The Road to Hell (22 page)

When refugees from Ethiopia flooded the north, they expressed surprise to find so many Isaaqs living there, as they had been led to believe that the land was more or less empty…. [T]he government would appeal to us [Isaaqs] to “help our impoverished countrymen” and we gave extravagantly…. They would come to rely on the refugees both as spies and soldiers—at the same time using them to get massive aid from the world.

Everyone who had a business was ordered to hire refugees or to train them for work in the camps. After six months “training,” their minimum wage was 1,300 shillings, going up to 3,000, while the average local citizen earned about 500. Every Isaaq in a prominent government job was seconded by a refugee who, after a short while, would take over and be in command. Land in Hargeysa was given to some of them free and we had to buy it back from them.
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It is possible for groups of expatriate aid workers to live and work in places while having not even the smallest clue what is happening to the general population. They rarely speak the language or socialize with the objects of their benevolence, but in the Somali situation it was glaringly obvious that the aid was being manipulated and abused.

The Africa Watch report quotes a Swiss national who worked in a Hargeysa orphanage:

The refugees in the camps were better off than the local population, which was a great source of tension. The government made a huge profit out of the substantial food and other aid given for the benefit of the refugees. This was resold by the government openly in the markets of Hargeysa, not in the front stalls where foreigners would see too easily “NOT TO BE SOLD” signs. But if you knew your way around the market, you could see all this for yourself. The fact that the government was using the refugees both to get aid and to weaken the Isaaqs politically was a major problem.

Why did CARE and other humanitarian organizations continue to feed the “refugees” when their partner in the project, Somalia's National Refugee Commission, pursued an agenda that created misery? I suspected I knew the answer.

Back home after a series of trips to Somalia during 1993, I received a call from a woman who had worked for CARE in New York. She had a few internal documents she wanted to show me. Mostly she was vaguely uncomfortable about CARE, suspecting that their decisions had more to do with business than humanitarianism. Her documents shed little light on the situation in Somalia, but she told me about a memo that a CARE administrator in Somalia had sent back to headquarters sometime in 1984 or 1985. The memo outlined the political situation in Somalia and questioned why CARE was still working there. According to her, the reply was blunt: CARE had a huge contract in Somalia. They couldn't afford to walk away from it.

How much was the contract worth? What were its terms? I called CARE. No, they wouldn't like to show me their contracts. That was the end of that.

As a private charity, CARE is not obligated to disclose the details of where their money comes from or how their funds are spent. Their only obligation is to make available their IRS 990 tax forms, which show aggregate inflows and expenditures. There is little useful information to be gained from such documents. The UN system is even more impenetrable. Only the U.S. government, under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), has an obligation to tell me how CARE and other charities spend their money. But CARE's Somalia contracts were with UNHCR, and the National Refugee Commission, not with the U.S. government. And even though a large part of UNHCR's budget was covered by American taxpayers, I had no official channels through which to explore where the money went. There was no way to trace a path of accountability.

No one ever called on CARE to answer for its shipment of food to armed fighters. If the consequences bothered anyone at headquarters, it was never made public. CARE continued to raise money from the public and to collect hundreds of millions in publicly funded contracts without anyone investigating a connection between their projects and the deaths of thousands of people in the Horn of Africa. The organization was, and is, allowed to define its own success. The sad truth is that CARE and other NGOs are never held accountable for their actions. And when U.S. troops went into Somalia in 1992, CARE was right there, collecting millions in new contracts.

At the USAID office in Nairobi in 1994, I asked an administrator who had just overseen a multimillion dollar grant to CARE why the organization continued to get money from the government. “It's because they keep
good books,” she said. “When we give money to CARE, we always know where it goes.”

And that, in reality, is the limit of accountability in the world of development and relief. NGOs are accountable to accountants, not to their individual donors, who have no way of judging the organizations' work, and least of all to the victims, the recipients of their aid, who have no voice and who are expected to look grateful when the cameras are pointed their way.

O
n my way back to Somalia in the winter of 1994,I made several stops in Europe, including Geneva, headquarters for UNHCR, on the long-shot possibility that I could talk someone into opening the files for me. I had several friends there whom I'd met working and reporting from Africa in the past. Perhaps one of them would help.

My connections got me past the guards and through the front door.

At that time, UNHCR was in the process of moving from their lakeside art deco building to more modern and spacious headquarters. It was obvious why. The organization had been growing wildly in the last decade. The little commission had become a powerhouse UN agency. File cabinets, bookshelves, and copiers spilled out of office doorways into corridors. Desks were crowded into tiny rooms. Inside the offices were secretaries typing documents into word processors and other people running around with stacks of papers in their hands looking busy. “They think they're saving refugees, but they're all just worried about rescuing their careers,” my friend Marco commented.

Marco had been with UNHCR for a long time, serving in both Geneva and perhaps a dozen overseas assignments, including Somalia. His cynicism wasn't unique among UN employees. He was just noting the obvious. The UN is as hierarchical a bureaucracy as exists anywhere. UN employees grouse endlessly about salaries, benefits, and their all-important ranking: “This guy is a P-4 and I'm only a P-3, and I've been here for two years longer. It's because his brother-in-law is the assistant deputy minister of finance in Ecuador.” That sort of thing. Rank is everything and often has little to do with performance and everything to do with politics.

Marco turned me loose in the corridors, and I found my way to the Somalia desk and asked if it might be possible to see some records going back a few years. The desk officer, a Mexican, said he'd see what he could do and picked up the phone. He flirted a bit with the woman on the other end. I took this to be a good sign. Maybe they'll do each other a favor and I'll be the beneficiary. He asked her about going out to dinner, and seemed
pleased with the answer. Then, replacing the receiver on the phone he asked me, “What did you want again?”

