In Somalia, new famine born of out of old failures

After the United States left Somalia, the rest of the world stood by, leaving the warlords to profit from their criminality. Al-Qaeda strengthened its presence in the country. Foreign vessels entered Somali waters and engaged in illegal fishing, which caused piracy to balloon into an ugly reality. Somalia lived on mortgaged time, leased out to criminals of one sort or another, an ideal world for terrorists to flourish.

If we had had foresight and acted upon it; if the Marines had disarmed the warlords; if the U.N. Security Council had issued arrest warrants for the warlords early on, stopping them from prolonging the failure of the state; if the Security Council had dealt with the warlords — who had denied millions of starving people access to food — decisively, in the same way it dealt with the genocidal regimes in Serbia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Sudan, then al-Qaeda would not have established a secure base from which to plan terrorist attacks. Our country would not have been hamstrung by the enormity of our problem, nor would it have become the world’s worst humanitarian disaster.

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For two decades, many alliances known by different names and belonging to different interest groups, all of them harmful to Somalia, have collaborated to destabilize the country. The Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen has said that famines are easy to prevent and that they often disappear with the establishment of a multiparty democracy, a free press and an active political opposition. These elements of a democratic society can guard against famine or mitigate its disastrous consequences.

We don’t have any of that in Somalia. Instead, we know that the recurrence of droughts stems from political collapse — the failure of the governing class to deal with impending catastrophes, which often take years to materialize.

By the time drought is upon us, it is often too late. On my last visit to Somalia in February and March of this year, one could already see terrible times coming, a rainless season on the horizon. People were studying the arid desert winds for signs. Many people I spoke to couldn’t help forecasting a famine. The word, in fact, was on everybody’s lips in Galkayo, in the central region of the country. There, the wells had dried up, and wars were being waged over the right of the nomads to water their beasts.

To date, the world has taken only piecemeal steps to deal with the Somali people’s plight. So far, none has worked. It is time that the Security Council referred Somalia to the International Criminal Court for an in-depth investigation, as happened with other recent humanitarian disasters in Sudanand Libya, for example. Only the high-profile nature of such a prosecution could ensure that justice is done and Somalia can become a governable country.

The alternative is for the international community to prepare to return to Somalia in 10 or 20 years. Then, humanitarian agencies will have to negotiate for access to millions of starving Somalis with some new group of criminals bent on the physical elimination of their people, knowing that, as in the past, they can pursue their goal with impunity.

Nuruddin Farah, a Somali-born novelist, divides his time between Cape Town, South Africa, and Minneapolis, where he holds the Winton Chair in the college of liberal arts at the University of Minnesota. His novel “Crossbones” is forthcoming in September.

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