Due to the recent headlines regarding the al Shabaab attack on the mall in Nairobi, Kenya, the Future of Freedom Foundation has published my subscription-only Future of Freedom article, “U.S. Government to Blame for Somalia’s Misery” online for all. Please do subscribe to The Future of Freedom anyway. It’s awesome.
At the beginning of May the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET), a U.S.- and U.K.-government-financed organization that monitors various food crises around the world, released a new report detailing the horrific consequences of the Somali famine of 2011.
According to FEWS NET, ‘An estimated 4.6 percent of the total population and 10 percent of children under 5 died in Southern and Central Somalia [between October 2010 and April 2012.]’
It is now estimated that more than a quarter of a million people died, more than half of them ”” at least 125,000 ”” children. This is more than twice the number the British government had previously concluded.
Even in the midst of the global economic crisis, there is enough wealth in the world that it is an outrage so many should die of such extreme poverty and deprivation. But what is absolutely unforgivable is the role played by the U.S. government in making a horrible drought into a humanitarian catastrophe in what has to be the worst case of the strong picking on the weak since ”” well, probably the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.
