After weeks of receiving threats and demands that it dismiss many female employees and pay a “security fee” to an Islamic extremist group, the UN World Food Program announced on Tuesday that it was suspending food deliveries to 1 million people in southern Somalia indefinitely.
The cutoff, which includes the withdrawal of more than 40 local staff members, will affect roughly one-third of the 2.8 million people whom the food program had anticipated feeding in Somalia this month.
“In the past few weeks there has been a harder line of unacceptable demands and conditions set by armed groups in these areas,” Peter Smerdon, the spokesman for the program, said by telephone from Nairobi, Kenya. “We sadly had to make the decision to pull our staff out.”
The demands had been accompanied by a rise in intimidation, threats and harassment, he said.
Various branches of the Shabab, the Islamist militants who control much of southern Somalia, presented local offices of the food program with a list of 11 demands in November. They included paying a US$20,000 fee for security every six months, seeking Shabab approval for their projects and replacing all female staff not engaged in healthcare with men.
The militants also demanded that the organization put a more Islamic stamp on its activities by not bringing in alcohol or foreign films, not celebrating holidays like New Year’s Day, not observing the weekend on Saturday and Sunday and not flying the agency’s flag.
The Shabab also pressed a demand that the agency not import food during the harvest season, which just ended, to encourage the development of local agriculture. Several previous Shabab statements accused the agency of undermining local agriculture and importing poor quality food.
In the statement announcing the suspension, the agency said that even in the best of times, Somali farmers supplied only about 40 percent of the food needed in the country, and although last year’s harvest was good, in the past five years it had fallen to about 30 percent.
The monthly food distribution included staples like corn and sorghum, as well as vegetable oil, beans or lentils and sometimes salt.
Smerdon said the agency had tried to negotiate with the Shabab and community elders, but ultimately decided the distribution centers would have to close.
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