The Road to Hell, page 25
“The only limit was that the damage couldn’t exceed a certain dollar value. So they were ready to pay just to call an end to this twelve-year scam.”
When his CARE contract ended later that year, with the job far from completed, Bryden found work with the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) in the northwest, in the coastal town of Berbera, the main port in the region and the site of the still-unused American airbase. On one of his trips to the northwest, he was accompanied by Abdirahman Osman Raghe. “I went to the north with Raghe to distribute plastic sheeting to some new arrivals displaced from the fighting around Boroma. It was during [the Muslim holy month of] Ramadan, and I had an enormous fight with Raghe because we couldn’t get the workers at the airport to move the stuff. They all wanted to go home early. I still had my fresh ideals about aid and how there were people suffering and we had to get them this plastic sheeting before the rains. And Raghe said, ‘Look, you can’t make these people work. It’s dangerous. They don’t care. They’re not interested in the end result of all this.’ And I got on my high horse and said, ‘Okay, fine if you don’t care. But I care enough that we gotta get this stuff moving.’ And Raghe blew up and told me that I was coming into this as an arrogant, young gaal who thought that aid work was the only thing people cared about. We were having this big fight at the airport. It would have continues but we got distracted because some soldiers started shooting at us for fun. And that was my introduction to Berbera.”
Bryden was learning lessons that all aid workers learn, eventually. He was just absorbing them faster in the context of the frenetic collapse of the Somali state. On Bryden’s second day in Berbera, someone tried to kill the head of UNDP in the town. An administrative screw-up meant that people weren’t getting paid on time. One of the workers returned with a gun and fired on the man. He missed, but the officer broke his hip diving out of the way. He was sent back to Mogadishu, and Bryden, twenty-four years old, was left in charge.
“The only help I had was the driver in the office, who was made a field assistant because he was the only one who spoke English and knew the system. His name was Mohamed Abdi Mohamed. An old man. Very gentle. He was from the Isaaq clan and was stuck in Berbera. Because the government troops in Berbera were Ogaadeen and Hawiye, and other clans from other areas, they spent the nights basically taking a turn in the town looting, pillaging, and raping in one of the blocks in town where there were Isaaqs. And the Isaaqs were powerless. Little by little, Mohamed tried to explain to me what was going on, when we were alone in the car on the road. He’d try to explain to me what the SNM was, what the fighting was about.”
Bryden was on six-month contracts and at the end of the first one, he took leave to attend a wedding in Canada. Mohamed Abdi drove him to the airfield. He took all his belongings with him. As he looked across the flat, hot coastal plain to the mountains in the distance, he turned to Mohamed and said, “I’m not finished with Berbera yet. I’m coming back.”
After three weeks, Bryden was back in Nairobi at the UNDP office to collect his ticket back to Somalia. The man at the UNDP travel agency looked at him and asked, “Are you coming or going?” Bryden replied, “I’m going. I’m going back to Mogadishu. I’m going back to Berbera.” The man said, “Oh, you haven’t heard, but there was a massacre in Berbera. Twenty-one people were shot. Four from the Red Cross and one from UNDR” The army had gone around, taken people who were identified as being Isaaq— twenty-one of them—took them behind the UNDP office and machine-gunned them. Bryden knew the one from UNDP was Mohamed Abdi.
“I remember that I used to kid myself thinking if I hadn’t left, they wouldn’t have dared,” Bryden said. “Not when I was there. But I took my leave, I came back, and he’s dead.
“I think I was protected in the sense that I represented a lot of aid, and even the generals in the army didn’t want this aid to stop. That was my protection. I didn’ realize that. I thought the UN was my protection. I thought I had some kind of diplomatic immunity.”
Bryden nevertheless returned to Berbera. There were new refugees and new problems, and the World Food Program and the NGOs were back in the business of sending food. As usual, most of the food was being stolen by the local military commander who, in the absence of any real government authority, was acting as a warlord. He was the one who had executed the Isaaqs in town, and now he was getting rich and feeding his troops on relief food. Bryden thought someone would care. He was still too new to Somalia to know any differently. “When I reported this back to a heads of agencies meeting in Mogadishu, people just didn’t want to hear it.”
At one meeting in 1990, when I was complaining about diversion of relief food, I remember the head of WFP saying, ‘Yes, that’s all very interesting, but we need to maintain a presence. It’s important that the UN have a presence in the northwest.’”
That presence was costly. Soon after, a Red Cross representative, Peter Altwegg, was killed near Hargeysa by the SNM, and two other Red Cross workers were kidnapped. “The Red Cross delegation in Berbera was fairly traumatized by all of this,” Bryden said. “It was dramatic; when Peter’s body came back to Berbera, I was pretty traumatized. I went down to Mogadishu at that time as well to say, ‘Hey, I’m not working.’ At that time I was doing no work, essentially. I’d do administration for UNDP in the morning and by noon I’d run out of things to do. I taught English for an hour every day at the Red Cross Hospital for the Somali staff. I had a class of sometimes fifty people who I’d teach for an hour. After that I’d usually give a hand in the operating theater in the wards because there was a lot of work to do and I wanted to learn.
