Education, education, education

Image credits: Free Grunge Textures

Further to Harry Scrase’s piece on the Kenyan shopping mall which can be read here, Olivia Paine investigates the root of the problem back in Somalia.

The attack on the Westgate shopping mall in Kenya on 21 September shocked the world. Al-Shabaab militants stormed the centre killing 67 people in the worst terrorist attack Kenya has seen since 1998. The international community came together to condemn the atrocity and US Navy Seals have attacked the leader of Al-Shabaab, Mukhtar Abu Zubeyr, at his home in Baraawe, Somalia. In an article in the New York Times an American security official is quoted anonymously as saying that the raid “was prompted by the Westgate attack”. Clearly the international community and particularly the US are targeting senior members of al-Shabaab due to their involvement in the Westgate siege and in an attempt to prevent further acts of terrorism.

Yet central to reducing terrorist attacks, is to understand why they happen in the first place. We will never know why the attackers themselves chose to kill innocent people because they died in the four-day siege that followed. A Twitter account which claims to represent Al-Shabaab, however, released a statement saying that the attack was in revenge for the actions of Kenyan forces which have been in Somalia since 2011, aiding the government and fighting against Al-Shabaab militants. According to the source the violence and death caused in Kenya was a “very tiny fraction” of the pain that Somalis have suffered at the hands of the Kenyan military and that “now it’s time to shift the battleground and take the war to their land”. The anger felt by Al-Shabaab militants, and possibly Somalis generally is clear. In an interview with The Telegraph, Amber Prior, a mother who managed to rescue four children including her own from the Westgate shopping mall, told of how one of the attackers was keen to let her know that they were “not monsters”. He claimed that their actions were as a result of Kenyan military intervention and even apologised for her having been shot. Regardless of this, it is impossible to escape that these men needlessly killed 67 people. The suffering of Somalis cannot absolve the attackers of their crimes. The loss of innocent lives in one country can never justify the murder of innocents in another.

There is however a more complex reason for the atrocities at the Westgate shopping mall. I was made to think of this last week when I was in a seminar and watched a lecture given by Dr Dambisa Moyo, a leading world economist, on her book Dead Aid: Why Aid is Not Working and How There is a Better Way for Africa. Moyo said something which I found truly shocking: no child has been to school in Somalia since 1992. There has been no school in the entirety of my lifetime. Between 1991 when the socialist state founded by Mohamed Siad Barre was overthrown and 2012 when the formal government led by Hassan Sheikh Mohamud was sworn in, there was no real state infrastructure. Somalis have endured one tragedy after another, from civil war, to famine, to a tsunami. It is estimated by the CIA that since 1991 up to 1.1 million Somalis have been internally displaced due to the conflict in their country. The proof of this suffering is all around us, 15,000 Somalis came to my hometown of Leicester in one year alone. Somalis now make up 5% of the total population of the city. Combine this with every other city and country that takes in Somali refugees and the numbers are

US military personnel are prevalent in Somalia.
Image credits: expertinfantry

staggering.

Although the establishment of the new government in 2012 was an enormous step, the country still faces enormous problems. The CIA World Factbook states that the time Somali children spend in school is still only two to three years which, when considering that 44% of the population is under 14, is a lot of children out of school. Without school, children and young people have no focus in their lives, they have very few prospects for employment and they are left with nothing for which to strive. They can see no way out. There is a whole generation that has been lost in Somalia. I for one cannot imagine where my life would have gone without the education that I have received. It is not surprising then that it is easy for terrorist organisations to recruit young men and women from Somalia. They are angry and have nothing to do. All they have known for their entire lives is turmoil and Al-Shabaab gives them something to believe in and someone to take out their anger on.

UNICEF acknowledges the power of education and one of their key goals is to achieve universal primary education by 2015. They have committed $233 million dollars to the cause and place particular focus on improving girls’ education. Apart from the obvious benefits like improved employment prospects, UNICEF recognises that school can “provide a sense of normalcy, as well as safety and security from the heightened risk of violence and exploitation” that children undergo during times of crisis. With education children are protected from social and political unrest and are given future opportunities and the likelihood of engaging in terrorism and violence is reduced.

Obviously you can never justify the murder of innocent people by the destruction and suffering your own country has witnessed. Two wrongs will never make a right. The people in the Westgate shopping mall had nothing to do with what Somalia has endured over the last twenty years, whether they were Kenyan or not; they did not deserve to die. Understanding what has happened in Somalia since 1991 however, is an important step to ending this cycle of violence where young people have little else to turn to other than extremism. It is not enough to simply demonize these attackers. I don’t really have any answers about what should be done to counter terrorism, but one thing seems clear to me. The international community and the Somalian government must do all they can to establish schools within Somalia. With the benefit of education young people are given hope and something to strive for, something which is essential to fight future terrorism.

Olivia Paine

Tackling poverty: political or personal?

Elena Wason looks at the world’s progress in tackling poverty and asks if we should be doing more to help the poor?

Poverty: what progress is really made by world leaders? Picture credits: bandarji

Last week the deep issues of international development and poverty rolled past the media’s peripheral vision again, as they got mildly excited by David Cameron’s co-chairing of the panel on the Post 2015 Development Agenda. The meetings aim to renew or refresh the Millennium Development Goals which expire in two years’ time, so world leaders are revelling in the opportunity to demonstrate their concern and commitment to helping those less fortunate. But what progress is really made when the cameras stop rolling and the leaders go back to their privileged lifestyles?

