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Ubah (4) did not survive the drought in Somalia.
She died the night after this picture was taken
Photo:
Joost Bastmeijer / DER SPIEGEL
A youth squats on the dusty floor, her long robe covering her entire body down to her feet.
Blood is dripping under her dress, everyone knows it, but no one should see it.
The young woman is on her period.
But here in the camp there are neither pads nor tampons, there is not even anything to eat.
So she crouches above the ground, for days, rooted to the ground, hoping it will be over soon.
All around them, colorful plastic tarpaulins sway in the wind, stretched over branches tied together in a dome shape.
It's a camp for displaced people. The Somali government has given them a piece of land in the south of the country. A water truck comes by every now and then.
The residents have to take care of the rest themselves.
They were all pastoralists at one time, but the great drought killed their animals.
More than four million of Somalia's approximately 16 million inhabitants are affected.
There are some small hills between the tents with the plastic sheets.
They are graves - they used to be on the outskirts of the camp, but every day dozens of new people come here and build their dwellings.
The tents grow around the dead.
This Tuesday in March
It's another funeral, a man walks away from the tents towards the bush with a kind of roll of cloth on his arm.
A few hundred meters away, about a dozen other men are waiting, they have already dug a hole.
The roll of cloth is so thin, it's hard to imagine that a corpse could be wrapped in it.
The dead body is that of a four-year-old child, little Ubah died a few hours ago, shortly after morning prayers.
The day before, DER SPIEGEL had accompanied Ubah and her mother, the scenes were frightening.
The girl in her mother's arms, every single bone was visible, the child was only able to raise her arms with difficulty.
A mobile team of doctors was visiting the camp at the time. They measured Ubah's upper arm width, the measuring tape pointed so far into the red area that the scale reached its limits.
"She's getting worse every day, she can't keep anything down," said Juhara Ali, her mother.
Ubah was previously ill, having been partially paralyzed since birth.
"She used to drink milk from our animals, that made her strong," says Ali.
But when the animals died, hunger came.
The only option for the family of five was to flee.
They walked to the camp for five days and nights, after the second day the food ran out.
And even when they finally arrived, the hunger never ended: no aid organization brings food regularly, on a good day they get a meal.
Nothing bad at all.
The doctors refer Ubah to the nearest hospital in the port city of Kismayo, about 15 kilometers away.
But it is too late, Ubah does not survive the drought.
"I will remember her as a happy girl, she always laughed with her siblings," says the mother.
According to authorities in the region, 15 people, mostly children, have died of hunger in the past week.
About 500 kilometers north, in the Somali capital Mogadishu, sacks are loaded.
The American flag is emblazoned on them, with “USAID” printed underneath.
In the sacks are peas, wheat or sorghum, a type of grain.
The sacks are intended to save lives, but the United Nations World Food Program (WFP) warehouse is not even half full.
"We can't do anything for the people in the camps, we just let them down," says El-Khidir Daloum, WFP country director.
The reason is simple: there simply isn't enough money.
Of the need for humanitarian aid that various organizations have calculated for Somalia, just three percent are covered.
97 percent are missing, and that means people are dying as a result of starvation, like Ubah.
And recently goods are missing, even those that have already been paid for.
Almost half of the food that WFP distributes to drought victims in Somalia has so far been imported from Ukraine.
On March 10, another such load should have arrived, 1,188 tons of peas, intended for the famine regions in Ethiopia and Somalia.
Port of Departure: Odessa, a Ukrainian port city now at war, like the rest of the country.
Eventually the WFP planners in Mogadishu got the message: postponed to March 15th.
This deadline also passed, the cargo remains missing.
The people of Somalia continue to starve.
In other cases, the WFP logisticians at least know what happened to the cargo.
“There were some shipments of goods promised to us by donors.
But at sea, these were briefly diverted in the direction of Ukraine,” says Daloum.
The WFP headquarters in Rome confirms that supplies were sent at short notice to Ukraine instead of to other crisis regions as planned.
