THERE IS a deep connection between the two horror stories of the last week – the massacre in Norway and the famine in Somalia. What connects them are the bad and good reactions to terrorism.
Just over two years ago, in July 2009, I wrote in this column about “a terrible, but largely unreported, humanitarian disaster. At least 3.5 million people are now on the edge of a precipice, without access to food, health services or basic security. Levels of malnutrition are among the highest in the world. Conditions in camps for displaced people and refugees are appalling.”
The column was about Somalia, where last week the United Nations finally declared a state of famine.
I was able to write about this “humanitarian disaster” not because of any great foresight, but because I had spoken to people who saw it happening. I had been in Kenya with Concern and while there I met aid workers who had returned from Somalia. They were absolutely clear about what was happening: millions of people were on the brink of starvation. Yet it has taken two years for this hellish reality to become a “story”.
And the reason for that is that the famine in Somalia is partly a creation of that great chimera, “the international community”. Drought is, of course, the immediate reason why so many people can no longer grow their own food. But what turns a food crisis into a famine is politics – the implosion of the Somali state. A major factor in this is the so-called “war on terror”.
It may seem bizarre to suggest that children dying of starvation in Somalia today are in some respects victims of 9/11. But the sequence of events that has been so catastrophic for Somalis includes the US response to al-Qaeda’s attacks on America.
Somalia became a failed state in the early 1990s. But for a short period, the country seemed to be emerging from anarchy. For seven months in 2006, the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), a broad coalition of Islamist factions, managed to govern all of Mogadishu and most of south-central Somalia. It established the rule of law and a good level of general security. It opened the seaports and the international airport.
However, the ICU was deemed to be unacceptably Islamist and therefore became a target in the “war on terror”. The US and the EU supported an essentially imaginary transitional federal government cobbled together at international conferences and which had minimal support inside Somalia. Then, with active US assistance, Ethiopia invaded the country, ostensibly to support the transitional government. Resistance was met with murder, rape, looting and indiscriminate attacks on civilians.
The grotesque outcome of this crude response to terrorism was actually to produce a terrorist regime. The ICU was destroyed, the Ethiopians were hated and the West was utterly discredited by its support for the atrocities carried out in the name of the transitional federal government. Into the vacuum stepped the apocalyptic Islamist groups, collectively known as al shabaab (the youth) and made up in many cases of child soldiers. The effect of the crude impulse to hit back at “terror” was to achieve the seemingly impossible and to make life significantly worse for ordinary Somalis.
The West walked away in embarrassment and preferred not to talk about Somalia, even when it was becoming obvious that a terrible humanitarian disaster was brewing. The Somalis were written off as collateral damage in one of the War on Terror’s more unfortunate sideshows.
The abysmal fate of the Somalis is the most extreme example of the worst way to respond to terrorism. Rage and fear are the normal human responses to cold-blooded massacres such as 9/11 or Anders Behring Breivik’s murderous spree in Norway. The desire to lash out, to find some kind of solace in making somebody suffer for what has been done, is powerful. But it is also deeply corrupting. It ends up reproducing the very inhumanity to which it is responding.
This is why the reaction of Norway, even in the stunned hours immediately after the massacre, is so important for the world as a whole. It is one thing to know intellectually that the only answer to terrorism is, as the Norwegian prime minister Jens Stoltenberg put it, “more freedom, more democracy”. It is a much more precious and remarkable thing to be able to say so even as you watch live images of teenagers’ bloodied bodies.
Stoltenberg and the Norwegians have redefined political courage, not as the macho swagger of “we’ll get the bastards”, but as the steely dignity of refusing to drink the toxic Cool-Aid of fear and rage. It is sickly ironic that the person who inadvertently put it best was Breivik himself. In his diary, he recorded a brush with the police two months ago: “I decided then and there that I would not allow paranoia to get the best of me.” By refusing to let paranoia get the best of its great traditions of democracy and decency, Norway has given the world the only real answer to terrorism.