Dear All,
I have been asked, by a friend, to pass this on. If you
have contacts at UN or in the media, they might be interested in knowing of
this problem/situation. Please send this on to your embassy....as
they might be obliged to move this information on to their superiors...or
investigate.
There is also one primate subspecies that is endemic to this
area....Zammarano's Monkey Cercopithecus mitis zammaranoi.
Tom
I am writing to you now to inform you of the situation in southern
Somalia. As you may have heard, the Kenya army took over the port of Kismayu
about a month and a half ago. They found a huge stock of c. 4 million sacks of
charcoal waiting to be exported. About 3 million sacks are in or near Kismayu
and another million at Buur Gabo, an estuary and village of the same name up the
coast from Ras Kamboni and the Kenya border. Although the UN (and the Somali
government) have banned all export of charcoal from Somalia first the
Kenyan army, then the Kenyan government, the African Union, and IGAD have
all asked the UN Security Council to temporarily lift the ban to permit
the export of the charcoal. The Security Council has declined to lift
the ban, but the Kenya army is permitting it to be exported, with the
connivance of local militia and politicians in both Somalia and Kenya. This has
apparently encouraged the continuation of charcoal production for export.
Needless to say this is environmentally unsustainable, and has caused unknown
damage to the Jubba valley forest and the Boni forest/Bush Bush National Reserve
which between them have 50 bird species not found anywhere else in Somalia. Much
of the charcoal going out of Kismayu must be coming from the Jubba valley, and
presumably all of the charcoal at Buur Gabo must be coming from Bush Bush and
the Somali part of the Boni Forest.
I don't know if there is
anything that BirdLife can do about this, but I thought you should know about
it.
I am attaching a list of the 50 bird
species.