Issue 281

I chose the year 1955 to begin this article about Dhaqanguur - a Somali verb meaning to change one’s way of life. I am not implying that Somalis hanker after a change in their life styles, though in disruptive and murderous Mogadishu today many probably do. What they have hankered after in both old and new Somalia is a change from 47 years of indifferent government, or no governance at all, to peace and solid governance, free from war and incorrigible corruption.

Readers who may not be familiar with the Horn of Africa may wish to be reminded that the northern coast of Somaliland overlooks the Gulf of Aden. It was, until 26 June 1960, the British Somaliland Protectorate, with Berbera as its seaport and Hargeisa as its capital. The rest of the Horn, with the longest coastline in Africa, stretches along the Indian Ocean littoral to the shores of Kenya. It was the former Italian Somaliland with Mogadishu as its capital. Nicknamed Somalia, this elongated country, from north to south, united with Somaliland on 1 July 1960, to form the Somali Republic a few days after British Somaliland acceded to its own sovereignty.

The union was a disaster; it had no juridical standing. It was never formally ratified. Moreover, a military coupd’état in Mogadishu in 1969 replaced the first and only democratically elected government that Somalia ever attempted. The coup brought with it incoherent Marxism and a penchant from Mogadishu for atrocities carried out in former Somaliland, burying Somalilanders alive in bulldozed pits, among other horrors. Thus Somaliland unilaterally restored its 1960 sovereignty on 18 May 1991, but no-one in the international community has had the guts, as yet, to seriously take up the cudgels for the rights of Somaliland’s humanity and its political recognition.

My choice of the year 1955, and subject-matter, exemplifies two phenomena: first, the widespread enthusiasm in that year of the Somali-speaking peoples throughout most of the Horn of Africa, including the then Northern Frontier District of Kenya, for the white, five-pointed star on a sky-blue background of Somalia’s national flag-to -be. It represented a cultural purity, a pine for ‘Greater Somalia’, meaning a union of the five neighboring Somali-occupied countries, namely Somalia, Somaliland, the Ogaden in Ethiopia, Djibouti and the Northern Frontier District of Kenya. Somalia and Somaliland started the ‘union’ off by becoming, five years later, in 1960, the so-called sovereign territory of the Somali Republic.

Members of two political parties, one in Somalia, the Somali Youth League, and one in Somaliland, the Somali National League, were led by pro-Greater-Somalia westernized Somali politicians in smart suits and ties, hot foot from education overseas. These gentlemen contrasted in dress and physical appearance with the hard-working, raw-handed, sarong-clad Somali elders. The latter, for the most part, looked after the interests of pastoralists who formed the greater majority of the Somali population in the Horn. They were readily moved by the Greater Somalia ideal.

The second phenomenon relating to the year 1955 was that Britain invited a Colonial Office minister, the Under Secretary of State, to address Somaliland politicians and elders in Hargeisa. His subject was a ‘generous’ offer by Ethiopia to pastoralists in Somaliland. The offer allowed British Liaison Officers (myself included) to remain for 15 years in Somaliland’s gazing grounds, called the Haud, adjacent to Somaliland and claimed by Ethiopia. Our functions were to protect Somaliland’s shepherds and camel herdsmen from Ethiopian interference before Britain returned the 25,000 acres of territory, the size of England and Wales, to Ethiopia under a part-dishonest British government agreement with Ethiopia in 1897.

The territory in 1955 was then part of a vast area including Somalia, Somaliland, the Ogaden, the Haud and Reserved area; all inhabited by Somalis and administered by Britain following the eviction of Italy from Ethiopia, from British Somaliland and from Somalia during World War II. The Ethiopian offer of a 15-year protective stint went ten years beyond the United Nations’ fixed year of 1960 for Somalia’s sovereign independence. Although it should have been obvious, Britain could not understand why the minister’s speech received no applause from his audience. Instead, they turned their backs on the Under Secretary, Lord Lloyd.

The truth was that neither Ethiopia nor Britain wanted Somaliland to unite with Somalia because the Greater Somalia movement, if it had advanced successfully, would have deprived Ethiopia of its Ogaden region; Kenya of its Northern Frontier District; and France of Djibouti. Among Somalis, Greater Somalia was gaining wide popularity in the Horn. Suspicion was aroused, however, when Emperor Haile Selassie was invited to make a State Visit to London, with a gilded carriage drawn by impeccably-groomed horses, and a state banquet at nightfall. A new British agreement with Ethiopia was clearly on the cards. Lord Lloyd was geared to deliver it.

Britain by then had said in Parliament, under political pressure, that it regretted the agreement with Ethiopia. It had also failed to persuade Ethiopia to accept payment in exchange for the Haud, or to receive a battleship, or a railway line from Zeila. Whether this was simply a ruse by the British government to ameliorate Somaliland’s anticipated ire is not known.

