Somalia Quotes

His thoughts went to Kismaayo, and lately, particularly of Abdi. If there were a hero in this story, it was Abdi. Jon thought, this young man from Maine had left that war weary husk of a country called Somalia and had come to these United States of America to pursue the dream of happiness, security, and hope.

There are no longer natural famines in the world; there are only political famines. If people in Syria, Sudan or Somalia starve to death, it is because some politician wants them to. In

I feel that God made my body perfect the way I was born. Then man robbed me, took away my power, and left me a cripple. My womanhood was stolen. If God had wanted those body parts missing, why did he create them? I just pray that one day no woman will have to experience this pain. It will become a thing of the past. People will say "Did you hear, female genital mutilation has been outlawed in Somalia?" Then the next country, and the next, and so on, until the world is safe for all women. What a happy day that will be, and that's what I'm working toward. In'shallah, if God is willing, it will happen.

As I searched the atlas for somewhere to run to, Hugh made a case for his old stomping grounds. His first suggestion was Beirut, where he went to nursery school. His family left there in the midsixties and moved to the Congo. After that, it was Ethiopia, and then Somalia, all fine places in his opinion. 'Let's save Africa and the Middle East for when I decide to quit living,' I said.

Like the Nazis, the cadres of jihad have a death wish that sets the seal on their nihilism. The goal of a world run by an oligarchy in possession of Teutonic genes, who may kill or enslave other 'races' according to need, is not more unrealizable than the idea that a single state, let alone the globe itself, could be governed according to the dictates of an allegedly holy book. This mad scheme begins by denying itself the talents (and the rights) of half the population, views with superstitious horror the charging of interest, and invokes the right of Muslims to subject nonbelievers to special taxes and confiscations. Not even Afghanistan or Somalia, scenes of the furthest advances yet made by pro-caliphate forces, could be governed for long in this way without setting new standards for beggary and decline.

Love will cost you dearly. And it will break your heart. But in the end, it will save the world.

It is convenient for the old men to blame Eve. To insist we are damned because a country girl talked to the snake one afternoon long ago. Children must starve in Somalia for that, and old women be abandoned in our greatest cities. It’s why we will finally be thrown into the lakes of molten lead. Because she was confused by happiness that first time anyone said she was beautiful. Nevertheless, she must be the issue, so people won’t notice that rocks and galaxies, mathematics and rust are also created in His image.

In her orchard the trees had been born from deaths; they marked and grew from the remains of the children that had passed through her.

Mogadishu the beautiful - your white-turbaned mosques, baskets of anchovies as bright as mercury, jazz and shuffling feet, bird-boned servant girls with slow smiles, the blind white of your homes against the sapphire blue of the ocean - you are missed, her dreams seem to say.

I was hell-bent on being an effective humanitarian in Cambodia and Somalia. But a naïve fog is finally lifting. Revealed is a train wreck of illusions, the depravity of someone else's war, the futility of a competence stillborn there. To understand this you have to become this.

There are no longer natural famines in the world; there are only political famines. If people in Syria, Sudan or Somalia starve to death, it is because some politician wants them

Death in Somalia seldom bothers to announce its arrival. In fact, death calls with the arrogance of a guest confident on receiving a warm welcome at any time, no question asked.

With a decrease in the number of pirates, there has been an increase in global warming over the same period. Therefore, global warming is caused by a lack of pirates. Even more compelling: Somalia has the highest number of Pirates AND the lowest Carbon emissions of any country. Coincidence?

The Middle East and North Africa are almost out of water. Asia’s underwater. Syria is dystopian, Somalia, Bangladesh, dystopian. Everybody’s getting weather that never happened before. Melting permafrost means we’ve got like, a minute to turn this mess around, or else it’s going to stop us.

What developed in Somalia was things such as hunger and fighting.

Female genital mutilation predates Islam. Not all Muslims do this, and a few of the peoples who do are not Islamic. But in Somalia, where virtually every girl is excised, the practice is always justified in the name of Islam. Uncircumcised girls will be possessed by devils, fall into vice and perdition, and become whores. Imams never discourage the practice: it keeps girls pure.

Where I grew up, death is a constant visitor. A virus, bacteria, a parasite; drought and famine; soldiers, and torturers; could bring it to anyone, any time. Death comes riding on raindrops that turned to floods. It catches the imagination of men in positions of authority who order their subordinates to hunt, torture, and kill people they imagine to be enemies. Death lures many others to take their own lives in order to escape a dismal reality. For many women, because of the perception of lost honor, death comes at the hands of a father, brother, or husband. Death comes to young women giving birth to new life, leaving the newborn orphaned in the hands of strangers. For those who live in anarchy and civil war, as in the country of my birth, Somalia, death is everywhere.

When the NSA’s surveillance program was exposed by Edward Snowden’s revelations, high officials claimed that it had prevented fifty-four terrorist acts. On inquiry, that was whittled down to a dozen. A high-level government panel then discovered that there was actually only one case: someone had sent $8,500 to Somalia. That was the total yield of the huge assault on the Constitution and, of course, on others throughout the world.

Too often, poverty and deprivation get covered as events. That is, when some disaster strikes, when people die. Yet, poverty is about much more than starvation deaths or near famine conditions. It is the sum total of a multiplicity of factors. The weightage of some of these varies from region to region, society to society, culture to culture. But at the core is a fairly compact number of factors. They include not just income and calorie intake. Land, health, education, literacy, infant mortality rates and life expectancy are also some of them. Debt, assets, irrigation, drinking water, sanitation and jobs count too. You can have the mandatory 2,400 or 2,100 calories a day and yet be very poor. India’s problems differ from those of a Somalia or Ethiopia in crisis. Hunger—again just one aspect of poverty—is far more complex here. It is more low level, less visible and does not make for the dramatic television footage that a Somalia and Ethiopia do. That makes covering the process more challenging—and more important. Many who do not starve receive very inadequate nutrition. Children getting less food than they need can look quite normal. Yet poor nutrition can impair both mental and physical growth and they can suffer its debilitating impact all their lives. A person lacking minimal access to health at critical moments can face destruction almost as surely as one in hunger.

And yet these Americans, with their helicopters and laser-guided weapons and shock-troop Rangers were going to somehow sort it out in a few weeks? Arrest Aidid and make it all better? They were trying to take down a clan, the most ancient and efficient social organization known to man. Didn’t the Americans realize that for every leader they arrested there were dozens of brothers, cousins, sons, and nephews to take his place? Setbacks just strengthened the clan’s resolve. Even if the Habr Gidr were somehow crippled or destroyed, wouldn’t that just elevate the next most powerful clan? Or did the Americans expect Somalia to suddenly sprout full-fledged Jeffersonian democracy?

Tig had been thinking about the aftermath of the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu in Somalia, memorialized in Black Hawk Down, particularly the part when locals had dragged the bodies of American soldiers through the streets.

