US Assistence To Somalia: Pheonix From The Ashes

U.S.
FOREIGN ~ ~ ~ S I S T TO ASOMALIA: N ~
PHOENIXFROMTHE~S?
Dr. Menwurtcs is associatepro$ssor ofpolitical science at Davaon College. In 1993-94, he servedas special plitical adviser in the United Nations @ration i n Somalkz The author grateflb acknowledges-ial sqprt that contributed to thk researchporn the Fulbright abctoral dissertation grant program (1987-88), a summer research grmforn the Amerkan University in Cairo (I 9901, and a research gr@j?om Davaon College (1996).
ew topics inspii more cynicism amongseasoned observers of internationalpolitics than foreign assistanceto Somalia. By m e reckonings, no o k country save Isael has received such high levels of military and economic aid per capita; certainly no country has less to show for it. Even before its collapse into protracted civil war and anarchy in 1990, Somalia had earned a reputaton as a graveyard of foreign aid, a land where aid prbjeds were notoriously unsuccesshl, and where high levels of foreign assistance helped to create an entirely * le, c o m p t and repressive state. The heavily m e d violence of Somalias civil war, moreover, exposed the destntCtivm of yeafi of Cold-Wat-inspi military aid into the Hom of Afiica Finally, the massive armed humanitarian intmention into and out of Somalia in 1992-95 dramaticallyexposed the shommings of the entire industry of foreign aid-hm the
succumbed to extortion h m Somali militias and sometimes inadvertently heled local
conflicts;t o compt local leaders, who systematicallyd i v e d foreign aid to their own coffm at the expense of their own populations. In short, Somaliashistory of foreign aid yields an almost exclusively negative set of lessons leamed. Y e t the very depth of these failures both in Somalia and other crisis-ridden countries in the Greater Horn of Afiica may now be providing fertile ground for innovative reforms in the philosophy and delivery of foreign aid. Among thosedonors at the forehnt of new thinking on foreign aid to Somalia is the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which is attemptingto operatiodize these new approaches through its Greater Horn of Afica Initiative(GHAI). Though still in planning stagqtheGHAI isconceptually.superiorto past approaches to development aid. It
bihteddonors,whosestrategicandpolitical i n have m l y & n i with the needs of the Somali people; to UN agencies, whose inflexible bmaucraticproceduresfiiled t o respondto the Somali h i n e ; to the nongovernmental organizations,whose programs
This tern encompasses the region from Burundi and Tanzania in the south to Sudan in the north-a zone characterized by endemic humanitarian, political, and rehgec crises that have presented the international community with some of the most challenging complex emergencies in the world. 124
MENKHAUS: U.S. FOREIGN ASSISTANCE TO SOMALIA: PHOENIX FROMTHE ASHES?
emphasizes conflict prevention as a means of addressing r o o t s causes of the regions endemic humanitarian crises; African ownershipof development prioritization; regional approachesto problems transcending borders, as the GHAIs name suggests; capacity-building rather than project-driven aid; the strengtheningof civil society; and effective mechanisms to support transition h m relief to development aid. Though none of these ideas about aid is new, attempts to systematically build them into foreign-aid programs in USAlD are. Moreover, coming a t a time of significant shrinkage in the foreign-aid budget, the GHAIs prioritization of local capacitybuilding and African-led initiatives,rather than costly conventional development projects, provides it with fiscal as well as conceptual appeal. The GHAI is about doing business differently in the region, observes one USAID official. This is not about more money, its about progmnming resources more efficiently. The GHAI is already considered a potential model for U.S. foreign aid in other regions of the world and thus merits close xrutiny as it is moved h m the chalkboard into operation. It is of additional interest in that the principles on which it is founded reflect one of the pillars of the Clinton administrations a r foreign policy. This emerging post-Cold W pillar is the conviction tha!among the chief timats to American interests and global stability are state collapse, civil war and protmcted humanitarian crises in mnes like the Greater Horn of Africa, and tha!American interests are best promoted through long-term,
comprehensive assistance aimed at preventing these complex emergencies. In the case of Somalia, of course, calls for crisis prevention come too late. Worse, Somaliascurrent state of affairs poses a fundamental challenge to some basic premises of foreign aid. One of these premises is the existence of state authority. In Somalia, USAID and other donors conhnt the dilemma of channeling development aid where there is no sovereign state, forcing them to consider the problems and prospects of identifylngand working through alternative sourcesof social and political authority.
Foreign Aid and the Nature of the Somali

State
Past research on the impact of foreign aid on leastdevelopedcountries suggests that large-scaleassistance generally has a distorting effect on both the economic and political finctioning of the recipient country. Economically,high levels of aid can shah the absorptivecapacityof weak economies, misdirect development priorities towards expensive and inappropriate large-scale projects, and foster dependenceon external sourcesof finding to meet both development and recuning administrativecosts in the states budget. Politically, high levels of foreign aid in very poor states have been associated with the rise of endemic political corruption, the strengthening of repressive arms of the state and the bloating of the civil service, since external assistance enables rulers to utilize expanded employment in the state and the military as a critical form of patronage politics. In Somalia, however, aid has not so much distorted politics as it has transformed it. The Somali state itself is a historically artificial and
For recent media coverage of this new aid philosophy, see Howard French, Donors of Foreign Aid Have Second Thoughts, The New York Times (April 7, 1996), p. 5. 3 Interview with USAID official. June 1996.
See J. Brian Atwood, Suddenly, Chaos. The Warhington Post (July 3 1, 1994).
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MIDDLE EASTPOLICY, VOL. V, No. 1, JANUARY 1997
unsustainable structure. First superimposed on a statcless,predominantly pastoral society by Italian and British colonialism,the state in Somalia was subsequently sustained and dramaticallyenlarged by generous levels of foreign aid. Its growth into the primary source of employment in Somalia in the 1970s
economically viable! The Cold W a r temporarily obscured this fundamental problem. Attracted by Somalia's perceived strategic importance in the Horn of Afiica-a geopolitical advantagethat Somali leaders were keen to exploit- diverse range of donors provided economic assistance that may have exceeded $5 and 1980s,g The Somali state has never not only a bloated billion fiom 1960 to been remotely sustainable by 1988 and mi)itaryaid bureaucmcy but also one of subsahdomestic sources of revenue. estimated at Africa's largest billion.' In addition, armies, co&ided Somalia's endemic with extremely high levels of foreign assistance food shortages, and its long-term rehgee crisis from a wide variety of donors during the Cold resulting h m the drought of 1974 and the W a r .Conversely, in 1989-90, when reduced O g a d e nW a r of 1977-78, added enormous Cold W a r tensions enabled western donors to flows of food relief and refbgee assistance into freeze fmign assistanceto Somalia a m i d s t the foreign-aid lifeline. By the mid-1980%100 charges of gross violationsof human-rights by percent of Somalia's development budget was the Barre regime-an ethical luxury that the extemally financed,and a disturbiig 50 percent logic of the Cold W a r had prevented in the of its r e c m t budget dependent on past-the Somali state quickly collapsed and intemational loans and grants as well.' At the has yet to reappear. Even the prolonged height of Somalia's foreign-aiddependence in efforts at nation-building by the U.N. operation 1987, one analyst calculated t h a t total in Somalia (UNOSOM) fiom 1993 to March development assistanceconstituted a stunning 1995 were unable to resuscitate a bmali state beset by powerful centrifugalpolitical f m 6Mark Karp, The Economics ofTrusteeship in and a weak domestic economy that cannot Somalia (Boston: Boston University Press, I960), generate tax revenues for a minimalist centdpp. 146-169. state structure? Estimates given here are based on figures from the It may be an exaggeration to claim that the US. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, World Military Expenditures and Arms Transfers Somali state is a creation of external (annual handbook), and crosschecked with the assistance, but it is indisputable t h a tthe state CIA, The World Factbook (1995). It should be has never been remotely sustainableby noted that total economic and military assistance is domestic sources of revenue. As far back as difficult to calculate precisely. In addition to routine problems of comparability with statistics, the 1950s, observers worried that an Somalia received a variety of unorthodox forms of independent Somali state would not be
...
$2.4
h i s thesis is presented in greater detail in Ken Menkhaus and John Prcndergast, "Governance and Economic Survival in Post-Intervention Somalia" CSIS Afiica Notes (May 1999, pp. 1 12.
foreign aid that did not always appear in official databases. For instance, in the late 1970s the B m c regime unofficially received up to S300 million annually in cash from Saudi Arabia as part of a sweetener to brcak ties with the Soviet Union. crhese figures were disclosed in an interview with a World Bank official in Mogadishu, 1988.
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MENKHAUS: U.S. FOREIGN ASSISTANCE TO SOMALIA: PHOENIX FROM THE ASHES?
57 percent of Somalia's GNP.9 Somalia had become "a ward of the international aid comunity."" This level of aid dependence transformed the institution of the state. Whole ministries were heavily or even totally reliant on a foreign donor-the Ministry of Agriculture on the Germans, the Minisby of National Planning on the Swedes, Somali National University on the Italians,the military on a constellation of Westem donors. Throughout much of the 198% Saudi Arabia supplied most of Somalia's energy needs for free as part of the "weaning away" of Somalia h m its 1970s alliance with the Soviet Union." Somali civil servants devoted most of their energies to "project hopping'*-linking up to foreign-aid projects that would pay viable salaries-rather than performing their duties within their ministries, where they went virtually unpaid." H i g h levels of foreign assistance to Somalia have had a profound effect on Somali urban political culture as well. Since 1960, one of the most important roles of the Somali state has been as a catchment point through which
9Dataare from ACDA, World Military Expenditures and Arms Transfirs, cited and analyzed in Paul Henze, The Horn o f Afiica: From War to Peace (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991). p. 125. To put this figure in context, in 1987 foreign aid as a percentage of GNP in Sudan was 10.5 percent, and in Ethiopia 11.7 percent. %avid Laitin, "Somalia:America's Newest Ally." (unpublished paper, 1979). p. 8. II The Saudis did, however, link the free supply of petroleum to demands that Somali civil servants attend regular Arabic language classes, an extraordinary case of cultural imperialism which the Somalis resented. But, having pragmatically sought membership in the Arab League in I973 in order to facilitate access to new OPEC wealth, the Somalis had little recourse but to accede to the request. 12 A civil servant's monthly pay in the mid-1980s covered only two to three days worth of household expenses.
foreign aid is h e l e d into the country. This unintentionallyreinforced a "Mogadishu bias" in modem Somali political culture, a centralizationof political life and competition in the capital, the point at which foreign aid entered the country and was allocated. And foreign aid continues to foster a "cargo cult" among Somali political figures,an illusion that the reestablishmentof a Somali state will again be g r e e t e d with Cold W a r levels of international largess, to be enjoyed by whoever is clever and ruthless enough to convince the international community he presides over a structure that can pass for a state. This illusion has exacerbated the pmtracted impasse over national reconciliation in Somalia today and has fueled the ongoing civil war, which has largely been fought over control of points of entrance of internationalemergency relief into the country. Were there no potential foreignaid bonanza linked to the capturing of the central state, it is quite likely that factional conflict in Somalia would be far more muted. It would be an error to project this portrait of dependence on foreign aid to the entire economy of Somalia Most of the rural sector-the pastoral economy of livestock herding and the smallholder agricultural production in southem, inter-riverine Somalia-has remained relatively self-reliant, despite the fact that this sector has been a major target of development aid since the 1960s. It is the urban,civil-servant class that has developed an entire economy and lifestyle m und the accessibilityof foreign aid and the bloated Somali state it has sustained. That segment of the economy remains the most dysfunctional and vulnerable in the aftermath of the collapse of the state.
US. Aid during the Cold War

