Corriere della Sera (in Italian), pg. 7 — Report “Too Many Italian Gifts to Barre” by Ettore Mo

Mogadishu — For $40 per day, which is the price of board at the comfortable hotel in Mogadishu in which I was staying, and which is the equivalent of 65,000 Somali shillings, an ordinary Somali family could easily make ends meet for three months: But there are homes (very many, it seems) which have scarcely 2,000 shillings (around 2,000 Italian lire) each month, and this explains the squalor of a human and social panorama with which few can compare.

The people who in the past few days have been shaking their fists and shouting “Down with Barre” outside the Villa Somali—the president’s residence–were not just protesting the slaughter in the sports stadium, the bombing of the north, or the murder of political prisoners, but a regime which has brought the country to complete destitution.

It will be necessary thoroughly to seek to discover what use has been made of foreign aid intended for Somalia’s social and economic emancipation. After winning power through a coup in October 1969, Barre’s main aim has always been to strengthen and protect his power with a rigid police and military apparatus: But the country has gradually slid into lethargy, unmoved by the Marxist
experiment with which the regime tried (at least until 1977 when, abandoned by the USSR, it requested protection from the West) to turn nomads into sedentary farmers and fishermen.

In Italy, this Marxist grimace [cipiglio marxista] by Siad Barre–who had trained as a carabiniere in Florence–was immediately welcomed and the Italian Communists, led by Pajetta, began to court him; later it was the Socialists’ turn and they launched into the former colony with fraternal haste and entrepreneurial zeal. The visits and frequent contacts with Mogadishu by Craxi, Pillhtteri, Lagorio, and Martelli are now ancient history, as are those made by Francesco Forte who, as chief of the Italian Aid Fund, invested in Somalia one fourth of the 1,900 billion lire made available by the government for underdeveloped countries.

“But what happened to that flood of lire?” one of the veterans of the Italian community in Mogadishu (around 1,300 people) now laments. “What happened to the 100 billion lire and more per year which came from Rome? It built an asphalt road from Garos to Bosaso on the Gulf of Aden which Barre needed to send his troops to control the rebels in the north.”

The construction of the road (442 km) certainly brought some economic relief to local manual laborers: but its cost, around 300 billion lire, seemed exorbitant and out of all proportion to the objectives and advantages. There is some justification for the impression that above all it was Italian construction firms which benefited.

“Frankly,” according to one of the 114 signatories of “Manifesto Number One,” which called for a change of regime at the end of May, (Jiimale Ossoble, one of the leaders, died of a heart attack in Rome yesterday– Corriere della Sera editor’s note), “the animosity shown by a section of the population toward the Italian community stems from the fact that it is unjustly blamed for your government’s campaign of aid and investment which is helping to strengthen Siad Barre’s position.”

With some delay and after so many sinister events, the Italian authorities have realized the need to limit their own moral and economic support of the former carabiniere given that he is no longer capable of controlling the situation.

“We have nothing to gain from Somalia,” our diplomats admit; “historical interests have been reduced to zero and we must now show that we also have a polticial role and not just a competitive role.” The impression is that, despite everything they intend to support him in his attempts at renewal, inspired by his belated and very uncertain democratic vocation, and this is partly to prevent Libya’s replacing Italy in the former colony with results that can be imagined.

Given the atmosphere in Mogadishu and the people’s exasperation, our government’s decision to withdraw the military representatives and stop the dispatch of 130 Italian teachers to the Somali National University in mid-July was wise: Particularly in the case of the teachers, it will be difficult to convince the poor people that their presence is not a further waste of money.

“Nobody denies the value of culture,” people at the Italian Center say, “but it must be kept in proportion. In view of the country’s conditions there is something offensive about the presence of this small army of overpaid foreign teachers. With a six-month contract, their monthly pay is around 15 million lire, and it may even be increased by 30 or 40 percent at times of greatest crisis or danger. They are entitled to bring their cars and families to Somalia, and more than 250 kg of provisions. Most arrive with generators which, when they leave, they sell to Somalis at a good profit. And many of them have discovered that it is possible to make some money by changing dollars on the black market.”

Although this behavior causes indignation and astonishment among the ordinary people, perhaps initially taken in by Marxist theory of equal distribution of goods, it does not cause any surprise in Villa Somalia where an omnivorous regime swallows up everything.

According to a recent and accurate analysis by Pietro Petrucci in PANORAMA, the economic affairs department is “the most crowded”: It is headed by Hassan Mohammed Siad, Barre’s eldest son, who is assisted by four of his sisters. This means that everything is kept in the family.

According to one of the signatories of the Manifesto who holds a key position in the Commercial Center, the greediest of these sisters “controls the entire fish market, benefits without cost from the state deep freezes, pays neither taxes nor customs duty, and receives loans from the bank of up to 15 billion shillings. [Passage omitted]

_{FBIS-WEU-90-148-A, 1 Aug. 1990, pp. 13-15}