Serious malnutrition ... scores of Somali children are dying. The announcement came as the UN's refugee agency warned that parts of Somalia and Kenya were experiencing ''pre-famine'' conditions. Scores of Somali children were dying on the journey or within a day of arrival at refugee camps in Kenya and Ethiopia, as they fled the region's worst drought in decades, the agency said.
An al-Shabab spokesman, Mohamoud Raghe, said in Mogadishu that the aid groups were going to be allowed to work in order to help bring relief to areas hard-hit by the severe drought.
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Al-Shabab said its drought committee would work with aid organisations, which they have accused in the past of acting as spies and of being anti-Muslim.The drought is being compared with the drought of the early 1990s, when famine claimed more than 300,000 lives.
At the time, large amounts of international aid were commandeered by Somali warlords to help fuel the country's civil war and there is concern among Western governments and aid groups that al-Shabab, which is battling Somalia's Transitional Federal Government, might do the same.
High levels of malnutrition, combined with violence in the war-torn nation on the Horn of Africa, were threatening ''a human tragedy of unimaginable proportions'', the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees said.
After several seasons of failed rains and rising global food prices, drought has affected more than 12 million people across Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya.
Thousands of Somali refugees are making perilous journeys of hundreds of kilometres to seek assistance: 54,000 people crossed into Ethiopia and Kenya in June alone. Levels of serious malnutrition among newly-arrived children in Ethiopia are exceeding 50 per cent, while in Kenya levels are reaching 30 to 40 per cent.
The UN's World Food Program pulled out of northern Somalia last year because of threats and extortion demands by al-Shabab. But a UN spokesman in Nairobi said the organisation was prepared to co-operate with anyone who could work to ease the crisis and save lives.
The US said on Wednesday that it was prepared to ''test'' the willingness of al-Shabab to allow Western food aid to reach the millions of Somalis threatened by drought.
The US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, has ordered a co-ordinated response to try to prevent another famine in the Horn of Africa like the one that struck two decades ago.
Al-Shabab, which controls most of Somalia's territory and is listed by the US as a terrorist organisation, has until now barred outside humanitarian aid groups from areas it dominates.
A senior State Department official said now that al-Shabab was ''making noises about being a co-operative player'', it was incumbent on the US and other donor countries to test whether the group was ready to let starving people receive humanitarian aid.
A State Department spokeswoman, Victoria Nuland, said the drought might have displaced 1.5 million people in Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya, and that the US has begun positioning relief supplies to respond to the crisis.
''We have already delivered some 19,000 metric tonnes of food to the World Food Program, and a lot of that has already been staged in warehouses to insure rapid delivery a to insure rapid delivery into the area,'' she said.
Agencies
Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/world/somali-militants-lift-food-aid-ban-amid-starvation-20110707-1h4wi.html#ixzz1RUB8mtjt
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