The Road to Hell (7 page)

The Somalis would retire to their homes or to tea shops for heated discussions about nothing in particular. Or they would chew qat with friends.

T
he life of the Somalis was utterly hidden to foreigners like Cassidy. In their offices they would come in contact with professionals who stepped
comfortably into their roles as junior bureaucrats, administrative assistants, and secretaries. At the end of the day the Somalis would walk out the gates and disappear into the vast anonymity of Mogadishu, into neighborhoods such as Medina or Wardigley, where the streets became narrow and crowded.

The foreigners would get into their Land Cruisers and drive to one of the beach clubs. The Anglo-American Beach Club, the Italian Beach Club, and the UN Beach Club sat along the stretch of the Lido in north Mogadishu. People ate hamburgers and drank beer on patios overlooking the ocean. The company was cordial. Almost everyone in the small expatriate community knew everyone else. A few children played in the restaurants, running between the tables and chairs while their parents talked, usually about the business of development. And about the Somalis. Below, Somalis bathed and fished. Expatriates had long since stopped swimming there, since sharks prowled the shallow waters, eating the occasional swimmer. The expats drank their drinks and watched the fins in the waves and wondered who would be next. There were no hospitals in north Mogadishu, no ambulances. Open wounds drained until death.

In the last week of March 1981, three people died from shark attacks just off the Lido by the beach clubs. One was a fourteen-year-old boy who lost a piece of his thigh as he ran about five yards from the shore chasing a football. He bled to death on the way to the hospital. Two days later a man standing in waist-deep water had his intestines ripped out by a passing shark. Several hours later the corpse of another shark victim washed ashore.

Four years earlier the government had built a slaughterhouse just north of the Lido beach. Blood and guts drained into and floated about the water, attracting the great whites to the warm unprotected shore.

At the UN Beach Club someone drew a poster on notebook papers showing a panicked Somali bather watching wide-eyed as a great white shark swam off with his severed leg. Before this happens to you, we should get a pool, the sign said.

The people who sat around drinking beer and eating hamburgers were mostly young workers for private voluntary organizations. Today they are called NGOs, but in 1981 they were known as volags, a contraction of voluntary agencies, or PVOs, for private voluntary agencies. Neither one of these names was precisely accurate. Few of the people who worked for them were really volunteers. Most were getting paid, some quite handsomely, with prospects for advancement. And since most subsisted on government contracts, they weren't precisely private.

These years saw the dawn of the yuppie in America. Development work
had once been the domain of good-hearted, globe-trotting, draft-dodging hippie types who enjoyed living and working in places where dope was cheap and life was easy. But by 1981, these people were being rapidly pushed aside by movers and shakers on a career track. Development work was being professionalized, which many saw as a good thing.

The people who started arriving to work in development were more and more young professionals with graduate degrees in nonprofit management from Yale or backgrounds in economic and political development from Columbia or the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, the same people who were starting to take over Wall Street. They had new ideas about how to move all those bags and bags of U.S. relief food. They had ideas about how to feed hundreds of thousands of refugees and how to take a backward desert country where 70 percent of the people were nomads and where average life expectancy was thirty-nine years and turn it into a modern and more productive state.

But mostly they had ideas about spending money. And suddenly there was a lot of money available for Somalia. Fat contracts were floating about from the UN and the U.S. government to do things in Somalia. Much of that money was allocated to the care of ethnic Somali refugees who had fled Ethiopia in 1977 and 1978 in the wake of a short and brutal war between Somalia and Ethiopia in the Ogaden desert. Today the war in the Ogaden would be one of those African skirmishes lost on the inner pages of only the largest newspapers. In 1977, however, this border war became the vortex of American and Soviet power facing off in yet another test in the Cold War. The brief exaggerated importance of the Horn of Africa meant that arms poured in from the East and West, and along with these arms, to fight the battle for hearts and minds, came relief and development aid. For the new young professionals in the development industry, this Cold War aid race was a lucrative opportunity to practice their craft. Aid workers and military advisors splashed around together in the embassy swimming pool, but still the aid workers refused to imagine that they were all there for the same purpose, their funds coming from the same source to accomplish the same goal. In order for America to maintain a foothold on the Horn of Africa, they were all there to please one man, Siyaad Barre, to help the dictator stay in power, even if that meant supporting his broken dream of Greater Somalia.

