The Road to Hell, page 16
With the Jalalaqsi camp in a panic, the local population from the rebel-allied Hawaadle clan began to attack in advance of the rebel army, which was composed mostly of fighters from the Habar Gidir clan.
“They came through the camp and slaughtered people like goats, and they were thrown into the river,” Abdi said. “There was one month of serious fighting every morning.
“One morning after prayers, while I was just having my cup of tea, the Hawaadles came toward the camp.” Abdi began to halt. His eyes moistened. “They were using APCs [armored personnel carriers] with big guns that they were firing. We had only light arms, but bullets from an AK are nothing compared to the big guns. There were casualties, and we were all rounded up. We were told to surrender the guns, and we gave them up. And they went to each and every house and looted everything—men, women, and children herded like animals into the town center.
“The Hawaadles knew the refugees well and vice versa. The bad people were known. Those who sided with Barre were known. Some people were put on trucks by the USCSNA [United Somali Congress rebels] and taken toward the Ogaden, taken out of town. Some were massacred on the river in Beledweyne.
“I stood with my arms folded while they took everything from me— clothing, mattresses, beds, 1,000,710 shillings. A married daughter of mine was trying to stop one of them from going into the house. I saw her shot to death in front of me, and I could do nothing.
“I had a Haawadle friend who was a driver. He rescued me and my family and brought us to Mogadishu, where I am today. I lost everything. Everything. Even now I’m afraid.”
• • •
Ispoke with Abdi and Aden over a period of days, while Mogadishu rocked around us with clan violence. After every night of fighting, I went back to visit them, and they were glad to see me. I met CARE wife who apologized again and again that she had no tea for me.
Abdi understood what the aid had done to him. He knew that it had made him greedy and enticed him to abandon the life he would give anything to return to now.
* The Harti are a subgroup of the Daarood which includes the Majeerteen, Dulbahante, and Warsangeli subclans. The Marehan and Ogaadeen clans—Siyaad’s family groups—are not included. The Harti are considered by some to be the upper classes of the Daarood.
GENEVA
—From the Somali poem, “The Fire,” by Ali Dhux
A man tries hard to help you find your lost camels. He works more tirelessly than even you, But in truth he does not want you to find them, ever.
In 1985, eight years after the end of the Ogaden war, six years after the refugee crisis began in Somalia, CARE reported that their food delivery systems were running smoothly, their ration card system was mostly in place, they had cut down on the theft of commodities, and refugees were getting fed. By 1985, however, the reasons for the refugee crisis had been long forgotten. In Ethiopia a massive and telegenic famine was dominating world headlines and mobilizing rock ’n’ roll stars. The Ethiopian government was busy using the famine to eliminate their own ethnic problems and wasn’t worrying much about Somalia. Siyaad Barre had long since abandoned the dream of greater Somalia and was instead obsessed with the rapid rise of militant resistance to his regime.
Some relief agencies had reported as far back as the middle of 1982 that the crisis was over. In February of 1984, Red Cross officials announced that 150,000 refugees had returned home on their own during the previous six months. When the world responded to the famine in Ethiopia, word had spread among the refugees that better relief and aid programs were available across the border.
The Somali government routinely rejected plans to repatriate the refugees, and then they rejected plans to resettle them. Either option would have meant an end to their “refugee” status in the eyes of the UN and therefore an end to the more than $80 million in annual refugee aid. Aid workers complained but continued to administer the relief programs.
A 1982 Associated Press report summed up the common perception:
“There are strong political and economic reasons why Somalia wants the refugees to remain refugees,” said a top relief official in Mogadishu…. Refugee aid has become so big a source of foreign exchange that it has become an important component of the Somali gross national product, he said, asking to remain anonymous because of his position.
This “top relief official,” like hundreds of others, continued dumping aid into what he knew was a scam, yet he fled from the consequences of his action in order to protect “his position.”
When the first refugees from the Ogaden war crossed into Somalia in 1977, other Somalis welcomed them as family returned home. The war and Somalia’s brief victory had set off a rush of nationalist fervor. After seven years, however, the welcome had worn thin. The refugees were receiving favorable treatment from the government and were prospering. Many kept decrepit huts in the camps in order to continue collecting rations but had managed to buy houses in the towns. In some cases the camps were in better shape than the towns.
Around Somalia, refugees were getting government jobs. They were joining the army in increasing numbers. In a country ruled by a military government, it meant a tidal shifting of power from the local clan to a group of outsiders who were totally indebted to Siyaad’s government for their food and livelihood. Add to that the fact that the Ogaadeen had a clan relationship with the rulers, and Siyaad Barre had a loyal armed cadre firmly entrenched on the land of his enemies.
Throughout the early 1980s, Siyaad Barre had been faced with an uprising by rebels of the Somali Salvation Democratic Front, made up predominantly of members of the Majeerteen clan. The SSDF leader, Colonel Abdullahi Yusuf, was a hero of the Ogaden war who, along with his colleague Mohamed Farah Aydiid, led a failed coup at the end of the war in April 1978. Barre’s troops hit back against Abdullahi Yusuf’s Majeerteen subclan in the early 1980s, executing hundreds. All of this took place far away from the expatriates, the refugee camps, and the press. Western governments said little to Siyaad Barre, who continued to gather more and more economic and military assistance.
