Somalis’ Plight Getting Worse, Red Cross Reports
The Red Cross said Thursday that the plight faced by Somalia’s people is more desperate now than before the cease-fire and urged increased international aid to the country.
Peter G. Stocker, head of the Red Cross delegation in the Horn of Africa nation, said “a dramatic and worsening situation is being faced by the people of Somalia day after day.”
“It is much more horrifying today” than it was six months ago, he said, before a tenuous cease-fire in March ended five months of heavy shelling of the capital, Mogadishu, by rival clans.
Stocker told a news conference that drought, aggravated by the war and continuing clan violence, has caused tens of thousands of deaths throughout the largely desert country. He said precise figures are not available, “but people die by the hundreds every day.”
Peter Fuchs, director general of the Geneva-based agency, who returned from a tour of Somalia on Wednesday, said the country faces “one of the worst situations I have ever seen.”
“Yugoslavia is not comparable in terms of quantity or increased need (of aid),” said Fuchs, referring to the civil war in the Balkans.
He said the Red Cross already has spent $78.5 million in Somalia this year.
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