T
he dream of Greater Somalia could be seen in the maps hanging on the walls of government offices. There were no borders where we're used to seeing borders, just uninterrupted stretches of brown and green reaching
across through central Kenya, over into Djibouti, and across the Ogaden into the Ethiopian highlands, the area that Somali officials called Western Somalia. These were the lands inhabited by ethnic Somalis, one people divided by old colonial lines.

In the absence of any other forces uniting this nation of solitary nomads, the idea of Greater Somalia provided them at least with a common quest, some common enemies. The Somalis who live in these three other countries are represented by three of the points of the five-pointed star on the Somali flag. The other two points represent the regions of the former Italian Trust Territory of Somalia, that is, southern Somalia, and the former British Somaliland Protectorate, the northern region around Hargeysa.

The idea of uniting the five Somali groups has long been at the root of Somali nationalism. The former British region became independent on June 26,1960. The Italian region achieved its independence five days later, and the two joined to form one country.

In 1963, as Kenya verged on independence from Britain, Somali Nationalists looked southwest to the part of Kenya known as the Northern Frontier District (NFD). Its population was more than 60 percent Somali, predominantly Muslim, and overwhelmingly in favor of unification with the Somali state. Their wishes were ignored in favor of those of Kenyan nationalists, who opposed partition of the colony. When Kenya became independent in December 1963, Somalis in the NFD began a long, futile war against the new government. The Somalis called them freedom fighters and the Kenyans called them
shifta
, a term applied to bandits and cattle thieves.

To this day, Kenya's Northeastern Province is a dangerous place to travel.
Shifta
still attack convoys and raid towns on occasion. And both the Kenyans and the Somalis are right: the
shifta
are usually bandits who call themselves freedom fighters, and occasionally freedom fighters who behave like bandits.

The situation in the Ogaden, however, proved much more explosive. For centuries Amharic Emperors had, through intimidation and agreements, controlled the Muslim lowlands of the Ogaden. As in Kenya, the freedom fight sputtered along, but the Somali military had little chance of any victory against the superior American-trained Ethiopian army under Emperor Haile Selassie.

In 1967, the elected Somali government of Prime Minister Mohamed Ibrahim Egal began a process of making peace with the nations that stood in the way of the pan-Somali dream. Egal realized that the dream was fruitless,
that all of Africa, confronted with secessionist minorities, had lined up against Somalia. Though Egal's peace efforts weren't appreciated by Somalis, his coalition won the fraud-laced 1969 election. Yet in the process of assuring his own power, Egal had angered the military, which then overthrew him in October 1969. The coup leader, Major General Mohamed Siyaad Barre, ascended to the leadership of the country.

Several years after the coup, Barre announced that his government, led by the Supreme Revolutionary Council, would pursue the path of “scientific socialism.” A loose military alliance with the Soviet Union became codified, and Barre began a massive military buildup with armored units, MiG-21 fighter-bombers, and Ilyushin bombers. Thousands of military advisors began to train the 20,000-man Somali army. The Ethiopians and Kenyans, with reason to be scared, turned to their American allies.

All of this might have turned into a typical Third World, Cold War arms race had it not been for the 1974 coup in Ethiopia that booted Haile Selassie from the imperial palace and installed a socialist government. The Soviets, seeing that Ethiopia was probably the most valuable piece of real estate in Africa, did a clean sweep on regional foreign policy. They stopped backing Eritrean and Tigrean rebels fighting against the Ethiopian government and began to arm the new military junta, the
Dergue
, while attempting to maintain their relationship with Somalia.

