Somalia starves, America retreats
My middle-school girls looked beautiful as they marched across Hargeisa Square in their white dresses. They held their heads high, knowing they were the first young women in the new republic to be educated above the elementary level.
Watching them, I remembered what a lecturer had said to our Peace Corps group: “When you teach a boy, you teach a boy. When you teach a girl, you teach generations.”
A large crowd of people lined the square to watch contingents of students, civil servants and soldiers parade by the reviewing stand in honor of the new president. They clapped their hands in unison and sang a song composed for the new nation’s founding: “Somalo Wanachsen” (Somalia is great). It was 1962 and everyone had high hopes.
By the 1990s Somalia had begun a slow descent into violence, until it really wasn’t a country anymore. The region in the north where I had taught broke away and formed its own republic, Somaliland, which has survived and done well. Many of my students are probably dead now, but others — perhaps their daughters or granddaughters — have taken their place. Some girls have gone on to study medicine and train as nurses or midwives.
Al Shabab, a militant terrorist group, took advantage of the anarchy brought on by years of civil war and famine in the south to seize control, imposing their extremist Muslim ideology on an exhausted people. Warlords chased them off for brief periods, but they always came back and are still present in rural areas, harassing the inhabitants and often keeping outside help from getting to them by murdering aid workers.
They continue to be a problem because the last thing they want is a democratic Somalia with a decent economy and relations with the outside world.
Now the Somalis are starving again, as they did six years ago. Especially the children, who are the most vulnerable. They are suffering from one of the worst of the periodic droughts that afflict the region, as well as from Al Shabab.
Remember the photos of the children we once saw in the media who were hardly able to lift their heads, their ribs protruding from their emaciated bodies? This time the famine levels could be even worse than they were in 2011. The government of Somalia has already declared it a national disaster, with hunger threatening the lives of over 6 million people, or one-half of the nation’s entire population.
The world was too slow in responding to the last drought, as international aid organizations now admit. This time, if funds don’t start pouring in right away to stem the flow of misery, the cost in human life will be greater than any we have witnessed so far. Other countries, including South Sudan and Nigeria, are also at grave risk.
There should be reason for hope. A measure of national stability was established last month when a new president was elected by the Somali Parliament. Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed happens to be a dual citizen of Somalia and the United States, where he attended school before returning to his homeland. He is committed to its welfare and deserves our help. But President Trump has just proposed a heartless budget that beefs up the Pentagon at the expense of agencies that provide support for domestic and foreign aid programs — if not doing away with some of them entirely.
He is also trying to ban all Somalis as well as citizens of five other Muslim countries from entering the United States.
The U.S. used to be the biggest contributor to the relief of nations in need; we still boast of being the planet’s most generous nation.
What little sustenance the Somalis still receive from us is left over from President Barack Obama’s budget. Recently the UN and other relief groups sent out requests for immediate funds to help feed the desperately hungry. Many have stepped up. The U.S. has yet to been heard from.
Besides the humanitarian impulse Americans are known for, foreign aid actually helps to keep us safe and terrorists at bay. It’s not just walls and weapons that ensure our security. Other countries — who are not our friends — are waiting to fill the gap if we abdicate our moral responsibilities. Will our new mantra be America First and only?