To Somalilanders, Britain’s failure to retrieve their grazing grounds brought relations with Britain to an unhappy close. Britain was forced to yield to Somaliland’s insistence that their sovereign independence be simultaneously achieved with that of Somalia on 1 July 1960, not ten years later as proposed by Ethiopia. In fact, Somaliland became independent on 26 June of that year, having incidentally rejected the idea of joining the British Commonwealth.

To-day, in the year 2007, fifty two years on, I am still working in the Horn, having watched and written about one drama after another, which, taken as a whole, regrettably, has not given Somalis an international name to conjure with.

The bane of Somali governance was, and still is, an irresistible desire to pocket public funds (musuqmaasuk-corruption). The foremost Somali lyric poet, Seyid Mohamed Abdalla Hassan, also known at the turn of the 19C by the British Protectorate Government as the “Mad Mullah”, observed that musuqmaasuk was a speciality with Somalis.“…Somali waa meheradeediiye”, he noted.

The first Somali Republic government of Abdirashid Ali Sharmarke was also notable for pernicious innovations such as the central Government’s ‘dubious political fund’, to which only politically correct deputies in the National Assembly had access; the exoneration of deputies in the Assembly from criminal charges; and secret ballot voting in the Assembly to allow for concealment of who voted for whom and why. In the words of Professor I.M. Lewis, ‘…democracy had lapsed into commercialized anarchy’.

Typically, at the opening of the National Assembly in Mogadishu after the March 1969 election, there was a stampede of fifty opposition deputies to the government (Somali Youth League) benches, leaving the solitary, honorable figure of the outstanding former prime minister, Abdirizaq Haji Hussein, in opposition. He was NOT interested in receiving political funds. Corruption became more virulent during the diabolical rule of General Mohamed Siyad Barre who came to power for 21 years as President following a military coup d’état in Mogadishu on 21 October 1969. Siyad Barre started off his Marxist Socialist regime with, among other things, a hybrid invention called ‘scientific socialism’; the abolition of habeas corpus; temporary denunciations of government corruption; and the burial of ‘clannism’.

After the defeat of Somalia’s army by Ethiopia’s Russian and Cuban military auxiliaries during the 1977 ‘Ogaden war’, attempted assassinations on Siyad Barre’s life persuaded him to embark on a defensive course of ethnic nepotism, imprisonment without trial, even genocide carried out by his own clan-members and those of his kinship towards the main northern clan group, the Isaaq, who in part were buried alive in mass graves. So much for burying clannism; the root-cause, believed by many Somalis, of a divisive Somali Nation. Rightly or wrongly, some clan-based terminology is an irritant to modern Somali ears.

This is understandable. It is the Scottish word ‘clan’ and the Arabic word diya, among others, that need to be scrapped with all their non-juridical derivatives. The Somali word Tolnimada, meaning nationality and including every Somalis’ known identity through his or her birthright, should be substituted as a healthier improvement on the undesirable words ‘tribe’, ‘clan’, or worse ‘clannishness’, or diya instead of the more respectable Somali word mag, or xaal as collective tariffs of compensatory payments for wrong-doing where blood is not spilled. (Unlike Arabs, and contrary to some precepts of Sharia law, Somalis cannot afford to pay compensation for wrong doing individually; it is a collective effort run uptightly by Tol-leaders and other elders).

Nor should Somalia’s international debts be ignored. During part of Siyad Barre’s term of office debts amounted to US$2,850 million in 1986, with debt service payments of US$164 million. The budget was in chronic deficit, deepening from So.Sh.330 million in 1981 to So.Sh.6,937 million in 1986. There were no published figures after that. Quite clearly, Somalia’s financial performances over several decades were persistently awful. Future remedies must surely include donor countries’ insistence on auditing their donations.

As for the abolition of elders, the late President Egal told me, “Our biggest mistake in Mogadishu, when I was Prime Minister from March to October 1969, was to have ignored the elders. That bad habit has continued in Mogadishu. Elders in southern Somalia have no rank in the councils of state, where there is a state. We have the Guurti now in Somaliland’s upper house (a bicameral legislature) formed originally by the Somali National Movement (SNM) freedom fighters as their indispensable political wing.” For successfully recruiting Somali soldiers for the SNM, the elders were given a special advisory nomenclature with the freedom fighters.

It was assumed by the embryonic Somali politicians, before they experienced independence in 1960, that their respective, forthcoming, ‘modern’ administrations could effectively handle problems of rural communities better than sarong-clad Sultans and elders who lacked westernized education.

