[Continued from the previous issue]
Clandestine Markets, Political Entrepreneurs, and the Destruction of Southern Elite Autonomy
The failure of the Ogaden invasion posed a serious challenge to Barre’s authority, not just because of the military defeat and challenge to the irredentist project. The 1978 defeat and continuing armed clashes with Ethiopia through the early 1980s changed how Barre ruled. Barre could no longer mobilize a broad-based coalition on the basis of a vague socialist ideological appeal (backed with visible evidence of general economic development), nor could he unify his country in a regional state-building military campaign. Instead, he shifted toward a more thorough reliance on manipulating markets and directing the violent predations of strongmen who were allied with his regime. This key variable, already seen in reference to southern farming areas, shaped the physical and social distribution of insider beneficiaries and outsiders to Barre’s rule. Ironically, those who were left out-usually against their will-gained social tools that they used later to impose order and build defensive networks against local predation and disruptive elements of the world economy. Thus this analysis locates the primary cause of Somalia’s disruption as a consequence of the last two decades in the internal configuration of patronage politics and state collapse. Economic globalization contributed to this process only insofar as resources and opportunities were channels in ways that undermined social cohesion, which was precisely the informal aim of Barre’s patrimonial strategy, along with securing those resources for him to distribute at his personal discretion to his supporters. Likewise, global economic transactions became the key either to later fragmentation or consolidation of communities, depending upon how those communities allocated those resources after the central state collapsed.
Nor was Barre’s patrimonial strategy always successful, even when he dominated economic resources. One of his own Daarood clansmen, Colonel Abdulahi Yusuf, led an attempted coup against Barre. Abdulahi Yusuf was stationed in the northern part of the county amidst the half million Ogaden refugees from the 1977-78 war and presided over the lucrative distribution and looting of foreign aid to refugees. Like Barre, Abdulahi Yusuf and these refugees hailed from the Daarood clan. Despite these kinship ties (and undermining the notion that Somalia’s conflict derived from immutable clan identities), Barre took seriously the possibility that Abdulahi Yusuf could organize a mass-based uprising against his rule from these core members of Barre’s patronage network. Abdulahi Yusuf found that he could sell his opposition to Barre for military and financial support from Ethiopia’s regime, which saw in Abdulahi Yusuf’s role as a political entrepreneur who could weaken their enemy in Mogadishu. Abdulahi Yusuf used Ethiopian backing to form the Somali Salvation Democratic Front (SSDF), which took up arms against Barre’s regime.
Abdulahi Yusuf’s defection and suspicions that others might use clan solidarities and positions in his patronage network against him alerted Barre to the dangers of delegating too much responsibility to his subordinates, especially those who controlled coercive force and resources in their own right, to hold onto power. Yet the war with Ethiopia entailed increasing the army from 22,000 well-armed soldiers in 1977 to over 50,000 troops in 1981 once Barre’s adversary benefited from Soviet aid and advice. Many of these hastily mobilized soldiers owed more allegiance to specific commanders who recruited them than to Barre’s nationalist vision or centralized state. By 1990, numbers reached 60,000 through forced conscription. Barre’s dependence on these regional strongmen within his own political network seriously limited his ability to mobilize people or resources in Somali society.
Fortunately for Barre, Somalia’s increasing dependence on outsiders for aid facilitated his switch from a bureaucratic state-building project to a patronage network rooted in violent control over economic channels. His strategy of ruling through manipulating access to economic opportunity made segments of the country’s elite beholden to Barre for personal wealth and security. This neutralized the ability of clan elders to control resources on their own to resolve local conflicts, since official favour equipped local strongmen with means to appropriate these exchanges and resources for themselves and their followers. Those beholden to Barre’s network still could patronize their own clan’s kinsmen. This was Barre’s intention as well, since this gave Barre greater leeway to use his proxies to manipulate tensions between clans and within clan groups to divide not only his opposition, but also ensure that his allies never could mount a direct challenge to his rule.
Barre chose his associates according to this calculus of instigating clan competition for favour. ‘This’, wrote Lewis, was reflected in the popular code name '"MOD' given to the regime. M (Marehan) stood for the patrilineage of the President, O (Ogaden) for that of his mother, and D (Dulbahante) for that of his principal son-in-law, head of the national security service’. This bias in Barre’s provision of patronage benefited already entrenched southern-based elites more than it did northern ones who were more marginal to Barre’s original power base, and hence he trusted much less. Even so, enterprising northerners could participate, and as seen below, would engage in violent predation to bolster their fortunes in competition with their colleagues after Barre’s fall. Earlier, however, this arrangement gave the president excellent bases to sharpen and exploit competing security dilemmas within his own political clique. Local power and access to wealth, even in clandestine economies, increasingly came from membership in the capital-based clique, an arrangement designed to harness the ambitions and violent strategies of political entrepreneurs in Barre’s divide-and-rule network.
