The Road to Hell (13 page)

B
y February 1986, the family had settled in. Tone wrote a series of optimistic letters back to Cassidy's family in New Orleans. She noted that Bernie seemed to be thriving despite the heat, mosquitoes, and dust. He had grown to 12.5 pounds, not so big that she couldn't carry him around.

The Somalis would stare and laugh as Bernie was pushed around town in a stroller. They laughed harder when Chris carried him in the “snuggly” strapped to his chest. It was as if every time they saw him was the first time. Somali mothers, Tone noted, carry their infants wrapped in a piece of cloth on their backs. Carrying the baby up front is rare, and seeing the father carrying the child is unheard of.

Ilhan again warned Chris that people were talking. They'd lose respect for him. They'd lose respect for the project. Couldn't he just let his damn wife carry the baby? But Chris wasn't into this cultural sensitivity shit. He
was there to teach agriculture. He accepted the Somalis on their terms and they had better goddamn well accept him on his own. He thought they could get used to it. It wasn't as if his wife was walking around topless. Eventually the people did come to accept the Cassidys. The people stopped laughing, though they still stared. They liked to come up and touch the little white baby.

While Chris struggled with the books at work, Tone was coping with the home life. For two months Bernie had been sleeping badly and waking up two to three times a night. While Chris was at work, Bernie and Tone remained inside the SCF compound. Tone wrote back that their house was adequate, but very primitive and very poorly constructed. It was full of one thousand and one different insects that entered through the cracks in the floor. She was worried that the plumbing wouldn't hold out, a problem because there was no water at all in the town of Qorioley. And because they had not received the promised gas stove from Save the Children, she was forced to cook on a charcoal grill in their small kitchen. It was unbearably hot.

On the surface, Tone was patient, reporting that things weren't great but she had faith that as soon as Chris got his job sorted out, things were sure to improve. He wasn't exactly working yet. Too much to clean up from the past, too much paperwork to be sorted out before he could get started on what he considered his real job, working on the refugee farm with the refugees.

As the Cassidys settled into a routine they began spending Fridays at the beach in Merka, about forty-five minutes from Qorioley. Tone would sit with Bernie on a hotel verandah overlooking the ocean. Chris purchased a wind surfer and would put on a show for his family. There was a small convent in Merka where a group of Italian nuns did medical work in the community. On Saturdays a priest would come from Mogadishu and conduct a Mass in Italian. The Cassidys never missed it. The nuns were always happy to see them and doted on Bernie.

Tone managed to forget about the hardships in Qorioley and eventually found life there peaceful and relaxing. She wrote of her contentment and reported that they had hired a girl to do some cooking, cleaning, and laundry. She wrote that she and Bernie were leading an easy, carefree life, and she expected that to continue as long as he stayed healthy, and she didn't see any reason why he wouldn't so long as she and Chris were careful.

As Bernie grew bigger Chris would stick him in the back of the bicycle and he and Tone would ride around Qorioley as if they were pedaling through an American suburb.

•   •   •

I
n early 1986, Siyaad Barre threw a little party. It was a dinner for hundreds of aid workers to let them know how much the GSDR appreciated their contributions. Chris and Hassan Ilhan went. The dinner was held in the parliament building.

After dinner Hassan and Chris wandered outside. There on a huge pedestal was a brass statue of a man on a horse. The horse was reared up and it reminded Cassidy of statues of Napoleon. From the little concrete park around the statue all of Mogadishu was visible, as well as the Indian Ocean all the way to the horizon. “Who is that?” he asked Ilhan.

“Sayid Mohamed Abdille Hassan. Your people called him the Mad Mullah. But he wasn't a mullah and he wasn't mad. He was a poet and a warrior who knew how to inspire people. And he knew how to use a gun. He nearly drove the British and Italians out of Somalia in the 1920s. Now the British and Italians are back, of course.”

Hassan Ilhan looked up at the monument. Cassidy watched ships in the harbor. Most of the ships contained grain from the West. Behind him a row of Somali flags fluttered in the evening breeze.

