Prof Ioan M Lewis Perception Of Somalia/Somaliland in 11 years Ago.

[Gaashaamo]

*********** In The Land Of The Living Dead ********

 

by Prof Ioan M. Lewis

London School Of Economic(LSE),

University Of London.

London, England, UK.

 

 

Spare a thought, as you read this, for a brave and clever Algerian diplomat called Mohamed Sahnoun. It is his job to do something that has broken lesser men through the ages: to bring some order to the deadly anarchy of the clans of the Somalis.

 

Not only that: as the new representative of the United Nations secretary general, Sahnoun has taken on the fierce and suspicious Somalis at a time when they are more fractious, more belligerent and better armed than ever before when the warriors have swapped their old weapons for the tanks and bazookas of the cold war, and the chaos threatens the lives of millions.

 

Nearly 80 years ago, a brave servant of the empire called Richard Corfield also tried to bring order to the Somalis, when they were in rebellion under a religious leader dubbed the Mad Mullah by the British. All Corfield got for his pains was a bullet in the head in battle and a place in the epic poetry of Somalia a bloodthirsty hymn to victory that has lived on in a society steeped in antagonism to outsiders.

 

No doubt Sahnoun, in his high-walled villa in Mogadishu, is better protected.. But the passions that killed Corfield have not abated.

 

THE PEOPLE

 

THE first thing to understand about the Somalis is that they are not as other men. Richard Burton, the famous Arabist and explorer who trekked across their lands in the 1850s, called the Islamic Somali nomads a ''fierce and turbulent race of republicans''. More pungently, a Ugandan sergeant with the British forces fighting the Mad Mullah went on record as telling his officer: ''Somalis, Bwana, they no good: each man his own sultan.''

 

In other words, they take orders from nobody; and their sense of independence is matched by a supremely uncentralised and fragmented degree of political organisation, a kind of ordered anarchy. The basis of political allegiance is blood kinship, or genealogy. Children learn their ancestors' names by heart back to 20 generations and more. A Somali does not ask another where he is from but whom he is from. Strangers who meet, recite their genealogies until they reach a mutual ancestor the more closely they are related the more readily they unite, transiently, against others: ''Myself against my brother; my brother and I against my cousin; my cousin and I against the outsider.''

 

 

In general terms, they are divided into five or six major families of clans, sub-divided into many segments. Traditionally, their elders settled potential blood feuds between them by a strict system of compensation. Today, however, this nomadic society, with its goats, sheep and camels, has hit the age of the Kalashnikov. Every family has a high-powered weapon, and uses it; no tally of bloodshed can be kept and responsibility for violence is not clear; so the old system of reconciliation has been undermined. Even the minimal basis of order has broken down and violence is endemic.

 

How did it come to this? Some modern Somalis like to trace their history back to the ancient world, when, they believe, agents of the pharoahs sought frankincense and myrrh from bushes on the hills of northern Somalia. (These still grow there.) But probably the best point at which to start explaining the present is the end of the 19th century, when an African army gave Italy a shock and forced a decision that still costs many lives.

 

During the European ''scramble for Africa'', the Horn of Africa had strategic importance because it lay on the route to India and Indochina. France set up a base in Djibouti, while Britain the rival superpower set up shop in Aden on the other side of the Red Sea. To contain the French (and secure a supply of mutton for Aden), the British moved in to northern Somalia, and also encouraged the ambitious new state of Italy to colonise the rest of the Somali lands.

 

Menelik II, emperor of Abyssinia, the land that is now Ethiopia, had a surprise in store. Italy wooed him and even supplied him with weapons, thinking it could get dominion over his country. But Menelik turned on the Italians, defeating them in battle in 1896. The important point is not the humiliation of Italy but that, in subsequent negotiations, the British let Menelik have control of the Ogaden, a huge area populated by Somalis. This decision was to trigger further wars right up to the present, and is a principal reason for the extent of the current bloodshed.

 

THE COLONY

 

TO generations of colonial officials in Whitehall, the British protectorate of Somaliland became a hardship post. It had its attractions: the semi-arid interior, where gazelles grazed in huge numbers among the acacia trees, became a haven for big-game hunters; and the coastal coral reefs were the world's hidden beauties. But the rebellion of the Mad Mullah (Mahammed Abdille Hasan) lasted 20 years and eventually had to be put down by air power. Subsequently, London rarely had more than 200 officials in the protectorate at a time to disturb the clans of nomads with their epic poems and blood feuds.

