How Italy Aided in the Ruin of Somalia & Fighting SNM

The agony of Somalia has its roots in the endemic political corruption of Italy. Throughout the 1980s, Italian politicians and businessmen used the country, once a colony of Italy’s, as a playground for huge construction projects that either did little to help the local population or actually disrupted and damaged Somalian society.

“Italy is definitely responsible for the tribal warfare and the genocide in Somalia,” says Francesco Rutelli, a congressman for the environmentalist Green Party, which has played a leading role in exposing what has become a scandal in Italy. The United States, while not deeply involved in Somalia, was well aware of what was going on. Two U.S. ambassadors to Rome, Maxwell Rabb III and Peter Secchia, relayed Washington’s approval of Italian policy in the Horn of Africa in the late 1980s, according to Western diplomats and Italian officials.

The reality of Italy’s cynical role in Somalia is clear from documents made available to Parliament by the Italian Foreign Ministry. They show that Italy sponsored 114 projects in Somalia between 1981 and 1990, spending more than a billion dollars. With few exceptions (such as a vaccination program carried out by non-government organizations), the Italian ventures were absurd and wasteful.

Approximately $250 million was spent on the Garoe-Bosaso road that stretches 450 kilometers across barren desert, crossed only by nomads on foot. More than $40 million was spent to build a brand new hospital equipped with sophisticated machinery and operating rooms, in Corioley, south of Mogadishu. Since the Somalis were unable to run it, the hospital was allowed to fall to pieces. The Italian government paid about $95 million for a fertilizer plant in Mogadishu that never became operational. The Italians even established a University of Somalia — despite the fact that 98 percent of the population is illiterate. The Italian professors received salaries between $16,000 and $20,000 per month.

“If you consider that from 1981 to 1990 Italian aid to Somalia was almost equal to 50 percent of the country’s {Somalia’s} GNP and that for years Italy was the major donor of aid to Somalia,” says Rutelli, “it’s easy to see what a negative influence we had and just how great our reponsibilities are.”

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.

Control over the aid and development projects was shared by all the political parties 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

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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, Barre was embraced by the Italian Communist Party. 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.”