Somalia: the forgotten crisis?

According to the BBC, Somalia is 'the forgotten crisis', though one wonders about the poor Afghanis, steeping stones on the way to invading Iraq. But if Somalia is a forgotten crisis, it has not faired well when remembered. The 'humanitarian' intervention in 1992, nominally under UN-control (UNOSOM I and later II), but really directed by the United States, guaranteed Somalia would have deep trouble putting the state back together. And as a precursor of subsequent humanitarian efforts, showed that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Among other things, the food aid of the 1980s, and aid increase in the early 1990s helped sustain the civil war, itself the major cause of famine, rather than improve the situation. This was because the different warlords who controlled Mogadishu and its outlying areas were able to seize the food aid and use it to bind Somalis to them. The previous decade of food aid, combined with fluctuation in world food markets and European protectionism, had ensured that Somali farmers moved either to subsistence farming or away from their farms altogether. Without a source of income or means of survival besides aid, Somalis in Southern Somalia switched from being clients of the international aid industry to clients of warlords who controlled supplies. Moreover, what possibility of overcoming the divisions of the civil war in the south were destroyed by the blundering, inept and frequently violent actions of the intervening forces, which included 30,000 American troops.

The crisis in Somalia is not just the outcome of the failures of the early 1990s, but is a case study in a fundamental problem with humanitarian intervention that goes beyond the "road to hell" issue. It is not just what the intervening powers don't know that creates problems, but what they think they do. A humanitarian intervention is always cast in black and white terms, as a question of doing good and preventing evil. Doing good is often reduced to just preventing evil - this prevention has even been worked up into a 'duty to prevent.' This orientation turns complex political situations into a simplified moral spectacle. Intervening with that kind of outlook produces blunders, small and large, while making diplomacy that much more difficult.

Even worse, humanitarian interventions mean that a people's salvation depends upon the good will of others. This good will tends to have the attention span of a five year-old, and the memory too. It is possible to sustain the public interest of other nations only for so long, both because they have their own political swings, and because each humanitarian situation competes with so many more. Humanitarian sympathy for some quickly appears as callous indifference towards everyone else. It is not just the absence of intervention in Rwanda, soon after Somalia, but also more recent claims about the Congo and Sudan that reveal the problem. Being dependent upon the political mood of other, powerful nations for one's own political fate is a recipe for chaos. Somalia is a case study. After the interventions of the early 1990s, the US became gun-shy, and pawned off peace negotiations to international negotiations. Under the war on terror, a new interpretive frame opened up whereby Somalia became a threat, another misjudgment that eventually had disastrous consequences. The US supported a reinvastion of Somalia by Europe to overthrow the first Southern government with any chance of uniting that region of the country. Hence the new crisis. Indeed, calling it a 'forgotten crisis' is highly misleading. It is more like an ongoing crisis aided and abetted by international forces, which have always, in one way or another, been intervening in Somalia. It is only to the apolitical humanitarian sensibility that such a crisis could be considered forgotten, and need more intervention.