The gobannimo view
Dr Aweys O. Mohamoud, Founder of Gobannimo Institute
[email protected]
Friday, June 22, 2012
This is the first of a three-part series in furtherance of the gobannimo alternatives I published in February this year. My object here is to find ways to cut through the political doubletalk via critical analysis of the debate leading to the selection of the new leaders in August 2012 in a way that lends itself to a recognition of the problem “for what it actually is” and to suggest ways the Somali people can get off their politics on the right foot, under the circumstances. Gobannimo represents a new and original scholarship which, in my view, can give us an opportunity for new beginnings to reason out a solution to Somalia’s intractable conflict. I have already offered to debate any and all on this new idea, and that challenge still stands.
Somali leaders (aka the signatories of the process for ending the transition) have finally agreed with the help of the international community, at a meeting hosted by the African Union in Addis Ababa last month, to a time line for election of new leaders by 20 August 2012. The Istanbul II conference, which followed a few days later, iterated that same position.
Much of the commentaries have so far mainly been on the form, i.e., the draft constitution, the agreement and timeline, at the expense of substance. As Harold Saunders, an official of the U.S. State Department who participated in the “shuttle diplomacy” between the leaders of Israel and Egypt in the late 1970s, once remarked: “It’s the human process, not in the official negotiating room, that conflictual relationships change”. So while it is important to focus on the success of a process and agreement, it’s time we start addressing our conflictual relationships for peace to return to Somalia. That must be the debate to be had if we are to construct an effective post-TFG government that can end the war and negotiate peace with its adversaries, and create the conditions for mutually empowering state-society relations.
Success (including the discovery of “truth”) can only come, in my view, through debate and the competition of ideas. This series is my contribution to that debate, and the argument I advance is that the time has come for electing new leaders from outside the traditional power-holding (and power-contesting) sub-clans, namely Habargidir, Majeerteen, Mariixaan, and Muddullood, to defeat the “wedge politics” of division, discontent, fear, and suspicion of others, and to find a way out of the violence and fighting. As Somalia’s enduring civil wars are political in nature, so too must be the process of ending them.
We need to complicate our thinking about the conflict itself to develop new tools that can help us separate out the many complex interactions that cause our divisions. We then have to address, name and frame the issues in a way that accords with the meaning that we (Somalis) assign to them. Only by capturing these deeper perspectives will we be able to have a reasonable handle on the forces that motivate the behaviour and interaction of all participants, including ourselves. The sine qua non for any resolution to the conflict begins and ends with us overcoming our absolute misunderstanding of the problem and of each other.
Human agency is the proximate cause of our stumbling into failure. Human agency is the capacity for human beings to make choices and to impose those choices on their world. In my view, we have given unfair preference to one set of elites over ordinary citizens of Somalia for a long time. Some of these elites have in fact forced their way into power and maintained their dominance by recourse to violence and force of arms. We can now see that both groups have failed abjectly to live up to their responsibilities. Let’s now embrace the concept of turn taking “yes you can have a turn when I have finished” by electing new and competent leaders from other Somali groups in August this year. Will this not give a sense of empowerment and justice to both the giver (the Somali people) and taker (leaders from groups who have never been given the chance to lead their country)? I leave the answer to the reader.
I think it is appropriate to issue certain caveats here. I mention clan and sub-clan names without prejudice to address, name, and frame the issues. My view is that all clans or sub-clans contain good and bad people. Also there are good and bad leaders in every clan or sub-clan, now or in the past. The phrase clan ‘A’ or clans ‘AB’ manipulated power is, in my view, acceptable as long as it tallies with the truth. Also that is the meaning the Somali people attach to their politics, and is the way they perceive their reality. In some ways, one could read that as resentment against those who take power, or the powerful. But that is not the purpose here. My motivation is purely and simply to get the message across that deliberation and dialogue based on candid, open, and frank exchange of views is preferable to the violence and armed conflict that we’re using to deal with our conflict. As for resentment and anger, I repeat the mantra here let’s put the past behind us and move on. Let bygones be bygones.
Before I start, I will say one more thing. I hope we can all contribute to the debate on the basis of civil comity – the belief that, all other things being equal, it is better for those who differ to honestly and openly confront, discuss, explore, and examine their differences than to simply attempt to overwhelm, defeat, or destroy one another.
While you will have no trouble figuring out where I stand politically, I take my responsibility to present the case for electing new leaders from outside the traditional clan-power political groups in a fair and objective manner seriously. I will be making a three-pronged argument.
