The Road to Hell (16 page)

C
assidy paused. The dry January wind whistled over the hood of his truck. And then the distant clouds began to lift, revealing the magnificent snowcovered peak of Mount Adams. Cassidy pointed out a fox that had strolled across the road. He asked if I was warm enough. Should he turn on the engine and warm up the truck.

“No. Continue,” I told him.

I thought about the Anglo-American Club and long afternoons drinking beer on a verandah feeling the steady, warm ocean breeze. White noise, wind, and surf enclosed each little group of expatriates in a den of silence. I could picture Chris there with his family laughing and enjoying the afternoon.

The club was private. Membership was restricted to British and American citizens and their invited—usually European—guests. Some of the tables were outside on the deck, and others were under the roof of a wide open room. A Somali bartender served drinks, and waiters came when called upon. I'd spent a year living in a house just down the road, but I preferred the UN Beach Club, which was just up the road. The crowd at the UN Club was a bit younger and more international. The Anglo-American Club attracted families like the Cassidys.

O
ff the club's main dining room there were several doors to rest rooms and the kitchen. Cassidy now remembers one of those doors in particular. “There was a door with some kind of latticework covering it. I hadn't noticed it before, but we sit down and the next thing you know, the oldest guy
[Bernie] disappears. A second later we start looking around. I mean, it was just the staff of this place and one other couple with a child there, looking around.

“Where's Bernie, where's Bernie? Anybody seen Bernie? The gates are closed, so he can't get out. All the doors are closed. There's no way for a small kid to wander out. I looked over the wall down to the beach. There's no way down. No way he could have climbed up and over.

“I run over to the road, but everything is blocked off end gated off. There's an eating room and a verandah there and two rest rooms, and the guy's nowhere to be found. And then somehow, behind this latticework that has always been there, there's another door. I'd never even seen that door before in all the times I had been there, all the years I had been in that country, never even … never even knew. Inside, there is a cesspool. I removed the lattice and pulled open the door. I could barely get in there myself. No way a two-year-old could open that door. I looked in there. Nothin'. Kids don't wander into dark rooms, and not dark, smelly rooms. The place smells like shit. I went back outside, looking around.

“One of the staff there says, Oh, I think he's in there. No, Cassidy says, I already checked in there. He says, No, I think he's in there. He's really insistent this time—really saying, I
know
he's in there.

“So I go in there and shove my hands into the cesspool and sure enough, there's something in there. I know what it is. I pull out a body.”

Cassidy, drenched in shit and crouching in a dark room, began breathing air into his son's mouth, while outside the wind muffled all sounds and waiters served beers.

“I thought I could still get a pulse. I tried reviving him. I thought I could do this. It was as nasty and ugly as you can possibly fucking imagine. He wasn't conscious, but I had a pulse going there and I thought I could revive him. And after, I don't know, shit maybe twenty, thirty minutes, just decided, shit this is really touch-and-go, better fuckin' scream, get some help, throw the guy in a taxi, haul ass down to the embassy.

“Those guys know you at the gate, jump out with this kid, they let me in there. The marine guard took me to one of those back rooms. They started their emergency type thing. They get on the horn, get some other guys down there and I don't know, worked like hell trying to revive that guy, and finally after what would seem to be some hours, something like that, they really get a nurse down there and say it was all over.

“It was one of the strange things, I've never been able to … the guy had his head smashed in, Mike. And the cesspool wasn't just out in the open. It was under a three-inch slab of concrete. And how a fucking tiny toddler
kid that age could move this latticework that has plants hanging from it, open up a fucking door, get through that cement, with a smashed head, and end up in that thing when I didn't see him the first time through there, but he was there the second time … he was there.”

Cassidy slumps slightly behind the wheel of the pickup truck and crosses his hands tightly over his chest. His eyes fill with tears. He's sobbing.

“I knew that Save was pissed. I knew there was gonna be some government guys pissed that I was hanging around looking for jobs. You know, when you get fired you're supposed to fucking go home. You're not supposed to hang around looking for work. I mean in hindsight, it's easy to figure that out.”

Was Bernie murdered? It's difficult to imagine that even the most evil Somali security officer would kill a child. Why not just kill Chris? But Cassidy is convinced that Bernie's death was no accident.

“At that time, it's a typical kind of killing,” Cassidy says. “You go through the list of the violent activities that have happened in that country over time … I mean, that's a pretty standard calling card, giving some guy a subtle warning.

“Next time I was in Qorioley, guys come up and say, Listen, we wanna fuckin' get those guys that did that to you, to that child. I mean I was really well liked there, that family was really well liked, I mean Jesus, this kid … Anyway, as I was saying, you know, this is God's will and try to deal with it.

“That night I was completely fucked up … You can't even fuckin describe what the hell you go through with an ordeal like that, and it was … that was my fuckin life, I mean, that little guy named after my daddy had passed away. That was fuckin tough, and I just couldn't deal with it, you know, I was completely … that's the way you work through problems—just go to fuckin work, man. I just keep working even harder and I just wasn't prepared, I couldn't understand. I wasn't trying to figure out a reason for this, and that kind of shit'll drive you nuts. I was really questioning my religious convictions and spirituality. I was cursing God and the human race and everything, and everything I stood for and believed in had just been … the harder you work, trying to do good things for people and you just get, I really got fucked. Anyway, the Somali guys and the Ethiopian refugees are friends and everybody is really pissed off and the other, the American guys, some of the other expatriate guys, they know how sensitive I was to this.

“I wasn't one of these fuckin guys who say it's the old lady's job to take care of the kids. I was a diaper-changer, waking up in the middle of the night to get those kids so they could be breast-fed. I baby-sat, bathed them.
When I wasn't at work, that's what I was doing, taking care of those guys, and that was my life. Jesus. I didn't really care to dwell on Save the Children and this and that. It's get yourself up by your bootstraps and get on with it and try to deal with this as best you can.

