Authors: Michael Maren
And it wasn't as if the refugees were urbanites forced to live in tents. These people were nomads who'd spent their entire lives outdoors. For the most part, they could handle themselves.
In the evenings, when I could stand it, I'd get on the radio and talk to Mogadishu to find out what trucks had left and how much food they were carrying. The reception was so bad, nearly every word had to be spelled out using the Alpha-Bravo-Charlie-Delta alphabet. Passing along information could take hours.
My days were spent looking at registers and counting bags of food. I'd walk down to the local NRC office and sit down with the head, Abdullahi Jama. It was obvious that he was mucking with the books to hide the food. The numbers never matched. Abdullahi would shrug and smile. He was about thirty, and well educated. He had a bearded face that was marred by his crooked,
qat
-stained teeth when he smiled. Abdullahi Jama had a career in front of him. The NRC was becoming a powerful organization in
Somalia by virtue of its control of the programs that were bringing foreign money into the country.
Then I'd go and try to find out if the right amount of food had come in. Monitoring was impossible. I'd do spot checks at warehouses in the camps. If bags were short, they'd tell me that they had distributed them. Unless I stood there for an entire distribution, there was no way I could tell where the food was going. In addition, there were many camps with multiple distribution sites in a vast area to keep track of. I was sure that a lot of theft was going on, but I couldn't rule out every excuse for missing bags of food.
My trips to the NRC office became a bit of theater. I'd barge in and demand to see the books. I had to be forceful without humiliating Abdullahi in front of the people who worked for him. Sometimes I had to let him throw me out of the office. Usually he would instruct someone to fetch the ledgers, and I'd complain that records weren't being well kept. Abdullahi would blame it on the infrastructure. They didn't have chairs or desks or pencils, he'd complain. Then he'd ask me if he could borrow some of my pencils.
Most of my time was spent wandering around the camps and talking to refugees: They would tell me that everything was fine. If I asked where the boys and men were, I was always told that they were around or would be back soon. (In fact, they were back in the Ogaden with their herds.) I was regularly told how the Cubans and Russians bombed their cows. The stories were identical and clearly untrue. Obviously there was a movement afoot in the refugee camps to make sure that the refugees presented a united front to the foreigners. By my side on all these trips was my translator, a nervous man named Abdi, whose English wasn't very good. At first I kept him on because I felt sorry for him. Later I learned that Abdi reported every day to the National Security Service in Beledweyne. When I confronted him, he told me that it was true. He had no choice. He told them who I talked to and what I'd learned. Abdi apologized and begged me not to fire him. I fired him. A feisty young Somali woman named Faduma replaced him. I thought she might help me get information from the women in the camps.
There was a great deal of surplus food; even with the amount being stolen and disappearing, there was plenty of surplus food. Food was everywhere. Despite this, journalists still seemed to find emaciated children to write about. They'd hear from NGOs in the capital about how many lives they were saving, then they'd come out to the bush and probably not see much. Sometimes NGOs would lead them to hospitals and small pockets where children were suffering from dysentery or other debilitating diseases.
But they got these diseases from being in the camps in the first place. And back home NGOs continued to raise money by advertising that people were starving in Somalia.
A
t the center of the problem was this: The million and a half refugees who were allegedly in Somalia didn't exist. The Somali government liked to say 1.5 million. Journalists liked to say 1.5 million. It sounded good and added a weightiness to their stores. Several press reports even took the liberty of pushing the figure up to 2 million. I saw official reports from UNHCR and USAID that put the number at less than 400,000. And my own rough estimates from time spent in the camps made me suspect that even the 400,000 was generous. The camps were filled mostly with women and children and old men.
While I was monitoring the situation in Hiran District, my colleague and friend, Doug Grice, was doing the same job farther south in Bardera and the region along the Kenya border. Once a month, I'd make the five-hour drive to Mogadishu, and we'd meet in the house we shared on the Lido, across from the beach clubs. We were given a week or so to prepare our reports, maybe meet with the ambassador, get a hot shower, catch a movie or a videotape at the American compound. We'd sit on our roof deck and cut into our rations of whiskey and beer from the diplomatic shop. We'd chew
qat
and watch the ships in the harbor, or try to spot sharks off the coast. And we'd exchange stories about the refugee camps. Separately, we'd arrived at the conclusion that the relief program was probably killing as many people as it was saving, that Somali soldiers were supplementing their income by selling food, and that the WSLF was fueling their attacks into Ethiopia.
