Robert Murdoch's newspaper, Times of London, published this disgusting "cartoon:"
titled ‘Priorities,’ depicts three naked, skeletal, alien-like, supposedly Somali children with bloated bellies clutching empty bowls, in desperate need of food. In the cartoon, one of the aliens downplays the severity of the phone-hacking scandal, saying: “I’ve had a bellyful of phone hacking.”
Twenty-one professors from 7 leading UK universities blasted Murdoch for using "racist caricatures." The newspaper responded that there was no racism, just a "misinterpreted" cartoon. It should be noted that the cartoonist, Peter Brookes, did a prior cartoon for The Times on July 5th (that I have not been able to find), showing a "hollow-faced African framed in the map of Africa, with his mouth opened wide for food."
Ostensibly, this "cartoon" mocked the press for covering his scandal while ignoring the famine and drought crisis in East Africa. The media's lack of values, as reflected in its substantive and quantitative coverage of news, are a valid point, and thus some gave him a pass. Why? That point should have been made without resorting to an offensive, abominable "cartoon" that belittles and dehumanizes people suffering the crisis in East Africa. However, if the newspaper wanted to make this point, why did they not practice what they preached?
In the past week [of July 25th – "cartoon" published July 21st], while The Times ran only three stories about Somalia’s predicament, they published at least 239 news stories relating to the phone-hacking scandal.
Murdoch simply wanted to try to save his ass by any means possible. A few conservative members of Parliament expressed concern that the phone hacking scandal distracted people from more important issues, such as this famine crisis. The next day, Murdoch's paper grabbed onto this opportunity and published this "cartoon," exploiting human suffering to create misdirection from his own self-created legal troubles.
As the University professors stated:
At best hypocritical, since Murdoch's publications do little to support aid to Somalia or other African countries at times of crisis, at worst, inhuman, it is clear to us that nobody who genuinely cares about the lives of men, women and children, in a country subject to worsening conflict, drought and famine, could fail to react to this cartoon with anything but shock and anger.
While Murdoch exploits this crisis, "many mothers have lost three or four children."
Death is devastating. But the decisions forced on parents in this crisis are ones that no one should ever have to make.
Drought dried up grasses, leaving cattle and goats with no pasture or water as the rivers and ponds turned to cracked land. A family's animals were transformed into "walking skeletons" or "moving carcasses," identified as cattle only because they still have their horns, but they are weakened and die. The "carcasses of dead animals litter the side of the sandy road, their flesh baked so dry in the sun that vultures do not bother to pick at the meat."
At some point, families -- facing no food, water and income -- must decide whether to stay or walk for weeks to try to reach an aid camp. One family decided that the mother, Qadija Ali, would walk with her 9 children for what became a 16-day journey to Mogadishu while her husband stayed behind in their village to protect their home. Ali's family was "one of the well-off ones in the region, where ownership of numerous livestock, the mainstay of a rural economy, is a sign of wealth." They had 50 head of cattle, 20 goats and 5 camels before the drought hit them for two years.
For other families, the parents must make the unimaginable, anguished decision of whether to leave a child behind who is too weak for the long journey to aid camps in hopes of saving their other children. No one should be placed in this position.
There are even stories of children being left behind because they were too weak to move. These were the “sacrifices” many families had to make in order to save their other children.
If the family is able to leave together for their long journey to reach aid, the difficult trip in the heat without food and water turns the roads to aid into the roads of death:
On the road between the Kenyan and Somali border lie the dead bodies of children who have succumbed to the famine and the hardships of making the journey from their drought-stricken villages to Kenya.
And it is the story of these children who die between Somali’s southern town of Dobley, which is the last border town before crossing into Kenya, that is yet to be told, aid workers say.
Parents, weak and dying from starvation, must continue the journey after their children fall down on the road to die.
He says he sees droves of mostly women and children attempting to cross the border to Kenya. But when the children become too weak to walk any longer, they just fall down on the roadside while their mothers and families, half dead with starvation, continue to walk on in an attempt to reach the border and hopefully, aid.
"It is a shocking image to see (children) on the brink of death, their skin sagging from extreme dehydration, their frame too small for their height, their lips dry. They don’t talk, they just lie there.
"(Their) eyes sink into their sockets, but still they stare back at you. It is very disturbing. You think the others are heartless for abandoning them, but they too are in the same physical shape. Only the will to reach Dadaab keeps them going," Khalif explains.
U.N. aid officials have been working to "make sure the supplies are there along the road because some of them are becoming roads of death where mothers are having to abandon their children who are too weak to make it or who have died along the way."
At some point, when families do make it to aid camps, and do recover physically, some must deal with the pain of not just the death of their children, but the inability to bury their children who died on the road.
"Often, it's women [walking] alone with children, so they're not even able to bury them properly; they just have to leave them and walk on, hoping that somebody else will bury them for them, which is absolutely traumatic."
Ali lovingly carried her son for a whole day, thinking he was sleeping, but he was already dead:
He died in his mother’s arms as Ali and her eight other children made the 16-day epic journey from their drought-stricken village in Wanlaweyn district, Lower Shabelle, in southern Somalia to Mogadishu.
"I carried him a whole day while he was dead thinking he was alive and just asleep. We did not have anything to give him. No water or food for three days," an emotional Ali tells IPS at Badbado Camp on the outskirts of the Somali capital.
The families who make the long journey in intense heat to a refugee camp are not yet safe. Four children die each day at Dadaab, the largest refugee camp in the world with over 380,000 people. Many children arrive at the camps just too weak and malnourished from days of no food and water, leaving doctors unable to save them. After walking 21 days to reach Mogadishu, Daahir Gabow, a father of seven, had to watch two of his children die from severe malnourishment despite best efforts from the doctors and nurses.
In July, there were 554,550 "acutely malnourished children under five years" in Somalia. Add in Kenya and Ethiopia, and there are 2.23 MILLION children suffering from acute malnourishment.
This is a "child survival crisis" Mister Murdoch, not a freaking opportunity for you to exploit and dehumanize children to save your own worthless ass.
East Africa Food Crisis: 48 Hours of Action
This weekend, Daily Kos is participating in 48-Hour Fundraiser hosted by environmental websites and nonprofit organizations to benefit the 12 million people struggling for survival in the East African countries of Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya and Djibouti. Last week, the United Nations announced famine -- already declared in two districts -- is likely to spread throughout southern Somalia. This week, the UN issued a warning that food insecurity in northern Uganda is sufficiently alarming to raise the possibility that the country might become the fifth nation impacted by the worst drought in the Horn of Africa in sixty years.
Also participating in this weekend of action are 350.org, Oxfam International, WiserEarth, tcktcktck, DeSmogBlog, MIT Climate CoLab, BPI Campus, Climate Change: The Next Generation, RedGreenAndBlue.org, Cool HIVE, MedicMobile, and The Enough Project.
Over the course of the weekend, experts in the field of humanitarian assistance will join environmental writers to outline the history of the region and detail how geopolitics, colonialism, ongoing civil wars, climate change and geographic vulnerabilities have combined to create the perfect storm now ravaging East Africa.
Each participating organization is choosing its particular group for donated funds. Daily Kos is donating all monies raised to directly support the work of Oxfam in the Horn of Africa. Please add $.01 to your donation so it ends up being $5.01, $20.01, $50.01, $100.01, and so on. This will enable Oxfam to keep track of all Daily Kos donations.
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