The Road to Hell, page 4
Someone offers history: Twenty-five years ago most of the countries in Africa had indigenous methods for dealing with food shortages. Somalia in particular had a well-established system for dealing with regular cycles of drought and famine. Farmers in the river valleys built secure underground vaults where grain was stored during the fat years. When drought threatened the nomads, animals that might die anyway were exchanged for grains. Though nomads showed very little respect for farmers, they were aware that their lives might one day depend on these sedentary clans. They were therefore generous with the bounty of their herds when times were good. The result was a mutual insurance system and a truce of necessity across the land.
But few of the aid workers here know anything about pre-civil war Somalia. Their only experience is with the beaten and anarchic society they see beyond the high walls of their compounds. Some of the more experienced aid workers can offer the wisdom that no country was ever transformed from being famine-prone to food self-sufficiency by international charity. In fact, as Harvard economist Amartya Sen has shown, famines always occur in authoritarian states, when the government mismanages the economy. Famines disappear when those countries become market-efficient. India, for example—the epitome of the famine-afflicted land when I was a child—no longer suffers famines despite its huge population.
And some targets of charity get worse. Today, after huge infusions of international aid, Somalia and all its formerly self-sufficient neighbors are chronically hungry and dependent on foreign food. It becomes increasingly difficult for aid workers to ignore the compelling correlation between massive international food aid and increasing vulnerability to famine. “Our charity does not overcome famine, and may help to prolong it,” someone will always lament. Those who spend the time to study the local economies see that the people have now geared their own activities not to returning to their old lives but to getting their hands on aid.
And in the case of Somalia, the notion was beginning to dawn on a number of aid workers that the food aid was helping to prolong the war as well Could it be that it was the food that was causing the conflict and the instability that was making it impossible for people to get their own food? Though the answers were never clear, the questions were always troubling.
While these doubts are often sent back to the home office in New York or Atlanta, they receive very little discussion beyond the walls of the relief agencies. To let that happen would mean having to consider the possibility of going out of business. Instead, the relief agencies advertise.
In America’s intimate morning hours, television screens pulse with images of starvation. A typical television advertisement carefully scripted by an agency hired by Save the Children runs as follows:
VIDEO: SHOT OF NEEDY CHILD
A child’s face collapsed around its pleading eyes. The script calls for
SHOT OF MORE NEEDY CHILDREN
and then
EMOTIONALLY CHARGED CHILD SHOT
followed by
SHOT OF VERY MALNOURISHED CHILD
For sound effects, the script asks for
APPROPRIATELY HARD-HITTING, EMOTIONAL ORIGINAL MUSIC
The viewer might sink into helpless despair but for the interviews of a weepy actress who steps through the misery with a solution.
Voiceover: You’ve seen the frightened faces…heard their cries of hunger… watched their small bodies fall prey to sickness.
VIDEO: MORE HOPEFUL SHOTS OF KIDS—EATING, PLAYING, SMILING, ETC.
But you can help ease the pain—by becoming a Save the Children sponsor. It’s so easy—just a phone call…then only pocket change—65¢ a day. Your concern can help stop horrible hunger with nutritious food…
Now is the time to rescue one fragile, weakened girl or boy…your $20 monthly gift will be combined with those of other sponsors…
Please—reach out…end this nightmare. You can do it, right now. With just a phone call, you can help stop a different kind of child abuse.
This is the extent of the public discussion instigated by the charity. The goal of the message is not to make us think about hunger and poverty. It is to relieve us of the burden of having to think about it. The charity provides this narrow portal into the world of hunger, a way to reach through the dark distances of space and culture to touch the child. This is real interactive TV. Pick up the phone. Pick up the phone. The deed is done. The child is healed before the viewer’s eyes. The relentless message is that it is all so simple. It’s easy. Just send money.
The $20 or $50 that the viewer has pledged now begins its long journey from his Visa or MasterCard account through the bank and bureaucracy of the charity, and into other bureaucracies of subsidiary charities. The funds appear as an asset on a series of spreadsheets and merge with funds from other donors and governments. Some is used to pay the $200,000 in salary and benefits for the president of the charity, and some is used for his $2,000-a-month housing allowance, which doesn’t show up on public financial statements. Part of the money is used to pay the rents for the charity’s offices and to buy airline tickets for the people who make the videos that are shown on television. Some of the money shows up in the ledgers of organizations in the country where the picture of the starving child originated. Some of that will be used to buy or rent a Land Cruiser or put petrol in the tanks of other Land Cruisers. Some will pay the salaries of expatriate workers. In Somalia, some of it will be used to pay the gunmen who protect the expatriate workers. And some of it will be stolen by those very gunmen. The bureaucracy is a hungry beast. It must be fed.
The donor doesn’t really want to know any of this as he reads his credit card number over the telephone on that sleepless night. That’s not the point. The aid is an offering, an act of compassion and sacrifice. Perhaps it will buy a good night’s sleep and a feeling that from the dark interior fortress of America, a life can be touched 8,000 miles away. The charities count on that. They know that out in what they call “the field,” the recipients of the charity are not exactly what they seem to be. The donors are amateurs. The recipients are professionals. The expatriate relief workers have been playing this game for a few months, or maybe a few years. The recipients have been on the dole and beating the system for decades.