The SSDF operated predominantly out of Ethiopia. Barre couldn’t use his own troops across the border, which is why the “rebel” Western Somalia Liberation Front become so important. And since the WSLF was composed of Ogaadeen refugees operating out of refugee camps on the border, the camps were a key strategic consideration.
By the mid-1980s, the aid-fed militias of the WSLF had succeeded in tying down the SSDF (which eventually neutralized itself because of internal squabbles), and the Majeerteen were rehabilitated in the eyes of Siyaad, who figured he could count on them if the government were challenged by the Isaaq or Hawiye clans.
Increasingly, the Isaaq clan in the north became the biggest threat to Siyaad’s government. Siyaad had a deep and personal dislike for the clan. The real reasons can only be guessed at, but in part it was due to his inability to control them. As accomplished business operatives, they had built a society that was not dependent on government largesse. The Isaaq had traditional trade relationships with the nations of the Arabian Peninsula that continued despite the attempts of the government to center all economic activity in Mogadishu. Siyaad did what he could, however, and Isaaq traders were forced to make the long trip to Mogadishu for permits and licenses.
In addition, the Isaaq definitely had an “attitude” about the southerners. In part, it came from their disparate colonial experiences. The British-colonized north had a more efficient civil service and better system of education than the Italian south.
In 1981, Isaaq dissidents in London formed a rebel group to overthrow Siyaad Barre. It was called the Somali National Movement (SNM). Like the SSDF, they set up their military bases in Ethiopia, and though they didn’t cause any immediate problems for the government, they appeared to be growing into a threat. Barre sent two of his most trusted generals to the north to keep things quiet. As military governor, he sent his son-in-law, Mohamed Hersi “Morgan.” Morgan, who was at first referred to simply as the son-in-law, would soon earn a third nickname, the Butcher of Hargeysa. To command the government troops in the area, he sent his cousin, General Mohamed Hashi Gani.
Among other things, Gani directed the refugee-camp-based WSLF in a campaign to terrorize Isaaq civilians and loot food convoys.
As in the south of Somalia, by 1985, the refugee crisis in the north was no longer a refugee crisis. It was status quo. A report from the human rights organization Africa Watch documented some of what was going on. Hargeysa resident Safia Ali Mataan told Africa Watch,
When refugees from Ethiopia flooded the north, they expressed surprise to find so many Isaaqs living there, as they had been led to believe that the land was more or less empty…. [T]he government would appeal to us [Isaaqs] to “help our impoverished countrymen” and we gave extravagantly…. They would come to rely on the refugees both as spies and soldiers—at the same time using them to get massive aid from the world.
Everyone who had a business was ordered to hire refugees or to train them for work in the camps. After six months “training,” their minimum wage was 1,300 shillings, going up to 3,000, while the average local citizen earned about 500. Every Isaaq in a prominent government job was seconded by a refugee who, after a short while, would take over and be in command. Land in Hargeysa was given to some of them free and we had to buy it back from them.*
It is possible for groups of expatriate aid workers to live and work in places while having not even the smallest clue what is happening to the general population. They rarely speak the language or socialize with the objects of their benevolence, but in the Somali situation it was glaringly obvious that the aid was being manipulated and abused.
The Africa Watch report quotes a Swiss national who worked in a Hargeysa orphanage:
The refugees in the camps were better off than the local population, which was a great source of tension. The government made a huge profit out of the substantial food and other aid given for the benefit of the refugees. This was resold by the government openly in the markets of Hargeysa, not in the front stalls where foreigners would see too easily “NOT TO BE SOLD” signs. But if you knew your way around the market, you could see all this for yourself. The fact that the government was using the refugees both to get aid and to weaken the Isaaqs politically was a major problem.
Why did CARE and other humanitarian organizations continue to feed the “refugees” when their partner in the project, Somalia’s National Refugee Commission, pursued an agenda that created misery? I suspected I knew the answer.
Back home after a series of trips to Somalia during 1993, I received a call from a woman who had worked for CARE in New York. She had a few internal documents she wanted to show me. Mostly she was vaguely uncomfortable about CARE, suspecting that their decisions had more to do with business than humanitarianism. Her documents shed little light on the situation in Somalia, but she told me about a memo that a CARE administrator in Somalia had sent back to headquarters sometime in 1984 or 1985. The memo outlined the political situation in Somalia and questioned why CARE was still working there. According to her, the reply was blunt: CARE had a huge contract in Somalia. They couldn’t afford to walk away from it.
How much was the contract worth? What were its terms? I called CARE. No, they wouldn’t like to show me their contracts. That was the end of that.