The 20th century merits the name "The Century of Murder." 1915 Turks slaughtered 2 million Armenians. 1933 to 1954 the Soviet government encompassed the death of 20 to 65 million citizens. 1933 to 1945 Nazi Germany murdered more than 25 million people. 1948 Hindus and Muslims engaged in racial and religious strife that claimed more lives than could be reported. 1970 3 million Bangladesh were killed. 1971 Uganda managed the death of 300,000 people. 1975 Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia and murdered up to 3 million people. In recent times more than half a million of Rwanda's 6 million people have been murdered. At present times genocidal strife is underway in Bosnia, Somalia, Burundi and elsewhere. The people of the world have demonstrated themselves to be so capable of forgetting the murderous frenzies in which their fellows have participated that it is essential that one, at least, be remembered and the world be regularly reminded of it. _Consequences of the Holocaust

In Somali culture hyper-masculinity is the most desired attribute in men. Femininity signifies softness, a lightness of touch: qualities that are aggressively pressed onto young girls and women. When a woman does not possess feminine traits, it is considered an act of mild social resistance. This applies equally to men who are not overtly masculine but the stakes are considerably amplified. If a Somali man is considered feminine he is deemed weak, helpless, pitiful: The underlying message being that femininity is inherently inferior to masculinity.

(Somalia) was a watershed," said one State Department official, "The idea used to be that terrible countries were terrible because good, decent, innocent people were being oppressed by evil, thuggish leaders. Somalia changed that. Here you have a country where just about everybody is caught up in hatred and fighting. You stop an old lady on the street and ask her if she wants peace, and she’ll say, yes, of course, I pray for it daily. All the things you’d expect her to say. Then ask her if she would be willing for her clan to share power with another in order to have that peace, and she’ll say, 'With those murderers and thieves? I’d die first.' People in these countries - Bosnia is a more recent example - don’t want peace. They want victory. They want power. Men, women, old and young. Somalia was the experience that taught us that people in these places bear much of the responsibility for things being the way they are. The hatred and the killing continues because they want it to. Or because they don’t want peace enough to stop it." (pg 334-335)

The Tears of Dark Water is not really “about” Somali piracy. It is about the multi-dimensional fallout of Somalia’s disintegration over the past two decades. Piracy offered me a narrative framework to explore not only how a hijacking and hostage crisis could end in tragedy but also how the breakdown of social order on land could inspire young Somalis to take to the ocean.

Consider how the rich countries of the world are filled with hypocritical people. These are the people who complain about children who are starving in Somalia, and speak of the plight of youth in the inner city, speaking as though they are emotionally tortured by these tragedies. But then they refuse to do a thing about it. When they are approached by charities, they give only an infinitesimal fraction of their wealth.

In Somalia, like many countries across Africa and the Middle East, little girls are made "pure" by having their genitals cut out. There is no other way to describe this procedure, which typically occurs around the age of five. After the child's clitoris and labia are carved out, scraped off, or, in more compassionate areas, merely cut or pricked, the whole area is often sewn up, so that a thick band of tissue forms a chastity belt made of the girl's own scarred flesh. A small hole is carefully situated to permit a thin flow of pee. Only great force can tear the scar tissue wider, for sex.

Most recently, these people have been emigrants trying to get into Italy, not emigrants trying to leave, and their passage is no easier or safer than that of their antecedents. Thousands of refugees from Syria, Libya, Eritrea, Somalia, Ghana, and Nigeria have died off the coasts of Italy in the last ten years, capsized, drowned, sunk in flames. History marches on, and names and destinations change, but not the injustices we let one another suffer.

More than any other nation, the United States has been almost constantly involved in armed conflict and, through military alliances, has used war as a means of resolving international and local disputes. Since the birth of the United Nations, we have seen American forces involved in combat in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Cambodia, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Greece, Grenada, Haiti, Iraq, Korea, Kosovo, Kuwait, Laos, Lebanon, Libya, Nicaragua, Panama, Serbia, Somalia, and Vietnam, and more recently with lethal attacks in Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and other sovereign nations. There were no “boots on the ground” in some of these countries; instead we have used high-altitude bombers or remote-control drones. In these cases we rarely acknowledge the tremendous loss of life and prolonged suffering among people in the combat zones, even after our involvement in the conflict is ended.

The desertion of Rwanda by the UN force was Hutu Power’s greatest diplomatic victory to date, and it can be credited almost single-handedly to the United States. With the memory of the Somalia debacle still very fresh, the White House had just finished drafting a document called Presidential Decision Directive 25, which amounted to a checklist of reasons to avoid American involvement in UN peacekeeping missions. It hardly mattered that Dallaire’s call for an expanded force and mandate would not have required American troops, or that the mission was not properly peacekeeping, but genocide prevention. PDD 25 also contained what Washington policymakers call “language” urging that the United States should persuade others not to undertake the missions that it wished to avoid. In fact, the Clinton administration’s ambassador to the UN, Madeleine Albright, opposed leaving even the skeleton crew of two hundred seventy in Rwanda. Albright went on to become Secretary of State, largely because of her reputation as a “daughter of Munich,” a Czech refugee from Nazism with no tolerance for appeasement and with a taste for projecting U.S. force abroad to bring rogue dictators and criminal states to heel. Her name is rarely associated with Rwanda, but ducking and pressuring others to duck, as the death toll leapt from thousands to tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands, was the absolute low point in her career as a stateswoman.

Piracy is not so much organized crime as it is a business, characterized by extremely efficient capital flows, low start-up costs, and few entry barriers.

May your blessings be as countless as the grains of sand in the desert and the stars in the sky.

Salvation Army [10w] The Salvation Army invaded Somalia and left soap and deodorant.

As a Puntland cabinet minister once told me: “In Somalia, there are two industries that work: hawala [money transfer] and khat.

There are no longer natural famines in the world; there are only political famines. If people in Syria, Sudan or Somalia starve to death, it is because some politician wants them to.

En la actualidad, el promedio global es de solo 9 homicidios anuales por cada 100.000 personas, y la mayoría de estos homicidios tienen lugar en estados débiles, como Somalia y Colombia.

I had always assumed that persecution was abnormal, exceptional, unusual, out of the ordinary. In my mind, persecution was something to avoid. It was a problem, a setback, a barrier. I was captivated by the thought: what if persecution is the normal, expected situation for a believer? And what if the persecution is, in fact, soil in which faith can grow? What if persecution can be, in fact, good soil? I began to wonder about what that might mean for the church in America—and I began to wonder about what that might mean for the potential church in Somalia.

What will be lost, and what saved, of our civilization probably lies beyond our powers to decide. No human group has ever figured out how to design its future. That future may be germinating today not in a boardroom in London or an office in Washington or a bank in Tokyo, but in some antic outpost or other -- a kindly British orphanage in the grim foothills of Peru, a house for the dying in a back street of Calcutta run by a fiercely single-minded Albanian nun, an easy-going French medical team at the starving edge of the Sahel, a mission to Somalia by Irish social workers who remember their own Great Hunger, a nursery program to assist convict-mothers at a New York Prison -- in some unheralded corner where a great-hearted human being is committed to loving o9utcasts in an extraordinary way.

It’s not that I hate everyone outside of England. I don’t. I don’t hate people from Syria, Afghanistan or Somalia. How could I? I don’t know them. How could I hate someone I don’t even know? That would take a special kind of madness. But if they refuse to make a useful contribution to society then we should send them back where they came from because we just can’t afford them anymore. It’s 10.30 p.m. and my front door’s locked. Why? Certainly not because I hate everyone OUTSIDE the front door, but because I love everyone INSIDE. Nobody’s telling me not to not to lock my front door. Or are they? The EU certainly is.

