The Road to Hell (38 page)

In fact, 4.5 million represented the vast majority of the total population of Somalia, and it would have been clear to anyone traveling beyond the immediate famine zone that the vast majority was, to the contrary, not in any danger at all. (Some sources place the entire population of Somalia at 4.5 to 5.5 million.) The entire population of the famine-affected areas of the country was actually only 2.5 to 3 million.

The point of such UN reports is clearly to generate big numbers in the hope of provoking a response. What does it mean to face starvation? Nomads, I suppose, “face” starvation all the time, which is all the report was saying, since there were fewer than 4.5 million people in the entire affected area of southern Somalia. The media uncritically passed along all of the UN's propaganda as if it were blasphemous to demand details and hard facts during an emergency.

Nor did anyone in the press point out that earlier dire predictions had not materialized. Typical of summertime newspaper stories was this AP dispatch: “The United Nations estimates 1.5 million people are in imminent danger of starving to death in Somalia while another 4.5 million are nearing a food crisis.”

Though aid agencies often generate baseless numbers on their own initiative, reporters also play a large role. I've been to hundreds of news conferences in the midst of crises where journalists relentlessly demanded
figures from reluctant spokespersons. Numbers make journalists sound authoritative—and editors back home demand them.

In the Somali context, and during most crises, this is idiocy. Numbers are usually baseless fabrications. As an example of how difficult it is to come up with numbers, Murray Watson wrote the following in an unpublished critique of aid agencies in Somalia.

Reporters used manufactured statistics to back up their own very real observations, yet few put their observations in context. Most were reporting from the so-called triangle of death that encompassed the towns of Bardera and Baidoa. The reporters were brought there, housed, and fed by relief agencies working in those towns. They drove along the very roads that four armies had passed as Mohamed Farah Aydiid battled first with the forces of Siyaad Barre and later with soldiers loyal to Barre's son-in-law, Mohamed Hersi Morgan. Bardera experienced a large jump in deaths in mid-October after Aydiid's forces pulled out and Morgan's fought their way in. This temporary surge in the death rate coincided with a huge increase in media attention that made all of Somalia seem like Bardera. In addition, relief camps were set up in major towns, and victims flocked to those towns, presenting to visiting reporters a concentration of misery that was indeed shocking.

There was very little reporting that let people know that most of Somalia was fine.

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A
id workers who weren't in the relief business at the time had a very different perspective. Willie Huber had flown with Murray Watson over the Baidoa area to try to get some firsthand perspective on what they'd been getting from the media. “We kept hearing that this is the biggest catastrophe in the world and that millions of people were at risk and thousands of people dying every day, and so on. We really wanted to know a little bit more. From the plane we saw all the areas of the country which were not accessible by jeeps and by cars. There were people down there who probably at that time didn't even know that a civil war had hit their country. They were going on about their life as if nothing had happened.

“Baidoa became really a focus. And as soon as the food was being distributed from there, a big rush of people arrived from other parts. I also believe people who have not been that much affected by the drought had been going toward Baidoa for this food in search of relief. But just 10 kilometers from Baidoa you start finding a completely normal life.”

On November 25, 1992, President Bush offered to send American troops to Somalia. Even though the food situation had improved dramatically, the country now was in full-blown Step-Five famine coverage. CBS's Dan Rather and ABC's Ted Koppel were en route, ahead of the American soldiers. Reporters from dozens of local television stations were arriving. Many would have been shocked at Somali living conditions, even during the best of times. None of these reporters questioned why troops were needed, although they themselves could move safely throughout Somalia.

Yet when the troops landed in Mogadishu in full combat gear and met reporters wearing Levi's Dockers and T-shirts, everyone should have known something was wrong.

Months later, having returned to New York, I was watching the action on television as the U.S. networks joined CNN in starting to lay on the video coverage. Newscasts faded into ads for Save the Children. At first I thought, How tricky of Save the Children to make their ads look like news. Then I realized that it was the other way around. The news was looking like Save the Children ads. The massive concentration of images of death was moving, but this was not the Somalia I had seen.

In Somalia I had seen the day-trippers—the camera crews that bounded off relief planes and asked the nearest relief worker to take them to the sickest children before the plane took off again in thirty minutes. The relief workers usually obliged. For television, the worst, most despairing picture
was the best. Famine and horror became a commodity. The worse it looked the better it sold. At the same time, the possibility of American intervention increased the value of that commodity. This was the first Africa story ever that had a solid hometown America angle to it: For the first time, the sons and daughters of middle America were in Africa.

Returning to Nairobi, I went to the Reuters television archives and began poring through hours of raw video footage of the famine. The scenes were gruesome, but before the editing, certain things were clear. The sound track was filled with voices of people going about their lives, children playing and shouting in Somali at the cameraman. One kid screamed, “Hey, infidel, stick that camera in your butt.”

As cameras panned away from the sullen faces of the sick, they passed across the faces of the curious—children and young men who had come to watch the news media. Though the scenes of death were horrifying, the raw footage held none of the helplessness and hopelessness that was conveyed by the edited news footage.

