The Road to Hell, page 34
Oakley had grabbed for himself the reputation for being “the one American who really knew what was going on.” He had the useful skill of projecting an enigmatic half smile whenever confronted with questions he didn’t want to or, more likely, couldn’t answer. Most of the assembled press corps interpreted this as a sign of higher knowledge. The few with more experience in Somalia figured he didn’t know what he was talking about. One press conference stands out.
The day that Aydiid was taken off the UN’s most-wanted list in November 1993, Oakley went to see him. As he drove back through the streets of Mogadishu with an Aydiid-supplied military escort, his little convoy found itself in the middle of a cheering throng of Aydiid supporters, who began chanting “Oakley, Oakley, Oakley.” The ambassador wisely did not yield to the temptation to address the jubilant crowd. When I asked about it later, he pretended that it was all part of the plan.
“I’ve seen crowds here before. When they have on their smiling faces it’s good,” he said. “When they have on their nasty face it’s bad, but I wasn’t the least bit nervous.” One of Oakley’s assistants provided a bit more detail: “They led us on … we had no idea. We came down this street and there’s this huge crowd … and I thought, Gee, this looks interesting.” The truth was, as usual, that Oakley was being manipulated by Aydiid.
Several times during Operation Restore Hope, Aydiid’s clan was close to running him out of town at the end of a technical. Each time he was rescued, inadvertently, by the Americans. Aydiid deftly learned that he could unite his forces only by focusing on a common enemy; a call to arms against infidels and imperialists still gets adrenaline pumping in that part of Africa. The best way to isolate Aydiid would have been to ignore him, not to put a $25,000 price on his head or send in Delta Force. Each bloody confrontation with peacekeepers raised his profile. Likewise, every time Aydiid was flown to a meeting or was visited by U.S. special envoy Robert Oakley, he walked away strengthened.
For that reason, the impending departure of UNOSOM was an immediate threat to Aydiid’s power, and the announcement that the marines would return to assist in the withdrawal was a final opportunity for Aydiid to raise the banner of glorious combat.
In the months before the UNOSOM withdrawal, Aydiid’s power had been seriously challenged from within his own clan and from his external allies. His closest advisor and primary financier, Osman Ato, and his most powerful military ally, Colonel Abdullahi Yusuf, had been talking with members of Ali Mahdi’s faction and were united in their conviction that Aydiid had become power mad and was the main obstacle to peace in Somalia. Ato had gone to the Sa’ad clan elders and gotten their agreement on this notion.
Aydiid responded by playing his anti-American card once again. Through his radio station—the one he rebuilt after the Americans leveled the first one—he told Somalis that the Americans were coming to “recolonize” Somalia. Most Somalis saw it for what it was, a desperate gambit by a desperate man. But Aydiid’s core supporters in his subclan rallied round. They attended twice-weekly demonstrations (as they had during the days of Aydiid’s battle against the UN) and spread the word. In the coastal town of Merka a week before the Americans were to land, a group of elders asked me to explain why the Americans wanted to take over Somalia. I tried to assure them that the Americans would be there for only two days, three at the most. They remained skeptical.
Just before the Somalia landing, the Pentagon unveiled an array of hightech nonlethal weapons that it had in its arsenal. These included StickyGoop, which would disable an onrushing crowd by engulfing people in a mountain of glue, binding them to themselves, other people, and the ground, and carpets that would release CS gas if trod upon. President Clinton had reportedly been upset by the numbers of civilian casualties involved in a series of U.S. operations in Somalia, starting with the deaths of at least 100 bystanders, many of them women and children, in a September 9, 1993, firefight. But his most immediate concern was with the Republicans, and avoiding anything that would serve as a vehicle for recalling the disastrous October 3 attempt to capture Aydiid. The plan was to keep it low-key and nonviolent. The announcement of these nonlethal capabilities was designed to let potential looters and troublemakers know that the United States was prepared to deal with them. The message to Somalis was, Stay away.
