The Dutch press has reacted with astonishment to the announcement. Trouw headlines “Hardly a nuisance, but banned all the same,” while rival daily De Volkskrant points out that “of the 27,000 Somalians in the Netherlands, only 10% are addicted to khat.”

De Volkskrant argues that the government’s plan to outlaw a stimulant and to classify it as a hard drug is wide of the mark: “Targeted measures would likely have had more effect than a blanket ban,” which runs the risk of contributing to the development of a black market.

NRC Handelsblad adds that-

... the importing of khat into Europe is only legal in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. As a result, Schiphol [airport] and the neighbouring town of Uithoorn have been able to develop as the centre of a European market.

According to the newspaper, “a mistrust of Somalia as a trading partner” also played a role in the decision by the government, which believes that the “revenue generated by the trade is used to finance terrorist activities” in the Horn of Africa.

“When the UN sends a plane full of emergency food to Somalia is it a communications offensive or the beginning of a determined aid effort?” queries the Berlin alternative daily. “Both responses are correct, that’s one of the paradoxes of [this] famine,” the paper says, adding, “But naturally, we are dealing with hard-core spin when the WFP uses “airlift” to refer to a flight of freight landing at a normal airport, used for commercial ends”.

Without calling into question the need for emergency aid, TAZ notes that real aid consists of supporting the productive forces in a country long before the spiral of pauperisation has begun. Somalia, the paper says, “is an exporter of food. It sold over 4 million farm animals to the Arab world and even today, it supplies sugar and rice to its neighbours”.

In an in-depth feature, Politiken explains that according to Somalisk Netværk president Mohamed Gelle – himself the target of a fatwa – a cabal of 15 to 20 militant Somali Islamists have launched a drive to recruit young compatriots for Al-Qaeda-affiliated cells by bringing pressure to bear on their families (whether in Denmark or Somalia) and by indoctrinating them in radical Islam. There are 16,700 Somalis currently living in Denmark.