Hassan Ilhan gave Cassidy a shorthand version of the story of the Somali nationalist hero. To be sure, it was not a story universally known in Somalia, and even today many educated Somalis know very little about the Mad Mullah. In the 1980s, there was only room for one hero in the country, and that was Mohamed Siyaad Barre. The story of Mohamed Abdille Hassan had to wait to be dusted off by Western journalists and piped back into Somali at the time of the U.S. intervention. By then, however, the statue was no longer a reference point. It had been stolen and reportedly sold off as scrap metal to feed the war of Somali upon Somali, a sad irony that once again seemed to have more resonance among Westerners in search of history than for Somalis rooted in the here and now.

Mohamed Abdille Hassan was an Islamic religious leader, a warrior, and a poet, who raised an army of Dervishes to confront the British colonial government in the first years of the twentieth century.
*
He is considered by many to be Somalia's foremost nationalist leader and a symbol of Somali pride. But, like most things in Somalia, the story of this hero ran up against the country's clan-based reality. The Mullah was a Daarood, descended from the Ogaadeen and Dulbahante clans. It was easy and natural for Daaroods
to remember his war against British colonialism and honor him with the most prominent pedestal in modern Mogadishu, but others in the country regard him differently. Though the Mullah was a self-professed anti-tribalist, many of his victims were from the Isaaq and other nonDaarood clans. Some of his critics point out that his followers were little more than looters who ravaged their own people in the name of nationalism and Islam, charges that are identical to those leveled against the warlords who dominate Somalia today.

The two men stood before the statue in silence. Finally, as Cassidy recalls, Hassan Ilhan spoke. “Look at my people. What are they now? Beggars.”

“We can make this project work,” Chris said like a cheerleader. “We've got the skills. You can do the administration. There's nothing to stop us. Well get the money. We've got the stuff here. We can make these people independent.”

“They're wasting the money,” Ilhan grumbled.

“No, man, this is American money, our taxpayers' money. They can't fuck it up. We can empower these people,” Cassidy said. “I promise you, Hassan, they will be able to feed themselves. They will build something here.”

Hassan looked back at the American. “You know nothing about power. There is only one power in this country, and that power doesn't want these people to feed themselves. That power wants them to eat out of the ‘handshake' bags from America.” Ilhan was referring to the symbol of USAID, two hands clasped in front of a stars-and-stripes medallion.

“Hassan. That makes no sense.”

”You can't understand, because in your country things are simple.”

“Well fucking explain it to me.”

“They're screwing us.” Hassan Ilhan said.

“Yes?”

Hassan Ilhan took a breath. “I can explain this to you, but you won't understand or you won't believe me.”

“Just explain.”

“The refugees are from Siyaad's mother's clan. They support him. They are grateful that he is feeding them.”

“So?”

“So if he stops feeding them they will no longer be grateful. If they can live on their own they won't need him. Also, he has given them this land, but this land belongs to the Biimaal people and the Rahanwiin people. They will also need Siyaad to protect them from the people who want their land back. And the land he has given them isn't enough to really live on.
It's nothing that a man can pass down to his sons. Siyaad has made them his slaves, and he has you here to help him.”

“So why are you helping him?”

“What can I do? I have to say that this is better than nothing. This is all we have.”

B
ack in Qorioley, Cassidy sank back into frustration. He wasn't doing the project. He'd spent months just trying to figure out what was going on, trying to make the books and records reflect reality. And he still couldn't get money from the Mogadishu office.

So be began to pay his staff from his own salary. When Tone heard about it she exploded. There was barely enough money for them to live on as it was. It was expensive to import things for Bernie. Chris was still paying college loans back in the States. And now he was paying salaries.

Chris argued that it wasn't much money.

