Piero Ugolini, a Florentine agronomist who worked for the technical cooperation unit of the Italian Embassy in Mogadishu from 1986 to 1990, says that a majority of Italian cooperation projects were carried out without considering their effects on the local populations. The result, he says, were increasing social tensions that led to the civil war. In February 1988, for example, Italy donated more than $ 4 million to set up a joint venture company that would buy cattle and sheep from the pastoral populations. The animals were fattened and exported to provide the Somali government with a source of hard currency. One year later, Siad Barre sold 3,500 head of cattle to the Yemeni army, in exchange for weapons used to fight his rivals, according to Ugolini.

"The Italian aid program was used to exploit the pastoral populations and to support a regime that did nothing to promote internal development and was responsible for the death of many of its own people," Ugolini says. Ugolini points out that the Italian authorities failed to discourage the use of what he calls "the modern equivalent of slavery" at the former "Duca degli Abruzzi" farm in Johar. More than 3,000 people were employed every year at the farm; most of them came from a prison located in the midst of the sugar plantation. Other workers were "hired" after lists were drawn up during meetings between the director of the farm, the political police, the leaders of nearby villages and the unions. The average pay was between 500 and 700 lira per day, about 50 cents.

Behind these misbegotten projects lay old-fashioned corruption. The Italian construction and engineering companies who were awarded lucrative contracts for the projects provided kickbacks to the political class in Rome and local politicians. The Italian taxpayer footed the bill. All the political parties shared control over the aid and development projects in exactly the same way that all jobs in the vast public and semi-public sector were divided up. Ethiopia, another former Italian colony in the Horn of Africa, was awarded to the Christian Democrats. The Socialist party got Somalia.

The Socialists' long affair with Siad Barre had its roots in the early 1970s, when the future dictator had embraced socialism and vowed to carry out a revolutionary transformation of the Somali pastoral society. At first, the Italian Communist Party embraced Barre. Party officials, leftist intellectuals and sympathetic businessmen all frequented Somalia. But this flirtation ended abruptly in the first months of 1978, after Barre attempted to grab the Ogaden region from Ethiopia. The Somali invasion ended in defeat and humiliation. Barre broke off with Moscow and renounced "scientific Socialism."

In October 1978, the Italy-Somali Chamber of Commerce opened in Milan, the first act of a new political alliance between the Somali Socialist Revolutionary Party and the Italian Socialist Party. The party's new leader, Bettino Craxi, was seeking to make the Socialists a force to be reckoned with. His brother-in-law, Paolo Pillitteri, was the president of the Chamber. The Chamber brokered many of the Italian-sponsored construction projects in Somalia in the 1980s.

Kickbacks became a routine part of doing business through the Chamber, according to a lawsuit filed against Craxi and Pillitteri in the spring of 1989. Gen. Mohamed Farah Aidid, a former aide to Siad Barre, alleged in the suit that the Socialists had promised him and another Somali official a "50-50 split" of the 10 percent commission on all deals settled through the Chamber. The two Somalis claimed they were owed billions of lira. A civil court in Milan dismissed the case, ruling that it was impossible to confirm the existence of an agreement to split the kickbacks without any written evidence. Aidid, whose name means "he who doesn't tolerate insults," is one of the two most powerful warlords in Somalia. Not surprisingly, he protested loudly when Italian troops returned to Somalia last December as part of Operation Restore Hope.

The corrupt relationship between the Italians and Barre, which began in 1978, flourished after 1983 when Craxi became prime minister. The Socialists flooded Somalia with millions of dollars in aid. Siad Barre obtained arms, military advisers and trainers for his armed forces. In September 1985, Craxi became the first Italian prime minister to make an official visit to Somalia, and he promised Siad Barre aid worth approximately $ 450 million over the next two years. Barre returned the visit and twice came to Rome, where he was received with all honors in 1986 and 1987. When Italian President Francesco Cossiga received the Somali dictator at the presidential palace in 1987, he congratulated Siad Barre, who had just been "re-elected" president with over 99 percent of the vote. On the Somali side, Barre's eldest son allegedly handled all the money, 48-year-old colonel Hassan Mohammed Siad, who had an apartment in the Hotel Raphael in Rome -- the same hotel where Craxi had his permanent residence in the Italian capital. During these years, many members of the Barre family (the dictator had five wives and at least 30 children) acquired property and bank accounts in Switzerland. On the Italian side, the list of beneficiaries reads like a who's who of major construction, engineering and communications firms.