Within the narrow geopolitical logic of the Cold War, independent Somalia found
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MIDDLE EASTPOLICY, VOL.V, No. 1, JANUARY 1997
itself occupying strategicallyvaluable real estate in the Hom of M c a , the "soft underbelly" of the Arabian Peninsula Like its neighbors in northeast Afrca-Ept, Sudan, and EthiopiAomalia was able to parley this strategic significance into high levels of foreign aid. Yet throughout the Cold War Somalia was always a consolation prize for superp~wen vying for influence in the much more important country of Ethiopia. Since Somalia's emnity with Ethiopifunction of Somali irredentist claims on Ethiopia's Somali-inhabitedOgaden region-pmluded an alliance with both countries, the first choice of both the East Bloc and the West in the Horn of Afiica was Ethiopia, which possesseda much larger population and land m a s s ,M c a ' s largest army, and far greater political prestige and leadership than Somalia" Much of the international assistance which flowed into the Horn of Mica was military, helping to transform the region into one of the m o s t militarized zones in the Third World. A heavy sham of the responsibilityfor this weapons flow rests w i t h the fonner Soviet Union, which fiom 1%7 to 1987 provided an estimated H.2 billion in arms deliveries to i t s clients in Somalia, Ethiopia and Sudan." The U.S. bansferred about $1 billion in military
~~
Several books document the politics of Cold W a r competition in the Horn of Africa See Jeffrey Lefebvre, Arms for the Horn: US.Security Policy in Ethiopia and Somalia, 1953-1991 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991); Paul Henze. The Horn of Afiica: From Ww to Peace (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991); Steven David,
Choosing Sides: Alignment and Realignment in the Third World (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. 1991); Robert Patman, The Soviet f Afiica (Cambridge: Union in the Horn o Cambridge University Press, 1990). 14 Henze, The Horn ofAfiica, p. 119.
I1
equipment and support into the Horn over tbe course of the Cold W a r . " Somalia's legacy of international assistance since independence in 1960 can be broken down i n t o three distinct periods, corresponding roughly to each decade. o s t of the 197Os, Somalia e m b d 'I?uough m a close alliance with the Soviet Union; as a consequence, the United States provided virtually no aid h m 1970-78. By contrast, in the 1960s and 1980%the United States played a relatively significant role as a foreign donor, but always as part of a much wider, multinational program of assistance. In neither the 1960s nor the 1980s did U.S. bilateral economic and military assistance rank as the t o p sou~ce of aid for Somalia Still, U.S.b i M economic aid to Somalia h 1954 to 1987 t o t a l e d $677 million (oneof the top recipients of U.S. aid in subSaharan Africa)'' and U.S.military aid to Somalia in that period reached $380 million." Moreover, inasmuch as U.S.assistance was closely c o o r d i n a t e d with other major donors like Italy and Saudi M i a , and its policy preferences influential in multilateral lenders like the World Bank and Lntemational Monetary Fund,the United States had a powerful voice in shaping the philosophy and goals linked to intemational aid to Somalia Thrwghout the Cold W a r ,American foreign aid to Somalia was defined and driven by strategic rationales, often a t the expense of developmental concerns.
U S Aid i n the 19609. The United States

played a relatively subdued role in foreign
~~ ~
"Lefebvre, Arms for the Horn p. 15. '%SAID. Congressional Presentation. Fiscal Year 1990. Annex I,Africa p. 338. 17 Peter Schracdet and Jercl Rosati, "Policy Dilemmas in the Horn of Africa: Contradictions in the US.-Somalia Relationship." Northeast African Studies 9 . 3 (1987) p. 28.
128
Ozay Mehmet, "Effectiveness of Foreign Aid-The Case of Somalia," The Journal of Modern A ricun Studies 9, 1 ( 197 1 ) pp. 37-40. '6SCe Catherine Besteman and Lee V. Cassanelli, eds.The Struggle for Land in Southern Somalia: The War Behind the Wur (Boulder: Wcstview, 1996).
development consultants to understand Somali assistance to Somalia in the 1960s. U.S. pastoral land tenure undermined a range military aid to Somalia for the entire decade o w n of management project in the southern t totaled only $1 million, in conbast to $47 Afhadow. The project sparked intra&n million provided h m 1963 to 1969 by the Soviet Union." hostilities and had to be a b o r t e d due to Part of this low-key approach was a As most of the assistance offered whatanembassy report described as function of the to Somalia was in the form of close ties between an imposition of the United states concessionary loans, poorly "American style" conceived development projects range management, and Ethiopia in that era, an alliance saddled Somalia with foreign which was which would have "completely beenjeopardized debt which it could not service. contrary to local had tie United style."21 States provided U.S. assistance o a multilateral, Westem aid Somalia with significant military aid. also contributed t The United States was, however, able to program aimed at training and support for the Somali national police force. Not surprisingly, match the Soviet Union in development e s t e r n aid to the Somali the combination of W financing, contributing 17 percent of the funding of Somalia's t o t a l development budget police and Soviet aid to the Somali military set up an internal security rivahy which was h m 1963 to 1969. American assistance resolved by the 1969 military coup. focused on infnstmctud projects like port construCtion, highways and u r b a n water In keeping with the predominant aid supplies, as well as range management and philosophy of the times,other donors focused rain-fed agricultural development in the interresources on largescale infnstmctural projects as well, including roads, agmindustrial riverhe region." As pad of its effort to help develop Somali agriculture, which was projects, and telecommunications, as well as predominantly small-holder, subsistence social projects such as technical schools, stadiums and theaters. The shortcomings of farming, American aid officials pressed the this type of assistance were predictable. First, Somali government to adopt modem landtenure laws. They were believed to be a donors tended to tie assistance to high-prestige that did not always coincide with projects precondition for h e r s to invest in their land, development priorities in Somalia Second, as but they created a ! least as many problems as they were to time passed it quickly became apparent that This was clear at the many of the infktructuml projects were outset, when i n 1%1 the failure by American unsustainable; Somalia was unable to finance the maintenance ofmack, airports andagro"Henze, The Horn of Afiica p. 101. industries,which slowly fell into disepair. 19
~~
21 Frank Mahony. "The Pilot Project in Range Management Near Afmadu." USOWSomali Republic (March 1961).
129
Third,foreign assistance in the 1960s, including

