“Why do you matter less in this world if you are from Somalia?”
admin September 14th, 2009
UNHCR reported last week that its Goodwill Ambassador, Angelina Jolie, had visited Dadaab, the world’s largest refugee camp situated on the Kenya-Somali border on Saturday. Describing the camp as ‘one of the most dire’ she had seen, Jolie concluded her visit by asking “if this is the better solution, then what must it be like in Somalia?”
During her day-long visit, Jolie visited one of the three camps that together host around 285,000 refugees. She met a number of families including a mother just arrived in the camp, after walking for days with her three young children to flee war-torn Somalia.
Like the West African floods commented on below, the ongoing war and displacement of people in Somalia is one of those African disasters that is going on below the radar of the general public in the West.
The country is also going through its worst drought for ten years yet, ironically, there is also flooding expected shortly in parts of the country – classic symptoms of the mix of extreme weather events that global warming brings.
Speaking to CNN, Robbert Van den Berg, a spokesman for Oxfam International in the Horn of Africa said, “Somalis flee one of the world’s most brutal conflicts and a desperate drought, only to end up in unimaginable conditions in camps that are barely fit for humans. Hundreds of thousands of children are affected, and the world is abandoning the next generation of Somalis when they most need our help. Why does it seem like you matter less in this world if you are from Somalia?”
Oxfam accused the international community of failing the refugees, who have little access to basic services such as water and medicine. It added that about 8,000 Somali refugees flock into the Dadaab camp in northern Kenya every month – the camp, which has facilities for about 90,000, is currently housing 280,000 refugees who have no access to basic necessities, including clean water.
- blog
- Comments(0)
