Things are not going well in Somalia:
NAIROBI (Reuters) – Forty aid agencies urged the world on Wednesday to focus attention on Somalia’s “catastrophic” humanitarian crisis where hundreds of thousands of people are suffering from war, drought and food shortages.
Their statement, issued by Oxfam, said Somalia now had one million internal refugees, their numbers swelled by an exodus of 20,000 a month from Mogadishu, where Islamist insurgents are fighting the Ethiopian-backed government.
Record high food prices, hyper-inflation and drought across the Horn of Africa nation were exacerbating the situation and will worsen if seasonal rains due from April fail as predicted.
Let’s recap. During the Cold War, Somalia was, like Ethiopia a pawn in the struggle between the US and the USSR, with the resident strongman Siad Barre first having the support of the Soviet Union, then of America. When he was finally toppled a civil war broke out, George H. W. Bush decided, high on victory in Gulf War II and the New World Order, to intervene. With their customary cackhandedness this meant the Americans taking sides and attempting to take out various warlords with little result but further antagonising the population until one day the Blackhawks came down… Since then the US was content to let the place stew, but then The War on Terror happened and since it looked like an Islamist movement was taking control of the country, America went back in. Not openly of course like in 1993, but by a) airstrikes against supposed terrorist targets in the country and b) backing the 2006 Ethiopian invasion of the country, the latter of which has now led to the humanitarian crisis described in the Reuters article.
Now I know it’s hard to believe of a country that was the butt of dubious and racist starvation jokes in the eighties, but Ethiopia has long been an imperial power in East Africa –ask Eritrea–, had already fought one war with Somalia about Ogaden, historically a part of Somalia but given to Ethiopia by the western powers at the end of World War 2 and is widely suspected in Somalia to want to subjugate the entire country, either directly or through a puppet government. No wonder their intervention only worsened an already bad situation.
But hey, at least Somalia isn’t in the hands of terrorists anymore!