U.S. aid, tended to be concentrated in the south of the country, leading to a politically sensitive regional imbalance in development. Finally, as most of the assistance offered to Somalia was in the form of concessionary loans, poorly conceived developmentprojects saddled Somalia with foreign debt which it could not service. As early as 1968, the Somali government pro@ rescheduling and renegotiation of its debt, a harbinger of things to come.n
In response, the Barre regime was quick to abandon its revolutionary socialist slogans and embrace anti-Soviet "containment"rhetoric in an effort to gamer American military aid against the Soviet-backed Ethiopians. What ensued was a pivotal debate in the Carter administration between "regionalists,"who were inclined to view Somalia as a diplomatic pariah state for its irredentist war for the Ogaden, and "globalists," for whom Soviet military adventurism in the H o r n of Afiica boded ill for ditente and had to be countered by the United States. Despite the Carter US.Aid to Somalia 197781988. In the administration's preference for a regionalist approach, events beyond the Hom-the fall of aftermath of the 1969 military coup that the shah of Iran,and the Soviet invasion of brought Mohamed Siyad Barre to power, the Somalia's stmtegic Somali government forged intensive ties with Afghanimportance as a potential component of an the Soviet Union, embracing "scientific socialism" in the process. In reality, Barre evolving American Rapid Deployment Force understood Marxist-Leninism poorly, but for the Persian Gulf?' In the end, Somalia was somewhat reluctantly taken on by an internally appreciated the ideologicaljustification it provided for his consolidation of power within divided carter administrationas a client, a a single vanguard party and the suppression of relationship t h a t brought a tremendous wealth of foreign aid to Somalia but failed to deliver dissent within the Somali polity. Somalia's the levels of military aid the Barre regime ideological conversion was an attempt to desired. maximize Soviet military support, which U.S. military and economic aid to Somalia intended to devote to i t s irredentist Somalia from 1978 to 1989 formed part of a claims on the Ogaden region of Ethiopia semi-coordinated,multilateral effort between Under Soviet patronage, the Somali military more than doubled in size from 1971 to 1977. the U.S. and its W e s t e r n and Arab allies, particularly Saudi Arabia Militarily, the But in 1977, when Ethiopia was weakened by revolution, internal political strife and multiple United States could not afford the diplomatic civil wars, providing Somalia with its fallout of providing an irredentist state with offensive weaponry. So beginning in 1980, the o p m t y to capture the Ogaden, Somalia found that its erstwhile superpowerpatron United S t a t e s provided Somalia w i t h a package abandoned it in favor of a new alliance with the of military aid that was defined as defensive in nature. This aid, which began at $45 million revolutionary Ethiopian regime. This left Somalia badly beaten by Soviet and Cubanfor the period of 1980-81, came to t o t a l over backed Ethiopian forces in the 1977-78 Ogaden $500 million up to 1989, the largest U.S. security-assistance program ever provided to a War.
UMehmut, "Effectiveness of Foreign Aid," pp. 4246. "For more detailed discussion, see Lefebvrc. Arms
for the Horn, pp. 175-205.
130
subsaham African state." But the "defensive" U.S. military aid constituted only a small portion of total arms bansfers to Somalia in the 1980s. Generous financial assistance h m Saudi Arabia and elsewhere enabled the B a r r e regime to purchase $580 million in arms between 1979 and 1983; most of the weaponry was imported &om Italy.u No defensive restrictions were placed on these purchases, allowing Somalia to continue to build up its offensive capacity while shielding the United States h m criticism that it was aiding that process. But the real problem in fashioning o t insuring that it military aid to Somalia was n would be limited to "legitimate defensive h r e a t of needs." By the 1980%the only security t consequence to the Barre regime emanated From within an increasingly rebellious Somali society, so that the main p m u p a t i o n of the Somali military was repmive internal security operations. This posed a very different type of dilemma for military aid donors, but one which was downplayed until 1988, when a full-scale civil war broke out between the Somali t , the government and a northern liberation h Somali National Movement. The Barre regime's brutal treatment of the Isaaq clan in the north of the count^^ was carried out with t a t e s and its weaponry supplied by the United S allies, and by military leaderstrained in the U.S. IMETprogram. Many observers subsequently faulted the West for having been
obliviousto the costs of anning a military whose sole enemies were its own citizens. In retrospecsjustifications for U.S. military aid to Somalia as a quid pro quo for U.S. accessto the strategic airfield at Berbera in northwest Somalia appear unwarranted. Charged with planning a Rapid Deployment Force capable of enforcing the carter Doctrine in the Persian Gulf, U.S. officials sought access to naval and air bases throughout the Middle East and the Indian Ocean, including Egypt, Kenya, Oman and Diego Garcia Somalia's n airfield at Behem, the longest runway i Africa, was viewed as an athactive additional u t even within Washington circles, facility. B questions were raised h u t the redundancy of the Somali facility, especially when the United S t a t e swas initially presented with extremely high "mt" requests by the Barre regime." The margmal importance of the Berbera facility was demonstrated during the Gulf W a r , when the deployment of over 250,000 U.S. troops to the Persian Gulf was accomplished without use of the Somalia runway. American milmy assistance to Somalia was always part of a broader package, one which David Rawson has termed the U.S. economic "secuity/development aid, which totaled $639 million over the course of the decade, included roughly equal ratios of development assistance (earmarked through USAID'S Development Fund for Afiica budget), Economic Support Funds
Ibid.. p. 14, 241. U.S. military aid during this period included $128 million in Military Assistance Program (MAP) funds, S175 million in Economic Support Funds (ESF), S60 million in Foreign Military Sales (FMS), and S7.5 million for an lntemational Military Education and Training (IMET) program. An additional S200 million was released in FMS cash arms agreements. 251bid.,p. 228. 131
24
Ibid., pp. 199-200. Misreading its bargaining position, Somalia initially requested $1 billion over a five year period, a package that would have included advanced military equipment. "David Rawson. The Somali Stale and Foreign Aid (Washington, D.C.: Foreign Service Institute, 1993). Rawson's study is a detailed and valuable analysis of U.S.and Western foreign aid to Somalia in the
1980s.
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(development assistance designed to support stmtcgic intemts) and commodity i m p o e which were channeled through the PL 480 Food For Peace program and the Commodity Import P r o p P Collectively,these American aid p r o w s formed an important part of an enormous internationalaid presence in Somalia in the 1980s, a period in which Somalia received $1.1 billion from OPEC states and $3.8 billion in Western bilateral aid, as well as an estimated $2 billion through U.N. agencies,the World Bank and the M." U.S. bilateral aid w a s delivered in two distinct packages. One back centered on provision of technical assistance to multidonor projects, while the other focused on economic support for policy reform. Projectrelated assistance included several agricultural extension and training progtarns; a threeyear feasibility study for a proposed $600- million, World Bank-hydro-electric dam on the Jubba River, rangeland-mangementand livestock-marketingprojects; groundwater and irrigation projects; rural healthprograms; and rehgeerelated projects. B u t for a handhl of exceptions, nearly all of the project-related packages were deemed outright failures. One unusually candid USAID intemal assessment confirmed, "USAID projects accomplished e a s u r e d againsttheii close to nothing if m original design.'m And the U S A D mission in Mogadishu was not alone on this score. Nearly all other external donors, many of them partners with USAID in multidonor projects, experienced similar setbacks. Some specific examples help to underscore the depth of these foreign-aid
28
fiuhations. In the case of rural development, USAID and fellow donors recognized the central importance of a revitalized agricultural and pastoral sector in the Somali economy, and correctly perceived that the underdeveloped rural sector possessed considerable potential. As a consequence, USAID provided assistance to nearly every multidonor agricultural and e t rangemanagementproject in the 1980s. Y follow-upevaluationsfound that virtually none of the agricultural and pastoral projects succeeded. These evaluations tended to focus on technical and operational problems of timing and implementation, faulting in particular the cumbersome nature of multidonor project coordination." But there was a far more fundamental flaw in these rural development projects, rooted in the predatory natm of the Somali state. In the absence of an effective and legitimate land-tenure system, projects which increased the value of mngeland or farmland often inadvertently triggered struggles for control over that res0u~ce.f'Land-grabbing by politically empowered clans and civil sewants was rife in zones demarcated for internationallyh d e d irrigation projects, resulting in the expropriation of tens of thousands of hectares of riverine land fiom minority farming communities. Even the activitiesof the AID-hded feasibilility study for the proposed Badhere Dam triggered speculative land-grabbing.)' Rangeland improvementsalso exacerbated pastoral
"lbid. See also the summary of these various audits and evaluations in Rawson. The Somali Sfafeand Foreign Aid, pp. 7 1-74. "The Somali had established "modem" land-tenure laws in 1974 to replace customary tenure, but the system was badly abused by civil servants and powerful political figures to lay claim to land farmed by smallholders for generations. "See Besteman and Cassanelli, The Strugglefor Land.
29
Ibid., pp. 70-80. CIA, The World Factbook 1995 p. 388. I0 Melissa Pailthorp, Development before Disaster: USAID in Somalia 1978-1990 (Washington: USAID, 1994), p 1.
132
conflictsover wells and pasture, as politically Another projectcentered preoccupation of donors, including USAID, was assistanceto empowered clans (such as Barres Marehan clan) encroached on land traditionally Somalias large refbgee population, victims of controlled by other clans. By the late 1980~, drought and warfire in the 1970s. Since the donor priorities and projects in the rural sector refbgees were ethnic Somalis (though most of had unintentionallyhelped to accelerate a Ethiopian origin) and since there appeared to be no near-term resolution to the Ethiopianhistorically unprecedented wave of land expropriation in southern Somalia, a process Somali conflict, donor strategy focused on a which left many riverine agricultural goal of refbgee self-reliance. Ihis led to the communities destitute. fimding of a number of refbgee resettlement Training projects. Programs, Though the government of intended to Since government and military Somalia build Somali Proposed these officials were diverting much of the strengthen schemes, it was publiesector refugee aid, the regime had a strong ambivalent interest in overestimating the refugee about actually capacity, fared nobetter. One population and threatened aid officials closing down refilgee camps, AID who challenged their numbers. which report &ncluded that generated considerable fewer than a levels of third of the t a t e s ongoing international assistance. Since Somalis sent to study in the United S govemment and military officials were returned to Somalia, leading the author to diverting much of the refbgee aid, the regime wonder whether,after spending over $2 1 had a strong interest in overestimating the million, . . . the country is better off. The refugee population and threatened aid officials statisticsshow that An,is spending money to produce what may be a net brain drain rather who challenged their numbers.% The camps, moreover, became important sourcesof than a brain gain to the country. A 1989 World Bank report reached a similar recruitment for the Somali military in its battle against northern Somali insurgency conclusion: after tens of millions of dollars were spent putting thousands of Somalis movements. This bansformed refbgee n t o logistical support for an army assistance i through training programs, the quality of accused of atrocities against its own people, public-sector management had actually and placed donors in a politically untenable deteriorated in the mid to late 1980s.
Jeffrey Franks, Brain Drain or Brain Gain? A Review of USAID Participant Training in Somalia (for USAIDISomalia, September 1986), p. 5. World Bank, Somalia: Policy Framework Paper (1989-1991). (April 1989), p. 1 I , quoted in Rawson, The Somali State and Foreign Aid p. 54.
34
36Docurnented in U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) study Famine in Afiica: Improving
Emergenry Food RelieJPrograms (Washington:
GAO, March 1986); it concluded that Somali military diversion of refugee food aid was the worst in the history of U.S. food aid programs.
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position. Distuhingly, a combination of U.S. strategic needs and UNHCR i n s t i t ~ t i ~ ~ l imperatives--and a fear of criticism for abandoning refbgees- allowed refbgee aid to continue to f l o w until 1990. The m o s t important development goals set by the donor community in Somalia,however, were policy reforms, not projects. ?hroughout the 198b Westem donors, led by USAID,the IMF and the World Bank, sought to link assistanceto economic and f i s c a l policy reform: liberalidon, privatization and financial stabilization. Superficially, this conditional assistance appeared to enjoy some successes in the 1980s. Under pressure h m the World Bank and the United States, the Bane regime agreed in 1981 to liberalize agricultural policies by lifting price conmls on staple crops. Donors hoped that t h i s and other b m a r k e t reforms in the d sector would provide h e n greater incentives to expand crop production and reduce Somalias chronic food deficits. Likewise, the IMF was able to press the Somali government to accept stabilization schemes and Shuctural adjustment reforms,which included moving the value of the Somali shilling closer to real market value, privatizing some state-contmlled industries and reducing u t these proved to be government spending. B ephemeral victories, leading to far less substantive and enduringpolicy reform and outcomes than donors desired. In the case of agricultural liberalization, policies changed but wtcomes did n o t . Detxpbvely, he-market reforms pushed by Westem donors did appear to trigger impressive growth rates in S o m a l i agricultural output as early as 1982. By 1987, the Somali Minisby of Agricultm reported that total grain production had more than doubled between
1980 and 1986, after a decade of Stagnafi~n,~ and the World Banks WorkiDewlopmenf Report 1988 listed Somalia f i r s t in Africa in increased grain production between 1980 and 86, with an average annual increase of 7.9 percent Not surprisingly, donors celebrated this dramatic improvement in production as clear evidence of the success of conditionality and b m a r k e t reforms, and of the failure of price controls, which, they contended, had so depressed incentives that many farmers in the 1970s had reduced their efforts and work volume to a level which simply guaranteed subsistence. One consultantsrepott produced for USAID went so far as to claim that agricultural refom had enabled Somalia to become more than self-sufficient in maize and sorghum, had driven agricultural wages above the salaries of government civil servants,and had triggereda reverse Nfalexodus of citydwellers returning to the farms, though none of these contentions was remotely close to the buth. The causal link between price liberalization and increased agricultd output in Somalia, so intuitively obvious to the donor community, quickly became conventional wisdom. In reality, however, agricultural output did not increase in the 1980s nearly as