We'd then dutifully submit our reports and head back to the countryside to start monitoring the food all over again. At one point a State Department delegation came to Somalia because (I presumed) of all the reports back home about stolen relief food. In the field I spoke with one of the delegates, who started asking me questions, questions that I and other food monitors had answered a hundred times in our reports. “Haven't you read the reports?” I asked. She'd seen reports, she told me, but they were not mine. They were executive summaries compiled by the USAID mission. The detailed reports I'd written had remained in the files in Mogadishu. It was then that I became aware of what my real role was: I was writing reports because the Food for Peace program regulations said that reports had to be written. The food monitor was a requirement built into the law, but what I actually reported was meaningless. No one really cared what we had to say.
In June of 1981, CARE, the American NGO, was hired to distribute food. They were experts at it. In fact, it was practically all they did. Even today, nearly half of CARE's budget comes from the distribution of surplus U.S. commodities. USAID had insisted that CARE distribute the food in order to keep track of it. They entered into a contract with UNHCR and Somalia's National Refugee Commission. The resulting organization was called ELU/CARE (Emergency Logistics Unit).
To run the program, they brought in people from Indiaâhard working, meticulous, efficient, and most of all, cheap. They seized the ports and began trying to keep records.
Within a few months the record books looked better. The reality, however, was that the WSLF and the army still ended up with the food. The National Refugee Commission was still pocketing millions of dollars, and there were still far fewer refugees than food was being supplied for.
I was no longer concerned with where the food was going. The more time I spent in Somalia, the less it seemed to matter. I was more concerned with what the food was doing.
In Beledweyne I spent more time talking with Abdullahi Jama. I stopped pestering him about the records and the food. I figured CARE could worry about that now. The streets of Beledweyne became more and more crowded with Land Cruisers as more NGOs showed up.
At night the expats would gather and drink whiskey and smoke cigarettes. The conversation was monotonously the same. Talk was about the refugees, the stolen food, the corrupt camp commanders, and the idiotic projects. Oxfam was teaching refugees to grow onions and cabbages and peppers in the refugee camp. The two Oxfam agriculturists discussed their dilemma nightly: The idea behind their project was to make refugees more self-sufficient. But if the refugees were going to return to their nomadic way of life, these skills wouldn't be very useful. And if they were going to settle down and become farmers, they'd need to know a lot more about agriculture than how to grow just a few cash crops. And there was very little incentive for them to learn. They could eat fine on their rations and sell the surplus for whatever pocket change they needed. The Oxfam team drank their whisky every night and wondered aloud why they were doing what they were doing every day.
O
ne evening during the Islamic month of daytime fasting, Ramadan, I went to Abdullahi Jama's house to chew
qat
and break the fast. We talked about the refugees. He didn't seem to care much about them, but he was starting to feel that things might be turning against him politically. Then
he started telling me about the food being stolen. The conversation was strictly off the record at that time. It was two friends talking.
He explained to me that the people around Beledweyne were from the Hawaadle clan, related to the large Hawiye clan that dominated the area. The refugees were mainly Ogaadeen, from the Daarood clan, relatives of Siyaad Barre. At first the Hawiye welcomed the refugees, but now they'd been there for three years. The refugees were getting rich. They were getting rations. (The word
ration
is now part of the Somali vocabulary. It refers to any kind of free food.) The local people were getting nothing and starting to resent it. And many people were starting to say that the purpose of the refugee camps was to replace Hawiye with Daarood.