By the late 1980s, the Italian government had lost touch with reality in Somalia. "We obviously had no idea of what was going on in Somalia and until the very last moment we tried to save Siad Barre," says Francesco Rutelli. In May 1988, rising dissatisfaction with Siad Barre's regime led to rebellion in northern Somalia. The dictator crushed the revolt by destroying three cities; 15,000 people died. Back in Rome, opposition politicians demanded an end to the cooperation with Somalia and were rebuffed. Detailed reports of tortures and atrocities committed by the Barre government, released by Amnesty International, had no effect on the Italian government. Rome maintained cordial relations with Siad Barre after the assassination of the bishop of Mogadishu, Salvatore Colombo, in July 1989, and even after an Italian biologist was beaten to death in the headquarters of the Somali secret services in June 1990. When members of the opposition complained in Parliament that Italy was supporting dictatorships, Socialist Foreign Minister Gianni De Michelis answered: "If we were to abandon all those states run by dictators in Africa there would be no one left to cooperate with."

Italy lost its final chance to win back some friends in Somalia when, just before Siad Barre was forced to flee Mogadishu in January 1991, Foreign Minister De Michelis tried to convince representatives of the rebel movements in Rome that a new political scenario must include the former dictator.
The tragedy of Italian involvement in Somalia, according to Rutelli and others, is that Italy was in a position thoughout the 1980s to put enormous pressure on Siad Barre and force him to change his ways. But every time he and the Greens called on the government to link the concession of Italian aid in Somalia to human rights and reforms, they were rebuffed by the powerful interests around Craxi.

Now Craxi and Pillitteri are at the center of a huge corruption scandal in Milan. Investigating magistrates claim that the Socialist Party in Milan orchestrated a huge web of corruption and kickbacks paid to local officials, belonging to almost all the political parties, in exchange for lucrative public contracts. The magistrates have asked Parliament to lift the Socialist leader's immunity from prosecution. More than 90 politicians and businessmen, many of them with close personal ties to Craxi, have been arrested, and a number of major construction companies like Cogefar and Lodigiani, which carried out some of the biggest jobs in Somalia, have also been implicated.

In Somalia, the total breakdown of civil order after Siad Barre's departure forced humanitarian agencies to withdraw and prompted the United Nations to call for U.S. intervention. When the U.S troops arrived via boat in the harbor of Mogadishu, they unknowingly passed by the rotting remains of three boats that had been paid for by an Italian government program to develop the fishing industry. The boats had never been used.
Wolfgang Achtner is a journalist in Rome.
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Stories and People
How Western Aid Helped Destroy Somalia
By George Ayittey

Somalia is probably the most egregious example of Western patronage gone berserk. Huge amounts of economic relief aid were dumped into Somalia, transforming the country into the "Graveyard of Aid." But the massive inflow of food aid in the early 1990s did much to shred the fabric of Somali society. Droughts and famines are not new to Africa, and most traditional societies developed indigenous methods of coping. Those methods were destroyed in Somalia, and the country became more and more dependent on food imports...

Food aid depressed grain prices giving local farmers fewer incentives to farm. It became easier for them to trek to the refugee centers for their food rations. The young, armed with AK-47s, saw an opportunity. Relief supplies could be looted. One Somali, Abdirahman Osman Raghe, complained bitterly, "We would talk about how food aid destroyed our systems. For many years we weren't dependent on food aid. We had droughts before."

