A baby named Luck - relief efforts for Somalia - Editorial

The aftermath of war, like the aftermath of a great natural disaster, produces a numbing stream of displaced, bewildered people. So it is now at the end of the cold war. While surrogate East-West conflicts have cooled, fierce civil and ethnic conflicts have flamed, startling in both their cruelty and their profusion. U.S. News & World Report (November 30) estimates that as the result of the cold war and post-cold wars there are now 18 million refugees in foreign lands and 23 million "displaced persons" in their own countries. In Somalia, on the Horn of Africa, an estimated 2 million of its 8 million people are exiles and 2 million more at home are threatened with starvation. Over 300,000 Somalis have perished in the past year-and-a-half from famine and civil war; the social cohesion of the country is utterly shredded. Whatever power holds sway issues from the muzzle of the gun. It is a power administered increasingly by teen-agers in search of their next meal. Even international relief agencies have been victimized: their supplies stolen and bartered elsewhere for weapons, their vehicles commandeered, their personnel threatened and murdered.

And yet in the last weeks there has developed a flicker of hope for Somalia. In November UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, remarking that the task facing the UN in Somalia was nothing less than "the reconstruction of the entire society and nation," called on the world community for suggestions on how to deal with Somalia's collapse. In response, President George Bush proposed sending up to 30,000 U.S. troops to police the country and to insure the distribution of critical food supplies; and later the White House floated the idea of establishing a temporary UN protectorate in Somalia. It may prove to be one of Bush's finest acts.

Yet neither these headline events nor the searing television coverage of the starving Somalis prepared us for the impact of a small photographic exhibit we saw recently at the UN General Assembly Hall. Titled "The Cry of Somalia," the exhibit is made up of fifty-six photographs, some in color, some black and white, contributed by twenty-three photojournalists. The exhibit tells the story, uninhibitcd and undiluted, of the human tragedy of Somalia.

We viewed the exhibit in the company of an American missionary recently returned from the Horn of Africa. There were represented rural scenes of war, street-fighting cityscapes, and Somali refugee encampments in Kenya. There were wrenching scenes of grieving Somalis, the haunting face of mass starvation, and a joyous interlude of boys at play. And there were guns--too many guns. The exhibit, our companion said, in no way exaggerated conditions. To us that was alarming; to her it was reassuring. Photographs can lie, but these, she said, are true.

* In one exquisitely colored photograph, for example, taken outside a food distribution center that had just run out of supplies, a long line of people wait for the food that will not now come. Our companion had been forced to turn people away at a dispensary not long ago. She said it had been one of the hardest moments of her life.

* There was a photograph of a frantic young wife, her right palm extended over her dying husband's forehead, her left arm gripping their infant and simultaneously reaching up to her own face, her left hand extending from her open, wailing mouth to her ear in a gesture of abject grief. Our friend had seen this exact expression of despair.

* A young man in a crude operating room, his arms extended as if on a cross, writhes on a gurney of blood and tissue as three attendants struggle to extract shrapnel from his contorted body. Our friend had assisted a similar young man not many months before. The young man had died.

* A boy of ten, his hair turning red, is seen carrying the living carcass of his three-year-old brother. The missioner was quite familiar with red hair and explained its significance: a telltale sign of malnutrition.

* And a group of boys at a refugee center, avidly playing with toy trucks made from food tins, pushing them with sticks, like Victorian children pushing hoops. Our companion described seeing such children, replenished from the food they had received in a refugee center, fashioning the tin for the wheels.

* And there were the madonnas. On the eve of Advent, they could not have been more poignant. There was one woman at a makeshift hospital in Baidoa. She held her two-day-old infant with the stump of her left arm as her right hand fell listlessly from the cot. The woman's left leg was missing entirely.

* There was a mother breastfeeding her child in a refugee center in Mogadishu (the capital); where it had not been shaved, the child's hair was red. This pair, a caption read, were lucky. They had arrived at an Australian center adequately equipped to help them.

* And finally, a baby being born on the road to Kenya. As the mother lay on the ground surrounded by five women, a Kenyan woman cut the umbilical cord with a knife lent by the photographer. The baby's name was "Luck."

Images alter our consciousness. In a true sense, they are sacramental. We may forget them, return to life as we habitually live it and know it; but somewhere in the accumulated growth rings of our psyche a searing mark remains. And given the longevity of memory, and its power, that burr may yet play its part in our lives and those of others.

The psalmist says the nations of the earth have conspired against the Lord and against his anointed. The anarchic powers in Somalia and the faint-hearted response of the rest of the world have conspired against the people of Somalia. Only now is the world beginning to act, impelled belatedly by Secretary General Boutros-Ghali and, perhaps, in some small way by the photo exhibit in the General Assembly Hall. The necessary steps to peace in Somalia should begin with the placement of UN-sponsored forces charged with disarming the warring factions and policing the country. Already several Somali warlords have sent out messages welcoming U.S. and UN forces.

In the fourth century, the Christian theologian and bishop, Saint Athanasius, compared the Incarnation itself to such an act of reordering and restoration. "You know how it is when some great king enters a large city and dwells in one of its houses; because of his dwelling in that single house, the whole city is honored, and enemies and robbers cease to molest it. Even so is it with the King of all; he has come into our country ... and put an end to death."

Somalia, Sudan, Bosnia, Cambodia, South Africa: all need such divine intervention now. But it will happen only if the world's people first open their eyes and hearts to prepare for it. There is no better season in which to begin.

COPYRIGHT 1992 Commonweal Foundation
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