The Somalis didn’t get it. For a week before the arrival of the marines, the streets of Mogadishu were abuzz with rumors about the fantastic comicbook science-fiction gadgets the Americans were bringing with them. People planned to go to the gates of the port and airport just to see the stuff. What the hell? It couldn’t kill you.
So once again, the Americans had completely misread the situation on the ground in Mogadishu. Their humane gesture was interpreted as a sign of weakness and an invitation. Privately, U.S. commanders were concerned about just that. “Once the bad guys figure out we’re not going to kill them, they become more dangerous and endanger the force on the ground,” said one military planner.
But once again the Pentagon’s eye wasn’t exactly on the ball. They may have been back in Somalia again, but their concern was with future peacekeeping missions. If the United States ever hoped to employ Egyptian, Pakistani, or other forces in future multinational operations, it needed to demonstrate that Americans would put their lives on the line to protect them. And despite a real distaste for the peacekeeping business in Washington, Pentagon officials accept that the military had better be doing something if they’re going to continue getting huge budget allocations. “It’s becoming inevitable that we’re getting these types of capabilities thrust upon us,” said a Pentagon source. “The attitude is let’s dance with it rather than wrestle against it.”
The Pentagon is now dancing in the ruins of Yugoslavia, and Somalia has slipped back into its preintervention stateless state. There is almost no evidence that the United States and UN were ever there and little trace of the $4 billion that was spent. Mogadishu remains a collection of clanbased enclaves, each protected by its own militia. Somehow people eat and survive, children go to school, businessmen import and sell goods. Occasionally a battle erupts.
Somalis are now responsible for their own futures. There are no foreigners to blame for their failures. And sometimes a bright spot emerges. Elman Ali Ahmed, a Somali electrician, stayed through all the fighting and ran a technical school for Mogadishu’s orphaned children and for former militia members. He was known in Mogadishu for his dreadlocks and his car, a beat-to-death Toyota with no roof. Journalists knew him because he would drop by to visit and help people repair computers and other electronic equipment. He spent all his days trying to convince Somalis to come to their senses and organize against the warlords for peace. On March 10, 1996, he was shot to death by gunmen who supported Aydiid.
He was unique in Mogadishu. He did what most people waited for foreigners to do. He never formed an NGO or asked for money from the UN. Elman always knew he was in danger. He understood that there was no such thing as a “pure” humanitarian intervention. Humanitarianism, like poverty and underdevelopment, is political. It takes commitment, and it comes with risks.
*UNSecurity Council Resolution 923 renewed the mandate until September 30, 1994, while reaffirming the objective that UNOSOM II complete its mission by March 1995.
*Victor Gbeho replaced Admiral Jonathan Howe, who left in February 1994.
†Brown & Root has collected around $250 million from the Pentagon for work in Somalia and Haiti and is now the primary U.S. contractor in Bosnia. The firm is owned by the Dallas-based Halliburton Company. The man who now runs Halliburton, Dick Cheney, was secretary of defense when Brown & Root won the Pentagon contracts.
*In the spring of 1994, Aydiid’s financier and top advisor, Osman Ato, deserted him along with Mohamed Hassan Awale, the SNA’s “foreign minister,” and Abdi Hassan Awale Ato, who had been imprisoned by the Americans and had millions of dollars worth of equipment destroyed in American raids, thought that Aydiid was being too anti-American and too intransigent in negotiations.
†UNdocument S/1994/1068.
RUNNING TOWARD RWANDA
—Lindsey Hilsum, British journalist
War is the beast which eats children. With food aid, we think we are feeding the children, but we may be feeding the beast.
Buffalo Bill’s is ripe with the stink of cooked meat, stale beer, and very cheap perfume. Rooted to the floor around a horseshoe-shaped bar, bare steel poles rise to menace customers who crowd around waiting for beer. Back when this was Nairobi’s first American-style burger joint, the poles, topped with saddles, served as barstools. Parts of the western motif remain; Conestoga wagon tops arc above the booths nearest the bar. Early every evening young African women wander in and order soft drinks, which they share with each other while they wait for the men who will buy them alcohol, and maybe take them away.
