The Road to Hell (15 page)

The next day the family hauled itself to Qorioley. They hadn't even unpacked when Chris found a letter waiting. It was dated from when he was still in Europe. The letter said that funding had dried up and the position was eliminated.

Cassidy had been fired.

*
For a full account of the story of “the Mad Mullah” see
Divine Madness
by Abdi Sheik-Abdi (London: Zed Books, 1993).

DEATH IN MOGADISHU

—Milan Kundera,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being

For there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.

W
illie Huber had always admired Chris Cassidy. He admired his work ethic and his straightforward and honest way of dealing with Somalis and Somalia. So he immediately offered Chris a job.

He promised that his organization, SOS Kinderdorf, would be different from Save the Children. SOS was an Austrian-based organization that set up children's villages and practiced integrated development policies in restricted environments. The villages included schools, hospitals, teaching farms. They took no money from governments and stayed highly focused on improving the lives of the children within their project. Huber figured that the difference between SOS and Save was that SOS supported its people in the field. He was confident that he could close his project at his own discretion at any time.

When Huber first moved to Somalia in 1982 to set up an SOS village, he was immediately shaken down by assistant government ministers and
their relatives. Rent my land. Rent my house. Use my vehicles. Hire my nephew. Buy my food. Huber saw things were getting off on the wrong foot and demanded and received a meeting with Siyaad Barre.

They met at 1:00
A.M.
in Villa Somalia. Barre was an insomniac who stayed awake at night chain-smoking Benson & Hedges cigarettes and insisting that people meet him on his schedule. Huber walked in angry and delivered a quick ultimatum.

“I don't want to get into a fight with your ministers,” Huber told the president, “but we have to do our project our way. If in a year from now you don't like what we're doing, we'll leave.” Huber half expected that Barre would toss him out of the country. There were some ninety other NGOs in Somalia at that point. The government could pick and choose. They didn't need this arrogant German-speaking Italian from the Alps having his own way. But Barre just smiled. At 2:00
A.M.
he summoned some of his ministers. “When the wheel is turning fine you don't put a stick in it,” he lectured. Huber had his year.

“You have to be firm,” Huber told me later. We were sitting in his highrise office in Nairobi talking about Cassidy. “And to be firm you have to know exactly what you want to do. You have to be prepared to walk away. Most important, you need your organization to back you. The Somalis know this. If an organization just wants to work, and doesn't know or care what they do, they'll make any kind of compromise and the Somalis will eat them alive. They want new people who will not cross them. There is a history here of driving away NGO directors until they find someone who won't resist. They want a puppet. Most NGOs oblige them.”

Cassidy refused to be a puppet; Save the Children was all too willing.

“The first things the Somalis will do is find out your weaknesses and then exploit them,” Huber said. “You have to admire them for that. They are the world's greatest entrepreneurs.”

Just north of Mogadishu, in Balad, SOS had a 500-hectare farm where Huber wanted Cassidy to work. Cassidy flew off to SOS headquarters in Innsbruck to get the details. And then, to Huber's surprise, he turned the job down.

He wanted something bigger. He wanted to make a huge difference and wasn't interested in a small project. Huber figured that after his experience with Save the Children, Cassidy wanted to prove something. He wanted a project to shove in the government's face, and to show up Save the Children. He needed to succeed on a massive scale. He wanted revenge. According to Cassidy, Save the Children should have had $400,000 on their books for the Qorioley project when he took his home leave. How could
they not have the money to pay his measly salary? How could they have let him run around busting his ass doing errands in Europe for them when they knew in advance that he would be let go? How could they have let him return to Somalia with his recovering wife and infant son and then tell him they had no money to buy him air tickets home? Cassidy would never have brought his family back had he known.

Back in Mogadishu, Cassidy rented a small house and started teaching English at night and got a day job managing the International Golf and Tennis Club near the site of the new U.S. Embassy compound under construction. Playing the nine-hole golf course was more novelty than sport so it attracted many nongolfers who wanted to whack at golf balls in the exotic setting of Mogadishu. It was one huge sandtrap. The “greens” were really “brown” surfaces where the sand had been tamped down and oiled to allow for putting. Keeping them smooth kept the Somali caddies busy. The rough was truly rough, full of wildlife and glorious birds and dik-diks, tiny antelopes.

The club had been around since the 1960s, when the Somali government had given the Americans (as well as the Italians and British) a big chunk of desert out on the far edge of town in the hopes that they'd build an embassy there. The American ambassador decided to use his parcel to build a golf course. Eventually, tennis courts and a clubhouse were added, and much later the embassy was relocated there. (The Italians built the University of Mogadishu on theirs; the British sold theirs to a private entrepreneur.)

When Siyaad Barre seized power, the club became a sort of subversive hangout for the regime's more patrician opponents. Later, in the 1980s, when the aid agencies and Americans started moving back in force, the incumbent ambassador persuaded the Department of Defense to fund an expansion of the club—swimming pool, showers, snack bar—for R&R purposes. The place became less “international” and more strictly American. As one former American diplomat recalled, “We had redneck DOD contractors all over the place who couldn't bear to see foreign children, never mind Somalis, swimming in the same pool as their own kiddies—their U.S. Defense Department-built pool.”