My first argument deals with the historical record of leadership positions assumed by these four sub-clans from 1956 to the present. I will present facts but also search for an interpretation of the past. An understanding of the past is fundamental to an understanding of the present, and I hope that is what we learn from here. I also hope that our renewed understanding of the past will provide us with the intellectual and moral resources necessary for dialogue and political engagement conducive to peace and symbiosis in Somalia.
So what does the record show? As we can see in the table below, these four sub-clans have dominated the political life of the Somali state since executive authority was handed over by the Italians in 1956. Collectively, they have produced 18 of Somalia’s 24 leaders: 9 presidents and 9 prime ministers to be precise. That represents 75% of the total leadership of Somalia since 1956. All the presidents Somalia ever had, including those who claimed/contested these positions during the protracted civil wars in the 1990s, hail from these 4 sub-clans (For a more detailed analysis of Somali leaders’ genealogies, see my gobannimo document).
Four sub-clans who dominated political power in Somalia |
No. |
Name |
No. of Presidents |
No. of PMs |
Total |
1 |
Habargidir |
3 |
1 |
4 |
2 |
Majeerteen |
2 |
5 |
7 |
3 |
Mariixaan |
1* |
1 |
2 |
4 |
Muddullood |
3 |
2 |
5 |
Totals |
|
9 |
9 |
18 |
*President Siyad Barre, who later turned dictator, came to power in 1969 via a military coup. He ruled Somalia for 21 years and 3 months, more than the combined terms of 5 elected Heads of State, namely Presidents Aden Cadde, Abdirashid A. Sharmarke, Abdiqasim S. Hassan, Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, & Sharif Sh. Ahmed. If we accept the proposition that the post-independence Somali state lasted for thirty years, between 1960 to 1990, then Siyad Barre ruled Somalia 70% of the duration of that state, which eventually collapsed under his watch. He left behind an unconscionable mess of fratricidal civil war and disintegrating nation. |
That’s not fair expresses a feeling that frequently leads to conflict. What would their percentage in the Somali population be? I don’t know, but I should here declare an interest. I hail from one of these sub-clans. My question would therefore be this: how have we become afflicted with such hubris? Why have we arrogated the privilege of running Somalia to ourselves alone? Is it on account of our superior virtue, deep sense of personal responsibility, and great achievements in knowledge, wisdom, and education that we have become leaders of Somalia for all time? Or is it simply lack of empathy and fellow-feeling on our part that we failed to consider others? Do we not understand that we cannot survive as a group/clan, nation or country if everyone cared only about himself and his clan?
Perhaps a more fundamental question would be this: are we prepared to shoulder responsibility for the outcome of our political leadership in Somalia over the past many decades? More than half a century after gaining “political independence”, Somalia remains enmeshed in an enduring political/armed conflict that has already claimed the lives of millions. With the collapse of political order in late twentieth-century came anarchy and conflict together with extreme conditions of human suffering, poverty and cruelty. Somalia, into the 3rd decade of its unending conflict, lacks the capacity to provide basic security let alone civil administration, political institutions, economic reconstruction or development to its citizens. Like failed and failing states elsewhere, it cannot fulfil the primary function of the state which is to secure the nation and its territory. It has also become an all-important and critical issue for international order because it generates a vast array of dangers, from transnational terrorism to weapons proliferation, organized crime, humanitarian catastrophes, mass migration, disease and death primarily to its own people, environmental degradation, and regional conflict.
So who is responsible for what happened to Somalia? Who is accountable for it? Accountability, in a narrow legal sense, is about holding public officials responsible for their actions and for the outcomes of those actions. It is concerned, in particular, to prevent and redress abuses of power.
While these are matters for careful and sustained reflection, I believe it would be wrong to portray the catastrophic events in Somalia as simply a consequence of historical forces and ignore the impact of political leadership. We simply cannot ignore the intolerable political blunders committed by leaders who betrayed the trust and confidence of their people. We also cannot ignore the context in which these actors were operating, and its impact on their political judgement and decision-making. That context, I would argue, was clan competition for power and supremacy. That would be the perception of most victims of this great tragedy. Thus considering that individual as well as group (clan) motives and actions are perceived to be part of the story, can we not say that Somali clans and their leaders are responsible for what happened to Somalia? And if that proposition is acceptable, why not take it a little further to say that these 4 sub-clans are responsible for 75% of the outcome which corresponds to their 75% share of top leadership positions in Somalia over the years!
