The Real “Dirty Wars” in the Horn of Africa

When award winning journalist Jeremy Scahill landed at Mogadishu’s
International Airport in the summer of 2011 Somalia was in the midst
of its worst drought and famine in 60 years. Yet when Mr. Scahill
reported on his visit he seemed blissfully unaware of the hundreds of
Somalis that were starving to death every day not very many miles from
the hotel where he was staying.

He also didn’t write about the food and medical aid blockade being
imposed on Somalis next door in the Ogaden by the western supported
Ethiopian regime, something the International Federation of Jurists
(IFJ) has called “a genocide” and demanded the ICC prosecute.

The UN has admitted that at least 250,000 Somalis in Somalia proper
starved to death during the famine Jeremy Scahill landed in the midst
of, something I had predicted when I exposed that the UN, knowing full
well the extent of the drought, had budgeted less then 10 cents a day
for food to feed the starving.

The Great Horn of Africa Famine stared at the beginning of 2011 and
lasted about 2 years. 250,000 dead in Somalia from starvation equals
10,000 dying a month, 300 or more dying a day on average. And this
just in Somalia where there was aid being distributed. Next door in
the Ogaden, with a population of almost as many as in Somalia the same
famine was raging and no aid what so ever was being allowed.

Even Doctors Without Borders (MSF) and the Red Cross (ICRC) had been
expelled from the Ogaden by the Ethiopian Regime, the Prime Minister
of which was later eulogized at his funeral by none other than Susan
Rice, presently National Security Advisor to Barack Obama.

If Jeremy Scahill didn’t know about the hundreds that were dying from
starvation every day all around him when he was carrying out his
“investigative journalism” in Mogadishu in the summer of 2011 than the
question has to be asked “Why not?”

If he knew about this enormous crime against humanity and instead
chose to write about  “secret CIA prisons” and the murder of several
hundred via the USA’s drone assassination program in the Horn of
Africa, a much “sexier” topic, shouldn’t other investigative
journalists be questioning his priorities? Genocide or drones, what’s
more important?

Today Mr. Scahill picks up a paycheck signed by Pierre Omidyar who
persists in trying to rape the lush tropical hillside overlooking
Hanalei Bay on Kauai, Hawaii by developing multimillion dollar estates
for his fellow 1%.

The real dirty wars in Africa remain unknown to the worlds peoples,
thanks in part to a smokescreen, how ever blissfully ignorant or well
intended, about drones and high tech murders that diverted attention
from the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Africans, whose
“expiration by starvation” was  sanctioned by the highest levels of
the Obama White House.