The Road to Hell Read Online Free Page B

traditional underground food stores in an effort to halt the advance of the pursuing forces of the United Somali Congress, who nonetheless managed to find more to loot and destroy. Before it was over, the armies would pass through the region four times, achieving monumental levels of destruction.
    But Baidoa didn’t become famous until the battles ended and people began to starve there. That’s when the relief workers showed up withtruckloads of food. That food along with everything else the outsiders brought were the only items of value in the area, so the relief supplies became the center of a new regional economy. It was an economy of theft. In the anarchy that followed the fighting, freelance militias, criminal gangs, ruled the roads and towns. They extorted money from relief organizations or simply stole the food. The nomads and others who fled to towns such as Baidoa expecting to be fed, waited and died.
    After the relief organizations brought the media to videotape, photograph, and otherwise capture the death for the outside world, Baidoa became an international symbol of starvation. Then it became a symbol of liberation when the U.S. Marines rolled into town just before Christmas 1992, escorting a first symbolic shipment of relief food for the starving. The next day they escorted additional symbolic food shipments out of Baidoa to the hinterlands. Journalists crowded around to get the first shots of the first shipments arriving and leaving the City of Death. On New Year’s Day 1993. President George Bush, on his final official trip, dropped into the symbolic city to meet the marines and tour an orphanage. He was greeted with banners and songs. “The marines saved us. Welcome, President, welcome,” the orphans sang in Somali.
    As he smiled and waved and grasped hands, Bush betrayed no sense that this site of his bold humanitarian act had once been the focus of intense American interest of a different kind. Under his administration and the previous ones, the same Siyaad Barre who delivered death to Baidoa was a friend and ally. Presidents Carter, Reagan, and Bush, in their campaign against communist influence in Africa, pumped massive amounts of military and economic aid into Somalia and kept the hated dictator in power. Fortress Somalia had been in part built from bags of food, relief food for the hungry refugees from an earlier war. The food fed the troops and kept the cadres in step behind the regime. It enriched loyal merchants in the capital and kept the president’s family and friends awash in luxury. And though no one dared stain Bush’s visit with questions of history, the Somalis who saw the convoys of food rolling inland toward Baidoa understood something that these relief workers and soldiers did not: The show unfolding before them was much more than a grand gesture of charity. Food was power, and so long as the food came in, the battle to control it would continue, as it had for years.
    B y the spring of 1993, people had stopped starving in Baidoa. American soldiers had come and gone, replaced by international peacekeepers. Aid workers by the hundreds descended upon the town to nurture the victims.Many Somalis who had fled the city during more than a year of fighting began to return. And other Somalis, many of whom had never been to Baidoa, showed up looking for work with aid agencies, the United Nations, the Red Cross, and the so-called non-governmental organizations, commonly known as NGOs.
    On a typically hot afternoon in June 1993, a young American aid worker climbs into the front passenger seat of his Toyota Land Cruiser. Beside him sits his driver, a nineteen-year-old Somali kid called Jiis. In the back seat of the vehicle sit two other young Somalis; one is Jiis’s younger brother, and the other is a cousin of some sort. The trio are employed as security guards. Each holds a battered AK-47 assault rifle, muzzle resting lightly on the door frame and pointing toward the