"Stern UN action" sounds more like the punchline of a bad joke than a genuine call to arms. Since the Rwandan genocide in 1994 - when UN fecklessness led to the butchering of as many as 800,000 people - the international organization has seldom managed to summon the will to be stern with anyone.
In Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and elsewhere, it often expressed its disgust with brutal regimes and dictators who harbour terrorists, but it has left the enforcement of its resolutions to international coalitions. Most often, NATO has had to do the fighting on behalf of the UN Security Council.
So when Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga called for "stern UN action" to head off the starvation of 750,000 Somalis before the end of the year, it would be tempting to laugh were the human stakes not so high.
Did he mean stern UN action such as in Srebrenica? There, in July 1995, as many as 8,000 Bosnian Muslims, mostly men and boys, were rounded up by Serbian militiamen and murdered because, while the UN had declared the town a safe zone and vowed to protect its residents, when the Serbs attacked, the United Nations Protection Force did little or nothing to prevent Srebrenica being captured and its male inhabitants slaughtered.
Did Odinga mean stern action such as in Darfur? Since 2003, the Janjaweed militia, with the backing of the Sudanese army, has killed or starved to death as many as 300,000 Darfurians, largely because the Darfurians, while Muslim like the Janjaweed, are non-Arab Muslims. The vicious militia and Sudan's ruling junta are mostly Arab Muslims.
Far from being stern, the ultra politically correct UN cannot even bring itself to call the massacre in Darfur a genocide. No sense offending Muslim states or Arab states or Africans in general by suggesting the hellhole is actually a hellhole. About the only country the UN ever seems to get around to being stern with is Israel.
No, if Somalis are to rely on the UN's stern action to save them from starvation, they are likely never to find relief. The UN is a toothless harridan.
Which means if half a million or more Somalis are to be spared from famine, it will once again be up to western nations to intervene and force a solution.
Members of al-Shabaab, a group linked to al-Qaida, this week in Somalia. The head of the Canadian Somali Congress told a Washington congressional committee that ‘radicals in our community’ are teaching young Canadians of Somali descent ‘a dangerous and constant anti-western narrative,” and that some are going to Somalia to join al-Shabaab.
Photograph by: Feisal Omar, Reuters
The problem is al Shabaab, the al-Qaida affiliate that controls most of the starvation-ravaged regions of Somalia.
In the 21st century equivalent of the old "better dead than Red" sloganeering, al Shabaab leader Sheikh Muktar Abu Zubeir recently explained why his group is using force to block grain and other food shipments.
"Aid agencies and some countries declared famine and pretend they want to help you. They do so for these reasons: for trade purposes, to convert you from your religion and to colonize you."
Right, so much better to die an agonizing, prolonged death than to take a bag of rice from Oxfam or the Red Cross. Drat those darned colonizers! Al Shabaab is hardly a mighty opponent. In the face of a modern western army it would crumble faster than Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard or the loyalists of Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi.
Kristalina Georgieva, the EU's commissioner for humanitarian aid, says al Shabaab is disorganized and prone to infighting.
She called the group "a dragon with many heads" and advised that "negotiating with one head doesn't mean you've received the blessing of the others."
So what's holding us - the West - back? Did we not declare that the international community has a "responsibility to protect" against "mass atrocity crimes?"
Indeed, R2P - as its supporters have nicknamed it - was largely a Canadian initiative, at least at the beginning. It was supposed to set "a new international security and human-rights norm to address the international community's failure to prevent and stop genocides, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity."
The famine in Somalia and the world's inaction in the face of it seem to fit that description to a tee.
But the sad truth is, the West can't intervene everywhere at once. The Libya mission - Operation Unified Protector - has stretched NATO thin, especially given that the core NATO nations that carried the can in Libya are almost all the same nations who did the bulk of the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.
One could argue that Somalia has a greater need for and right to western military and humanitarian help than Iraq.
Certainly, preventing the deaths of several hundred thousand Somalis should be a greater concern than deposing an aging Gadhafi.
It is quite possible to make a case that the West cannot intervene where it should - Somalia and Darfur - because it has stretched itself too thin (and worn out its citizenry's patience for protracted foreign wars) by intervening where it needn't have.
Still, the point remains that as much as we in the West might need to help starving Somalis by roughly pushing the bad guys away, we haven't the taste for it or resources to do so.
Source: The Edmonton Journal
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