Many await benefits of Marine presence
Knight Ridder/tribune
February 23, 2003
DJIBOUTI CITY, Djibouti - U.S. Marines are training in this desolate nation, America's key ally in the Horn of Africa, to fight regional terrorists or Iraqi forces.
What they are less prepared to confront is the potentially dangerous frustration that U.S. authorities and others report among Djibouti's poor. They'd hoped Uncle Sam would deliver jobs and foreign aid in return for their nation's hospitality.
"If I don't get a job, I'm going to feel angry," said Mahmoud Hussein, 24, wearing a neatly pressed shirt and pants. He was among scores of young, unemployed men seeking employment at the U.S. military base.
While Hussein appeared harmless, al-Qaida and other terrorist groups have a history of recruiting frustrated anti-American locals in the region.
"We need to make a difference in their lives, and they need to understand that having us here will have a positive benefit to them," said Marine Maj. Gen. John F. Sattler, commander of the Horn of Africa's new U.S. military forces. "We need to be contributing as well as we're using."
Last month, Djibouti's president, Ismael Omar Guelleh, took his country's case to President Bush in Washington.
After the meeting, American officials said they planned to reopen the office of the Agency for International Development, the foreign aid arm of the U.S. government, in Djibouti. The office was shut down for budgetary reasons in the mid-1990s.
"The U.S. vision of thinking that we're only here to defend U.S. interests is wrong," said Fatma Samoura, the head of the U.N. World Food Program in Djibouti. "People are getting more and more upset, and very disappointed that the U.S. is looking only after its own interest."
Reopening the U.S. aid mission, however small a gesture, underscores Djibouti's new importance, and the potential concerns. This moderate Muslim nation is an hour's speedboat ride from Yemen, Osama bin Laden's ancestral homeland. He dispatched his suicide operatives from the region to bomb U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998.
Djibouti also shares a porous border with Somalia. That lawless nation is home to al Ittihad al Islamiya, a group with reported links to al-Qaida. Somalia is also where 18 American soldiers were killed in a firefight that forced the United States to withdraw from a failed U.N. peacemaking mission in 1993. That was the last American military presence in the region.
Roughly half of Djibouti's 700,000 people are ethnic Somalis linked to various clans. There's also a sizable Somali immigrant population that travels freely across Djibouti's borders.
But what binds most Djiboutians is extreme poverty. Nearly half the population earns less than $2 a day. A third of Djibouti's children suffer from chronic or acute malnutrition, one of the continent's highest rates.
Thousands of job seekers have applied to fill the 200 or so posts available at the U.S. base, said Ibrahim Said, the manager of the employment agency that fills the jobs.
"Our people have nothing," said Daher Ahmed Farah, who leads the opposition Party for Democratic Renewal. "We are afraid that al-Qaida and other fundamentalist organizations will try to profit off the extreme poverty of our population."
Many Djiboutians hoped the Marines would inject lots of American dollars into their economy. But Djibouti's economy is so import-dependent and heavily taxed that GIs can't afford it. Beers are $5 and spaghetti is $20 a plate. Add security concerns, and you see why the Marines rarely venture from Camp Lemonier. The United States even flies in its own supplies.
Home | Contact us | Links | Archives