Month: March 2017

Deadly cholera is spreading through drought-ravaged Somalia as clean water sources dry up, a top aid official said, deepening a humanitarian crisis in a country that is on the verge of famine.

The Horn of Africa nation has recorded more than 18,000 cases of cholera so far this year, up from around 15,000 in all of 2016 and 5,000 in a normal year, Johan Heffinck, the Somalia head of EU Humanitarian Aid, said in an email on Thursday.

The current strain of the disease is unusually deadly, killing around 1 in 45 patients.

Somalia is suffering from a severe drought that means more than half of its 12 million citizens are expected to need aid by July. Families have been forced to drink slimy, infected water after the rains failed and wells and rivers dried up.

“We are very close to famine,” Heffinck said.

The Security Information Network (FSIN), which is co-sponsored by the United Nations food agency, said in a report on Friday Somalia was one of four African countries at high risk of famine.

Somalia’s rainy season normally runs from March to May, but there has been no rain this month.

The drought has hit particularly hard in the breakaway northern region of Somaliland, where the rains began to fail in 2015, killing off animals that nomadic families rely on to survive.

‘This is the last bottle’

Listless, skinny children last week lay in crowded wards in the main hospital in the regional capital Hargeisa.

Three-year-old Nimaan Hassid had diarrhea for 20 days before his mother brought him to hospital. He weighs only 6.5 kilograms, less than half the normal weight for his age.

Doctors say he is suffering from severe malnutrition but his grandmother, 60-year-old Fadumo Hussein, told Reuters the family has no money for food or clean water.

“We don’t have mineral water to give to the sick child. This is the last bottle,” she said, carefully pouring it into a feeding tube inserted through his nose.

In the malnutrition ward in the general hospital of Somaliland’s second city Burao, Doctor Hamud Ahmed said children were also being hit hard by diseases like tuberculosis, meningitis and measles.

Children’s admissions reached almost 60 in March, up fourfold from October.

“This is due to the drought,” Ahmed said. “When families lose all their livestock and children do not get milk, this is the famine that causes the children to suffer.”

If the rains fail, the country could tip into famine.

Somalia’s last famine, in 2011, killed more than 260,000 people. Heffinck said aid agencies were working overtime to try to prevent a similar disaster, trucking in clean water and stepping up the distribution of food and cash.

“The big difference this time is that we have started the preparation and scaling up of the relief operations earlier,” he said.
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The main rebel group in South Sudan is threatening to disrupt oil production in the country, a day after it released three foreign oil workers it kidnapped earlier in the month.

An official of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement in Opposition (SPLM IO) said the government is using oil revenue to purchase weapons and kill civilians.

“People in South Sudan are not receiving their money (from oil revenue). This money is going to their pocket (of government officials) and for buying arms for killing our people. If we have chance to stop the oil production, we will do it,” said Dak Duop Bichok, the head of the SPLM IO’s committee for energy and mining

Oil workers released

Duop confirmed the rebel group has released three foreign oil workers it abducted in the Adar fields of oil-rich Upper Nile State earlier in March.

VOA’s South Sudan In Focus obtained a letter dated March 28 ordering the release of two Indians, Muthu Vijaya Boopathy and Ayaz Hussein Jamali, who work with a Chinese-led consortium, and Ambrose Edward, a Pakistani employed by a South Sudanese company.

Duop said the three were released after officials from their countries spoke with rebel leader Riek Machar.  He said the freed oil workers were flown to Khartoum via Addis Ababa on Thursday and taken to their countries’ embassies in Khartoum.

Ransom demand denied

South Sudan’s Information Minister Michael Makuei said early this month the government received reports that rebel forces were demanding a $1 million ransom for the oil workers. He said South Sudan’s Transitional Government of National Unity does not deal with what he called terrorists.

Duop denied his group demanded ransom for the oil engineers.  “We didn’t demand anything, we released them without any deal,” he told VOA’s South Sudan in Focus.

Duop said the SPLM IO is not a terrorist group, but fights for the rights of South Sudanese.

Repeated warnings

At the same time, he said the SPLM IO has given repeated warnings to national and international oil companies to abandon the oil fields.

“You please, evacuate the place. The government is producing oil, and is getting money and is buying (arms),” he said.

South Sudan’s Minister for Petroleum, Ezekiel Lol Gatkuoth said early this month that his government has learned a lesson and will increase measures to protect oil workers in the area.
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For the last five years, Michael J. Sharp lived in one of the most dangerous countries in Africa, trying to broker peace between armed groups.

“He was following his passion and mission to make peace in the world — a very broken and violent world,” his father, John Sharp, told VOA in an interview late Thursday.

That mission ended when Sharp, Swedish colleague Zahida Catalan and their interpreter, Betu Tshintela, were killed after being abducted in Kasai Central province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo earlier this month. Their bodies were found March 28 in a shallow grave next to the Moyo River.

The fate of a Congolese driver, Isaac Kabuayi, and two motorcycle drivers who were also kidnapped remains unknown.

Sharp, also known as MJ, and Catalan were working as experts for the United Nations, investigating funding and weapons sources for militia groups in the DRC. Their goal was to determine whether U.N. Security Council sanctions against the groups are effective, and if they stop militias and members of the Congolese military from running illegal mines for profit.

Now, John Sharp said, “We are waiting for the Congolese government to give their permission to ship the body back to the U.S.” Michael Sharp’s body was found intact; Catalan’s was decapitated.

The father believes his son’s work to promote lasting stability in the troubled province should continue. “Let’s let Zahida’s and MJ’s work continue in other hands. There’s much more work to be done. Peace has not yet been negotiated,” he said.

