In 1982, Michael Maren was sent to Somalia to oversee the distribution of food aid for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). He found that two thirds of the food was being stolen by army officers or refugee camp commanders, who would eat the food themselves or sell it. This wasn’t much of a problem, because Mohammed Siad Barre, the country’s “leader” had overstated the number of refugees by an even larger margin, to justify far more aid than was necessary to feed the refugees, according to Maren. There was plenty of food left over to not only feed existing refugees, but to lure new ones: the nomadic tribes and families that Barre had found difficult to tax and to rule. As the “scientific socialist” government hoped, very many of them abandoned their nomadic lifestyle and became “civilized” members of society, or rather of refugee camps. As Maren put it1:
Somalis are nomads who spend most of their time looking for food. If you put a pile of food in the desert they will come and get it…The famine camps were set up and they came. African leaders like to settle nomads… Nomads make it hard to build a modern state, and even harder to build a socialist state. Nomads can’t be taxed, they can’t be drafted, and they can’t be controlled. They also can’t be used to attract foreign aid, unless you can get them to stay in one place… In addition, many African leaders, trying hard to be modern, view nomads as an embarrassment and a nuisance. Anything ‘primitive’ is an embarrassment and a nuisance. From Bamko to Nairobi I’ve listened to Africa’s elite discuss nomads as if they were vermin.
Meanwhile, more and more refugees came from towns – why should they not get to eat for free? There was more than enough food. So much that even with a fairly high wage, a working Somali could not provide his family with as much food as was available for free at the refugee camps. And so soon enough, the number of refugees began to increase dramatically, justifying additional aid increases. All this free food depressed farm prices, as more and more Somalis abandoned buying food in the face of free food. Farmers began going bankrupt or anticipating bankruptcy, and stopped farming, soon creating a famine that had not at first really existed.
Maren’s report to his superiors concluded that the aid program was killing far more Somalis than it was helping. That there had not originally been a famine at all, that the refugees had come not in search of food, but to flee the guerrilla warfare between the Somali army and the Western Somali Liberation Front (WSLF), who was now using much of the stolen food to conduct their operations. That the number of refugees was deliberately highly inflated by the Somali government, in order to sucker Americans into sending aid. That just as would occur again a decade later, the American excess of food was inspired by duplicitous journalists, “who took pictures of the sick and the hungry, and the relief agencies arrived on the scene with food.”
His USAID bosses rejected this report, saying: “You guys know you can’t write this stuff. Stick to the facts,” i.e., to the amount of food missing and stolen. His final report before quitting his post in disgust proved prophetic: “Expanded services to the refugees will only aggravate the problem by encouraging them to stay, and more refugees to arrive. It will spread more thinly the resource base leaving the door open for a real emergency situation in the future. The future for refugees in the camps holds only years of relief.” Instead, Maren declared, the efforts of the international community should be to get the refugees out of the camps, not to attract more.
Soon U.S. food aid accounted for two thirds of the Somali economy, first because of its sheer size, but also because the rest of the economy drastically shrank as it became increasingly dependent on that aid. Maren’s successor, Chris Cassidy, later wrote to him2:
One of the things that got Barre and his henchmen pissed off was when you wrote reports saying that Somalia was self-sufficient in food. That was because free food is what controls the place. The mentality is, ‘Why should we let people produce their own food and control their own lives when we can keep them under our thumbs and under the gun? We claim famine, flood, and refugees and get the food shipped in here for free. Now we’ll tell you when to eat and when you can’t eat!’
And so the famine and other atrocities committed by Barre continued until his regular massacres (conducted against his own subjects with U.S.-supplied military equipment) could no longer be overlooked, and U.S. aid was finally withdrawn in 1989. His regime famously fell in 1990, and much of this story was repeated once again, this time with U.N. aid.
Somalis are nomads who spend most of their time looking for food. If you put a pile of food in the desert they will come and get it…The famine camps were set up and they came. African leaders like to settle nomads… Nomads make it hard to build a modern state, and even harder to build a socialist state. Nomads can’t be taxed, they can’t be drafted, and they can’t be controlled. They also can’t be used to attract foreign aid, unless you can get them to stay in one place… In addition, many African leaders, trying hard to be modern, view nomads as an embarrassment and a nuisance. Anything ‘primitive’ is an embarrassment and a nuisance. From Bamko to Nairobi I’ve listened to Africa’s elite discuss nomads as if they were vermin.
Meanwhile, more and more refugees came from towns – why should they not get to eat for free? There was more than enough food. So much that even with a fairly high wage, a working Somali could not provide his family with as much food as was available for free at the refugee camps. And so soon enough, the number of refugees began to increase dramatically, justifying additional aid increases. All this free food depressed farm prices, as more and more Somalis abandoned buying food in the face of free food. Farmers began going bankrupt or anticipating bankruptcy, and stopped farming, soon creating a famine that had not at first really existed.
Maren’s report to his superiors concluded that the aid program was killing far more Somalis than it was helping. That there had not originally been a famine at all, that the refugees had come not in search of food, but to flee the guerrilla warfare between the Somali army and the Western Somali Liberation Front (WSLF), who was now using much of the stolen food to conduct their operations. That the number of refugees was deliberately highly inflated by the Somali government, in order to sucker Americans into sending aid. That just as would occur again a decade later, the American excess of food was inspired by duplicitous journalists, “who took pictures of the sick and the hungry, and the relief agencies arrived on the scene with food.”
His USAID bosses rejected this report, saying: “You guys know you can’t write this stuff. Stick to the facts,” i.e., to the amount of food missing and stolen. His final report before quitting his post in disgust proved prophetic: “Expanded services to the refugees will only aggravate the problem by encouraging them to stay, and more refugees to arrive. It will spread more thinly the resource base leaving the door open for a real emergency situation in the future. The future for refugees in the camps holds only years of relief.” Instead, Maren declared, the efforts of the international community should be to get the refugees out of the camps, not to attract more.
Soon U.S. food aid accounted for two thirds of the Somali economy, first because of its sheer size, but also because the rest of the economy drastically shrank as it became increasingly dependent on that aid. Maren’s successor, Chris Cassidy, later wrote to him2:
One of the things that got Barre and his henchmen pissed off was when you wrote reports saying that Somalia was self-sufficient in food. That was because free food is what controls the place. The mentality is, ‘Why should we let people produce their own food and control their own lives when we can keep them under our thumbs and under the gun? We claim famine, flood, and refugees and get the food shipped in here for free. Now we’ll tell you when to eat and when you can’t eat!’
And so the famine and other atrocities committed by Barre continued until his regular massacres (conducted against his own subjects with U.S.-supplied military equipment) could no longer be overlooked, and U.S. aid was finally withdrawn in 1989. His regime famously fell in 1990, and much of this story was repeated once again, this time with U.N. aid.
get a job sxb
