UN official says crisis far from over

Carolyn McAskie, the acting UN Emergency Relief Coordinator, told IRIN on Friday that the regional drought crisis was far from over and that the international humanitarian community faced an uphill struggle. McAskie was speaking after a 10-day visit to Ethiopia, Eritrea and Kenya. She also met the team of UN Operation Lifeline Sudan (OLS) and staff of the UN Somalia programme. “I would say we are at the stage of advertising the crisis, but this crisis is not over and we still have to run quite hard to stay in front of it,” she said. Asked if there had been a place or incident which concerned her most, McAskie cited a camp for internally displaced people (IDPs) in Eritrea, where she found 65 percent of the inmates were children, and most of the others women and elderly men. This camp, and others in Ethiopia, showed the burden that had been placed on women having to cope with broken lives and broken homes, she added.