By Ibrahim Abdulkadir

After nearly two decades of civil unrest, Somalia is overwhelmed with another perniciously widespread drought that has threatened almost every living creature on its path. As each day passes, livestock are perishing in the thousands, and humans alike are in the hundreds, especially the weak, children, women, and elders. Indeed, the prolonged drought has created massive internal displacement in the deepest pockets of the rural nomadic populations. A mother was reported to have lost all her three kids for thirst and hunger, while away for fetching water in 70-kilometer distance. Another horrific story has the attention of local media, some kids desperately drinking their urine, out of acute thirst, when all liquid is gone. The call for SOS is louder and it is a high time to survive.

Living in one of the most prosperous nations on the earth, where excessive indulgence of food has left on the people’s body the imprints of obesity and overweight, I wonder how history will record the contrasting reality between America and the Horn of Africa. The throwaway society and the drought-inflicted one, surely is the sign of a world suffering from the ultimate numbing of moral crisis. Skinniest, they say, implying Somalis, in the movie of Black Hawk Down, but recent pictures taken from the drought victims in the southern regions reveal the gloomiest suffering of children and women in the process of slow, yet painful deaths.

Nearly 11 million of people are facing the impacts of the drought that is raging in the semi-arid lands of the Horn of Africa, majority Somali nomads dispersed in four countries, Northeastern Frontier Districts (NFD) in Kenya, Ogaden in Ethiopia, Djibouti, and the southern of Somalia. Though forgotten their plight by the international community, the few coverage of the western media allotted to the drought crisis has exacerbated the situation, causing fear, while depicting the country as pirate and terrorist infested sanctuary.

Neighboring countries of Somalia who had forcefully seized, with the help of former colonies, large territories of Somalia are pursuing a systematic clandestine plan of annihilation against the indigenous population through blocking outside assistance and imposing harsh measures. The 1999 crisis of the Ogaden acute short supply of food and water in Ethiopia was a prime example indicative of the diversion of large quantities of aid to government stores, starving its recipients to death. The ever-corrupt government of Kenya that is infamous with policies against its Somali populations has followed the same path, abandoning its respective role to devise a program for its citizens to safeguard them from the imminent crisis of the drought, failing to do so until this day. More viciously, the two rivers in Somalia that originate from Ethiopian highlands are plummeting due to government-sponsored dams that swayed the course of the river to benefit Ethiopian’s farmer communities. This was an attempt to avoid the Egypt’s conflict in the water of Nile.

The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, though lagged behind, has sent enough signals to the world community to act immediately in the deteriorating situation. Other international aid agencies followed suit in their plea for helping the population under malnutrition in East Africa, but an urgent response from the interest-led donor countries is far away now. Moreover, the reality of the drought has proven inescapable to the pastoralists since their coping strategies in the past could not deal with the present one, thus making them more vulnerable than ever as the crisis progress.

In fact, the current drought in Somalia was triggered by some well-known factors that range from man made to natural disasters. The country is facing one of the irreversible ecological disasters: the enormous trade of charcoal to the Gulf countries, as well as Saudi Arabia, emerging as a niche for some reckless dealers soon after Somali’s main export of livestock was halted for reasons of an economic ban from the same countries. The high price of desertification and deforestation was prompted by the lawlessness and absence of central government in Somalia, making Somali’s unique landscape and pristine forests open to irreparable damage, coupled with the exploitations of not only Arab countries, but also European countries whose trans-continental companies had dumped high-level radioactive wastes in our seashores. All these violations are well-known and verifiable facts, but since we are a stateless society, our complaints were dismissed as our existence was forgotten, leading to a greater detriment on us.

The environmental implications in Somalia amount to a bleak future for our next generation. The indifference to the plight of human suffering in large scale leads to a green light for complete environmental degradations from any conceivable front. Now, that the worsening situation in Somalia, in terms of the drought, is partially contributed to the phenomenon of global warming, as a new study published recently in the Science magazine in South Africa indicates. Hence, a Somali adage says, when dealing desperate crisis with utter helplessness, “Cidna uma maqna, Ceelna uma qodna,” meaning that ‘No well is dug for them, and no help is coming to them.’ Unless we extend our hand to our fellow humans, we will become guilt of stinginess that otherwise has no place in our humanistic spirit for common compassion to each other. And, through the American Relief Agency for the Horn of Africa, ARAHA, a nonprofit organization that plays a crucial humanitarian programs in the region, we can channel our support to the revival of starving populations.

Ibrahim Abdulkadir
E-mail: [email protected]
Boston, MA