The Road to Hell, page 28
Step Two coverage generally follows immediately from Step One. If a follow-up story is going to be written about a predicted African famine, it is usually about how nothing is being done. This reflects the agenda of the aid agencies, who are the main source of the story—and who are trying to raise money to mobilize.
Steps Two and Three occurred over the next year. The ouster of Siyaad Barre didn’t get much press coverage because it coincided with the beginning of the Gulf War. But the war soon became more than just the reason Somalia was ignored. It was seen as the moral antithesis to feeding the hungry. News reports started quoting air officials who blamed the United States for pouring all its attention and resources into the war while Africa was facing starvation. On February 18, 1991, Julian M. Isherwood of United Press International wrote: “The Gulf War, potentially one of the most devastating wars in history because of its use of advanced technology of destruction, has stolen the headlines from these other wars and catastrophes around the world, as well as the diplomatic momentum to solve long-standing armed quarrels and help those in need.”
On March 10, 1991, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported from London, “Aid organizations believe the Persian Gulf War is largely to blame for the huge shortfall in government donations, diverting attention from the African drought.” The challenge to America was apparent: You are willing to use your money and might to kill, but not to help starving Africans.
By the summer of 1992, months of lobbying by aid agencies resulted in a jump in press coverage about starvation in Somalia.
By this time, too, the morality of U.S. policy in Africa had particular resonance; the presidential race was moving into high gear. The Bush policy regarding Haitian refugees had been attacked as “immoral and racist.” At the same time, there was an expectation that the United States soon would militarily intervene in the Balkans and that Somalia would be ignored. In July, UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali chastised the Security Council for ignoring the fate of Africans and focusing too much on “a rich man’s war” in former Yugoslavia. Boutros-Ghali borrowed this slogan from anti-Gulf War protesters who had chanted: “Why should the poor fight a rich man’s war?” With the Gulf War a distant memory, Somalia was now held up against Bosnia as a morality test for President Bush’s foreign policy. The press corps duly assisted this effort.
On August 12, the Washington Post headlined an article by Nairobi correspondent Keith Richburg, “Somalia’s Overshadowed Tragedy: World Anxious About Balkan Turmoil, Aloof to That in Africa,” in which Richburg wrote: “If tragedy were measured simply in numbers of human lives destroyed, the one in Somalia would, by many accounts, be judged greater than that in Croatia and Bosnia. Here, civil war has been compounded by a famine that is starving entire villages. But unlike the Balkans, the Somali crisis has attracted little international attention or aid, and only faint, distant calls for Western military involvement.”
Richburg quoted Sanford J. Ungar, a former Post correspondent stationed in Africa who is now dean of American University’s communications school. Speaking of what he called “a Eurocentric bias,” Ungar told the Post, “It’s part of the old myths and assumptions that the most important things happening in the world at any given time are the things happening in Europe.”
The same day, Anna Quindlen in her New York Times column sounded the interventionist war cry, blaming United States inaction on Eurocentrism: “But the truth is that we are a deeply Eurocentric nation…. Bosnia, with all its horrors, is at the center of public and political dialogue and Somalia, with all its horrors, is a peripheral discussion.” She quoted Jack Healey, executive director of Amnesty International to explain why: “It’s racism.” That tons of relief food and supplies were flowing into Somalia, with more on the way, did not impress Quindlen. “The United Nations has agreed to airlift food into the interior,” she wrote, “but that is neither an adequate nor a long-term solution. Senator Nancy Kassebaum, who sits on the Senate Subcommittee on African Affairs, supports the use of an international force of soldiers to make sure food shipments get to the people.”
Quindlen then played the Gulf War card: “Just a year ago some of us, unpersuaded by the high moral principles involved in giving our all for cheap oil, were saying that America could no longer afford to police the world. With the President’s Gulf War bluster about liberation, we lost sight of the best reason to involve ourselves in foreign affairs—because it is sometimes obviously the moral thing to do.” Her conclusion: “Surely our empathy can transcend race.”
This was a perfect foreign policy cudgel to use on President Bush—no one expected him to send the marines to Somalia. Once he did, however, those who were so quick to point out the immorality of inaction seemed utterly unprepared to deal with the entirely new set of moral quandaries that accompanied the use of overwhelming military force in the service of humanitarian goals.
Although most Americans know about Operation Restore Hope, the military intervention in Somalia, few know about Operation Provide Relief, the massive airlift of food that began in the summer of 1992 and was financed primarily by the United States. As a result of this effort, food was reaching those in need, and death rates were beginning to fall. But the possibility of an invasion already had been raised, and this began to shape the famine coverage in the papers and on TV.
Indeed, it was this possibility of U.S. intervention—and far less the hungry people of Somalia—that led to the surge of media attention in the fall of 1992. Journalists who had never been to Africa were horrified at what they found and filed gruesome stories. Though no one really knew how many had died, press accounts were filled with numbers of dead and dying. Coverage of the famine in Somalia had moved to Step Four—the growth in the number of deaths.
