The Somali famine of 2011 was a massive, monstrous failure on the part of the international community at almost all levels. A new report released on Thursday indicates that the crisis took the lives of a far greater number than many experts predicted: Up to 260,000 Somalis died that year, over half of them children, largely due to the world’s slow response.

While it can’t be known for certain, a set of proposals from the Obama administration to completely revamp food aid might be able to prevent future tragedies of this scale from happening. Currently, U.S. law says that 85 percent of all international food aid must be purchased from the United States, then shipped from our shores to the country in need. Under the new format, introduced in President Obama’s FY 2014 proposed budget, the amount of food required to be produced in the United States would drop to 55 percent, with the rest of it being purchased from local sources through donated cash.

As Secretary of State John Kerry told the House Foreign Affairs Committee last week, having the ability to buy more food locally could make all the difference in a humanitarian crisis — such as in Somalia — in getting food to those in need faster, while saving the United States money:

KERRY: By giving us the ability to modernize, including the flexibility to also procure food aid in developing countries closer to the crisis areas, not only do we feed more people, but we get food to malnourished people 11 to 14 weeks faster. So here’s the bottom line: This change allows us to do more, to help more people lift themselves out of hunger at a rapid pace without spending more money. I think that’s a great deal for the American taxpayer.

USAID Director Ravij Shah explained during his own appearance before Congress last week that under the new proposals as many as 4 million extra people would be reached per year without an increase in the foreign aid budget. Without the new system, Shah warned, about 150,000 children in Somalia would cease to receive food aid from the U.S. as other hotspots around the world consume the fifteen percent of food aid able to purchased locally. Such a decrease would prove devastating in the event of another massive crisis on the same scale as Somalia’s.

While a 2006 proposal to increase food aid flexibility to 25 percent failed, the odds are looking better for the new attempt. Rep. Ed Royce (R-CA) and Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY) — the Chairman and Ranking Member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee respectively — put out a letter supporting the initiative following the release of President Obama’s budget. Despite that, pressure is growing from agricultural interests such as the American Farm Bureau Federation and lawmakers from states with large farming populations to water down — or outright kill — the proposal.

CAP experts in a 2012 report called for the restructuring of the U.S.’ food aid program in a similar fashion to the method the administration is advancing. “At a minimum, we recommend that nonemergency food aid be exempt from both cargo preference and “buy American” requirements,” the report suggests, adding that “cost savings from these reforms would vary from year to year depending on fluctuations in food assistance. We estimate, however, that efficiency gains would range from $488 million to $628 million annually.”

(Photo Credit: Roberto Schmidt/AFP/Getty Images)

This morning’s tale of a dramatic escape from Syria by an NBC correspondent only serves to highlight the near record bad year for journalists around the world in 2012.

NBC News chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel, along with his production team, made their way across the border to Turkey after five days in captivity in Syria. In interviews on Tuesday, Engel said that he and his team were captured while traveling with Syrian rebels and theorized that he was being held by a Shiite militia group loyal to the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Engel said the militia’s members used “psychological torture” on him and his crew and intended to exchange the NBC crew Engel and other journalists for the freedom of others being held by rebel groups. (Watch an interview with Engle and his associates here.)

Word of Engel’s capitivity began to spread on social media on Monday after reporting from Turkish newspaper Hurriyet, despite an official media blackout from NBC. Engel’s freedom came at the hands of a Syrian rebel group known as Ahrar al-Sham:

Hazem al-Shami, spokesperson and a fighter in Ahrar al-Sham battalions, said the rebels had been on the lookout for the missing journalists, and so they had set up checkpoints to search for them. One of the checkpoints was near the town in Idlib Province where the hostages were being kept.

“When they saw we’re searching cars, they started to shoot at us,” he said in an interview on Skype. “So we attacked them until the kidnappers ran away and the hostages stayed in the car.”

Engel’s escape is unquestionably a welcome development, but it also draws attention to the scores of journalists who find themselves either unable to flee prisons or who have given the ultimate sacrifice for their work over the course of this year. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 67 journalists have been killed in the line of work in 2012, a number only surpassed in 2009 in terms of lethality.

