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07/25/2008: "Somali Killings of Aid Workers Imperil Relief"
At a time of drought, skyrocketing food prices, crippling inflation and intensifying street fighting, many of the aid workers whom millions of Somalis depend on for survival are fleeing their posts or in some cases the country.
They are being driven out by what appears to be an organized terror campaign. Ominous leaflets recently surfaced on the bullet-pocked streets of Mogadishu, Somalia's ruin of a capital, calling aid workers "infidels" and warning them that they will be methodically hunted down. Since January, at least 20 aid workers have been killed, more than in any year in recent memory. Still others have been abducted.
The deliberate assault on aid workers is a chilling new dimension to the crisis in Somalia that has unfolded over the past 17 years but has grown increasingly violent as outside forces, including the United States military, have turned a civil war into a more international conflict.
United Nations officials are especially worried by the recent attacks because they say Somalia is heading toward another full-blown famine. Without professional workers to distribute food or tend to the sick, the country could sink into a catastrophe reminiscent of the early 1990s, when hundreds of thousands of people starved.
[ This is great news. Somalia needs to sort out its own problems without the interfering of other nations, whether the aim is philanthropic or plain exploitation. The world is also overpopulated and Somalians need to reduce to a sustainable level. ]
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/20/world/africa/20somalia.html?_r=2&th&emc=th&oref=slogin&oref=slogin