Authors: Michael Maren
“You can't carry the baby like that. People won't respect you. Only women carry babies and they don't carry them like that.”
“You tell people that in my country, men carry babies like this. I'm going to do things the way I want. You tell them.”
“Another arrogant American,” Ilhan thought. “But he probably won't be here very long.” He looked over the blond-haired foreigner. Then he asked, “Why did you come here with your wife and your child? Are you blind enough to believe you can help these people? Whatever happens, you will soon go. And we will be here. How long will you stay? Maybe you'll stay a year. You will write your reports and say the project is good and that's all that your people care about.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You're going to boss some people around here. I know. I've worked for ten boys like you. You come here and spend money and get Land Cruisers. You dig holes. But what about my people? They have no land and no water. They eat your bags of food like beggars.”
“We've got a saying in my country,” Cassidy preached, “No free lunch. People have to get off their asses and grow their own food.”
“Your people understand nothing,” Ilhan shot back. “You don't even understand your own people, how they are stopping us from growing food. This land will grow nothing without water.”
“What about the water from the irrigation canals?”
“What water?”
“The water from the irrigation project.”
“Why are you telling me there is water when there is none?”
“Yes there is. I've seen photographs. I've read the reports. What are you trying to tell me?”
“Yes, there are irrigation canals. The people have dug them. But there is no water in the canals. There is no way to get the water from the river to the canals.”
“But I saw pictures.”
“Yes there is water in the pictures, but no water in the canal.”
“What?”
In Westport Cassidy had seen photographs of happy farmers posing on the banks of flooded irrigation canals. Now Hassan Ilhan was telling him that land leveling hadn't been done and the water couldn't flow into the
fields. And even if that work had been done, it wouldn't have mattered: There were no head gates on the river to control the water flow into the canals. And there were no gates on the irrigation ditches to drain the fields to keep them from being flooded if the water ever did reach the fields.
“Where did the pictures come from?” he asked Ilhan.
“They brought pumps to fill some of the canals for the photographs and the reports.”
For the next few days, Hassan Ilhan showed Cassidy around the project. The two of them barely spoke. Chris asked questions. Ilhan provided concise answers. Chris learned that not only couldn't he get water into the canals but that most of the land still hadn't been divided among the refugee families, and there was no timetable for doing it.
“It was just a fucking scam,” Cassidy recalls, “only I refused to see it at first. Nothing had been done. Sure, they'd spent money and bought some equipment. Pumps from Italy, engines from Japan, tractors from Britain. Everyone out there got a little piece of the money. There was lots of hardware. But that's not what you need to run an irrigation project,”
Cassidy launches into lecture mode, explaining what it takes to get a self-sufficient irrigation program off the ground: “You need a schedule to get water on and off and have a maintenance program. Farmers have to be taught to farm and how to use the water and how much water. The project was years and years away from being completed. And here I thought I'd be coming in with the farmers ready to go.”
“Any engineer can construct an irrigation system, but using the system to grow food is another matter altogether. In other words, if all it took were pipes and pumps to provide fresh, clean water to people, everyone in the world would have fresh, clean water. It's not hardware. It's systems and education. That's the hard part. Most aid workers are in love with hardware. You install the pipes and pumps and make them work. Then when the system breaks down you just blame the people. They're stupid, backward, and lazy. You did your job. You earned your paycheck. You can walk away, get your promotion, and talk about the dumb Somalis with your friends at the beach club or in your nice house while you're getting rich off taxpayer money being pumped in here.”
C
assidy's project was called the Refugee Self-Reliance Project and was funded by USAID and the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). In the world of aid, organizations like USAID only fund projects; they don't do projects. Organizations like Save the Children
and CARE do projects with USAID money, the American taxpayer's money. Private companies like Louis Berger also do projects with USAID money. The big difference between Louis Berger and CARE is that CARE raises money from the public and doesn't have to pay taxes. Another difference is that as a private company, Louis Berger hires qualified and wellpaid experts. Save the Children often uses college kids who work for little or nothing. And even Cassidy, with his masters degree and experience in Somalia, had agreed to work for $18,000 a year.
The project started in July 1983. USAID kicked in $473,000 and Save agreed to put up $79,000, much of which could be provided on an “inkind” basis for administration. That means Save could just hire an accountant to write off a portion of the salaries of the secretaries and janitors and gardeners in Westport along with his own time and call it money spent on helping refugees become self-reliant. Cassidy's salary was paid by the U.S. government.
Another $550,000 was to be contributed by the Somali government, or the Government of the Somali Democratic Republic (GSDR), as it is referred to in official documentation. The agreement stipulates, however, that the GSDR could raise the money to pay for their share by selling off bags of U.S. surplus food donated to them by the people of the United States of America under a program known as Food for Peace, or less grandly as Public Law-480. Thus that part of the project was also in reality carried by U.S. taxpayersâat a cost considerably more than $550,000. Food was sold in Somalia for a lot less than the price paid to the American farmer by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which made American farmers very happy. And since the business acumen needed to make a profit selling free food was nil, it made Siyaad Barre's relatives very happy; they were the ones who magically got all the contracts. In addition, $550,000 worth of food in a country of six million people where food was cheap, is a lot of food. The markets felt it.
Another $795,000 was to be contributed by UNHCR, much of which was also U.S. taxpayer money, bringing the total on the project to just over $2 million when all other miscellaneous inputs were computed.
USAID's partner in this was Somalia's National Refugee Commission, headed by a man named Mohamed Abdi Tarrah. Tarrah ran the NRC with an iron hand and sticky fingers and eventually became one of Somalia's richest men. It was his reward for being the caretaker of the refugee programs, the country's main earner of revenues.
