The Road to Hell (34 page)

Bryden drove through the streets and saw a city panicked. Refugees were on the move. Looters had begun to empty houses of everything that was left behind. It was surreal and cinematic, too strange to feel really dangerous.

On New Year's Eve, the American presence was down to thirty-seven people. They gathered at the K-7 compound for a party. Bryden showed up, joining American security officer John Fox and several others.

Bryden recalls that around midnight, the UN got on the walkie-talkie net and started passing around ridiculous New Year's goodwill messages. Bryden remembers it going something like this: “First, the UN special coordinator, the UNDP resident representative, the UN special coordinator for emergency relief operations, would like to thank the members of the UN community for their hard work and blah-blah-blah throughout the year and to wish them the very best in the new year, blah-blah-blah. And then the representative of WHO would like to thank the UNDP resident
representative for his good wishes and for his support during blah-blah-blah and to wish all of the staff of the UN family and community in Somalia the very best for the coming year. And then the director of WFP would like to thank the …”

Then Joe Borge, the deputy chief of the mission, led the party in singing of “Amazing Grace.” John Fox recalls: “We hadn't finished the chorus when all hell broke loose, close to the compound, and then we heard quite heavy fighting going on in the distance.”

Naturally, everyone ran up to the roof, one of the highest points in the city. From there they watched the first rounds being fired into Villa Somalia. Suddenly, shooting broke out in the street, just beside the building. And then bullets came right over the top of the building. “We all hit the ground,” Bryden recalls, “and I noticed that most people had managed to land without spilling their drinks. I remember that distinctly.”

Fox described a rainbow arc of fire going into the airport where Barre's bunker was located. No one slept much, and they had breakfast by the swimming pool in the morning.

Fox peered out from the compound and saw “streams of refugees carrying nothing at all. Then we saw looters from our own houses, our own staff going by, our furniture on trucks. We could see individual houses being broken into from the top of K-7. Typewriters and computers were carried down the streets.”

The Siyaad Barre regime lasted until the end of January 1991, when the rebel forces actually arrived in town. This time the Americans evacuated for real. Operation Eastern Exit might have gotten some press, and the marines involved might have been considered heroes except that the Gulf War had just started, and the fireworks there were much more dramatic.

The Americans airlifted most of the expatriates out of the city, including the Russians. Somali staff who had worked for the U.S. and other embassies were left behind to their fate. As the last helicopters lifted off from the new U.S. Embassy compound, looters poured over the walls and grabbed everything that was left. And from above, the former Cold War adversaries safely observed what twenty years of the superpower competition had brought to Somalia.

*
The army by then was predominantly Ogaadeen, but the Ogaadeen were suddenly betrayed by Siyaad. In order to flush out Ethiopia-based rebel groups, Siyaad made an agreement with Ethiopia's dictator, Mengistu Haile Mariam, renouncing Somalia's claims on the Ogaden. Ironically, this agreement forced the SNM into an offensive position at the same time it made the Somali army less willing to fight. The Ogaadeen then formed several liberation groups and joined the fight against Siyaad's government.

†
Why Somalis Flee
by Robert Gersony , State Department report, August 1989.

*
bThe USC (United Somali Congress), under the leadership of General Mohamed Farah Aydiid, were advancing toward Mogadishu.

PIGS AT A TROUGH

—Senator Patrick Leahy

Our national generosity seems to have been perverted.

I
n October of 1993, U.S. Representative Tim Penny of Minnesota proposed an amendment to the Maritime Security and Competitiveness Act of 1993. The amendment restricted American ships carrying food aid overseas from charging the U.S. government rates in excess of “twice the level of competitive world market rates.” The amendment was opposed by representatives from maritime states and supported by representatives from farm states, who figured they could export more food if the freight costs were reduced.

This fight concerned a little-known government regulation known as cargo preference, which requires that 75 percent of certain foreign food aid be shipped on privately owned U.S.-flag vessels. According to the General Accounting Office, cargo preference laws increased shipping bills to taxpayers by an estimated total of $578 million per year from 1989 through 1993. For the same years, USDA and AID report that the additional transportation costs of the preference cargo they shipped on U.S.-flag vessels averaged about $200 million and $23 million per year, respectively. Most of their preference cargo is foreign aid. From 1988 through 1992, USDA and
AID shipped 36 million metric tons of food aid. Of the total amount, 27.5 million tons (approximately 77 percent) was shipped on U.S.-flag vessels.

