Three UN Agencies, Chinese Bicyclist Expelled from Somalia

[Photo of UN delegation traveling thru Mogadishu with an armed guard from www.un-somalia.org]

First, the bad news - Somalia is a complete fucking mess.  Which, granted, isn't much of a surprise.

Good news - even brutal insurgent groups are making efforts to coordinate with foreign aid agencies.  Case in point, Al Shabaab has just established the Office for Coordinating the Affairs of Foreign Agencies.

Bad news - by "coordinate with foreign aid agencies," we mean "impede their activities as much as humanly possible."  Or, as the Al Shabaab press release explains:

"The NGOs and foreign agencies will be informed of the conditions and restrictions on their work and on how their work may continue. Any NGO or foreign agency found to be working with an agenda against the Somali Muslim population and/or against the establishment of an Islamic State will be immediately closed and dealt with according to the evidence found."

Just to make sure that no thinks they've turned a new leaf, the Shabaab then immediately expelled three UN agencies - UNDP, the UN Department of Safety and Security, and the UN Political Office for Somalia.  [The actual Shabaab press release mentions UNOPS instead of the UN Political Office, but all news reports mention the latter.]

According to your favorite insurgents:

"This decision was finally concluded after thorough research and due to an ongoing investigation into the actions and motives of many of the NGOs and foreign agencies currently in operation...Some of the findings include evidence of training and support for the apostate goverment and the training of its troops."

Perfect timing, seeing as how the Famine and Early Warning System Network just announced that "the food-security situation in Somalia remains precarious, with over 3.2 million people in need of emergency humanitarian aid and livelihood support."

(For a map showing food security - or lack thereof - across the country, see here.)

Bad, bad insurgents.  But, the story, as ever, is slightly more complex.

As Rob Crilly explains on his blog African Safari:

"The UN political strategy in Somalia has been a thorough mess for the past two years. Millions of dollars has been channelled to warlords and thugs in the Transitional Federal Government charged with running its security aparatus. There has been no oversight and no accountability. Warlords have used the UN cash to build up their own militias and power bases.

...

The UNDP had paid for pickups for a new police force, run by one of the most notorious warlords of them all. No-one at the UN could tell me what had happened to the pickups and whether they had modified with heavy machine guns, turning them into 'technicals'."

It's hard for the UNDP to portray itself as neutral when it's busy arming one side in the conflict.  To that end, it's perhaps noteworthy that Al Shabaab expelled only certain UN agencies - for instance, they did not expel the World Food Program (WFP), which provides food to around 2.8 million people.

Granted, this isn't saying much, seeing as how Al Shabaab just looted the WFP compound in the town of Wajid, as well as another UN facility in Baidoa.   (Further, the group has shown no compunction about threatening other agencies involved in food distributions, such as CARE.)

For its part, the UN is trying its best to stay engaged - according to one top UN official: "We're not backing away from Somalia more widely and we hope to continue operations there despite all these difficulties."

To get a sense of the restrictions aid agencies face in Somalia - and how this impacts their day-to-day operations - see here.  UN OCHA also has an excellent map showing food distributions across the country.

Finally, to complete the tale of woe - the authorities in the semi-autonomous region of Puntland just expelled a Chinese bicyclist trying to cycle around the world.  According to Mr. Lee Yue Zhong, he just wanted to "see [Somalia's] landscapes and cities."

What this says about bicyclists being, on the whole, another matter.