Sri lanka Muslims Web Portal Diversity and Inclusiveness
Somalia in the Horn of Africa is a Muslim country. Somalis are pious and god fearing people with their own tradition and culture. They are so religious that most Somalis in the south memorize the Holy Quran, Hafiz, when they are around 12 or 13. They learn Quranic verses written on huge trees and their classes are around these trees.
Though the people were poor and contented Somalia is blessed with oil wealth. Thus the vultures – oil companies, weapons industries, financial oligarchy and the Jewish lobbies- which rule United States decided to destabilize to loot the oil wealth.
Under this design they overthrew the pro Soviet President Said Barre in January 1991, armed rival tribes and triggered a civil war which turned this once peaceful country into a killing field causing death, devastation and immense sufferings .The anarchy continued unabated. Today Somalia is divided into lawless autonomous statelets. US oil companies have already entered the country and awaiting the opportunity to loot the oil wealth.
Today Somalis are experiencing the worst ever famine in the worst ever drought in 60 years. Across Somalia, about 3.7 million people, half the population, are facing starvation, with an estimated 2.8 million of them in the south.
Andrew Mitchell, the UK's international development secretary, said: "In Somalia, men, women and children are dying of starvation. If a concerted effort is not made to save the situation thousands are bound to die within a month or two. Already tens of thousands of people have died of starvation during the past few months.
The crisis is not something unexpected. Aid agencies and governments have known for almost a year that food would run out by now. But it is only now, when the children begin to die and the cattle have been sold or died that the global humanitarian machine has moved in, with its TV shows, co-ordinated appeals and celebrities.
A father of three walked almost a month to reach a camp in Kenya. On the way all three children died one after the other due to heat, lack of water and food. He had to bury his own children and by the time he dragged himself to the camp his wife too died of starvation.
Declaring South Somalia as a famine stricken area on 21 July 2011, the UN Secretary General Ban Ki moon said: Across the Horn of Africa, people are starving. A catastrophic combination of conflict, high food prices and drought has left more than 11 million people in desperate need. The UN has been sounding the alert for months. There is famine in parts of Somalia. And it is spreading. This is a wake-up call we cannot ignore. Every day I hear the harrowing reports from our U.N. teams on the ground. Somali refugees, their cattle and goats dead from thirst, walking for weeks to find help in Kenya and Ethiopia. Children who arrive alone, terrified and malnourished, their parents dead, in a foreign land.
He added that “from within Somalia, we hear terrible stories of families who watched helplessly as their children died, one by one. One woman recently arrived at a U.N. displacement camp 87 miles southwest ofMogadishu after a three-week trek. Halima Omar, from the region of Lower Shabelle, was once considered well-off. Today, after three years of drought, she barely survives. Four of her six children are dead.
"There is nothing in the world worse than watching your own child die in front of your eyes because you cannot feed him," she said of her ordeal. "I am losing hope."
Even for those who reach the camps, there is often no hope. Many are simply too weak after long journeys across the arid land and die before they can be nursed back to strength. For people who need medical attention, there are often no medicines. Imagine the pain of those doctors, who must watch their patients perish for lack of resources.
As a human family, these stories shock us. We ask: How is this happening again? After all, the world has enough food. And yes, economic times are hard. Yet since time immemorial, amid even the worst austerity, the compassionate impulse to help our fellow human beings has never wavered.
That is why I reach out today: to focus global attention on this crisis, to sound the alarm and to call on the world's people to help Somalia in this moment of greatest need. To save the lives of the people at risk — the vast majority of them women and children — we need about $1.6 billion in aid. So far, international donors have given only half that amount. To turn the tide, to offer hope in the name of our common humanity, we must mobilize worldwide.
Bitterly criticizing the indifference Paddy Ashdown said” in todays newspapers – from front to back – I was hoping to see the media use their power and influence to tell this story. I hoped to see headlines shouting that millions of women and children in Somalia, and across the entire Horn of Africa, are struggling for survival and need the British public to help. But I didn't. Instead, my eyes were blurred with articles of shaving foam and hacking scandals, as talk about the dire need for nutritional supplies for children who need their lives saved slipped into the footnotes.
In fact this is a man made disaster .To understand the causes it is necessary to race back the roots of the problem to colonization and imperialism, political economic and social policies pursued in post-colonial times which perpetuate recurring famine and crisis and the crucial role of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
