Quotes About Somalia

The people of Somalia just do not have a voice. They are to me the most forgotten people in the world.

I'd love to work with children. I've set up the charity, and that's going well. We've got a lot of projects we're doing in Somalia, so I'd like to see how we're doing there.

Our assistance in Somalia has been remarkably effective and successful, and we have helped with very small resources - a large group of people and we can now do even more.

I never have my CNN off, it's on the whole day. I don't want to be out of range of television. I'm constantly bombarded by information - Somalia one second, Haiti the next - I need that constant pounding. I couldn't write without television. I need to have the world in my room.

The long-term solution in preventing another famine in Somalia is to promote self-reliance.

I don't have much in me left for Somalia, because the country is so broken, it's not realistic to daydream about it.

Somalia is an important story in the world, and it needed to be told.

It was a slow understanding that the lack of education in a country like Somalia creates these huge social problems.

I started to work on a feature-length script about pirates in Somalia, but I knew that there was something I was missing, which was that I didn't know what day-to-day life looked like and felt like in East Africa. So I decided I had to go.

I think the biggest challenge for Somalia has been the sense that it is a hopeless case of incomprehensible internal conflicts and there is nothing we can do.

An oversupply of national sentiment is not the problem in Somalia. The problem is a lack of it. The problem is an oversupply of sub-sub-clannish attitude.

The change began in Somalia, where we discovered that we were involved in an operation where there was no peace, so there was no more a peacekeeping operation because there was no peace.

Somalia is very dangerous, and no one knows that better than I.

The criteria, for me, is movie star. It's Hollywood. Not Somalia.

Along the borders to Ethiopia and Somalia, anarchy reigns, the police and military have retreated quite some distance.

I think probably the scaredest I've ever been was in Somalia. I arrived there when the episode that became known as 'Black Hawk Down' was still taking place. The Americans were still pinned down under fire. And everybody else was basically going the other way, and I was the only one putting my hand up for a flight in.

Going into Somalia, I didn't anticipate how many people's lives would be affected by it. In hindsight, I certainly wish I had taken more time to think about that, but I can't change it.

What we have seen with Islamist extremism, whether it is in Mali or Somalia or Afghanistan, is that the disease is not necessarily the individual country. The disease is the Islamist extremism, and that's what we have to fight; that's the narrative that we have to beat.

I want to go see Somalia because I've never been there, and I feel like I'm missing out. I want to learn that heritage; I want to learn about my culture.

Life in Somalia before the civil war was beautiful. When the war happened, I was 8 years old and at that stage of understanding the world in a different way.

The last naturally occurring case was reported in Somalia in 1977,

For us, Cambodia was an election amid minor eruptions of political violence from a decrepit Khmer Rouge, just dangerous enough to add an edge to the otherwise bacchanalian proceedings. We thought Somalia would be similarly exultant, but instead we're inserted directly into combat. This is a hot war. It's hard to make peace in a society of nomadic warriors who like to fight, and twenty thousand UN and U.S. soldiers are failing.

An American Special Forces guy greets me at the airport. If you liked Beirut, he says, you're gonna love Mogadishu. I only half understand the reference and the implication. There's so much fighting in the city today, he says, that we have to shuttle incoming UN staff from the airport to the office compound via Black Hawk helicopter. Jump on, son, welcome to Somalia.

I was hell-bent on being an effective humanitarian in Cambodia and Somalia. But a naïve fog is finally lifting. Revealed is a train wreck of illusions, the depravity of someone else's war, the futility of a competence stillborn there. To understand this you have to become this.