Special Guest Writer for the Somaliland Times, Prof. William Reno, Northwestern University
[Continued from the previous issue]
Foreign aid enhanced the importance of commercial farms in elite political strategies and increased the disruptive impact of state ‘development’ strategies on the local population. Foreign support for the three largest commercial farms in the Jubba area during the period 1976 to the late 1980s totaled at least $325 million, while direct state aid exceeded $50 million annually, a considerable sum given the country’s GDP of $1.7 billion in 1987. Privatization of enterprises, begun in 1981, reinforced close ties between political power and one of the country’s primary economic assets. A 1975 land tenure law expanded the assets available for patronage through giving legal means to civil servants and businessmen who could get government backing to claim village lands that were not included in commercial farms. Registration of titles became ‘a political rather than an economic process’ reported a foreign technical expert. ‘The successful individual is one that has contacts in the bureaucracy, knowledge of how to "work the system", clan and personal ties with high government officials’, at the expense of the mostly Gosha small holders who held land on the basis of custom and lineage ties solidified through marriage. The land grab in southern areas alienated a further 6,000 ha in addition to the 16,000 ha lost to plantations, increasing the importance of this region as a source of political patronage beyond its value as a recipient of foreign aid, and put most of the region’s economy under control of powerful outsiders.
The top-down merging of political networks and official economic policies destroyed local customary authorities’ capacity to control resources. It also helped determine the contours of conflict in the 1990s, since it drew into the region outside elites of mixed origins, several of whom became important political actors in the river valleys by virtue of their positions in the hierarchy of the military dictatorship in the capital. Their economic power was tied to the coercive power of the state. As state control diminished in the 1980s, they developed their own capacity to act as political entrepreneurs to recruit and field armed forces. The significance of colonial and nationalist policies, however, lay in providing these actors with tools to become violent entrepreneurs as these policies weakened local capacity to resist this process.
Southern river valleys consequently became a site of frequent conflict since 1991. Control over major plantations played key roles in the strategies of two major militia leaders in the early 1990s. General Mohammed Aydeed, who had held positions in the government in the 1980s, and his backers provided land in the river valleys on which disaffected mooryaan (‘dispossessed ones’) could settle. Aydeed used the attractions of this region to recruit followers from his own Habr Gidir clan to join his faction of the United Somali Congress (USC). Other strongmen from the Barre regime saw a strategy of survival in southern farms. Aydeed’s principal businessman backer, Mogadishu-based Osman Ato, organized the looting of farm equipment, then provided backing to set up militia-controlled plantations. Ato already had a base in the area, since he had been allocated a farm in the 1980s that his sister ran. Barre’s former defense minister, Adan Abdullahi Nur ‘Gabeeyow’ also used southern farming lands as a patronage resource of his own once his president had fled to attract and organize fighters, first after teaming up with Col Omar Jess, and continuing after he switched to the side of General Mohammed Said Hersi ‘Morgan’, another Barre crony and head of the Somali National Front (SNF).
Continued exports of bananas to Europe provided hard currency to entrepreneurs, estimated to total $26 million in 1990, and still generated export incomes in the range of $6 to $8 million in 1994. These resources and opportunities drew in more mooryaan from other regions for refuge, employment, and food. Col. Omar Jess, for example, used the southern region as a base for displaced members of his Ogadeen clansmen who had fought in an earlier conflict once Jess recognized in 1990 that his presidential patron was going to fall. Thus the report of an aid worker in 1995 reflected the presence of large numbers of armed outsiders: ‘In lower Jubba, the district commanders and militia are the only structure of authority...there is no civilian administration. Osman Ato’s farm is where the main commander is based’. Despite the absence of state-like administration, this merging of economic and coercive power shrank the social space for indigenous resistance. Defensive groups of local farmers from the Shebelle and Jubba valleys such as the Somali African Muki Organization (SAMO) have remained weak because they lack access to hard currency with which to buy weapons and cannot recruit their own mooryaan from distant urban areas or other battlefields like their much stronger opponents.
This organization of conflict hardly counts as a societal consensus on virtues of clan politics. Instead it follows from a colonial, then national labour policy that undermined local customary contract arrangements and political institutions based upon elders’ control of marriage and land allocation. These changes indicate that woman once played an important role in maintaining flexibility in lineage boundaries and thus in political arrangements. As outsiders disrupted local matrimonial customs, then seized local farms, local people were unable to control enough resources to oppose these interlopers. Indigenous people and newcomers alike became ‘stabilized’ around rigid lineage identities as a consequence of the coercion, then outright violence of economic policies that created security dilemmas for entire communities. Denied means or incentives to make local political accommodations, newcomers petitioned patrons in the capital to hold onto their assets and positions. Eventually they had to seek protection from clan militias that also served the same entrepreneurial purpose, except now in more outwardly violent ways.
Indigenous inhabitants had fewer choices. If they lacked weapons, they had to seek protection as subordinates to local armed groups, or take their chances in poorly armed home guard militias. These rigidified lines of conflict fit the expectations of scholars that political entrepreneurs will exploit these security dilemmas to get control of local resources. This is especially true among new arrivals who lacked mechanisms to settle disputes among themselves, since all were ‘foreigners’ who could call upon distant kinsmen to tip the balance of power. The relative violence in southern regions illustrates the proposition above that outsider elites who had benefited from privileged access to the political networks of the crumbling state fit best into the expectations that state collapse and violent exploitation of resources will lead to long-term conflict, rigidified ethnic defensive groups, and will fail to build large-scale political communities. Economic globalization in this setting adds resources to sustain the battles of political entrepreneurs, and thus creates formidable obstacles to organizing stable political authority.
To be continued...
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