The Road to Hell (43 page)

In May 1994, the Security Council voted to allow the mission to proceed for another three months.
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The decision received little scrutiny from the U.S. press, which, like the U.S. government, was busy with new crises in Haiti and Rwanda.

With the press and the Americans occupied elsewhere, the UN civilian bureaucracy in Somalia spread like a tropical fungus. Between March and December 1994, Somalis saw the number of UN civilian employees double to nearly 800, even as humanitarian activity ground to a halt. One worker in the humanitarian office said she was “disgusted” with how little was going on. Most of these foreign employees, she complained, were just doing time there to help them climb the UN career ladder. “A Somalia combat ribbon looks good on the résumé,” she said.

A Somali employee in the same office was more bitter. Having worked under five different foreigners at the humanitarian unit, he said he finally had figured out that the expatriates were interested only in collecting their daily subsistence allowance of $100 or more per day, beyond their salary and perks. Somali employees were lucky to get $300 per month.

The UN spent $160 million renovating the former U.S. Embassy compound (which was completed at a cost of almost $40 million by the U.S. government just before Mogadishu descended into chaos). Even after it became clear that the UN operation would be ending, the bureaucracy continued to sink money into construction. A new airport terminal building was completed in August 1994- Then, in November, the UN installed speed bumps inside the 80-acre compound; apparently, driving the same two miles of road day after day had made people reckless. (Anyone could walk across the compound in ten minutes.)

Despite continued UN attempts to “normalize” relations with Aydiid's faction, the warlord did only what was in his own strategic best interests. In July 1994, his soldiers attacked a Zimbabwean contingent in the town of Beledweyne. One Zimbabwean was killed, and the rest were stripped to their underwear. Automatic weapons, mortars, and armored personnel carriers valued at more than $2 million were confiscated. (After the American withdrawal, the UN lacked the transport capability to reinforce any of its troops in the field.) Aydiid apologized for killing the soldier, kept the goods, and continued to meet cordially with new SRSG, Victor Gbeho—who continued to express optimism that the UN could broker a peace
agreement.
*
Meanwhile, Aydiid had been complaining about the UN's failure to pay hotel bills that his delegation ran up during months of stalled negotiations in Nairobi and Addis Ababa.

Aydiid, preparing for the inevitable withdrawal, insisted that the UN leave behind all vehicles and other valuable equipment, arguing that any “aid” that came into Somalia belonged to the Somali people and, by extension, Aydiid himself. Though the request struck many at the UN as impertinent, Somalis considered this a perfectly reasonable request. From their perspective, the UN operation was inherently corrupt, and UN bureaucrats were in Somalia only to enrich themselves. They saw little evidence to dissuade them.

Since the beginning of the intervention, Somalis charged that the Egyptians and other Third World troops in Somalia were there only to “do business.” It appeared they were right. Once the Western contingents had left, security collapsed. A few dollars passed to sentries bought anyone entrance inside the gates of the port or the airport to do business. In the five months following the American departure, fifty-seven brand-new four-wheel-drive vehicles were sold to Somalis by the security force for between $3,000 and $5,000 apiece. Some turned up on the streets of Nairobi—their UN markings faintly visible beneath fresh paint—where they fetched $50,000 to $60,000. In September 1994, four tankers filled with gasoline were simply driven out of the port, never to be seen again. Cash and goods alike fed the arms buildup.

The bill for the operation reached $4 million per day—one-third of it supplied by the United States. Most of that paid for foreign troops. Another large chunk went to foreign contractors such as Australia's Morris Catering and the Texas-based Brown & Root.
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Somali businessmen who have tried to deal with the UN complained that procurement officers demanded kickbacks. Then there was the $3.9 million in cash that disappeared from the UN compound in April 1994. None of the money ever showed up—despite detective assistance from Scotland Yard—and it is generally considered to have been an inside job.

The expenditure might have been worth it if the UN had succeeded in brokering peace, but it never did. The two main factions drifted even further
apart and then splintered again as some of Aydiid's top lieutenants abandoned him.
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As negotiations became more intricate, the UN personnel in the country had less and less experience. By the time the UN mandate was renewed, there was no one left with any institutional memory.