In the 1980s, a running and walking course was cleared with the help of the military and the CIA. “Just strolling in the early evening was a delight,” the diplomat remembers. “At the end, we had problems with herders running cattle onto the course at night and kids throwing stones at the golfers and joggers from beyond the fence.”

The good life in Mogadishu was coming to an end.

It was early in 1987 and Somalia was going through some changes. This was the time of Siyaad Barre's car accident, and there were rumors that he had suffered some sort of brain damage. What else could explain the way his closest relatives were snatching up all the government ministries and having their way with the country? Family members took over the Central Bank, the Ministry of Defense, foreign ambassadorships, and the directorships of state-owned enterprises such as Somali Airlines and the petroleum agency. Wholesale looting of government coffers kicked into high gear, and people were taking actions to protect their own turf. Aid workers who challenged the corruption were being threatened and occasionally beaten up.

Somalia's political prison, Labatan Jirow, about 190 miles down the coast from the capital, filled up with dissidents and others who had displeased the president and his buddies. There they were tortured and kept for years in solitary confinement in tiny cells. And in northern Somalia, the guerrilla war against the government intensified. The streets of Mogadishu grew tense with fear as those who were “in” with the regime now had, or feel they had, carte blanche to pursue their own interests and deal with their enemies.

C
hris Cassidy never spoke about the events that followed. Many of his friends knew vaguely what had happened to Bernie and the rest of the family, but no one ever asked Chris about it. He had constructed a solid wall around the issue.

In the winter of 1994, I went to Yakima, Washington, to see Chris. It was a year after his “debate” with the marines at Central Washington State University and he was still too shaken and embittered by his Somalia experience to really discuss it. We'd spoken on the phone a few times since the Somalia intervention, but Cassidy's comments were general and political, never personal, not a word about what he himself had been through.

I met him as I came off a flight from Seattle at the Yakima airport. We drove back to Cassidy's tiny one-room apartment. We sat and talked, but he said little. Each time I'd ask him about his experiences in Somalia, he would quickly digress into development theory and what he was doing in Yakima, about his plans to build an airstrip so Japan-bound cargo planes could take off with fresh apples and peaches from the reservation.

Cassidy seemed more comfortable talking when we were in the car, so we drove around the reservation, where he kept interrupting his narrative to point out various sites. Finally, on my fifth day in Yakima, we went up a road where we could go no farther.

“This is as far as I can take you, Mike. You can see we're getting into a
timber area. This is paradise, man. You go through the commercial forest, the closed area, where it's just old-growth forest—the sacred religious area for the Indians—I mean it's just… you get there and you feel inside … I've never been so moved by anything. The elders tell you the legends, and I can't go to the sacred areas with anybody, but we're here on the edge of it. This is a special place up here.”

Cassidy pulled the car off the road where we sat in silence looking out at the cloud-shrouded Cascade range. And he started to talk about what had happened after he was fired by Save the Children.

“I mean, I didn't have any … I had no fucking margin. I had debts, I had no money in the bank, no cash in reserve, because Save hadn't paid me and I had no way to get back to the U.S. I was stranded. Shit, what does a guy do?

“Goddamn it, you put a roof over your family's head, and you get your ass to work, and then you take care of the emergency and then we'll start figuring out the short-term and the long-term plan from here.

“When I was down grabbing my shit from Qorioley, those guys are really pissed off. It's just like, Hey, why the fuck is agriculture getting shut down? Why are you getting kicked outta here when we have all this money on the books? Our project's supposed to be ongoing, we have these agreements. The project people were pissed, all kinds of rumors were floating around.

“'Why didn't you take your cut?' they kept asking me. ‘Why don't you go back and negotiate with them?' Shit, tell me who played the game. I just said fuck it guys. I gotta eat, you gotta eat. Sorry, that's the way things worked out. Yeah, they didn't follow the plan, they're not fulfilling their agreements. It's a raw deal all around.

“I had to forget about others for a change and concentrate on my own family situation, because we were fucking desperate, man. A newborn, a guy who had just come back, shit, he was just a month old, a month and a half, something like that—and a toddler. Anyway, I was trying to keep my rage from being known. I didn't want to have a reputation in that town as being, ‘Oh, Cassidy gets the ax and now he's going around badmouthing Save the Children.' I needed a job.

“So I went to USAID, the private consulting firms in town. I'm a talented guy, I had a good reputation for work, people are … you can't fuckin' walk in a door and get a job overnight. You gotta see what projects are on the drawing board, who needs what help, where your skills match. So I was working on that. We're living down there in Lido … had to deal with the same old shit: no appliances, no cooker, no refrigerator, no fucking generator. We had mats on the floor, we had cribs for the kids and mosquito
net, but I mean it was … we were roughing it, and shit, I went for an interview for a job at FAO [the UN Food and Agriculture Organization]. It was a high-pressure thing. They had the boss-man there, and the representative, the project manager, some other technical experts. I had applied through the headquarters, the headquarters had sent a telex to the field office, and hey this guy's available, he has really interesting credentials, can you call him in and interview him?

“Just like everybody else, you gotta family, you gotta big fuckin' time job interview, you're a bit nervous, it's stressful, it's a difficult time in your life, and still recovering from this childbirth thing, you know, normal shit.

“I came back from this interview, like everybody's starving and say hey, let's go down to the Anglo-American Club. It was a short walk down from where we had rented this house and I thought it was a safe area. People knew us. People knew the kids. It was in the time of the day when it's quiet.”