SDR, Ministry of Agriculture, Department of Planning and Statistics, Yearbook of Agriculfural Stafisrics 198tV87, prepared in cooperation with GTZ (Mogadishu: State Printing Agency, 1987). h o m a s LaBahn. The Development of the Cultivated Areas of the Shabelle River and the Relationship between Smallholders and the State, in Somalia: Agriculture and the W i n h of Change, ed. by Peter Con= and Thomas LaBahn (Saarbmcken: epi Vcrlag. 1986). p. 137. % a x Goldensohn, Don Harrison and John Smith. Donor Influence and Rural Prosperity: The Impact of Policy Reform on Economic Growth and Equity in the Agricultural Sector in Somalia (USAID: March 1987). pp.2-3.
134
dramatically as donors and analysts believed. The statistics, it turned out, were flawed but went unchallenged because they appeared to confirm donors belief systems about policy reform and liberalization. Donors and outside consultants had mistakenly assumed that the socialist Somali state of the 1970s possessed the capacity to capture surplus grain production and enforce price controls, when in fact the Somali state proved quite soff and relatively easy for farmers, merchants and even the states own civil servants to evade. As a result, n s t e a d of price controls in the 197Os, i suppressing production, had merely heled a vibrant parallel grain market The result was that the state marketing boards statistical data on grain production in the 1970s was attificially low, while the dramatic increase in grain production in the early 1980s actually represented the statistical rpappearance of gmin sales formerly hidden fiom official view ratherthan a significant upsurge in domestic grain production. Ultimately, the inaccuracy of grain production figures in the 1980s and of contentions that Somalia was approaching selfsufficiency in maize and sorghum due to price liberalization, were exposed by dramatic increases in Somali food imports and food aid fiom the 1970s to late 1980s. According to the World Banks own study, food imports in the period 1970-79 constituted less than 33 percent of Somalias total food consumption, but rose
to an alarming 84 percent during 1980-84. Likewise, World Food Programme (WFP) records indicate that total food aid deliveries to Somalia increased nearly twofold fiom 1982 to 1986-87. Somalias food crisis continued to women through the 1980s despite Western policy reforms. The donors collective misreading of the impact of price liberalization is both instructive and puzzling. On one level, it highlights the obvious: accurate assessmentsof the impact of reform must be m t e d in astute political as well as economic analysis. In the case of Somalia, the donor communitys misreading stemmed not from an economic e m but fiom political misjudgment. The mistake was not in assuming that price liberalizationserves as an incentive for producers, but rather in assuming that price controls had been enforced by a sufficiently authoritative state so as to afFect productivity. . W h a t is less clear is whether the donors political misreading were born of ignorance or cognitive blinders. On the one hand, many donors and their consultantswere alarmingly far-removed from d a y - t d y economic and e p o r t swere social life in Somalia Studies and r produced from air-conditioned offices in Mogadishu, drawing on market surveys and official data collected by Somali c o u n t e m Anyone . possessing a passing familiarity with daily life in Somalia knew of the vibrant black market within which many or most economic transactions took place and h a t into would have known to factor t assessmentsof the impact of government price
Y. Hossein Farzin, Food Import Dependence in Somalia: Magnitude. Causes, and Policy Options (Washington: World Bank Discussion Paper no. 23. 1988), p. 14. WFP, Total Food Aid Deliveries to Somalia, 1982-1987. (Mogadishu, January 10. 1988) (mimeo).
135
41
For further detail see Kenneth Menkhaus, Rural Transformation and the Roots of Underdevelopment in Somalias Lower Jubba Valley (University of South Carolina Ph.D. dissertation, 1989). pp. 390404; and International Labor Organization, Jobs and Skills Program for Africa (JASPA), Generaring Employment and Incomes in Somalia (Addis Ababa: JASPA. March 1988). pp. 17-22.
40
c o n t r o l s . But that level of familiarity with Somalia could not be assumed within the insular world of intemational aid donors in the capital.
On the other hand, ample evidence exists suggestingthat donors were well-aware of the sohess of the Somali state and its vibrant parallel economy. In the 198Os, for instance, USND and the World Bank were so concerned over the Somali governments inability to tax its citizens (and hence increase state revenues)that they provided technical assistance designed to enhance the revenue collection system (to no avail). Donor reports periodically noted the existence of the patallel market in Somalia,but rarely conneded it to their macrwnalysis of the economy.Y And it h a t monitored rapidly was the major donors t rising food imports and food aid into Somalia in the 1980s. Westem donors efforts to promote f i s c a l reform and stabilization faced quite a different problem, namely, t h a t policy reforms
Numerous published studies existed on Somalias vibrant parallel market; see for instance Norman Miller, The Other Somalia, Horn ofAfrica 5, 3 (1982), pp. 3-19; and Boston University, African Studies Center, Somalia: A Social and Institutional ProJle (Boston: Boston University Press, 1983), pp. 5-6. 44 Two biting critiques of international donors in Somalia can be found in Graham Hancock, Lords of Poverty (London: Macmillin. 1989), and Michael Maren, The Road to Hell: The Ravaging Eflects of Foreign Aid and Infernational Charity (New York: Free Press, 1996). 45 Pailthorp, Development before Disaster, p. 64; Rawson, The Somali State and Foreign Aid, p. 46. 4b See for instance. IMF, Somalia: Recent Economic Developments, I98 1 (mimeo. July 10, 198 I ) , p. 7; and John Holtzman. Maize Supply and Price Situation in Somalia: A Historical Overview and Analysis of Recent Changes (SDR Ministry of Agriculture. Working Paper no. 5 , May 1987). pp. 8-9, IS.
themselves were short-lived, casualties of what Rawson calls the studied ambivalence of Siyad [Barrels zigzag tactics. Faced with donor insistence on stabilization and austerity m e a s w that threatened to undermine the y s t e m on which the Somali entire patronage s state was bcsed, the Barre regime resorted to delaying, agreeing, reneging and renegotiating, a strategy designed to give donors hope that the regime was approaching stabilization schemes in good faith, but never enough to actually see the reforms through. Four times over the course of the 1980s the Somali government entered into stand-by programs with the tMF; each time, the government failed to meet r e f o r m targets. T w i c eover the come of the 1980sthe Somali government signed onto broad sbuctwal-djustment pgrams with the World Bank. In each case, it reneged on those accords as wellu Why, then, did donors continue to return to the negotiatingtable in the hope that,this time, the Somali governmentwould carry through on i t s promises? One view, voiced by David R a w n , attributesthis to a combination of factors: the cunningtactics of baii and switch on the part of the Barre regime; the baseless optimism of the donor community, which, he contends, never filly understood that the B m regimes agenda was divergent ffom their own; b m c inertia within aid agencies, where careets were staked on largescale development projects that officials were understandably loath to suspend; and a p p t f i i dynamic within the donor community.* Another view focuses more exclusivelyon the strategic imperatives that drove the delivery of aid to Somalia Pailthorp
41
Rawson, The Somali State and Foreign Aid, p. I IS. Ibid., pp. 39-45 ?bid.. pp. I 1 S-I 18.
136
forces that lived on throughout the 1980s. concludes that despite blatant corruption, Western donors in the 1980s deplored the human-rights abuses and inconsistent mperation in policy reform, donors continued political repression and notorious human-rights to support a abuses but, for government strategic reasons, fmanced almost Western donors in the 1980s kept largely silent. deplored the political But in May 1988, a exclusively by sourcesin remession and notorious fill-scale civil war m order to uphold erupted in northern human-rights abuses but, for Somalia, foreign-policy agendas.m ~n other strategic reasons, kept largely government forces, words, success or silent. which were &lure m d in increasingly manned developmental through forced terms was ultimately irrelevant, since the Conscription, against the Somali National primary purposeof Cold War economic Movement, representing a liberation h n t of assistance was strategic. the northem Isaaq clan. The Barre regimes response to the W s attacks was brutal, The End of the Cold War and the Fmving includingthe leveling of the city of Hargeisa of Foreign Aid, 1987-90 and the strafing of civilian refugees fleeing for After decades of shrewdly playing Cold safety over the Ethiopian border. Casualties War competitors offone another to maximite were so high, and unarmed civilians targeted so its access to foreign aid, it is ironic that Somalia systematicallyas part of the regimes tactic of became one of the first targets of post-coid repnsal and tenor, that some international W a r political conditionalitf of aicc-the observers termed the war a campaign of lmkage of U.S. assistanceto improvementsin genocide against the Isaaq. human-rightsand political liberalization. Ihe war in northern Somalia, e s t case. Once Somalia was a relatively easy t documented by a highly critical General Somalias perceived strategic value was Acounting 0!3ce (GAO) investigation deflated by the waning of the Cold War, the mandated by Congress, energized Bam regime was deprived of its sole trump congressional calls to keze aid to Somalia card. Ihere was relatively little at stake for u n t i l human-rights improved? Congress, donon in post-cold War Somalia, a fsct which which had never exhibited great enthusiasm for gave them far greater leverage to link aid to hm-rights. The most carefully documented accounts include Human-rights violationsand political Robert Gersony, Why Somalis Flee: Synthesis o f repression had been a hallmark of Somali Accounts o$Con/lict fiperience in Northern Somali politics since the 1%9 coup that h g h t Refugees. Displaced Persons, and Others (Bureau strongman Siyad Barre into power. In the for Refugee Programs,U.S. Department of State, August 1989), and Amnesty International, Somalia: 197% East Bloc patrons of Somalia assisted in A Long-Term Human-rights Crisis (New York: the development of fearsome internal security
Amnesty International, September 1988). %.S. General Accounting Office, Somalia:
Observations Regarding the Northern Conflict and Resulting Conditions (May 4, 1989).
?ailthorp,
Development Before Disaster, p. 1.
137
the strategic rationales behind U.S.foreign aid to Somalia,had alteady suspended ESP funding to Somalia in 1987. Key figures like Rep. Howard Wolpe @MI) led a chorus of criticism of US. policy in Somalia,blaming the United States for propping up the incredibly repressive, conupt regime of Siad Bane. By the summer of 1988, the United States had already h z e n shipmentsof lethal weapons to Somalia on the advice of the U.S. ambassador, over the objections of the Pentagon. Still, the Bush administration hoped to unheze the ESF h d s to Somalia, arguing for a policy of e a c e h l constructive engagement to assist in a p transfer of power. But additional massacres and worsening civil war in Somalia in 1989 insured that Congress would n d appropriate funds to a regime with such a proven track record of repression. By 1989, USAID and other donors began to wind down or suspend projects. Amid worsening violence, the U.S. embassy in Mogadishu, a newly completed, $50 million complex replete with thnx swimming pools, a golf course, and a M o f 430 (the largest in subFsahm Afiica), reduced & t o fewer than 100. Diplomats continued to emphasize the need for national reconciliation and respect for human-rights, but by 1989 nearly all internationaldonors had suspended foreign aid to the country. Without international support and finding, the B m regime quickly collapsed in the face of multiple liberation h n t s and a popular uprising in Mogadishu.
The Famine and US.EmergencyAid, 199192 Somalias fall into heavily armed anarchy in 1991 and 1992 quickly provoked famine conditions in the southern half of the country, where a large urban population was trapped in a war over Mogadishu, rural farming communities were subjected to endemic banditry and assaults by roving militias, and the entire economy collapsed amidst such extensive looting that even copper telephone lines and sewage pipes were stripped and sold for scrap metal. By late 1991, relief agencies wamed of an impending famine of massive proportions. But the complete breakdown of governmental authority and social structures, combined w i t h overwhelmingrefirgeeflows, warlordism and extortionateb a n d i w constellationof crises that came to be known as a complex emergencf-presented aid donors with unprecedented dilemmas. There is near universal consensus that international humanitarian organizations failed to meet the challenges the Somali crisis posed in 1931-92. This failure of the collective response proved very costly. One problem was t h a tkey players in the aid communitywere virtually absent fiom Somalia h r n January 1991 (when the last set of intemational diplomats and aid workers were evacuated)until mid-1992, when intensive media coverage of the famine triggered a tidal e w relief agencies, food airlifts and wave of n U.N. activity. Throughout all of 1991 and half of 1992, only the Intemational Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC)and a small corps of non-governmental organizations(NGOs)
55
Quoted in Terry Atlas, Cold W a r Rivals Sowed Seeds of Somalia Tragedy,Chicago Tribune (Dcc. 13, 1992), sec. 4,p. I . 54 Rawson, The Somali Sfate and Foreign Aid, p.
111.
Jeffrey Clark, Debacle in Somalia: Failure of the Collcctive Response, pp. 205-39, in Enforcing
Restrainf: Collective Intervention in Internal Conflicts. ed. by Lori F. Damrosch (New York:
Council on Foreign Relations, 1993).
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MENKHAUS: U.S.FOREIGN ASSISTANCE TO SOMALIA: PHOENIX FROM THE ASHES?
operated in the country,providing emergency food relief and medical care. Ihe United Nations and its agencies were generally inert, citing security concerns, mandates (most U.N. agencies do not work in active war zones) and politidegal complications(U.N. agencies work through a host government, which was absent in Somalia). U.N. diplomatic inaction was in no small m a w due to the indifferenceof the Security Council, which, preoccupied by more r a q and Bosnia, was important crises in I reluctant to address the Somali crisis. It was, moreover, the U.S. delegation t h a t blocked attempts to place Somalia on the Security Councils agenda and watered down a January 1992 Security Council resolution in order to keep U.N. diplomatic involvement in Somalia minimal? Top advisers in the Bush t a t e administration, including Secretary of S James Baker and Undersecretaryof State for InternationalOrganhtion John Bolton, opposed any resolutions which might potentially expand U.N. peacekeeping obligations at a time when its budget was in arrears? It was only in the summer of 1992 that a combination of political pressures, including sudden and intensive media coverage
h i s latter issue led to a scandalous situation in which the U.N. Development Program (UNDP) failed to use $68 million budgeted for Somalia for nine months because it could not secure the signature of a Somali government. Ibid., p. 220. Jane Perlez, Somalia Self-Destructs, and the World Looks On, The New York Times (December 29, 1991). p. I ; for a stinging and detailed indictment of UN inaction in Somalia, see Clark, Debacle in Somalia 5 : Refugee Policy Group, Hope Restored? Humanitarian Aid in Somalia, 1990- I994 (Washington DC: Refugee Policy Group, November 1994), p. 20. This is the most extensive reconstruction of decisions involved in humanitarian action in Somalia, rich with interviews with top officials.
