World Should Not Forget Situation In Somalia
The situation unfolding in Somalia is horrifically grim. According to the UN, it is the worst crisis in Africa; worse than the crisis in Darfur that outraged the world’s conscience in an unprecedented way. The past few months was the nightmare scenario that many analysts warned against as John Bolton, the US Ambassador to the UN, in his last days, aggressively pushed for resolutions that would ultimately pave the way for Ethiopia to invade its neighboring Somalia under the pretext of a preemptive war to protect its national security and contain “the spread of terrorism.” The mainstream media can no longer disregard the magnitude of the human suffering in that part of the world, graphic pictures of the grisly effects of a callously ignored preventable violence and starvation are making their way to the living rooms of millions of household- an ominous reminiscence of the early 1990s. Pope Benedict XVI urged global intervention to help end the violence and starvation. "I am anxiously following developments and I call on those who have political responsibilities on the local and international levels to seek peaceful solutions that can bring relief to these people," said the Pontiff. A week earlier, the European Union passed a resolution that "strongly condemns the serious violations of human rights committed by all parties to the conflict,” and called for "an independent panel to investigate war crimes and human rights violations.” Accordingly, these turn of events have compelled Washington to dash for public relations damage control. Washington’s image has been steadily eroding since the spring of 2006, when ‘Operation Dung beetle,’ a CIA covert operation that financed some of the most brutal warlords to hound after the Islamic courts became public news. This subsequently led to the June 2006 popular uprising that firmly established the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) and chased the despised warlords out of Mogadishu. The courts ruled for six months, described as the most peaceful period that war-torn Somalia has known since the civil war erupted in 1991. Washington viewed this as a threat, and ill-advisedly opted to support the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia which, in due course, led to the humanitarian and political mayhem at hand. We feel that the world in general and the US and UN in particular have grave responsibility in this regard. As Abukar Arman ,the freelance writer based in US , has written,Washington still has a chance to rectify its wrongs and play a constructive role in helping to stop the brutal bloodletting in Somalia, by pulling the plug on the Ethiopian occupation and initiating through the UN Security Council a resolution that would replace them with UN forces instead of the mirage of African Union forces. Similar points have been argued by Sadia Ali Aden, President of the Somali Diaspora Network in a debate hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations a few months ago. We hope international community will heed their advice.