The spike in those lost this year comes primarily from Syria, where 28 have died in combat or have been targeted by the government, and another 18 in a mass of targeted deaths in Somalia. The vast majority of those lost this year have been local journalists, though four international members of the press, including American writer Marie Colvin and Japanese journalist Mika Yamamoto, were killed in Syria.

Meanwhile, as of Dec. 1, 232 journalists remain imprisoned worldwide for attempting to cover the news. According to the Committee to Protect Journalist, fifty journalists are behind bars in Turkey alone, the highest rate of incarceration for media members in the world, having just arrested another on charges of terrorism yesterday. The majority of those locked up in Turkey are Kurds on terrorism charges.

Engel’s release also shines a light back onto journalists who also remain in captivity within Syria. Among them is Austin Tice, a freelance journalist who first went missing in August, whose whereabouts are still unknown.

By Dara McLeod, Director of Communications, Refugees International

MOGADISHU, SOMALIA — Yesterday, I met with a man in Mogadishu whose business was the target of a suicide attack. Ahmed is a British-Somali who returned to the country in 2008 and went on to open up several popular restaurants. Last Thursday, two suicide bombers walked into one of those restaurants and killed 15 of Ahmed’s patrons and staff.

Ahmed’s story is a perfect illustration of the current state of affairs in Mogadishu. Since the departure of Al Shabaab last year, Mogadishu has changed for the better. Businesses like Ahmed’s are springing up and doing well, and the unexpected result of the recent presidential election has given people here some hope that the corruption that has plagued this nation is perhaps starting to lose its stranglehold.

But last week’s attack at Ahmed’s restaurant also demonstrates just how precarious life still can be in this town formerly described as “the world’s most dangerous city.” And there is no group of people more vulnerable than the city’s tens of thousands of internally displaced.

Drive through the streets of Mogadishu, and you’ll see that almost every place where there is an empty plot of land, there are the makeshift shelters of internally displaced people (IDPs). Some IDPs have been here for decades, others more recently arrived — the victims of ongoing conflict and last year’s famine. All came to Mogadishu seeking shelter, only to be further victimized by a system that prevents them from getting the assistance they so desperately need.

Most of Mogadishu’s IDP settlements are run by so-called “gatekeepers” — de facto camp managers who control access to the camps as well as exit from them. Some estimates suggest that there are as many as 1,100 gatekeepers in Mogadishu. There are a few examples of “good” gatekeepers, who provide a measure of security for the IDPs in their care. However, there are far more examples of gatekeepers who are using the IDPs as commodities in a complex matrix that includes local government officials, private militias, and the international aid community.

It is no secret that Somalia suffers from an institutional diversion of aid. Many of the gatekeepers are a large part of this. For example, to live in the camps, IDPs often have to pay “rent” to the gatekeepers — usually in the form of a portion of the international assistance that they receive. There are stories of IDPs wanting to leave the camps, but who are unable to do so because their rent is always in arrears. There are other stories of entire camps of IDPs being sold from one gatekeeper to another. The system has been described by some as a kind of slavery. And it can make it incredibly difficult for those IDPs to break out of this cycle of obligation and re-establish their own livelihoods. Here is video of an IDP camp in Mogadishu we recently filmed:

Read more

Today on a press call with Mitt Romney’s campaign foreign policy advisers, former Navy Secretary during the Reagan administration and now Romney adviser John Lehman claimed that American allied military leaders around the world are telling him that under President Obama, the United States is no longer leading in world affairs. As one piece of evidence, Lehman cited the Obama administration’s policies in combating piracy:

LEHMAN: I think the biggest concern when I talk to my former counterparts and current military leaders in — among our allies in Europe and the Pacific is, the theme that they — I keep hearing from them is, Why is the United States under Obama abdicating leadership or keeping stability in the world? … And they see our abdication of leadership in for instance dealing with the pirates. We were not in a leadership position and that’s opened up a very attractive opportunity for the Russians and even the Chinese have two ships out there.

Listen to the clip:

Absent in Lehman’s argument of course is the fact that, according to data released just this week, sea piracy worldwide has declined 28 percent in the first quarter of the year and, as the AP reported, “attacks fell sharply in Somalia’s waters thanks to international naval patrols.” And which country has a “large” naval presence there? The United States.