“And I’d travel back to Mogadishu to say that to me there was an imbalance—we were taking risks, we were doing no really effective work, and yet things like Peter’s murder were becoming more common. There was more shooting in Berbera toward the end of 1990. People were beginning to get killed in Mogadishu as well. By then I think there had been a German killed; his girlfriend had been raped. There had been an American marine from the embassy shot through the back three times, badly injured—though he was okay. Violence was becoming part of the atmosphere and I was worried and upset, and the response that I remember getting from UNDP again was, ‘Yeah, but we need a presence in the northwest.’ And privately, I thought, I don’t want to be just a presence. Not that I didn’t want to risk my life—that went without saying—but also I didn’t want to have to watch other people get killed. I had to stand be and watch this and suffer the loss of friends and colleagues for nothing—because the UN wanted a ‘presence.’”
The hit song in Mogadishu in those days was by a woman named Saado Ali Warsame. It was called “Land Cruiser.”
It’s a bad idea and wrong way of thinking
to buy a Land Cruiser while you beg for maize.
The house is dark
with no water flowing in the taps,
and the babies have no food to eat.
While seeing the shining car
and hearing the sound of its powerful engine
you think you’re powerful in the Horn of Africa.
Dear relatives, do you all agree with
the lack of food in our homes
without raising any objection about the luxury cars
and the buying of Land Cruisers.
It’s a bad idea and wrong way of thinking
to buy a Land Cruiser while you beg for maize.
Bryden remembers driving around Mogadishu with Somali friends blasting the song out the window. The symbol of wealth, power and the NGOs had become the anthem of the revolution.
• • •
By August of 1990, the Americans started to play it safe. Dependents and nonofficial Americans were asked to leave. In November, the UN started to evacuate all its nonessential staff. Bryden was sent to Nairobi against his wishes. After a few weeks there, he felt a hunger to go back. He’d seen so much violence and tension building up. He’d seen a government staggering under the weight of a rebel assault. Now the rebels were marching toward Mogadishu, and he didn’t want to read about it in the Nairobi papers. Under strict orders not to return, and banned from official UN flights, Bryden bought a ticket on the last commercial Somali Airlines flight from Nairobi to Mogadishu. He arrived on December 30, 1990.
“On the flight I met an American diplomat. We had three or four beers together on the flight. Got a little bit tanked. And when we set down in Mogadishu, they opened the door of the aircraft. Then we heard it. Heavy machine gun fire and explosions and mortars. There were a lot of people trying to get on that flight out. And I asked one of the guys, a Somali I saw as I got off the airplane, I said, ‘Who is it? Is it the USC?* What’s going on?’ And he said, ‘It’s the Hawiye.’ And that’s all he said. And it was true, because what happened in Mogadishu that day was not the arrival of the USC. It was just the uprising, in mainly Hawiye neighborhoods, where kids started putting up barricades, taking out their guns, and started shooting at soldiers, started arming themselves, forming militia units.”
Bryden drove through the streets and saw a city panicked. Refugees were on the move. Looters had begun to empty houses of everything that was left behind. It was surreal and cinematic, too strange to feel really dangerous.
On New Year’s Eve, the American presence was down to thirty-seven people. They gathered at the K-7 compound for a party. Bryden showed up, joining American security officer John Fox and several others.
Bryden recalls that around midnight, the UN got on the walkie-talkie net and started passing around ridiculous New Year’s goodwill messages. Bryden remembers it going something like this: “First, the UN special coordinator, the UNDP resident representative, the UN special coordinator for emergency relief operations, would like to thank the members of the UN community for their hard work and blah-blah-blah throughout the year and to wish them the very best in the new year, blah-blah-blah. And then the representative of WHO would like to thank the UNDP resident representative for his good wishes and for his support during blah-blah-blah and to wish all of the staff of the UN family and community in Somalia the very best for the coming year. And then the director of WFP would like to thank the …”
Then Joe Borge, the deputy chief of the mission, led the party in singing of “Amazing Grace.” John Fox recalls: “We hadn’t finished the chorus when all hell broke loose, close to the compound, and then we heard quite heavy fighting going on in the distance.”
Naturally, everyone ran up to the roof, one of the highest points in the city. From there they watched the first rounds being fired into Villa Somalia. Suddenly, shooting broke out in the street, just beside the building. And then bullets came right over the top of the building. “We all hit the ground,” Bryden recalls, “and I noticed that most people had managed to land without spilling their drinks. I remember that distinctly.”
Fox described a rainbow arc of fire going into the airport where Barre’s bunker was located. No one slept much, and they had breakfast by the swimming pool in the morning.
Fox peered out from the compound and saw “streams of refugees carrying nothing at all. Then we saw looters from our own houses, our own staff going by, our furniture on trucks. We could see individual houses being broken into from the top of K-7. Typewriters and computers were carried down the streets.”
