LET THEM EAT LEAD

AS FAMINE STRIKES SOMALIA, THE US JUST SERVES UP MORE BOMBS

Somalia has officially been designated ‘world’s worst country to be in’ by the UN, who declared the Horn of Africa region (Somalia, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Djbouti) a famine zone. The UK’s own Disasters Emergency Commission has already started a fund-raising campaign for famine relief. Famine is hardly new to the parched area, which has already been teetering on the brink of mass starvation for years.

The USA has also stepped up its efforts in Somalia. However, their particular brand of intervention has not been exactly what Somalis have asked for. The US State Department announced in the beginning of July that they had begun employing UAV drones to bomb the country. The USA is now simultaneously providing food aid and missile strikes to the same country.

It’s no surprise (although it’s barely been reported in the western press) that the famine is much more political in nature than it is environmental. Climate change has pushed a harsh climate closer to the edge, but it is the bloody civil war and total breakdown of civilian state institutions that has left Somalia unable to plan for droughts and failed harvests. Somalia nearly had something that looked like a semi-workable government briefly in 2006 (see SchNEWS 567) but that was destroyed by a a joint US/Ethiopian invasion that laid the groundwork for a bloody insurgency and brutal intra-islamist civil war that continues to this day.

Somalia thus joins Yemen, Libya, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Palestine and Iraq as the battlefield of the USA-led robot war on the world’s poor.

To date the US has only publicly confirmed one drone strike in Somali territory, targeting soldiers fighting for the Al-Shabab Islamist movement on the 23rd June. Effectively, team Obama has restarted the Bush-era policy of strategic strikes on Somali targets (‘targets’ which may be either Al Qaeda militants or goat herders), only with drones in place of attack helicopters and A10 gunships. It is believed that the drones were launched from Manda Bay, a US airbase in Kenya.

Meanwhile, the international response to the famine has been deemed too little and too slow. The world’s largest complex of refugee camps, Daadab, has become overfilled with people escaping both war and famine, to the point where it is no longer able to receive more refugees. Its population is now a staggering 380,000, and refugees are now forced to make their own shelters on its outskirts.

* See www.doctorswithoutborders.org/news/voices/ for news from the frontline of famine relief in Somalia.