[Continued from our previous issue]

Controlling Political Entrepreneurs

Political entrepreneurs still posed a danger to the formation of a separate Somaliland polity outside the predatory framework of the collapse of Barre’s patronage networks. For example, in June 1989 Jess formed his own Somali Patriotic Movement (SPM), which joined forces with the SNM that he previously attacked to overthrow Barre’s regime. As Barre began to look very vulnerable, military leaders from the Hawiye clan, including Mohamed Farah Aydeed, organized their own clan-based opposition groups under their personal leadership in the loosely organized United Somali Congress (USC) in nominal alliance with the SNM. It was these military formations that Jess and Aydeed used to move south to the farming valleys to seize plantations that served as their own refuge for armed followers and to some extent a source of income that they controlled directly.

But Jess’s SPM alliance and the other groups’ support for the SNM could not be described as a nationalist opposition to Barre. These loose affiliations and shifting alliances are better explained in terms of the political entrepreneurial and social contexts of faction leaders. Before his fall in 1991, Barre was able to instigate tensions between Hawiye sub-clans to create antagonisms between Hawiyes who had joined the SNM and its Isaaq core. This led to a split in 1989, with the departure of Ali Mahamed Osooble Wardhigley, who organized a faction of the USC in Rome in Jan 1989. The Hawiye dispute reinforced the mutual interests of other political entrepreneurs in SNM and Barre himself in indirect ways. For example, Ahmed Silanyo, the SNM chairman from 1984 to 1990, used an alliance with Hawiye commanders to cleanse the organization of fellow Isaaq who opposed him, behavior that contributed to Barre’s hold on power at first, but also encouraged ambitious strongmen to make their own bids for power. Especially among the Hawiye factions of the USC, commanders conscripted fighters from various linage segments, and led them to Mogadishu to overthrow Barre. This geographic mobility of fighters aided control of militia leaders, since it freed their fighters from immediate concerns about retaliation against their families for looting and murders that they committed. These conflicts also seem to fit well with standard explanations that identify the extreme economic externalization and dependence on predatory rent-seeking opportunities as foreclosing any large-scale social control over violence.

Nor were northern politicians immune to the allures of competition over the spoils of predation. Abdirahmaan Ali Tuur, an Isaaq and the first (interim) president of Somaliland, joined the SNM shortly after its founding in 1981. Tuur’s supporters were involved in fighting in the northern port city of Berbera in February 1992 where they emptied local banks and sacked several NGOs. Conflicts over the integration of clan-based units into a Somaliland national army led to further fighting in 1991-92 before clan elders brokered a peace agreement. They criticized Tuur for his close friendship with Aydeed, and for his participation in various peace conferences organized by the UN and Egyptians. Tuur was able to claim a seat at the negotiating table on the basis of his importance as a commander of fighters, which gave him additional incentives to battle potential allies and loot local communities, lest he be left out of any externally brokered settlement that promised control over the whole state-including clandestine and predatory economic opportunities-to the fortunate winners of the mediation effort. Tuur’s maneuver also informed local notables’ criticisms of foreign-organized peace conferences in general. They threaten internal stability through diluting local control over the control of resources since they raise the stakes of struggle to control the state. This is not a situation easily dealt with in customary law, especially when the locus of that struggle is distant from the social context of customary law’s social control over violence. 

In the provisional government that followed, Tuur’s political authority rested upon his direct control over armed units. The majority of the remaining militia commanders were dependent upon local clan elders for recruitment and to maintain loyalty within the ranks since their inability to establish ‘liberated zones’ in Ethiopian refuges (before their eviction in 1988 after incessant Ethiopian manipulation of leadership politics) led them to turn to Isaaq clan elders to recruit and maintain fighters. Tuur’s fighters, on the other hand, found it easier to loot and abuse the local population, since they could escape social consequences of their behavior. While in Somaliland, Tuur relied upon ties with Mohamed Aydeed for resources and to support him in conflicts with rivals within the SNM in Somaliland. But when local commanders were able to control fighters enough to consolidate forces to oppose him, Tuur’s ambition took him from Somaliland to Mogadishu where he too contended for a role in externally supported peace negotiations. Meanwhile, his associate Jaama Mahamed Ghalib Yare defeated in May 1993 presidential elections, helped promote fighting in Burao and Hargeisa in 1994-95, reportedly with the help of bribes, variously reported to be from Aydeed and other southern politicians who resisted Somaliland separatism.