 

Italy, on the other hand, took its colony of Somalia much more seriously. Italian settlers grew fruit in the fertile south and the mafia found there were profits in importing Somali bananas. Under Mussolini, Italy also took its revenge on the Ethiopians, invading in 1935 and holding on until British and Commonwealth troops arrived in the second world war.

 

The defeated Italians later got their colony back until 1960, when it formed a democratic, modern Somalia with British Somaliland. This democracy under a succession of elected coalitions representing various clans lasted for nine years, until the army took power after the murder of the president.

 

The ideology of the time was to try to erode the tradition of the clans, and the new Soviet-leaning military government under General Mohammed Siad Barre a former policeman and a bit of an old sweat carried out ceremonies ''burying'' the clans. But people got around that by talking to each other of their ''ex-clans'', the same old genealogical catechism in new clothes.

 

At the same time, the trappings of a people's democracy appeared. Scientific socialism became the creed of the day. A national security service was set up under East German guidance, headed by the president's son-in-law. And Soviet advisers and weaponry stiffened the armed forces.

 

Once again, it was an event in Ethiopia that determined Somalia's fate. In 1974, young officers overthrew Emperor Haile Selassie in Addis Ababa, and the subsequent turmoil weakened the Ethiopian army's grip on the Ogaden. The Somali clansmen there prepared to renew their campaign for independence. Siad's mother was an Ogadeni and her clan looked to him for support. In fact, despite ''scientific socialism'' and the ''burying'' of the clans, Siad's power was clan-based.

 

By 1977, Ogadeni guerrilla forces had started to push the disorganised Ethiopian forces out of the Ogaden and full-scale war rapidly erupted between the two neighbouring states. America had traditionally been Ethiopia's superpower ally, but President Jimmy Carter was showing less interest in its fate.

 

The Americans were withdrawing and the Russians felt drawn into the vacuum. Ethiopia, a huge state, was a much greater strategic prize than chaotic, demanding Somalia. Oddly, the Russians had also had a 19th-century fascination with Ethiopia: Ethiopian ancestry was ascribed to Pushkin, the national poet, and the Russian Orthodox church felt links with Ethiopia's Copt-like Christianity.

 

The Russians made one of the most breathtaking acts of treachery in history, switching theirmilitary advisers from the Somali to the Ethiopian side and routing the Somali forces. The result was not just humiliation for Siad, but the arrival in Somalia of 500,000 Ogadeni refugees, many of them guerrillas with their weapons the first wave in the flood of modern weaponry that was to transform Somalia.

 

THE COLLAPSE

 

THE Ogaden campaign had been immensely popular and the Somali defeat prompted bitter recrimination, exacerbated by the influx of refugees and the loss of the familiar Soviet patronage. Siad naively assumed that the Americans would move in overnight to replace the Russians, but he got only defensive weapons from them. The EC also provided financial aid, urged on by Italy, which still had settlers in Somalia and some of whose politicians, it was later to be alleged, may have had a personal interest in the flow of money.

 

Dissent was gathering momentum. In 1978 there was an attempted coup, and the organisers escaped to Ethiopia, where they regrouped with the encouragement of Addis Ababa and started cross-border raids. More significantly, in 1981 a group of exiles in London formed the Somali National Movement (SNM) in the Marlborough pub in Gower Street with the support of professionals and former ministers based in Saudi Arabia.

 

The SNM was based on the Isakh clans of northern Somalia, the former British protectorate, where Siad's forces were becoming increasingly oppressive and discriminatory. The north was rent by grazing disputes between the local Isakh and refugees from the Ogaden, who were also being illegally recruited into Siad's forces and encouraged to take over the Isakh businesses. The point was that the Isakh were heavily involved in livestock exports to the Gulf (shades of the old Aden mutton trade), where a large number of their clansmen were also established as migrant labour, known locally as the ''brawn drain''. Taken together, these activities earned lucrative remittances for the northerners, but were not passed through the official Somali banking system.

 

Siad and his clansmen, the ***** , progressively tried to harass and replace the Isakh entrepreneurs, and the military brutally suppressed the local people. The SNM, with Ethiopian support, began retaliatory raids, and repression increased accordingly.

 

In 1988, there was another cynical deal. Siad and President Mengistu Haile Mariam of Ethiopia, both tottering in the face of internal dissent, agreed to stop supporting insurgents on each other's territory. Expecting to be thrown out of its Ethiopian bases, the SNM took the initiative, entering northern Somalia in strength and defeating Siad's forces. His retaliation was brutal.. His military took apart Hargeisa, the northern capital, with such ferocity that even now it is still a wasteland.