However, this had no effect on the supply in these countries, since there were still reserves in the camps.
However, due to the war in Ukraine, supplies are becoming increasingly difficult to obtain.
Hunger in Europe competes with hunger in Africa.
Vladimir Putin's victims can now be found all over the world.
Another consequence of the war: drastically increased prices
And the World Food Program and numerous other organizations are still struggling with another consequence of the war: the drastically increased prices.
For the same budget they now get far fewer goods and can therefore help far fewer people.
In some African countries such as Somalia, prices have already exploded in recent months, and even basic foods are now unaffordable for many people.
The drought at home and the war far away are a toxic mix.
Several planned on-site visits by high-ranking donors in Somalia have been canceled in recent days, reports WFP country chief Daloum: »That means we are no longer on the radar.
That's unfair.
We have deep sympathy for the people in Ukraine, they don't deserve this.
But the people of Somalia don't deserve it either."
»It is currently extremely difficult to raise funds.
Many potential donors point out that the war in Ukraine is consuming a lot of resources,” says another high-ranking UN official.
"We're supposed to keep prioritizing, but we're slowly running out of criteria." Meanwhile, the helpers are already looking at where it's most likely to rain again.
At least the people there have a chance of surviving - and that's where some organizations are now focusing the remaining support.
"The Worst Humanitarian Disaster In The World"
"The war in Ukraine has indeed drawn attention away from the catastrophic drought in Somalia," writes the UN emergency relief agency OCHA.
That became clear on Wednesday evening on the other side of the Gulf of Aden, in Yemen.
A devastating civil war is still raging there, and the United Nations describes the situation in the country as the “worst humanitarian catastrophe in the world”.
A large donor conference should raise the hoped-for funds to at least alleviate some of the suffering.
Despite the war in Ukraine, the plight in other parts of the world should not be forgotten, the organizers warned in advance.
But in the end, just a third of the hoped-for 3.9 billion euros came together.
"Disappointed," said the UN about the result.
Even before the war in Ukraine, it was becoming increasingly difficult for international organizations to raise funds.
According to the EU Commission, the need for humanitarian aid is at an all-time high - and new crises are constantly emerging.
The funds for Ukraine have not yet been diverted from budgets intended for other regions.
But the gap between the available funds and global demand is growing.
Climate change is already making whole areas of Africa virtually uninhabitable, and after decades of boom, famine is suddenly back on the continent.
And now a humanitarian catastrophe in the heart of Europe, caused by Putin's relentless invasion.
The world is bleeding from more and more wounds, but the wealthy countries are running out of plasters.
March is a crucial month, public budgets are presented in several countries, including Germany and the USA.
Disastrous signals are coming from Washington: Although an additional 4.1 billion US dollars have been budgeted for the victims of the Ukraine war, the remaining humanitarian aid is to be cut by a billion dollars compared to the previous year.
Numerous organizations are already up in arms against it.
The budget was also presented in Germany this week, with a similar result: emergency aid is to be increased slightly overall, probably also because of the war.
Elsewhere, however, significant savings should probably be made: The Development Ministry (BMZ) must expect losses of 800 million euros if nothing changes in the upcoming renegotiations.
The so-called transitional aid would be particularly affected by the cuts - it includes measures that go beyond acute emergency aid.
These funds are used, for example, to drill wells, support drought-resistant agriculture or create job opportunities for displaced people.
In 2020, these funds in the federal budget were still one billion euros, of which only a little more than half will be left in 2022.
"This development gives us great concern in view of the increasing crises," criticizes the non-governmental organization ONE.
According to SPIEGEL information, the new budget is also causing dissatisfaction within the development aid ministry.
The next big donor conferences are coming up soon: at the end of the month for Afghanistan, in May for Syria.
Even before Putin's invasion of Ukraine, the gap between the huge humanitarian needs and the funds provided was widening.
This gap has now widened even further.
Russian tanks and bombs are not only destroying apartment blocks in Kyiv and Mariupol.
The war in Ukraine is also killing children in Somalia.
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