Somalia Foreign Minister’s Missteps are not “Unprecedented”

[Deeq A.]

Classified documents of the State Department indicate that in 1971 Addou told an American officer from the State Department that “Somalia has “virtually lost its independence” to the Soviet Union”

Fiqi wrote a letter to the United Nations and asked for “the termination of the mandate of United Nations Assistance Mission in Somalia (UNSOM).

Mogadishu (PP Report) — The Somali Foreign Ministry under Ahmed Moallim Fiqi undergoes an uncertain period of foreign policy making similar to the early 1970s when Dr. Abdullahi Ahmed Addou was the Somali Ambassador to the United States. This week Fiqi wrote a letter to the United Nations and asked for “the termination of the mandate of United Nations Assistance Mission in Somalia (UNSOM)”.

There is an inexplicable link between the popular perception that Addou was a capable diplomat and the depiction of his interactions with US diplomats for more than 14 years first as an ambassador and then as the  Minister of the Presidency.  Declassified documents of the State Department indicate that in 1971 Addou told an American officer from the State Department that “Somalia has “virtually lost its independence” to theSoviet Union. The Somali military is in charge of the government and Soviet advisers have a preeminent position in the Somali military. A Soviet Colonel is the principal adviser to Somali military intelligence and sees General Siad regularly. The Soviets are also influential in the Ministry… ; All Western influence in Somalia, however, is threatened by the current Soviet domination.”. About the Somalia-China relations the documents contain the information attributed to Addou: “The Chinese are active in economic projects.  The latest is an offer, which the Somalis are considering seriously, for a 2,000-mile road to be constructed from Mogadiscio to Berbera.”

The declassification of State Department documents on US-Somalia relations assumes poignant significance given the description made about Addou and his family by Peter Scott Bridges, a US Ambassador to Somalia during the 1980s, in his memoirs Safirka.

“During his first tour in Washington, his purchase of a house on Foxhall Road for his daughter had reportedly been the second-largest residential real-estate sale in the District of Columbia that year. There was no proof of wrongdoing, but the ambassador had done well for a nomad’s son on a Somali official salary. Addou’s elegant and attractive wife, Asha, also owned a string of villas in Mogadishu, and she built two large ones near the compound of our Office of Military Cooperation. She tried very hard to get me to rent one for our embassy. She wanted, she said, six thousand dollars a month for either of them, payable in dollars not shillings, please (which would be in contravention of Somali currency regulations). I told her we did not need any large, new villas. Then I heard that she was threatening to rent them to the Libyan embassy; she commented to an American that no doubt the Libyans would find it advantageous to locate near our military compound” Bridges wrote.

Bridges commented  on the nepotistic appointments of the military regime. “I knew from my meetings with Foreign Minister Jama Barre that he, for one, was a minister with little understanding of economic problems”. Bridges correctly identifies “Abdirahman Jama Barre, [as] the president’s foster brother” who was the Foreign Minister before being appointed the Finance Minister to implement the IMF’s Structural Program that earned him the political nickname Kadarre “deteriorator”.                  

It is extremely difficult to refute either the minutes in the declassified State Department documents or the reminiscences of the former American Ambassador. The archives of the Somali Foreign Ministry were looted in 1991 after the fall of the military regime.  The Federal Republic of Somalia under President Hassan Mohamud Sheikh took the tested and failed path of personal foreign policy making approach for a country recovering from state collapse. 

© Puntland Post, 2024

The post Somalia Foreign Minister’s Missteps are not “Unprecedented” appeared first on Puntland Post.