This was a mistaken belief. Rural elders, and not westernized central government ministers in the north, are democratically elected Tol-leaders, conversant with ancient Somali customary law, Heer, and as such continue to this day to be exclusively responsible for allocations of fertile land to farmers, controllers of pastoral land for herders, protectors of individual birthrights, dispensers of all-embracing, honest judicial functions under Heer. And this after 47 years of independence.

If outbreaks of serious violence occur in Mogadishu or elsewhere who are called to calm the waters? The unpaid elders of course. They are pious people who never fail to start their deliberations without the injunction “In the name of Allah, most gracious, most merciful.” It is for this same virtuous reason that the moderate, bearded ones of the Islamic Courts were able to dispose of the corrupt, secular warlords, backed by the United States, without a shot being fired, before taking popular control of Mogadishu for six months.

Neighboring countries, with the help of the Pentagon, then ran the Islamists to the ground with heavy armor and air strikes. Photographs on the internet of staunch ten-year-old Somali boys of the large Hawiye clan, firing their fathers’ AK47s against the invaders, with spent bullets at their feet, say it all. They held their ground in 2007 with their bold elders, crying out for Dhaqanguur, and the removal from southern Somalia of President Abdillahi Yusuf’s Darod Somali soldiers from Puntland; and the removal of other neighboring imposters.

It is a mystery why the Pentagon found it necessary to advise the United Nations Security Council to authorize the implementation of Chapter 7 of the UN Charter to ‘peacekeep’ in Mogadishu between 2006-07, when they had as their rotten example the dastardly consequences of US helicopter gunships, acting under Chapter 7 on 12 July 1993, around 10am, murdering 73 Hawiye elders gathered, without weapons, on the second floor of ‘Qaibdiidhouse’ in Mogadishu. I witnessed it from Shamu’s Guest House.

The gunships were instructed to strike the building at three points on the assumption that General ‘Aideed’, also of the Hawiye clan, was present and would be killed. The three points were the second floor conference hall so that the furiously burning wooden roof would fall on the delegates below, as it did; the charred, wooden, broken staircase leading from the conference hall to the ground to block any escape; and the outside gate so that the US Marines, landing by helicopter, would have clear access to the building to shoot or capture anyone escaping. Aideed was not in fact there. ‘Operation Michigan’ began.

Three days before, I was asked by two prominent delegates to the conference to arrange an appointment for them with Admiral Howe, the Special Representative of Mr. Butros Butros Ghali, the Secretary General of the United Nations. They were Sheikh Mohamed Iman and his brother. I was present. The two delegates explained to Howe the reason for their forthcoming elders’ conference at ‘Qaibdiid’s’ house which was to reach a peaceful agreement as to how to restore Hawiye relations with the United Nations. ‘Aideed’ had by then escaped capture by UNOSOM forces. No weapons, said the Sheikhs, were to be allowed at the conference. The Admiral nodded approval.

Three days later, the two brothers were killed among 71 other delegates in the carnage that followed in the conference hall in the wake of the bombing. Shots were taken by a video camera. But scenes of shattered limbs protruding through the rubble were judged by CNN, who bought the video, as too horrific to be shown publicly. The Justice Division of UNOSOM II described Operation Michigan as having “raised important legal and human rights issues”. Perhaps the leader of the Division had war crimes in mind.

Yet few outside Somalia recall that scandalous Operation Michigan. The popular film ‘Black Hawk Down’, which depicted the American abortive attempt to kill or capture ‘Aided’ in Mogadishu, two and a half months later on 3 October 1993, when 16 American Rangers were killed, and 77 Rangers were wounded, is all that the world, and especially America, knows about the way Chapter 7 of the UN Charter was used in 1993 against Somalis in Mogadishu. However, the Hawiye in Mogadishu would certainly have been reminded, during their war in 2007 against foreign imposters, of the horrifying cause and the appalling consequences of their earlier struggle in 1993 with American Gunships in Operation Michigan.

J.G.S.Drysdale is a member of the Anglo-Somali Society, and, as stated on page 29 of the Spring 1994 Issue, his long and distinguished association with the Somali people began in 1942 when, as an officer in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders he was seconded to 71 (Somali) Battalion KAR and saw action with them in Burma. The Spring 1994 Issue gave an account of a talk Mr. Drysdale gave to the Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House, UK, which described his role in the turbulent events of 1993. A review of one of his more recent books, Stoics Without Pillows, can be found on page 50 of Issue No29, Spring 2001.

A photograph on page 20 of Issue 35 of the Journal, Spring 2004, shows Mr. Drysdale at work in his home town of Gabiley, west of Hargeisa. His recent mapping and land registration activities in Somaliland were described on page 58 of Issue No. 33, Spring 2003, page 20 of Issue 25, and page 39 of Issue 30. John Drysdale sees the present article, in part, as an update of views expressed in his book, Whatever Happened to Somalia?, published by Haan Associates in 1994.