Somalia was a sideshow in the war on terror – and is paying a colossal price

This extract is from Guardian Development, by Madeleine Bunting. Views expressed are the author’s own.

In the past three months, 150,000 people have arrived in the Dadaab refugee camp in northern Kenya. About 80% of them are women and children and many have walked 100km to reach the sprawling, crowded camp of 440,000 that now counts as Kenya’s third largest city. This is all we can see of Somalia’s famine – the ones who manage to get out. Those suffering in Somalia are largely beyond the reach of the television cameras and the aid agencies. This is a catastrophe the world is finding it easy to forget.

Last week, the predicted figures climbed to a staggering 750,000 who could die in Somalia before the end of the year. That’s more than double the number who died in the early 1990s in a previous famine, despairs Mark Bradbury, an expert on Somalia at the Rift Valley Institute . He adds that 20 years ago conflict in Somalia was more intense and puts the crucial question, why is the likely death toll so much higher now?

After the famine in Ethiopia in the mid-1980s, there were plenty of declarations that it must never happen again. Since then millions have been invested in famine monitoring and prediction systems. This is a region prone to food insecurity, but the lesson of Ethiopia a quarter of a century ago was that it is not natural disasters, such as drought, that cause famine but human aggravation of them by conflict.

Aid agencies are beating their chests with guilt and anguish. “It’s a catastrophic breakdown in the world’s collective responsibility to act”, declared Oxfam . But the prediction system worked – it warned of the imminent famine a year ago. Moreover the public response to the appeal has been generous – the British government’s response in particular. So why is this food crisis likely to become the worst famine ever in Somalia?

The predicted death toll didn’t reach the top of television bulletins last week. Attention was focused on the 10th anniversary of 9/11. But what is almost routinely overlooked – except by longtime observers of Somalia – is that its plight is bound up with 9/11 and the way that the war on terror shaped US foreign policy. In fact, when historians reflect on the early decades of the 21st century Somalia, alongside Afghanistan and Iraq, will be seen as having paid a colossal price in human life as a result of the US war on terror. The deaths in Iraq were brought by bombs, the deaths in Somalia are from hunger: both are a direct consequence of the violent extremism triggered by US aggression.

Somalia’s catastrophe is about how “humanitarian space” – the principles of neutrality crucial to effective intervention – has been destroyed by US policy in Somalia since 9/11. This is the key difference with the famine of the early 1990s, when the warring clans still recognised the neutrality of humanitarian aid rather than seeing it as a tool of western political strategy. Now the fringe extremist Islamist al-Shabaab militia, who control many parts of Somalia, will not allow access to most western aid agencies; the World Food Programme had to pull out in 2009, cutting off the food aid on which thousands were already dependent. The deaths of aid workers have forced most western aid agencies to withdraw from working in the country. The result is that there is no one who can engineer the massive logistical effort required to provide the food needed.

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