Barre confronted Abdulahi Yusuf’s challenge with this technique of selective arming of strategically placed clan based political entrepreneurs. As Barre armed other Daarood sub-clans, Abdulahi Yusuf’s Majeerteen compatriots found themselves increasingly isolated and fair game for other groups that wanted to take advantage of the general political crisis to loot their politically marginalized neighbours. This created a reciprocal rationality of fear among Daarood sub-clans as communities and their elders had to decide whether they would back their president or side with a potentially successful challenger. Kinship should matter more in choices like this, since one wants to be able to count on receiving protection from one’s patron, even if the patron’s fortunes should decline. Abdulahi Yusuf also had to contend with Barre’s efforts to appease segments of its broader Daarood membership with bribes to desert his SSDF. This meant Abdulahi Yusuf’s sub-clan became even more exclusively associated with the SSDF. This in turn caused the entire group to become suspect in the eyes of people, even among those who might otherwise join forces with them against Barre.
Barre also armed Ogadeeni refugees to fight Isaaq communities in the north who he thought might be sympathetic to the plight of his other enemies, or perhaps join them in arms. Supplied with government arms, Barre used his patronage of Ogadeni refugees to revive old conflicts over pasturage in Ethiopian territory with their Isaaq neighbors dating from the 1950s. British forces had occupied shared pasture land in Ethiopia during World War Two, then returned it to Ethiopia in 1954 with the proviso that northern (mostly Isaaq) pastoralists would continue to have access to pastures. This was a bargain that was kept only intermittently. WSLF fighters sought to exploit this grievance too, but could not join with Isaaqs to address this problem if the key to patronage from the capital for Ogadeenis lay in getting guns from Barre’s allies to attack other Somalis. Attacks on Isaaq occurred within Somalia too. During May of 1983, for example, Daarood Ogadeeni fighters killed 500 northerners in a week of fighting in the Burao area. Now conflict was taking on the character of a seemingly deeply rooted clan conflict. Fighting thus mobilized more immediate personal interests in the framework of clan politics, as Lewis observed when he visited the region in the late 1980s: ‘Male Ogadeeni refugees [of the Daarood clan] have been encouraged to take over the remains of Isaaq shops and houses in what are now ghost towns. Thus those who were received as refugee guests have supplanted their Isaaq hosts, many of whom-in this bitterly ironic turn of fate-are now refugees in the Ogaden’. Through selective arming of Daarood Ogadeenis to target supposedly disloyal Daarood sub-clans, Barre deflected armed opposition and undermined prospects for any unified challenge to his rule.
Barre also promoted preferred supporters from among Oromo and Ogadeeni refugees to official positions in the north. This hitched the ‘official’ clandestine economy to Barre’s favourites, since state office gave these appointees positions from which to skim substantial humanitarian aid for themselves. Their exemption from enforcement of other laws and economic regulations gave these people privileged commercial positions from which to use their loot in the country’s clandestine economy, for example, in unofficially condoned smuggling operations. Barre and his associates then were able to manipulate violence for the benefit of the state through tapping into other informal sectors of the economy. Young men who sought access to clandestine economic opportunities quickly discovered that their best chance of improving their situation lay in joining a regime-approved patron who would supply them with guns, protection and access to economic opportunity on this basis of manipulated inter-clan tensions. This allowed the president to exploit what a UN agency observed as a ‘synergy between two forces-increasing economic exclusion and social disintegration’. Barre turned violence that might otherwise be directed toward his regime into a controlled political space with armed groups preying upon other citizens, leaving victim and predator unable to construct an alternative stable political order.
The resulting chronic instability further exacerbated insecurity and created some opportunities for northern political entrepreneurs too. Many Isaaq who faced ‘official’ predation and who wanted to get their pasturage back sided with an armed Isaaq group within the WSLF, the ‘Fourth Regiment’ that Barre’s regime supplied with weapons. They fought Barre’s other allies, in the process ensured that none became so strong that either could repeat the 1978 coup attempt. Meanwhile, inter and intra-clan fighting over pastures in Ethiopia left Barre’s Ethiopian enemies with turmoil in their own neighbourhood. Nor could Ethiopians support Barre’s enemies too strongly, lest their Somali clients use this aid to reclaim parts of Ethiopia’s Ogaden for themselves. Their 1984 arrest of Abdulahi Yusuf and persistent meddling in the internal politics of the Isaaq opposition further divided these groups, even those that later became the core of the Somaliland administration. Thus parochial politics overwhelmed even the façade of twentieth century liberation politics, a process that Barre’s economic politics from the late 1970s reinforced.
To be continues next week
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