INTERNATIONAL ATTENTION is focusing once again on acute human suffering in the Horn of Africa, where the United Nations has declared a famine in parts of Somalia. Policy debates and media accounts recall previous hunger and drought there, as well as the wars and conflicts which have reinforced them.
Recent calls by the head of the Goal agency John O’Shea for a United Nations led military intervention to clear the path for emergency food aid being brought to those suffering from local Islamic fundamentalist militias are particularly controversial. They deserve informed debate in Ireland, which has an honourable record of public and voluntary action and international leadership there.
Humanitarian crises are commonly divided into two major categories: complex emergencies and natural disasters. The latter are sudden events, evoking instant popular sympathy in an age of 24-hour media. Complex emergencies are normally longer-term processes, the effects of which become media events only when they have fully matured. It is important not to confuse the two in planning and executing an effective humanitarian response, even though they overlap and fuse with one another. Intervening in complex emergencies as if they are natural disasters risks making a bad situation worse.
The latest Somali crisis emerges from a highly complex history: political violence, state collapse and failure, botched interventions by the UN and neighbouring states, together with deteriorating cycles of drought associated both with climate change, deforestation and land use patterns transformed by the sale of large tracts of land to Chinese and Saudi commercial agricultural interests. Most of the families suffering from hunger are from a pastoralist background, whose peoples have been most exposed to these changes. Their mobility and access to pastures has been badly disrupted. Their loyalties and allegiances to local warlords and Islamic groups are also complex, driven by successive breakdowns of state authority and interventions driven by the United States in its global “war on terrorism”.
Mr O’Shea’s call for military intervention takes little or no account of this complexity. It fails to recognise that UN action in Somalia is not geopolitically innocent, having been bound up with the US-led intervention in 1992-1994, which ended in ignominious withdrawal. Later US-supported interventions from Ethiopia and the Islamist Al-Shabaab organisation’s designation as a terrorist group supporting Al Qaeda mean this is how intervention would be perceived. The African Union force in Mogadishu would also perceive it this way.
Other humanitarian aid agencies have rightly criticised Goal’s policy on this issue, while recognising the urge to get aid to a stricken people quickly and efficiently. They argue persuasively that political engagement with local forces on the ground can better open up access, based on long-standing involvement there. This should be coupled with a redoubling of publicity about the Somali crisis and a willingness to argue the political case for action in all relevant international forums.