“Then Hassan Ilhan came back from his training in Kenya and he was just shattered about this whole thing, about what happened to my employment, what happened to the project when he was gone. Because I was still trying to take care of his family when he was out, throw 'em a little money, make sure that they got transportation, that the kids were okay. He was a committed guy, he was going out for his training and coming back and was gonna stay with the project. We had some long heart-to-heart talks and he said, ‘I've heard certain things and I can check into it further. Do you want me to do anything?' And I would say no, and he said, ‘You know the rest of these guys are really pissed and they wanna go after these fuckers and they wanna settle the score. You know how we do things in the Muslim world, eye for an eye.'

“Then it was some months later we heard reports that Somalis who spoke English, who associated with foreigners, were being harassed by the intelligence people. They were shaking them down for information. And there was a guy associated with that club that had some security force come to his place one night and interrogate him, and when he wouldn't provide the information, they raped his wife and a couple of his daughters. Some other male member of the family that resisted was killed and this guy was hauled off, being accused of supplying arms and information to the rebels.”

I tried to pin Cassidy down. What did he think happened? Was the man who worked at the club terrorized into taking revenge against Cassidy's family? That's possible, Cassidy seemed to say. He clearly didn't want to talk about it anymore.

We were driving in the truck again, down from the hill, away from the Yakima sacred forest. Cassidy seemed scattered now, unable to focus. He wasn't looking for answers any more. He had them. His commitment to development work had killed his son.

Bernie was buried at a Catholic cemetery near the headquarters in Mogadishu of SOS Kinderdorf. Willie Huber helped with the arrangements. A service was held in the capital's central cathedral, presided over by Salvatore Colombo, the bishop of Mogadishu. When Chris and Tone and little Christopher arrived home from the funeral, they found that their house had been ransacked.

Two years later, the bishop of Mogadishu would be shot to death on the
steps of that very cathedral by gunmen acting for the government. The bishop had been speaking about human rights and about helping the poor. Like Chris and hundreds of others, he had realized that charity and development work are political, that doing relief and development work in the context of oppression is counterproductive. Any real commitment to development requires political action, speaking out against the powers that keep populations from developing themselves. In the Somali context, doing real development work was a truly subversive activity. During the late 1980s, at least a dozen aid workers were killed in Somalia. In 1988 alone, there were over 200 acts of violence
reported
against aid workers. Some of it was robbery and general harassment, much of it was directed against activities that the government viewed as against its best interests.

Aid groups were left in peace so long as they didn't cross the government. Most kept working through the violence, though their activities were kept to a minimum. In essence, they were allowed to stay any work so long as they really didn't do their jobs.

In 1989, Hassan Ilhan was gunned down outside of Qorioley after he protested that government soldiers were looting supplies from refugees.

In this context, it doesn't seem that farfetched that the government would want Cassidy to leave. But Cassidy didn't leave. He was offered the job at FAO and accepted it. Now his determination to succeed with an agricultural project was more single-minded than ever. If the people who killed Bernie thought it would drive Cassidy from the country they couldn't have been more mistaken. It never occurred to him that he should leave.

W
hen Cassidy took the FAO job, he and his family stayed in Mogadishu and he commuted southward to the town of Afgooye. Every day, six days a week, he left at dawn and drove to the project. By this time, things started to become dangerous. Soldiers appeared on the roads and began collecting “tolls.” Cassidy noticed military vehicles cruising around his project sites and following people working on the project.

“Soldiers started appearing at the project site, fucking with the irrigation system,” Cassidy told me. “They vandalized it to prevent people from getting water. Then they started raiding warehouses, stealing fertilizer and tools. Military trucks rolled in and took vehicles and fertilizer. The roads were so dangerous we couldn't move things from the port to the project anymore.

“It was a terrifying situation. I was being constantly threatened. People carrying automatic weapons were demanding rides. It was hell. I was scared
for my wife and kids at home in Mogadishu. The UN hired armed guys with machine guns to watch our house.”

Once when Cassidy was driving his kids (another child had been born) to the embassy swimming pool, a car chased him down and passed him. Inside the car a group of men stared back at him, and one drew his finger across his throat making the universal sign for “I'm going to kill you.”

The men in the car were not common thieves. Common thieves in Somalia did not have cars. Over the next months, the stealing of Land Cruisers from NGOs would become the most common crime in the country. They were stolen by rebels looking for vehicles to turn into “technicals” and by government soldiers at the direction of their superiors or on their own.

“The worst part was that we didn't know what was going on,” Cassidy said. “There was no public information. The UN didn't offer any. We just heard things by word of mouth, stories about nerve gas and mercenaries doing bombing, but we never knew what was really going on.

“Because of the security situation, I'd stay in Mogadishu for a few weeks. Then I'd come back and find everything destroyed.

“On the project site, farmers were suddenly afraid to deal with the foreigners. ‘The white people are working for the people who are oppressing us,' was the way they saw it. The aid workers were caught in a cross fire. The peasants said we supported the military, and the military said we supported the peasants. Men started disappearing from the project sites. One of our drivers was shot to death at a road check.”

Some of the looting was carried out by Siyaad's personal “red beret” security forces. “They just came there in hoards and took off with tractors and pumps and vehicles,” Cassidy said. “Then they hit the seed multiplication center. What are the military doing stealing seeds? They're not going to plant them! They want people to eat in the refugee camps, where they can control the food. It was a blatant politically motivated attempt to prevent people from growing their own food. There was a campaign to destroy agriculture.”