The global aid community is mobilised into fighting drought in a district that gets 1,500 mm of rainfall annually. The reverse spiral begins. Donor governments love emergency relief. It forms a negligible part of their spending, but makes for great advertising. (Emergencies of many sorts do this, not just drought. You can run television footage of the Marines kissing babies in Somalia.) There are more serious issues between rich and poor nations—like unequal trade. Settling those would be of greater help to the latter. But for that, the ‘donors’ would have to part with something for real. No. They prefer emergency relief.

In language that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago, a young Moroccan named Brother Rachid last year called out President Obama on YouTube for claiming that Islamic State was “not Islamic”: Mr President, I must tell you that you are wrong about ISIL. You said ISIL speaks for no religion. I am a former Muslim. My dad is an imam. I have spent more than 20 years studying Islam. . . . I can tell you with confidence that ISIL speaks for Islam. . . . ISIL’s 10,000 members are all Muslims. . . . They come from different countries and have one common denominator: Islam. They are following Islam’s Prophet Muhammad in every detail. . . . They have called for a caliphate, which is a central doctrine in Sunni Islam. I ask you, Mr. President, to stop being politically correct—to call things by their names. ISIL, Al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, Al-Shabaab in Somalia, the Taliban, and their sister brand names, are all made in Islam. Unless the Muslim world deals with Islam and separates religion from state, we will never end this cycle. . . . If Islam is not the problem, then why is it there are millions of Christians in the Middle East and yet none of them has ever blown up himself to become a martyr, even though they live under the same economic and political circumstances and even worse? . . . Mr. President, if you really want to fight terrorism, then fight it at the roots. How many Saudi sheikhs are preaching hatred? How many Islamic channels are indoctrinating people and teaching them violence from the Quran and the hadith? . . . How many Islamic schools are producing generations of teachers and students who believe in jihad and martyrdom and fighting the infidels?1

Når jeg spurte ham om hvilken krig han hadde kommet hjem fra, Vietnam, Gulfen, Somalia, Irak, Afghanistan, Korea, for den saks skyld, bare ristet han på hodet og sa: Kan være det samme, Chris. Alle kriger er like. Også din.

The United States and its NATO Alliance constitute the greatest collection of genocidal states ever assembled in the entire history of the world. If anything the United Nations Organization and its member states bear a “responsibility to protect” the U.S.’ and NATO’s intended victims from their repeated aggressions as it should have done for Haiti, Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, Libya, now Syria, and perhaps tomorrow, Iran. The United States and the NATO Alliance together with their de facto allies such as Israel constitute the real Axis of Genocide in the modern world. Humanity itself owes a “responsibility to protect” the very future existence of the world from the United States, the NATO states, and Israel.

Il Viaggio è una cosa che tutti noi abbiamo in testa fin da quando siamo nati. Ognuno ha amici e parenti che l’hanno fatto, oppure a loro volta conoscono qualcuno che l'ha fatto. È come una creatura mitologica che può portare alla salvezza o alla morte con la stessa facilità. Nessuno sa quanto può durare. Se si è fortunati due mesi. Se si è sfortunati anche un anno, o due.

Now let’s close the trap, and capture the misconception. We now know that people believe that life in low-income countries is much worse than it actually is. But how many people do they imagine live such terrible lives? We asked people in Sweden and the United States: Of the world population, what percentage lives in low-income countries? The majority suggested the answer was 50 percent or more. The average guess was 59 percent. The real figure is 9 percent. Only 9 percent of the world lives in low-income countries. And remember, we just worked out that those countries are not nearly as terrible as people think. They are really bad in many ways, but they are not at or below the level of Afghanistan, Somalia, or Central African Republic, the worst places to live on the planet. To summarize: low-income countries are much more developed than most people think. And vastly fewer people live in them. The idea of a divided world with a majority stuck in misery and deprivation is an illusion. A complete misconception. Simply wrong.

It’s perhaps telling that the United States for years was, embarrassingly, the only country in the world besides Somalia and South Sudan that had not ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child. That has now changed: the United States is the only nation that hasn’t bothered to ratify it.

Tom Donilon walked in to brief me on a developing situation involving an issue I’d never been asked about during the campaign. “Pirates?” “Pirates, Mr. President,” Jones said. “Off the coast of Somalia. They boarded a cargo ship captained by an American and appear to be holding the crew hostage.

Indian children are more likely to be malnourished than children from Zimbabwe, Somalia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, Africa’s three poorest countries,1 and in Delhi, nearly 5 million school-aged children have irreversible lung damage from that city’s air quality, which is twice as bad as Beijing’s.2

I and Somalia against the world; I and my clan against Somalia; I and my family against my clan; I and my brother against my family; and I against my brother. Those were appalling words to live by, but a telling glimpse into the heart behind the face of evil—and perhaps a hint into the worldview that might actually explain the insanity.

To play the country-game, we have to choose a country. Everybody wants to be the USA and Britain and Canada and Australia and Switzerland and them. Nobody wants to be rags of countries like Congo, like Somalia, like Iraq, like Sudan, like Haiti, and not even this one we live in - who wants to be a terrible place of hunger and things falling apart?

Mass famines still strike some areas from time to time, but they are exceptional, and they are almost always caused by human politics rather than by natural catastrophes. There are no longer natural famines in the world; there are only political famines. If people in Syria, Sudan or Somalia starve to death, it is because some politician wants them to.

For the masses of unemployed and resentful local youth, piracy was a quick way to achieve the respect and standard of living that the circumstances of their birth had denied them.

I have never seen sheep kill sheep, but wolves? We have civil unrest in Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Sudan, Somalia, Algeria, the Philippines, Indonesia, Egypt, Occupied Judea…everywhere. Where the creed of the wolf thrives, everyone dies. The sheep are not the only ones dying—the wolves eat the sheep, but they are also killing each other without mercy.

Mom. The permafrost is melting. Millions of acres of it.”Willa tried to see a connection. “And I’m just worried about my house. That’s your point?”Tig shook her head. “It’s so, so scary. It’s going to be fire and rain, Mom. Storms we can’t deal with, so many people homeless. Not just homeless but placeless. Cities go underwater and then what? You can’t shelter in place anymore when there isn’t a place.”Willa tucked her hands between her knees and declined to believe these things. “The Middle East and North Africa are almost out of water. Asia’s underwater. Syria is dystopian, Somalia, Bangladesh, dystopian. Everybody’s getting weather that never happened before. Melting permafrost means we’ve got like, a minute to turn this mess around, or else it’s going to stop us.

Obama would prove to be one of the most militarily aggressive American presidents in decades. He authorized military operations in seven Muslim countries—Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen; mandated a troop surge in Afghanistan; and vastly ramped up the CIA drone program. And he became the first president since the Civil War to authorize the assassination of a U.S. citizen: Anwar al-Awlaki.

Deploying LOGCAP or other contractors instead of military personnel can alleviate the political and social pressures that have come to be a fact of life in the U.S. whenever military forces are deployed,” wrote Lt. Col. Steven Woods in his Army War College study about the effects of LOGCAP. “While there has been little to no public reaction to the deaths of five DynCorp employees killed in Latin America or the two American support contractors from Tapestry Solutions attacked (and one killed) in Kuwait … U.S. forces had to be withdrawn from Somalia after public outcry following the deaths of U.S. soldiers in Mogadishu.… “Additionally, military force structure often has a force cap, usually for political reasons. Force caps impose a ceiling on the number of soldiers that can be deployed into a defined area. Contractors expand this limit.

