UN aid chief in Somalia slams report alleging half of Somali food aid diverted from hungry

UN official slams report on Somalia food diversion

GENEVA — A report alleging widespread corruption in Somali food deliveries lacks evidence and is endangering lifesaving assistance to the impoverished African country, the U.N.’s aid chief in Somalia says.

In a letter obtained Thursday by The Associated Press, Mark Bowden criticized the “sensational” claim by a panel of experts that up to half the food aid for Somalia’s hungry people was being diverted to cartels and other unintended targets.

“These estimates of diversion are not apparently based on any documentation, but rather on hearsay and commonly held perception,” Bowden wrote in the letter, dated March 23, to a group created by the U.N. Security Council to monitor sanctions against Somalia. He didn’t provide his own estimate.

The allegations concern one of the most challenging places in the world for aid work, and would be difficult to verify.

Findings of the report were first made public by The New York Times on March 9, and have led to severe criticism of U.N. accountability efforts. It said food aid in Somalia was being diverted to corrupt contractors, radical Islamic militants and local U.N. workers, and called on U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to authorize an independent investigation of the operations of the World Food Program in the country.

Bowden also challenged the report’s assertion that U.N. agencies were accepting stolen and diverted aid as a “cost of doing business” in the violence-ravaged Horn of Africa nation. He said that U.N. bodies have spent over $350,000 to improve monitoring in Somalia since 2008, and adopted other steps to limit risks in a “complex environment where a war economy has predominated for many years.”

Transporters in Somalia must truck bags of food through roadblocks manned by a bewildering array of militias, insurgents and bandits. Kidnappings and executions are common and the insecurity makes it difficult for senior U.N. officials to travel to the country to check on procedures. Investigators could end up relying on the same people they are probing to provide protection.

Bowden rejected one of the report’s recommendations to allow monitors to use U.N. Humanitarian Air Services to travel around the country.

“Passengers are in general restricted to those working for humanitarian organizations,” he wrote. “The work of the monitoring group has been determined to be political in nature and therefore … it would not be appropriate to make UNHAS flights available to them.”

He said the bad publicity was making it harder for humanitarian workers dealing with increased malnutrition in Somalia, where over 3 million people — or about half the population — need aid.

“This is already affecting flows of humanitarian assistance,” he said.

In Geneva on Thursday, WFP executive director Josette Sheeran also said there was “zero evidence” for the report’s claims of large-scale diversion of aid. She said the agency would welcome an investigation, but noted that no proof has been presented or uncovered to back up the report.

WFP has previously said that internal investigations showed between 2 and 10 percent of aid was being sold.