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Submitted by najiaa on April 29, 2008
Category: English
Words: 1939 | Pages: 8
Views: 55
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Somalia has Internally Worsened since 1960s
In the summer of 1992, the emerging famine in Somalia seemed incomprehensible. The Seattle Times reported that since 1991 civil war, an estimated 100,000 people had perished. Of that number, approximately 45,000 Somalis died of starvation and related diseases in seven months (Johnston 2). This was Somalia’s despairing condition in the summer and late fall of 1992 (Johnston 11). Somalia has been in conflict and crisis since the 1970s as a result of starvation, anarchy, and feuds between clans.
Many scholars ask whether Somalia will be consumed by its own problems or if it will be able to unravel itself from the chaos that surrounds it and forge a new and strange nation as it enters the twenty-first century. Forty-four years after independence, Somalia should have been a country at peace with itself. But it is not. Still bleeding from wounds inflicted by the civil war of 1991, it has effectively split into several mini-states and fiefdoms. The northern region has seceded and declared itself as the sovereign republic of Somaliland.
For the first nine years of its life as an independent nation, Somalia had a democratically elected government that the international community hoped would serve as a model for other nations newly freed from their colonial rulers. On October 1969, President Abdirashiid Ali Shermarke was assassinated. Mohamed Siad Barre came to power in his place; ruled the country for twenty-one years, until the beginning of 1991, when he was overthrown. Barre changed Somalia dramatically. He got rid of the Natural Assembly, suspended the country’s constitution, and prohibited any form of political gathering (Hussien 10). Meanwhile, from 1978 to 1979, the region suffered a severe drought, the cost of living skyrocketed, and people could not afford to buy food or fuel. Somalis grew desperate. By the late 1980s it had become clear to many Somalis that Barre had neither the skills nor...
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