The morning after the American troops left Somalia, most of the press followed. The story was over. The predictable tale of famine, upon running its course, had become an American story, a military odyssey, a failed but exciting hunt for a fugitive warlord, and then an American tragedy. A noble gesture by one president had become a foreign policy debacle for his successor. A cartoon by Oliphant seemed to sum it up for most Americans. In frame one, a soldier is feeding a hungry Somali child. In frame two the child shoots the soldier. Copies of that cartoon hung in the offices and barracks of the American military.

The journalists sitting around that hotel room their last night in Mogadishu seemed to know this, acknowledging their own contribution to the endgame. And the reporter who had raised the question about the press corps' role in the U.S. intervention answered it. “We were wrong.”

The effect was that 30,000 American troops poured into an improving situation. If the press reports had emphasized that things were getting better, there would not likely have been much support for the intervention. And journalists sent 9,000 miles to the Horn of Africa by their hometown papers weren't about to report: that things had gotten better. First, they couldn't have known. And second, no editor wants to shell out all that cash only to learn that his reporter missed the worst of the situation. Reporters, especially TV reporters, like to put on their flak jackets and khakis and do their stand-ups in front of the worst devastation possible. Reporters, after all, want to be noticed. That's why they become reporters.
They want to put themselves into dramatic situations. That's how they become famous reporters.

S
o how many people did die? How many lives were saved? NGOs are in need of a number so they can attempt to quantify the effects of their efforts as well as brag about it. A total number of lives saved becomes a kind of community property. Everyone who was near Somalia or raised money for Somalia or spoke about Somalia can speak proudly about the numbers of lives that were saved there.

One unbiased attempt to quantify things was made by the Refugee Policy Group, an independent NGO based in Washington. Their November 1994 report,
Lives Lost, Lives Saved: Excess Mortality and the Impact of Health Interventions in the Somalia Emergency
, offers some numbers, despite the candid admission that the process of arriving at figures is “so fraught with methodological problems that it is rarely attempted.”

The report states: “By the time the first feeding programs had been established, excess mortality had already peaked. By the time the media had visited Baidoa and relief flights were ongoing, the peak of the mortality had already passed.”

The RPG study concludes that some 202,000 to 238,000 people died from famine in Somalia, and 100,000 deaths were averted because of outside assistance. Of those lives saved, 10,000 were saved after the U.S. Marines landed in December 1992.

The Americans stepped in on December 9,1993, because UNOSOM—the UN Operation in Somalia—failed to hold onto a fragile peace among the Somalia's clan factions. UNOSOM (which is now known as UNOSOM I) with its military contingent of 500 Pakistani soldiers succeeded only briefly in intimidating the factions into any kind of compromise. Once the fighters adapted to their presence it was business as usual, looting, killing, and intimidation of aid workers. The Pakistanis were the butt of jokes among the Somali militias who realized very quickly that the force was utterly impotent. Mohamed Sahnoun had been saying all along that outside force was not the answer, and he embarked upon a grassroots diplomatic campaign.

In retrospect, many critics of the military intervention have said that Sahnoun's way would have brought peace to Somalia. That isn't at all certain. In all likelihood his tactic of conciliation and appeasement would have eventually left him and the UN where they ended up anyway—weak and ineffectual. What is certain is that UN headquarters in New York wanted something bigger and more sensational than one Algerian diplomat
talking peace with Somalia's clan leaders. UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali wanted his massive intervention. Sahnoun stood in the way. And Sahnoun's early successes in getting the factions to talk became a threat to the secretary general's plans. Sahnoun was ignored by New York and essentially given no option but to resign at the end of October 1993. The American-led, 30,000-strong Unified Task Force would take over from UNOSOM.

THE MOGADISHU LINE

—Somali proverb

A man who has warned you has not killed you, yet.

O
n Memorial Day of 1994, President Bill Clinton handed Congressional Medals of Honor to the widows of Master Sergeant Gary Gordon and Sergeant First Class Randall Shughart.
*
The two soldiers had been killed in combat in Mogadishu, October 3, 1993. “They were real American heroes,” Clinton said. Indeed they were. Gordon and Shughart jumped from a helicopter into what they knew was near certain death to save the lives of their comrades. “They were part of a larger mission—a difficult one,” Clinton said, a mission “that saved hundreds of thousands of innocent Somalis from starvation, and gave that nation a chance to build its own future.”

This last part wasn't exactly true. Gordon and Shughart had arrived on a very specific mission with the Army Rangers and the secretive and specialized Delta Force in August of 1993, long after starvation was any kind of issue in Somalia. That very month, in fact, all feeding programs had been stopped. Theirs was a purely combat mission: to capture, or otherwise
punish, warlord Mohamed Farah Aydiid. On that October Sunday, eighteen Americans died, eighty-four were wounded, one was captured, and two had their lifeless corpses dragged through the dust by angry and victorious Somalis. And the Somali anger was understandable: perhaps 500 Somalis perished that bloody day, many of them civilians caught in the crossfire as the Americans invaded a densely populated neighborhood in what would be their final assault against Aydiid.