People still fleeing insecurity and famine

Civil war and factional fighting in Somalia since the late 1980s have resulted in one of Africa's largest refugee populations during the past decade, the United States Committee for Refugees (USCR) said in a report issued on Wednesday. Approximately 350,000 Somalis remained internally displaced, while another 300,000 were refugees outside the country as of September 2001, said the report. USCR said that recurrent armed clashes and crop failures in central and southern Somalia in the first nine months of this year had caused many Somalis to flee their homes.

In the report, entitled "More than half-million newly uprooted people in Central Africa and Horn of Africa", Jeff Drumtra, senior Africa policy analyst for USCR, said that while the world was rightly concerned with the possibility of hundreds of thousands fleeing their homes in Afghanistan, "more than half-million people have already fled their homes in Central Africa and Horn of Africa in recent months because of wars already happening." He said that many of these people "receive virtually no humanitarian assistance, or they have experienced cutbacks this year in the modest amounts of relief aid that reaches them".