In 1977, however, the Soviets were forced to choose sides. A bloody internal power struggle in Ethiopia had left the regime vulnerable. Barre sensed his opening. The Soviet military buildup in Ethiopia hadn't gotten very far, and his own army was primed and ready. In July 1977, he invaded the Ogaden, rapidly capturing the region and driving the Ethiopians back into the hills. Elated Somalis decreed Barre the savior of the Somali nation. He was at the peak of his popularity.

What followed in Ethiopia was Jimmy Carter's worst nightmare, and it changed the direction of U.S. military policy. Midway through the war, the Russians, who had signed an “eternal” friendship treaty with Somalia in 1975, switched sides, airlifting 18,000 Cuban troops and $2 billion worth of arms to the Ethiopians. Barre turned to the Americans. The Carter administration promised him weapons but then, at the height of the fighting, decided to withhold them. By then it was too late for Somalia. By March 1978, the Somalis were run out of the Ogaden.

Shocked by the lightening Soviet response to the military and diplomatic crisis on the Horn, U.S. military strategists started feeling paranoid about America's ability to wage a “conventional” war, and the idea of a
Rapid Deployment Force took hold. The Americans convinced themselves that an abandoned Soviet naval base at Berbera, in northern Somalia, was critical to America's security.

The Heritage Foundation, soon to gain influence in the Reagan administration, spelled out the evolving mood concerning the Horn of Africa:

Siyaad Barre had something the Americans wanted and were willing to pay for. For the next ten years he would use America's lust for the Berbera base to extract as much military and development aid as he could. By the time U.S. hostages were seized in Iran and the Soviets had invaded Afghanistan, the United States was scrambling to look tough. In early 1981, the incoming Reagan administration dispatched Henry Kissinger to Mogadishu, where he assured Siyaad Barre that America was behind him. “It is not tolerable that the Soviet Union and its proxy forces engage in expansion all over Africa and in the Middle East without opposition,” Kissinger said in Cairo after a day with Barre in Somalia.

From Washington, the barren wastes of Somalia suddenly looked like the center of Berlin.

B
y 1979, within Somalia, the gloss had worn off the campaign in the Ogaden. Barre was becoming increasingly unpopular, and his secret police, the National Security Service (NSS) was stepping up its campaign of intimidation against his enemies. Previously, Somali governments had tried to maintain a broad base of representation from various clans. But as Barre began to feel less and less secure, he started to close the circle, increasingly employing his own clansmen and his own relatives in positions of power.

At the same time, Somalia maintained a low-level war against the Ethiopians in the Ogaden, arming a group of Ogaden Somalis called the Western Somalia Liberation Front, or WSLF. The WSLF attacks drew reprisals, and increasingly the Somali nomads from the region found themselves caught in the middle. Some of them sought safety over the border in Somalia. Barre began to pressure his Western allies for refugee relief, and they responded. There were big stakes placed on the table. Barre claimed a half a million refugees, then a million, and soon a million and a half. Journalists took pictures of the sick and the hungry, and the relief agencies arrived
on the scene with the food. Siyaad Barre knew from the beginning that these foreigners, arriving in the guise of angels, could help him hold on to his flagging power.

C
assidy and the other Americans arrived in Somalia not exactly sure what they would find, but not particularly concerned either. U.S. government employees were housed in former Italian villas along the beach on the Lido or in other parts of town. The houses were luxurious by any standards. Floors were Italian porcelain tile. Their contracts specified that the houses contain refrigerators and huge freezers for storing their imported food. Likewise, under contractual agreement, the houses were air-conditioned. This all depended on the regularity and amperage of local electricity, which was beyond the control of the American government. When the air conditioner in an expatriate house kicked in, the street lights would dim.

Houses also included quarters for the help, verandahs, couryards, and other niceties that made staying home infinitely more comfortable than venturing outside. Somali entrepreneurs were starting to catch on and build more and more homes to house the Americans, who were more demanding and had bigger budgets than the Soviets.