The Daily Gleaner
Tuesday, August 02, 2011
In the hope of mobilizing international good will, media outlets are saturated with the now-familiar images of death and suffering.
However, what is often missing in such coverage is background context, which often makes the difference between enlightened readership and yellow journalism.
When the media presents African crises as urgent and sensational, but with little context outside the backdrops of war and poverty, it masks the complex role of global politics in which Western foreign policy is often implicated. And one only has to look at the recent developments in Somalia, the epicentre of the ongoing tragedy, to make this point clear.
A people whose primary means of livelihood depended on pastoralism and coastal trade, in the late 19th century the Somalis turned into a classic victim of divide-and-rule after imperial partition left them scattered across four or five colonies.
In 1960, following independence, British Somaliland and Italian Somaliland joined to form the republic of Somalia.
Irredentism or "Greater Somalia" became a national vision as symbolized by the five-pointed star on the flag, and Radio Mogadishu began to broadcast secessionist propaganda to the millions of co-ethnics in neighboring Kenya, Ethiopia, and Djibouti.
Hoping to take advantage of Ethiopia's weakened state as a result of the war in Eritrea and other internal divisions, in 1977 Somalia converted its irredentist ambition into a full-scale war. When its military lost the war badly, discontent in the army festered into clan and regional civil wars, leading to the subsequent implosion of the whole country.
In 2006 events took on a remarkable turn. A network of religious authorities known as the Islamic Courts Union, ICU, used its growing leverage to rid Mogadishu and other towns of their warlords, a feat that the Americans had tried and failed. For the first time since 1991 most of Somalia became united under a central government. Gun-slinging youths and arbitrary roadblocks disappeared; trade in the drug Chat got banned; and markets and ports began to function normally, albeit under the Shariah law.
Historically, the Somalis, despite geographic proximity to the Middle East, never cared for Wahabi-style extremism, and that fact alone should have been sufficient for concerned Western powers to try to engage the Islamists.
That never happened. The spectre of an African Taliban loomed large in Bush's White House, and the Ethiopians, backed by American intelligence, invaded Somalia and ousted the fragile ICU.
Military intervention, as many observers had cautioned, was bound to muddy the waters further, however. Backlash against the foreign soldiers transformed the obscure al-Shabab into a formidable national actor, and a year later the Ethiopians beat a hasty retreat, having suffered heavy losses.
Despite the presence of a relatively large peacekeeping force from Uganda and Burundi, Somalia still remains a failed state, piracy on high seas and a seesawing civil war being direct byproducts.
Looking back to 2006, many Somalis blame the West and its Ethiopian proxy for reversing the best chance the country has had toward a genuine statehood. And to prove that a diplomatic engagement with the ICU could have worked, such critics point to the many Islamists that the West had once declared unacceptable and who now constitute the top politicians in the U.S.-backed Transitional Federal Government, TFG, in Mogadishu.
The connection between the missed opportunity in 2006 and the current Somali famine is thus obvious.
Nature is the worst culprit in the ongoing food shortage in the Horn of Africa, for sure. But so far, Somalia is where the drought has escalated into a full-fledged famine.
If the West had cultivated a policy of rapprochement five years ago, more likely Somalia, like Liberia and Sierra Leone, would have made a fresh start after decades of anarchy.
The scale of the present drought would not have been what it is, there would have been no al-Shabab to obstruct the international relief operation, and as a result, thousands of lives would have been spared.
Fikru Gebrekidan is an associate professor of history at St. Thomas University.