Why Somalia aid workers are attacked

NY Times:

At a time of drought, skyrocketing food prices, crippling inflation and intensifying street fighting, many of the aid workers whom millions of Somalis depend on for survival are fleeing their posts — or in some cases the country.

They are being driven out by what appears to be an organized terror campaign. Ominous leaflets recently surfaced on the bullet-pocked streets of Mogadishu, Somalia’s ruin of a capital, calling aid workers “infidels” and warning them that they will be methodically hunted down. Since January, at least 20 aid workers have been killed, more than in any year in recent memory. Still others have been abducted.

The deliberate assault on aid workers is a chilling new dimension to the crisis in Somalia that has unfolded over the past 17 years but has grown increasingly violent as outside forces, including the United States military, have turned a civil war into a more international conflict.

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This is not particularly new or surprising. It is the way Somali tribes make war. Consider it a logistics strategy. The tribes try to starve their opposition into submission. Aide workers interfere with this strategy and therefore the aid workers must be attacked. Man made famines are not new in Somalia. The one in the early 90's that resulted in the aid shipments and then the Blackhawk down incident was also man made and the attacks on the forces of the UN bring aid were part of the logistics war wages by one of the war lords for a tribe.

What needs to be remembered is that in these man made famines the starvation is not a by product of the warring factions, but a deliberate strategy.