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| Five Arab nations on UN's list of least developed. Wotta surprise. |
| 2002-06-29 |
| Five nations from the Arab world are on the UN's list of least developed countries' where millions of people live below the poverty line. These countries - Djibouti, Mauritania, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen - are inhabited by 59.3 million people, a major part of whom earn less than $1 a day, according to a United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) report released here recently. UNCTAD has posted 49 countries on its 'Least Developed Countries Report 2002'. The UN selection criteria for the list of the least developed countries is low national income, weak human assets, and high economic vulnerability. What do they have in common? I don't know much about Djibouti — maybe I could find it on a map, and not much more about Mauretania, except that it's primitive, an area more than it is a country. Of the other three, the number of guns per capita is pretty breath-taking, as is the amount of tetchy, easily offended honor. Three out of five, and I'd guess five out of five, are what Bill Quick describes as Honor-Shame societies. |
| Posted by:Fred Pruitt |
| #1 "An area more than a country." Classic! They used to contest the Western Sahara with Morocco but gave that up, what, a decade ago? And I think I've heard that GIA militants shelter over the border, as well as Western Saharan militants and their government-in-exile (which is a recognized member of the OAU, one reason Morocco isn't). But I don't think they do much on their own. Djibouti used to be the key French port at the horn of Africa, but since the beret-wearers left I gather it's been in a steady decline, a city-state with no real reason for being. You can think of it as being a less-chaotic extension of Eritrea and Somalia, maybe one of the reasons the unrecognized government of what used to be British Somaliland has been able to pull itself together. If I'm not mistaken, the north coast of the horn is ethnically and culturally more Arab than the interior and east coast. |
| Posted by: Dan Hartung 2002-06-29 09:13:29 |