Then the Land Cruisers start to arrive. Groups of white men enter the bar. They are as young as twenty and as old as sixty. They have a swagger about them; masters of this universe. At the very least, they own the night. Some of them are white Kenyans, known as Kenya cowboys. Others are foreign aid workers. Most of them make their money from the aid business. While some of them work directly for NGOs, many are part of a different class of aid workers. They are aid entrepreneurs—truckers, mechanics, consultants, engineers, pilots, and others who do the real work of aid, the moving and lifting. They execute the plans of the humanitarians and missionaries.
In the summer of 1994, they are having their best year ever. Just as the relief effort in Somalia was winding down, Rwanda exploded. For three months they waited on the sidelines while members of Rwanda’s Hutu ethnic group took machetes, clubs, and knives to 800,000 Tutsi countrymen. Then, after the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front captured the country and the Hutus fled across borders into Tanzania and Zaire, the good times returned. Two million people in refugee camps meant lots of work for everyone. And everyone at Buffalo Bill’s is in high spirits.
Kevin, a middle-aged South African, runs a trucking company that is now covering the roads between Mombassa, Kenya, and Goma, Zaire, where a vast refugee camp has pitched itself on volcanic rock. The refugees need everything, and Kevin’s trucks are there to deliver. Kevin talks loudly and throws back beers as a Kenyan woman rubs his neck and attempts to slide onto his lap. He passes her some money and says, “Fuck off and get some beers, will you darling.”
The women at Buffalo Bill’s, nearly all of them prostitutes, outnumber the potential customers by a factor of four. It’s a buyer’s market, but a few jobs a week can earn the women a lot more money than an African office worker with a good education and secretarial skills, and office jobs are impossible to find anyway. Many of the women are educated, and most of them have tried to find jobs in other fields.
In Nairobi and all over Africa, prostitution flourishes wherever it is not actively suppressed. From an economic point of view, going into prostitution is a rational decision for an African woman. It’s one of the rare avenues open for her to make real money. The sex industry is one of the few points where the local economy and the expatriate economy intersect.
Like most African nations, Kenya runs on two parallel economies. The expatriate economy, which includes most high-level government officials and some powerful businessmen, is a First World economy. It is the world of Mercedes-Benz automobiles, palatial homes, servants, nightclubs, and expensive restaurants. Four-wheel-drive vehicles can cost $90,000. The average Kenyan earns less than $400 a year.
This really struck me one day when I arrived at a friend’s home where I was staying in Nairobi with several bottles of whiskey I’d just picked up at a local liquor store. In my friend’s absence, I was paying the salaries of his cook, gardener, and watchman. As I was handing them their cash, I saw price stickers, which were still on the bottles. I suddenly realized I’d just paid for a single bottle of a standard blended Scotch what amounted to the gardener’s monthly salary—and he had a decent salary by Kenyan standards. In industrialized countries, even the lowest-paid worker can occasionally spring for a good bottle of whiskey or a decent pair of shoes. Rich and poor exist on opposite ends of a broad economic continuum. In Africa there are few places where the two economies meet.
Of the money that Western organizations, businesses, and charities spend in Africa, a small part goes into the African tier economy. This is the money paid to servants and workers, the pennies passed out to beggars and street children for watching their cars at night. The vast bulk of the money that Westerners spend is in the upper tier of the economy. Rents are paid at European rates, often in foreign exchange. Planes are chartered and trucking companies are engaged to move aid and relief supplies. The landlords and car dealers are the government officials who live in this upper tier with the expatriates, who show up at the restaurants and clubs. NGOs generally pay their local staff well, by local standards. But even the lowliest foreign-born volunteer aid worker exists in the expatriate economy; these unskilled Westerners earn multiples of what highly qualified nationals get paid.
