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Colonizing east africa Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-djibouti23dec23001435,0,3092906.story?coll=la%2Dheadlines%2Dworld%2Dmanual"I was so angry," Youssouf said. "Don't give us $3 million for security at our airport when we need schools, jobs, clinics, wells and roads. I told them: 'We don't want this money. Take it back to Washington.'
Farah, who is known as Daf, for his initials, said he has warned Western diplomats: "If you want this military platform to continue to be quiet, you have to help us make sure these elections are transparent. So if people are unhappy, anything can happen. An explosion is possible, just like the one that happened over there" in Somalia.
"They come, they do as they like, they disturb our peace, they give us no jobs and, finally, the impression is negative."
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-djibouti23dec23001435,0,3092906.story?coll=la%2Dheadlines%2Dworld%2Dmanual
THE WORLD
Djiboutians See No Payoff for U.S. Presence
Surrounded by poverty, the U.S. military sticks to its secretive base in the Horn of Africa.
By Mark Fineman
Times Staff Writer
December 23 2002
DJIBOUTI -- Just beyond the barbed-wire berms and guard posts that mask the U.S. military's secretive special-operations base, past a cratered road strewn with scrap heaps and human waste, Kadija Omar expects the Americans to deliver.
Like her desperate nation, the 40-year-old mother of six has been waiting for American jobs, food, money, schools, medicine and even a bit of U.S.-style democracy, said Omar, who earns $5 a month smuggling diesel fuel into neighboring Somalia.
But for the moment, she and her 2,000 neighbors in a parched squatters' patch of tin, plywood and sand in the shadow of the U.S. military's Camp Lemonier would settle for a few engine parts to get the pump in their well up and running. It has been broken since August, leaving a vegetable crop to wither.
Villagers asked the American soldiers for help weeks ago, she said, when their Humvees rumbled through on a security patrol. But still, Omar said, sighing as she cradled a baby covered in flies, "we are waiting."
A full year after the Djiboutian government quietly gave the U.S. military free land, free rein and full secrecy for a forward base to hunt Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups in troubled East Africa, even senior officials grumble that they have gotten precious little in return. The U.S. must do more to contribute to this deeply impoverished Muslim nation, they and others said, or it will soon lose the hearts and minds of a country that is culturally, linguistically and socially almost identical to neighboring Somalia -- the failed nation where U.S. soldiers were savagely beaten to death and dragged through the streets in a fierce battle that ended America's last military venture in East Africa nearly a decade ago.
The U.S. military's return to this turbulent region through a strategic beachhead in so needy a land says much about the often-conflicting priorities in America's global war on terror. It is a portrait of what ensues when a superpower meets superpoverty in a quirky, little-known nation suddenly thrust onto center stage in a new kind of war.
"We are poor. We have nothing," said Mahmoud Ali Youssouf, minister of international cooperation. "We readily enrolled in this global war on terror after 9/11, and we've given the Americans everything they have wanted. But for the time being, we haven't seen anything from the United States in return."
Several weeks ago, a visiting U.S. delegation added insult to injury, Youssouf said. The Agency for International Development offered his government just $4 million in development aid for this nation of 600,000 people. Three-fourths of it was earmarked for upgrading security at Djibouti's international airport.
"I was so angry," Youssouf said. "Don't give us $3 million for security at our airport when we need schools, jobs, clinics, wells and roads. I told them: 'We don't want this money. Take it back to Washington.'
"We're not begging for such money. But if you're going to spend money here, spend it more effectively. We have basic needs."
The scene from dawn until dusk at the corner of Athens and London streets in downtown Djibouti, the capital city, is testimony to the most basic need: Hundreds of young men waving resumes and trade certificates gather each workday at the Personnel Management Agency. The tiny storefront allots the precious few menial jobs the American base has on offer.
"America! America! We want a job," they chanted one day last week, crushing against the entrance. A manager later explained that thousands had applied for 250 day-labor jobs that the base had filled three weeks before. "And still they come every day," he said.
Since independence from France in 1977, Djibouti has survived on foreign aid; its main domestic product is salt. Official corruption, which is as endemic here as cholera, has kept much of the aid from those who need it most.
Djibouti has the highest rate of malnutrition in all of Africa, a chronic condition that draws none of the emergency food given to its neighbors fighting famine. The U.S. gives Djibouti about 8,000 tons of food a year through the United Nations in an aid program that long predates the American military base.
Ninety-nine of every 1,000 Djiboutians die at birth, and the maternal death rate is triple that of Rwanda -- the result of a bad diet, widespread maternal anemia and rampant female genital excision. About 60% of all Djiboutians are unemployed. Female rural illiteracy tops 85%. And the average Djiboutian lives just 51 years.
"The needs are enormous here," said Jorge Mejia, the resident representative of UNICEF. "All the economic indicators are extremely low."
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A Skewed Economy
The prices of Djibouti's consumer goods also top the list for Africa. Everything is imported and heavily taxed. The result is a skewed, split-screen national economy, where Cabinet ministers and a tiny elite of powerful businessmen dine on lobster and steak au poivre with European dignitaries on crisp linen in fine French restaurants, while most Djiboutians cook vegetables and pasta over open fires fed with scrap wood outside tin shacks. A block from the sweltering job seekers at the U.S.-base employment agency, foreigners and wealthy Djiboutians pay $3.50 an hour for Internet access at air-conditioned workstations in the Filga Foire Informatique, a cafe that even features private Web cameras.
