Posted by 2courtneyb on October 11, 2009 at 8:48pm
A failed state is a weak government who can not control their area that they live in. The government can’t provide basic services to its people. An example of basic services would be water, sanitation, and things you need in daily life. They can’t control crime. People often times move away from countries with weak government.
Over a billion people live in countries with a failed government. When a government fails it is usually after a civil war, hurricane, tornado, earthquake, and other disasters like that. As of right now Iraq and Afghanistan are the sixth and seventh states most fraught for danger in the world. A professor from the University of Hawaii named Tarcisius Kabutaulaka said that “it's easy to forget that many countries have had troubled histories.” To determine whether or not a state has failed you have to look at the people. Are the people leaving, are they happy with what the government has done for them, do they feel there is crime, and so on.
In the second article, a shattered Somalia, it talked about a boy named Mohammed. He is 18and goes to a light house every day. He looks out from the light house at the ruined city. He usually tries to look at the ocean because he knows that that is where his food comes from. He is a fisherman. He gets up very early every morning to fish. He takes whatever he catches to the market and sells it to get money. This helps feed his parents and two younger siblings. His father was killed some time ago and Mohammed’s family has turned to him since he was 14. To go to school it is 10 dollars a month, but he can not afford this. When Mohammed was born Somalia’s last president was overthrown which is a downfall of the government. For the past two years Somalia has been the number one ranked failed state.Mogadishu a city that looks like any other city in Africa used to be a beautiful city. By five in the afternoon if you are on the streets you are just looking for something bad to happen to you. Just before the photographers left they visited Mohammed. Mohammed says "We don't want to flee our own country." "I don't want to be a refugee. We're ready to die here."What kept Somalia together but also tore it apart was its clan system. When the Europeans came the clans feel apart. In 1960 when the left nationalism took over Somalia, but that got all messed up too. Then in 1969 a dictator named General Mohamed Siad Barre came. He forbid having clans and practiced a divide-and-rule. He was then chased down in 1991. It has been 18 years and they still haven’t had a new government.Mohammed was a baby when the civil war began. There were 4 months of fighting in Mohammed’s neighborhood. He can remember his parents telling him “we couldn't get any food. Everyone was so scared." One day a mortar killed his neighbors. During this some of the shrapnel which is shell containing lead pellets that explode in flight flew into Mohammed’s house. The shrapnel damaged his father’s neck and rib cage. Mohammed’s family then hitchhiked with their neighbors to Hargeysa in Somaliland. They stayed there for three months. When the came back to their house most of it was destroyed.Mohammed’s family had to start their lives all over now. Since Mohammed’s father had been hurt by the shrapnel he could not keep a job. Mohammed shined shoes on the streets. His mother told him to stop working and go to school. Their aunt that lived in Saudi Arabia sent them money and that is how they got by. When it rained it flooded their home.Mohammed said that his friend was killed walking the streets. Mohammed couldn’t sit in school without thinking about the boy so he quit school and became a fisherman. Two weeks before the person who wrote the story about Shattered Somalia came Mohammed’s father woke up from his sleep with his normal headache. This was something he always got because of his injury. He got up to go to his job. He worked to help clean up. Mostly women were in this group. He got to his job an hour late that day and discovered that 44 of them were lying on the street dead from a bomb. They were taken to a hospital and half of them were dead.The man that is writing this story about Mohammed says that on his fourth morning in Mogadishu. Late in the morning he visited Medina Hospital. He has gone to this hospital every day he has been in Mogadishu. There were people with all kinds of problems lying all over, but no one cried. Someone told Mohammed that if he joined Al Shabaab he could earn $150. He went home and talked to his family about it. They decided he shouldn’t got because the people that went didn’t come back.This story was very shocking and makes me not take for granted all the simple things that I have. I feel bad for Mohammed and how he really doesn’t know how a stable government is run. I think it would be very scary to live in a failed state. This has probably been the most interesting blog topic that we have gotten so far this year, and the longest blog I have written this year.
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