On September 15, the Associated Press quoted CARE president Philip Johnston: “‘From 2,000 to 5,000 Somalis are dying each day,’ he said.” Johnston, described in the article as a “private relief expert,” was in the United States raising money for CARE.
On October 2, the Washington Post’s Richburg found an honest source to comment on the death rates in Somalia: “‘I don’t think anyone has a clue how many people have died,’ said Roy Williams of the International Rescue Committee.”
On October 4, Associated Press correspondent Mort Rosenblum wrote: “Even now, the relief officials said, efforts lag far behind the need. An estimated 1.5 million Somalis are in danger of starving to death and already are dying at a rate of 2,000 a day.”
On October 8, the AP reported: “Up to two million Somalis are said to be at imminent risk of starving to death. Estimates of the number who have died vary widely, but experts agree it far exceeds 100,000.”
That figure appeared in thousands of newspaper articles until October 12, when Boutros-Ghali’s special envoy to Somalia, Mohamed Sahnoun, told a fund-raising conference in Geneva that 300,000 people might have died from war and famine while the United Nations did nothing and Somalia “descended into hell.” The 300,000 figure was then cited as the UN estimate, while the Red Cross and CARE continued to tell reporters the death figure was around 100,000. But the higher number prevailed in news accounts.
Reports conflicted on the severity of conditions in Somalia. A careful reader would have noticed that the situation in Baidoa was improving, while the situation in Bardera was getting worse. These details, and the questions they might have raised about the localized impact of the famine, were lost in the overall impression that the entire country was starving. Television cameras continued to seek out and broadcast the worst cases, while print coverage took a backseat to the pictures. On October 11, Reuters reported that the international relief efforts had turned the tide of death in Baidoa, a symbol of Somalia’s agony. “The known daily death rate has dropped from 400 to around 100 in recent weeks, [the Red Cross] says.”
Jane Perlez, then covering Africa for the New York Times, was one of the few correspondents who tried to be more specific. On October 22, she reported that 65 people in Baidoa had died that night. (In fact, 65 deaths per day was about average for the month of October according to official Red Cross documents examined later.)
At the same time that conditions in Baidoa were improving without international military intervention, news accounts conveyed that 1,000 people were dying every day in Somalia. Most echoed this October 29 report from the United Nations as found in the Washington Post: “The new UN plan comes amid growing concern that unless international relief efforts intensify, an estimated 250,000 Somalis could die by the end of the year and an additional 4.5 million could face starvation.”
In fact, 4.5 million represented the vast majority of the total population of Somalia, and it would have been clear to anyone traveling beyond the immediate famine zone that the vast majority was, to the contrary, not in any danger at all. (Some sources place the entire population of Somalia at 4.5 to 5.5 million.) The entire population of the famine-affected areas of the country was actually only 2.5 to 3 million.
The point of such UN reports is clearly to generate big numbers in the hope of provoking a response. What does it mean to face starvation? Nomads, I suppose, “face” starvation all the time, which is all the report was saying, since there were fewer than 4.5 million people in the entire affected area of southern Somalia. The media uncritically passed along all of the UN’s propaganda as if it were blasphemous to demand details and hard facts during an emergency.
Nor did anyone in the press point out that earlier dire predictions had not materialized. Typical of summertime newspaper stories was this AP dispatch: “The United Nations estimates 1.5 million people are in imminent danger of starving to death in Somalia while another 4.5 million are nearing a food crisis.”
Though aid agencies often generate baseless numbers on their own initiative, reporters also play a large role. I’ve been to hundreds of news conferences in the midst of crises where journalists relentlessly demanded figures from reluctant spokespersons. Numbers make journalists sound authoritative—and editors back home demand them.
In the Somali context, and during most crises, this is idiocy. Numbers are usually baseless fabrications. As an example of how difficult it is to come up with numbers, Murray Watson wrote the following in an unpublished critique of aid agencies in Somalia.
Between 1978 and 1989 the World Bank, USAID and other donors invested about $600 million in development projects, many of which were concerned with generating a knowledge base about how rural Somalis were using natural resources in generating food and cash for survival and socio-economic advancement. At some periods there were almost fifty expatriate professionals with degrees in statistics, agronomy, sociology, livestock science, ecology, nutrition, public health, demography, fisheries, economics, agriculture, meteorology, pedology, hydrology, etc. working in Somalia. Most of these professionals had long experience working in Africa … Many of these were either based for long periods in the rural areas, or making frequent visits to them. At that time it was possible to drive and spend the night ANYWHERE in Somalia. And even then no professionals knew enough to say that “x” percent of the population were malnourished, or that “y” thousand tons of food would be needed to keep them alive, although droughts and famines did from time to time occur or were claimed to occur.
Reporters used manufactured statistics to back up their own very real observations, yet few put their observations in context. Most were reporting from the so-called triangle of death that encompassed the towns of Bardera and Baidoa. The reporters were brought there, housed, and fed by relief agencies working in those towns. They drove along the very roads that four armies had passed as Mohamed Farah Aydiid battled first with the forces of Siyaad Barre and later with soldiers loyal to Barre’s son-in-law, Mohamed Hersi Morgan. Bardera experienced a large jump in deaths in mid-October after Aydiid’s forces pulled out and Morgan’s fought their way in. This temporary surge in the death rate coincided with a huge increase in media attention that made all of Somalia seem like Bardera. In addition, relief camps were set up in major towns, and victims flocked to those towns, presenting to visiting reporters a concentration of misery that was indeed shocking.