“When the Obama administration came to office the problem of piracy off the coast of Somalia was snowballing out of control,” Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs Andrew Shapiro said recently at an event sponsored by the Center for American Progress, “through the collective effort of the United States, the international community, and the private sector, we are now seeing signs of clear progress.” Shapiro continued:

The numbers clearly demonstrate this. In 2011, the number of successful pirate attacks fell by nearly half. As a result, there has been a significant drop in the numbers of ships and crew held hostage. In January 2011, pirates held 31 ships and 710 hostages. In early March of 2012 pirates held eight ships and 213 hostages – a roughly 70 percent decline. This is still way too many, but it is clear advances are being made.

“The Obama administration has pursued a strategy that seeks to leverage all elements of U.S. power” to combat piracy, Shapiro added, which comprises an integrated multi-dimensional approach that includes diplomatic engagement, expanding security at sea, preventing attacks and debilitating piracy networks.

Also absent from Lehman’s argument? Obama’s order in 2009 for a successful Navy SEALS operation to take out pirates holding an American ship captain hostage, nor his most recent order for U.S. special ops forces to rescue an American and a Danish hostages from pirate-affiliate kidnappers.

By Laura Heaton

The Famine Early Warning Network warned last week that the current rainy season in the eastern Horn of Africa will not be adequate to prevent food insecurity in the region still recovering for last year’s devastating famine. Learning lessons from what did and did not work in the 2011 famine relief efforts in Somalia is thus a matter of urgent and immediate concern. A new field dispatch by the Enough Project illustrates how, on the most local level, deficiencies of the relief effort played out, based on research conducted in the Somali capital of Mogadishu.

Communities across Somalia, Ethiopia, and Kenya suffered severely from the 2011 drought and famine; tens of thousands of people died. Somalia was the epicenter of this human tragedy, largely because conflict and the severe policies of the militant group al-Shabaab undercut the traditional coping strategies Somalis use to deal with extreme weather and also cut off these vulnerable communities from humanitarian aid.

The relief effort in Mogadishu suffered from lack of access and ongoing insecurity, but unlike in most other parts of the country, Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government, or TFG, had unparalleled control there. And yet the city was mired in some of the most acute suffering, and famine was persistent, even as the United Nations rolled back the famine classification for other Somali regions.

Through interviews conducted primarily in settlements of displaced people who fled to Mogadishu from the surrounding regions at the height of the famine, Enough found:

“[I]nsecurity, inadequate oversight for distribution of humanitarian assistance, and wholesale criminality combined to create a situation where beneficiaries often didn’t see the relief intended for them, security services involved in distribution committed abuses with impunity, and aid flowed instead into the pockets of corrupt Somali officials—all issues that primarily fall to the TFG to address.”

The field dispatch, “Somalia Famine Relief: A View from Mogadishu,” presents individual testimonies from displaced people, highlights some important details about the scope of the suffering in Mogadishu, and features the Somali prime minister’s startling denial of famine in the city, just a day before the U.N. announced a massive new appeal for funds.

“Recent attention to Somalia generated by the high-level conference in London in February and by the reported successes of joint military operations targeting al-Shabaab leaves the impression that important changes are afoot. There are,” the field dispatch states. “But without some dramatic changes in the way the country is governed and humanitarian issues are handled, Somalia remains prone to the next iteration of al-Shabaab, coming in to fill the void, and donors’ contributions to assist Somalis most in need continue to risk falling into the hands of those who benefit from Somalia’s chaos.”

Cross-posted from the Enough Project.

Our guest blogger is Laura Heaton, the Writer-Editor for the blog, Enough Said

Just six months remain before the Somali Transitional Federal Government’s time is up to ready the country for more permanent governing structures and institutions after more than 20 years of civil war. Marking the start of that countdown, British Prime Minister David Cameron convened a high-profile conference today in London to map out plans for concluding the transition and rally support for the many costly initiatives currently underway inside Somalia.

The conference also comes at a significant moment militarily in the long war. African Union peacekeepers, working alongside the army of the Transitional Federal Government, or TFG, have chalked up some important recent victories against Somalia’s al-Qaeda linked al-Shabaab militia. Shabaab still controls large swaths of central and southern Somalia, but A.U. peacekeepers and the TFG now hold the capital of Mogadishu. While the threat from Shabaab has morphed—from street battles to guerrilla tactics like roadside bombs—and is far from defeated, control of Mogadishu carries significant value because it’s the place where all Somali interests and grievances converge.

