The Road to Hell (33 page)

“As long as our marching orders were what they were—‘Keep that strategic foothold, but don't ask for any more military aid money'—we were doing the right thing to downplay UNHCR's sacred principles. The important thing, and we sadly failed to pull it off, was to bring about some kind of accommodation between Siyaad Barre and the SNM/Isaaq.

“Siyaad's was, after all, the only government we had to work with! Our only alternative would have been to fold our tents and (figuratively) leave, like the Brits did, tossing away any chance of moderating the course of events. We chose to stay the course, keep our eye on the main chance, and ignore the whines and whimpers from the incredibly pedestrian, narrow-minded UNHCR bureaucrats.”

Crigler felt that aid should have continued so the United States could have leverage with Siyaad. Human rights violations only got worse when the aid was being phased out. Siyaad had nothing more to lose except his own power, and he was now prepared to do anything to hold onto it.

Later I questioned Crigler: “Then aid to Somalia, as you saw it, had nothing to do with development?”

“Shit, no. Aid is not development; it doesn't do diddley-squat.”

M
atthew Bryden, on leave from the Canadian military, went to Africa as a tourist in 1987 and ended up working for CARE, repatriating refugees for $50 a day. He started out in Nairobi without knowing where it was or what he was going to do there. He spent three months traveling around Kenys, Uganda, Rwanda, and Tanzania. In Uganda he met up with an Italian journalist whom he accompanied to the northern part of the country, where he witnessed the rebellion of the Holy Spirit movement, led by a woman named Alice Lakwena. She was the one who told her followers that bullets would pass through them like water. Thousands of them died.

“I saw orphaned kids and I saw displaced kids, I saw all the trash and the decadence of war without seeing the fighting. We saw villages that had been smashed and burned, and this made a really strong impression on me. I asked the local Red Cross office if they needed any help, that I could stay and work, and they said, ‘No, you can't do it like that. You've got to go back and go through the head office.'

“I traveled a bit and while I was traveling I reflected on it and I thought: No, what I really want to do is come back and rather than be a soldier, what I'd like to do is be on the other side of the divide. I don't want to be the one who creates this sort of destruction and violence; I'd like to be helping pick up the pieces, helping people recover from violence and destruction.”

So he went back to Nairobi and spent three months hunting for a job. Nairobi was full of aid workers and would-be aid workers. Itinerant world travelers who'd gotten a taste of the Third World life and found it to their liking, slapped together résumés and went looking for jobs. Some of them found jobs, and a few even found careers.

Then Bryden heard about the job with CARE in southwestern Somalia. CARE needed bodies to fill in registration forms. It was January 1988. Bryden was told that Mogadishu was still safe, though the countryside could be dangerous. But not long after he arrived, Mogadishu was shaken when an ammunition dump just outside town was blown up.

In the refugee camps, he was part of what UNHCR called its “Durable Solution” to the refugee problem. Durable Solution offered three choices: repatriation to Ethiopia, integration into Somalia, or resettlement in a third country such as Canada or Sweden. The third choice wasn't really an option for most refugees, and the first two choices weren't very attractive. Somalia was on the verge of a civil war, and the refugees weren't exactly popular with the forces that would likely take over. Conditions in Ethiopia weren't much better, and much worse than they would have been a few years earlier. Still, CARE and UNHCR acted as if conditions were finally right for solving the refugee crisis. In reality, the refugees weren't useful to anyone any more: Siyaad had other problems, and the Ogaadeen people had formed their own rebel group, the Somali Patriotic Movement (SPM), to challenge the government. And with the Cold War over, there was no more money available for the UN and NGOs who wanted to take care of the refugees.

The problem had to be dispensed with, and itinerants like Bryden could do the job as well as anyone. Bryden didn't stay ignorant very long. He developed an instant attachment to Somalia and quickly began to learn the Somali language and to grasp the nuances of the country. “I became aware pretty quickly that this was a buyout, that UNHCR was essentially bribing the refugees to go away, to avoid embarrassing the UN. CARE wanted it finished. They knew that there was going to be an outrageous inflation of figures. They thought, ‘We'll buy every ration card we've ever handed out. We'll pay, and then it will be over.' So they didn't give a damn that the figures were inflated. In the camps, we didn't care when we saw kids registering in two different families. We'd see the same family register in two different, three different camps. We knew there were families with fifty, a hundred ration cards. There were token attempts to stop it, but we all understood by then that the whole system was so corrupt and so flawed that the only possible solution now was to get out.