The Qorioley project was fairly straightforward: 1,220 hectares of land
would be prepared for irrigated farming and allocated to each of 2,500 refugee families. In order not to anger the local population, 400 local families would also be helped with land.
According to the project timetable, the primary irrigation canal was to have been completed by December 1983, with some 200 hectares of land distributed. By June 1986, all of the project's goals were to have been met: “The irrigated farm is self-sufficient financially and manageriallyâ¦. All expatriate staff have been phased out of the project,” the original project timetable said. In just three years, camel-herding nomads were to be completely transformed into self-sufficient farmers.
The rosy forecast bore no resemblance to the mess Cassidy found when he arrived at the end of 1985. No one seemed to care terribly. The project continued to receive funding, and Save the Children continued to get paid for administering it. The people from USAID, UNHCR, and Save who had designed and executed the project had long since moved on to other jobs in other countries. To their replacements, the Qorioley refugee agriculture project was a collection of file folders and a series of disbursements.
Most people who get a lousy $18,000 a year from the tax rolls consider it an insult and an entitlement. Cassidy considered it a sacred trust. He was angry about the plight of the refugees, but he was sincerely indignant about what was happening to the American taxpayers' money. The government could send millions of dollars over here and then pay no attention as it vanished into Potemkin villages. The modus operandi in Somalia, as far as Cassidy could tell, was keep your mouth shut, collect your salary, and keep the project going. That's what Hassan Ilhan expected from Cassidy.
B
y the time Cassidy arrived in Qorioley, Hassan Ilhan was thirty-three years old and had seven children of his own. Back in sedentary life, he had picked up some of his old urban habits, wearing Western clothes and carrying around documents in a briefcase. The project was
his
. Cassidy was an interloper.
In the early days Hassan Ilhan kept his distance from Cassidy. He mistrusted the frenetic and serious white man. Cassidy, Ilhan assumed, was untrustworthy. Why else would a
gaal
come to this place except to make his fortune, to steal his share of the money before leaving? Government officials were stealing money. Foreigners were stealing money. Everyone was getting a share.
Cassidy was oblivious, his mind occupied with making notes about what he needed to do to make the project work: He needed agricultural extension agents on staff to train people. He contacted USAID and the UN
Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and begged them to send some agriculture people. “Let's do some trials and demonstrations. Let's get some good seed out here. Otherwise you won't be able to pay for irrigation water. Let's get a few plots working so we can anticipate problems down the line.”
In normal circumstances this might be considered initiative. In development work it's not appreciated. Cassidy was developing a reputation as a troublemaker. His gathering of resources for the project was highlighting its flaws. He was pointing out lapses in evaluation reports that had already been written saying that the project was coming along nicely. An expatriate who becomes a vocal advocate for the people he is trying to help is said to have “gone bush.” And Cassidy's manner only reinforced that opinion.
“M
y thinking was this free lunch isn't going to go on forever. Eventually the free food will stop coming. The donors will get bored. They always get tired of it. They're going to leave Somalia hanging out there. The longterm outlook should be to develop the skills.”
Cassidy demanded that the free food be phased out immediately. “How the hell am I going to convince these people to get out there and dig if they get more food than they can eat free from CARE?” No one was really interested in answering that.
The food wasn't coming only to Qorioley. Similar refugee projects dotted the country along the Juba and Shebele rivers in the northern areas around Hargeysa. Refugees from Ogaden were placed in camps, and convoy after convoy of food was leaving Mogadishu under the supervision of an organization called ELU/CARE. CARE, of course, was the American NGO; ELU stood for Emergency Logistics Unit. This hybrid agency was a tripartite cooperative run by CARE, Somalia's National Refugee Commission, and UNHCR. CARE and UNHCR were concerned with delivering as much food as they could as efficiently as possible. The NRC was apparently more interested in keeping cash and food flowing and with skimming as much as they could. The supposed beneficiaries of all of this, the refugees, seemed peripheral to the major issues confronting the logistics operation. Cassidy, too, might have forgotten why he was there, but Hassan Ilhan was always around to remind him.
S
everal weeks after arriving in Qorioley, Cassidy found he had an even bigger problem than dry canals. The staff wasn't being paid. They had no money for their families or even to buy food. The refugees at least had food. Cassidy knew this could spell disaster for the project. One way or the other they would eat. They would begin stealing from the project if they
hadn't already. He would have to become a policeman. The project would devour itself.
Cassidy immediately dispatched angry letters to Mogadishu and Westport. He made deals with local shopkeepers to extend credit to the staff based on the promise that Save would pay the bills as soon as he straightened out a few things. As the weeks passed, he ran out of good will with the merchants. Cassidy spent his days walking the length and breadth of the project, meeting with the refugee farmers. And then he stayed up nights with a kerosene lantern going over the books.
The project had sixty-seven Somali employees. Some had degrees in engineering and agricultural sciences. The agriculture engineer was a Somali, Haroun Abrar. He had a master's degree, spoke perfect English, and was paid $40 a month. “Westport couldn't come up with a lousy forty bucks to pay his salary,” Cassidy recalls. “Haroun worked anyway. I have no idea how he fed his family.”
Cassidy hounded headquarters to come up with financial obligations. When letters didn't work, he started making the grueling drive to Mogadishu, banging on doors. People were stalling for days up there, and Cassidy knew that he was becoming a total pain in the ass. “They weren't giving us any money and they're advertising for funds with pictures of a starving Somali child.”
Cassidy was spending more time hounding Abdukadir and calling Westport than he was working on the project. He'd march into government ministries and accuse them of trying to starve their own people. Cassidy's penchant for inflammatory rhetoric didn't help his cause. Expatriates thought he'd gone over the edge. Somali officials thought he was dangerous.