Since 1945, when Jesus granted America air superiority, we have bombed Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Lebanon, Granada, Panama, Iraq, Serbia, Somalia, Bosnia, The Sudan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya and Yemen. And Yemen only because the tenth one was free. How did we inherit this moral obligation of bringing justice to the world via death from above? Are we Zeus? It doesn't make any sense. Our schools are crumbling and we wanna teach everyone else a lesson.

The UN lacked the ability to act without the support of its more powerful members, notably the United States. The American government wanted to avoid a repetition of its unsuccessful intervention in Somalia, in which thirty American troops were killed. President Clinton issued a directive on UN military conditions. The operations would also have to be directly relevant to American interests. These conditions excluded American support for UN intervention to stop the genocide [in Rwanda].

The 20th century merits the name "The Century of Murder." 1915 Turks slaughtered 2 million Armenians. 1933 to 1954 the Soviet government encompassed the death of 20 to 65 million citizens. 1933 to 1945 Nazi Germany murdered more than 25 million people. 1948 Hindus and Muslims engaged in racial and religious strife that claimed more lives than could be reported. 1970 3 million Bangladesh were killed. 1971 Uganda managed the death of 300,000 people. 1975 Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia and murdered up to 3 million people. In recent times more than half a million of Rwanda's 6 million people have been murdered. At present times genocidal strife is underway in Bosnia, Somalia, Burundi and elsewhere. The people of the world have demonstrated themselves to be so capable of forgetting the murderous frenzies in which their fellows have participated that it is essential that one, at least, be remembered and the world be regularly reminded of it. _Consequences of the Holocaust by Raul Hilberg

Ilhan Omar’s 100,000-strong Somali community in Minneapolis is the terrorist recruitment capital of the United States. It is a fertile base for both direct and online recruitment. FBI data show that more men from this community have joined, or sought to join, a foreign terrorist organization over the last dozen years there than in any other jurisdiction in the nation. From this community alone, 45 members left to join either the Somalia-based insurgency al-Shabab or the Iraqi and Syrian wing of ISIS.

Dadaab is a vivid reminder that refugee problems don't end simply because journalistic interest moves elsewhere. The inhabitants themselves are irremediably stuck. They can't go back to Somalia because it isn't safe and they can't go elsewhere in Kenya because Kenya has problems enough of its own without having 134,000 Somalis pitching up in Nairobi or Mombasa, looking for food and work. And so way out in the desert there exists this strange city-that-isn't-a-city filled with people who have nowhere to go and nothing much to do.

Ayaana was surveying the longest line on the globe’s three dimensional grid, the equator, the first line of latitude. Her special point zero, 40,075 kilometers long; 78.7 percent across water, 21.3 percent over land, zero degrees, all the Kenya equator places she had never imagined to claim as her own: Nanyuki, Mount Kenya. The invisible equator line crossed only thirteen countries - Kenya, Ecuador, Colombia, Brazil, São Tomé and Principe, Gabon, Republic of Congo, Uganda, Somalia, Maldives, Indonesia, and Kiribati - thirteen countries that were the center of the world, and hers was one of them.

The fears of militarization Holbrooke had expressed in his final, desperate memos, had come to pass on a scale he could have never anticipated. President Trump had concentrated ever more power in the Pentagon, granting it nearly unilateral authority in areas of policy once orchestrated across multiple agencies, including the State Department. In Iraq and Syria, the White House quietly delegated more decisions on troop deployments to the military. In Yemen and Somalia, field commanders were given authority to launch raids without White House approval. In Afghanistan, Trump granted the secretary of defense, General James Mattis, sweeping authority to set troop levels. In public statements, the White House downplayed the move, saying the Pentagon still had to adhere to the broad strokes of policies set by the White House. But in practice, the fate of thousands of troops in a diplomatic tinderbox of a conflict had, for the first time in recent history, been placed solely in military hands. Diplomats were no longer losing the argument on Afghanistan: they weren’t in it. In early 2018, the military began publicly rolling out a new surge: in the following months, up to a thousand new troops would join the fourteen thousand already in place. Back home, the White House itself was crowded with military voices. A few months into the Trump administration, at least ten of twenty-five senior leadership positions on the president’s National Security Council were held by current or retired military officials. As the churn of firings and hirings continued, that number grew to include the White House chief of staff, a position given to former general John Kelly. At the same time, the White House ended the practice of “detailing” State Department officers to the National Security Council. There would now be fewer diplomatic voices in the policy process, by design.

Our ancestors, alas, knew it only too well. When they cried to God, ‘Deliver us from famine!’, this is what they had in mind. During the last hundred years, technological, economic and political developments have created an increasingly robust safety net separating humankind from the biological poverty line. Mass famines still strike some areas from time to time, but they are exceptional, and they are almost always caused by human politics rather than by natural catastrophes. There are no longer natural famines in the world; there are only political famines. If people in Syria, Sudan or Somalia starve to death, it is because

Yes, our social and economic circumstances shape decisions we make about all sorts of things in life, including sex. Sometimes they rob us of the power to make any decisions at all. But of all human activity, sex is among the least likely to fit neatly into the blueprint of rational decision making favoured by economists. To quote my friend Claire in Istanbul, sex is about 'conquest, fantasy, projection, infatuation, mood, anger, vanity, love, pissing off your parents, the risk of getting caught, the pleasure of cuddling afterwards, the thrill of having a secret, feeling desirable, feeling like a man, feeling like a woman, bragging to your mates the next day, getting to see what someone looks like naked and a million-and-one-other-things.' When sex isn't fun, it is often lucrative, or part of a bargain which gives you access to something you want or need. If HIV is spread by 'poverty and gender equality', how come countries that have plenty of both, such as Bangladesh, have virtually no HIV? How come South Africa and Botswana, which have the highest female literacy and per capita incomes in Africa, are awash with HIV, while countries that score low on both - such as Guinea, Somalia, Mali, and Sierra Leone - have epidemics that are negligible by comparison? How come in country after country across Africa itself, from Cameroon to Uganda to Zimbabwe and in a dozen other countries as well, HIV is lowest in the poorest households, and highest in the richest households? And how is it that in many countries, more educated women are more likely to be infested with HIV than women with no schooling? For all its cultural and political overtones, HIV is an infectious disease. Forgive me for thinking like an epidemiologist, but it seems to me that if we want to explain why there is more of it in one place than another, we should go back and take a look at the way it is spread.

Before her official rule began, Arawelo was already used to doing work traditionally meant for men. When she was younger, and drought and famine roundhouse-kicked her kingdom, she organized a group of women to fetch water and hunt, the sort of physical labor usually done exclusively by men. When she officially took power, Arawelo was ready to shake things up. Citing the past decades of war that had stricken Somalia as evidence that men break everything they touch, she packed her government with women. "NEVER HAVE CONFIDENCE IN ANY MAN." Under Arawelo, girls ran the world, and their men stayed home, took care of the children, and cleaned.

