UN humanitarian chief John Holmes urged the international community not to turn its back on Somalia at a time of desperate need, saying the government appears to be seriously underestimating the humanitarian suffering in the country.
Holmes told the Security Council on Monday that the UN believes almost 400,000 people fled Mogadishu in recent fighting and the vast majority have not returned while the government claims that only 40,000 were displaced and about half have returned to the capital.
Holmes visited Mogadishu earlier this month and met President Abdullahi Yusuf, but his planned two-day trip was cut short when two explosions went off -- one of them near the UN compound that killed three people.
During his brief stay, Holmes said, clan elders and representatives of civil society and women's groups expressed concern about intimidation and several said they were convinced the UN and the international community had abandoned Somalia and weren't interested in the fate of the Somali people.
"I assured them that this was not true and that my presence in Mogadishu was a symbol of the UN's deep concern, political as well as humanitarian," said Holmes, the most senior UN official to visit Somalia since the early 1990s. "We all have a responsibility to ensure that this is indeed the case, and not to turn our backs on Somalis in their latest hour of desperate need."
Somalia has been mired in chaos since 1991, when warlords overthrew dictator Mohamed Siad Barre and then turned against each other. The government was set up in 2004, but has failed to assert any real control.
The latest surge in fighting, between March 12 and April 26, killed at least 1,670 people and sent at least 400,000 fleeing the capital as the government and its Ethiopian allies tried to quash an Islamic insurgency.
The government declared victory more than two weeks ago, and there has been relative calm. But in a city teeming with guns after more than a decade of chaos, the government has declared victory before -- only to have the insurgents reappear.
Holmes said the recent massive displacement "has further compounded one of the most difficult humanitarian situations in the world, in a country affected not only by long-running internal conflict but also chronic food insecurity, alternating droughts and floods and endemic disease."
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema