Also see: Somalia: Worse Than Darfur
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AFGOOYE, Somalia — Just step into a feeding center here, and the sense of hopelessness is overwhelming.
Dozens of women sit with listless babies in their laps, snapping their fingers, trying to get a flicker of life out of their dying children.
Little eyes close. Wizened 1-year-olds struggle to breathe. This is the place where help is supposed to be on its way. But the nurses in the filthy smocks are besieged. From the doorway, you can see the future of Somalia fading away.
While the audacity of a band of Somali pirates who hijacked a ship full of weapons has grabbed the world’s attention, it is the slow-burn suffering of millions of Somalis that seems to go almost unnoticed.
It's what is known as SELECTIVE AGENDA-PUSHING, readers, and the NYT is the best at it!!
In August, 200 women with emaciated babies lined up outside his clinic every day. Today, there are 400. More than three million people, about half Somalia’s population, need emergency rations to survive. Nobody seems to like it. Many say they feel humiliated.
All brought to them by the U.S., readers:
Memory Hole: Somali Slander
Memory Hole: More on Somalia
You PROUD, 'murka?
“That’s all we talk about: when will the next handout come,” said Zenab Ali Osman, a grandmother raising her daughter’s children. Before fighting drove her from Mogadishu, the capital, to Afgooye’s endless refugee camps of gumdrop-shaped huts made of plastic bags and in some cases soiled T-shirts, Ms. Zenab used to wash clothes for a living. On a good day, she made the equivalent of 80 cents.
The civil war has eviscerated the economy, leaving so many people to survive off pennies.
Somalia has not had any marines, or national army or navy of any significance, since the central government imploded in 1991. Clan-based warlords carved the country into fiefs, preying upon the population. People eventually got fed up, and in the summer of 2006, a grass-roots Islamist movement drove away the warlords.
Ethiopia and the United States accused the Islamists of sheltering terrorists, and in the winter of 2006, Ethiopian and American forces ousted the Islamists. But the Islamists are back. Supported by businessmen and war profiteers, Islamist guerrilla fighters are viciously battling the weak government forces and Ethiopian soldiers. Civilians are often caught in between. Thousands have been killed in the past year and a half.
I really despise how the New York Times tells such a slanted and biased account of what happened. Must I continue to repost debunking link after debunking link, readers? Can't the NYT for ONCE tell the TRUTH?!
Ethiopian Atrocities in Somalia
Ethiopia's Invisible War Crimes
Memory Hole: Our Ally in Africa
Thousands of hungry people besieged a convoy of 35 United Nations-chartered food trucks moving through Mogadishu two weeks ago. The people stripped the trucks clean, looting more than two million pounds of food.
That has taken food out of the mouths of people like Ms. Zenab, whose daughter was one of the 20 street sweepers in Mogadishu killed by a bomb in August that was buried in a pile of garbage.
She is now helping raise several grandchildren. Amina, 13 months old, will not eat. The two sat the other day on a cot covered with flies. All around them were little babies looking up at the ceiling with round wet eyes, some with faces covered in tape because they were too sick to swallow and were being fed milk through their noses.
Who does she blame?
“Those with guns,” Ms. Zenab said. “Whoever they are.”
I know whom I blame, and I have damn good evidence!
And do you think things could get any worse, readers?
Just imagine the HORROR of being a Somalia on board this ship:
Somali Migrants Cast Overboard
SANA, Yemen (AP) — About 100 migrants from Somalia are missing and feared drowned off the coast of Yemen after smugglers forced them overboard in the treacherous Gulf of Aden waters, Yemeni officials and the United Nations refugee agency said Friday.
So far, 30 bodies have been found washed up on shore on Friday and were buried immediately, a Yemeni security official said. The waters off the Horn of Africa and Yemen have become some of the most lawless in the world, plagued by Somali piracy. The area is also a busy crossing-point for migrants fleeing to Yemen from the Horn of Africa, particularly from the violence in Somalia.
In Geneva, the United Nations refugee agency said the smugglers’ boat left Somalia on Monday with 150 people on board. When their vessel was about three miles from the Yemeni coast, the smugglers forced all but 12 of the migrants overboard, the agency said. The 12 were put in a smaller boat while the rest tried to swim to shore. Only 47 made it and alerted authorities, the agency said.
Reports of abuse by smugglers are common in the heavy traffic of migrants across the sea to Yemen. To avoid Yemeni patrols, the smugglers often dump their passengers far from shore in shark-infested waters and force them to swim the rest of the way. --more--"
They have got to be kidding? That is INHUMAN, readers!!!!
Nope!
SAN'A, Yemen - Dozens of bodies washed ashore yesterday in Yemen after smugglers threw nearly 150 Somali migrants overboard in shark-infested waters, the latest such tragedy in one of the most lawless stretches of ocean in the world. --more--"
