The Somalia Syndrome (Page 1 of 2)

"This poor country keeps taking one blow after another," Peter Goossens observed two months ago in an interview with The New York Times' Jeffrey Gettleman. "Ultimately, it will break." The country is Somalia, and Goossens directs the World Food Program, which is now feeding some 1.2 million people there, 15 percent of the population.

This tragic and tortured land is "marching right up to the edge of a crisis," Goossens said. "Any additional little thing, any little flood or drought, will push them over."

Somalia, war- and famine-torn, is beset from within and without. With a vigilance especially stepped-up since Sept. 11, the United States has reformulated its long-standing efforts to control the Horn of Africa (Djibouti, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia) as a front line in the "war on terror," and Somalia is at its very tip. The crisis in Somalia may be regarded partly as collateral damage from that "war on terror" and the geopolitical concerns reframed in these terms.

As Somalia sinks deeper into chaos, members of the African Union have sent small peacekeeping forces there, and pledged to send more if funding is made available. But they are unlikely to do so, "because there is no peace to keep (in Somalia) in the first place," Richard Cornwell, of the Institute for Security Studies in South Africa, told Scott Baldauf and Alexis Okeowo of The Christian Science Monitor in May.

By November, the United Nations noted that Somalia had "higher malnutrition rates, more current bloodshed and fewer aid workers than Darfur," Gettleman reported. Indeed, Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the top U.N. official for Somalia, described its plight as "the worst on the continent."

The United Nations, however, lacks the capacity to reach the people who are hungry, exposed, sick and dying in Somalia, according to Eric Laroche, head of U.N. humanitarian operations there.

"If this were happening in Darfur, there would be a big fuss," Laroche said. "But Somalia has been a forgotten emergency for years."

One distinction, hard to miss, is that the tragedy of Darfur can be blamed on someone else, in fact an official enemy -- the government of Sudan and its Arab militias -- while responsibility for the current disaster in Somalia, like others there that preceded it, lies substantially in our own hands.

In 1992, after the overthrow of the Somali dictatorship by clan-based militias and the ensuing famine, the United States sent thousands of soldiers on a dubious "rescue mission" to assist with humanitarian operations. But in October 1993, during the "Battle of Mogadishu," two Black Hawk helicopters were shot down by Somali militiamen, leaving 18 U.S. Army Rangers dead, along with perhaps 1,000 Somalis.

U.S. forces were immediately withdrawn in a manner that continued the murderous ratio. "In the final stages of the troops' retreat, every bullet fired against them was answered, it seemed, by 100," Los Angeles Times correspondent John Balzar reported. As for the Somali casualties, Marine Lt. Gen. Anthony Zinni, who commanded the operation, informed the press that "I'm not counting bodies ... I'm not interested."

CIA officials privately conceded that during the U.S. operations in Somalia, in which 34 U.S. soldiers were lost, Somali casualties -- militiamen and civilians -- may have been 7,000 to 10,000, Charles William Maynes reported in Foreign Policy.

The "rescue mission," which may have killed about as many Somalis as it saved, left the country in the hands of brutal  warlords.

"After that, the United States -- and much of the rest of the world -- basically turned its back on Somalia," Gettleman reports. "But in the summer of 2006, the world started paying attention again after a grass-roots Islamist movement emerged from the clan chaos and seized control of much of the country," leaving only an enclave adjoining Ethiopia in the hands of the Western-recognized Transitional Federal Government.

During their brief tenure, the Islamists "didn't cause us any problems," Laroche reports. Ould-Abdallah called the six months of their rule Somalia's "golden era," the only period of peace in Somalia for years. Other U.N. officials concur, observing that "the country was in better shape during the brief reign of Somalia's Islamist movement last year" than it has been since Ethiopia invaded in December 2006 to impose the rule of the TFG.