The Road to Hell (17 page)

“Why did you even stay there?” I asked Cassidy.

“You bullshit yourself. It all comes down to why you're there in the first place. Adventure? Sure. Money? Sure. Some people got raises to stay in the danger zones. Development work? If so, well there wasn't much development work going on there. All those who want to do development work can go home now because there isn't any development work to do.”

At one point Cassidy protested to Somali authorities and heard from
one of the Somali officials involved: “I'm in charge of your security. Are you worried about being the next foreigner to die here?”

As it turned out, the next foreigner to die there, in March of 1990, was Peter White, a British agricultural consultant. White was approached by a gang outside his home in Mogadishu and, according to the British Embassy, they demanded the keys to his Land Cruiser and then killed him when he resisted. He had lived in Mogadishu with his wife and young daughter since the start of a two-year contract in July 1988. The Somali police claimed White was the first casualty in a series of robberies by armed gangs intent on stealing four-wheel-drive vehicles and smuggling them across the border to Ethiopia.

Cassidy never believed that it was really about the car. As an agricultural consultant, White had seen what Cassidy had seen. Cassidy believes that White was silenced, and the Land Cruiser was the payment by the government to the killers.

A
t the end of 1990 the Cassidys fled Somalia with hundreds of other expatriates. Development work in Somalia had ended, at least for the immediate future. The family went to Nairobi and then Tone took the kids back to Norway while Chris cooked for work once again. He ended up in Rome at the headquarters of the FAO where he was told another job would soon be offered to him—another development challenge in another country. He phoned Norway with the news and told his family that he would soon be there.

There was a cold silence at the other end of the line. Tone was direct. She never wanted to see him. She was keeping the children, and he would not be allowed to see them until they were old enough to decide for themselves if they wanted to see their father. Divorce papers written in Norwegian showed up at the Cassidy homestead in New Orleans. His family, everything he thought he was working for, was gone. Cassidy first begged, and then tried to use the courts. Nothing worked. Norwegian law left him with nothing.

I
n the Spring of 1995,I walked down the Lido, pausing for a moment at the house where I had once lived. It was as I remembered it except that it was full of bullet holes. A refugee family was living there. A woman sat weaving a mat on the front verandah. A goat wandered around on what used to be the front lawn. Children quietly played in the yard. I waved to the woman on the verandah and told her that I'd once lived in that house. She said nothing. A man came out of the house and stared. Then I realized
he was looking past me to my Somali guard, Nur, who was chewing qat and had an AK-47 strapped around his neck.

Nur shadowed me everywhere, even though guards were not needed in this part of Mogadishu at this time. Northern Mogadishu, north of the “green line” that divided rival factions, was enjoying the fruits of
Sharia
, Islamic law. Thieves were hauled before Islamic courts, tried, and then had their hands sawed off. After several months people got the message.

(Things were different in south Mogadishu, where Mohamed Farah Aydiid was more or less in charge. There, walking on the streets wasn't a good idea, even with a phalanx of bodyguards.)

I continued walking down the Lido. It was a wide avenue with a slim median strip. Street lights hung over the street, but there was no electricity here, though the Ali Mahdi faction that controlled the north had managed to restore electricity in some of the more commercial areas. For a moment I could almost imagine the Lido as it was. At certain angles I could make the destruction disappear, but only for a moment.

I walked on to the Anglo-American Club. The building was destroyed but the wall around it was still standing. The gate had been blocked off with pieces of scrap metal, so I climbed over the wall. The verandah overlooking the beach and the Indian Ocean was still intact. No one was on the beach. I walked into what had been the dining room and imagined Chris and Tone and the kids sitting there with the other aid workers eating their hamburgers. Then I imagined little Bernie wandering away. I looked to where the bar used to be. The place had been used as a fortress recently. Stones had been placed on the walls as gun rests. The floor was covered with rubble, probably the remains of the roof, but someone had cleared an area for sleeping. Several fires had been lit on the floor.

I walked along by the rest rooms, looking for the doorway—there were no doors—where the latticework was. But the floors were covered with too many layers of rock and metal and wood. I thought for a moment about digging through to find the hole in the floor, but Nur, who was standing behind me, looked concerned. Then it occurred to me that this might not be a good idea. Landmines or other unexploded devices could have easily been under any stone. Nur relaxed when I finally turned to go.

CRAZY WITH FOOD

—Fred Cuny

Very few policy makers understand what famine is. They think it means there's no food….Famine is a failure of the market. And you can't fight an economic problem by giving away food.

C
hris Cassidy wasn't like most young college graduate aid workers who want to do good, give it a shot for two years, see some of the contradictions of aid but decide to get on with their lives rather than deal with them. For them, aid is a phase to be passed through, a rite of passage on their way to law school or business school, something to be forgotten except for those stories that can be told over and over again over beers in evenings far away. And Chris wasn't like the ones who fall in love with the aid life. They stay in it, become part of the system, and only resist it on occasion. They cling to the idea of aid. Aid redeems their lives and uplifts the lives of the poor. To them, the contradictions all stem from the West's not understanding or helping enough. Their answer is always
more
aid, bigger budgets, another project.

Cassidy identified the problem. It was political. He kept pointing to it. His tragedy might have been avoided, but his entanglement in local politics
and the local authority's resentment of him would not have been otherwise. He was dedicated to his job, not to his career.

