The United Nations must be hold accountable for feeding terrorist groups
.msnbc.msn.com As much as half the food aid sent to Somalia is diverted from needy people to a web of corrupt contractors, radical Islamist militants and local United Nations staff, according to a new Security Council report.
Half of Food Aid to Somalia Is Diverted, Report Says
.msnbc.msn.com As much as half the food aid sent to Somalia is diverted from needy people to a web of corrupt contractors, radical Islamist militants and local United Nations staff, according to a new Security Council report. The report, which has not yet been made public but was shown to The New York Times, outlines a host of problems so grave that it recommends Secretary General Ban Ki-moon open an independent investigation into the World Food Program there. It suggests that the program rebuild the food distribution system — which serves at least 2.5 million people — from scratch to break what it describes as a corrupt cartel of Somali distributors.
In addition to the diversion of food aid, regional Somali authorities are collaborating with pirates who hijack ships along the lawless coast, the report says, and Somali government ministers have auctioned off diplomatic visas for trips to Europe to the highest bidder, some of whom may have been pirates or insurgents. Somali officials denied the visa problem was widespread, and officials for the World Food Program said they had not yet seen the report but would investigate its conclusions once it was presented to the Security Council on March 16.
The report comes as Somalia’s transitional government is preparing for a military major offensive to retake the capital, Mogadishu, and combat an Islamist insurgency with connections to Al Qaeda. The United States is providing military aid, as the United Nations tries to roll back two decades of anarchy in the country.
Death threats
But it may be an uphill battle. According to the report, Somalia’s security forces “remain ineffective, disorganized and corrupt — a composite of independent militias loyal to senior government officials and military officers who profit from the business of war.”
But it may be an uphill battle. According to the report, Somalia’s security forces “remain ineffective, disorganized and corrupt — a composite of independent militias loyal to senior government officials and military officers who profit from the business of war.”
One American official recently conceded that Somalia’s “best hope” was the government’s new military chief, a 60-year-old former artillery officer who, until a few months ago, was assistant manager at a McDonald’s in suburban Germany.
The report’s investigators were originally asked to track violations of the United Nations arms embargo on Somalia, but the mandate was expanded.
Several of the reports’ authors have received specific death threats, and the United Nations recently relocated them from Kenya to New York for safety reasons.
Possible aid obstructions have been a nettlesome topic for Somalia over the past year and have contributed to the American government holding up aid shipments and United Nations officials recently suspending food programs in some areas.
It singles out the World Food Program, the single largest aid agency in the crisis-wracked country, as particularly flawed.
“Some humanitarian resources, notably food aid, have been diverted to military uses,” the report said. “A handful of Somali contractors for aid agencies have formed a cartel and become important power brokers — some of whom channel their profits — or the aid itself — directly to armed opposition groups.”
Outside investigation urged
These allegations of food aid diversions first surfaced last year, and the World Food Program has consistently denied finding any proof of malfeasance and said that its own recent internal audit found no widespread abuse.
These allegations of food aid diversions first surfaced last year, and the World Food Program has consistently denied finding any proof of malfeasance and said that its own recent internal audit found no widespread abuse.
“We have not yet seen the U.N. Somalia Monitoring Group report,” the World Food Program’s Deputy Executive Director, Amir Abdulla, said Tuesday. “But we will investigate all of the allegations as we have always done in the past if questions have been raised about our operations.”
The current report’s investigators question how independent that past audit was, and called for an new outside investigation of the United Nations agency.
“We have to tell these folks that you cannot go on like this, we know what you are doing, you can’t fool us anymore, so you better stop,” said President Ali Bongo Ondimba of Gabon, who was at the United Nations, where his country holds the reins of the Security Council this month.
The report also charges that Somali officials are selling spots on trips to Europe and that many of the people who are presented as part of an official government entourage are actually pirates or members of militant groups.
The report says that Somali officials use their connections to foreign governments to get visas and travel documents for people who would not otherwise be able to travel abroad and that many of these people then disappear into Europe and do not come back.
“Somali ministers, members of parliament, diplomats and ‘freelance brokers’ have transformed access to foreign visas into a growth industry, matched possibly only by piracy, selling visas for $10-15,000 each,” the report said.
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