Drought didn’t cause Somalia's famine
War did. And food aid may well make it worse
By
Aidan Hartley, The Spectator,
6 August 2011
It seems wicked to question charity appeals for starving
people in the Horn of Africa. Hunger is a terrible way to go, as
I discovered when I once asked a dying Somali near Mogadishu to
tell me what he was feeling. He was just passing into that
zombie-like state with staring eyes. He said how the first ache
was replaced by burning thirst that never leaves you. Marasmus
turns children into martian-headed skeletons. Kwashiorkor swells
their bellies. Glossy black hair turns reddish. Teeth fall out
and ulcers like gunshot wounds eat into the cheeks. Inside, the
body cannibalises itself, eating up fat reserves, then muscle
proteins. Immune systems crash, diseases pour in and terminal
release comes with organ failure.
I am haunted by the people I have seen die in
Somalia, and by news pictures of
the latest famine, but aid agencies are presenting this crisis
misleadingly — as if it were an act of God in the Old Testament.
In early July charities were blaming it on the ‘worst drought in
60 years’. They are still calling it the ‘worst drought ever’
when in recent days torrential rains have flooded refugee camps
in Mogadishu. The reality is that war caused this famine, not a
drought, and the heart of it is in the battlefields of southern
Somalia.
In December 2006, Ethiopian forces, financed by
US and British money and
reinforced by western special forces, invaded southern
Somalia and occupied Mogadishu.
The objective was to expel Islamists accused of being linked to
al-Qa’eda who had seized power six months before in the capital.
Under the Islamists, the city was enjoying its first period of
relative peace since Somalia
collapsed into civil war in 1991.
The infighting was by no means over, but what was evident in
Mogadishu under the Islamists, as I saw, was that Somalis were doing
a surprisingly fine job of sorting out their own problems. The
Ethiopian invasion smashed this process to smithereens, stirring up
an insurgency led by militant forces of al-Shabaab. In the past 55
months of conflict, thousands have been killed in Mogadishu. It has
become a battlefield between militant factions and an African Union
force that replaced the Ethiopians with support from western
intelligence agents, mercenaries, aerial drones and lashings of
anti-terrorism money. Out in the provinces, al-Shabaab forces rule
over the population in a style reminiscent of Pol Pot’s Cambodia
crossed with the Taleban.
In the sorghum-growing areas that are Somalia’s breadbasket,
al-Shabaab forces looted grain stores, taxed food markets and
menaced farmers until they gave up planting crops. These farmers are
Rahanwein, a family of clans who suffered most of the 300,000 deaths
in Somalia’s 1992 famine. Some Rahanweins are aligned with
al-Shabaab, but that hasn’t saved them. Other weak clans, meanwhile,
are powerless against the onslaught of warlike nomadic militias in
the pro-government or militant forces.
For let’s get one thing right: the ‘Somalis’ are not starving.
The victims are mainly the weak or minority clans — or anybody who
has not armed himself to the teeth. Add to this political mix the
failures of the United Nations and its main sponsors. The UN’s
diplomats evacuated Somalia in 1995, following the collapse of the
Unosom peacekeeping mission. They have sat in Nairobi ever since.
In the absence of useful action to solve Somalia’s conflict, the
UN through its World Food Programme agency has funnelled just enough
grain into Somalia to make it appear as if a humanitarian policy
exists. But shipping the subsidised harvests of Nebraska to Africa
year after year is not a clever thing to do unless you have a bigger
plan. Across Africa’s Horn, vulnerable populations have been kept
alive with food handouts that do not allow them to live well — but
maintain their fertility so that their numbers have exploded. In
Ethiopia, one of the nations now affected by hunger, the population
is now twice the figure it was in the 1984 famine, and even in a
good harvest year aid agencies feed the same number of people as
those who received food handouts in that one historic year.
In 2010, al-Shabaab fell out with the United Nations and kicked
the WFP out of its territory. Another season of war — and the
failure of recent rains — and disaster seemed inevitable. The signs
have been there for months, but the story was set to break in the
quiet summer news cycle — what journalists call the ‘silly season’
of July — which is when famine stories always make the front pages.
Suddenly, the UN declares ‘tens of thousands’ have already died. Aid
agencies demand billions of dollars in emergency relief. The UN
kicks off its campaign with a flight of four tonnes of food to
Mogadishu. Flying food to a large port on the Indian Ocean — is this
a good use of money in a recession-hit world? Will heads roll at the
UN for allowing mass death and the waste of funds? Of course not,
because the UN system has undergone no reforms whatsoever since it
presided over the last famine in Somalia 20 years ago.
Even so, the British public who have had their holidays ambushed
by pictures of starving Somalis will now hope their donations will
alleviate the problem. Wrong again. Those photos of starving
children are, in aid worker parlance, DBTs — Dead By Tomorrows. By
the time you see these pictures, your donations will be too late to
save them. In 1992, almost all the children below the age of five in
Rahanwein-populated areas died despite the aid that culminated in
the US military-led Operation Restore Hope. That ill-fated mission,
which collapsed after Somali mobs dragged the bodies of American
servicemen through Mogadishu, means that the West will not deploy
troops in response to those who demand we ‘do something’ again to
stop the suffering in Somalia.
These days, we have African Union troops in Somalia, though what
exactly they are ‘doing’ — except fighting, shelling civilian
districts and having the corpses of their lost comrades dragged
through the streets — is unclear. Rumour suggests the African forces
will be given more military clout to take on al-Shabaab. This will
serve Western interests in the liquidation of extremists regarded as
al-Qa’eda’s allies. Another thing that may happen is that
Mogadishu’s businessmen will make fortunes out of humanitarian aid,
just as they did in 1992, because Somalis are the most enterprising
of all African entrepreneurs. And if the last famine is anything to
go by, the famine relief, delivered too late, will stir up fresh
tensions as political rivals fight over the aid bonanza. Aid workers
will be kidnapped and murdered, food will be looted, battles will
erupt. As one UN military officer summed it up after the last
famine: ‘We fed them. They got strong. They killed us.’
As a result, all of those who donated so generously to the famine
appeals will end up loathing the Somalis, who they will blame for
being ungrateful savages. World governments will hold a conference,
then wash their hands of Somalia yet again. But it won’t save those
starving children.