For ten years before the famine of 1992, Somalia was the largest recipient of aid in sub-Saharan Africa, and in some years the third largest in the world behind perennial leaders Egypt and Israel. But most of Somalia’s 6 million people never saw a penny. Much of what wasn’t filtered out to pay the expenses of the relief agency was lost in the corrupt maze of the Somali government’s nepotistic bureaucracy. Only the wiliest and most entrepreneurial of Somalia’s people ever saw any tangible benefits from the aid. That money went to Somali bureaucrats whose primary skill was in earning money by dealing with foreign charities. And when money did drip down to the people it was used in ways designed by a government desperately trying to cling to its diminishing power. And in all these things, Somalia was only a slightly more extreme case of how aid works everywhere. The other big recipients of aid in Africa have fared no better than Somalia.
As Somalia stood on the brink of chaos in 1990, it was utterly dependent on foreign aid. It is little wonder then that when aid started pouring into the country once again in 1992, humble gratitude was not people’s immediate response. Instead, another generation of Somalis prepared to get its share, to get rich by doing whatever it took to get as much as possible from the foreigners.
And it wasn’t as if the foreigners weren’t making out in the deal. The Somalis saw young white people in their mid-twenties with no recognizable skills driving about in Land Cruisers and living in nice houses for which their organizations were paying thousands of dollars a month in rent—rent money that was going to the biggest criminals in the country. The young foreigners didn’t speak Somali and knew nothing of the history of the place. They always had plenty of money to spend and didn’t mind paying absurd prices for what they bought. The people back home might have regarded what these people were doing as a sacrifice, but the Somalis saw them living high.
Few foreigners ever invested the time or effort to see aid from the point of view of the recipients. They rarely looked beyond their own idealized images of famine and charity. Into Somalia’s nightmare world of warlords and forced starvation, they held aloft the image of the hungry child-God they themselves had created to justify their own actions. And they marched blindly into the mire.
FAR FROM SOMALIA
—Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed
All domination involves invasion—at times physcial and overt, at times camouflaged, with the invader assuming the role of a helping friend.
Chris Cassidy felt a rush of revulsion. Then a queasiness arose in his stomach. His life seemed to be unraveling all over again. He had tried to exile himself in eastern Washington State, as far away from Somalia as he could get, but now Somalia had come and found him. It appeared on the front pages of the local paper and on local radio and television stations. It wouldn’t leave him alone.
Cassidy said from the beginning that the Americans should not have gone into Somalia. When he spoke, people were surprised to learn that the man who now lived alone in Yakima doing agricultural work on the nearby Indian reservation could become so enraged over what was seemingly a brave and charitable gesture from the United States government. Cassidy has always impressed people as the giving and caring type.
But then Cassidy would explain that he had lived in Somalia for six years. He had worked there with the U.S. government and with Save theChildren, and the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO)—and he knew what he was talking about. Somalia was a trap.
It had been two years since he and his family had been forced to flee the violence of Mogadishu at the end of 1990. The rebels had been approaching the city, and the government troops had begun to terrorize the residents. Aid workers were particular targets, as government soldiers and the rebels began to commandeer Land Cruisers off the streets. All local authority broke down as the president hid in his bunker at the airport and his frightened, leaderless troops wandered the streets.
In this chaos, Cassidy guided his Norwegian wife, Tone, eight months pregnant, through the choking heat of the Mogadishu airport terminal, beneath the gaze of soldiers and police who must have known that they too would be fleeing the city soon. Cassidy held the baby in his arms. Little Christopher grasped his hand as the family climbed the stairs of the Kenya Airways plane. Gunfire cracked in the distance.
As the plane taxied away from the terminal, Cassidy should have felt relieved. But Tone’s weighty silence told him that all was not right. For the first time he noticed how worn she was, how devastated. How long had she been like this? It could have been years. The look in her eyes petrified him. Below, in the northern part of Mogadishu, under a small stone in the Catholic cemetery, lay their eldest son, Bernie. There had been no time to remove the body, but Chris promised that he would do that in a few months, as soon as the fighting ended. Then Bernie could be buried in the family cemetery in New Orleans. But the flight to Nairobi would be the last thing the family would do together.
Later, in Yakima, Cassidy avoided talking about Somalia, and when it did come up he’d dismiss it. Where is Somalia? Never mind. Forget it. Nobody was really that curious anyway. Not in Yakima. He would tell them: “You know, it’s in the Bible. The land of frankincense and myrrh. One of the wisemen was a Somali or something.” Few knew what frankincense was and fewer could even guess about myrrh. But “frankincense and myrrh” floated like a familiar song and left people feeling some sort of connection.