As a private charity, CARE is not obligated to disclose the details of where their money comes from or how their funds are spent. Their only obligation is to make available their IRS 990 tax forms, which show aggregate inflows and expenditures. There is little useful information to be gained from such documents. The UN system is even more impenetrable. Only the U.S. government, under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), has an obligation to tell me how CARE and other charities spend their money. But CARE’s Somalia contracts were with UNHCR, and the National Refugee Commission, not with the U.S. government. And even though a large part of UNHCR’s budget was covered by American taxpayers, I had no official channels through which to explore where the money went. There was no way to trace a path of accountability.
No one ever called on CARE to answer for its shipment of food to armed fighters. If the consequences bothered anyone at headquarters, it was never made public. CARE continued to raise money from the public and to collect hundreds of millions in publicly funded contracts without anyone investigating a connection between their projects and the deaths of thousands of people in the Horn of Africa. The organization was, and is, allowed to define its own success. The sad truth is that CARE and other NGOs are never held accountable for their actions. And when U.S. troops went into Somalia in 1992, CARE was right there, collecting millions in new contracts.
At the USAID office in Nairobi in 1994, I asked an administrator who had just overseen a multimillion dollar grant to CARE why the organization continued to get money from the government. “It’s because they keep good books,” she said. “When we give money to CARE, we always know where it goes.”
And that, in reality, is the limit of accountability in the world of development and relief. NGOs are accountable to accountants, not to their individual donors, who have no way of judging the organizations’ work, and least of all to the victims, the recipients of their aid, who have no voice and who are expected to look grateful when the cameras are pointed their way.
On my way back to Somalia in the winter of 1994,I made several stops in Europe, including Geneva, headquarters for UNHCR, on the long-shot possibility that I could talk someone into opening the files for me. I had several friends there whom I’d met working and reporting from Africa in the past. Perhaps one of them would help.
My connections got me past the guards and through the front door.
At that time, UNHCR was in the process of moving from their lakeside art deco building to more modern and spacious headquarters. It was obvious why. The organization had been growing wildly in the last decade. The little commission had become a powerhouse UN agency. File cabinets, bookshelves, and copiers spilled out of office doorways into corridors. Desks were crowded into tiny rooms. Inside the offices were secretaries typing documents into word processors and other people running around with stacks of papers in their hands looking busy. “They think they’re saving refugees, but they’re all just worried about rescuing their careers,” my friend Marco commented.
Marco had been with UNHCR for a long time, serving in both Geneva and perhaps a dozen overseas assignments, including Somalia. His cynicism wasn’t unique among UN employees. He was just noting the obvious. The UN is as hierarchical a bureaucracy as exists anywhere. UN employees grouse endlessly about salaries, benefits, and their all-important ranking: “This guy is a P-4 and I’m only a P-3, and I’ve been here for two years longer. It’s because his brother-in-law is the assistant deputy minister of finance in Ecuador.” That sort of thing. Rank is everything and often has little to do with performance and everything to do with politics.
Marco turned me loose in the corridors, and I found my way to the Somalia desk and asked if it might be possible to see some records going back a few years. The desk officer, a Mexican, said he’d see what he could do and picked up the phone. He flirted a bit with the woman on the other end. I took this to be a good sign. Maybe they’ll do each other a favor and I’ll be the beneficiary. He asked her about going out to dinner, and seemed pleased with the answer. Then, replacing the receiver on the phone he asked me, “What did you want again?”
“Somalia. Records.”
“I don’t know. I don’t think we have records that far back. I think they’re stored in a warehouse somewhere else. I don’t know where they are.”
“Is there anyone else here who deals with Somalia?”
He sent me down the hall and into an office where a friendly looking man sat at his desk, doing nothing, surrounded by large stacks of paper. The man appeared to be from Asia, somewhere in Indochina I guessed.
“Excuse me. I was looking for some information on Somalia. I was wondering if you could help.”
Of course,” he said. “Somalia became independent in 1960, when the former Italian Somaliland merged with the British Protectorate of Soma’ liland.”
I stopped him. That wasn’t really what I had in mind. I was looking for archives. Did he know of any? No, he told me. He hadn’t been on the job for very long, had never been to Somalia, and was just starting to study the history. He hadn’t yet reached the Ogaden war of 1977 or the refugee crisis in the 1980s, and really had no idea where records might be.
I went back to Marco’s office and we went to lunch in the cafeteria of the main UN headquarters at the Palais high on a hill overlooking the lake.
The UN was neck deep in its peacemaking role in Somalia at that time. UNHCR was actively working with Somali refugees in Kenya. The entire UN organization had committed huge amounts of resources to various humanitarian projects. Marco and I sat down over our trays of food, and he started to speak about the mess in Somalia, and his colleagues at the UN. “No one here has the courage to say that Aydiid is a criminal. They’ll be the first to criticize a Western power, but they’re available to accept any kind of crime to stay in a country and show the world they care about starving children.” He paused to look around the room full of smartly dressed UN bureaucrats who were eating their lunches and drinking wine. “It is just a big masturbation,” Marco said in English heavily spiced with his Italian accent. “UN bureaucrats are people too stupid to get real jobs with their own governments but too powerful to be disposed of. I can’t stand them. They should disappear, all of them.” Once more he paused. “These are the people who decide the future of Angola and Somalia.”