In explaining this Somalia-to-Sweden continuum, with poor violent repressive unhappy countries at one end and rich peaceful liberal happy ones at the other, correlation is not causation, and other factors like education, geography, history, and culture may play roles.60 But when the quants try to tease them apart, they find that economic development does seem to be a major mover of human welfare.61 In an old academic joke, a dean is presiding over a faculty meeting when a genie appears and offers him one of three wishes—money, fame, or wisdom. The dean replies, “That’s easy. I’m a scholar. I’ve devoted my life to understanding. Of course I’ll

Reportage is violence. Violence to the spirit. Violence to the emotional sympathy that should quicken in you and me when face to face we meet with pain. How many defeated among our own do we step over and push aside on our way home to watch the evening news? "Terrible" you said at Somalia, Bosnia, Ethiopia, Russia, China, the Indian earthquake, the American floods, and then you watched a quiz show or a film because there's nothing you can do, nothing you can do, and the fear and unease that such powerlessness brings, trails in its wash, a dead arrogance for the beggar on the bridge that you pass every day. Hasn't he got legs and a cardboard box to sleep in? And still we long to feel.

Their concerns seemed realized just a week later, when Trump continued the process of destabilizing the government to push an authoritarian agenda. At 4:42 p.m. on January 27, the administration announced a travel ban on people coming from primarily Muslim countries. Executive Order 13769 stopped travel from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen for 90 days. The list of countries appeared random—Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, countries from which terrorists have sometimes come directly to the U.S., weren’t on the list—and appeared to fulfill a campaign promise and assert a new view of executive power. It also stopped the admission of refugees for 120 days and suspended the Syrian refugee program.

It is critical to recognize that we live in an increasingly complex world - biologically, socially, politically, technologically, you name it - that holds many inherent contradictions. In the middle of this complex world are we humans, who have a natural tendency to seek coherence in what we see, feel, think, and do. When we experience conflict, this tendency intensifies. Conflict is essentially a contradiction, an incompatibility, oppositely directed forces, and a difference that triggers tension. When we encounter conflict, within the field of forces that constitute it, the natural human tendency is to reduce that tension by seeking coherence through simplification. Research shows that this tendency toward simplification becomes even more intensified when we are under stress, threat, time constraints, fatigue, and various other conditions all absolutely typical of conflict. So what is the big idea? It is NOT that coherence is bad and complexity is good. Coherence seeking is simply a necessary and functional process that helps us interpret and respond to our world efficiently and (hopefully) effectively. And complexity in extremes is a nightmare - think of Mogadishu, Somalia, in the 1990s or the financial crisis of 2009 or Times Square during rush hour on a Friday afternoon. On the other hand, too much coherence can be just as pathological: for example, the collapse of the nuances and contradictions inherent in any conflict situation into simple 'us versus them' terms, or a deep commitment to a rigid understanding of conflicts based on past sentiments and obsolete information. Either extreme - overwhelming complexity or oversimplified coherence - is problematic. But in difficult, long-term conflicts, the tide pulls fiercely toward simplification of complex realities. This is what we must content with.

Why Westerners are so obsessed with "saving" Africa, and why this obsession so often goes awry? Western countries should understand that Africa’s development chances and social possibilities remain heavily hindered due to its overall mediocre governance. Africa rising is still possible -- but first Africans need to understand that the power lies not just with the government, but the people. I do believe, that young Africans have the will to "CHANGE" Africa. They must engage their government in a positive manner on issues that matters -- I also realize that too many of the continent’s people are subject to the kinds of governments that favor ruling elites rather than ordinary villagers and townspeople. These kind of behavior trickles down growth. In Zimbabwe Robert Mugabe is the problem. In South Africa the Apartheid did some damage. The country still wrestles with significant racial issues that sometimes leads to the murder of its citizens. In Ethiopia, Somalia and Kenya the world’s worst food crisis is being felt. In Libya the West sends a mixed messages that make the future for Libyans uncertain. In Nigeria oil is the biggest curse. In Liberia corruption had make it very hard for the country to even develop. Westerners should understand that their funding cannot fix the problems in Africa. African problems can be fixed by Africans. Charity gives but does not really transform. Transformation should come from the root, "African leadership." We have a PHD, Bachelors and even Master degree holders but still can't transform knowledge. Knowledge in any society should be the power of transformation. Africa does not need a savior and western funds, what Africa needs is a drive towards ownership of one's destiny. By creating a positive structural system that works for the majority. There should be needs in dealing with corruption, leadership and accountability.

The figures for 2002 are even more surprising. Out of 57 million dead, only 172,000 people died in war and 569,000 died of violent crime (a total of 741,000 victims of human violence). In contrast, 873,000 people committed suicide.5 It turns out that in the year following the 9/11 attacks, despite all the talk of terrorism and war, the average person was more likely to kill himself than to be killed by a terrorist, a soldier or a drug dealer. In the decentralised kingdoms of medieval Europe, about twenty to forty people were murdered each year for every 100,000 inhabitants. In recent decades, when states and markets have become all-powerful and communities have vanished, violence rates have dropped even further. Today the global average is only nine murders a year per 100,000 people, and most of these murders take place in weak states such as Somalia and Colombia. In the centralised states of Europe, the average is one murder a year per 100,000 people.

More often, I’d meet people like Brett Favre. Not literally like Brett Favre, in the sense that they were forty-year-old football players, but that they were people who loved Wisconsin but couldn’t find a way to make it work there, took off for NewYork, crashed and burned, and then found a home for themselves here in the City of Lakes. Minneapolis is where the drama queens and burnouts and weirdos and misfits of the rural and suburban Upper Midwest wind up. It’s a city full of people who, though they’d never say it, secretly suspect they don’t belong here, that they’re not Minneapolis enough, because they didn’t go to a city high school, or because they didn’t hang out at First Avenue when they were teenagers, or because they came from the suburbs, or from outstate.They came from the Iron Range or Fargo–Moorhead or Bloomington or White Bear Lake or Collegeville, or from Chicago or California or the Pacific Northwest or Mexico or Somalia. Wherever they came from, Minneapolis is their home now, and it belongs to them. It belongs to us.

Who do I write for? I thought about this again and again over the next few days until the answer crystalized in my consciousness. I write for all readers. But my primary interest is in representing the complex but universal experience of Somalis. I do this because the media representation of the global Somali community is one that is carved out of derivative clichés crammed with pirates, warlords, terrorists, passive women and girls whose entire existence seems to be nothing more than a footnote on the primitive dangers of female genital mutilation. I write because I want to give a long-overdue voice to a community that has experienced a tremendous array of challenges but who constantly face these challenges with the most wicked sense of humour, humility and dignity. My father always used to tell me that in our culture, the done thing when you’re facing hardship and your belly is empty is to moisturize your face, comb your hair, press your clothes and step out into the sun with your sense of humanity intact. It’s a lesson I’ve carried with me to this day.

During the same hours of 1993 when the chopper crews in Somalia were slowly being overpowered and gunned down, there were twenty-four young boys back in the United States who would grow up to be future players in that African struggle. They had no way to know anything yet about the unique fighting group every one of them would eventually strive with all his determination to join. They also couldn’t know, though they would one day find out in person, that this particular battle corps is so elite, the candidate must first be a Navy SEAL just to attempt to get through the training - and even then, three out of four of those superb warrior-athletes fail to qualify. The group has had numerous military names during its long rise from the murky history of the early “frogmen” swimmers, to the black operations of the Underwater Demolition Teams whose only calling card was to render their targets dead, to the latest appellation as the U.S. Naval Special Warfare Development Group - or DEVGRU, for those who prefer names ugly and short. But the group is better known to the general public as the near-mythical warriors of “SEAL Team Six.” Their complex training supports a brilliantly simple task: to be the very last thing their opponents see, if they are ever seen at all.