My story is different from Chris's in many ways. Both of us still wrestle with the contradictions of aid. I sometimes write about it; he still practices it. I once thought I might have a career in the aid business, but Somalia changed all that for me. It made painfully clear to me the full extent of aid's failure.

W
hen USAID hired me to go to Somalia, I felt that I'd been called up by the big leagues. For a young man looking for advancement in the development world, this was as good an opportunity as ever came along. In the scheme of the development universe, USAID was a donor, up there with the World Bank or Britain's ODA (Overseas Development Administration). All the NGOs received their funding through the big guys. In Somalia USAID was calling the shots. The UN was there with all its agencies—UNICEF, UNHCR, UNDP WFP , FAO—and all the European countries were represented, but everyone knew who was in charge. I was playing a minor supporting role in the organization as a personal services contractor, PSC. I had no diplomatic status and was on six-month contracts.

I was a food monitor until my title was upgraded to food assessment specialist. But I was only twenty-five, and I had time. The money was great. I had my own four-wheel-drive vehicle and a house on the beach in Mogadishu. Most of the time, however, I was in Beledweyne, a town on the Ethiopian border about 200 miles from Mogadishu. I was in the middle of a group of refugee camps that had been set up along the banks of the Shebelle River, where it was all happening in Somalia. The future looked bright.

My job was to make sure that the food sent from the docks of Mogadishu reached the refugees in my region. When the food didn't arrive, I was supposed to find out what had happened to it. Most of the time I felt like a cop. People were actually afraid of me. I could sit down with military men and accuse them of stealing food, and there was nothing they could do about it. I worked for USAID. A food monitor working with Save the Children, on the other hand, was badly beaten by thugs in a refugee camp.

The job didn't require a lot of detective work. On my first few days in the region, I saw military vehicles leaving refugee camps loaded down with bags of food. I saw merchants' warehouses filled with bags bearing the USAID handshake logo and the words “Donated by the People of the
United States of America, Not for Sale.” Over the next few days, I saw military warehouses packed to the ceilings with refugee food.

After checking ledgers at refugee camps, I figured that most of the relief food being sent to the region—probably about two-thirds—was being stolen. Some disappeared from the docks in Mogadishu. Some disappeared from the trucks along the way to the camps. Sometimes entire trucks would leave the port and vanish forever. Most of it, it seemed, disappeared from the camps, sold by camp commanders, who were usually Somali military men, or were just taken by the soldiers or by the guerrillas, who were members of the Western Somalia Liberation Front (WSLF). Along with the food, the WSLF also raided the camps for able-bodied young men, unwilling conscripts for their murky guerrilla war across the Ethiopian border in the Ogaden desert.

Soon after I arrived in Beledweyne, the town began to fill up with NGOs. Each group rented a walled compound with plenty of room to park Land Cruisers, and with houses large enough to house the expatriate staff. Everyone hired a watchman and a cook and a maid.

I rented a room at the UNHCR compound. It was a small stone house surrounded by a wall. The dining area was outside on a patio covered with a thatched canopy. A second patio served as an outdoor living room. The shower was also outdoors. A 55-gallon UN-blue drum was mounted on a platform above a shoulder-high stall. Water would be hand-pumped into the barrel in the morning. After baking in the sun all day the water was perfect shower temperature.

Behind the compound was open desert. Peering above the wall in the evenings provided magnificent sunsets and the sight of camels moving in and out of town as nomads came across the Ethiopian border to trade animals and milk. Across the street was a German NGO primarily doing water engineering. Oxfam and a religious British group called the Tear Fund, which did medical work in the refugee camps, were a short walk away. Save the Children moved in, along with two separate teams of Italian doctors. In a refugee camp outside of town was an American group called Medical Volunteers International. The French group Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) showed up eventually.

Why so many NGOs? There was money available from donors, so they came. The Somali government loved it as well. More NGOs meant more headquarters in Mogadishu. Most of the major landlords in the city were relatives of the president or other high government officials. Even in towns such as Beledweyne, homes were rented from government officials at preposterous rates. The government was pleased to have all the NGOs they
could get. So, in addition to the NGOs permanently camped out in town, we had a steady stream of itinerant charities that came through looking for projects and things to do.

A Canadian group arrived one day looking for orphans. They checked into the local office of the National Refugee Commission and were given permission to collect whatever orphans they found. Of all the problems that had sprung up in the refugee camps, I was never aware that orphans was one of them. The tight-knit clan structure meant that every child had a relative around somewhere. If no one closer could be found, a third cousin would gladly take and raise a child. But nonetheless thirty or forty children were gathered together and loaded onto a truck and carted off to an orphanage in Mogadishu, while their clan's elders protested.

Other NGOs came prospecting for projects. They would spend a day and then submit a project proposal to USAID in Mogadishu. When I'd get back to the capital, my opinion would be solicited. I always recommended that the projects not be funded. They were never well thought out. For example, one NGO sent a recent graduate from a forestry program to look into planting trees in Somalia. She had no practical experience in Africa yet submitted a proposal for more than $100,000. Later I brought her out to the site near the Shebelle River where she proposed to plant the trees. I pointed out to her that in much of the area the subsoil was limestone, and even if trees
could
be made to grow in part of the area, nomads normally brought their cattle to that spot, and the trees would be munched up in no time unless she proposed stationing armed guards around the area for the next four years.