Cargo preference is just one of the hidden ways that U.S. companies get their hands on foreign aid money.

In support of the amendment, Representative Pat Roberts from the farming state of Kansas said,

These funds, spent entirely to support American private companies and retain American jobs in the shipping industry, are called foreign aid. Predictably, Representative Jack Fields of Texas, a state from which much grain is shipped, spoke in opposition to the amendment. “How does the cost of cargo preference compare to agricultural subsidies?” he asked.

Agricultural subsidies dwarf cargo preference. If we are going to be talking about subsidies, we ought to talk about agricultural subsidies. The U.S. government spends 8 of every 10 of its export financing dollars to promote the export of agricultural commodities, which account for only one-tenth of all American exports. The U.S. Government spent about $12.2 billion in domestic and export subsidies for agricultural products in 1992, about 15 times the total amount spent to promote the whole maritime industry and 90 times the amount spent on cargo preference.

And so the real battles over foreign aid are fought not in terms of helping the hungry but in this arena of battling subsidies. The companies and industries that line up at the subsidy trough—the agricultural industry, the shipping industry, the big private food exporters, and the NGOs—speak about food security, jobs, humanitarianism. The words they use to get their piece of the action are determined by their audience. The rationale can be hard-nosed utilitarian or weepy humanitarian or a mixture of the two. But at the tail end of the debate, there is always the same result: public money destined for private hands. The massive amounts of this money dwarf the few million here and there ripped off by corrupt Third World dictators. The prizes on this side of the ocean are much bigger, and entirely divorced from what actually happens to the food once it leaves these shores.

What was interesting about the debate on the Penny amendment was that it pitched two titanic interest groups against each other. The ensuing battle tore gaping holes in the wall of silence that often rises across both sides of the congressional aisle when talk turns to government pork. These are regional and individual economic issues, beyond the control of the party whips and others who would normally suppress a discussion.

In addition to highlighting the issue of agricultural subsidies, the Penny amendment debate led to the following statement from Representative Charles G. Rose III of North Carolina.

Rose's statement seemed the stuff of high scandal. Nothing of what he said ever got far beyond the House chamber.

This time the Penny-Grandy amendment was defeated. But it was only one battle in a forty-year-old war that has been waged since the beginning of U.S. food-aid programs. It is a battle that has been waged out of the public's view as if it was the private affair of a few members of Congress, the way it has always worked, ever since an idealistic senator from Minnesota got the idea to change the name of the Agricultural Assistance Act to Food for Peace.

A
t the close of the Second World War, the United States was exporting food to a devastated Europe. The Marshall Plan's food component was a boon to American agriculture. But it was a short-term program. Europe rebuilt quickly and its agriculture was back on line by the early 1950s. Meanwhile, American farmers were still producing far beyond the demands of the domestic market.

In a normal world, the rising surpluses would lower prices—and profits—driving people out of the grain market until supply and demand would settle into some sort of harmony. That wasn't about to happen in the United States because, since the 189Os, a system of price supports has been in place. In order to take up the slack in demand and to ensure a floor price for commodities, the government's Commodity Credit Corporation would buy up any surplus.

The problem farmers had was that they had very few places to sell their grain. There were millions of farmers and a handful of grain companies who could easily and quietly fix prices. In addition, the farmers had another disadvantage: Since most harvests were ready for market at the same time in the fall, supply was highest and price was lowest just as farmers were ready to sell. To protect the farmers, the federal government, through the CCC, set up a mechanism that worked like this: Congress would determine a floor price for a commodity such as wheat, say $1 a bushel. The government promised farmers that if the big grain buyers bid the price below that level, if they only offered 90¢ a bushel, the farmer could go to the CCC and borrow $ 1 a bushel for the amount of wheat he had. When
the grain companies finally needed the grain and bid the price back up, the farmers would sell it and repay the loan with interest.

If no buyers were in the market, however, the government would serve as the buyer of last resort. In order to protect itself, several years later, the government instituted a ceiling price for grains. If prices went above a certain level, the government released onto the market enough grains from its surplus stock to drive prices back down into the accepted range. But as farmers kept producing surpluses, the government ended up with too much stock. The only option was to destroy it. Soon it became easier and cheaper to pay the farmers not to grow food. That way no one had to worry about trucking, storing, and dumping it. It was much neater just to send a check to the farmer.