Part II

By Dr. Mohamed-Rashid Sheikh Hassan

In the evening of the same day Siyad Barre called 35 officers both military and police including the heads of the police forces in a meeting and presented to them four points to be discussed:

1) To have a name for the council and decide the number of the council numbers.

2) Election of the chairman of the council.

3) To nominate the new government and decide its composition

4) Other points.

The general then suggested that they would call the Council as the Supreme Revolutionary Council (SRC) and it would consist those who participated in the first meeting, whether they took part in the preparations of the coup or not. He then omitted point number two and jumped to the third point. General Aidied and others raised some questions of the logic of exclusively having a military government to run the country and suggested that technocrats or civilians to be called upon to form a government. Adding that, if the reason of the overthrow of the civilian government was to rectify the past injustice and corruption, then it is important that we consult other important people such as intellectuals and patriotic business people. Siyad Barre categorically rejected this idea and immediately closed the meeting, saying that the military took the responsibility for this change and the future government must be led by the military and civilians can be included too.

About one week later, 25 names of those who were present in the meeting appeared in the government-run newspaper and 10 officers including General Aidied who were in the first meeting were omitted. This shows Siyad Barre took his first undemocratic decision in the first week he took over the power of the country.

Huntington, the well-known social scientist and author of “Clash of Civilizations” and other books, made a contrast between the developing and developed countries as regards the relationship between the civilian and military. He argued that the civilian military relations in developed countries had what he called “objective civilian control”, while this is remarkably absent in the case of the developing countries. He posited the following characteristics that are associated with the behavior of the military of developed countries:

1. A high level of military professionalism and recognition by military officers of the limits of their professional competence;

2. The effective subordination of the military to the civilian political leaders who make the basic decisions on foreign and military policy;

3. The recognition and acceptance by that leadership of an area of professional competence and autonomy for the military; and

4. As the result, the minimization of military intervention in politics and of political intervention in the military.

Huntington also asserts that causes of military intervention are also a legacy of under development citing military interventions in Latin America and Africa.

Politics, even in the first years of African’s independence, was often an activity, with social repression used as a method of retaining power in the context of declining legitimacy and societal scarcity. Only the inherent pluralism and inertia of traditional African society structures such as the Somali traditional structure and the relative weakness of central structures and bureaucratizes, have delayed the takeover of military rule in some African society for some time. However, during the 1970s and earlier 1980s, post-colonial states in Africa such as Somalia were overtaken by military rule.

There have been deeper problems in the Somali post-colonial state that prompted military coup. Somali post-colonial state suffered fundamental administrative weakness and malpractices with a declining legitimacy when the military intervened. Somaliland civil servants who had good training were overwhelmed by the Somalia civil servants who had less training to run the affairs of the emerging nation except few and the two countries, Somaliland and Somalia having different historical backgrounds had still fundamental differences and were not in line with each other.

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