Abdullahi Jama didn't buy that, but the talk scared him. He was from another Daarood subclan, the Majeerteen. After the Ogaden war, a Majeerteen leader, Colonel Abdullahi Yusuf, had split with Siyaad Barre and, with the support of the Ethiopians, had begun a low-key guerrilla war against the Somali government. His group was called the Somali Salvation Democratic Front, or the SSDF. Jama wasn't sure who his friends were anymore. He knew that much of the stolen refugee food went to the Western Somalia Liberation Front, which claimed to be fighting the Ethiopian government for control of the Ogaden. In reality, they were fighting the SSDF. And as an employee of the National Refugee Commission, he was feeding themâfeeding people who were killing his own clansmen.
Abdullahi Jama was not a man inclined to view the world through the lens of clan. He was a modern Somali, a nationalist. But suddenly he was thrust back into the clan-centered world of his ancestors. Siyaad Barre was using foreign aid to manipulate ethnic rivalries, and Abdullahi Jama was being forced into the dangerous politics of clan.
Many years later, I would learn that Abdullahi Jama had been somewhat naÃve about clan politics. Siyaad Barre was indeed using the refugee crisis to displace clans whom he viewed as his political enemies.
I was in the town of Boosaaso in 1994 at the Hotel Ga'ate, where I thought I might find some answers to questions I'd had in 1981. The Ga'ate could almost be a motel in Miami Beach. Low, white buildings perched on the edge of the sea surrounded a courtyard where old men, retirees, sat and drank tea. The sand was pure white and the ground was covered with small, round white stones. But these weren't any old men. The first person I met in the parking lot was Mohammed Jibril, former head of the feared NSS, now an overweight and sickly man who leaned heavily on an intricately carved cane. I approached him and asked for an hour of his time. He told me he'd be happy to talk. We set up an appointment, but I
never saw him again. A few yards away I ran into General Gani, the man who bombed Hargeysa to dust. It struck me that Hotel Ga'ate was a rest home for war criminals. It also became the unofficial seat of the Northeastern Somali government in the years after the fall of Siyaad Barre. In the hotel lounge a group of men were glued to CNN watching
Larry King Live
. One of them, a large man with crooked teeth and an imposing beard, was Abdullahi Boqor Muusse. Boqor is a title meaning king. Abdullahi Boqor is widely known by his nickname, King Kong. As king of the Majeerteen, Abdullahi Boqor was also king of the Daarood.
In traditional terms Abdullahi Boqor's father, Muusse Boqor, would have been considered Siyaad Barre's king. Siyaad didn't always appreciate this and alternated between tossing Muusse Boqor into jail and inviting him over for dinner. Siyaad always tried to stay on good terms with his political prisoners. Abdullahi Boqor spent three years in isolation in one of Barre's prisons from 1976 to 1978, where he was beaten and tortured. Barre tossed him into jail eight other times on various offenses.
One time was punishment for something his father did. Abdullahi Boqor explained: “In 1983 Siyaad called the Harti
*
elders together at Villa Somalia in Mogadishu and told them about a plan for the Daarood to control the country. âIf we put half a million Ogaadeen in Beledweyne the Hawaadle will be a minority,' he told them. It was his plan to move the Ogaadeen into all the strategic areas. The Warsangeli and Dulbahante agreed to go along with Siyaad, but my father refused.
“He refused because the Majeerteen are friends with the Hawiye. We do business with them. The Warsangeli and Dulbahante don't have anything to do with the Hawiye. My father had many meetings with the elders of the Hawiye. He wasn't going to betray them.”
Siyaad was furious that a traditional leader would so brazenly rebuke him. At the time, Muusse Boqor was old and sick. Putting him in prison wouldn't have been very satisfying to Siyaad so he took his revenge on Abdullahi, Muusse's eldest son and heir to the leadership of the Daarood. Once again Abdullahi Boqor was tossed in jail and tortured.
Boqor Abdullahi wandered back to the CNN room. General Gani squeezed over on the couch and made room for him. There they were, the torturer and the tortured. Gani, the ultimate Siyaad Barre loyalist, and Abdullahi, his victim, sitting and watching NBA highlights on CNN.
The scene reminded me how little I had understood in 1981. But Abdullahi Boqor's brief explanation put a lot of what I had seen into perspective. And it showed me how the events placed into motion thirteen years earlier had resulted in the present chaos in Somalia.