But what impoverished al-Shabab’s few thousand fighters also helped push a few million Somalis to the brink of starvation. The same areas ruled by al-Shabab are those now blighted by famine. On the ground in those regions are the Red Cross, several Islamic charities, a handful of Médecins sans Frontières workers and UNICEF contractors. The WFP, the giant of famine relief, whose slogan is “Fighting hunger worldwide,” is absent. The U.N. says just 20% of the 2.8 million southern Somalis in need are being reached.

Asked whether the U.S. inadvertently contributed to the famine, Bruce Wharton, U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, chooses his words carefully. “U.S. sanctions against al-Shabab do not and have never prohibited the delivery of assistance to Somalia, including those areas under de facto control of al-Shabab,” he says. That may be technically correct, but the effect of U.S. sanctions has been to block aid to southern Somalia. By mid-August, WFP staff confirmed that the agency had no access to al-Shabab areas.

Some aid workers openly accuse the U.S. of causing the crisis. “The famine is proof of U.S. success,” says Tony Burns, operations director for the Somali aid group Saacid. Washington’s allies in the TFG aren’t shy about hailing the strategic advantage the disaster gives them. The famine “is an opportunity to expand our reach,” TFG Prime Minister Abdiweli Mohamed Ali tells Time. Underlining the point, TFG commander General Yusuf Mohammed Siad says, “We cannot take food to where they are. They have nothing, they cannot fight, and what we need to do now is clear them out.”

Help out of Reach
If there’s little aid in the famine areas, there’s not enough outside them. Afraid for their safety, most Western aid agencies hole up in a fortified base next to the airport. Three weeks after the U.N. declared a famine, despite several aid flights arriving daily, food had yet to make it out of the airport to a camp just 100 yards away. The WFP was distributing 85,000 hot meals a day through local groups, a small fraction of what Mogadishu’s 500,000 refugees needed.

Many in the aid world struggle to explain their poor performance. “We are still trying to work out how we ended up here, what we missed, what we did wrong,” says Peter Hailey, senior nutrition manager at UNICEF. For the U.N. not to call an emergency appeal until July 20, by which time Europe and the U.S. were consumed by their debt crises, seems a particular mistake — and a reason the U.N. had by Aug. 24 only 58% of the $2.48 billion it says it needs.

That hasn’t stopped some aid groups from claiming heroic successes. The WFP broadcast a fundraising Twitter message on Aug. 9 proclaiming, “Airlifts launched to bring enough high-energy biscuits to Horn of Africa to feed 1.6 million people.” An accompanying press release clarified that the biscuits would feed 1.6 million people for one day and that the “airlifts” were from Nairobi to Mombasa, Kenya, not Mogadishu. On Aug. 10, Oxfam claimed it was “now reaching 880,000 people in Somalia.” A spokesman later admitted to TIME that there was no Oxfam staff in southern Somalia and that the figure of 880,000 was an estimate of the beneficiaries of Oxfam-funded, locally implemented projects across all of Somalia, including latrines, water projects and aid vouchers outside the famine. It’s all too much for Mogadishu Mayor Mahamud Nur: “The aid groups say they’re here, but where? It’s complete rubbish! Children are dying!”

The day I first visit Banadir’s 35-bed children’s ward, a 7-year-old child called Umar has just died. But Banadir has lost its cemetery: refugees have built huts and a makeshift classroom over the graves. As relatives scour Mogadishu for an unclaimed space big enough in which to lay Umar’s tiny body, I stand with his mother Khalima, 38, as she watches an orderly wash her son’s pin-thin body and wrap him in a white shroud. Overhead, unseen, a Predator drone hums. Then, in the graveyard school next door, the children start to sing.