From: Charles Scheiner <cscheiner@igc.apc.org>
Newsgroups: soc.culture.african
Date: 15 Aug 92 00:15 PDT
Subject: NYT/Quindlen on US racism v. Somal
Nf-ID: #N:cdp:1471700064:000:4569
Nf-From: cdp.UUCP!cscheiner    Aug 15 00:15:00 1992


******************    Somalia's Plagues    ***************************

"Public and Private" by Anna Quindlen on the New York Times Op-Ed page, 
August 12, 1992.  Reprinted without permission.

The two children are the last survivors of their family, but not, it 
appears, for long. In news footage they sit naked on the ground, their 
spindly arms wrapped around one another, the inevitability of their 
imminent deaths in their sunken eyes. In their homeland, rent by internal 
power struggles, there is no food, and so they starve while worlds away 
the politicians puzzle over what to do.

But these children are not in Bosnia, now the center of world attention. 
They are in Somalia, an African country living through - and dying of - a 
lethal combination of clan warfare, drought and famine that has wrought 
what one U.S. official called the worst humanitarian crisis in the world 
right now.

Millions of people in Somalia are in danger of starving to death in the 
months to come. Hundreds will die today. Although the International Red 
Cross has mounted the largest relief effort in its history, it is too 
dangerous to take food to some areas, since supplies are often stolen by 
gunmen and sold by profiteers. Relief kitchens have graveyards flanking 
them, so that those who die on food lines may be buried while the line 
moves on.

Eurocentrism was a kind of catchword not long ago amid the scornful 
discussion of multicultural curriculums in the public schools. Were we 
going to throw out Shakespeare, cease to teach Magna Carta, minimize the 
role of Napoleon in world affairs?

But the truth is that we are a deeply Eurocentric nation, and for obvious 
reasons. Many of us have Euroroots, and from the beginning we have sought 
Euroalliances. When we hear of Serbian-run concentration camps we relate 
them, with renewed outrage, to the atrocities of Nazi Germany. When 
Americans see Bosnian orphans crying in the windows of buses, offers pour 
in to adopt them.

Bosnia, with all its horrors, is at the center of public and political 
dialogue and Somalia, with all its horrors is a peripheral discussion. 
"Its racism," says Jack Healey, executive director of Amnesty 
International.

And a peculiar sort of myopic ignorance. Civil war and unconscionable 
internment in Bosnia seem man-made evils, subject to man-made solutions. 
But Africa is a mystery to our Eurocentric nation, even to many 
African-Americans. Its troubles seem like Old Testament plagues, 
irresolvable and inevitable.

There is nothing inevitable about the corpses littering the landscape of 
Somalia. There are no easy solutions for a nation of nomads who have been 
prevented from planting crops by the ravages of civil war, a country that 
has almost no government aside from village elders in dying towns.

There are no easy solutions in the former Yugoslavia, either, where 
factional hatreds are a tangled web stretching back centuries. But there 
is now sharply focused attention by the international community on what 
should be done and who should do it. Somalia deserves that same intense 
attention, from George Bush, Bill Clinton, the American people and our 
allies abroad.

The United Nations has agreed to airlift food into the interior, but that 
is neither an adequate nor a long-term solution. Senator Nancy Kassebaum, 
who sits on the Senate subcommittee on African affairs, supports the use 
of an international force of soldiers to make sure food shipments get to 
the people. But she also says the United States must have a continuing 
commitment to development in African nations instead of a crisis 
management approach.

Just a year ago some of us, unpersuaded by the high moral principles 
involved in giving our all for cheap oil, were saying that America could 
no longer afford to police the world. With the President's gulf war 
bluster about liberation, we lost sight of the best reason to involve 
ourselves in foreign affairs - because it is sometimes obviously the 
moral thing to do.

The new Secretary General of the United Nations, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, 
an Egyptian who is the first leader of the U.N. from the continent of 
Africa, has referred to the Bosnian conflict as the "rich man's war." He 
means it is a white man's war, a Eurowar, in its combatants, its victims 
and its international interest. That makes aid no less necessary. Just as 
the color of its children must make no difference in our help for 
Somalia. Surely our attention span can encompass two mortal crises at 
once. Surely our empathy can transcend race.



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