Passionate pacifist

A devout member of the Mennonite church — a branch of Christianity that emphasizes pacifism — Michael Sharp first went to the DRC as a volunteer with the Mennonite Central Committee, doing humanitarian work.

He spoke Spanish, German and French, and was learning Swahili. “He developed his passion for peacebuilding and peacemaking in a violent world from his family, his theology, his church because Mennonites have a theology of peacebuilding and nonviolence and he seemed to take that on,” his father said.

Sharp collaborated with the Congolese Protestant Council of Churches, which was working to persuade rebel fighters to abandon violence and give up arms. His efforts were bearing fruit, with about 1,600 fighters in January 2015 laying down arms.

His father said Michael Sharp was willing to expose himself to risks in order to understand the causes of conflict, and he strived to build relationships with those involved.

“He was most passionate about something he initiated, I believe, and that is working to build relationships with militia group leaders, so he would travel unarmed through the forest and sit down and talk with them,” his father said.

Sharp also earned the admiration of prominent DRC expert Jason Stearns, director of the Congo Research Group and senior fellow at New York University.

The DRC is home to dozens of small militia and rebel groups who hide out in its jungles and make a living mining the country’s abundant natural resources, including copper, gold and diamonds.

One of the most prominent is the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), led by Rwandan Hutus fighting against what they say is a Tutsi influence in the region. 

In a blog post this week, Stearns said the FDLR is “one of the most brutal and reclusive armed groups in the region.” However, that didn’t deter Sharp from entering into their territory unarmed, learning about their families, listening to their pleas and “trying to gain their trust and to project empathy. Not an easy feat for a committed pacifist,” Stearns wrote.

Stearns said he has always been skeptical of foreigners coming in the country, but Sharp showed him that it is possible to do genuine work on behalf of the Congolese people.

“I am always wary of researchers and activists who come to the Congo for adventure and self-legitimation rather than out of solidarity with the local population,” he wrote. “But Michael was no such thing — he was self-effacing, devoted, and empathetic.”

Last mission

Sharp and his colleagues went to Kasai Central in early March to investigate widespread human rights abuses near the remote village of Bunkonde, south of the provincial capital, Kananga. Violence driven by political and tribal rivalries has killed hundreds in the province since last August, and several mass graves have been found.

The U.N. team disappeared March 12. The next day, the DRC government said that Sharp and Catalan had “fallen into the hands of unidentified negative forces.”

Quickly, the U.N. mission in Congo, MONUSCO, began a search-and-rescue effort that ended Wednesday with the discovery of the bodies.

The eastern DRC has been plagued with violence since the mid-1990s, with millions killed and more than 2 million displaced in what is sometimes called Africa’s World War. Much of the country remains beyond the reach of the central government and is controlled by militia groups.

Sharp’s father wants to see Congo’s perpetual conflict brought to an end, and thinks the loss of his son could trigger more attention to the cause of the conflict.

He urged the U.N. not to give up on its mission, and said more experts are needed to monitor sanctions and bring justice to the area. 

“As my son said, nothing is acceptable until there is true peace and complete peace,” John Sharp said. “Congolese people deserve peace, they deserve to live in harmony with their neighbors and we should make all efforts possible to make that happen and to stop believing in the myth of redemptive violence.”
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In Zimbabwe, a tractor loaded with tobacco arrives at an auction floor in Harare driven by farmers from Hurungwe area, about 300 kilometers north of the capital. One of them is Felix Tarutsvira.

“I prefer [to sell] tobacco because when we compare prices, maize [corn] prices are lower than tobacco’s,” Tarutsvira said. “So as farmers want money quickly, they tend to grow tobacco.”

But maize remains the country’s staple crop and, in an effort to recover from drought-induced food shortages, the government is encouraging farmers to grow more of it.

One strategy has been pegging the buying price of maize at $390 per ton, among the highest prices in the world. But the government rarely pays farmers in a timely manner, said Paul Zacharia, executive director of the Zimbabwe Farmers Union.

“By default many, many farmers would be producing maize,” he said. “But if … tobacco gives you three-four times over what maize is giving you, go for that which gives you money. Out of the proceeds of that high-value crop you buy grain, feed your family.” 

Zacharia points out Zimbabwe could use the profit from tobacco crops to import maize that is more affordable.

“Even as a nation, we could put high-value crops in our fields, make the money that you require, import the grain. It [is] much, much cheaper than the current $390 that we buy it locally,” he said.

However, that approach can leave the country vulnerable in times of crisis.

The El-Nino-induced drought in 2015 and 2016 left Zimbabwe with serious food shortages. The government could not afford to import grain on short notice and ended up relying on aid agencies. An estimated four million Zimbabweans currently rely on food handouts from international organizations until this year’s harvest starts in April, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. 

Ahead of the 2016-2017 planting season, the government launched the “Targeted Command Agriculture” policy. The goal is ensuring food self-sufficiency. The government gave participating farmers maize seeds and supplies.

In return, the farmers will give the government five tons of maize per hectare at harvest time. The farmers keep the rest of the yield for themselves.

So far, the rains have been good this year, and Zimbabwe’s minister of agriculture, Joseph Made, said that, thanks to the initiative, the country is on track to harvest enough maize for local consumption — as much as two million tons.

Bishow Parajuli, the U.N. resident coordinator in Zimbabwe, says recovery is under way.

“[In] Zimbabwe, we were facing lots of challenges when the drought came in,” said Parajuli. “But the proactiveness of the government and the strong partnership we did have addressed all issues of famine and hunger. Of course, there is food insecurity, malnutrition issues, and that is what we are working on at the moment.”

Next month, the Zimbabwe Agricultural Society will gather to figure out other incentives for farmers to plant maize crops in the hopes of easing the country’s perennial food shortages.
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