From: trh@jack.sns.com (Al Trh)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.afghanistan
Subject: What do we say to this?
Date: 12 Dec 1992 05:47:00 -0600
Organization: UTexas Mail-to-News Gateway
NNTP-Posting-Host: cs.utexas.edu


Send your responses to B.J Cutler. If anybody knows the 
address of Scripps Howard News Service, please post.
 
                       Ignoring Somalia's Crisis 
                         WHERE ARE THE MUSLIMS 
 
                             BY B.J CUTLER 
 
            AS a compasionate men President Bush really had no 
     other choice but to send American troops to halt the 
     starvation, bloodshed and anarchy in Somalia. 
      His advisers and his own experience told him a distressing 
     truth: if the United States did not take on the burden, no 
     one else would, and as many as 2 million innocent Somalis 
     could die of hunger. 
       Even more distressing is that America should not have 
     faced the dilemna of either dispatching soldiers or watching 
     people die on TV. The several million surviving Somalis are 
     Sunni Muslims, and their co-religionists had it well within 
     their powers to rescue them. 
       There are about a billion Muslims in the world They 
     compose a maority in more than 60 countries, one-third of 
     the United Nations' membership. To think that the Islamic 
     states themselves cannot handle a few Somali warlords and 
     their teenage thugs is ridiculous. 
      Start right in the neighborhood~. Saudi Arabia has 72,000 
     superbly equipd men under arms. The world came to the 
     Saudi's aid when they were threatened by Iraq, but Riyadh 
     shrinks from action to save the Somalis. Is it because they 
     are, though Muslim, non-Arab and black? 
      And then there is the emir of Kuwait (he of the gold 
     bathroom fixtures), back in his palace thanks to Desert 
     Storm. His armed forces are small, under 20,000 men. But is 
     a company or a squad too much for him to offer Somalia? Yes. 
       Egypt and Syria have powerful armed forces, numbering 
     420,000 and 404,000, respectively. Each sent a division to 
     the Persian Gulf War (when the Saudis were paying the bill). 
     For Somalia, Egypt is considering a token force, after the 
     Americans secure the ground. 
      Sudan trumpets itself     as an Islamic nation. Its 71,000-
     strong military is engaged in a holy war against Christians 
     and animists in the country's south. Does it have anything 
     for Somalia? Don't ask. 
      Sudan's patron, fundamentalist Iran, counts 368,000 troops, 
     none of whom are doing anything for the Somalis. Pakistan is 
     the Muslim superpower, with a military of 666,000. It did 
     send 600 soldiers to Mogadishu Airport, but should do much 
     more. 
       Indonesia, the most populous Muslim nation with 192 
     million people, has 279,000 soldiers, sailors and airmen. 
     Its military is better known for killing Christians in East 
     Timor than  helping Muslims abroad. 
 
      AMERICAN EQUIPMENT 
 
      Morocco is a U .S. friend whose 196,000 troops use mostly 
     American equipment. They are busy seeing that the Western 
     Sahara, which King Hassan II occupied in 1976, does not gain 
     independence. 
 
      Other Muslim or largely Muslim countries, with the size of 
     their armed forces, include: Turkey, 579,000; Bangladesh, 
     106,000; Malaysia, 128,000; Algeria, 126,000; Nigeria, 
     106,000; Libya, 86,000; United Arab Emirate, 44,000; Oman, 
     26,000; Tan-zania, 47,000, and Albania, 48,000. 
      If the 19 countries named above contributed an average of 
     1,200 troops apiece to a U.N. peace-mak-ing unit, Somalia 
     could be pacified and fed without the United Stats hgving to 
     do it. 
      On a separate issue, foreign ministers from 40 Islamic 
     nations met in Jidda, Saudi Arabia, last week. They demanded 
     immediate military interven-tion by the United Nations to 
     halt Serbian slaughter of Bosnian Muslims. Presumably, they 
     intended the U.N. force to be spearheaded by the United 
     States, as in Somalia. 
      They also called on the Security Council to lift its arms 
     embargo on Yugoslavia so the Bosnians could get arms for 
     self-defense. They did not decide to take action in Bosnia 
     themselves. 
 
     B.J Cutler is foreign affairs columnist for Scripps Howard 
     News Service