The Siyaad Barre regime lasted until the end of January 1991, when the rebel forces actually arrived in town. This time the Americans evacuated for real. Operation Eastern Exit might have gotten some press, and the marines involved might have been considered heroes except that the Gulf War had just started, and the fireworks there were much more dramatic.
The Americans airlifted most of the expatriates out of the city, including the Russians. Somali staff who had worked for the U.S. and other embassies were left behind to their fate. As the last helicopters lifted off from the new U.S. Embassy compound, looters poured over the walls and grabbed everything that was left. And from above, the former Cold War adversaries safely observed what twenty years of the superpower competition had brought to Somalia.
* The army by then was predominantly Ogaadeen, but the Ogaadeen were suddenly betrayed by Siyaad. In order to flush out Ethiopia-based rebel groups, Siyaad made an agreement with Ethiopia’s dictator, Mengistu Haile Mariam, renouncing Somalia’s claims on the Ogaden. Ironically, this agreement forced the SNM into an offensive position at the same time it made the Somali army less willing to fight. The Ogaadeen then formed several liberation groups and joined the fight against Siyaad’s government.
† Why Somalis Flee by Robert Gersony , State Department report, August 1989.
*bThe USC (United Somali Congress), under the leadership of General Mohamed Farah Aydiid, were advancing toward Mogadishu.
PIGS AT A TROUGH
—Senator Patrick Leahy
Our national generosity seems to have been perverted.
In October of 1993, U.S. Representative Tim Penny of Minnesota proposed an amendment to the Maritime Security and Competitiveness Act of 1993. The amendment restricted American ships carrying food aid overseas from charging the U.S. government rates in excess of “twice the level of competitive world market rates.” The amendment was opposed by representatives from maritime states and supported by representatives from farm states, who figured they could export more food if the freight costs were reduced.
This fight concerned a little-known government regulation known as cargo preference, which requires that 75 percent of certain foreign food aid be shipped on privately owned U.S.-flag vessels. According to the General Accounting Office, cargo preference laws increased shipping bills to taxpayers by an estimated total of $578 million per year from 1989 through 1993. For the same years, USDA and AID report that the additional transportation costs of the preference cargo they shipped on U.S.-flag vessels averaged about $200 million and $23 million per year, respectively. Most of their preference cargo is foreign aid. From 1988 through 1992, USDA andAID shipped 36 million metric tons of food aid. Of the total amount, 27.5 million tons (approximately 77 percent) was shipped on U.S.-flag vessels.
Cargo preference is just one of the hidden ways that U.S. companies get their hands on foreign aid money.
In support of the amendment, Representative Pat Roberts from the farming state of Kansas said,
When it came time to pay for the freight—listen to this—when the USDA asked for bids from U.S.-flag carriers, one of the early bids came in at $138 per ton, more than five times the going world rate of $20 to $30 per ton. The Secretary of Agriculture wisely refused to accept a freight bid that was fully one-third higher than the value of the grain to be shipped. But as later bids came in, the USDA was forced to accept rates upward of $90 per ton, three times more than the world rate.
These funds, spent entirely to support American private companies and retain American jobs in the shipping industry, are called foreign aid. Predictably, Representative Jack Fields of Texas, a state from which much grain is shipped, spoke in opposition to the amendment. “How does the cost of cargo preference compare to agricultural subsidies?” he asked.
Agricultural subsidies dwarf cargo preference. If we are going to be talking about subsidies, we ought to talk about agricultural subsidies. The U.S. government spends 8 of every 10 of its export financing dollars to promote the export of agricultural commodities, which account for only one-tenth of all American exports. The U.S. Government spent about $12.2 billion in domestic and export subsidies for agricultural products in 1992, about 15 times the total amount spent to promote the whole maritime industry and 90 times the amount spent on cargo preference.
And so the real battles over foreign aid are fought not in terms of helping the hungry but in this arena of battling subsidies. The companies and industries that line up at the subsidy trough—the agricultural industry, the shipping industry, the big private food exporters, and the NGOs—speak about food security, jobs, humanitarianism. The words they use to get their piece of the action are determined by their audience. The rationale can be hard-nosed utilitarian or weepy humanitarian or a mixture of the two. But at the tail end of the debate, there is always the same result: public money destined for private hands. The massive amounts of this money dwarf the few million here and there ripped off by corrupt Third World dictators. The prizes on this side of the ocean are much bigger, and entirely divorced from what actually happens to the food once it leaves these shores.
What was interesting about the debate on the Penny amendment was that it pitched two titanic interest groups against each other. The ensuing battle tore gaping holes in the wall of silence that often rises across both sides of the congressional aisle when talk turns to government pork. These are regional and individual economic issues, beyond the control of the party whips and others who would normally suppress a discussion.
In addition to highlighting the issue of agricultural subsidies, the Penny amendment debate led to the following statement from Representative Charles G. Rose III of North Carolina.
My 21 years with the House Committee on Agriculture have taught me that this debate is less about cost savings to the U.S. government and more about increasing the profit margins of multinational grain merchants, many of which have financial investments in foreign-flagged ships.
