The Biggest Challenge in the World
For years now, I’ve been cataloguing the wreckage that’s resulted from the disastrous American-backed Ethiopian invasion of Somalia back during Christmas of 2006. At the time, the invasion was generally cheered by conservatives and ignored by the mainstream. Ever since, terrible things have been happening. For example, Antonio Guterres is the UN High Commissioner for Refugees so he knows a lot about bad situations. And what does he think is the very worst situation? Well, it’s Dadaab in Southern Kenya where 280,000 Somalis are currently living:
Laura Heaton at Enough Said observes that “The camp was built to accommodate far fewer inhabitants, but since the beginning of the year, Dadaab has seen an influx of 4,000-5,000 new arrivals each month.” At the moment, UNHCR is trying to expand the camp to accommodate its many inhabitants but is having trouble getting Kenya to agree to offer up more land. All that aside, the sheer quantity of people is staggering. “Camp” doesn’t really fit the bill when you’re really talking about a small city all full of absolutely desperate people.
18 Responses to “The Biggest Challenge in the World”
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June 18th, 2009 at 9:19 am
Hey Matt,
The AMA all but endorsed the public plan: http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/Daily-Reports/2009/June/18/Doctors.aspx
They’ve now gone from being 90% on board with your proposals to 99%. Does that get doctors removed from your axis of evil?
June 18th, 2009 at 9:21 am
That will make the Sri Lankan government happy, I suspect! They were flabbergasted that the UN’s SG called that country’s camps the worst he had seen.
June 18th, 2009 at 9:39 am
But the Iran invasion is still on, right? We’re on Georgians now and all that? If we are steadfast in our something we’ll something else resloute something evildoers magic will happen?
June 18th, 2009 at 9:44 am
From the title, I thought this was going to be about USA-Brazil soccer match today. We’re probably going to get slayed
June 18th, 2009 at 9:52 am
What was amazing back in 2006 was the conservatives’ complete amnesia concerning the Iraq invasion.
As we found out in 2003, invading a Third World country and kicking the current government’s ass is really pretty easy, if you’re the U.S.A. But making things work in a country whose government you’ve just eradicated is extremely hard.
But the American right cheered on the invasion of Somalia in December 2006, and proclaimed it a big success at the time, as if they’d completely forgotten that this was the easy part, and that the real test of whether the invasion ‘worked’ was still ahead.
Anyone who cheered on the Somalia invasion in 2006 should never be paid attention to again, because they have the attention span of a fruit fly, you know.
June 18th, 2009 at 9:57 am
Obviously David Letterman has a lot more to apologize for.
June 18th, 2009 at 10:24 am
I guess if you grow up in Manhattan, go to college in Boston, and then move to DC, over a quarter million people can qualify as a “small city.” Or you could say it ties Newark as the 65th largest city in the US.
This is mind-boggling – a place that did not exist three years ago. Beyond the complete lack of infrastructure, how do you even begin to deal with the sewage of 280,000 people in a place with NO NATURAL WATER SUPPLY?
And self-evidently, conditions are so bad in Somalia that all of these people think the camp is a better option.
June 18th, 2009 at 10:31 am
The Dadaab refugee camps have existed since 1991. Since Matthew believes that Somali history began at Christmas 2006, he is obviously ignorant of this fact.
Nonetheless, this post is part of Matthew’s continuing series expressing contempt for the international community and the UN and AU-backed Somali government, which was saved by the Ethiopian invasion. We all know that Matthew supports the Taliban-like Islamists in the Somali civil war, and opposes the UN and the AU, both of which back the moderate government. It is just another sign that Matthew is not a liberal internationalist – instead, he is a pure isolationist, since, obviously, a liberal internationalist would be backing the UN and the AU.
June 18th, 2009 at 10:40 am
Re David
A minor correction, Mr. Yglesias went to college in Cambridge, Ma., a suburb of Boston.
June 18th, 2009 at 11:06 am
MY wasn’t interested, but there was a severe refugee problem before December 2006. But if it doesn’t matter to domestic political debates in the US, it doesn’t happen.
June 18th, 2009 at 11:08 am
Al,
It’s much simpler than that. For hipsters like Mr. Yglesias, whatever Ethiopia does must be wrong. Ethiopia is a Christian country you see, and the stupid Christers are so out-of-date and backward. Islam, on the other hand, is, like, totally cool.
Hence the penchant of Mr. Yglesias & company to support Somalia over Ethiopia, Turkey over Greece, Azerbaijan over Armenia, Pakistan over India, and the shameful way they hounded Bishop Nazir-Ali out of office.
June 18th, 2009 at 11:26 am
Dadaab is in Northern Kenya…
June 18th, 2009 at 1:09 pm
Hector for a guy who can be pretty reasonable a lot fo the time you are a real ass.
Us cosmopolitan’s you despise so much don’t give a flying fuck what religion countries are. What we care about is when they invade other sovereign nations and create failed states leading to hundreds of thousands of refugees.
June 18th, 2009 at 1:33 pm
Re: and create failed states leading to hundreds of thousands of refugees.
Create, Eric, Create? WTF are you smoking? Somalia has _been_ a failed state since the early 1990s (not that it was terribly functional under the late and unlamented Siyad Barre anyway). Tons of Somalians were fleeing into neighboring countries, and some to the United States as well, in the late 1990s. Ethiopia can perhaps be blamed for aggravating the Somali crisis, but certainly not for creating it.
Leaving Somalia to its own devices has not exactly worked very well, in case you weren’t paying attention between 1990 and 2006.
June 18th, 2009 at 2:42 pm
It’s kind of fascinating what an incredible monster Al is. He really makes you understand what hardcore Pravda hacks were like in the Stalin era.
June 18th, 2009 at 2:49 pm
I wasn’t referring to Somalia specifically, just invasions in general.
But yeah your right Somalia has been a mess for a long time, but a military invasion hardly helped the situation, it just made things even worse.
June 18th, 2009 at 4:42 pm
Conservatives screw up foreign policy: Film at 11.
June 18th, 2009 at 7:18 pm
Eric K,
True. Ethiopia’s invasion of Somalia screwed up royally, and made the situation worse. But we didn’t know that at the time, and something needed to be done. Something _still_ needs to be done, unless you want power in Somalia to keep seesawing between Jihadists and pirate gangs. Leaving Somalia to its own devices, I say again, has not worked. If there is a place in the world crying out for _someone_ to intervene, it’s Somalia.