The Horn of Africa is facing the biggest drought it’s seen in years, with a current estimate of twelve million people in urgent need of aid. Yet the problems do not stop there. A recent report by the Amnesty International has stated that the number of children being exploited, injured, killed, kidnapped, being trained as soldiers and abused is dramatically increasing, especially in Somalia.
The number of war-wounded children was nearly 46% of reported injuries in the month of May alone, compared to only 3.5% in April. The severe increase shows the harshness of the situation in Somalia which has, unfortunately, not received a lot of media or political coverage and as such, despite Somalia's Transitional Federal Government being on the UN list of shame as a party recruiting, using, killing and maiming children in armed conflict, very little is being done about it. Somalia has committed to respect children's rights; however, this is clearly not happening.
Roughly 3000 people leave Somalia every day, claiming refugee in Kenya, Ethiopia and Djibouti, and those children who do get out of Somalia and manage to get to what they assume to be safe ground at refugee camps face further problems as due to the camps being completely exhausted of resources and space, there is an increasing number of reports of child abuse and children being kidnapped to be trained as soldiers for al-Shabaab, a group of Islamist militants fighting to overthrow the government of Somalia.
There are reports that al-Shabaab have been kidnapping children from towns and from families en-route to refugee camps. al-Shabaab has also placed bans on education, especially for young females. Children who have spoken to Amnesty International have reported stories of al-Shabaab coming in to schools and kidnapping other students and murdering their teachers. Many schools have also been destroyed, and if the school has been lucky enough to survive the attacks by al-Shabaab, the staff and students are frightened going to and from a place which should be a safe zone where education can happen freely, without fear.
The stories being told by children are difficult to stomach, they show just how truly dire the situation is and the emotional turmoil which will face the next generation is difficult to estimate but not impossible to understand. One child reported the death of his two brothers to Amnesty International workers: “Two of my brothers were killed in February 2010. One day they were going to Bakara market and war broke out. They got caught in the cross-fire. Their names were Abdullahi, who was 18 and Ahmed, who was 14. When the fighting stopped we had to run to the market to pick up their bodies.”
Two brothers who did make it to the refugee camps explained why they left their homes: “We came here with our mother and five other people. We came from Karan district in Mogadishu. We left because of the bullets. We had to run away from the big bombs. Our village was constantly being bombarded from the other side. We couldn’t even get home sometimes.” These two brothers, only 10 and 13 years old, face the challenge of growing up in a community destroyed by civil war and in a country which has currently no food or water to provide for its people.
Somalia has been suffering from problems for many years and since 1991, the country has been divided between clans and groups of warlords, including al-Shabaab. An estimated 7.5 million people from Somalia, a quarter of the entire population, are thought to have been uprooted before the start of 2011. This number has increased, with an estimated further 10 million people affected in Somalia, Kenya and Ethiopia by increased insecurity and civil wars, as well as drought, which has resulted in the situation in the Horn of Africa being described as “the worst humanitarian crisis in the world today”
Children are not the only people in need in the affected countries. The high number of refugees is only expected to rise since rain is not forecasted for anytime before October, and even this is not guaranteed. The situation needs to be focused on, and although the African Union says that $35 million has been raised for aid relief, this is only a fraction of the $2.5 billion that is estimated to ensure that every vulnerable person has access to aid and to the chance to life.
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