of the worsening famine, stinging public: criticism by U.N. Secretary-GeneralBoutros Boutros-Ghali(who called attention to the naked double standard between Western largess in the Bosnia crisis and inaction in Somalia) and pwing, bipartisan congressional demands for action in SomaliaB*ll coming in the midst of a presidential election campaign-which mobilized the Bush administrationto become much more engaged in Somaliam Until that time, however, U.S. government monitoring of Somalia was limited to a single State Department political officer,and a single officer of the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA), both stationed in Nairobi, Kenya Like other governments, the United States concluded that Somalia was too dangerous to reopen its embassy and was reluctant to give the OFDA officer security clearance to bavel even for brief periods in the country. Still, OFDA was able to channel over $21 million in emergency assistance in 1991 through the ICRC, CARE and other NGOs working in Somalia6 Monitoring the effmtive delivery of that aid to starving populations, however, was next to impossible, an increasingly worrisome problem as reports grew that much or even most food aid was being diverted by militias. Within the U.S. government, agencies were split over the Somali famine. Those closest to the crisis, like the OFDA, the State
59Anexcellent chronicle of congressional action on Somalia is recorded in Refugee Policy Group, Hope Restored? Annex 3-2. %e Ken Menkhaus with Lou Ortmayer. Key Decisions in the Somalia Intervention. Pew Case Studies in International Affairs, no. 464 (Washington DC:Georgetown University, Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, 1995), pp. 2-3. 6Jan Westcott, The Somalia Saga: A Personal Account, 1990-1993 (Washington DC: Refugee Policy Group, November 1994). pp. 14,22.
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MIDDLE EASTPOLICY, VOL. V,NO. 1, JANUARY 1997
Department's East Afiica ofice and the of food, "Operation Provide Relief." ?he Human-rights Bureau,rang the a l m , fought military airlift was intended to be a strictly to maximize emergency assistance to Somalia, temporary measure to cope with immediate and pressed U.N. agencies to take more active famine conditions until a planned U.N. security roles in Somalia. The director of OFDA, force of 3,500p a k e e p e r s could take control Andrew Natsios, testified to the House Select of the airport and seaport. Politically, it was Committee on attractive as an option Hunger in Januaq that promised to media images 1992that the Somali Politically, it was attractive as deliver famine was "the of U.S. militruy planes g r e a t e s t humanitarian an option that promised to off-loading famine deliver media images of U.S. relief while emergency in the world'" and Publicly military planes off-loading engendering little risk criticized U.N. to U.S. troops and no famine relief while inaction, unaware that long-term h e u.s.delegation to engendering little risk to U.S. m i m e n & , Itwas the United Nations troops and no long-term also politically was trying to keep significant in that it commitments. U.N. involvement in injected a military Somali limited. component into Later, an OFDA official admitted that "we humanitarian efforts, a rising bend in the were going off in one direction and didn't aftermath of Operation Provide Comfort in realize that the political f o b were going in r a q .The airlift did enjoy some northern I another.'" But even among the "political success- independentestimates held that folks" in the States Depariment there were some 40,000 lives were saved fiom August to divisions. The Bureau of Afiican Affairs was December 1992 thanks to additional food aid stymied when it tried to make Somalia a top provided by the airlift.".' B u t problems arose as priority of Secretary of S t a t e Baker, and well. First,the proposed U.N. security force Assistant Secretary of State Herman Cohen's faced innumerable political problems and efforts to make OFDA hlly operational inside logistical delays, forcing the U.S. planners to Somalia were blocked by Bolton and National extend the airlift. Second, the food dropped off Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, who by the airlift was supposed to be distributed and opposed allocating resources to an area deemed monitored by the ICRC and several marginal to U.S. intern." NG0s-U.S. military authoritieswere to have Media, congressional, and public pressure no role on the grounMut thoseagencies to "do something" finallyjolted the Bush lacked the manpower to oversee such sizable administration into action in August 1992, shipments of food aid dropped off at scattered producing the high-visibilityemergency airlift sites in southem Somalia In the town of Bardhere, the airlifted food attracted competingm i l i t i a s ,triggering episodes of fighting and looting that left target populations "Clark. "Debacle in Somalia," p, 2 12.
Bill Garvelink, quoted in Refugee Policy Group, Hope Restored? p. 7. Mlbid., p. 20.
61
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worse off than before.@And finally, media coverage of the famine was not sated by the airlift, but remained intense, and often critical, right through the election. Meanwhile, the hdamental obstacle to the relief effort remained security. Estimates of the level of food relief diverted by militias varied-some agencies claimed less than half, others contended up to 80 percent-but it was clearly too much. It is appalling that there was food at the Mogadishu port but it cannot reach starving people a few kilometen away because of insecurity,argued OFDA Director James Kunder in July 1992.People are dying in the thousands daily because aid workers cannot move relief food. The world has a Militia leaders responsibilityto end that.167 understood and cynically exploited the fact that relief agencies had institutional imperatives to get food to starving populations and would tolerate virtually any level of looting,extortion and even the deaths of international staff to that end. e d intervention was considered, Until m OFDA and EU officials tried to cope with worsening problems of extottion and looting, much of it orchestrated by militia-backed merchants in Mogadishu, by introducing a monetization scheme in which some highvalue food commodities were sold to merchants while low-value food aid continued t o be be brought in as emergency relief. This, it was hoped, would both drive down the value of food aid, which had become the major item over which militias fought and enriched themselves, and would give the merchants a
~ ~~ ~~~~~ ~
financial stake in security tather than looting. However, since most of the diverted food aid was sold in markets in Ethiopia and Kenya, the policy did not have the anticipated impact on local prices, nor did it break the economy of extortion and bandiby which had developed around international relief deliveries. Meanwhile, reports h m OFDAs Disaster Assistance Response Teambrought back bleak news to Washington. In Baidoa, the center of the famine, an estimated 75 percent of the children under five had already died, while over a million more Somalis remained at immediate risk of starvation.OAnd, despite a Herculean international relief effort, including a U.S. contribution of food and refbgee aid totaling $95 million in fiscal year 1992, humanitarian relief remained crippled by militias diverting and blocking aid convoys. Even the port in Mogadishu was shut down by fighting. By November 1992, calls for a more forcefbl humanitarian intervention into Somalia were receiving favorable hearings h m President Bush and his cabinet. Some hoped to use Somalia as a doable test case to strengthen U.N. peace enforcement in the postCold-War era for eminently pragmatic reasons. The more effective an international peacekeeping capacity becomes, the more conflicts can be prevented or contained, and the fewer reasons there will be for Americans to fight abroad, testified Under-Secretary of
69
Menkhaus, Key Decisions, pp. 5-6. 67 Quoted in Ibid., p. 2. 6n For critical commentaries on NGO acquiescence to extortion. see Marguerite Michaels, Lemon Aid: How Relief to Somalia Went Wrong, The New Republic (April 19, 1993), p. 16; and Maren, The Road to Hell.
66
For a detailed explanation of the monetization project, see Andrew S. Natsios, Humanitarian Relief Interventions in Somalia: The Economics o f Chaos, International Peacekeeping. vol3, no. 1 (Spring 1996). pp. 68-91. 7%enkhaus, Key Decisions, p. 6. 11 Refugee Policy Group, Hope Restored? Annex CI.
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Defense Frank Wisner.R As during the Cold W a r , Somalia would once again attract the attention and m u m s of a superpower, not on its own terns but as part of broader strategic interests.
continued U.S. humanitarian and development aid to Somalia, the U.S.-led intervention possessed several features worth highlighting. First, o n Restore Hope was explicitly identified by Washington as a short-term and purely humanitarian mission. Reflecting the Operation Restore Hope and UNOSOM, American preoccupation with avoiding 193-1994 casualties,UMTAF operations were highly The Bush administrations decision in late risk-averse. Forces were tasked with securing November 1992 to humanitarian relief to approve a massive starving populations, But ending the famine and leavingthe problematic humanitarian intervention into issues of ending the crisis which demobilization and Somalia, led by 30000 provoked the famine were disarmament national U.S.troom. marked a mi1-n; post-Cold two separate issues. reconciliation, nationw a r international building and economic development to its relations and transforned the nature of the relief mission successoT, the U.N. Operation in Somalia into Somalia The details of both the decision (UNOSOM). With its mission so narrowly to intervene and various interpretationsof what defined, o p e could not but o n Restore H subsequently went wrong in the ill-fated be an unqualified success. The militarys interventionare more than adequately treated in ability to secure airports, seaports, and protectrelief convoys and feeding centers enabled an other accounts. From the standpoint of unintenupted flow of food aid to reach famine e e k s ,the intervention victims. Within w 72 effectively broke the back of the famine and Testimony, Hearing on International Peacekeeping and Enforcement, Senate Committee on Armed suspended, if not eliminated, the economy of Services, Subcommittee on Coalition Defense and extortion to which aid agencies had sucumbed. Reinforcing Forces, 103rd Congress, 1st sess., 14 U.S. emergency relief f l o w e d into Somalia A July 1993. 71 total of $174 million was spent i n 1993, mostly There are now hundreds of articles, books, and commissioned studies of UNOSOM and Operation in the fonn of USDA Food for Peace, as well Restore Hope. Among the most carefully as OFDA p t s to NGOs and U.N. agencies, documented and/or significant accounts include: and refugee assistance. Collectively U.S. aid Refugee Policy Group, Hope Restored?; Clark, constituted 65 percent of the t o t a l food aid Debacle in Somalia; Menkhaus, Key Decisions; Somalia received in 1993, a generous and John Bolton, Wrong Turn in Somalia, Foreign Affairs vol. 73, no. 1 (Jan.-Feb. 1994), pp. 56-66; substantial contribution. John Drysdale, Whatever Happened to Somalia? B u t ending the famine and endingthe (London:Haan Associates, 1994); John Prendergast, provoked the Fdmine were two crisis which The Gun Talks Louder than the Voice: Somalias separate issues. Long-term, sustainable efforts Continuing Cycles of Violence (Washington: Center
of Concern, 1994); and Walter Clarke and Jeffrey Herbst, Somalia and the Future of Humanitarian Intervention, Foreign Affairs vol. 75, no. 2 (March-April 1996), pp. 70-85.
14
Refugee Policy Group, Hope Restored? Annex C-
1.
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to help rebuild the society and promote
reconciliation, public order and development were needed for real success in Somalia Because the OFDAs mandate was limited to short-term emergencies, it tended to share the militarys quick response mentality, which focused more on immediate goals than on sustainability. This approach was at odds with the USAID teams, which was more attuned to long-term development and local capacity building. At the field level, it was not difficult r n OFDA and for individual aid officials h USAID to reconcile short and longer-term objectives, both of which had obvious merit. Still, it highlighted one of the interventions flaws, the yawning gap between the massive resourcesand manpower devoted to emergency relief (as well as military outlays) and the extremely scarce finding available for the much more complex task of long-term recovery.6 USAID in 1993 contributed $29.4 million to a variety of development schemes, including mining for the Somali police force and judicial system, demining, and rehabilitation of water, inigation, and healthcare systems but had to rely on ad hoc measures by OFDA to redefine b d i n g to assist these programs. Like other major donors, the U S .
Refugee Policy Group, Humanitarian Aid in Somalia: The Role of the Ofice of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA). 1990- I994 (Washington, D.C.: Refugee Policy Group, November 1994). p. 4. 76 UNOSOM had to endure a storm of criticism when it was revealed that for every ten dollars spent on the intervention, nine was earmarked for maintaining and paying the U.N. peacekeeping forces and civilian staff, only one in ten dollars was available for Somali reconstruction and development. nRefugee Policy Group, Humanitarian Aid in Somalio. Figures are drawn from a U.N. Department of Humanitarian Affairs situation report, November
3. 1993.
75
budgetary process distinguishes between emergency relief (for which there is ample finding and surplus foodstuffs)and development (for which firnding is scarce), creating enormous bansition problems in postemergency settings. Ihe USAID team thus found itself working with very limited finds to help UNOSOM promote both political and economic reconstruction. In 1993 and 1994, USAID focused especially on the reestablishment of a police and judicial system,which was deemed necessary to provide Somalis a sense of security and an environment in which the economy could prosper. However, USAID facsd the Same problem as other providers of postemergency development aid: namely, the prolonged absence of a recognized and authoritative governmentto which police and judges would be accountableand through which broader development policies could be rationalized and articulated. The very statelessness of Somalia posed a firndamental challenge to donors, and presaged donor troubles in other complex emergencies. UNOSOM and donor agencies h a t the establishmentof a Somali hoped t Transitional National Council would serve as the repositoryof Somali sovereignty to resolve this dilemma, but endless setbacks in Somali national reconciliation conferences made this impossible.RDonors were left with the unenviable task of wing to determine who,
Compounding this budgetary problem still further was that most of the implementing agencies (the NGOs) through which AID and OFDA funds were dispersed were defined either as relief agencies or as development agencies and were not structured to cope with transitions from relief to development. 79 For analysis of Somali national reconciliation. see Ken Menkhaus, International Peacebuilding and the Dynamics of Local and National Reconciliation in Somalia, International Peacekeeping, vol3, no. 1 (Spring 1996), pp. 42-67.
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in the contentious arena of s t a t e l e s s Somali politics, constituted authoritative local leadershipthrwgh which development programs could proceed. Militia leaders, factional politicians, elders, intellectuals, merchants and clerics all laid claim to authority, in reality, few possessed it. The scramble by Somalis to emerge as recognized local leaders through which aid agencies worked was not only an attempt to use foreignersto legitimizetheir claims on authority; it was also an effort to conml the lucrative flow of foreign aid. As in the past, foreign aid during the intervention had a corrosive and distomng effkct on Somali politics and economic activity. Employment and conbacts with the U.N. agencies and intemationalNGOsbecamepnzed commodities, monopolized by factional