 

Even so, Siad had lost his grip. The Isakh of the SNM encouraged other clans to take up arms. Siad, falling back on his capital, Mogadishu, desperately tried to manipulate the clan system, dividing and ruling and distributing modern weapons from his huge stockpile. The end came when another clan family, the ****** , which had long been docile clans, formed a powerful militia in Mogadishu itself known as USC. Siad turned his artillery on USC held areas of the city, triggering an extremely bloody uprising that swept him from power in January last year(1991).

 

But that was not the end of the matter. While the Isakh clans consolidated their hold in the north, and eventually declared it independent state known as "Republic Of Somaliland" on the boundaries of the old British Somaliland protectorate, the USC forces in the south split apart. Some, under General Mohamed Farah Aideed, a former ambassador to India who had broken with Siad after exposing corrupt links with Italy, set off in pursuit of the fleeing ex-president. Others, under Ali Mahdi Mohamed, a prominent businessman, stayed behind in Mogadishu and proclaimed a separate government.

 

The division between Aideed and Mahdi (to whom the Arabs and Italians tended to be sympathetic) degenerated into the terrible, internecine civil war that has now devastated so much of Mogadishu and southern Somalia.

 

This man-made catastrophe has been driven on by the most readily available resource in Somalia arms. Weapons in huge quantities were left behind by Siad's forces and were bought cheaply from the disintegrating Ethiopian army (Mengistu had fallen from power, too). Weapons and ammunition were also arriving across the Kenyan border and by ship. Imports of the drug qat have played a grim role, too, in the increasingly terrible situation (see panel).

 

THE FAMINE

 

THE consequences of this strife are now all too apparent. Nobody really knows how many people have died in Somalia in what aid workers say is the world's greatest emergency; worse than the famine that killed 1m in Ethiopia in 1984-5. Some say 200 children die every day in Mogadishu. But how many are dying in forgotten tracts of bush 500 miles, 100 miles or even 10 miles outside the city? Some say 1.5m people (a third of the population) are starving; others say 4m. After 18 months of civil war, which has reduced Somalia to anarchy, there is no way of finding out.

 

Foreign aid workers fear it may be too late for the hundreds of thousands left helpless, but they have set up emergency food centres to try to stop the tide of death. Baidoa was once a wealthy town, built by Italian colonists 150 miles from Mogadishu. Now pitiful figures file silently past its sun-baked Italianate buildings, drawn by news that food is there. Kurtun Warey was a huge state farm 100 miles south of the capital; French doctors have transformed it into a sanctuary for shattered survivors of the famine. Merca, on the coast, is still a beautiful town of 18th-century Arab buildings, where the Italian expatriates used to take their holidays. Now an Italian doctor feeds the thousands of emaciated wanderers. There is food to be bought; and there are boats to sanctuary in Kenya for those with money. But wealthy Somalis ignore the starving strangers.

 

In this terrible anarchy, not only are children left to die but warlords and their gunmen commandeer the food sent to save them. Food is a strategic weapon and armed gangs have seized aid shipments. UN officials have had to recruit the gunmen as ''guards'' in effect, paying protection money to save food for the hungry. Some aid workers see only one solution: flood the country with 40,000 tonnes of food a month, so that there is so much that the price drops and the cynical merchants who have stockpiled food in their warehouses are forced to sell their hoards on the open market.

 

The UN is trying to restore control, but two of its unarmed soldiers were shot and badly wounded in the preliminary to a looting raid on an aid shipment on Friday.

 

THE MUSLIMS

 

SOME reports from north-east Somalia suggest there has also been an upsurge in Islamic fundamentalism strong enough to challenge the authorities there.

 

This region is controlled by the Majerteyn clan grouping through its army, the Somali Salvation Democratic Front (SSDF). For over a year, according to aid agency sources, the SSDF tolerated a fundamentalist group controlling the region's main port, Bossaso. They proved to be honest and efficient workers and Bossaso became the focal point for fundamentalists from all over Somalia.

 

In January 1992, however, a visiting Unicef doctor was killed and a representative of another agency, Care, wounded while eating supper in Bossaso. The masked gunmen ran away and were never caught.

 

Later, according to the reports, open fighting broke out in Bossaso between SSDF troops and fundamentalists who were well-trained, armed, financed and equipped, apparently with Iranian and Sudanese money. There were also reports of Saudi support for the gunmen. SSDF commanders suspected that the fundamentalists were about to make a bid for total control of the region and forced them out of the territory.

 

Further south, in and around Mogadishu, where the militias are unsympathetic to anyone preaching against cigarettes, loose women and qat, fundamentalism is not so evident, according to aid workers.