“For decades, the world focused on what we could prevent from happening in Somalia—conflict, famine, terrorism,” said Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who represented the United States in London. “Now, we are focused on what we can build.”

But what’s the good of a ‘transition’ that primarily focuses on surface-level tasks—in and of themselves no small feat in Somalia—like replacing the current leaders and building more representative, streamlined institutions? To Somalia expert Ken Menkhaus, such a process would produce little more than new names and faces but with “the same frustrating outcome.”

“Changes in political leadership and decision-making structures will have limited effect if no effort is made to weaken the political cartels and networks that work behind the scenes in Somalia to divert funds and stymie effective rule of law,” Menkhaus, a professor at Davidson College, wrote in a briefing paper published by the Enough Project today.

After seven years and with little to show for its tenure, the TFG has provided ample illustrations of how not to garner support for Somalis or build institutions and credibility to extend security and services beyond the limited areas controlled by foreign peacekeepers and government-aligned armed groups. The past several years have also showcased the apparent lack of understanding by many international-led efforts of the necessity for an inclusive, transparent process to ensure that Somali people—long wary of outside interventions—feel represented.

The delegates at today’s conference broadly acknowledged these pitfalls, firmly noting that “there must be no further extensions” of the TFG’s mandate and of the need to “spend more time on the ground in Somalia in order to work more closely with Somalis on the challenging tasks ahead.”

Moving beyond Somalia’s big day in the spotlight, international efforts to prepare for the end of the transition in August 2012 and pave the way for a government with a stabilizing effect on the country will have to strike a balance between keeping an eye on the calendar and encouraging dialogue and inclusivity to ensure Somali initiative and buy-in.

“Back-room deals and decisions driven by expediency and deadline-induced panic have been the norm over the past two decades of diplomacy in Somalia and have consistently produced failure,” wrote Menkhaus. Certainly, with just six months to go, the temptation to look for shortcuts will be strong.

Meanwhile, the London conference appeared to be a motivating factor for the United Nations Security Council to approve an African Union proposal to expand the AU’s peacekeeping mission in Somalia, raising the troop strength from 12,000 to nearly 18,000. After deliberating the expansion since December, the Security Council signed off on the plans yesterday, which, with a price tag of about $300 million, more than doubles the mission’s current budget. This move, too, consolidates pressure on the TFG and its successor. As peacekeepers from an array of African countries risk their lives to roll back al-Shabaab, the Somali government must be ready to quickly step in and fill the void.

Amid the riveting tales from Somalia of a daring special operations rescue of aid workers, captures of Somali pirates, and, today, news of Ethiopian forces pressing a new front in their battle for the anarchic Horn of Africa state, comes the harrowing story of journalist Hassan Osman Abdi.

The 29-year-old director of Shabelle radio network was shot to death on Saturday outside his home by unknown assailants. Abdi, known by his nickname “Fantastic,” covered corruption in Somalia.

The advocacy group Reporters Without Borders said of his death:

Violence against journalists in Somalia is sustained by impunity for those responsible. It is quite clear that Abdi was deliberately targeted. We call for a serious and impartial investigation that leads to the identification of his murderers.

His colleagues said they believe the al Qaeda-linked Al Shabab militant group that rules large swaths of Somalia by force orchestrated the killing. “Absolutely, we are sure it is al-Shabab,” Abdi’s colleague told Al Jazeera. An Al Shabab website offered up the killing as a “lesson” to other journalists, further pointing to the group as the killers.

Another journalist, Abdisalan Sheikh Hassan, was killed just over a month ago. In the past three years, 13 journalists in Somalia died in targeted violence, according to the Committee To Protect Journalists, an advocacy group that meticulously documents such killings and confirms motivations behind the killings.

The deaths — and continuing threats — are having a chilling effect on reporters in Somalia, which has lacked an effective central government since 1991. Five employees of Shabelle radio alone lost their lives in attacks, and Abdi is the third news director to be killed. His colleagues are disheartened. Station editor Muhyadin Hassan said the threats continued:

We sleep at the radio station because we can’t go home. We don’t know why we are being targeted. You can’t know who is going to kill you.

