It’s terribly sad, but you just can’t make this stuff up:

Thousands of sacks of food aid meant for Somalia’s famine victims have been stolen and are being sold at markets in the same neighborhoods where skeletal children in filthy refugee camps can’t find enough to eat, an Associated Press investigation has found.

As much as half of the food aid going into Somalia is stolen and sold in markets. Militants that control of large parts of the country and those who run refugee camps interdict the aid and sell it to free agents. Last week we warned about rampant corruption and theft in the country, but passages like this from the AP story are still heartbreaking

The aid is not even safe once it has been distributed to families huddled in the makeshift camps popping up around the capital. Families at the large, government-run Badbado camp said they were often forced to hand back aid after journalists had taken photos of them with it.

The camp bosses, employed by the most corrupt government in the entire world, take back the food and sell it outside the camp. The flow of aid has e torrential as Western governments take note of the famine and announce generous new aid packages. That has created what one Somali official called a “bonanza” for local charlatans. (The man spoke on condition of anonymity because, believe it or not, “monitoring food assistance in Somalia is a particularly dangerous process.”)

One man interviewed for the story seems to have read yesterday’s PowerBlog posting on the famine.

“While helping starving people, you are also feeding the power groups that make a business out of the disaster,” said Joakim Gundel, who heads Katuni Consult, a pany often asked to evaluate international aid efforts in Somalia. “You’re saving people’s lives today so they can die tomorrow.”

What Somalia needs is a PovertyCure.Instead of hosting hundreds of thousands of its people in refugee camps, which reinforces their powerlessness and encourages the country’s agricultural impotence, the country must open itself up to entrepreneurial development. And the West must focus its resources not on the indirect funding of militants, terrorists, and shysters, but on helping Somalia to build up its civil society and protect the economic freedom of its citizens.