Talking about possible famine in Somalia without exploring how the powerful helped create it is deceitful, says Azad Essa.
Six years ago, Rihanna, Eminem and Lady Gaga led a campaign on social media to highlight the devastating famine in Somalia.
The I’m Gonna Be Your Friend drive was launched to raise funds and awareness about a catastrophic drought that had turned the country into a dusty wasteland. Millions of Somalis were affected; up to 1 million children faced death by starvation. Fast-forward to today, and you probably would have seen Ben Stiller’s Facebook video where he asks Turkish Airlines to send a plane full of food and medicines to the country.
When I went to Somalia in 2011 to report on the hunger crisis, I had to take the long route via Kenya.
When I finally reached Dobley, a town on the Somalia-Kenya border, I saw a hospital ridden with bullets after al-Shabaab had swept through the area and left a trail of destruction in its wake.
I saw a lorry emerge from the horizon carrying about 110 people, mainly women and children. Some had been sitting on each other for most of the trip. Here, their journey on wheels would end, and another would start on foot. They would need to walk across the hot desert to Kenya if they were to find food, water and medicine.
Many didn’t make it. The famine killed at least 260 000 people, including 133 000 children in Somalia alone.
It was called the worst drought in 60 years.
Today, 9 million people in East Africa are facing a food crisis, with 2.9 million in Somalia alone.
Again, it’s being called unprecedented. Again, UN agencies and international NGOs are urging leaders of the world to act. Once again, images of gaunt black children are splashed across our screens, urging each of us to take action, in one form or another.
When I look back at the 2011 famine and the current crisis, the similarities are disturbing.
Just as in 2011, the reasons for the crisis are shoved under a convenient lexicon of “failed rains”, “conflict” or “instability”; if you read between the lines, the people just lack the means to take care of themselves under a harsh climate.
Unlike what the UN, aid agencies and celebrities would have you believe, a food crisis, or that of impending famine, is rarely a story about the total unavailability of food.
For instance, when I was in Dobley, I found food in the town’s market. Because of the shortages, prices of staple foods had risen more than 240%. Of course, few could afford it. But they did exist.
As they continue to do so today, the armed al-Shabaab back then held large swathes of southern Somalia where many Western or UN agencies were banned from operating. And even if they were able to operate, the fact that al-Shabaab was designated a terrorist organisation by the US meant that those handling aid would have to answer for any assistance that benefited members of the group. Typically, the US was so concerned that food and money would fall into “wrong hands”, it would rather have ordinary people starve.
It is no surprise that getting food to some of these areas continues to be difficult, but it isn't for the reasons you would expect. Instead, it's a set of recalcitrant politics, in which Western powers and even the UN continue to isolate and demonise the armed group, rather than look to open dialogue towards rescuing a beleaguered population.
The way the story of this crisis is being told is dishonest. Again, and this time courtesy of benevolent celebs, Somalia is seen as a troublesome, far-off place that needs a special chartered plane that must cut through galaxies to reach.
But Mogadishu is just 2 hours 35 minutes from Nairobi, 4h 30min from Dubai and 7h 30min from Istanbul. I assure you, this “troubled land” is very much on planet Earth. Unlike what the celebs would have you believe, Turkish Airlines is not the only airline that flies to Somalia, and if there existed a real will to help, it could have been done already.
Unlike 2011, there is a far more developed mobile money transfer service in Somalia. Forget about sending a plane; aid agencies can send money to millions who have cellphones, so they can purchase the little food or supplies that do exist. Then there are the US drones parked off in Djibouti. The same ones used to target “terrorists” can drop off food and supplies instead.
Of course, they will also drop into “wrong hands”, but the world needs to decide if this humanitarian crisis is worth the risk.
“The situation remains very complicated. The political issues always take precedence in the end, and it depends on how those dynamics play out,” Nisar Majid, a food security expert and co-author of Famine in Somalia, told Al Jazeera in January.
To say that the Horn of Africa has a food crisis is no misnomer. But to talk about possible famine and starvation without exploring how the powerful have helped create the crisis is deceitful.
* Azad Essa is a journalist at Al Jazeera. He is also co-founder of The Daily Vox.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.