Somalia had had a well-developed credit system. Nomads would come to urban centers during times of need in order to borrow money, which would then be repaid during good times. Such credit systems, indigenous to Somalia, were largely destroyed by massive aid sent by Western nations...

Piero Ugolini, a Florentine agronomist who worked for the technical unit of the Italian Embassy in Mogadishu from 1986 to 1990, revealed that most of Italian cooperation projects were carried out without considering their effects on the Somali population. "Italian aid programs [were] used to exploit the pastoral populations and to support a regime that did nothing to promote internal development and was responsible for the death of many of its people," he said.

Italian construction and engineering companies that were given lucrative contracts for projects in Somalia provided kickbacks to politicians in Rome and Mogadishu...
Somali president Siad Barre used this aid to purchase arms and military advisors for his armed forces, which declared war against their own people. Northern Somalia , a hotbed of opposition to Barre's tyrannical rule, was bombed on several occasions, even with napalm. Barre's eldest son, Colonel Hassan Mohammed Barre, who handled aid money, acquired property and bank accounts in Switzerland...

When the Somalia crisis erupted in 1991, a swarm of foreign non-governmental organizations descended on the country. Why so many? According to U.S. AID official Michael Maren, "There was money available from donors, so they came. The Somali government loved it as well. More NGOs meant more headquarters in Mogadishu. Most of the major landlords in the city were relatives of the president [Barre] or other high government officials."

Very quickly the aims of the humanitarian mission became perverted. Each group or organization involved in the relief efforts saw in the famine/war crisis an opportunity to advance its own sectarian agenda. Refugee aid became such an important source of foreign exchange that the Somali government grossly inflated the number of refugees. According to US AID official Maren:

The million and half refugees who were allegedly in Somalia didn't exist. The Somali Government liked to say 1.5 million. Journalists liked to say 1.5 million. It looked good and added a weightiness to their stories. Several pres reports even took the liberty of pushing the figure up to 2 million. My own rough estimates from the time spent in the camps made me suspect that even 400,000 was generous.

Nor was the Somali government interested in resettling or solving the refugee crisis, as that would eliminate its source of foreign currency... In addition, relief aid provided Somali soldiers with a means to supplement their income.

A large part of donor funds often goes to feed a hungry bureaucracy. Aggressive lobbying campaigns often are launched to provide justification for the continuation of food relief aid...
How much of the food actually reaches the needy? In the case of Save the Children, in 1994 less than 50 percent of the total of sponsors' dollars actually went in grants to field programs. Of that amount, about half was given in grants to other organizations, which also had their own salaries and expenses, to actually implement relief programs.

Even then, not all the programs on the ground were defensible. Michael Maren, the US official, provides examples of such "idiotic projects":

Oxfam was teaching refugees to grow onions and cabbages and peppers in the refugee camp. The two Oxfam agriculturalists discussed their dilemma nightly: The idea behind their project was to make refugees more self-sufficient. But if the refugees were going to return to their nomadic way of life, these skills wouldn't be very useful. And if they were going to settle down and become farmers, they'd need to know a lot more about agriculture than how to grow just a few cash crops. The Oxfam team drank their whiskey every night and wondered aloud why they were doing what they were doing that day."

Because of Africa's social system of extended families, there is no such thing as an orphan. A child without parents can always find an aunt, cousin or some distant relative to serve as a guardian. Yet Maren points to "a Canadian group [that] arrived one day looking for orphans. They checked into the local office of the [Somali] National Refugee Commission and were given permission to collect whatever orphans they found. Thirty or forty children were gathered together and loaded onto a truck and carted off to an orphanage in Mogadishu, while their clan elders protested."
 

The Summary Of  The Project And Bilateral Aid To Somalia From 1985-1990

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Excerpted from Africa in Chaos by George Ayittey of the Free Africa Foundation . George Ayittey is a professor of economics at American University and president of the Free Africa Foundation.


 

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