For more than two decades, despite war and chaos and the murder of 16 staff members, Doctors Without Borders has maintained its crucial medical aid to Somalia. But a new wave of extreme attacks has pushed it into an unprecedented response: closing down all of its projects in the impoverished country.
In one shocking case, the convicted killer of two of the agency’s aid workers was mysteriously freed from prison after serving only three months of a 30-year sentence, it said.
Hundreds of thousands of Somalis will be left without humanitarian aid as a result of the sudden withdrawal by the famed relief agency.
The withdrawal was a grim reminder that Somalia remains a dangerously violent and terror-prone country, despite recent fanfare about an “investment boom” in Mogadishu after the retreat of Islamist militants from the capital.
Doctors Without Borders, also known as Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), announced on Wednesday that it is shutting down its activities in Somalia after a “series of extreme abuses” – including the killing of two staff in Mogadishu and the kidnapping of two other MSF aid workers who were abducted in a Kenyan refugee camp and held hostage in southern Somalia.
With about 1,500 staff in Somalia, the agency is one of the biggest providers of medical care in the war-torn African nation. It helped more than 620,000 patients last year alone in a dozen towns and cities across Somalia.
The closure is “one of the hardest decisions MSF has had to make in its history,” the agency said in a statement.
It is the first time in 22 years that the agency has shut down its medical work in Somalia. But it had already been forced to use armed guards to protect its staff in Somalia – a precaution that it does not take in any other country.
The decision to withdraw from Somalia was not only because of the extreme violence, but also because the attacks were increasingly supported or tolerated by civilian authorities, MSF said.
Civilian leaders in Somalia are playing a role in “the killing, assaulting and abducting of humanitarian aid workers … either through direct involvement or tacit approval,” it said in the statement.
In some cases, it said, the attacks have been supported or condoned by the same armed groups or civilian leaders with which MSF has to negotiate promises of security for its humanitarian work.
“Ultimately, civilians in Somalia will pay the highest cost,” said Unni Karunakara, the international president of MSF, in a statement on Wednesday.
“The armed groups’ targeting of humanitarian aid and civilian leaders’ tolerance of these abuses has effectively taken away what little access to medical care is available to the Somali people.”
He said the “risks and compromises” for MSF staff have become too high for the agency to accept.
“In choosing to kill, attack and abduct humanitarian aid workers, these armed groups and the civilian authorities who tolerate their actions have sealed the fate of countless lives in Somalia.”
