Unicef puts Somali ops on ice

2005-05-27 19:55

Nairobi - The United Nations Children's Fund (Unicef) has indefinitely suspended operations in Somalia's breakaway northeastern state of Puntland after one of its international staff members received a specific death threat, the agency said in a statement on Friday.

The statement said the agency, based in Puntland's capital Bossaso, decided to withdraw after the threat early this month and the state's "president", Mohamud Muse Hirsi, reneged on an earlier assurance of security.

Unicef said the threat was the latest in a series against international staff, forcing them to relocate to the Kenyan capital Nairobi.

"Such actions have left Unicef staff vulnerable, at risk and without further recourse to protection and arbitration," the agency's representative to Somalia Jesper Morch said.

"Unicef-Somalia has no recourse but to withdraw from Puntland state and suspend its programme activities indefinitely," he said.

The agency's work in Puntland broadly focused on human health, development, environmental sanitation as well as rehabilitating areas affected by the tsunami that hit the Indian Ocean on December 26 last year.

Puntland declared itself autonomous from the rest of strife-torn Somalia in August 1998.

Attacks on humanitarian workers are common in the shattered Horn of Africa nation, whose government has been holed up in Kenya for security reasons since it was formed last October.

Somalia last had a fully recognised national government in 1991, when the regime of president Mohammed Siad Barre collapsed, plunging the country into bloodletting as numerous warlords and their militias battled it out for territory, political influence and resources.

- AFP