The Road to Hell (5 page)

I
n the town of Galkayo, in the heart of Somalia's rangeland, I sit down to dinner with a group of aid workers at the United Nations compound. They are American and Belgian and Danish. There is a woman from India. The food is local meat with canned imported vegetables whipped up into a meal by a Somali cook who's learned to prepare food for Westerners. It is April of 1994 and Galkayo has been suspended in a tense peace for nearly a year despite its location at a point where two major feuding clan groups face each other.

The dinner conversation drifts over a number of subjects: negotiations with local leaders, information about supplies arriving on the next flight, the logistics of living in the middle of nowhere. Coffee is served. Electric lights pulse with the distant straining of diesel generators. A bottle of whisky is pulled from a cabinet, and the world slows. Cigarettes are lit. There is time to be thoughtful, and the conversation shifts from the daily details to the more general subject of aid, and the question arises: Are we doing more harm than good by being here? Nighttime discussions among aid workers always end up at this point. I've had this conversation with hundreds of different aid workers, on hundreds of occasions: with a Catholic priest in Kakuma, northwestern Kenya, during the famine of 1979; with the head of an NGO in Ouagadougou, capital of Burkina Faso, in 1986; in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in 1995; in Kampala, Uganda in 1989;
in New Delhi, India in 1974. And nearly every night in 1981 when I was living in Beledweyne, Somalia.

Aid workers notice things: Food aid attracts people to refugee camps, where they die from dysentery or measles or other diseases they wouldn't have contracted in the bush. Is there really a food shortage when anyone with money can find all the food he wants, when the aid workers themselves enjoy meals that the locals could never get even in the best of times? And why does it always seem that a group of local elites finds a way to get rich from the disaster? Are we contributing to the problem by dealing with these businessmen-politicians who lease Land Cruisers and homes to the aid agencies and who provide trucks to transport food?

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.

I
n 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.

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.

T
he $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.

C
hris 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 the
Children, and the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO)—and he knew what he was talking about. Somalia was a trap.

I
t 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.