So far, though, U.S. aid for Djibouti appears to be targeting America's most basic needs. The airport-security funds that U.S. AID officials recently offered are for an international airport that abuts the new Camp Lemonier, which reportedly houses the most secretive Army, Navy and intelligence forces in the terror war.
The U.S. government has also committed an additional $2 million to renovate state-run Radio Djibouti, along with $100,000 in annual rent, in exchange for a strategic transmission station the U.S. is building for the Voice of America just outside the capital. The targeted audience: Yemen and the southern regions of Saudi Arabia -- rich recruiting grounds for Al Qaeda and home to more than half the Sept. 11 hijackers.
America also is spending $500,000 to help finance next month's Chamber of Deputies elections here, which diplomats say will be a lightning rod for Djibouti's democratic aspirations -- and for a possible anti-American backlash if the polls are seen as unfair.
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Watershed Vote
It will be the first multiparty election in Djibouti's quarter-century of independence, and U.S. officials are hoping it will usher in a stable era of democracy. After the French ended colonial rule, the country became a typical, one-party African autocracy. A new constitution ratified in 1992 -- the year that also marked the beginning of Djibouti's nine-year civil war -- called for the multiparty system to begin now. An opposition, five-party coalition launched its first campaign last month.
"These elections are very, very important for the future of this country because we are in a situation that cannot continue," said Daher Ahmed Farah, a former political prisoner and newspaper editor who leads the opposition Party for Democratic Renewal.
"People are very, very angry. Until now, the anger is generalized. People want change, and we are determined not to allow the government to steal the election."
Farah, who is known as Daf, for his initials, said he has warned Western diplomats: "If you want this military platform to continue to be quiet, you have to help us make sure these elections are transparent. So if people are unhappy, anything can happen. An explosion is possible, just like the one that happened over there" in Somalia.
Farah stressed that Djiboutians remain a peaceful and welcoming people, and most diplomats here played down the likelihood of an anti-American backlash. But they too cautioned that the potential for it is compounded by the lack of tangible U.S. assistance.
"The American troops live in a closed system," Farah added. "We have no positive communication with them. They just stay in their base. Their only communication with the people is through their power, when they go to the countryside and fire their weapons during their exercises.
"They come, they do as they like, they disturb our peace, they give us no jobs and, finally, the impression is negative."
President Ismail Omar Guelleh said in an interview Saturday that "it is normal that we should get something" in exchange for allowing the U.S. military to have a base in Djibouti. Negotiations for a formal base agreement that will fix those benefits are underway and will be signed in January, he said, but he ruled out any anti-American backlash by the Djiboutians if the U.S. falls short.
Guelleh, a former police intelligence officer, said his people were likely to be merely disappointed. "We are a peaceful country."
U.S. Marine Maj. Gen. John F. Sattler, commander of the region's new military forces, said he would fight the shortcomings in American aid.
"Guilty as charged," he said on his command ship that arrived near Djibouti's shores just a week ago. "If we just build a camp, and we stay inside that camp, and we don't bring folks in to work in the camp, and there's no distribution of wealth outside by virtue of spending our money in the Djiboutian economy, I would feel the same way they did."
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Different Spending
A beer in town costs $6, a pizza $17 -- prices that have helped keep the U.S. troops at Camp Lemonier off the streets and largely confined to a camp that brings in its own supplies and contributes almost nothing to the economy. That American dearth contrasts sharply with a French largess that has accompanied the thousands of soldiers and French Foreign Legion troops Paris has maintained here since independence.
The French forces are credited with preserving Djibouti as a nation. Without them, it probably would have been swallowed by neighboring Somalia or Ethiopia, which coveted its seaport. And unlike the Americans, the French have been ubiquitous, buying from local markets, using local services and renting local houses, until they opened a modern French compound that is a virtual city within the capital a few years ago.
According to one U.N. calculation, Djibouti's annual per-capita income is $800 when the salaries of the 2,800 French troops stationed here are included. When they're not, that figure is cut almost in half.
Even the German navy, which is part of the coalition task force patrolling the region for terrorists, has spent a fortune here. On average, a spokesman said, it has contributed $2 million a month to the local economy since its 800-strong force arrived in February.
Yet, only a fraction of that has trickled down to the impoverished grass roots.
Eight miles outside town, near the future site of the VOA transmitter, sits the squalid Pointe Kilometre 12 squatters' city. Among the few concrete foreign-aid projects that these 10,000 people have seen since they were scooped up by police in the capital and shipped out to a barren stretch of desert 20 years ago is a mosque built by Saudi Arabia.
The mosque is a rare solid structure in PK 12, as the locals call their village. It's part of a Saudi project that has financed hundreds of new mosques throughout Djibouti, Pakistan, Yemen and other impoverished Muslim countries. The program is largely meant to export Saudi Arabia's fundamentalist Wahabbite form of Islam -- the religion shared by most of the Sept. 11 hijackers and Al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden.
"We don't care about this Wahabbism. We Djiboutians are far too moderate for all of that," explained Mohammed Nour, 30, who helped organize a village development committee in a squatter city that lacks electricity and running water but does feature a school built by the U.N.
"The U.N. also has given us some sewing machines and training, and that is a good start. But what we really need is sustained vocational training, a factory where we can produce something. Maybe even some old computers, and a generator to run them.
"We are happy to meet the Americans. We need the Americans. We have been trying to find them. But until now, they're invisible."
Minister Youssouf agreed. "We'd like to keep the Americans in this country because we believe there is a great potential for us, and for them," he said. "But if the Americans do not play this kind of game, or use this kind of strategy, it is they who will be the ultimate loser, not we."
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Copyright 2002 Los Angeles Times
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