|Biographical detail : ||Peace activist and aid worker.
Starlin was always active in negotiating with warlords, setting up hospitals or chairing her Somalian homeland’s Olympic committee.
In 1991 when Somalia erupted into war she along with her sister, Halima, organised food deliveries. This led to her involvement with the UN’s emergency relief effort when famine struck. In 1993, Starlin tried to negotiate an end to the stand-off between the warlord Muhammad Farah Aideed and the Americans. In 1999, she turned down a high-level job in a new, UN-sponsored government.
Starlin was murdered in Nairobi while on her way to observe the peace talks between Somalia’s warlords being herself the victim of robbery – an ironic end for a woman for whom confrontations with gunmen were a daily ordeal. Thousands lined the streets to receive her body when it came to her hometown, Merca.
Starlin’s childhood in Merca, a small Indian Ocean port 60 miles south of Mogadishu, prepared her for a role with the help of her mother who taught a fierce love of Somalia’s unique Islamic culture. Starlin lived in Italy for 13 years where she also did her schooling.