“The only limit was that the damage couldn't exceed a certain dollar value. So they were ready to pay just to call an end to this twelve-year scam.”

W
hen his CARE contract ended later that year, with the job far from completed, Bryden found work with the United Nations Development
Program (UNDP) in the northwest, in the coastal town of Berbera, the main port in the region and the site of the still-unused American airbase. On one of his trips to the northwest, he was accompanied by Abdirahman Osman Raghe. “I went to the north with Raghe to distribute plastic sheeting to some new arrivals displaced from the fighting around Boroma. It was during [the Muslim holy month of] Ramadan, and I had an enormous fight with Raghe because we couldn't get the workers at the airport to move the stuff. They all wanted to go home early. I still had my fresh ideals about aid and how there were people suffering and we had to get them this plastic sheeting before the rains. And Raghe said, ‘Look, you can't make these people work. It's dangerous. They don't care. They're not interested in the end result of all this.' And I got on my high horse and said, ‘Okay, fine if
you
don't care. But I care enough that we gotta get this stuff moving.' And Raghe blew up and told me that I was coming into this as an arrogant, young
gaal
who thought that aid work was the only thing people cared about. We were having this big fight at the airport. It would have continues but we got distracted because some soldiers started shooting at us for fun. And that was my introduction to Berbera.”

Bryden was learning lessons that all aid workers learn, eventually. He was just absorbing them faster in the context of the frenetic collapse of the Somali state. On Bryden's second day in Berbera, someone tried to kill the head of UNDP in the town. An administrative screw-up meant that people weren't getting paid on time. One of the workers returned with a gun and fired on the man. He missed, but the officer broke his hip diving out of the way. He was sent back to Mogadishu, and Bryden, twenty-four years old, was left in charge.

“The only help I had was the driver in the office, who was made a field assistant because he was the only one who spoke English and knew the system. His name was Mohamed Abdi Mohamed. An old man. Very gentle. He was from the Isaaq clan and was stuck in Berbera. Because the government troops in Berbera were Ogaadeen and Hawiye, and other clans from other areas, they spent the nights basically taking a turn in the town looting, pillaging, and raping in one of the blocks in town where there were Isaaqs. And the Isaaqs were powerless. Little by little, Mohamed tried to explain to me what was going on, when we were alone in the car on the road. He'd try to explain to me what the SNM was, what the fighting was about.”

Bryden was on six-month contracts and at the end of the first one, he took leave to attend a wedding in Canada. Mohamed Abdi drove him to the airfield. He took all his belongings with him. As he looked across the
flat, hot coastal plain to the mountains in the distance, he turned to Mohamed and said, “I'm not finished with Berbera yet. I'm coming back.”

After three weeks, Bryden was back in Nairobi at the UNDP office to collect his ticket back to Somalia. The man at the UNDP travel agency looked at him and asked, “Are you coming or going?” Bryden replied, “I'm going. I'm going back to Mogadishu. I'm going back to Berbera.” The man said, “Oh, you haven't heard, but there was a massacre in Berbera. Twenty-one people were shot. Four from the Red Cross and one from UNDR” The army had gone around, taken people who were identified as being Isaaq— twenty-one of them—took them behind the UNDP office and machine-gunned them. Bryden knew the one from UNDP was Mohamed Abdi.

“I remember that I used to kid myself thinking if I hadn't left, they wouldn't have dared,” Bryden said. “Not when I was there. But I took my leave, I came back, and he's dead.

“I think I was protected in the sense that I represented a lot of aid, and even the generals in the army didn't want this aid to stop. That was my protection. I didn' realize that. I thought the UN was my protection. I thought I had some kind of diplomatic immunity.”

