Skip to main content

Decency and humanity dictate we all do something


If this a civilised world in which we all live, we cannot stand by and see the massive scale of starvation unfolding in the Horn of Africa without doing something positive to alleviate the suffering of millions of people.

"The United Nations is to convene an emergency meeting to discuss the response to Horn of Africa drought, which it says has already killed tens of thousands of people. Famine was declared in two regions of Somalia on Wednesday – the first time this has occurred since 1992 – with 3.7 million people needing urgent humanitarian assistance.

A further 8 million people require food in neighbouring countries such as Kenya and Ethiopia. The UN's Food and Agricultural Organisation said the meeting at its Rome headquarters on Monday would be attended by its 191 member countries, as well as NGOs, other UN organisations and the regional development bank. France, the current president of the G20 group of leading economies, called the meeting.

Topping the agenda will be discussions on how to deliver aid safely and effectively into Somalia. While the drought has been severe across the Horn, with some areas receiving the lowest rainfall for 60 years, Somalia has been worst affected because of conflict, lack of governance and the security risks facing aid groups. Having had no effective government since the overthrow of Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991, the country is gripped by an Islamist insurgency led by the hardline Al-Shabab militia. The group, which controls much of southern Somalia, lifted a ban earlier this month on international humanitarian groups, including the World Food Programme (WFP), but aid organisations are seeking guarantees the food will not be diverted and aid workers will be safe."

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Pentagon's eye-popping spending....and waste!

Only a gigantic bureaucracy could get away with spending of such dimensions - and the amazing waste involved in part of that ginormous spend.   Think US Pentagon..... "From spending $150 million on private villas for a handful of personnel in Afghanistan to blowing $2.7 billion on an air surveillance balloon that doesn’t work, the latest revelations of waste at the Pentagon are just the most recent howlers in a long line of similar stories stretching back at least five decades.  Other hot-off-the-presses examples would include the Army’s purchase of helicopter gears worth $500 each for $8,000 each and the accumulation of billions of dollars' worth of weapons components that will never be used. And then there’s the one that would have to be everyone’s favorite Pentagon waste story: the spending of $50,000 to investigate the bomb-detecting capabilities of African elephants. (And here’s a shock: they didn’t turn out to be that great!) The elephant research, of course, represe...
Post a Comment
Read more

Video: Israel demolishing a Bedouin village

From Mondoweiss - Israel's supposed "most moral army in the world", the IDF, engaged in immoral, and according to international law, illegal action.... "Israeli forces have demolished every home in the Bedouin village of Khirbet Taha in the northern West Bank district of Nablus during three separate demolitions since the start of the year. Unlike most Bedouin villages, the residents in Khirbet Taha own their own land. However that land falls in Area C, territory in the occupied West Bank under full Israeli control. The village’s only school was also destroyed, leaving children to study in a dilapidated 100-year-old mosque — the only structure left standing in the village. According the United Nations, Israel has demolished half as many Palestinian buildings in the first few months of 2016, as they had in all of 2015. In February alone, the UN found that more Palestinians homes were destroyed than any other month since 2009, when the organization began its docum...
Post a Comment
Read more

Robert Fisk's predictions for the Middle East in 2013

There is no gain-saying that Robert Fisk, fiercely independent and feisty to boot, is the veteran journalist and author covering the Middle East. Who doesn't he know or hasn't he met over the years in reporting from Beirut - where he lives?  In his latest op-ed piece for The Independent he lays out his predictions for the Middle East for 2013. Read the piece in full, here - well worthwhile - but an extract... "Never make predictions in the Middle East. My crystal ball broke long ago. But predicting the region has an honourable pedigree. “An Arab movement, newly-risen, is looming in the distance,” a French traveller to the Gulf and Baghdad wrote in 1883, “and a race hitherto downtrodden will presently claim its due place in the destinies of Islam.” A year earlier, a British diplomat in Jeddah confided that “it is within my knowledge... that the idea of freedom does at present agitate some minds even in Mecca...” So let’s say this for 2013: the “Arab Awakening” (the t...
Post a Comment
Read more