the reconstruction of the entire country. When developmentaid appeared only in much more modest amounts, Somalis suspected that U.N. and aid officials were diverting h d s into their own pockets. As the U.S.-led UNITAF mission transitioned to UNOSOM in May 1993, divisions surfsced within the U.S. government over the level of development aid the United States should commit to Somali reconshuction. Many in USAID, S t a t e ,and the NSC saw the need to insure the success of the U.N. mission in order to strengthen U.N. capacity in peace enforcement, and sought to maximize U.S. support for U.N. reconciliation and development initiatives. B u t ollce armed hostilities erupted between UNOSOM forces and Genenil Aideeds Somali National Alliance in June 1993, leading to the highly mafias.lhegiganticUNOSOMpresencein publicized deaths of 17 U.S. Army Rangers Mogadishu genemted an estimated 11,OOO that October,congressional support for aid to localjobs,which helped Somali households in Somalia withered, Political figuresand pundits the short-term but created yet another instance t the fell over themselves to express outrage a of unsustainable dependence on i n t e m a t ~ ~ l ungratehlSomalis, and the C l i n t o n aid. And attempts by international donors to adminisbation announced the complete fund small projects through local NGOS, as withdrawal of all U.S. military personnel by part of a strategy of capacity-building, March 1994. A small staff of U.S. diplomats inadvertentlym p t e d the collcepf as Somali and USAID officialsstayed on until the closure factionsand entrepreneurs cfeated do= of of UNOSOM in March 1995 and oversaw bogus local self-help groups (all with continued aid to police and judicial programs. impressive English names and stationery!) that B u t the fiasco in Mogadishu had badly corneredintemationalgmntsand damaged U.N. credibility and U.S.hopes of misappropriated funds and commodities. building up U.N. capacities for peace Somalis were quick to comprehend and exploit enforcement; the prevailing sentiment in the latest approaches of the donor community Washington was simply t o let the U.N. mission in order to access their foreign aid. Donor quietly wind down,place blame for the failure cynicism toward Somalia, already a legacy of of the mission on the United Nations, and leave had experiences h m the 198Os, deepened with Somalia alone. For some critics of the every new case of fiaud and d o n . Somali intewention, leaving Somalia alone was the best prescription for the countxys recovery. cynicism toward foreign aid deepened as well; local expecMionsof a foreign-aid bonanza were huge and unrealistic, as many Somalis I0 Michael Maren, Leave Somalia Now The New expededthehtemamd * communitytofhd
York Times, July 6,1994, p. Al9.
144
MENKHAUS: U.S.FOREIGN ASSISTANCE TO SOMALIA: PHOENIX FROM THE ASHES?
The G r e a t e r Horn of A f r i c a Initiative Out of this bleak set of negative experiences with foreign aid to Somalia, as well as similar fhtrations in prolonged humanitarian and political crises in Ethiopia, Rwanda and Sudan, officials in USAID have begun exploring alternative approaches to development assistance in the G r e a t e rH o r n of Aiiica. The fust attempt to articulate a new development philosophy occurred in the midst of a region-wide drought in 1994, when the director of USAID, Brian Atwood, was briefed on the regions core problems: the predominanceof man-made rather than natural disasters,which suggested the need for a conflictearly-waming system to complement famine early-warning systems already in place; the regional nature of the emergencies, especially rehgee flows, which defied state boundaries and rendered state-cmtered aid strategies irrelevant; difficuttiesassociated with the relief-todevelopmentcontinuum in postemergency settings; and the pressing need to enhance regional capacity and Afiican ownershipof solutions to the regions problems. A powerful argument put forward by advocates of a new approach to the region h a t the Greater Horn of was the grim fact t Afiica had become, over the come of the past 20 years, the site of the worlds most intractable, endemic and expensive humanitariancrises, a cauklron of human misery that $4 billion of international aid between 1985 and 1992 had done little to resolve. International aid, it was argued, m e d to dress the wounds of regional disasten but was doing little to address their root causes.
Out of these discussions emerged what became the Greater Horn of Afiican Initiative (GHAI). As one of Atwoods top priorities and as a
presidential initiative enjoying the active interest and support of President Clinton, the GHAI has received priority inter-agency attention in its formulation. As of early 1997, the GHAI has yet to move fiom chalkboard to the field, and opetationalizingthe new approach it embodies will be extxmefy difficult Conceptually, however, the GHAI is a considerable advance over conventional, project-oriented aid philosophies. Among its most significant strengths are the following: 1) Promotion of regional capacity-building. The GHAIs primary aim will be to strengthen the processes by which both governments and civil society in the G r e a t e r Horn prevent or address conflicts and improve food secun-tythemselves. At the governmental level, this has led the GHAI to encourage the revitalization of a regional organization, IGADD (Inter-Govemmental Authority on Drought and Development) which governments in the Horn hope will serve as a central forum through which to a d regional problems. At the level of civil society, the GHAI seeks to strengthen the role of local NGOs in development aid. 2) Crisis prevention. A t w d has emphasized that one of the primary aims of the Clinton administtation is to help societies build the capacity to deal with the social, economic and political forcesthat threaten to t e a rthem a p t - Within the U.S. government, the GHAI has catalyLed an inter-agency process
Interview with USAID officials. March 1996. 12 USAID, Breaking the Cycle of Despair: President Clintons Initiative on the Horn of Africa Building a Foundation for Food Security and Crisis Prevention in the Greater Horn of Africa: A Concept Paper for Discussion, (November 1994), p. I .
Discussion papers and other information on the Greater Horn of Africa can be accessed via USAIDs web site. Atwood, Suddenly, Chaos. 145
MIDDLE EASTPOLICY, VOL. V,No. I , JANUARY 1997
bringing together members of the State collaborative relationship with them. Rather Department, USAID, D I A ,CIA and other than seeking to impose structures and agencies for periodic meetings under the rubric p m s e s on the regiowan approach which of a Repotting, Analysis, Decision-making failed in Somalia--the GHAI will sewe as an and Response(RADAR)team. This has enabler, supporting structures and pwxdures improved information-sharingamong agencies deemed most appropriate by the regional and between embassieson emerging regional authorities themselves. Because not all of the crises and conflicts. states in the region In the region, the are equally GHAI has also Past humanitarian emergencies enthusiasticabout a in the region have offered little regionalapproachto helped to set up internet llnkages aid and diplomacy assistance for sustainable, long- (Ethiopia, Eritrea between regional governments in h e term reconstruction. Of special and U g h are importance in this regard is an strong supportersof Greater Horn, enablingthem to the approach, while effort to promote food security better share Kenya and Sudan in the region. are more reluctant or information as well. A significant step in suspicious), establishingcrisis adherenceto the management mechanisms in the region principle of African ownership means that the occurred this spring, when governments in the GHAI will be slow to evolve. IGADD met and agreed to include conflict 5 ) Emphasis on the continuum between relief t s charter. This will enable prevention in i and development. Where disasters have IGADD to formulate its own approachesto erupted, the GHAI is intended to help conflict-prevention measures, which the overcome insitutitionalbaniers to reduce international communitycan assist as transition problems between emergency relief requested. and development. Past humanitarian 3) A regional approach to development aid. As emergencies in the region have mobilized vast the name of the initiative suggests, the GHAI resources for relief but have offered little assumes that crises in the Greater Horn assistance for sustainable, long-term transcend national borders and can only be reconstruction. Ofspecial importance in this addressed in a regional h e w o & . Though regard is an effort to promote food security in aid will continue to be allocated bilaterally, the the region. GHAI will encourageefforts to seek Value Significantly,this general approach to added on bilateral projects through regional foreign aid is shared by m o s t regional coordination and facilitate regional efforts to governments in the Horn of Africa, and enhance food security. Again, revitalitation of increasingly by other major donors. The IGADD will be central to this objective. coordinatingbody for emergency assistance 4) African ownership of the development from European Community states (ECHO), for process. TheGHAI is committed to instance, has ernbraced the approach and proceeding along lines prioritized by coordinates policy with USAID in the region. governments in the Greater Horn in a And the U.N. Development Programme has
146
launched a $25-billion development program for Afiica that centers on capacity-building. This broad consensus among the main donors and states in the region is critical in preventing the initiative fiom being perceived as an exclusively American agenda. For all of its appeal, however, the GHAI and the ideas it embodies face nummus and potentially debilitatingchallenges. First, one of its central objectives,conflict prevention, is an inherently elusive goal. Fostering regional integmtion via IGADD may help reduce interstate conflict in the long run, but most of the conflicts provoking humanitarian crises in the region are infru-state in nature, which IGADD is much less equipped to address. second, IGADD is problematic as a regional forum serving as the engine of the initiative. For one thing, it does not include several of the o r n of southern-tier members of the Greater H Aliica, including Rwanda and Burundi. The GHAI is thus of questionable relevance to two of the m o s t pressing political and humanitarian crises in the region. Somalia, meanwhile, remains unrepresented in IGADD as it lacks the essential prerequisite, a recognized government In addition, a key member of IGADD, Sudan, is virtually at war with neighbors Uganda, Eritrea and Ethiopia. IGADD can either serve as a regional development agency or as a coalition against Sudan, but not both.u Still, observers concur that there are no institutional alternatives to IGADD however imperfecf it is all weve got in the region. A third challenge relates to the GHAIs principle of African ownership of aid
French, Donors of Foreign Aid Have Second Thoughts. 15 Indeed, some observers suspect that U.S. enthusiasm to revitalize IGADD is animated in part by a strategic desire to strengthen regional containment of Sudans radical Islamism.
84
prioritization, which begs a hndarnental o r n of Afiica: which political question in the H Africans are to own the process, governments or civil sociev Put another way, is the r e a t e r Horn due to political crisis in the G parasitic and oppressive state authority, to be remedied by decentralization and the channeling of assistance away fiom cenbal governments to grass-mots organizations?Or, conversely, are pmbacted political and humanitarian crises in the region a function of the collapse of effective governance, to be remedied by the strengtheningof state authoriw A compelling case can be made for both arguments. A case can also be made for the simultaneousstrengtheningof both state and societal organization as mutually reinforcing processes. But in the context of disputed authority, civil war and scarce resources in the Greater H o r n , control over relief and development is viewed by local protagonists in starkly zero-sum terms. States in the region are distrustfid of both international and local NGOs, of rhetoric embracing the strengtheningof civil society and of any circumventionof sovereign states control over relief and development aid within their bordersu On paper, the GHAI appears to embrace both a topdown and bottom-up approach in the region. On the one hand, USAID claims to be committed to working to strengthen civil society. As Brian Atwood notes:
We cannot prevent failed states with a t o p down approach. No amount of international resources or organizational capacity c a n Serve as a substitute f o r building stable, pluralist societies New partnerships and new tools are
For a fresh look at the limits of sovereignty in zones of crisis, see Francis Deng et al., Sovereignty as Respomibiliw: Conflict Management in Africa (Washington: Brookings, 1996).
147
16
needed t o strengthen the indigenous capacity of people t o manage and resolve conflict within their
own societies.
f i s advocacy of a grass-rootsapproach to capacity-building coincideswith the views of m o s t internationalNGOs,which for years have served as vital conduits of emergency aid in the Greater H o r n and which possess considerable political clout. Their distrust of central state authority is the result of years of experience in which states have often been the primary source of conflict, corruption and humanitarian crises. In one GHAI workshop in October 1995, for instance, a top NGO representative went so far as to conclude t h a tthe government of Sudan constituted an enemy state in humanitarian terms. In the field, NGOs have sometimeschallenged the principle of state sovereignty,refusing to recognize real or alleged state authority. In Somalia,where no state exists, USAID has resolved the sovereignty issue by funneling aid through internationalNGOs to local communities, essentially sub-contracting a thorny diplomatic issue to actors for whom the issue is less problematic. But Somalia is the exception rather than the rule. Elsewhere in the Horn, U.S. diplomacy has tilted strongly towards accommodatingcentral governments and their demands for ownership of development priorities and allocation.This has meant that
Atwood, Suddenly, Chaos. A few NGOs have long ignored the authority of the government of Sudan in their work in southern Sudan. In Rwanda, 39 NGOs were expelled for refusing to register with and pay customs taxes to the new RPF government in 1994; in Somalia, General Aideed sought unsuccessfully to use international NGOs to shore up his claim of sovereign control over Somalia by kidnapping aid workers in the town of Baidoa on the grounds that they had not obtained visas from his government.
86 a7
colloborationwithin the GHAl has been almost entirely between donors and states. At the insistence of regional states, international and local NGOs have been given marginal roles to play in the GHAI, a fact which has not sat well with NGO officials; indeed, representatives of internationalNGOs complain that they were not brought into planning discussions of the GHAI until a year after its genesis. But as long as regional governments continue to distrust development rhetoric that embmxs empowermentof civic society, seeing such agendas a s meddling in M u internal affairs and potentially eroding their own often shaky authority, it is unlikely that the GHAI will be able t o effectively implement a two track policy of capacity-buildingat b o t h state and local levels. Meanwhile, the dilemma for USAID is t h a t misjudgmentsover the channelingof aid can easily lead to accusationseither of strengtheninga centml states capacity for repression o r a local politys capacity for secession. o s t potent threatto the The final and m success of the GHAI is budgetary. Though the GHAI is not premised on large allocationsof foreign aid, adequate donor resourcesare still essential. The decline of Cold War strategic interests in the region, which has freed USAID to pursue more sustainable and thoughtful initiativesthere, has simultaneouslyeliminated the rationale that justified aid in the f i r s t place. Ironically,aid resources for the region may dry up at the very moment when a promising philosophy of assistance is being developed. This is precisely the constraint faced by USAID in Somalia,where a paucity of fimding has dramatically reduced both the capacity and influence of American assistance
19John Prendergast, Front-Line Diplomacy:

