Three million drought-stricken Somalis' lives hang in the balance because of an ill-defined law that prevents Secretary Clinton from getting them the aid they need.
Last week Secretary Hillary Clinton’s office at the State Department announced that the U.S. was willing to send humanitarian aid to Somalia despite the fact that much of the country is under the control of Al Shabab, a ragtag bunch of grifters and militants, some of whom have ties to Al Qaeda. Somalia is bearing the brunt of the worst famine and drought in 60 years—the worst since Africa’s colonial period. Ten million people who live on the knobby spit off the East African coast called the Horn are suffering the famine’s effects: starvation and death. Somalia is bearing the brunt of this crisis, especially the nearly 3 million people who live in country’s south. The death toll could easily surpass that of Ethiopia in the '80s, which left 1 million people dead.
State Department intervention could spur the international community to act. But sadly, Clinton’s announcement is meaningless thanks to a bureaucratic snafu within the U.S. government. In 2009 the U.S. spent roughly half as much in food and disaster aid to Somalia ($130 million) as it did in military assistance ($246 million) not including CIA programs, such as drones. Yet thanks to a gnarl of red tape between the State and Treasury departments, it’s currently illegal for America to provide southern Somalia so much as a cup of rice or a bag of corn, due to the vagaries of an ill-defined law against providing material support to terrorists.
Famine, as we’ve learned over the past 30 years, isn’t only about a dearth of food. People starve as a result of economics and politics. Food serves as a weapon, particularly in Somalia, which has had no government to speak of for the past 20 years, longer than any other country on earth. When food prices began to spike several years ago in the Somali capital of Mogadishu, I watched “policemen” brandish AK-47s to muscle sacks of sugar away from a hungry mob—to give to their own families and friends or to sell them on the black market.
These days, Al Shabab functions as a virtual state in much of the south. In 2009, after the group targeted aid workers, banned foreign women from Somalia, and started to collect bribes and protection money they called “rent,” almost all international aid groups pulled out. Al Shabab, in turn, accused the groups of spying and being against Muslims, and banned all foreign-aid work.
Shockingly, last week the group changed its mind. Alarmed by the deepening drought and famine, Al Shabab held a press conference in Mogadishu to announce foreign-aid groups were welcome to return—even non-Muslims—to work alongside Al Shabab’s drought committee. The decision was prompted, in part, by the rebel’s desire to stop starving people from leaving their zones of control and flooding to areas controlled by the wobbly transitional government.
To her credit, Secretary Clinton promptly announced that the U.S. was willing to take Al Shabab up on its offer. In theory, she was willing to restart aid programs in Somalia. In reality, her hands are tied by paperwork. In places where U.S. aid might fall into the hands of terrorists, the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) at the Treasury Department must issue any group working there a license. But OFAC isn’t issuing licenses for any group—including USAID—to work in south-central Somalia because of worries about running afoul of a murky law against giving money to terrorists. Unless this legal impasse is cleared, nearly 3 million people facing famine are likely to starve.
There is a solution. It lies in legal precedents. OFAC has issued licenses for Sudan (although it’s on the State Department list of state-sponsored terrorists) and for Gaza (in Hizbullah’s control.) To do so, the State Department has to request a humanitarian exemption from OFAC, which is relatively easy to then grant legally. In fact, UNICEF has had some luck in receiving some licensing on Somalia.
Supplying aid to terrorists is an appalling prospect, one that alarms aid workers as much as it does the U.S. government. “Shabab doesn’t wear T shirts,” one relief worker said recently. There are a host of thorny questions about how to safeguard food and medicine from falling into Al Shabab’s control. These have to be worked out—and can be—by interlocutors in Nairobi before food flows. If Al Shabab is serious, the militants must demonstrate how they will let aid reach starving people before the U.S. can go forward. For the U.S., this is a risk worth taking. Without doing so, Somalis will continue to believe that the U.S. is using its bureaucracy to mask its hypocrisy toward Somalia. It will be impossible to prove them wrong.
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