This led to a series of diplomatic blunders that only confused the situation in Somalia. Based on information that Gbeho's staff sent back to New York, the secretary general, on September 17,1994, published a report that was packed with inaccuracies designed to justify the continued UN presence in Somalia.
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For example, the report concluded that the UN had successfully brokered a settlement in the lower Juba area south of Mogadishu. Although signatures had been coaxed onto paper, fighting had actually intensified during the summer. NGOs such as the World Food Program, Oxfam, and the International Rescue Committee were forced out of the region due to threats from General Mohamed Said Hersi “Morgan,” a participant in the “peace” process.

The report also listed a series of meetings and agreements among various Somali groups that it optimistically portrayed as steps to a wider peace. In reality, however, they were just more of the same hollow accords that the UN had been collecting signatures on for two years. No one who knew anything about recent history would have been at all cheered by the “agreements.” What the UN failed to realize, or refused to acknowledge, was that, because of its reputation, its very participation in a peace process nullified agreements in the eyes of the participants. In contrast, agreements that the Somalis hammered out among themselves, usually after a dose of bloody confrontation, seemed to hold.

UNOSOM was viewed by the Somalis not as a credible mediator but as a resource to be exploited. Right up to the UN's departure in March 1995, many Somalis saw the mission as little more than a source of revenue. In part, this was the result of a series of UN threats to close up shop if the warlords refused to negotiate in good faith. But every time the warring factions refused to budge, the UN came up with a new excuse to stay.

“   •   •

A
fter the Americans and journalists departed, Matt Bryden and I took a trip through “the rest of Somalia,” the areas where the UN and the NGOs weren't really working. We flew to Galkayo, in central Somalia, where a group of expatriates in a UNOSOM office quietly passed the time doing very little. They were in essence providing that all-important UN presence in Galkayo. The town was hot and peaceful. We dined with UNOSOM employees, who spoke openly about how UNOSOM was only making things worse.

On the streets of Galkayo we were approached by a man who asked, “Galkayo is so peaceful. Why are there no NGO's here working?” I suggested to him that maybe it was peaceful precisely because there were no NGOs there. He thought for a moment and then asked the question again.

We visited with the governor, Abdirahman Bixi, an acquaintance of Matt's. A member of the Omar Mahamoud subclan of the Majeerteen, Abdirahman Bixi became governor following the Galkayo accords engineered by Aydiid in Mogadishu in May 1993.

Matt described Abdirahman Bixi to me as warlord-mullah-businessman. When we arrived at his compound we found him sitting like Buddha—chubby, shirtless, and wearing a
macawis
—on the floor of his darkened bedroom. He greeted Matt with a roar and a huge hug, and then sent the children out to find some tea. So how were things in Galkayo? “Fantastic,” he said. And what had happened to the technicals, we wanted to know. Galkayo had been filled with technicals from both the Majeerteen and Habar Gidir clans shooting the place up. Abdirahman Bixi waved his hand dismissively. “The boys are doing business,” he said. They had removed the gun mounts from the sawed-off Land Cruisers and filled them with goods for the market. “Trucks come from Boosaaso bringing cheap goods. The drivers buy goats from the nomads. One sack of sugar equals 1.5 goats. They bring other goods from Berbera, goods at a cheap price.”

We left Galkayo overland, heading north to Boosaaso in a pickup truck rented from the governor. It was a ten-hour drive along what was called the Chinese road to Hargeysa. Chinese aid had built it in the 1970s, and it was still in pretty good shape. This was the kind of foreign aid the Somalis liked. It was something useful that everyone could see. Chinese aid is a whole package deal. They bring everything, including the workers. They build it and then they leave. Osman Ato had once told me that the Americans were stupid with their aid. “You waste money on a lot of big projects,” he had said. “The Chinese just build a stadium or a road and everyone loves them.”

We drove for hours across the featureless desert, and Matt told me stories about his experiences in Somalia, each one reinforcing to me—and to him—what a disaster the vast majority of aid projects had been. The warm air ripped through the cab of the truck as we flew up the deserted road. I was riding in a car without guns for the first time in two years.

