The Road to Hell (10 page)

“They couldn't answer any of my questions about the projects or the country,” Ortiz remembers. “We wanted nuts and bolts about what we would be doing, but they couldn't supply answers. The Sudan desk officer had visited the country only once and had never gotten out of Khartoum. When I asked him about conditions there, he said it was pretty awful and a lot of people were dying. Fucking great! That will help me solve the problem.”

Both men were troubled throughout the training. What was going to happen to them in an organization that treated them with disrespect from the beginning, an organization that couldn't tell them what to expect, that didn't address issues of commitment to the country, the financing of the projects?

There was one practical thing taught in Westport: They were shown how to pose children for photographs to go into brochures and ads.

Both of them recall a sickening feeling when Save took them to a vegetable garden project they were doing in the Bronx. Amateur, they both thought. How can you hire an agriculture specialist to engineer a massive resettlement project and then expect to impress him with an urban tomato patch? Something was very wrong.

They were also taught to deal with controversies of the day.

•   •   •

I
n the spring of 1985, a young student in a public school in the small town of Hughes, Arkansas, came home from school and dropped his knapsack on the floor. Later, as his mother was going through the boy's belongings, she found a photograph of a man and a woman and a letter addressed to her son. The letter said that the man lived in New Hampshire and hoped someday to come to Arkansas and see the boy and his family.

The boy's parents went to the school and then they went to an attorney. Together they learned that the couple in the photograph were Save the Children sponsors paying $16 a month for the support of their child. Not only did the parents not know their child was being sponsored, they weren't particularly needy. It was soon revealed that around 100 students in town has been enrolled in the program without the knowledge of their parents. Teachers at the school were being paid a dollar by Save the Children for each kid they recruited. The children were then “sold” to sponsors for $16 a month.

In October of 1985, parents of twenty-one children filed a $21 million lawsuit against Save the Children, the county director, and six public school teachers, alleging that Save had used their children in advertising campaigns without their permission. According to the suit, the teachers obtained permission to photograph the children and collect biographical information on them “deceitfully and without the consent or knowledge of the students' parents or legal guardians.”

“Not only did the teachers… fail to obtain the consent of the parents or legal guardians of the students,” the complaint alleged, “they knowingly and deliberately withheld from the parents the fact that the information was being gathered, and that the photographs were being taken and being used by Save the Children Foundation [
sic
], Inc.”

In addition, publication of the photographs and biographical information by Save the Children subjected the families “to ridicule, embarrassment and shame in the community as impoverished and oppressed individuals.”

T
he law suit was going on as Chris and José arrived for training. There had been a few mentions in the newspapers, wire reports mostly, nothing really big. But Save was focused on keeping the story under wraps. They wanted their new trainees to know what to do if approached by a journalist. The Arkansas business was just a small misunderstanding, nothing at all to worry about. “Ninety cents out of every donated dollar goes to programs,”
they were taught to say. But both Chris and José knew enough about development to know that wasn't true.

Save the Children was also getting some bad publicity from the massive and massively televised Ethiopia relief campaign of 1984 and 1985. They were told to forget about that: All those good works and all those lives saved were certainly going to attract some criticism. You can't save millions of lives without making mistakes, can you? So what if Save the Children's trucks had been used to cart refugees off to concentration camps? There has to be some kind of balance sheet—lives saved versus lives lost. Not only Save, but other NGOs had been suckered into the Ethiopian government's war against its own people. The government had launched a cynical campaign: First you starve them, then attract them to central areas with food, then cart them off to where you want them. That had been the government's plan, carried out with the assistance, unwitting sometimes, of local foreign charities using monies donated by schoolchildren and old ladies and working-class families in church.

To Cassidy, it sounded an awful lot like what had been happening in Somalia.

O
n the short trip into Mogadishu from the airport, Cassidy noticed that the streets were more crowded, there was more traffic, and a sense of frenzy was discernible. Land Cruisers bearing the emblems of NGOs lined the streets and clogged traffic circles. There was new construction going on. White faces were everywhere.

The town was full of new restaurants, clubs, and hotels. None of it was on account of economic development really, but it was all supported by the aid business. The money was generated by Western governments and paid out in contracts to private foreign companies such as the New Jersey-based Louis Berger, Inc., which made millions annually in Somalia doing range management and construction. Other contracts went to NGOs from the UN or the States or the European Economic Community (EEC). All these people needed Western-style housing, so Somalis with close ties to the government borrowed money and built entire neighborhoods where they could rent homes to foreigners for $4,000 or $5,000 a month. Since the foreigners weren't paying their own rent, they didn't really care how much things cost. So, in Mogadishu, at least, everyone profited.

J
ust as there was no one at the airport, there was no one at the Save the Children office when the Cassiyys arrived there. There was no house waiting
for them in Mogadishu. The office there was being run by the acting director, a man named Abdukadir, Abdukadir showed up about four hours later and greeted Chris as if nothing were wrong. The two men had known each other before. Abdukadir had worked at USAID with Chris before moving on to Save the Children. He greeted Tone as if he had just seen her earlier that morning.

Cassidy delivered a message from headquarters that they needed financial statements, but Abdukadir had heard that before. He laughed.

Abdukadir was doing what everyone did in Mogadishu, playing on the black market. Organizations like Save the Children had to play it straight and deal at the official exchange rate of 20 Somali shillings to the dollar. But anyone who wanted could get 60 or more on the black market. The only problem was that there were no bank receipts available. Abdukadir made $2 for himself for every $1 that Save sent from headquarters. He would invest the money or loan the hard currency to local businessmen, who would use it to import consumer goods and repay Abdukadir a percentage of the profits. Abdukadir was getting rich. The financial reports could wait.

Cassidy quickly figured out the game, and he might not have minded so much if he didn't start having problems getting money to pay his workers in the field.

