They call it Bula Bakti, the Carcass Dump. Here, in 37-degree heat, we help to dig a grave for Osman, a seven-month-old boy, who died of starvation in his mother’s arms the previous night.
It is 12.45pm on Saturday, and before Osman’s body is committed to the earth, his mother brings us to her home — a hut made from tree branches tied together into a dome and covered with bits of plastic for a roof.
Osman’s body lies on the mud floor; his mother, Mumini Ibrahim, sitting beside it, with Osman’s twin sister Kadida nestled against her breast. The surviving twin stares out at me with beautiful brown, scared eyes.
A mother's grief: Mumini Ibrahim looks at her dead baby Osman as she holds his twin sister Katid
Osman’s eyes are covered with a piece of fabric and his naked, emaciated body sits like an exhibit of macabre evidence on the floor.
His death will not go down as natural causes, or even as a crime against humanity, because Mumini will probably never officially report that Osman is dead. If she did, she would lose one portion of food rations from the World Food Programme.
It’s better to bury Osman in the Carcass Dump, alongside scores of other small mounds of dissipating clay where the dead children lie, their lives and deaths marked by little more than a twig or plastic bottle on the grave.
It would be unimaginable in the western world to sit and interview a grieving mother with her infant’s corpse in rigor mortis at her feet, but here in Dadaab, the world’s biggest refugee camp, there are no rules.
In the space of two hours, I have met and heard the story of an 18-year-old gang-rape victim who had her first child aged nine; seen swollen-headed children emaciated from hunger; and listened helplessly to the keening pleas of a woman who is nine months pregnant and has just walked for 15 days without food to get to this camp with her four children and two orphans she picked up along the way.
Through western eyes, Dadaab — 70km from the Somali-Kenyan border — is a hellhole of misery, a testament to Africans’ seeming inability to govern themselves.
Laid to rest: Osman is buried in the Carcass Dump area of the camp
Mumini tells me that she arrived in Dadaab two months ago. With Osman and Kadida tied to her front and back, and three of her other children, all aged under seven, by her side, she walked for 11 days from Dinsor in southern Somalia to Dadaab in Kenya’s north-eastern province.
With nothing but the clothes on their backs, and some tiny portions of maize, they walked 680km through bush-land to the Kenyan border. Then, in 40-degree heat, they had to traverse 70km of bush-land and desert to get to Dadaab where they were registered in Dagahaley, one of the three main camps.
Mumini left her husband, Abdi, and their two sons, Hassan, 10, and Abdi, 12, in Dinsor to try and eke a life as pastoralists — farmers who move camels and cattle around to ancient watering holes. There has been little rain in Dinsor for eight years, and none for the past three. The animals are dying, the crops have failed, and the ancient watering holes are dry.
Al Shabaab, Islamic fundamentalists allied to al-Qaeda, control southern Somalia and are refusing to allow international relief agencies in to aid families like Mumini’s.
‘Osman had diarrhoea and vomiting and could not eat. He died last night from starvation,’ Mumini, 40, says, gently, leaning forward to touch her dead child’s head. Mumini wraps Osman in a white sheet and rolls a purple rug around the body.
As is common among Muslim women, she does not go to the funeral, but sends her mother instead. ‘I would cry too much,’ she admits. Other refugees gather and use a shovel and pickaxe to dig four feet down into the sun-hardened clay earth. They cut a rectangular shape at the bottom of the grave and lay Osman inside in his sheet, keeping back the rug.
Then they cover his body with pieces of tree branches, before wetting the clay earth beside the grave to make a sticky mud paste, which several villagers press onto the branches.
Then four village elders, standing on pieces of wood because they do not believe this foreign ground is holy, say the Shanza prayer, a Muslim funeral invocation.
They take the earth from the right side of the grave and fill in the plot, before taking a final piece of earth from the left side to finish.
In accordance with Muslim tradition, the last piece of soil on the grave must be the first soil removed when digging the plot.
‘The first out must be the last in,’ an elder explains, his grey beard stained red at the tips to show that he is a good, old and wise man.
Osman was not the first and most certainly won’t be the last to die on Dadaab’s dead earth. Throughout the burial there are no tears among the 20-odd refugees who gather.
Even Osman’s grandmother shows no emotion — she just sits beside the grave and stares at the body with an expression hewn of stoicism and the knowledge that such deaths are as inevitable as they are common.
‘They have a harder life than us,’ volunteer charity worker Desmond Kimmet, 52, explains. ‘There is no emotion because there’s probably no one here who hasn’t had this happen to them.’
As if to prove the point, Derov Imra, 40, approaches and leads me to a mound of earth marked by a twig.
Face of famine: This haunting image of seven-month-old Mihag Gedi Farah was taken as he was examined by doctors at a field hospital in Dadaab
He buried his nine-month-old daughter, Hawa, there a month ago. He, his wife Isnnono, 30, and their children, Mohammed, 5, Arda, 8, Issac, 10, Fatuma, 12, and Gibril, 15, arrived at the Dagahaley camp, one kilometre from the carcass dump, in mid-June.
‘We walked for 20 days from Salagle. We had no food. Hawa was sick. We had no medication. She had milk from the breast, nothing else. She died from starvation after a few days here,’ Derov tells me.
The famine in Somalia is the first worldwide this century. Ten million in Somalia and across the Horn of Africa face starvation and death, due, in part, to the worst drought in 60 years.
Somalia’s transitional government has warned that more than 3.5million people could starve to death — one in three of the nine million population.
Nature can’t shoulder all the blame. In Somalia and large tracts of northern Kenya — where some 30 per cent of the population are classified as suffering from ‘acute malnutrition’ — political indifference and inaction are as much to blame.