At a few points along the trip we saw roadblocks. In the area around Mogadishu this would be an indication that it's time to fear for your life. But the men at these roadblocks didn't even ask for money. They wanted a commodity more important: news. “What do you hear from Galkayo, from Beledweyne, from Mogadishu, from Kismaayo?” Like desert nomads, they passed information on and we resumed the journey.

After the town of Garowe, where Ethiopia juts into Somalia, the Chinese road heads west toward Hargeysa, and a new road continues a final 450 kilometers northward to Gardo, up over the hills of Al Maskab, and downward to the seaport of Boosaaso. The second road is often known as the Italian road, built with Italian aid under the Socialist government of Benito Craxi for a cost of $250 million.

In typical Italian colonial fashion, the Italian construction companies that got the contracts returned millions to Italian politicians in the form of kickbacks. Many of these arrangements were made through Siyaad Barre's “Chamber of Commerce” office in Milan. The Chamber had a commission deal on every “aid” project, allowing Barre to keep a chunk of the aid loot right there in Italy so he didn't have to bother stealing it from his own central bank. Some 114 aid projects were arranged this way during the 1980s, including factories that never opened and hospitals that were never used. This came to light in 1989 when another Somali official, a certain General Mohamed Farah Aydiid, sued Craxi, alleging that the Socialists had promised him half of the 10 percent commission on all arrangements made through the Somali Chamber of Commerce in Milan. A Milan court dismissed the case, not sure how to deal with allegations that kickbacks were not paid on illegal kickbacks.

Meanwhile, there was a beautiful, rarely used road in the middle of nowhere, and after seven hours of driving I was happy to feel it under the tires. Perhaps Osman Ato had a point. We traveled around the region, ending up in Hargeysa some days later. Hargeysa, the capital of the former British Somaliland protectorate, was now the capital of the de facto independent Republic of Somaliland. I made an appointment to see President Mohamed Ibrahim Egal and walked around the town a bit.

Hargeysa had been under almost constant assault since Siyaad Barre started bombing it in 1988. A further civil war among northerners had destroyed
what was left. The independent Republic of Somaliland begged for foreign aid, but since no one recognized them, none came. What followed reminded me of a book I had read as a child:
Stone Soup
. In this children's story, some soldiers wander into a town somewhere in Europe and ask the villagers for food. The villagers lock their cupboards and plead poverty. In turn, the soldiers say that they don't need any food; in fact, they're going to cook a feast for the entire town: stone soup. They light a fire, fill a kettle with water, toss in some stones, and wait. The soup will be delicious, they say, but it would be so much better if they only had a carrot. So someone brings a carrot. And then it would be even better if they had some onions… and so forth, until the soup is full of vegetables and everyone marvels that soup made of stones could taste so good.

When it became apparent in Hargeysa that no outside money was coming in, a few local businessmen took it upon themselves to do a few repairs. Some houses were rebuilt. Money started to trickle in from relatives in Dubai and Toronto and London. Soon a mosque was repaired, a new hotel went up. Then someone built a power generating plant. And a satellite phone system was installed. It was a miracle, as if one of the most devastated cities in Africa had rebuilt itself.

It was evening, after 8:00
P.M.
, when I walked through the gates of the “presidential palace” in Hargeysa. Guards were lounging around, AK-47s lying carelessly on the ground. I strolled through the front door, past some guards sitting on the steps chewing
qat
. The stairs were frayed carpet on cracked marble. I wandered around the palace briefly until someone asked me what I was doing there. When I explained, he told me to wait in a room off to the right of the stairs. Inside, a little man with glassy eyes sat on a sheet spread on the floor. He had a bundle of
qat
on the sheet beside a beltfed machine gun near the window. “Somali whiskey,” he said, holding up a bundle. I stooped to examine the machine gun. It was old. The stock was wooden and worn smooth. I was then directed to a room across the courtyard, but it was too hot to stay inside, so I went and sat on the railing overlooking the rock garden below.