Excerpt
We all were shocked by the pictures and press reports of dying people, mainly women and children, in Somalia in the fall of 1993. We had seen similar pictures from Ethiopia and other countries situated in the Sahel belt in Sub-Saharan Africa, and automatically related them to degrading natural resources, a lack of rainfall, failing harvests, and of course, socialist governments.
We, therefore, welcomed the intervention of joint forces, dominated by the U.S., in December 1993, under the auspicies of the UN Security Council, which made relief assistance possible again, and rapidly turned the situation into a seemingly peaceful atmosphere. Following this line of thought, we will merely have to wait for a settlement to be achieved in the peace conference which has been scheduled for March 1993 in Addis Abeba, and forget about the small country in the horn of Africa again. Or perhaps not?
Are the causes of famine in Somalia the same as they are everywhere in the Sabel? Are famines fate, or are they a failure of the global system? What has been the role of geopolitics and the superpowers during the recent past? In other words, what is our own responsibility in the …
Footnotes
Hans Hurni is president of the World Association of Soil and Water Conservation, and director of the Group for Development and Environment at the University of Berne, Switzerland. He lived for 10 years in the horn of Africa, which has been his area of environment-related research for the past 20 years.
- Copyright 1993 by the Soil and Water Conservation Society
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