A Familiar Tragedy

In the southern part of the town, the camp of Bulo Jawanley is not a typical row of tents but a series of miniscule nests that the newcomers make for themselves in every empty space they can find. The day I visited, five more busloads of people arrived from Mogadishu. Fitting the new arrivals into the already overcrowded space seemed like trying to squeeze extra bees onto a honeycomb.

What I witnessed in Galkayo is happening all across the country. The U.N. refugee agency expects half a million Somalis to be displaced by the end of 2008. Dealing with such a large displaced population is beyond the capabilities of a weak transitional government, especially since Somalia has not functioned as a state for 16 years.

From a humanitarian point of view the Somali tragedy may have even more dramatic consequences than the Iraqi tragedy, for two reasons. First, owing to the geopolitical situation of Somalia, its people have nowhere to flee and the country is like a pressure cooker. The second reason is that Somalia does not have even the basic infrastructure to fall back on, unlike what Iraq had before the U.S. intervention. This is why the international community must step in.

But who can do it?

• International humanitarian organizations can try to help those who suffer from the combined effect of violence and drought—the EU has just allocated 10 million euros "for victims of continuing insecurity and climatic hazards"—but this will merely treat the symptoms of the crisis whereas ultimately the solution must be political.
• At the United Nations, another major crisis requires the attention of the Security Council: in Africa, Darfur overshadows Somalia, and there, in Sudan, the U.N. will join forces with the AU to field a new hybrid mission. On Somalia there seems to be full agreement among all sides: the meeting where the continuation of the AU peacekeeping mission was decided lasted just five minutes, from 11:05 a.m. to 11:10 a.m.
• President Bush (the elder) did send a humanitarian intervention to Somalia in late 1992, but it was ill-defined and ill-prepared. Heralded as Operation Restore Hope, it ended up months later in a tragedy known as "Black Hawk Down," and the U.S. meekly withdrew. In post-9/11 American foreign policy, the Global War on Terror in Somalia was at first outsourced to local warlords, some of whom were supported financially because they were thought to oppose Al Qaeda. Last December's proxy Ethiopian intervention was aimed at ousting the Islamic Courts but has not as yet achieved its goal. The stakes for the United States are understandably higher in Iraq and Afghanistan, where American troops are on the ground, than in the Horn of Africa.

The current situation is, according to Human Rights Watch, "a human rights and humanitarian crisis on a scale not seen since the early 1990s." The quagmire in Somalia is neither easy nor new, but this should not stop the politicians trying to find a solution. Everything and anything must be done, lest another few years in Mogadishu look like the past few years in Baghdad.