The Kenyan national newspaper, Daily Nation, summed it up in a lead editorial this week calling for ministerial resignations: ‘This tendency to attribute every misfortune to nature will be our downfall. We are not condemned by acts of God, but by gross mismanagement.’
The fleeing citizens of Somalia don’t even have a government to blame. Since 1991, when the first Somali refugees fled civil war and came to Dadaab, those who remained have been doomed to a dystopian nightmare, trapped between murderous militia on one side, and the onslaught of nature on the other.
A Transitional Federal Government (TFG) has been in place since 2006, but it scarcely controls a few neighbourhoods in the capital Mogadishu, a city now classified by the United Nations as the most dangerous on earth.
Somalia is the international community’s greatest failure. Experts report that a UN force of 22,500 soldiers would be required to suppress Al-Shabaab, and keep peace. Because of the United States’ €9 trillion debt and commitments in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq, there is no international will to invade Somalia.
Instead the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) needs €700million before December to stop deaths like Osman’s, after seven months of dry, harsh and unforgiving days.
Amina Mohammed, 25, is nine months pregnant, due to give birth any day. Her newborn may also suffer Osman’s fate — but not for want of effort by the UNHCR and the scores of non-governmental organisations doing heroic work to save the new arrivals. Officially, the UNHCR says about ten children have died from starvation at the IFO camp alone in the past two weeks.
However, our local translators say about ten children a day are dying, buried in places like the Carcass Dump, without being officially reported. Hospital authorities say the number of cases of acute malnutrition among children has doubled from four a day to eight.
I meet Amina at the registration area of IFO, which was the first camp set up in Dadaab in 1991.
Back then, the camp was built to house 90,000 people. Now more than 400,000 refugees are crammed into three camps spread over a total area of 50 square kilometres, all within an 18km radius of Dadaab town.
Two new centres costing €27m are planned to house the 180,000 extra refugees predicted to arrive here by the end of November.
Amina has four children, and also cares for two orphaned boys she picked up on her 15-day walk from Balhathawa in Somalia.
She fled her mud-brick home with corrugated iron roof, after al-Shabaab militia came to the village.
‘We took the children and fled. The conflict was terrible. There was shooting, looting and raping,’ she says.
Surrounded by her children Shamsa, 6, Ahmed, 4, Abdi, 3, Abdinasir, 2, and orphaned brothers Abdinasir, 11, and Shire 7, she tells me: ‘We travelled day and night. The journey was tiresome.
‘We left without food or water. We got water whenever we came across a watering hole. Sometimes we went two or three days without water. We went without any food, just taking a small cup of water. The children were sick with colds, measles, pneumonia.’
Though Amina arrived in IFO on July 22, there are so many arrivals — about 1,700 a day — it now takes a minimum of 15 days before a new arrival can be registered for food rations.
In the meantime, Amina and her children were given blankets, a bucket, and some plastic sheeting to use as a roof over whatever structure they can build themselves from tree branches.
They also get some flour, maize and oil.
When we met on Friday, Amina was one of hundreds queuing to be registered.
Other refugees gather around and one woman begs me to help Amina skip the queue for registration, pointing to her stomach and saying she will give birth any day now. ‘My baby will be born here. I don’t know if we will ever get home,’ Amina says.
The UNHCR wristband on her arm identifies her as number 295291. Unable to help her, we move on to the next statistic of Somalia’s dysfunctional history.
On Friday, we travel with an armed guard — required for all journalists and NGO staff leaving the UNHCR compound in Dadaab — out into the bush-land and desert to search for new arrivals coming in from the Somali border.
We meet Isack Adem, 32. Wearing flip-flops, a T-shirt and a Kikoi — the traditional sarong-type clothing of Somalis — and carrying the Koran in a shoulder bag, he tells us he is one of the lucky ones.
He has a donkey loaded with firewood and some pots.
He has left his wife, Hawa Jibo, 24, and their five children aged two to 12, further back in the bush, while he scoured the land ahead.
He takes us two kilometres back through the Mathenge bushes and swirling red sand to his family, where his wife was busy building a temporary home from branches and bits of plastic.
They had stopped here to rest under the shade of Acacia trees, after walking 18 days from Dinsor.
‘There was a lack of water and food. We would travel seven hours a day, sleep on the ground,’ Isack says.
The Dinsor region once had 16,000 inhabitants. Most have left.
‘The whole town is leaving. There is famine and insecurity. Everyone is leaving Somalia,’ he says.
Hawa Ali is perhaps one of the most tragic of those fleeing. Aged 18, she talks but will not meet my eye.
She has three children and has walked five days from Sago.
I am astonished to learn that her eldest daughter, Binti, is nine years old, her second child Nurta is eight, and Aden is three.
I am compelled to ask the translator to check again — she could not possibly have had a child when she was just nine?
The translator checks with Hawa, smiles and then takes me aside to explain that Somali girls menstruate at nine and typically lose their virginity between the ages of eight and ten.
‘This is very common,’ I am told.
Hawa holds her youngest close. The three-year-old has an infected eardrum and diarrhoea. I ask Hawa if she was attacked on her journey.
She meets my eye for just a moment before turning away and telling the translator: ‘I was raped by bandits near the border. There were many of them.’
The horrific details are as sparse as they are unnecessary — because the veracity of her story is in the deadness of her eyes, and the dehumanising of this 18-year-old child.
Source : Daily Mail UK
Billions spent on Mosques and weaponry to kill each other in tribal feuds, segregation among themselves and no food for their citizens!? This is insanity!!
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