In April, I posted a simple tweet. A video, showing the view from a plane I was on, soaring off Mogadishu’s coast before touching down at its airport. Almost immediately, a flood of replies began.
“I love my country, Somalia. The West should leave.”
“[Foreigners] bring nothing but trouble.”
“Read my lips: NGOs, they’re not welcome.”
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What was this hostility about? Gareth Owen’s new book might suggest some explanations.
This December will mark 30 years since Operation Restore Hope, when delivering humanitarian aid was used as a pretext for a US-led international military intervention in Somalia. Some 30,000 soldiers were deployed, and shortly afterwards Owen turned up, working for Irish charity Concern. The military effort would turn out to be “one of the most notorious humanitarian operations in history”, he writes; the “imposition of order through a Western gaze”.
When the Music’s Over: Intervention, Aid and Somalia is meant as an account of Owen’s experience in Somalia in 1993, though it’s worth saying that the book is comprised of “mostly fictionalised characters based on actual persons [he] encountered” — aimed at creating “the authentic spirit of the humanitarian endeavour”. This is done for understandable reasons, as the representations are not altogether flattering, though it makes it a bit unclear what is fact and what is fiction (in one interview, Owen called it “novelistic autofiction”, though his publicist assured me it is memoir).
Concern were responsible for the worthy goal of distributing food aid in some regions, as well as caring for severely malnourished children. Still, a truthful portrayal of “expat” aid worker life lends itself to some jarring juxtapositions.
The disconnection I saw this year in Somalia, where foreign UN and NGO staff eat lavishly while many Somalis are starving, is also evident here. There are a lot of descriptions of food. French legionnaires serve Owen and his colleagues red wine and peaches drowned with schnapps. A Concern staff member sends a car to “buy up all the fresh fruit and vegetables” they saw on a walk through town. Even the aid industry is constantly described using a food-related word: as a “gravy train.”
A significant amount of discussion revolves around how to get alcohol — a “coping strategy” — in a dry Muslim country. GOAL were the “undisputed champions” of party throwing, Owen writes. Near the book’s end, the Irish military make an appearance. “Like all good Paddies, the[y] announced their arrival by throwing a huge party,” where, Owen says, they served canned Guinness and Murphy’s Irish stout, and ate salmon and roast Irish beef, with sourdough and Irish butter.
Meanwhile, Owen describes denying food aid to a whole village because they turned up late for registration - a decision, he says, that he still regrets 30 years later.
The disconnect between local Somalis and foreign aid workers grows. While white people who die are mourned for weeks, a Somali killed after accompanying Concern’s team on a field assessment is described as “a sad footnote”. At one stage, Owen refers to “all Concern staff” being evacuated ahead of a break out of fighting, before mentioning that there were Somali employees left behind.
In comparison to Médecins Sans Frontières, which had a policy of neutrality Owen said he then didn’t understand, Concern worked directly with the military. He describes the French Foreign Legion using a rifle butt to push a local mayor to the ground, after he climbed on a Concern food truck to air his grievances. Another time, the local governor was woken at gunpoint in the night by French fighters and threatened. “[Locals] came to perceive Concern as merely an extension of the occupying force,” Owen writes.
This was a period, Owen explains, when aid workers lacked internet and mobile phones, and were often strikingly unaware of the big political and military pictures in the countries they were operating in. Somali leaders come off badly too, influenced by greed rather than a desire to help their own people.
Owen began to question his views on neutrality when the UN became a belligerent in the war in Mogadishu, with the help of the US, following the brutal killing of more than 20 Pakistani soldiers. In the aftermath, as many as 8,000 Somali civilians are said to have been killed by indiscriminate US firepower, and the international humanitarian intervention went, in Owen’s words, “from champions of human rights to mass murderers.” It was “a military campaign that had made an enemy of every Somali”. And the efforts to end the famine, in Owen’s opinion, were worthwhile but started too late: an estimated 300,000 Somalis perished, including a quarter of all Somali children under the age of five.
Owen is still an aid worker — he has spent his last 15 years as the humanitarian director in international charity Save The Children. He is clearly still grappling with the ethical implications of action, inaction, and all that accompanies both. In the end, he argues that as harmful as western interventions have been, “simply letting people starve or be slaughtered is always worse.”
He will be donating all royalties to the Children’s Emergency Fund.