Bryden nevertheless returned to Berbera. There were new refugees and new problems, and the World Food Program and the NGOs were back in the business of sending food. As usual, most of the food was being stolen by the local military commander who, in the absence of any real government authority, was acting as a warlord. He was the one who had executed the Isaaqs in town, and now he was getting rich and feeding his troops on relief food. Bryden thought someone would care. He was still too new to Somalia to know any differently. “When I reported this back to a heads of agencies meeting in Mogadishu, people just didn't want to hear it.”

At one meeting in 1990, when I was complaining about diversion of relief food, I remember the head of WFP saying, ‘Yes, that's all very interesting, but we need to maintain a presence. It's important that the UN have a presence in the northwest.'”

That presence was costly. Soon after, a Red Cross representative, Peter Altwegg, was killed near Hargeysa by the SNM, and two other Red Cross workers were kidnapped. “The Red Cross delegation in Berbera was fairly traumatized by all of this,” Bryden said. “It was dramatic; when Peter's body came back to Berbera, I was pretty traumatized. I went down to Mogadishu at that time as well to say, ‘Hey, I'm not working.' At that time I was doing no work, essentially. I'd do administration for UNDP in the morning and by noon I'd run out of things to do. I taught English for an hour every day at the Red Cross Hospital for the Somali staff. I had a class
of sometimes fifty people who I'd teach for an hour. After that I'd usually give a hand in the operating theater in the wards because there was a lot of work to do and I wanted to learn.

“And I'd travel back to Mogadishu to say that to me there was an imbalance—we were taking risks, we were doing no really effective work, and yet things like Peter's murder were becoming more common. There was more shooting in Berbera toward the end of 1990. People were beginning to get killed in Mogadishu as well. By then I think there had been a German killed; his girlfriend had been raped. There had been an American marine from the embassy shot through the back three times, badly injured—though he was okay. Violence was becoming part of the atmosphere and I was worried and upset, and the response that I remember getting from UNDP again was, ‘Yeah, but we need a presence in the northwest.' And privately, I thought, I don't want to be just a presence. Not that I didn't want to risk my life—that went without saying—but also I didn't want to have to watch other people get killed. I had to stand be and watch this and suffer the loss of friends and colleagues for nothing—because the UN wanted a ‘presence.'”

T
he hit song in Mogadishu in those days was by a woman named Saado Ali Warsame. It was called “Land Cruiser.”

It's a bad idea and wrong way of thinking
to buy a Land Cruiser while you beg for maize.

The house is dark
with no water flowing in the taps,
and the babies have no food to eat.
While seeing the shining car
and hearing the sound of its powerful engine
you think you're powerful in the Horn of Africa.

Dear relatives, do you all agree with
the lack of food in our homes
without raising any objection about the luxury cars
and the buying of Land Cruisers.

It's a bad idea and wrong way of thinking
to buy a Land Cruiser while you beg for maize.

Bryden remembers driving around Mogadishu with Somali friends blasting the song out the window. The symbol of wealth, power and the NGOs had become the anthem of the revolution.

•   •   •

B
y August of 1990, the Americans started to play it safe. Dependents and nonofficial Americans were asked to leave. In November, the UN started to evacuate all its nonessential staff. Bryden was sent to Nairobi against his wishes. After a few weeks there, he felt a hunger to go back. He'd seen so much violence and tension building up. He'd seen a government staggering under the weight of a rebel assault. Now the rebels were marching toward Mogadishu, and he didn't want to read about it in the Nairobi papers. Under strict orders not to return, and banned from official UN flights, Bryden bought a ticket on the last commercial Somali Airlines flight from Nairobi to Mogadishu. He arrived on December 30, 1990.

“On the flight I met an American diplomat. We had three or four beers together on the flight. Got a little bit tanked. And when we set down in Mogadishu, they opened the door of the aircraft. Then we heard it. Heavy machine gun fire and explosions and mortars. There were a lot of people trying to get on that flight out. And I asked one of the guys, a Somali I saw as I got off the airplane, I said, ‘Who is it? Is it the USC?
*
What's going on?' And he said, ‘It's the Hawiye.' And that's all he said. And it was true, because what happened in Mogadishu that day was not the arrival of the USC. It was just the uprising, in mainly Hawiye neighborhoods, where kids started putting up barricades, taking out their guns, and started shooting at soldiers, started arming themselves, forming militia units.”