 

Aid workers say that fundamentalist groups offer food, money, education and clean clothes and uniforms, weapons and training for militiamen. But some Somalis suspect foreign Islamic powers of having designs on what they believe are potentially large oil reserves in the north.

 

WHAT NOW?

 

WITH the UN now preparing to send 3,000 troops to guard and distribute food aid, can anything further be done to pull back the Somalis from complete catastrophe? To me, the priority lies in trying to re-establish the authority of clan elders, however difficult that may appear. Although war lords will have to be negotiated with to secure entry for aid, every effort should be made to boost the clan elders by using them as food distribution channels. Their cooperation would improve security for the UN's plans to develop humanitarian aid corridors at ports along the coast and on the Kenya border, which should be amplified to achieve the widest possible distribution of food and medicine. The UN could also try giving priority to regions where clan elders have established relative tranquility.

 

Somalia as a whole can only be rebuilt from the bottom up, as the increasingly active clan units develop common economic and other interests.

 

In the meantime, a UN presence is needed immediately, with appropriate military support to deliver humanitarian aid. The 3,000 soldiers who are being sent may not be sufficient. The arrival of French foreign legionnaires from nearby Djibouti would be the ideal solution.

 

Then there will be more for the UN to do, including the development of social services, such as education. The UN should also have a radio station to explain its aims and actions to the general public, who are avid radio listeners.

 

In other words, there should be an interim UN administration, requiring the substantial and imaginative involvement of the international community and stronger efforts to reduce arms sales to the various Somali factions, if necessary with military assistance from Britain and other EC(European Community) countries. By no means least important, either, should be controlling the import from Kenya of the qat that sustains so many of the gunmen.

 

 

Copyright 1992 Times Newspapers Limited

Sunday Times, London, England, UK.

 

August 30, 1992, Sunday.

[LANDER]

thanks for the article Gashaamo,

it was a refreshing look back in history...

[Samakab]

Interesting artical gaashaamo, very pleased to read. Although I was aware that Somali National Movement (SNM) was formed in London, it was a shock for me to hear that it was in pub :eek: Astagfurulah. Maybe the founders of sepretists movement were drunk when they drew the roadmap of distruction and division. May Allah forgive the wrong dowers.

[AYOUB]

thanks for that Gaashaamo, we all know what happen in the eleven years after Prof. Lewis' essay.

 

Lander nice to see you made it through the celebration!

 

Samakab wouldn't it be more appropriate for you to say ASTAGHFURLLAH for these actions:

 

.'..becomming increasingly oppressive'

 

'.....tried to harass and replace the Isakh entrepreneurs, and the millitary brutally supressed local people' etc etc

 

SNM are the only anti Siad movement still regarded as heroes by their people. Brave in battle magmanimous in victory. Unlike some pretenders, those young men and women have kept their word and are back to their day jobs after fulfilling their duties. I'm not asking a 'cyber guul wade' to bite the hand that fed it, but if you were sincere you would quietely welcome the fall of a government that built a brewery in a muslim country.

 

Prof. Lewis points out many errors made by Siad's people, i believe the biggest one is how they underestmated the SNM.

 

Who do they blame for the 11 barbaric years after SNM?

 

-----------------------------------

 

'YOU CAN RUN, BUT YOU CANNOT HIDE- JOE LOUIS.

[Samakab]

Originally posted by AYOUB_SHEIKH:

[QB]

 

 

..but if you were sincere you would quietely welcome the fall of a government that built a brewery in a muslim country.

 

 

....Who do they blame for the 11 barbaric years after SNM?

 

Interesting when you hear northeners talk about their "Holocaust". Its pitty for you my friend to even celebrate the fall of "your" government. If your defenition of Somali government is Siyaad's kingdom, you are wrong. The marxuum done more for you than his cousins or as you know them "his ppl".

 

Question : Suppose If the USC havn't acted barbarically as in jan '91, and no civil war broke out following the removal of siyaad. Imagine if a northener been selected to be a president. Would you have supported that government? if you are an ethnic somali, you would have jumped, bounced, cried for happiness and have your own "Kacaan" to replace the old one.

 

Who we blame for the 11 barbaric years? Those who cheered for the end of Somalia, and cheered "death to the unity". They know themselves and I'm not in a position to name.

 

By the way, the brewery you mentioned above, is it the one that russian built it somewhere in togdheer and still in use up to date? Astagfurullah siyaad on your wrong doing :confused:

[LANDER]

The marxuum done more for you than his cousins or as you know them "his ppl".

and exactly what has the "marxuum" done for the likes of ayoub?