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Yes, this is yet another African tragedy. It is another horrifying story from the continent within which life began. The expected general sentiments of the world’s public – a “shock-and-awe” dismay accompanied by mental fatigue to seemingly never-ending emaciated and haggard eyed images of a child starving to death – are understandable.

This is Africa.  Human life began here and the bounty to sustain it, even in the 21st century, is still intact. However, a child born in Africa has a remote chance of living long enough to harness what this continent could offer to him/her to survive.  This is not only tragic; but human suffering which is a criminal act. 

By the estimates, over the past 90 days, nearly 30, 000 children, under the age of 5, have starved to death in Somalia. Each day that passes, this figure will surely grow to unimaginable tally of preventable deaths. In fact, the scale of what is taking place in Somalia cannot be reliably estimated with simple numbers.  Death and destruction have become synonymous, over the past two decades, with Somalia.

The images of lifeless children on their parents’ knees or hands, the tales of mothers who left their dead youngsters on the roadside in a journey from one hell to another hell (Dadaab Refugee Camps, Kenya, and similar ones elsewhere) create anguish and anger. “Why and by how did this happen?” is frequent question.

In the Horn of Africa, droughts can be frequent.  But not all droughts result in a “perfect storm” of an epic famine as we witness today.

In Somalia, famine has been happening even without drought; a case in point being the famine that resulted in the US led multi-national Operation Restore Hope in 1992-93.  Restore HOPE? In hindsight, what an irony!  Hope readily came, but it left just as soon and here we witness another expected and preventable famine in Somalia. 

Welcome to the “hell-on-earth” that my homeland, Somalia, has become!

What we witness in Somalia is GENOCIDE – long “brewing” and expected genocide against innocent children.  You may ask who is responsible? I dare to say Men with guns and wrong policies that perpetuate human suffering while being attendants of human concentration camps. 
  
When your most vulnerable are stuck between the “rock” that is the “war-on-terror” and the “hard-places”/terror of the mindless designated terrorists, that seem to thrive out of the notoriety, then the worst drought over half a century will surely become the “perfect storm” for any society, much less one battered by incentivized instability for over two decades.

How long must the World watch as Somalia withers into the abyss? How many children must die as the world expediently pursues policies/strategies of myopic “band-aiding” of Somalia that often reward the violent men responsible for the mayhem that caused this famine and ones before? Yes, our children are tragically dying, but this is, by design, inevitable. 

As you extend your generous hands, consider this:

1. Our children are dying because our country has died.

2. We can rise from these miserable/agonizing deaths of both the child and country; but we “need a break.”

3. The war-on-terror’s myopic policies and strategies have being the biggest contributors to our current debacles: so Somalia “needs a break.”

4. We are not all mindless but suffer under thugs empowered by myopic policies who wish the status quo to continue. 

5. We have the means and the know-how to put this protracted miserable ordeals to an end and put our “house-in-order”; but we “need a break.”

6. We, the Somali Diaspora, are the biggest donors of Somalia (1 to 2 billion dollars annually – famine or not) and we are the last remaining HOPE for Somalia but we “need a break.”

7. One may wonder if help for Somalia is on the way! If so, please help us at two levels, one of which is to help ourselves!

By Abdiwahab A. Musse, PhD

The author is a Somali-Canadian, Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Health Research, and is based at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).