The Road to Hell (19 page)

I had seen young toughs starting to throw their weight around, a foreshadowing of the role the
mooryaan
would later play in Somalia. Under normal conditions, survival for Somalis is a precarious and delicate balancing act, requiring the wisdom and guidance of the elders. The society was solid and intact. But with food arriving on trucks every day, traditional wisdom and guidance were no longer needed. Kids with guns were king.

I thought it was my job to report these developments, but I soon learned that this was exactly the type of information my bosses in Mogadishu did got want in field reports. They wanted the tonnage of food received, and the tons missing; plate numbers of trucks seen driving off with food and names of camp commanders who weren't cooperating. Still, every month Doug Grice and I would write the reports and tack on our observations about the state of the refugees and of our growing doubts about the wisdom of the relief program.

Our boss, Robert J. Luneburg, the Food for Peace officer, would storm back with the reports and say, “You guys know you can't write this stuff. Stick to the facts as you observe them.” So we'd retype the reports and head back to the bush.

Thus confined by the USAID report format, I sat down at my typewriter in the dusty heat of the afternoon in Beledweyne and wrote a personal memo to L¨neburg. It would be my last memo to USAID:

At the risk of being labeled politically naÏve, I submit the following. I cannot in good conscience leave Somalia without expressing these opinions to the U.S. government in writing.

My experience in Beledweyne during the last few months has confirmed my growing suspicion that the Somali government is deliberately taking part in the diversion of refugee food, has deliberately inflated refugee figures in order to facilitate these diversions, and is now simply humoring donors by submitting itself to the impotent inspection and monitoring of the donors.

Our involvement in the refugee relief operation is participation in a political ploy to gain support for an unpopular military government. I do not presume to influence the policy of the American government in this regard, however I believe that the situation should be recognized for what it is. Our continued support for the refugees makes possible continued activity of the WSLF in the Ogaden, which in turn results in more refugees.

I realize that you have much more information than I do about the actual situation in the Ogaden, however I have made a point of speaking with refugees about the situation there until I was “warned” by the NRC early in July to desist. When I didn't, I was confined to my house for four days and denied access to the records of food deliveries.

I believe that the refugees have been coerced as to the manner in which to answer questions pertaining to the Ogaden. I know that there are individuals living in the camps known as “politicians” who instruct the refugees in political rhetoric and in how to answer these types of questions. I have been struck by the consistent similarities of their answers to the basic questions of “Why did you come here?” and “What was life like under the Ethiopians?” They all report that Cuban and Russinn pilots had bombed their cattle and killed their relatives.

There is a festering resentment among the general population toward the expatriates and the refugees. An old man stopped me on the streets of Beledweyne and demanded to know why he was not entitled to rations and health care just because he had decided to settle in the town instead of in a refugee camp.

A man with four children working in Beledweyne for 800 shillings a month (an extraordinarily high salary) could not supply his family with the amount of food the refugees receive for free.

Many of the town people have solved that problem by keeping a residence or a part of their family in the camps. Sigalow camp [near Beledweyne] is indistinguishable from the mud-house back streets of Beledweyne which have now reached the borders of the camp and are joining it to the town.

There are other issues that make our involvement questionable. Such as the recruitment by the WSLF and Somali Army in the camps. This activity takes place in all the camps in Hiran. Some of the camp commanders are WSLF officers.

PVOs are now submitting hundreds of proposals to improve services to refugees. Expanded services to the refugees will only aggravate the problem by encouraging them to stay, and more refugees will arrive. It will spread more thinly the resource base, leaving the door open for a real emergency situation in the future.

The future for refugees in the camps holds only years of relief. The efforts of the international community should be aimed at solving the problem— getting the refugees out of the camps.

USAID and the U.S. government weren't interested in what I had to say, and, for the most part, neither was the press. Reporters seemed content
to write about stolen food, starving babies, and heroic aid workers. I handed some of my memos to the only reporter who seemed interested in what I thought was the real story in Somalia. The story by Richard Ben Cramer was published in the
Philadelphia Inquirer
in the fall of 1981. It wasn't until fourteen years later that I heard of any fallout from the article.

I was in Nairobi visiting with Mohamed Abshir Waldo (not to be confused with SSDF leader General Mohamed Abshir Muusse). Born in the bush and a camel herder, he ended up at Columbia University during the student uprisings in the late ‘60s.

He became Information Minister for the SSDF and briefly head of the organization in the 1980s. From his home in Nairobi he was still active in the SSDF and in the running of the Majeerteen area in northeastern Somalia. He was explaining why the SSDF had turned down food aid from the UN. Though the 1992 famine in Somalia did not affect the northeast region, food and aid were still offered.

“If 10,000 tons of food arrives it will be sold on the black market and the proceeds used to buy arms,” he said. “It becomes an arms race. It means war. If food comes we lose our ability to control the peace and the stability of the region. Everybody will want to have a share, but that's not possible. It's been three years since there was any food aid and three years since there was the hijacking of a truck. The only trucks that are hijacked are the ones carrying food aid. No private truck with private cargo has been hijacked.

“We had meetings about this in Djibouti and in Garowe,” Abshir continued. “I met with Mohamed Abshir Muusse and with a number of elders and we discussed how any form of aid whether it was food or tents would cause problems. For example we had about 300 family-sized tents to be used exclusively for people who were living in public premises after the war: schools, hospitals, regional, administration offices, ports, shops, police stations. They were a Swedish church donation. They caused problems the moment they arrived. Those who were offloading the plane wanted to take some for themselves, and people immediately began fighting over them. The Red Cross also supplied quite a substantial number of people with kitchen utensils as an incentive for them to leave those places. The people took everything and never left the houses. This created a conflict between the administration and the people. And our relationship with the donors also gets spoiled because we've taken the gifts and haven't done what we were supposed to do.

