generalspeaking

Humanitarian Sacrifices

More abductions of foreign aid workers. Two people, a man and a woman, from the U.S. and Denmark were kidnapped at a town north of territory controlled by al-Shabaab. Somalia is not a country to be engaged in for the faint of heart or those less than totally dedicated to needy humanity.

Counting the two Spanish aid workers carried away from the huge refugee camp on the border between Somalia and Kenya set up to succour thousands of starving refugee Somalians, the kidnapping of a British woman whose husband was murdered before her eyes, and a French wheel-chair bound woman (now dead) who lived in Kenya it's easy enough to recognize a trend.

It's open season on Europeans. If they're there, readily accessible, they can be swifted away and held for ransom. That they're visitors, tourists, residents or foreign humanitarian aid workers is quite irrelevant. Law and order and humanitarian gestures and international compassion for the plight of the oppressed, the ill, the starving are civilized matters, not to be confused with a failed country like Somalia, with its coastal pirates and its Islamist marauders.

The two aid workers, along with a Somalian colleague who was also taken hostage, were working for the Danish Demining Group, part of the Danish Refugee council. "I saw the car carrying the foreigners leaving their office and the next minute I heard gunshots and two cars moving at very high speed through the town", explained a local shopkeeper in Galkayo.

The government of Kenya is tremendously put off by incursions over the border from Somalia by al-Shabaab. This, while Kenya has been extending itself to make accommodations possible for the countless refugees who streamed into Kenya; exhausted, fearful, victims of war and drought. It has dispatched several military platoons into Somalia to challenge al-Shabaab.

Somalia welcomed them at first, then had second thoughts. This is Africa, after all. Tribal enmities and national sovereignty are paramount in displays of relations between governments. And foreigners, just incidentally, make easy pickings.

Labels: Africa, Chaos, Charity, Conflict

posted by Pieface @ Wednesday, October 26, 2011