As Ethiopia's children starve to death humanity's shame grows

This AP photograph by Brennan Linsley shows a malnourished child scratching his leg and back, pondering an uncertain future and the painful fact of death through starvation. The frail child is captured leaning on a tree post for what will soon be a makeshift shelter in Denan, in drought-stricken southeast Ethiopia.

The recent tragedy has caused the world to see new, garish but realistic images of men digging graves against what eyewitnesses describe as "the hardness of the earth and their own physical weakness." Some of the Ethiopian babies starved to death, died from respiratory failure due to acute undernourishment, AIDS and other preventable factors.

USAfricaonline.com and USAfrica The Newspaper hereby call on the international community to act more decisively and swiftly in order to halt the shameful reality of any of the world's children starving to their sudden, premature death.

Yet, it is the primary challenge of Africans to fend for themselves. Where are all the stolen funds gone? In fact, currently, the funds spent on just one trip of most African presidents to a weekend retreat will restore the basic humanity and lives of almost 5,000 Ethiopian children. Also, the funds spent for propaganda in and around Washington D.C. by the Ethiopian government would have changed the lives of thousands of the dying and the death. But inside Africa, the priorities of some of these "Brother Presidents" are wacky and largely irrelevant to the existential realities of their citizens. The funds spent by Eritrea and Ethiopians over a conflict neither is, fundamentally, winning really questions the judgement of their leadership.

These painful, installmental deaths still occur amidst all the waste of foods and funds in the world; amidst all the opulent consumption in the developed world, the noxious and institutionalized corruption imposed on millions of children (without lobbyists) by the leaders of these countries where women and children collapse and die from not having just a grain of rice or a drop of water (clean or germ-ridden).

So long as the children of the world starve to these cyclical and painful deaths, to such extent will the label and use of the term "civilization" be an extravagant claim on the tortured consciences of some of the world's leaders.

Why, you may ask?

For the human species who, ably, put man on the moon four decades ago and recently built the techno-marvel call the Internet, it's truly a collective failure of mankind that hundreds of thousand of children and women die with flies all over their eyes, noses, mouths and all other human parts they can invade. These people are too weak to even swat the flies. Will you join to ensure and say "NO" to the installmental death of children, Black or White? It's a crying shame, my friends!

Should Africa debates begin and end at The New York Times and The Washington Post? Ethnic Cleansing and slaughter in the Sudan by Dawud Ibrahim Salih, Muhammad Adam Yahya, Abdul Hafiz Omar Sharief and Osman Abbakorah, representatives of the Massaleit community in exile, Cairo, Egypt

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