Another colleague noted that they couldn’t even attend his funeral service: “We can’t even pay respects to our fallen colleague since al Shabab is threatening us.”

Somalia’s president Sharif Ahmed, who controls little territory in the country despite foreign forces attempting bolster him, condemned Abid’s killing as a “senseless murder.” AMISOM, the African Union force fighting militants in Somalia, offered its condolences for the killing and said it would help the federal government in any investigation.

Our guest blogger is Laura Heaton, the writer-editor for the blog, Enough Said.

NAIROBI, Kenya — Kenya’s landmark incursion into Somalia last October and ongoing military operations present some important opportunities and disquieting potential pitfalls for establishing lasting security in a region controlled by the al Qaeda-linked jihadi group al-Shabaab.

The nearly three-month long intervention is the Kenyan army’s first-ever offensive across its borders. The commotion after Kenyan soldiers crossed over into Somalia and, reportedly, then sought approval from the Somalia’s transitional federal government compounded questions about the army’s experience. It also accentuated concerns about upsetting the fragile arrangements that have enabled Kenya to, for the most part, avoid being a target of Shabaab’s deadly attacks.

But beyond the viability of the military campaign to rout a brutal militant group that has employed devastating insurgency tactics against peacekeepers and soldiers more familiar with the terrain, the question of what comes next looms even larger.

“Intervention strategies that plan the war but not the peace will fail,” Somalia expert Ken Menkhaus warned in a policy paper published last Friday by the Enough Project.

“Indifference to or wishful thinking about the crafting of a post-intervention political order guarantees disorder, and can leave both the occupied country and the intervening power worse off than before.”

The stakes of the military operation against Shabaab this time around cannot be overstated. If the current campaign fails to dramatically undercut −− if not wholly defeat−− Shabaab, the situation will be even worse, as a longtime Somalia watcher here remarked to Enough recently: “Shabaab will look invincible.”

The responsibility for coming up with the post-intervention plan lies squarely with Somali leaders and authorities but will require strong diplomatic efforts and coordination by international partners, wrote Menkhaus, a professor at Davidson College. In particular, non-Somali actors must press for a governing plan that does not see the potential prizes of the operation against Shabaab −− most significantly, the lucrative and hotly contested port city of Kismayo −− divvied up along clan lines. Menkhaus explained: Read more

Minnesota-based Sunrise Community Banks, the largest U.S. bank that allows Somalis in the U.S. to send money back home, recently decided to halt money transfers back to the famine-stricken nation in an effort to comply with ambiguous U.S. laws on terrorist group financing. However, as CAP’s Sarah Margon noted on this blog last week, the decision means that a “vital lifeline” to Somalia “has vanished.”

In response, Somali-Americans held a rally at the St. Paul, Minnesota capitol building last Friday afternoon “calling on banks and the federal government to find a solution to a continuing crisis affecting their families.” “The money that we are transferring is for starving people,” one rally-goer said. “This is a lifeline,” another demonstrator said, adding, “If they don’t get the money, they are going to starve, which is already they are dying day by day.” Another local Somali said, “It brings tears to us. We can’t even sleep thinking about this.” Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) also spoke at the demonstration:

ELLISON: It’s important for all of us to know that as we stand here calling for simple justice that we don’t stand here alone. Our friends in the Christian community, other communities all over the state of Minnesota care about making sure that the lifeline stays in place for the people of Somalia.

Watch clips from the rally here:

In a letter to Secretary of State Clinton last month, Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) highlighted three major concerns he had in cutting off the remittances:

First, it would deprive many Somalis of a major source of sustenance. [...] Second, the lack of legitimate means for the transmission of funds to Somalia may end up driving people into more difficult-to-track channels for sending money, which heightens the risk of funds ending up in the hands of bad actors. Third, an end to the flow of remittances from the U.S. to Somalia would be a potential victory for al-Shabbab, which could then claim that America was preventing needed funds from getting to suffering Somalis.

Sunrise Community Banks said last week that it “has been and remains open to facilitating money transfers to Somalia.” In a statement on its website, they said they “reached out to multiple government agencies and officials, have made a specific proposal, and have told the agencies that we are seeking a constructive exchange with them in an effort to reach an accommodation that would satisfy the concerns of those sending funds, the government and the bank.”