“Don't worry about it, Cassidy,” Abdukadir would say.

“He never hassled me about anything, but he never paid me any money,” Chris remembers.

Their first night back in Somalia the Cassidys slept in a storage room above the Save the Children office. The room had just been emptied of bags of relief food and the grain dust settled over the family as they tried to sleep. Cassidy had expected a triumphant homecoming in Mogadishu. Instead, he felt within him a lump of anger.

But this was only the beginning. Cassidy, who had come to serve the people of Somalia, the war refugees, was to learn that he had been unwittingly employed in a cause, the cause of Greater Somalia.

H
assan Ilhan was one of the victims of the quest for Greater Somalia. He was among those refugees who left Ethiopia in 1977 as the Somali armies advanced across the Ogaden. An ethnic Somali, he was employed by the Ethiopian government at their ministry of agriculture in the capital, Addis Ababa. Hassan Ilhan was comfortable and could probably have gone on with his life if not for the fact that most of his family was back home in an area that had suddenly become a war zone. One day, he walked out of his
office and through the busy streets of the city. He collected his family, his wife and four children, and took a bus heading east toward the Ogaden town of Jigjiga and then on to the town of Dagahbuur, where he was born. There he collected other members of his family and they began to walk. They walked for more than 250 miles, joining with small groups of destitute nomads making their way toward the border with Somalia. For three weeks they shared food, water, and camel's milk with strangers.

As each day passed he began to look and feel more like a nomadic refugee and less like the urban bureaucrat he had been all his professional life. When they crossed the border into the Bakool region of Somalia, it was the first time he had ever set foot inside the country that was supposed to be his homeland.

Hassan Ilhan and his family waited quietly in a refugee transit camp, eating relief food and living in an
ochol
—a domelike Somali nomad hut made of grass, animals skins, and sticks. In the teeming camp, Hassan reflected on his flight. Why had he run from Addis? Fear. He was afraid the Ethiopian government would detain or harass ethnic Somalis. And what about the nomads? They, too, were running from fear as well as the Ethiopian army. As the victorious Somali troops had advanced through Ethiopia, they had sent the nomads behind the lines, telling them to go to Somalia to get away from the war. But then the direction of the war changed. With the help of Cubans and Soviets, the Ethiopians had stormed back, driving the Somali army back across its own border. The Somalis of the Ogaden were caught in the crossfire both times.

Hassan Ilhan was tall and husky for a Somali and stood out among the lean, wiry nomads. He had a big smile and his teeth were stained brown from chewing qat. One of his eyes would drift off in another direction and he usually wore sunglasses to hide it. It gave him an almost sinister look.

From transit camps, the Red Cross distributed refugees to thirty or so other camps throughout Somalia. Hassan Ilhan and his family were put on a truck and sent to Qorioley.

The Ogaden is sometimes called a desert, but in reality it is a huge savanna with scrub brush, a few trees, and rivers that run when there is rain in the Ethiopian mountains hundreds of miles away. It is oppressively hot and very dry. The people who live there travel with herds of camels, goats, and sheep. Other Somalis regard the Ogaadeen clan, Hassan Ilhan's clan, as the true nomads. They often wear the traditional white cotton robes and let their hair grow long and wild, and when they show up in the towns and markets of Somalia they are the objects of curiosity and respect. Other clans often speak enviously of how they live free under the warm, open sky,
how a man can have 200 camels and four wives and not a care in the world.

Qorioley is very different from the Ogaden. It is located in a coastal plain where Somalia's two permanent rivers flow. It is humid and fertile with thick dark soil that sticks like paste to the soles of the feet. Herds of camels are a liability. At one time it was home to some of Somalia's agricultural clans, people who were looked down upon by the nomads. The camel herders would trade with them but wouldn't want their sons and daughters to marry them. Digging in the dirt was considered a demeaning way to earn a livelihood, and it made it impossible to collect enough camels to purchase wives.

No one really bothered the agriculturists, until the Italians came. There, in the soil of Qorioley, they cultivated their fortunes. Plantations were carved from the tropical bush; bananas were planted along with mangos and papaya and watermelon. These commodities were exported to Italy, and the plantation owners became rich. When Somalia gained independence in 1960, Somali leaders were aware that the despised and inferior clans inhabited land that could produce wealth in the modern world.

Since these clans didn't actually hold title to the land in any Western, bureaucratic sense, the people in power used the rules of their new government and deeded the land to themselves. The poor clans from the Digil/Rahanwiin families were pushed onto more marginal land. Still, there was plenty to go around, but in the late 1970s as the Ogaadeen refugees came in, some of the land was parceled out to them. (They received favored status because, like Siyaad, they were part of the Daarood clan family. In addition, Siyaad Barre's mother was Ogaadeen. Siyaad trusted them, and they regarded him as a savior.) The refugees were settled in areas near the most fertile land, areas that could produce food if there was irrigation. The foreign aid agencies were then asked to provide the money and expertise to irrigate the land. They happily complied.

By the time Hassan Ilhan got to Qorioley, he'd heard enough to believe that it was safe to return to Ethiopia and resume his life in Addis Ababa. And he could easily have gone, but he was surrounded by people who couldn't just leave. These nomads, now former nomads, were lost without their animals and had no way to support themselves on this land. Most had no way to get home except to walk. The Red Cross, which had trucked them in, wasn't offering return journeys. Whereas help and food were provided for them at Qorioley, nothing at all was waiting on the other side. They had no choice but to stay.

Hassan Ilhan knew his agricultural and administrative skills could be used to help these people. He also possessed the one skill that was the most valuable in the country in the mid-1980s: He spoke English and thus was a link to the great aid machine, a gateway of information that the people with the money needed to reach the beneficiary population.