In the News: The U.S. Role in Somalia’s Ongoing Humanitarian Saga

posted by Bangirana Albert, Cilas Kemedjio, and Cecelia Lynch

George Monbiot, in a piece for The Guardian, with the incendiary title of “The careless, astonishing cruelty of Barack Obama’s government,” argues against what seems to be the inhumane currency control measure instituted by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) – a US federal agency tasked to prevent currency inflows into Somalia.

“The US, it seems couldn’t care less if it causes a humanitarian crisis in Somalia, one of the world’s poorest countries” says George Monbiot.

The US treasury emphasizes that such monies could be fueling terrorism in the region. However, with such remittances accounting for almost 50% of Somalia’s GDP – a surmountable percentage sustaining many vulnerable Somalis, such a move could trigger a national humanitarian catastrophe or even perpetuate what the US desperately intends to prevent – terrorism. This is because remittances help pay for not only immediate supplies such as food, but also get money circulating in the economy, which produces jobs for people who would otherwise be unemployed.

However, we suggest taking Monbiot’s analysis even further. In this case, the very act of welcoming Somalis and other Africans (irrelevant of their actual legal status) in the U.S., Britain, and elsewhere in the so-called developed world, is assumed to be an act of generosity, a humanitarian gesture. When the unsuspecting benefactor allows the immigrant to send money home, it is then another humanitarian act. We forget, however, all of the money that travels from Africa to the West, in terms of servicing African debt, prohibitively-priced airline tickets for families to re-unite from time-to-time, and imports. In constructing remittances only as enabled by such “humanitarian” acts, we ignore the control wielded by the benefactor in permitting or closing off the funding spigot. In this case, moreover, the spigot is shut off because of conditions that the “benefactor” (the U.S.) had a large role in creating: the destruction of the Islamic Courts in 2006 and the subsequent rise of Al-Shabaab. Given this background, Monbiot is right to condemn the blocking of remittances, but we need to ask harder questions about the assumptions regarding remittances and the hardships people endure through their creation.