As the experience of the war shows, northerners should have been even more susceptible to Barre’s strategy of divide-and-rule than their more privileged and better-connected southern neighbors. They were the ones who faced the most vicious initial attacks, bereft of the resources that their southern rivals controlled by virtue of their ties to the old president. In fact, political disfavour and the marginality to clandestine economic opportunities turned out to offer organizational means to northern authorities to resist outside interference once conflict started. Marginality began to get translated into autonomous economic channels even before Barre’s rise to power. Then exclusion from the benefits of southern agricultural projects, lack of access to subsidized credit, the fruits of privatization or the benefits of franco valuta manipulation in the 1980s forced more northerners abroad in search of work to support themselves and their families. Overseas work attracted youth from all over Somalia, but by 1987, the majority of the estimated 375,000 migrants in Gulf States were northerners. The International Labor Organization estimated n 1985 that 165,000 to 200,000 Somalis lived in the Middle East and remitted approximately 30 percent of their $700 million annual earnings, resources that contributed to northern elite autonomy and dependence upon local community business structures, rather than to predation.

Evidence elsewhere suggests that autonomous local social control of clandestine sources of wealth in the context of state collapse helps preserve order. Sierra Leone’s Revolutionary United Front (RUF) fighters had a fearsome reputation for committing serious human rights violations against non-combatants and devotion to diamond mining during the 1991-2002 war. In 1994, Dr. Alpha Lavalie, a professor at the University of Sierra Leone, organized home guard units called Kamajors to defend communities in diamond mining areas. While a student, Lavallie saw how Sierra Leone’s authoritarian ruler instigated violence in home town to divide opponents in an election, in which the regime ‘condoned, perhaps even encouraged, chiefdom uprisings which entailed intimidation and coercion’ with the help of thugs and paramilitaries acting on behalf of the president, much as Barre manipulated clan affinities with help from strongmen and their paramilitaries in Somalia. Lavallie observed, however, armed youths under the command of customary initiation society leaders tended to resist these enticements. He noted that many of the young men joined the militias of politicians to loot communities and beat up the president’s critics were outsiders, usually unemployed youth from urban areas. Local elders were able to use ‘traditional’ initiation rites to attract local youth and to drive out attackers. These youth became reliable defenders of their home communities and refused entreaties to join rebels to loot. Yet Kamajor units outside their home areas drew criticism for looting and human rights abuses. Kamajors eventually were organized as Civil Defense Forces (CDFs) as an alternative to the country’s fractured and predatory army. Still, CDF-Kamajors stationed outside home areas have proven less effective fighters and more likely to shift alliances in local factional fighting much like predatory RUF units did.

The behaviour of young fighters in Somalia’s north reflected similar elements of local versus outsider control over the distribution of resources. At first glance it appeared that Northerners had to cope with the problem of self-interested armed young men on the prowl for loot. Gerard Prunier described his visit to Somaliland in 1989: ‘The danger while traveling, comes rather from the SNM "auxiliaries," armed youngsters who drift around pretending to be "Mujahiddins" but without being really attached to any regiment’. But Prunier also observed that these young men mostly limited their predations to looting aid shipments. Social control extended to fighters of the SNM. He notes ‘the difficulty of shooting young apprentice-shiftas because their clan and family backgrounds have to be taken into account, and the same holds for any person they might kill,’ much like Sierra Leone’s Kamajors when they are posted in their home areas.

To be continued

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