Tropic of Chaos_ Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence - Christian Parenti [40]
The cost of war had crushed Somalia’s small, agriculturally based economy. External debt tripled from $95 million in 1976 to $288 million in 1979.20 The government’s macroeconomic policy was described as “erratic, inconsistent,” and often moving “from one set of objectives to another, thereby confusing the domestic market.” By 1990, as the Somali state began its final descent into chaos, its external debt to Western lenders was $1.9 billion, or 360 percent of its GDP. The crisis had originated in the military expenditures of the Ogaden war.21
Into the Abyss
Siad Barre held on to Mogadishu until January 1991, when three loosely coordinated rebel groups forced him to flee. The dictator’s military crumbled along clan lines, and his abandoned arsenals released a new wave of guns into Somalia, northern Kenya, and the whole Horn of Africa. As Terence Lyonses and Ahmed I. Samatar put it, “The demise of a state is inherently linked to a breakdown of social coherence on an extensive level as civil society can no longer create, aggregate, and articulate the supports and demands that are the foundations of the state. Without the state, society breaks down and without social structure, the state cannot survive.”22 A long-rotting structure came crashing down, and Somalia has not had a functioning government since. Worse yet, its war and constant instability have infected the entire region. The flow of weapons, ammunition, contraband, and armed men across borders has created a lawless zone that, increasingly, includes Kenya.
The Ogaden War, like the Ugandan invasion of Tanzania, was not initiated by the Cold War superpowers, but their compulsion to arm proxies badly exacerbated the conflicts. Put simply: imported weapons have brought Africa to its knees. Though it is not immediately obvious, all of this history came to bear when those Pokot raiders gunned down the Turkana herder, Ekaru Loruman, in a fight over cattle and water in the drought-stricken badlands of Kenya.
CHAPTER 8
Theorizing Failed States
The proceedings of civil and criminal jurisdiction . . . were
finally suppressed; and the indiscriminate crowd of noble and
plebeian slaves was governed by the traditionary customs which
had been coarsely framed for the shepherds, and pirates of
Germany. The language of science, of business, and of conversation,
which had been introduced by the Romans, was lost in the
general desolation.
—EDWARD GIBBON, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
THE SKY OVER Kisangani is flat and gray, but it never rains. Down by the river, market women sell small heaps of edible caterpillars, but no one seems to buy them. The streets of this small city at the heart of the Congo Basin are strangely calm and almost devoid of cars, most of which were looted during two recent invasions.
The old art deco buildings of the colonial era have slid into ruin, slowly succumbing to the rain, mildew, and vegetation, as if fading away before one’s eyes. No roads connect Kisangani to the rest of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) or any other part of the world; the jungle has retaken the tarmac strips. At the riverfront, the muddy water flows past as it has for millennia; a further thirteen hundred miles from here, over a massive set of cataracts, the rough, churning, brown river spills into the sea, bringing debris and floating plants with it.
Kisangani began as a Belgian trading station. Henry Morton Stanley established it for King Leopold on the American’s third bloody march through Congo in 1883.1Joseph Conrad used the spot as a model for his inner station in