Then, somehow, on this raw February night in 1993, Cassidy found himself preparing to give a talk about Somalia. He put on his best suit, climbed into his Toyota pickup truck, and drove along Route 82 from Yakima toward Ellensburg, some 45 miles away. The task should have been simple; the talk would be informal, relaxed. But Cassidy was not relaxed. He cracked open the window and cold, dry air filled the cab. And he thought one more time about what he would tell the audience.
As he sped through the early evening darkness, Cassidy knew he would not be allowed to get away with frankincense and myrrh. After the U.S. Marines landed, suddenly, people who had never heard of Somalia had opinions about it. It had been on television. Everyone knew it was a land where Americans had gone to rescue starving people from vicious warlords and drug-crazed thugs. They’d learned it all since the summer of 1992, when the picture of those beautiful black and dying people appeared on television screens across America. First they watched them starve and then they watched the marines climb over sand dunes. They watched blond-haired angels holding little black babies.
The crowd tonight is small, thirty or forty people in a small circular building on the campus of Central Washington State University. They are mostly students and professors and a smattering of the liberal intelligentsia who gather around rural universities, people who reserve copies of the New York Times at the local drug store, listen to National Public Radio, and spend their evenings in meeting halls boning up on international affairs so they can offer knowledgeable critiques of current events. They are thoughtful people who once might have stated with certainty that the United States of America would send its soldiers to protect oil but never to help starving Africans. Now they are confused.
Before them on the stage they see two young and polished marines and Cassidy, a nervous man in a suit. Cassidy has a thick blond lumberjack beard mounted like a fuzzy wreath around a sharp, angular face with piercing blue eyes and red cheeks. Some of the hairs from his mustache intrude upon his upper lip. He’s thin, almost bony, and he steps up to the small stage with the cautious movement of a former athlete whose grace is haunted with memory of injury.
The soldiers speak first. They are polite and very persuasive. Their demeanor radiates the “yes sir/yes ma’am” respect that has been drilled into them. They’re reinforcing the rosy images that have come across the television. They’re talking about the heroic effort to move through Somalia, secure towns, and open roads over which truck after truck now carried lifegiving food to the mouths of starving children. The operation they describe is an unqualified success, a tribute to America and to people like you. They thank the people in the room for the opportunity to go and perform such deeds. The audience is smiling. They are getting into the spirit of Operation Restore Hope.
Cassidy bends over in his chair, listening. These kids don’t know what they’re talking about, he thinks. They’re public relations commandos who could put a feel-good patriotic face on a bloody massacre. Cassidy is feeling crotchety and angry. What the fuck do they know about Somalia? They’ve probably spent a week there. I’m the one who put six years of my life into the place. What are they doing telling me anything? What are they doing telling anybody anything, especially at a university. Save that shit for the American Legion, boys. Talk to me again when you’ve really experienced hunger. When you’ve lived with the people.
The soldiers’ kind of charity, he reflects, is easy, like dropping a shiny coin into a grubby hand passing quickly in the hectic blur of the night. They want you to believe that’s enough—for $20 a month little Pedro can have a hot meal and a place to go to school and new pajamas. Problem solved. If everyone gave money we could dispense with all these unpleasant pictures of dying children once and for all.
Cassidy is angry, not at the marines; he’s angry at the stupid audience. These guys work for the government. Of course they’re going to tell you the bullshit. You’re a bunch of mush-minded guilty liberal assholes for believing them, for believing that money and guns can solve the problems of the poor.
“You know,” Cassidy begins with a stammer, “you just can’t send food and help starving people.” You can’t, he knows. But how to explain all of this? Why didn’t he ever get around to actually writing a speech? “Well, you know, you just can’t do that. It’s, it’s so really complicated.”
And it’s hard to explain. A better approach might be to sit and tell his story: Let me tell you what happened to me when I was in Somalia. But Cassidy isn’t ready to tell this to anyone.
“Helping people is all well and good, but what’s our policy? What is it going to do for our country? Why were those troops sent in there? I don’t see a plan. You give a guy a bag of food today and you give him a bag of seeds and…There is no plan to end the relief. There’s no phase-out built into the system.” The marines are sitting erect and pokerfaced. Cassidy paces across the stage. His hands are shaking, though he’s not nervous.
“You know,” Cassidy begins again, reaching for something, straining to grasp the handle of an idea. Cassidy tells the people he’s worried about sending troops without a mission. He’s worried because this Somalia of TV and government propaganda, this Somalia crying out for rescue, doesn’t at all resemble the Somalia he knows, and one day very soon the reality of Somalia will burst through and shatter the fragile media images. Then the world will punish Somalia for not living up to the manufactured mirage.
“Somalia doesn’t need our help. Somalia can feed itself. The problems are political, and we don’t have a plan for solving their political problems. In fact, we caused a lot of their political problems.”
Cassidy looks again at the audience. They hate him. They hate his disjointed presentation, and if they think they understand what he’s trying to say to them, they hate that, too. They prefer the modulated saccharine crap the marines are dishing out. They seem to be fading back into the distance. Cassidy has several friends in the audience, and they feel embarrassed for him. He’s being inarticulate, almost a buffoon. They’re not even sure what it is he’s trying to say, and they’ve heard him before.
