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Somali rebels say famine label used for politics

22 July 2011 00:50 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. Somali Islamist rebels accused the United Nations Thursday of exaggerating the severity of the drought gripping the south of the country and of politicizing the humanitarian crisis, APA reports quoting Reuters. .
The United Nations has declared famine in two pockets of southern Somalia, said that 3.7 million people risk starvation and that it is launching its biggest ever relief effort.
The south of the Horn of Africa country is largely controlled by the al Qaeda-linked militants whose four-year insurgency is widely blamed for exacerbating the impact of the drought.
"We say (the U.N. declaration) is totally, 100 percent wrong and baseless propaganda. Yes there is drought but the conditions are not as bad as they say," al Shabaab spokesman Sheikh Ali Mohamud Rage told a media briefing.
"They have another objective and it wouldn’t surprise us if they were politicizing the situation."
If the international community does not tackle the emergency swiftly, the famine will spread to all eight regions of southern Somalia, the United Nations has said.
In early July, the rebels lifted a ban on food aid which they had said created dependency.
The U.N. World Food Program (WFP), which suspended its operations in the south of the anarchic country in January 2010, said Thursday it planned to start airlifts into Mogadishu within days.
Wednesday it said food would be trucked southwards to the two famine-hit regions of Bakool and Lower Shabelle.
Kenya urged the WFP to open more feeding centers in Somalia to stem the flow of refugees across its porous border