Saving lives will also involve talking to terrorists
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskThe reason is that Somalia faces a famine. The worst drought in 40 years is killing livestock and causing crops to shrivel. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has exacerbated the crisis by raising grain prices, meaning that farmers and herders cannot afford to supplement their diets. Roughly 7m people, or 40% of Somalia’s population, are struggling to find enough food to eat. Around 1.4m children are severely malnourished.
Countless lives would be saved if the food made its way to people in the countryside, rather than the other way round. But negotiating access with al-Shabab takes aid workers into morally hazardous territory. In previous famines the jihadists forced humanitarian groups into handing over cash. This imposed a dire choice on aid agencies: “Pay off al-Shabab, a listed ‘terrorist’ organisation, or let people die,” said a report by the Overseas Development Institute, a British think-tank.
None of that is good for the security of Somalia or the region. But the world faces a trade-off: to shun al-Shabab and watch a famine claim perhaps hundreds of thousands of lives; or to talk to al-Shabab in order to get food to the starving in the knowledge that the jihadists will grow stronger. Caught between evils, the world should choose the lesser of the two.
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