“Somalia. Records.”

“I don't know. I don't think we have records that far back. I think they're stored in a warehouse somewhere else. I don't know where they are.”

“Is there anyone else here who deals with Somalia?”

He sent me down the hall and into an office where a friendly looking man sat at his desk, doing nothing, surrounded by large stacks of paper. The man appeared to be from Asia, somewhere in Indochina I guessed.

“Excuse me. I was looking for some information on Somalia. I was wondering if you could help.”

Of course,” he said. “Somalia became independent in 1960, when the former Italian Somaliland merged with the British Protectorate of Soma' liland.”

I stopped him. That wasn't really what I had in mind. I was looking for archives. Did he know of any? No, he told me. He hadn't been on the job for very long, had never been to Somalia, and was just starting to study the history. He hadn't yet reached the Ogaden war of 1977 or the refugee crisis in the 1980s, and really had no idea where records might be.

I went back to Marco's office and we went to lunch in the cafeteria of the main UN headquarters at the Palais high on a hill overlooking the lake.

The UN was neck deep in its peacemaking role in Somalia at that time. UNHCR was actively working with Somali refugees in Kenya. The entire UN organization had committed huge amounts of resources to various humanitarian projects. Marco and I sat down over our trays of food, and he started to speak about the mess in Somalia, and his colleagues at the UN. “No one here has the courage to say that Aydiid is a criminal. They'll be the first to criticize a Western power, but they're available to accept any kind of crime to stay in a country and show the world they care about starving children.” He paused to look around the room full of smartly dressed UN bureaucrats who were eating their lunches and drinking wine. “It is just a big masturbation,” Marco said in English heavily spiced with his Italian accent. “UN bureaucrats are people too stupid to get real jobs with their own governments but too powerful to be disposed of. I can't stand them. They should disappear, all of them.” Once more he paused. “These are the people who decide the future of Angola and Somalia.”

After lunch we went back to the UNHCR offices and started trolling around once again. This time Marco stayed with me. Several more people
told me that there weren't any records. Another may or may not have known anything but said he wouldn't help me. There wasn't much else to do, so we wandered around the halls talking. Marco continued to disparage the UN but also seemed resigned to spending the rest of his career there. He was well paid and had a good pension to look forward to. He had maintained a degree of distance from the bureaucracy and thereby kept a grip on his sanity.

We walked past the mailroom, where a young kid was distributing envelopes into rows of pigeonholes. We strolled in, and Marco asked the kid if he knew whom we should contact to get to the UNHCR archives. The kid put down his envelopes and walked to a row of keys dangling from hooks on the wall. He removed a set and walked out the door.

We followed him outside, and walked across the back lawn of the building to a road. Across the road we went into another building and then down a set of stairs into the parking garage. At the back of the garage we passed through another door, and into a corridor and yet another set of stairs. At the bottom of the stairs was a door. The kid fumbled with the keys for a moment. Then the door opened. We were in a tiny room with two more doors. Again he went through the keys and finally popped open the first door.

We walked into a cold room, stacked floor to 20-foot ceiling with files and ledgers. On the files were the names of countries: Cambodia, Angola, Mozambique, Pakistan, Somalia. Jammed between the rows of towering steel shelves were cardboard boxes. I popped open one box and found more files.

Marco immediately became nervous. Suddenly his career became important to him. Maybe we shouldn't be here, he suggested. But I hadn't come all the way to Geneva to find the files and walk away. The kid left us alone in the raw, cold room and I began opening files. Everything was there: every memo and cable, cash disbursements for every shovel and pencil. I told Marco that I'd photocopy the documents I needed and return them to their files (not that I thought anyone would ever actually look at them again). Marco said no. He said he had to go back to work and asked me to promise not to remove anything from that room. I promised. He also asked me not to tell anyone that I knew him if I was caught.

For the next two days I sat on the cold cement floor reading aloud from UNHCR documents into my tape recorder. I never left the room, afraid that I wouldn't get back in. I found a drainpipe to pee in so I wouldn't have to go outside. And in the end, the documents I read told quite a story.

•   •   •

I
n one binder I found the CARE contracts. CARE's first-year budget for delivering food in Somalia totaled just over $7 million. This included salaries for fifteen international staff (i.e., Americans and Europeans) budgeted at $822,000, while fifteen local staff members (Somalis) were to be paid $128,000. Commodity monitoring, which was primarily salaries paid to an undisclosed number of Asians, consumed $525,000. CARE also received $432,000 for administration back at headquarters in New York. The following year the total budget went to nearly $9 million, with close to $1 million in expatriate salaries and $660,000 for CARE's administration back in New York.

Included with the budgets were evaluation reports. A report dated 9 April 1985 outlined the objectives of the CARE project as follows: “To continue assuring that adequate relief assistance is channeled to refugees in 36 camps in Somalia. The means for achieving a gradual withdrawal of foreign inputs shall be studied. This implies full financial support to the emergency logistics unit.”

Later, the body of the report continued:

Throughout 1984 the refugees continued to be supplied with available relief supplies at camp level. Monitoring of the operation began with the clearance of goods at the port of entry to final distribution to the beneficiaries. Progress toward withdrawal of foreign inputs including expatriate staff were studied but agreed by all signatories of the project sub-agreement to be less of a priority in 1984. The same holds true for the proposed reduction in vehicle repair and fuel handling operations.

The project would continue and the expatriate staff would stay. The “all signatories” refers to UNHCR, Somalia's NRC, and CARE, three groups with a clear vested interest in keeping the money flowing and the project going—albeit for very different reasons. There is no further discussion in the long evaluation report about finding ways to send the refugees back to their normal lives, nor is there any discussion about why the signatories agreed that withdrawal of foreign inputs would be “less of a priority in 1984.”