Blogging on Meds

It seems the Horn and, in particular, Somalia, are always “on the brink”. But suffering from years of war, famine, and the complete absence of any type of government, it’s no wonder Somalia is constantly in a fragile state, and one of the most — if not the most — dangerous places in the world for aid workers, foreign or otherwise.

The NY Times ran an amazing story this weekend on the imminent collapse of the Somali “government” (or Transition Federal Government that the US and its Ethiopian proxies installed after the December invasion) based on a number of factors that are identical to the ones preceding the country’s ravaging famine in the 1990s: war, drought, displacement, and skyrocketing food prices. Government troops and Islamist forces are clashing on the streets over grain — a commodity that has, along with rice and flour, become rare worldwide — while Jeffrey Gettleman reports that:

“The Islamists have been gaining recruits, overrunning towns and becoming bolder… By its own admission, the Transitional Federal Government of Somalia is on life support.”

In some of the best lines of the articles, Gettlemen says that the government, as illegitimate as it may be (those are my words), is currently left with about “$18 million a year to run a state of nine million of the world’s neediest, most collectively traumatized people…And a failed state may be a generous term. In many ways, Somalia is not a state at all, but more a lawless space between its neighbors and the sea… Sometimes it seems that if anything binds this country together, it is scar tissue.”

RELATED POSTS:

• Guitar Hero / Gibson Charity Art Auction at SXSW
• Ian MacKaye = Jesus?
• Neighborhood Festival fun in LA September 9th
• Today’s Reads
• Today’s Reads