The Millennium Development Goals were set up in 2000 by the UN, and served as a concrete commitment to the world to achieve targets and put numbers on the amount of global progress made. Poverty eradication proudly featured as one of the eight goals, and the aim of halving absolute poverty was actually achieved as early as 2008. This has been largely attributed to the rocket growth of India and China, two of the most heavily populated and fastest growing economies in the world, who through this growth have managed to pull millions of people out of poverty. But the means of progress, albeit slower, is still being offered in bite-size chunks to nations who continue to struggle, be this through the top-down or bottom-up approaches. The countries of the world have seized their pick-axes and are chipping away at the problem, declaring with determination: ‘we’re working on it’.

Mr Cameron quite rightly pointed out that the problem cannot be tackled by simply throwing money at countries and hoping that it ends up in the right place. There are many issues with development assistance that were ignored in the past, but thankfully have been increasingly coming to the forefront of the foreign affairs agenda. This ‘modern’ approach involves crucially looking at the reasons behind poverty and what keeps people poor, which are primarily factors such as a lack of rule of law, external and internal conflict, and government and institutional corruption. If the top-down approach is going to be implemented by these national and global institutions, then these barriers need to be knocked down before societies can be built up. Countries riddled with poverty are struggling with much more than not being able to feed everyone; they are more often than not at battle with entrenched disputes about religion, natural resources and undemocratic governments, to name a few.

David Cameron co-chairing the panel on the Post 2015 Development Agenda. Picture credits: DFID – UK Department for International Development

The DebSoc debate on Friday raised some interesting points about poverty, asking whether it is something that the world could ever eliminate for good. It’s a tough question, but the one thing that the opposing sides agreed on was that we should never stop trying. Political institutions have picked up on the fact that populations care about their fellow nations and therefore vote for those who also do, so spending on foreign aid is often used as a tool to further political interests. In reality though, does this matter if one way or another the world is getting somewhere in its fight to save people’s lives?

But it is not just political institutions that are at war with poverty. Independent from high-profile politics, just in the UK there are thousands of grassroots development charities who believe that we should not stop trying. Their budgets may not stretch into the billions, but each organisation works away at its specialist field. They crucially empower local communities to make change from the bottom up, rather than relying on the top-down approach and hoping that the highly absorptive upper layers of society will be saturated, and allow for a few drops to trickle down. Organisations such as emerge poverty free specialise in this bottom-up approach, working to empower women, to give vulnerable children a childhood, and to support sustainable farming projects as a few examples. Work such as this, and the real touchable impact it has, expresses that it is not merely government and UN involvement that is necessary for the world to develop and overcome poverty, it is the collaboration of institutions and people coming together that smashes the problem the hardest.

 

Do you want to make real change happen? emerge poverty free are working at Exeter to get students involved in the fight against poverty. They are looking for a student ambassador and people to fundraise and campaign on behalf of those around the world whose voices are muffled. Contact: info@emergepovertyfree.org

Boycott Jaffa Cakes, save Gaza?

Photo credits to Rusty Stewart

On Saturday 17th November, protests were held by Exeter University Students in the High Street against Israeli actions with the aim of raising awareness for the protection and support of Gaza. With these students openly planning a week full of activities to show this support for Gaza, a question is raised over whether this is an acceptable and respectable support for a country in which the people are repressed by their own government or are uneducated over reactions to events in the Middle East due to their prejudiced anti-Zionist stance.

Some examples of photos posted on the Exeter University’s Friends of Palestine’s Facebook page, show how some of the sign’s branded messages such as “boycott Israel”, “stop Israeli aggression” or “boycott Israeli goods” do not show support for Gaza but instead attack Israel. This is far from what can be seen as a peaceful protest with the aim of protecting human life and promoting peace in the area. The clear stupidity of the idea that boycotting Jaffa Cakes will make life in the Middle East peaceful, just goes to show that people on such demonstrations are uneducated about the matter of the causes and reasoning behind the recent defence attacks by the Israeli armed forces.

With President Obama’s comments earlier this week as well as Israel’s actions being supported by the UN and EU, it is clear to any rationally thinking person that maybe there is more to the story that the average Brit with their minds limited to the likes of Sky News the BBC or – the best yet – The Daily Mail, would ever be able to comprehend. With a number of rockets being launched from Gaza into Israel on a daily basis, there are only so many days of the year for which the other cheek can possibly be turned before it is necessary to remove this regular threat to Israeli citizens living normal lives.

The main issue Israel faces is that their military operations merely seek to destroy the missile launchers, which the highly considerate and caring Hamas have attached to schools, hospitals or similar premises. Therefore, every time that Israel takes out one of the missile launching pads it is made out by the media that Israel has targeted a school. However, what is never mentioned is that at the time there weren’t any children in the school. It is not in the interests of the British media to actually investigate a full story as it would be neither financially nor politically beneficial to them.

No one is saying that there should not be support for Gaza, but it should not be grounds for those with a vendetta for Israel to publicly attack a nation merely trying to defend itself from constant bombardments by a terrorist organisation –Hamas- whom have been receiving a large number of weapons from the likes of Iran and Libya.

The situation needs to be assessed especially when students from a University take time out to make suggestions as ridiculous as boycotting a country’s products to solve world problems. Then again all one needs to do is look around the university to not be surprised at the level of activism on this front. After much investigation of the library it is possible to find a section about Zionism but in comparison to the vast array of books in Arabic the only books referring to Hebrew are biblical sources. Likewise for a University which boasts a great amount of Societies there is an Arabic Society, a Muslim society and a Friends of Palestine society, whereas there is just one society related to Zionism which is the Jewish society, which is not relevant for those without religious views.

As a student at a University which is pushing to be the first Conflict Free University to show its support for ongoing conflict in the Congo, it is perhaps about time that it set an example on all fronts to ensure equality for all and not follow the biased line of the British media. People cannot call for Peace in the Middle East unless they are themselves an example of that which they wish to achieve – peace can never come from prejudice.

Anonymous