Somalia Is Dying. Does Anyone Care?

[sabrina 1]

Remember Rwanda? When the world looked the other way and the genocide of hundreds of thousands of people took place? Later, way too late, world leaders, like Clinton, apologized.

What is happening in Somalia right now, 12 Million human beings may starve to death, is beyond human imagination. The horror, the tragedy, the magnitude of the suffering. It's not possible to absorb it, especially from a distance.



Actress Kristin Davis Breaks Down Over Conditions in Somalia

Actress Kristin Davis, best known for her role as Charlotte on HBO’s Sex and the City, broke down in tears on live TV while describing her visit to a refugee camp in Kenya. The camp is housing hundreds of thousands of refugees from drought-stricken Somalia, which is fast becoming one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world.

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In her work as an Oxfam ambassador, Davis visited a Kenyan refugee camp, where she saw the devastation first-hand.

“We were really unprepared for how shocking it is,” she told the BBC. As she began to cry, she added, ”I’m sorry, this story is a hard story. This woman can’t walk so she came from Somalia on a cart with a donkey. She started with five children and now she just has three. Her husband was killed along the way and everything she owned.”

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In an interview with NPR, Jeremy Konyndyk, the co-director of policy and advocacy for the global aid agency Mercy Corps, said, “ U.S. assistance is not there, will make a difference, but not enough of a difference. The U.S. is the largest donor of global food aid. And when the U.S. doesn’t contribute robustly to a response, there aren’t too many other donors in the world who can pick up that slack.”

The US has important business, elsewhere. In Iraq, in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, killing people, with drones and bombs.

Imagine if instead, we were saving lives?

An apology from this President after the fact, will be as comforting to the dead and their surviving loved ones, as Clinton's apology to Rwanda was!


The question in the article below is for Canada, which is also receiving criticism for its lack of interest in the plight of the people of Somalia:.




Somalia Is Dying. Why Don't We Care?

The United Nations warned Friday that all of Southern Somalia is in danger of slipping into famine. The number of people needing food is now at 12.4 million. Routes out of Somalia towards refugee camps are being called “roads of death” because of the bodies of those who starved to death along the way — particularly children — left by the roadside.

In the last week, since the Canadian Government announced that they would match all donations made to famine relief in Somalia and other parts of Africa, Canadians have donated — but not much. Since the announcement of donation matching, Canadians have donated $2.9 million to the Humanitarian Coalition, a group of charities that includes the Red Cross, Medecins Sans Frontiers and World Vision.

In contrast, in the week after an earthquake and subsequent tsunami devastated parts of Japan on 11 march, Canadians donated over $10 million to disaster relief, despite the fact that Japan is a wealthy, first world country with plenty of resources of its own. Why the discrepancy?

Yes, why the discrepancy? Is it racism? Or classism? Or both? Rwanda, Somalia, Darfur ...

After Rwanda we were never supposed to let it happen again.

I know this is not of much interest right now with the debt ceiling drama going on in DC using up pretty much all media airtime.

I don't know what to do to help, other than send a donation to the agencies linked in the articles, and spread the word, a little anyhow. The most trustworthy agency for me is https://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/donate /

But even if it’s not on the news, it doesn’t mean it’s not happening. People are dying. Children are too malnourished and weak to even try to feed from their mothers or take in any food that might come their way. Mothers are leaving the bodies of their babies by the side of the road when they cannot reach a refugee camp in time — and even if they reach the camp, there’s no guarantee there’s enough space or food.

The journey from Liboi to Dadaab, the refugee camps, can take some people up to four days





António Guterres, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees: "Knowing that children are dying along their journey to safety breaks our hearts. This is turning one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises into a human tragedy of unimaginable proportions.”