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UN defends move to pull out staff from Somalia
Editor: Yan Liang
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NAIROBI, Oct. 26 (Xinhua) -- The United Nations on Thursday backed its decision to pull out its foreign staff from strife-torn Somalia, but said it would still promote citizens and other national staff in its service to deliver essential relief services.
UN resident and humanitarian coordinator for Somalia Eric Laroche said the relocation of the international UN staff had been necessitated by a security report compiled by the world body, showing foreigners would be targeted in Somalia.
"The UN security department says Somalia is dangerous for UN staff. |
They (Supreme Council of Islamic Courts, SCIC) may use you for political purposes," Laroche told a media briefing in Nairobi.
"But I think not going there is probably more risky as the UN would be judged harshly by history," he added, saying the UN would increase the number of national staff operating in Somalia and elevate them career-wise to enable them provide essential services to Somalis.
The world body announced early this month that threats, coupled with insecurity after the murder of an elderly Italian nun in the Somali capital and an attempt to assassinate the country's transitional president, had prompted the UN move.
In addition, the UN said it had suspended "until further notice" all missions to Mogadishu. It did not say how many staff or missions were affected.
No one has claimed responsibility for either the murder of the nun at a Mogadishu hospital on Sept. 17 or the attempt the next day to kill President Abdullahi Yusuf with a car bomb in the government's temporary seat of Baidoa.
UN officials say the rising cases of insecurity and potential internal displacement had put more people living in Somalia at a higher risk of massive humanitarian crisis.
The political instability has also created renewed anxiety that the row between the Somali Transitional Government (TFG) and SCIC could escalate into a full-scale war in retaliation for recent killings targeting TFG.
Phillippe Lazzarini, the head of the UN Office for the Coordinator of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA), said Somalia needs increased funding to meet diverse needs but has only received a fraction of what it requested the world for its 2006 programs.
The UN launched an appeal for 324 million U.S. dollars to fund various projects in Somalia but managed to raise only 170 million dollars, which went into supplementing the food needs.
Lazzarini said the funds were too inadequate to meet the financing of other key programs such as those aimed at making Somalis self-sufficient in meeting their domestic requirements.
"We keep telling donors that there is an unbalanced funding of food needs at the expense of other vital sectors like water and other livelihood needs, these are severely under funded," Lazzarini told journalists in Nairobi.
Source: Xinhua
Somaliweyn Media Center (SMC)
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