The roots of Somalia's agony
Onyango-Obbo, Charles
In January 1991, Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia, was consumed by the bloodiest battles of a three-year civil war as government troops tried to fight off a rebel attack. By the end, the rebels...
...Possession and control of food is now the main source of power in Somalia...
...Five years ago, the situation was different...
...These interests may be narrow and immoral, but they are seen as legitimate...
...The little that remained of Mogadishu was leveled...
...10 • DISSENT The more interesting difference between the Somali and Ethiopian famines is that the Western cultural industry has not made Somalia into a sexy issue, as it did with the "Live Aid" concert for Ethiopia in 1985...
...Charges of racism, true as they might be, are often the safe refuge of moralists in both Africa and the West afraid to confront the unpleasant lessons of recent history: after the cold war, the West may not care much about most civil wars and famines...
...But because clans are such a basic unit of the community, when they were politicized and placed under stress, they fractured...
...By the close of the 1970s nearly all of Somalia's best minds had been silenced or forced into exile...
...A peculiarly narrow-minded and illiterate form of politics set in...
...Thousands of people were displaced, and livestock exports, which accounted for nearly 80 percent of the country's foreign exchange earnings, were knocked out...
...All foreign journalists left, and the rest of the world forgot Somalia...
...Beyond the international factors, the misery in Somalia has had a quality of inevitability...
...When several expatriates were killed, embassies began to withdraw nonessential staff...
...President Mohammed Siad Barre fled Mogadishu disguised in women's clothing...
...The desert had also been steadily encroaching upon the rest of the country, and Somali traders had to steal cattle from neighboring countries to make up the shortfalls in their export orders...
...The plunder of relief food by both organized and free-lance warriors is not driven solely by greed for a quick profit...
...It is the only economic activity that remains in the country, and the Somali state is being reconstituted around emergency relief, to the extent that it can get through...
...UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali thought he had an answer...
...This self-interest is not peculiar to the West...
...One possible reason is that the "Western conscience" became a victim of the end of the cold war...
...Newly influential in Egypt (the Middle East's most powerful state, apart from Israel) WINTER • 1993 • 9 and throughout North Africa, the United States no longer found Somalia of much importance...
...As in the past, so in the future, Somalia and other drought-prone countries will continue to be struck by famine, because the causes of starvation have not been addressed...
...Ali Mandi Mohammed, a businessman associated with the United Somali Congress (USC), at that point the dominant rebel group, was named interim president...
...Today such a concert is more likely to be a benefit in memory of Freddie Mercury, the pop singer who died of AIDS...
...In a scorched-earth campaign, government troops turned the area, inhabited mostly by the Issac clan, into a wasteland...
...In June he charged that the West was more interested in the humanitarian crisis caused by the Serbian rampage in the former Yugoslavia because it was a "rich man's war" and had kissed off Somalia because it was a "poor man's war...
...Beginning around June 1992, Somalia—or what was left of it—was "rediscovered...
...The ineffectual Organization of African Unity (OAU) has not done much either...
...If the country does not return to order soon, it might be left to die...
...It is unlikely that international humanitarian groups will continue to devote huge chunks of their budgets to the effort to keep Somalia alive, as strife and disaster strike even more parts of the world...
...Each Somali clan grew to distrust the others...
...So far the world has managed to ignore that catastrophe and live comfortably with itself...
...Extended military dictatorships like Barre's always exact their toll...
...Whereas in the past a quick response to a Somalia-type crisis would have been part of a wider struggle against communism, the West now believed that it did not have to prove anything...
...The Soviets recouped their losses in the Horn by replacing the United States as the benefactor superpower in Ethiopia...
...What should perhaps be of greater concern to those worried about the West's lack of interest in the Somalia crisis is that it has not found its way into the popular mind as did the equally devastating Ethiopian famine of 1984-85...
...Embarrassed, the United States and other Western governments nearly turned the relief effort into a stampede...
...By the late 1970s, however, the Soviets had fallen out with the Somalis, the Sudanese, and the Egyptians, while the Americans were in...
...After the Camp David accords, Egypt opened up to the United States in ways that shocked traditional Arab nationalists...
