Test of humanity

Kulapavana · July 25, 2005

What about Niger now?

Derrick Z. Jackson The Boston Globe

TUESDAY, JULY 26, 2005

BOSTON President George W. Bush sure cared about Niger in 2003 when he said, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." Vice President Dick Cheney sure cared about the yellowcake, so much so that one of the reported reasons that the diplomat Joseph Wilson went to the African nation in 2002 was because of Cheney's interest in checking out any possible links between Saddam and nuclear weapons. Wilson found no evidence of uranium sales.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld cared enough about Niger that, like Bush, he said Saddam Hussein "has the design for a nuclear weapon" and was "working on several different methods of enriching uranium and recently was discovered seeking significant quantities of uranium from Africa." Rumsfeld used that assumption to conflate the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, with Saddam, a tie disproved by Bush's own 9/11 commission.

Rumsfeld said: "We looked at the destruction caused by the terrorists who took jetliners, turned them into missiles, and used them to kill 3,000 innocent men, women and children, and we considered the destruction that could be caused by an adversary armed with nuclear, chemical or biological weapons. Instead of 3,000 to be killed, it could be 30,000, 300,000."

Let us hope an administration that used Niger to fake out the world for its invasion of Iraq can take the time to go back to that country to prevent death to many times more people. To almost the complete silence of the United States, Niger, one of the world's poorest nations, was hit last year by natural weapons of mass destruction - locusts and drought.

That double whammy decimated cereal production. Now, the United Nations and Oxfam are pleading for the world to pay attention. While Rumsfeld got us into war over fears of 300,000 Americans being killed, 3.6 million people in Niger - one-third of its population - are already malnourished, and 2.5 million of them face outright famine.

Jan Egeland, the UN relief coordinator, said last week that 150,000 children there will die soon without immediate aid. Relief agencies have been warning about the possibility of this since last autumn, but for all of the self-praise of wealthy nations at the recent Group of Eight summit, the response to this crisis has been appalling.

An initial call for aid by the United Nations in November resulted in almost nothing. This spring the United Nations called for $16 million and received only $3.8 million. The crisis has escalated so rapidly that Egeland revised the figure needed to $30 million, but so far, only $10 million has come in.

Egeland called the world's sloth a tragedy in itself. He said that if wealthy nations had been on top of the crisis early, it would have cost only $1 a day to prevent a child in Niger from being malnourished.

Now, he says, it will take $80 a day to save the child's life. Egeland noted that the $3.5 billion a year that the United Nations asks wealthy countries for humanitarian aid "is one-third what Europeans eat in ice cream a year and is one-tenth of what Americans spend on their pets a year."