There was very little reporting that let people know that most of Somalia was fine.
• • •
Aid workers who weren’t in the relief business at the time had a very different perspective. Willie Huber had flown with Murray Watson over the Baidoa area to try to get some firsthand perspective on what they’d been getting from the media. “We kept hearing that this is the biggest catastrophe in the world and that millions of people were at risk and thousands of people dying every day, and so on. We really wanted to know a little bit more. From the plane we saw all the areas of the country which were not accessible by jeeps and by cars. There were people down there who probably at that time didn’t even know that a civil war had hit their country. They were going on about their life as if nothing had happened.
“Baidoa became really a focus. And as soon as the food was being distributed from there, a big rush of people arrived from other parts. I also believe people who have not been that much affected by the drought had been going toward Baidoa for this food in search of relief. But just 10 kilometers from Baidoa you start finding a completely normal life.”
On November 25, 1992, President Bush offered to send American troops to Somalia. Even though the food situation had improved dramatically, the country now was in full-blown Step-Five famine coverage. CBS’s Dan Rather and ABC’s Ted Koppel were en route, ahead of the American soldiers. Reporters from dozens of local television stations were arriving. Many would have been shocked at Somali living conditions, even during the best of times. None of these reporters questioned why troops were needed, although they themselves could move safely throughout Somalia.
Yet when the troops landed in Mogadishu in full combat gear and met reporters wearing Levi’s Dockers and T-shirts, everyone should have known something was wrong.
Months later, having returned to New York, I was watching the action on television as the U.S. networks joined CNN in starting to lay on the video coverage. Newscasts faded into ads for Save the Children. At first I thought, How tricky of Save the Children to make their ads look like news. Then I realized that it was the other way around. The news was looking like Save the Children ads. The massive concentration of images of death was moving, but this was not the Somalia I had seen.
In Somalia I had seen the day-trippers—the camera crews that bounded off relief planes and asked the nearest relief worker to take them to the sickest children before the plane took off again in thirty minutes. The relief workers usually obliged. For television, the worst, most despairing picture was the best. Famine and horror became a commodity. The worse it looked the better it sold. At the same time, the possibility of American intervention increased the value of that commodity. This was the first Africa story ever that had a solid hometown America angle to it: For the first time, the sons and daughters of middle America were in Africa.
Returning to Nairobi, I went to the Reuters television archives and began poring through hours of raw video footage of the famine. The scenes were gruesome, but before the editing, certain things were clear. The sound track was filled with voices of people going about their lives, children playing and shouting in Somali at the cameraman. One kid screamed, “Hey, infidel, stick that camera in your butt.”
As cameras panned away from the sullen faces of the sick, they passed across the faces of the curious—children and young men who had come to watch the news media. Though the scenes of death were horrifying, the raw footage held none of the helplessness and hopelessness that was conveyed by the edited news footage.
The morning after the American troops left Somalia, most of the press followed. The story was over. The predictable tale of famine, upon running its course, had become an American story, a military odyssey, a failed but exciting hunt for a fugitive warlord, and then an American tragedy. A noble gesture by one president had become a foreign policy debacle for his successor. A cartoon by Oliphant seemed to sum it up for most Americans. In frame one, a soldier is feeding a hungry Somali child. In frame two the child shoots the soldier. Copies of that cartoon hung in the offices and barracks of the American military.
The journalists sitting around that hotel room their last night in Mogadishu seemed to know this, acknowledging their own contribution to the endgame. And the reporter who had raised the question about the press corps’ role in the U.S. intervention answered it. “We were wrong.”
The effect was that 30,000 American troops poured into an improving situation. If the press reports had emphasized that things were getting better, there would not likely have been much support for the intervention. And journalists sent 9,000 miles to the Horn of Africa by their hometown papers weren’t about to report: that things had gotten better. First, they couldn’t have known. And second, no editor wants to shell out all that cash only to learn that his reporter missed the worst of the situation. Reporters, especially TV reporters, like to put on their flak jackets and khakis and do their stand-ups in front of the worst devastation possible. Reporters, after all, want to be noticed. That’s why they become reporters. They want to put themselves into dramatic situations. That’s how they become famous reporters.
So how many people did die? How many lives were saved? NGOs are in need of a number so they can attempt to quantify the effects of their efforts as well as brag about it. A total number of lives saved becomes a kind of community property. Everyone who was near Somalia or raised money for Somalia or spoke about Somalia can speak proudly about the numbers of lives that were saved there.
One unbiased attempt to quantify things was made by the Refugee Policy Group, an independent NGO based in Washington. Their November 1994 report, Lives Lost, Lives Saved: Excess Mortality and the Impact of Health Interventions in the Somalia Emergency, offers some numbers, despite the candid admission that the process of arriving at figures is “so fraught with methodological problems that it is rarely attempted.”