The disaster in Somalia was a windfall for Kenya. The Kenyans charged landing fees for airplanes at Wilson Airport, where most charter and civilian planes are based. NGOs moved in thousands of personnel, and the United Nations operated most of their relief effort from Nairobi. In addition, hundreds of thousands of Somali refugees flocked into Kenya, where they were met by an army of aid workers to take care of their needs. Relief organizations purchased water, food, blankets, and other materials in Kenya. They rented houses. All of this was money going to Kenya’s politician-businessman class. With Kenya’s crucial tourism industry slipping, aid workers became a permanent tourist presence, filling hotels and restaurants as tourists once did. And just as the Somalia operation was ending, Rwanda arrived to fill the gap.
Most Kenyans stood helplessly by and watched the aid parade file through town. Only a few were in a position to benefit from it, and many of them hang out at Buffalo Bill’s.
On this particular evening at Buffalo Bill’s, I’ve come specifically to meet Kevin to ask about food diversions from the refugee camps in Zaire. A colleague of his told me with certainty that he would be here on any given night.
I find Kevin at a table with a group of others from the aid business. There is an American who works with CARE, and a Kenya cowboy in his late fifties who is head mechanic on Kevin’s fleet. He has psoriasis on his wrists and a gaunt, infected-looking face. There is also a younger Englishman, tall, thin, blond-haired, drunk.
I tell Kevin I’ve heard that much of the refugee food is falling into the hands of the Hutu extremist hit men who engineered the massacre of the Tutsis in the first place and then frightened their own people out of the country and into the refugee camps. Yes, true, he tells me. His truckers deliver all the food. The food is checked in at the camps. But, he tells me, his trucks don’t leave empty. They leave the camps with some of the food they came in with. “My drivers make what money they can on the return trip. They carry coffee or whatever they’re paid to carry. So they truck food out of the refugee camps.” On the return trip, the drivers are working for the Hutu leaders, who steal the food and use the money to purchase guns and ammunition to retake the country. Once again, it appears that an aid effort is financing a war. Once again, an investment in aid is ensuring that there will be another disaster in the future.
As I’m talking to Kevin, his attention is only half focused on me. I grab my answers as he alternately nuzzles and abuses the young Kenyan woman, who accepts the insults with professional good humor. “Didn’t I tell you to piss off? I’m talking to a journalist here.” His friends laugh and encourage him. Other women are gathering around and campaigning for their attention.
The tall blond Englishman says his name is John. When I’m introduced to him, he offers me his limp wrist to shake. He says that since I’m a journalist, I should buy a round. How long have you been in Kenya, he asks me, with undisguised hostility. This is a standard question, it is what determines the expatriate pecking order. When expats sit and talk about Africa, they display their combat ribbons. Length of stay is the most important. The ones who have been here the longest earn the right to say whatever they want. Their interpretations of African behavior and politics are given the most weight at gatherings like this. I’ve been here since 1977, I tell him, seventeen years. John is quiet for a moment.
“I was born here,” he suddenly blurts from the silence. “Buy me a fucking beer.”
His friends ignore him. They start talking about business and trucks and refugees. Kevin and his friends are the prime beneficiaries of the aid business, which is why they hold most NGOs in such contempt. They know they can overcharge, produce shoddy work, and still get paid. They joke about forming an NGO called Somalia Community Assistance Committee—SCAM. Everyone laughs. As in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, where journalists invent a war to write home about, they’ve decided that they should invent a famine, to get the food and money and work. Who’s going to know? Skinny Somalis always look like they’re starving anyway. They live in hovels even when they’re rich.
Kevin has been contracting for NGOs for fifteen years and doesn’t see much difference between his business and theirs. To him it’s all about contracts and getting paid on time. He turns back and tells me I should ride with his trucks for a week, see what happens to the food. John says nothing now but sporadically bangs loudly on the table. When people look at him, he affects an innocent look. Sorry. What did I do?
As the crowd gets drunker, the prostitutes move closer. They sit on laps. Fuck off, John says to one of them, getting into the spirit. But she doesn’t fuck off. Later he corners me in the men’s room. He looks to be about six feet four. He’s blocking my exit, and asks to borrow money. No, I tell him. Then he demands money. I just met you, I say. Ask your friends. Then John begins to cry and starts telling me about the embarrassment and pain of not being able to buy a drink for his friends.