Ryan was complex—he was big-hearted and caring but also resolute and direct. He once e-mailed me an audio clip of a television news interview he gave after a group of Navy SEALs rescued the captain of the Maersk Alabama tanker ship. Pirates had taken the ship and the captain hostage off the coast of Somalia, Africa. The story was later made into the film Captain Phillips, starring Tom Hanks. A team of Navy SEAL snipers shot and killed all but one of the hostage takers, who had placed themselves and their hostage in a desperate situation. Ryan told the TV reporter, “Despite what your momma told you, violence does solve problems.”1 I understood exactly what Ryan meant—there was no diplomatic or political solution to the crisis, and allowing pirates to take American vessels and crews hostage would set a bad precedent in other parts of the globe. Weeks before, in fact, the pirates had killed other hostages. Ryan’s statement was in no way meant to be bravado; he was merely conveying the fact that many times violence brings about a successful conclusion to a hostage crisis. The SEALs spoke the only language that the Somali pirates understood: violence. Apparently, the SEALs’ response acted as a deterrent, since the Somali pirates have consequently stayed clear of US flagged vessels. Chris Kyle later turned Ryan’s statement into a patch he wore on his hat.

If you proprose the idea of anarchism to a roomful of ordinary people, someone will almost inevitably object: but of course we can’t eliminate the state, prisons, and police. If we do, people will simply start killing one another. To most, this seems simple common sense. The odd thing about this prediction is that it can be empirically tested; in fact, it frequently has been empirically tested. And it turns out to be false. True, there are one or two cases like Somalia, where the state broke down when people were already in the midst of a bloody civil war, and warlords did not immediately stop killing each other when it happened (though in most respects, even in Somalia, a worst-case hypothesis, education, health, and other social indicators had actually improved twenty years after the dissolution of the central state!). And of course we hear about the cases like Somalia for the very reason that violence ensues. But in most cases, as I myself observed in parts of rural Madagascar, very little happens. Obviously, statistics are unavailable, since the absence of states generally also means the absence of anyone gathering statistics. However, I’ve talked to many anthropologists and others who’ve been in such places and their accounts are surprisingly similar. The police disappear, people stop paying taxes, otherwise they pretty much carry on as they had before. Certainly, they do not break into a Hobbesian "war of all against all." (p. 206)

The DUCE diverted funds intended for the Fiume adventure, and used them for His own election campaign. He was arrested for the illegal possession of arms, sent parcel bombs to the Archbishop of Milan and its mayor, and after election was, as is well-known, responsible for the assassination of Di Vagno and Matteoti. Since then He has been responsible for the murders of Don Mizzoni Amendola, the Rosselli brothers, and the journalist Piero Gobetti, quite apart from the hundreds who have been the victims of His squadistri in Ferrara, Ravenna and Trieste, and the thousands who have perished in foreign places whose conquest was useless and pointless. We Italians remain eternally grateful for this, and consider that so much violence has made us a superior race, just as the introduction of revolvers into Parliament and the complete destruction of constitutional democracy have raised our institutions to the greatest possible heights of civilisation. Since the illegal seizure of power, Italy has known an average of five acts of political violence per diem, the DUCE has decreed that 1922 is the new Annus Domini, and He was pretended to be a Catholic in order to dupe the Holy Father into supporting Him against the Communists, even though He really is one Himself. He has completely suborned the press by wrecking the premises of dissident newspapers and journals. In 1923 he invaded Corfu for no apparent reason, and was forced to withdraw by the League of Nations. In 1924 He gerrymandered the elections, and He has oppressed minorities in the Tyrol and the North-East. He sent our soldiers to take part in the rape of Somalia and Libya, drenching their hands in the blood of innocents, He has doubled the number of the bureaucracy in order to tame the bourgeoisie, He has abolished local government, interfered with the judiciary, and purportedly has divinely stopped the flow of lava on Mt Etna by a mere act of will. He has struck Napoleonic attitudes whilst permitting Himself to be used to advertise Perugina chocolates, He has shaved his head because He is ashamed to be seen to be going bald, He has been obliged to hire a tutor to teach Him table manners, He has introduced the Roman salute as a more hygienic alternative to the handshake, He pretends not to need spectacles, He has a repertoire of only two facial expression, He stands on a concealed podium whilst making speeches because He is so short, He pretends to have studied economics with Pareto, and He has assumed infallibility and encouraged the people to carry His image in marches, as though He were a saint. He is a saint, of course. He has (and who are we to disagree?) declared Himself greater than Aristotle, Kant, Aquinas, Dante, Michelangelo, Washington, Lincoln, and Bonaparte, and He has appointed ministers to serve Him who are all sycophants, renegades, racketeers, placemen, and shorter than He is. He is afraid of the Evil Eye and has abolished the second person singular as a form of address. He has caused Toscanini to be beaten up for refusing to play 'Giovinezza', and He has appointed academicians to prove that all great inventions were originally Italian and that Shakespeare was the pseudonym of an Italian poet. He has built a road through the site of the forum, demolishing fifteen ancient churches, and has ordered a statue of Hercules, eighty metres high, which will have His own visage, and which so far consists of a part of the face and one gigantic foot, and which cannot be completed because it has already used up one hundred tons of metal.

Si dalkiinu uu meel sare u gaaro, oo u noqdo mid mar kale horumar ku tilaabsada, ka bilaaba in aad doorataan hogaamiye wanaagsan. Ha ogolaanina in warbaahinta iyo kuwa danaha-gaarka ah lehi ay idinku qasbaan in aad doorataan dadka ay ayagu idiin xuleen, balse doorta dadka aysan ayagu xulan. Dadka dhexdiisa ka doorta hogaamiyaha, oo ah mid uu wado wadnahiisu, mid isu arka in uu matalo shacabka dalka, ogna waxa dalku u baahan yahay dhinac walba. Ha dooranina hogaamiye lacag uun u socda, oo aan waxba ka ogayn shacabka, shacabkana aan xiriir la lahayn, balse kaliya og waxa shirkadahu u baahan yahiin. Doorta nabaddoon. Mid dadka mideeya, ee aan qaybin. Hogaamiye aqoon leh oo taageera dhaqanka iyo xoriyadda figrad-dhhiibashada; oo aan ahayn mid dadka afka qabta. Doorta hogaamiye maalgaliya iskuulada, oo aan joojin maalgalinta waxbarashada, una ogolaanayn in maktabadahu xirmaan. Doorta hogaamiye wadahadal ka doorta in la dagaalo. Hogaamiye dadnimo leh, mid dhahaya waxuu aaminsan yahay, mid balanta ka soo baxa oo aan dadka been u sheegin. Doorta hogaamiye adag oo isku-kalsoon, laakiin aan kor isu qaadin. Mid caqli badan, laakiin aan dhagarow ahayn, hogaamiyo ogol kala duwanaanta oo aan cunsuri ahayn. Doorta hogaamiye maalgalinaya dhisidda buundooyin la isaga gudbo, ee aan dhisayn darbiyo dadka kala xira. Buugaag, maya hub, Daacadnimo, maya musuq-maasuq. Xigmad iyo aqoon, maya jahli, Xasilooni, maya baqdin iyo argagax. Nabad, maya burbur. Jacayl, maya nacayb, Isu-imaatin, maya kala qaybin. Dulqaad, maya cunsuriyayn, Daacadnimo, maya munaafaqnimo, Wax ku oolnimo, maya wax kama jiraan, Dabeecad, maya maangaabnimo, Soo bandhigid, maya qarsasho, Cadaalad, maya sharcidaro, Run, maya been. Ugu danbayn, doorta hogaamiye dadkiisu ay ku farxayaan. Mid dhaqaajinaya qalbiyada dadka, si ay wiilasha iyo gabdhaha qaranku ugu dadaalaan in ay ku daydaan sharafta hogaamiyaha qaranka. Markaas oo qura ayaa qaran si fiican kor ugu kici karaa, marka hogaamiye dhiirigaliyo, soona saaro muwaadiniin u qalma in ay noqdaan hogaamiyayaasha mustaqbalka, maamulayaal qiimo badan iyo nabaddoono. Waqtiyada hadda lagu jirana, hogaamiye waa in uu noqdo mid dhiiran. Hogaankoodu waa inuu ku adeego daacadnimo, mana aha inay u shaqeeyaan laaluush. Suzy Kassem, waana gabar qoraa Mareykan ah kana soo jeeda Masar, waa na faylasuuf.

