The UN and 250,000 dead Somalis

The UN has announced that in 2010–2012, including the Great Horn of Africa Drought period, at least 250,000 Somalis starved to death.

Most of those who died from starvation were internally displaced persons, displaced in the main by the military invasion and occupation of southern Somalia by the UN backed Ethiopian Army and then the AU “peacekeepers,” today some 25,000 strong.

When I last wrote about starvation in Somalia I spoke of the UN budgeting 10 cents a day for food aid to feed each Somali refugee. Its called a “budget shortfall” as in “we want to help but we just don’t have the money.”

Yet during this period of mass starvation of the Somali people the UN and its Western overlords spent over $1 billion funding their military “peacekeeping mission” in what’s left of the country.

$1 billion for war and 250,000 Somalis left to starve to death?

Maybe knowing that the head of the largest UN food aid “NGO” in Somalia, UNICEF, is Anthony “Tony” Lake, formerly National Security Advisor of the USA and once nominated to be Director of the CIA, can help one understand why this happened.

Tony Lake is the one who so infamously stated he “regretted” not doing anything while knowing full well mass murder was going on in Rwanda on his watch as Bill Clinton’s right hand man in 1994. CIA to UNICEF? Should one be surprised to find mass starvation under his watch in Somalia?

Today, while the propaganda machines in the Western media speak of “peace and democracy coming to Somalia for the first time in a generation,” they somehow forget how Somalis themselves brought peace to Mogadishu in 2006 only to see the UN backed Ethiopian invasion send it all up in smoke.

The television news channels may trot out a few tame Somalis to spout rhetoric about “Somalis running the show,” but behind the cameras stand “peacekeepers” armed to the teeth by the UN backed by the banktatorships in the West.

The fact is no power, no matter how strong, can bring peace to Somalia from without, only the Somali people, left alone to sort out their own problems, can do so. In 2006, the Union of Islamic Courts succeeded for the first time in 15 years to no avail due to armed intervention ordered by the USA and its minions in the UN. This externally funded and directed armed conflict continues to drive hundreds of thousands of Somalis from their land and homes, leaving them to starve on the UN’s bounty of 10 cents a day.

And all the while more arms pour into Somalia from the West with Pax Americana demanding that any and all paper restrictions on such be lifted, all in the name of the “war on terror,” really a “war of terror,” a war on the Somali people whose main misfortune turns out to be that they live smack in the middle of the Horn of Africa astride the “Gate of Tears,” Baab Al Mandeb, where the Indian Ocean meets the Red Sea through which the largest economies in the world depend on to ship their goods.

Writing about the enormous, inhuman crimes committed by the UN in the Horn of Africa has become almost to painful to continue to do. But when the UN sends its talking heads to tell the world that a quarter million more Somalis died these past two years, died by mass starvation, what choice does one have but to once again raise a voice in protest for turning your head away from the television and pretending not to hear is simply not a decision I for one can live with.

Thomas C. Mountain is the most widely distributed independent journalist in Africa, living and reporting from Eritrea since 2006. He can be reached at thomascmountain_at_yahoo_dot_com.