There are of course problems with this definition of accountability, given its level of generality. I therefore briefly examine a few specific examples concerning the causative and consequential role of these four sub-clans in Somalia’s state collapse and the continuation of that condition for more than two decades.
The first example comes from the collapse of Somalia’s central government where Siyad Barre arrogated more and more power and privilege to himself and his trusted clansmen and other loyalists. Finally, there was none left for other pretenders to power and the rewards of power. The Somali state had been gutted; its ability to provide public goods endlessly compromised, and the fall into failure and then into full collapse followed inexorably.
Moreover, his was a highly repressive regime that preyed on the Somali people. He practiced a brutal divide-and-rule, encouraging clan warfare. At first, he used his army to conduct punitive raids. Later his troops armed so-called loyal clans and encouraged them to wage wars against “rebel” clans. The damage caused by his regime’s manipulation of ‘clan consciousness’ contributed to the inability of civil society to rebound long after Siad Barre fell from power.
Siad’s clan persecutions, and this is my second example, led his opponents to utilize their own clans as organizational bases for armed rebellion. After failing in his coup attempt against the regime in 1978, Col. Abdullahi Yusuf [later TFG President] fled to Ethiopia where he established the Somali Salvation Democratic Front (SSDF), the first clan-based armed opposition group. Col. Yusuf’s armed front attracted support mostly from his sub-clan, the Majeerteen. The second clan-based armed opposition group which was established after the SSDF was the SNM. This latter group derived its main support from the Issaq in the north. Then came the USC, a Hawiye-based armed opposition group, which was founded in 1989. The main protagonists of the USC were Abgaal (Muddullood) and Habargidir, whose bloody and sustained post-Barre contest for power would later destroy Mogadishu.
Once Barre was ousted from power, and this is the third example, leaders of the rebellion were unable to agree on anything other than to continue the bloodshed and mayhem, and hence quicken the pace of societal disintegration. Johnathan Manthrope of the Montreal Gazette, writing within two months of Barre’s flight from Mogadishu, had this to say: “In Somalia, there is an unspoken acceptance that the … rebels who toppled Siyad Barre will not meet at the negotiating table to draw up a new constitution and pave the way for elections. They will meet on the battlefield, probably in protracted and irresolute war”. That is exactly what happened.
I ought to add here the caveat that this is not an account of the bloody reprisals committed against civilians of whatever clan origin or none in Mogadishu or elsewhere by the rebels who ousted Siyad Barre from power. It is also not an account of the destructive inter-clan warfare that ensued following the ouster of the dictator. What I am concerned here is the failure of political leadership, and how that might be accounted in the context of Somalia’s unending ‘clan power politics’.
My position is that the lack of a broader national vision, political will and commitment to cooperate on the part of the armed opposition clans as well as their lust for power and supremacy have contributed to the sinking of Somalia into unending socio-political disaster. Since 1991, the international community has launched nearly two dozens of peace initiatives attended by Somali leaders who readily signed their end results. Yet all that they produced was more clan power struggles, more rivalry, more clan paranoia, and hence more grievances. As one analyst recently put it: “Clan competition to control whatever form of state was to emerge was to prove ruinous” for Somalia.
I argue that the lead clans in this contest to control the state are those named above who held the ‘reign of power’ for 75% of the time, and whose leaders were the main actors in each and every international peace initiative for Somalia. Any other explanation would not give much of a role to power which occupies a central role in the whole exercise. As I have demonstrated above, these four sub-clans are also without exception party to the conflict that led to the collapse of the central state and the continuation of that condition. The term ‘parties in conflict’ could include individuals, groups, communities and/or clans. It is an analytical construct referring to those units which initiate a conflict, pursue it and determine its outcomes.
In my next article, I will explore how the enduring rivalry between these sub-clans has taken Somalia’s internal strife to the level of a competitive interstate conflict involving the threat and/or use of force.
Gobannimo Institute is a trading name for Gobannimo Somali Centre of Ideas Limited, Reg. No. 7943558 whose registered address is PO Box 25609, London N17 9WL, incorporated in England and Wales.
Lohmann, Roger A., & Jon van Van Til, eds., (2011) Resolving Community Conflicts and Problems: Public Deliberation and Sustained Dialogue. New York: Columbia University Press, p. ix.
Patrick, Stewart (2011) Weak Links: Fragile States, Global Threats, and International Security. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.