By the time Jessica Buchanan was kidnapped in Somalia on October 25, 2011, the twenty-four boys back in America who had been so young during the 1993 attack on the downed American aid support choppers in Mogadishu had since grown to manhood. Now they were between the ages of twenty-three and thirty-five, and each one had become determined to qualify for the elite U.S. Navy unit called DEVGRU. After enlisting in the U.S. Navy and undergoing their essential basic training, every one of them endured the challenges of BUDS (Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL) training, where the happy goal is to become “drownproofed” via what amounts to repeated semidrowning, while also learning dozens of ways to deliver explosive death and demolition. This was only the starting point. Once qualification was over and the candidates were sworn in, three-fourths of the qualified Navy SEALS who tried to also qualify for DEVGRU dropped out. Those super-warriors were overcome by the challenges, regardless of their peak physical condition and being in the prime of their lives. This happened because of the intensity of the training. Long study and practice went into developing a program specifically designed to seek out and expose any individual’s weakest points. If the same ordeals were imposed on captured terrorists who were known to be guilty of killing innocent civilians, the officers in charge would get thrown in the brig. Still, no matter how many Herculean physical challenges are presented to a DEVGRU candidate, the brutal training is primarily mental. It reveals each soldier’s principal foe to be himself. His mortal fears and deepest survival instinct emerge time after time as the essential demons he must overcome. Each DEVGRU member must reach beyond mere proficiency at dealing death. He must become two fighters combined: one who is trained to a state of robotic muscle memory in specific dark skills, and a second who is fluidly adaptive, using an array of standard SEAL tactics. Only when he can live and work from within this state of mind will he be trusted to pursue black operations in every form of hostile environment. Therefore the minority candidate who passes into DEVGRU becomes a member of the “Tier One” Special Mission Unit. He will be assigned to reconnaissance or assault, but his greatest specialty will always be to remain lethal in spite of rapidly changing conditions. From the day he is accepted into that elite tribe, he embodies what is delicately called “preemptive and proactive counterterrorist operations.” Or as it might be more bluntly described: Hunt them down and kill them wherever they are - and is possible, blow up something. Each one of that small percentage who makes it through six months of well-intended but malicious torture emerges as a true human predator. If removing you from this world becomes his mission, your only hope of escaping a DEVGRU SEAL is to find a hiding place that isn’t on land, on the sea, or in the air.

clearly could. Nor is this to say that Somalia is better off stateless than it would be under any government. A constitutionally constrained state with limited powers to do harm but strong enough to support the private sector may very well do more for Somalia than statelessness can. Further, Somalia's improvement under anarchy doesn't tell

Like Katie Hopkins, prime minister David Cameron described migrants as a ‘swarm’. Foreign secretary Philip Hammond called them marauders bent on overrunning European civilisation. Home secretary Theresa May frequently scoffed at any suggestion that they might simply be seeking safety. Interviewed on Today, BBC radio’s flagship current affairs programme, May said, ‘People talk about refugees, but actually if you look at those crossing the central Mediterranean, the largest number of people are those from countries such as Nigeria, Somalia and Eritrea. These are economic migrants.

The last naturally occurring case was reported in Somalia in 1977,

Home is where you need to be, not where you were born.

birthday. Step out of a car in many areas of the eastern Congo during the war, and you were often confronted with children suffering from kwashikor, or clinical malnutrition. It was a bizarre sight to see such listless children surrounded by lush hills. Congo is not Niger or Somalia, where famine and malnutrition are closely linked to drought. Here,

Parents in extreme poverty need many children for the reasons I set out earlier: for child labor but also to have extra children in case some children die. It is the countries with the highest child mortality rates, like Somalia, Chad, Mali, and Niger, where women have the most babies: between five and eight. Once parents see children survive, once the children are no longer needed for child labor, and once the women are educated and have information about and access to contraceptives, across cultures and religions both the men and the women instead start dreaming of having fewer, well-educated children.

The ‘atrocities’ that are occurring or are alleged to have occurred in Israel are overshadowed by the myriads of killings of innocents in Syria, Somalia, Rwanda, Sudan, Egypt, Afghanistan and Iraq to name a few. So what makes this particular conflict so outstanding? The most logical explanation is that the Arab-Israeli conflict is not about land, occupation, politics, or a dispute over historical legitimacy and ownership of a tiny corner of real estate -especially one that lays within a sea of sand and has virtually no natural resources. This conflict is rooted in a much more encompassing issue: it is the battle between Islam and Judaism. Judaism and Islam are indeed at odds.

She compares up, to the First World, where privileges are treated as rights. I compare down, to the apocalyptic Africa that presses in around us, where rights are only for the privileged. After covering wars in Mozambique, Angola, Uganda, Somalia, and Sudan, Zimbabwe feels to me like Switzerland.

During his first month in office, Trump excluded some prominent reporters from a press briefing. Almost immediately, the government of Cambodia threatened to kick a contingent of American journalists out of its country. Spokesmen in Phnom Penh said they perceived a “clear message” from Trump that “news broadcast by those media outlets does not reflect the truth,” adding that “Freedom of expression . . . must respect the state’s power.” Cambodia’s was the first of many governments—others include those of Hungary, Libya, Poland, Russia, Somalia, and Thailand—to insist that negative stories about them are false for no reason except that the press cannot be trusted. According to the People’s Daily, the house organ of the Chinese Communist Party: “If the president of the United States claims that his nation’s media outlets are a stain on America, then negative stories about China should be taken with a grain of salt, since it is likely that the bias and political agenda are distorting the real picture.” The ability of a free and independent press to hold political leaders accountable is what makes open government possible—it is the heartbeat of democracy. Trump is intent on stilling, or slowing down, that heartbeat. This is a gift to dictators, and coming from a chief executive of the United States, cause for shame.

The ten most violent countries in the world in 2014 – Syria, Afghanistan, South Sudan, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Pakistan and North Korea – are all among the least capitalist. The ten most peaceful – Iceland, Denmark, Austria, New Zealand, Switzerland, Finland, Canada, Japan, Belgium and Norway – are all firmly capitalist.

