At least 16,000 people have been chased from their homes in Mogadishu, said Ron Redmond, spokesman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. Many have crammed into the Somali town of Afgooye, which is already flooded with more than 300,000 internally displaced people.
“The new wave of displacement is worsening an already catastrophic situation,” Redmond told reporters in Geneva, where the agency has its headquarters.
He said more than 1 million people are displaced in Somalia, which has not had an effective government for more than 17 years. At the end of last year, there were nearly a half-million Somalis registered outside the country, but many more have fled without notifying authorities.
The crisis is exceeding even the worst-case scenarios imagined nearly two years ago, when troops from neighboring Ethiopia arrived to oust a radical Islamic militia and support the Western-backed government. The Ethiopian troops, which many Somalis consider an occupying force, are seen as a cause of the violence and not a cure.
In a renewed explosion of violence this week, 30 people died in fighting in the capital on Monday and at least 11 civilians were killed during a later attack on an African Union peacekeepers’ base in Mogadishu.
Nicolas Bwakira, the AU envoy to Somalia, said Friday that the 2,600-member force is not in Somalia to fight or to be drawn into any conflict it is not part of.
“We are there as an impartial and neutral peacekeeping force in order to help Somalis in their quest for peace in their country,” Bwakira told journalists in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi. The AU mission has its main office in Nairobi because Somalia is insecure.
Bwakira, however, said that the force will defend itself if attacked.
The Somali government, powerless without Ethiopia’s muscle, is likely to crumble if their protectors pull out. And al-Shabab, a radical group at the heart of the insurgency, refuses to negotiate as long as Ethiopians remain.
The refugee situation is grave.
Redmond said refugee agency’s teams in Kenya’s remote Dadaab camp _ about 50 miles (80 kilometers) from the Somali border _ are reporting thousands of new refugees each month. Even though the frontier is officially closed, the border is very porous, he said. More than 45,000 new asylum seekers have arrived at the camp this year, he said.
He said Dadaab is one of the world’s oldest, biggest and most congested refugee camps, with a population of over 215,000 people. Most are from Mogadishu, and the agency is trying to help alleviate the overcrowding at the site because more refugees may be on the way.
Neither side has shown regard for civilians who stream out of the capital in droves, many of them gravely wounded and taking shelter by roadsides or sneaking into neighboring countries. A local human rights group says the insurgency has killed more than 9,000 civilians.
The United States has repeatedly accused the Islamic group of harboring international terrorists linked to al-Qaida and allegedly responsible for the 1998 bombings of the U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