Humanitarian Aid and Conflict Prevention in Afiica
(Boulder: Lynne Rienner Pub., 1996). 148
programs. The vacuum created by the shrunken USAID mission has been filled by a robust European Commission,which now dominatesdonor policies and priorities in the Somalia Aid Coordination Body (SACB), a consortium of donors, U.N. agencies, and N O Soperating in Somalia For instance, U.S. contributionsto food monetization pmgrams, a critical instrument in the shaping of rehabilitation priorities in Somalia,was dominant h r n 1992 to 1994, but by 1996 had dropped to only $4 million, compared to $48 million fiom the European Union. Indeed, the total USAID budget proposal for Somalia for fiscal year 1998, includingthe categories of development assistance, emergency feeding, food-for-work, monetization and disasterassistance funds, comes to a mere $15.4 million, and it is likely that request will not be hlly funded. As a result, U.S. aid officials have had a much harder time shaping donor policy in the SACB, and American influence over political as well as economic developmentsin the country have been marginalized."
For Somalis, the real external power broker has become the European Commission, which, armed with a large budget and an extensive team of European technical advisers and consultants, constitutes a virtual surrogate government based in Nairobi, Kenya" Given these constaints, there is, some critics predict, a real possibility that the GHAl will remain an attractive set of principles that will prove difficult to operationalizein the turbulent Greater Horn. On the other hand, past approaches have so clearly failed the region that no justification can be made for continued business as usual. Without ambitious and creative departures h m past practices, and without reasonable levels of h d i n g from donors, the region will again be consigned to another generation of endemic crises, and the United States will continue to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on reactive humanitarian assistance to preventable crises.
90
Figures based on discussions with UN, EC. and USAID officials in Nairobi, Kenya, August 1996.
As of August 1996, the EC Somalia Unit included one special envoy, three delegates, ten technical advisers, and 25-40 short-term consultants; collectively they prioritize, oversee, and evaluate all EC-funded aid projects in Somalia, which currently totals about $60 million. While this figure is expected to drop significantly in the coming two years, it at least temporarily gives the EC special envoy and his team imperial authority over the weak and fragmented Somali society.
91
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succumbed to extortion h m Somali militias and sometimes inadvertently heled local