So we, God’s servants, go, our Master’s invitation in our hands, out to the highways and hedges. We walk through squalid refugee camps in Syria, fetid open-air trash dumps in Mozambique, drug-infested smoky brothels in Bangkok. We go because deep in the Pamir Mountains of Tajikistan and out on the dusty plains of Iraq, there are people whom God wants to come to His feast. There are people hidden away in small villages in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan who belong at God’s table. There are women in Somalia; street kids in Portland, Oregon; girls in northern Nigeria; and men in Chechnya and a thousand other places who belong in God’s house. God sees them, every one of them, people drawing water from open wells, drinking tea in mud houses, scheming evil in dark camps, hiding from violence in rough caves. He knows their names and faces and voices and laughter and tears. He knows their fears and dreams and joys and sorrows. He was there when they were born, when they fell down, and when they got up—and He wants to share the blessings of all He has with them. This is the heart of God—generous, loving, kind, patient—always ready to bless. He’s prepared His table from the foundations of the earth, and there is still room.

In the Horn of Africa, a famine had created a terrible humanitarian crisis. Millions of people were starving. There were images of potbellied children with shrunken limbs and dazed eyes. The Islamist extremist group, Al-Shabab, had banned international food relief efforts in the areas of Somalia they controlled. For some reason, Scorpion couldn’t take his eyes off the images of the starving children. Later that afternoon, he boarded the Alitalia flight to Rome. It was a short flight, just over an hour. By the time he landed at Fiumicino airport, he knew what he was going to do.

In 2000, the National Gallery in London put on a millennial exhibition entitled “Seeing Salvation.” That was a case in point—especially remembering that European countries tend to be far more “secularized” than the United States. It consisted mostly of artists’ depictions of Jesus’s crucifixion. Many critics sneered. All those old paintings about someone being tortured to death! Why did we need to look at rooms full of such stuff? Fortunately, the general public ignored the critics and turned up in droves to see works of art, which, like the crucifixion itself, seem to carry a power beyond theory and beyond suspicion. The Gallery’s director, Neil McGregor, moved from that role to become director of the British Museum, a job he did with great distinction and effect for the next decade. The final piece he acquired in the latter capacity, before moving to a similar position in Berlin, was a simple but haunting cross made from fragments of a small boat. The boat, which been carrying refugees from Eritrea and Somalia, was wrecked off the coast of the Italian island of Lampedusa, south of Sicily, on October 3, 2013. Of the 500 people on board, 349 drowned. A local craftsman, Francesco Tuccio, was deeply distressed that nothing more could have been done to save people, and he made several crosses out of fragments of the wrecked vessel. One was carried by Pope Francis at the memorial service for the survivors. The British Museum contacted Mr. Tuccio, and he made a cross especially for the museum, thanking the authorities there for drawing attention to the suffering that this small wooden object would symbolize. Why the cross rather than anything else?

No one wants to admit that the temporary camp of Dadaab has become permanent: not the Kenyan government who must host it, not the UN who must pay for it, and not the refugees who must live there. This paradox makes the ground unsteady. Caught between the ongoing war in Somalia and a world unwilling to welcome them, the refugees can only survive in the camp by imagining a life elsewhere. It is unsettling: neither the past, nor the present, nor the future is a safe place for a mind to linger for long. To live in this city of thorns is to be trapped mentally, as well as physically, your thoughts constantly flickering between impossible dreams and a nightmarish reality. In short, to come here you must be completely desperate.

After so much death, it was a wonder anyone remained in the country at all. No one really knows the population of Somalia but, during the past twenty years, somewhere between one third and one half of the six-to-eight million inhabitants had fled their homes. There were over one and a half million refugees abroad, many of them in the camps of Dadaab. The people who still lived in Somalia were the ones without the bus fare to flee, the ones with property to guard or money to make, or the ones who had simply lost their minds. Many were afraid to take the risk of running into the unknown and held to the adage, ‘better the devil you know’. Many more were so inured to the roulette of war, it had simply become the landscape of life. Guled was one of these.

Using steel-pronged drag fishing nets, these foreign trawlers did not bother with nimble explorations of the reefs: they uprooted them, netting the future livelihood of the nearby coastal people along with the day’s catch. Through their rapacious destruction of the reefs, foreign drag-fishers wiped out the lobster breeding grounds. Today, according to Boyah, there are no more lobsters to be found in the waters off Eyl.

I tried to explain to the NSC officials my own wonder at this teeming ramshackle metropolis with cinemas, football leagues, hotels and hospitals, and to emphasize that, contrary to what they might expect, a large portion of the refugees are extremely pro-American. I said that the Kenyan security forces, underwritten by US and British money, weapons and training, were going about things in the wrong way: rounding up refugees, raping and extorting them, encouraging them to return to war-racked Somalia.

Leon Panetta, ehemaliger CIA-Chef und Verteidigungsminister von 2011 bis 2013, kommentierte den Beginn der amerikanischen Luftangriffe auf IS-Stellungen im Irak im August 2014 mit den Worten: «Ich denke, wir stehen vor einem neuen 30-jährigen Krieg.» Und ergänzte: «Dieser Krieg wird über den Islamischen Staat hinausgehen und sich neuen Gefahrengebieten in Nigeria, Somalia, Jemen, Libyen und sonstwo zuwenden.» Im Klartext: Wir führen Krieg ohne zeitliche oder räumliche Begrenzung, wann und wo wir es für erforderlich halten. Egal, welche Folgen es für die betreffenden Regionen und die dort lebenden Menschen hat. Der amerikanische Enthüllungsjournalist Glenn Greenwald meint: «Es ist mittlerweile nicht mehr vorstellbar, dass sich die USA nicht im Krieg befinden. Das wäre eine Sensation, wenn das noch zu unseren Lebzeiten geschehen sollte. Regierungsbeamte sagen es ganz offen: Der Begriff ‹endloser Krieg› ist keine rhetorische Floskel, sondern eine präzise Zustandsbeschreibung amerikanischer Außenpolitik. Warum, ist nicht schwer zu verstehen. Ein endloser Krieg rechtfertigt Geheimniskrämerei, den Machtzuwachs der Regierung und die Aushöhlung von Bürgerrechten. Gleichzeitig werden Steuermittel in gewaltiger Höhe in die ‹Homeland Security› und die Waffenindustrie gesteckt.»

Die Amerikaner haben, unter anderem in Somalia, in Afghanistan und im Irak, erfahren müssen, dass von ihnen initiierte oder befeuerte Kriege unter Einsatz von Bodentruppen kostspielig und die Folgewirkungen schwer zu kontrollieren sind. Auch mit Blick auf deren Legitimierung gegenüber der eigenen Bevölkerung. Deshalb fordern sie zunehmend «Bündnissolidarität» von ihren europäischen Partnern ein, um die eigenen Militärausgaben zu verringern und politische Verantwortung zu verlagern. Das Ideal Washingtons ist der «delegierte Krieg»: Europäer oder regionale Akteure, bis hin zu «guten» Dschihadisten, übernehmen, gewissermaßen im Franchise-Verfahren, Ordnungsaufgaben im Sinne der USA.

After almost seven months in Baghdad, I set my sights on Somalia. The reasons to do it seemed straightforward. Somalia was a mess. There were stories there—a raging war, an impending famine, religious extremists, and a culture that had been largely shut out of sight. I understood that it was a hostile, dangerous place and few reporters dared go there. The truth was, I was glad for the lack of competition. I figured I could make a short visit and report from the edges of disaster. I’d do stories that mattered, that moved people—stories that would sell to the big networks. Then I’d move on to even bigger things.