WASHINGTON – The United States is working to get more relief into famine-ravaged southern Somalia and is reassuring aid agencies they will not be penalized for programs in regions controlled by al-Shabab rebels, US officials said on Tuesday.
"We have issued new guidance to allow more flexibility and to allow a wider range of aid to a larger number of areas in need," one US official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
"Humanitarian assistance organizations that have good faith efforts to deliver food to people in need will not risk prosecution."
The United States has placed al-Shabab on its official list of foreign terrorist organizations, a designation which forbids US groups from providing "material support" to the group that controls large parts of the Horn of Africa nation.
The designation has complicated international aid efforts for Somalia, where a famine is spreading and some 3.7 million people are in urgent need of assistance in southern regions, many of them in areas controlled by al-Shabab.
The US officials declined to say what specific steps are being taken to lift the threat of prosecution for aid flowing into al-Shabab regions. But they said aid organizations should feel confident they can step up efforts to provide assistance in the worst-hit areas.
Concerns over possible diversion of relief supplies to al-Shabab prompted a number of international aid organizations to suspend programs in southern Somalia in January 2010 and continue to constrain aid work, the US officials said.
Al-Shabab has given conflicting signals about whether aid programs will be allowed to resume but the US officials said they believed that, at least in some hard-hit parts of Somalia, it would be possible to get assistance in.
"We don't expect there to be any grand bargain where we'll be able to have access to all of southern Somalia," a second US official said. "(But) we believe there will be ways and opportunities to move selectively into southern Somalia."
The United Nations' humanitarian aid chief said on Monday the famine in the Horn of Africa is spreading and may soon engulf as many as six more regions of Somalia.
The United States has already started to move emergency food supplies into the region, with some 19,000 metric tonnes of assistance delivered last week.
The officials stressed the new aid guidelines would include risk mitigation procedures designed to prevent al-Shabab from profiting from any aid diversions but they conceded that some spillover was possible.
"There is some risk of diversion," the first official said. "We're gong to do everything we can to prevent that diversion…but I think the dimensions of this famine, this humanitarian crisis, are such that we've got to put taking care of people first."