“So if we had accepted the food we knew it was going present these problems of instability in the region and attract bandits. There was very
good trading going on; livestock, hides, and fish were exported. Commodities were imported. People were trading. You know, things were normal. Nomads were breeding the animals for sale, but if you have the food even the nomad will leave the animals to have a share of this food.

“On the other hand, we could not say we did not want food. We wanted the food to buy arms. The donors were giving food to our enemies and they were buying arms. We did not even dare not to protest very loudly for aid because otherwise the population would say, why are we not getting our share of the food? And secondly, what do you do about the liquidity that the food will bring in, the selling of the food, realizing money, and then buying arms?”

“It's like a mini arms race fueled with food. If your enemy does not buy arms you don't have to be armed yourself. Or if you rearm and get the finance and so on, then you need to rearm also, to balance. Just like the big powers were doing.

“So we decided to minimize the damage. What we actually did—why we had peace—was to give 90 percent of the food straight to the militias. That was not what the donors intended, but the donors were giving it to our enemy. What would you do?”

Abshir left the room and returned with some pamphlets from when he was in charge of propaganda for the SSDF in the mid-1980s. He showed me that the SSDF leadership had come to terms with the military uses of food aid from watching the Siyaad Barre regime manipulate food aid for years.

“We've known for a long time about the damage caused by food,” he said pointing to a pamphlet entitled “Somalia Under the Dictatorship of General Siyaad Barre.” At the bottom the pamphlet it said Printed in Mogadishu, August 1994. In reality it was printed in Ethiopia, but Abshir explained with a laugh that they were just trying to piss off Siyaad. I flipped through the pamphlet until something caught my eye.

Feeding on the Hungry of Somalia

“Profiting from misery” From “Good Intentions gone sour,” a series of reports published in the Philadelphia Inguirer, USA by Richard Ben Grammer, the staff writer, in 1981.

They hadn't gotten the name of the paper exactly right, and the writer's name was misspelled. Close enough. I read on.

Famine is not the issue in Somali Refugee camps. The huge international relief effort has succeeded to this extent: Food has poured into Somalia … The relief effort was spurred by a fraud. The theft, the false population count, the fraudulent nature of the emergency are all common knowledge in Somalia. The army of relief workers talks of little else. But nothing is said publicly because the relief business is big business, and no one can afford to derail the gravy train—not Somalia, not the donors, not the relief workers, Specially not the refugees because they are hungry.

A food monitor for the US AID programme, Mr. Michael Maren said, “sixty percent of the food for the refugees is stolen. Sixty percent or two thirds. A third of the food that is loaded on trucks never gets to the camps, and half the food that does get through is stolen in the camps.”

I showed it to Abshir. “You were quoting me before you knew me,” I said.

“As a US civil servant, I am not free to criticize the UN agencies. You can do what you like, of course, using this information … I am not surprised it's all screwed up out there, food going every way,” pointed out Mr. Michael Maren.”

I looked at Abshir. “I didn't say this. You guys just made it up. I never said anything of the sort.”

“The theft was not possible to be the work of a certain individual. He had to have certain support within the system. We shared our reports with the Somali Government. Relief business is like other business: there are careers and organizations to protect,” concluded US relief expert Mr. Michael Maren.

I hadn't said that either, not exactly, though it was inferred from other comments I'd made to the paper. All these years, unbeknownst to me, my name was being used against the government of Siyaad Barre. Abshir smiled mischievously. “Thanks,” he said.

The refugees never left the camps. The “temporary” camps, set up allegedly to shelter refugees from the Ogaden war are still there, more than ten years after that war ended. As I and many of the other critics of the 1981 relief effort predicted, the residents of those camps are still dependent on relief food and still have no way to earn a living on their own.

Several months after I sent my final memo, Grice participated in a study of the Somali economy. It found that the relief industry accounted for two-thirds of the country's economy. There was no way Siyaad Barre could afford to let the refugees go.

And the private relief agencies couldn't let them go, either.

When I was back in Mogadishu in 1993 and 1994, I decided to try to find out what happened to the Ogaadeen refugees from the camps in the Hiran region. I found groups of them in Mogadishu, where they had settled in open spaces, on the grounds of deserted public areas, in school compounds. They were in the same thatched huts living, it seemed, much as they had lived in the camps. The difference now was that there were no NGOs there working with them and supplying food and medical care. The children whom I had seen running around in the camps in 1981 were now young adults, and there were hundreds of children who had known nothing except refugee camps in their entire lives.

In Mogadishu in 1993, these Ogaadeen were nonpersons. The city was controlled by various factions of the Hawiye clan, who were fighting among themselves for power and loot. The Ogaadeen hadn't had any particular problems with the Hawiye, since they had nothing worth stealing. The young Hawiye gunmen were not looking to avenge the wrongs of the past. So the Ogaadeen in Mogadishu did as they had been doing for the past fifteen years: They sat. They waited.

A small group of men quietly gathered around me, looking almost embarrassed at their predicament. We met under a tree just outside their encampment, but as we were making our introductions, children came over and began shouting. Unable to hold the discussion, we moved indoors to what was once a Save the Children health center. It was a cavernous cement structure with cartoonish drawings on the walls showing fat, healthy children, children being weighed, inoculated, fed.

Then one of the elders spoke: “We are known to respect and welcome our visitors. If we had the resources we would have killed a goat. Since you came here, we have been trying to obtain even some cups of tea. But poverty does not permit us.”

They were surprised that I was interested in history, and shocked that I knew anything about the refugee camps at Beledweyne and Jalalaqsi. Everyone in this group had been in those camps and fled to Mogadishu ahead of the advancing rebel force. They fled toward the protection of a government that was crumbling, a government that had long before deserted them.