MENKHAUS: U.S. FOREIGN ASSISTANCE TO SOMALIA: PHOENIX FROMTHE ASHES?

Foreign Aid and the Nature of the Somali

MIDDLE EASTPOLICY, VOL. V, No. 1, JANUARY 1997

MENKHAUS: U.S. FOREIGN ASSISTANCE TO SOMALIA: PHOENIX FROM THE ASHES?

US. Aid during the Cold War

MIDDLE EASTPOLICY, VOL.V, No. 1, JANUARY 1997

U S Aid i n the 19609. The United States

MENKHAUS: U.S. FOREIGN ASSISTANCE TO SOMALIA: PHOENIX FROMTHE ASHES?

MIDDLE EASTPOLICY, VOL. V, No. 1, JANUARY 1997

Third,foreign assistance in the 1960s, including

MENKHAUS: U.S. FOREIGN ASSISTANCE TO SOMALIA: PHOENIX FROM THE ASHES?

MIDDLE EAST POLICY, VOL. V, NO. 1 , JANUARY 1997

MENKHAUS: U.S. FOREIGN ASSISTANCE TO SOMALIA: PHOENIX FROM THE ASHES?

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MENKHAUS: U.S. FOREIGN ASSISTANCE TO SOMALIA: PHOENIX FROMTHE ASHES?

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MENKHAUS: U.S. FOREIGN ASSISTANCE TO SOMALIA: PHOENIX FROM THE ASHES?

Development Before Disaster, p. 1.

MIDDLE EASTPOLICY, VOL.V, No. 1, JANUARY 1997

Council on Foreign Relations, 1993).

MENKHAUS: U.S.FOREIGN ASSISTANCE TO SOMALIA: PHOENIX FROM THE ASHES?

MIDDLE EASTPOLICY, VOL. V,NO. 1, JANUARY 1997

MENKHAUS: U.S. FOREIGN ASSISTANCE TO SOMALIA: PHOENIX FROMTHE ASHES?

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Refugee Policy Group, Hope Restored? Annex C-

MENKHAUS: U.S. FOREIGN ASSISTANCE TO SOMALIA: PHOENIX FROM THE ASHES?

to help rebuild the society and promote

MIDDLE EASTPOLICY, VOL.V, No. 1, JANUARY 1997

MENKHAUS: U.S.FOREIGN ASSISTANCE TO SOMALIA: PHOENIX FROM THE ASHES?

MIDDLE EASTPOLICY, VOL. V,No. I , JANUARY 1997

MENKHAUS: U.S. FOREIGN ASSISTANCE TO SOMALIA: PHOENIX FROM THE ASHES?

MIDDLE EASTPOLICY, VOL.V, No. 1, JANUARY 1997

19John Prendergast, Front-Line Diplomacy:

(Boulder: Lynne Rienner Pub., 1996). 148

MENKHAUS: U.S. FOREIGN ASSISTANCE TO SOMALIA: PHOENIX FROM THE ASHES?

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