Written by Emma Okocha
Thursday, 16 April 2009
"While the world as a whole, without distinction of race, creed or
religion was sympathetic with our agony and willing to reach across
vast distances to assist us, we the Somali people were not ready to
help ourselves.
The world has with pain learned that Somali is indeed a difficult
patient who refuses to be tested, fed and cured.....The result was a
self inflicted social suicide. And after the Americans left, it was
this ‘cultural propensity’ that led to an initial instinct among
Somalis for revenge’’ —Gassem Mariam, Hostages, as quoted in Me
Against My Brother, London: Routledge 2000 Page157
"The Republic of Somalia was created in 1960 when the British
Somaliland and former Italian Somaliland merged on the eve of
Independence. After 1960 under the new political leadership, the
‘Greaterd Somali’ goal became the pre-eminent national agenda.
Tragically, it was this national obsession of liberating the Somali
lost territories at the expense of everything else that contributed
to the actual demise of the very existence of the Somali state.’’ —
Prof. Hamdesa Tuso, Institute of Conflict Studies, George Mason
University, Virginia.
African experts and scholars of Conflict Studies did not see it
coming. The contemporary assumptions and the basic pontifications
held by these theoreticians, politicians and policy makers closely
associated with the administration of a modern state were shattered
as a helpless world watches the gradual and steady plummet into
chaos, of the state of Somalia.
Granted that unlike most other African states, Somalia is endowed
with natural attributes which are presumed essential for smooth
governance of a modern state: unlike most other African states which
were carved out of a plethora of ethnic groups, the Somali
population is homogeneous; all speak one mother tongue, Somali. The
majority of Somalis adhere to Islam; they all share a common culture
and colonial experience and by all accounts there has been less
social stratification.
They ascribe to some notion of a ‘pastoral ethic of clan socialism.’
Thus, it is safe to argue that the glaring failure in the case of
the Somali nation debunks the position attributed to the
contemporary school; which proclaims that that the modern nation is
bye and large on a safe ride, once the native population is
homogeneous.
The steep level conflict and the simmering war-lord confrontation in
the streets of Mogadishu and beyond was the second stage of a three
era war which have decimated generations of the Somali manhood and
pulled the nation over the precipice. Indeed, the new political
order established in the post colonial Africa with respect to the
question of unifying those people and territories partitioned during
the European scramble for Africa was sealed by the Organization of
African Unity.
The OAU adopted the colonial boundaries as legitimate demarcation
for the newly independent African states.
Utilizing OAU’s principles of ‘territorial integrity’ and ‘non
interference’ in the ‘’internal affairs’ of a member state, Somali
neighbours, Ethiopia and Kenya, rebuffed every attempt made by
Somalia on its claims to the territories within their respective
states.
In 1977, General Muhammad Siad Barre with the support and military
assistance from the United States invaded Ethiopia. The Soviet Union
and Castro’s Cuba poured in over 10 million dollars assistance and
manpower into Ethiopia. Suddenly the Horn of Africa became very
attractive and the bordering states, pawns in the new international
political order which emerged during the post world era.
The two Super Powers; the United States and the Soviet Union were
unrelenting in their support for their respective allies as they
elbowed their way to establish presence in the strategic Horn. It
did not matter if the Powers changed sides, they did not bother if
dictators shared their beds.
The Super Powers propped up dictators from the Congo to the
Mediterranean and the Horn of Africa would not be an exception.
These dictators survived on their allegiance to the political goals
of a Super Power rather than on the needs and wishes of their
people. In the case of Somalia, it was General Muhammad Siad Barre
(a member of the Mareehaan clan), having captured the seat of power
in Somalia in October 1969, who became the beneficiary of the Super
Power politics in the Horn.
From 1969-1976, with the Soviet Union on his side, he moved Somalia
to the left, preaching Socialism and denouncing America. The Red
revolution of Haile M. Mengistu in Ethiopia shifted the alliances on
the Horn.
When Siad Barre invaded Ethiopia in 1977, the later was defending
the hilly and the stone topography of the Judah kingdom with the
latest Russian tanks under the command of Cuban officers.
The General’s intention was to liberate and incorporate the Ogaden
into the state of Somalia, and restore the national obsession of
reclaiming the lost tribes of the Greater Somali nation. His
invasion of Ethiopia, a nation that was never conquered or colonized
by any power throughout its spectacular history that is beyond
memory, turned out to be a political miscalculation of colossal
proportion.
His divisions were masticated and the losses of the Somali army was
enormous. From that battlefield, Somalia would never recover. The
nation had suffered a national psychic injury resulting in the loss
of the Somali soul.
What precipitated the final fall of Siad Barre was the end of the
Cold war. Somalia, was suddenly irrelevant to the East-West
politics. Thus, in 1988, the US Congress, concerned with the human
rights violations in Somalia and having determined that Somalia was
expendable, blocked aid to Somalia.
Rakiya Omaar, Somali born executive director of ‘Africa Watch’ in an
early warning article, wrote; ‘’Nineteen ninety-one is the year
Somalia died’’ Subsequently, James Jonas the then UN envoy from
Sierre Leone, returned from Somalia with the following reports: ‘’In
Somalia you cannot talk of an organized civil society ...by all
accounts, there is no central authority to keep law and order and
bring a halt to the rampant violence, every aspect of the state
system has been destroyed , there is no central government with the
authority and capacity to collect taxes and raise revenues for the
purpose of providing services to the people.’’
At about that time some one million Somalis fled to the neighboring
countries of Kenya, Ethiopia, Yemen and Egypt. Currently, thousands
perish daily due to starvation. Food and medicine donated by
international community rarely reach the forlorn civilians.
In explaining the reasons for the collapse of Somalia, we argue that
the clan based politics and the cold war reflexes as practiced by
the Somalia’s last dictator did not provide for the impending global
new world. With one of Africa’s highest birth rates and faced with
dwindling resources at home and also at sea, (the Somali fishermen
lost the sea and fishes to more efficient Chinese, Russian and
European rivals), the nation needed to affect the dream of every
Somali.
The liberation and incorporation in one entity, of the Greater
Somali. That failed project ate up the Somali peoples’ hopes.
The calamitous loss, in the pursuit of that obsession, what the
Germans refer to as its ‘Lieberstrum,’ the need to ‘’preserve the
German Heartland,’’ became the driving force behind the national
propensity to engage in suicidal operations. Hence, everyone took to
his tent. Every street has a different command under an independent
war lord.
And the sea lanes away from the Somalia ports are ravaged by Pirates
under the command of unknown dollar suckers whose orders to wrought
mayhem on the high seas may be issued by a Long John Silver or
another one legged General, Igala Atamuna, of the Vanguard Canal
Combat fame.
Source: Vanguard