But soon it was. Before long he had invested $3,000 cash into the project. And now a second baby was on the way. Chris was drinking heavily and Tone wasn't far behind. He'd come home evenings hauling work with him. Hassan Ilhan would often stop by and the two of them would shuffle through reams of paper. Tone didn't know what they were up to. Her anger grew, but she and Chris rarely spoke of problems. On the outside she expressed confidence that everything would pass. Inside she was sinking deeper and deeper into despair.

On top of his problems with Save the Children, Cassidy was running up against the corruption and indifference of the Ministry of Agriculture. Resources and field support that were supposed to have been funneled through the ministry never arrived. Cassidy suspected they ended up in the hands of private farmers with connections to Siyaad's family. When ministry officials did show up at the project site it was always to deliver bad news: Land originally slated for allocation to refugees is no longer available. Hardware or fertilizer in the project warehouse has to be be “reallocated” to another project somewhere else. Expats were helpless to do anything about it, and most just grumbled quietly to themselves. Cassidy shouted to anyone who would listen. Part of him really thought he could change things.

Not long after Cassidy and Hassan Ilhan's conversation by the monument, Siyaad Barre was traveling back to Mogadishu from an inspection tour of the southern Lower Shebelle region. The car in which he was traveling overturned in heavy rain. The president was injured in the crash and
flown to Saudi Arabia for treatment. Radio Mogadishu tried to downplay the incident, but Barre was seriously injured. The president was described as being sixty-seven years old, but in truth he was probably ten years older. Things would never be the same in Somalia again.

In early 1986, some of the Somali shillings that made their way to Qorioley had an extra symbol hand-stamped on them. It stood for the Somali National Movement, a northern rebel group that had begun fighting to overthrow the regime. Panic set in among the refugees. They didn't want to touch the money. It was as if each exchange of the currency slowly eroded the foundations of the regime that had invited them to Somalia and made them the wards of the state. Even those refugees who despised Siyaad knew that other Somalis regarded them as his allies. Their fate was tied to that of the dictator.

I
n late 1986, nine months after Cassidy arrived in Qorioley, a new Save the Children director was finally appointed in Mogadishu. His name was John Marks, a former Peace Corps volunteer who was in Somalia when Siyaad threw the Peace Corps out in 1969. Marks spoke Somali fluently, which was an impressive trait. Few of the foreigners who came to Somalia in the 1980s ever learned the language. For one, it was tough to learn. For another, the government didn't encourage Somalis to teach the language to foreigners. A Somali-speaking foreigner was a danger to the system.

Marks had been working for CARE in Hargeysa, where he had a reputation for being too friendly with government officials who were orchestrating a campaign of terror against the Isaaq clan in response to their support of the rebel Somali National Movement. In Hargeysa Marks's name still elicits negative reactions. He was said to be friendly with General Gani, the military commander who later was responsible for bombing the city into rubble, and he was there to feed Ogaadeen refugees, people who moved into Isaaq land and soon started supporting Siyaad's government in its campaign of extermination against the Isaaq.

Save the Children wasn't going out of its way to hire a director; they saved a lot of money by not having one. But the absence of a director was endangering the project. A German NGO, GTZ, was prowling about Qorioley and drooling. They saw the potential of the project, its possible impact, and its potential for attracting money. Qorioley was a pilot. Make it work and rich contracts are yours. Hundreds of refugees could be made self-sufficient. Anyone would want to sign on to that team. “Frankly, I think the Germans would have done a good job,” Cassidy says.

•   •   •

T
he first thing Marks did was to get a new director's residence in Mogadishu. He rented a former USAID guest house near Villa Somalia, the presidential palace, with a view of the city. The second thing he did was throw a cocktail party. Chris came for the free booze and to be polite and meet the new director. The place was full of every NGO representative in Mogadishu plus Somali government officials, the same ones from the Ministry of Agriculture who had been stealing from the project.

At the party, Abdi Mohamed, the project's farm manager, had been drinking heavily. He kept staring at Marks. Finally he walked over to him: “How is it that the first thing you do is rent a mansion and buy alcohol for all these white people?”

Cassidy walked over and grabbed him from behind and dragged him out of the party.