...The International Red Cross will by December 1992 have spent onethird of its worldwide budget to bring a hundred thousand tons of food to Somalia...
...The defense rests, as it were...
...How could a country have been left to starve to death in these times, when the European Economic Community is alleged to be dumping food in the sea to reduce surplus stocks...
...African governments also forgot Somalia as they turned their attention to their own droughts and to prodemocracy demonstrators bent on toppling them from power...
...Barre, however, found that he could play the clan card—a remarkable accomplishment, because Somali clans do not differ significantly...
...The pictures the world saw, and the stories it read, revealed a country that had fallen from purgatory into hell...
...An attempt in 1991 by the OAU to reconcile the factions and mobilize medical relief flopped...
...But rarely has so much effort been put toward so superficial a venture...
...Barre's divide-and-conquer strategy soon led to famine...
...For a moment many people thought the worst was over...
...It was a tough nut to crack, because Somalia is one of the few homogeneous countries in Africa...
...It was the hour of the Soviets...
...By that time Somalia was already over $2 billion in debt and struggling to keep up large-scale imports of food to ward off starvation...
...Barre surrounded himself with his own Marehan clan, played other clans against each other, and periodically carried out purges of some...
...The Soviets at that point were not only cozy with the Somalis but also with Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt and with the Jaffar Numeiry regime in Sudan...
...After all, in southern Sudan, as a result of the civil war there, thousands of people have been killed or starved to death...
...With his political base eroded, Barre looked hard for a way to divide the Somali people in order to stay in power...
...By the end, the rebels had won, and most of Mogadishu lay in ruins, with about fifty thousand people reported to have died...
...The roots of the current crisis were laid down long ago, and in recent months we have been witnessing the results...
...The only hope is that the Somalia crisis is the wake-up call that the continent will finally heed...
...Located in the Horn of Africa, Somalia was a key staging point for superpower politics in the Middle East...
...Nearly two million people faced death by starvation...
...The West has its own pestilence, and there are not even enough concerts for that...
...But Mandi's presidency was stillborn when other rebel groups refused to join or recognize his government...
...Western indifference to Somalia during the first half of 1992 underscores the fact that humanitarian aid is a tool by which the countries doling it out pursue their own interests...
...The United States was locked out, except in neighboring Ethiopia, where the aging and reactionary Emperor Haile Selassie was highly enamored of Washington...
...The economy had already gone under after the state-run banking system collapsed in April 1990 with the closure of national banks...
...After Barre grabbed power in a 1969 coup, he adopted a "socialist" posture and formed an alliance with the Soviets...
...Everyone in Somalia belongs to a single nationality (ethnic) group, the Somali, and speaks the same language, Somali...
...Only 1 percent of Somalia's 738,000 square kilometers was being used for agriculture in 1990, Even in the best of times only about 9 percent of Somali land is arable—hardly enough to meet the needs of its population of five million...
...Western civilization" gloated that it triumphed over communism because of its moral superiority...
...This denunciation of Western racism found front-page notice in many Western newspapers and on prime-time television news...
...If Africa does not throw away its crutches and learn to fend for itself, several parts of it could well be wiped out...
...Months before Barre's fall, law and order broke down even in Mogadishu...
...There will be no big concerts for a black country like Somalia or even a white one like Bosnia-Herzegovina...
...In Ethiopia, Selassie had been ousted and later murdered by the hard-line Marxist regime of Haile Mariam Mengistu...
...Thus, after twentyone years, ended one of Africa's longest uninterrupted military dictatorships...
...Barre's regime did not have the political legitimacy or the intellectual resources to mobilize the country to check the advance of the desert or to improve agriculture by irrigation...
...In a situation where both the modern state and the traditional social structures are shattered, a Hobbesian "state of nature" —a war of all against all—ensues...
...Almost overnight, lawlessness and banditry replaced all residual forms of government as the country was carved up among warlords...
...The International Red Cross reported that up to a hundred thousand people had already starved to death, a figured considered conservative because thousands were estimated to be dying every day...
...In April 1990, the regime tried to eliminate a two-year insurgency in the northern part of the country...
Vol. 40 • January 1993 • No. 1
