Somalia in Transition Since 2006

Shaul Shay

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781412853903
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351488761
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

This book picks up where its predecessor, Somalia between Jihad and Restoration, left off, examining international efforts to stabilize war-torn Somalia. It analyzes major political events in Somalia in the years since 2006, examining opportunities for restoration of the country based on the United Nations-backed plan known as the "Roadmap for the End of the Transition," improved security conditions, and international economics and financial support. The author notes that the time of transition may be over, according to the timetable of the United Nations, but it is clear that the work of transformation is just beginning. In considering whether political and social chaos in Somalia is ending, Shay sees two possible futures. One possibility is the establishment of a reform government that unifies Somali society; another is continued strife that accelerates Somalia's descent into the endless violence of a failed state. Shay believes the international approach to Somalia requires a thorough reassessment. He argues it has been limited to two Western priorities-terrorism and piracy-while largely ignoring domestic issues of critical concern to Somalis. As a result, many Somalis have come to view those participating in the international effort as a foreign occupation.

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Somalia: Historical Review

Background

Somalia is situated in the African Horn, an important strategic location overlooking the passageway between the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean.¹ Lying on the east coast, along the Horn of East Africa, Somalia is a coastal country with the Indian Ocean to the east and south and the Gulf of Aden to the north. Land boundaries are shared with Djibouti to the north, by Ethiopia to its north and northwest, and Kenya in the southwest.

The Gulf of Aden, situated at the southern end of the Arabian Peninsula between Somalia and Yemen, is one of the most important trade routes in the world. It is the southern gateway to the Suez Canal, which connects Europe and North America with Asia and East Africa. About 10 percent of global shipping traffic passes through it every month, including 4 percent of the world’s daily crude oil supply.

The Jubba and the Shabelle Rivers flow through Somalia on their way to the Indian Ocean. Both rivers originate in the Ogaden region of Ethiopia. The region between them makes up most of Somalia’s agricultural farmland before it opens out into pastures southwest of the Jubba River that go all the way to the Kenyan border. But Somalia is basically an arid country, prone to periodic droughts and famines.

Somalia was a target for Western colonialism from the sixteenth century until the last century and alternated between Portuguese, Italian, French, and British control. The first Europeans to gain a foothold in Somalia were the British, who were forced to do so to protect the all-important trade routes to India and the Far East. The British consolidated their position in 1839 by gaining control over the strategic port of Aden in the Arabian Sea.

Between 1840 and 1886, the British East India Company established a series of trade treaties with various Somali chiefs. Italy also had a hand in the early establishment of Somalia and marked out the boundaries of Italian Somaliland in the south between 1897 and 1908. Ethiopia claimed the Ogaden region of western Somaliland in 1897.

The first uprising against colonialism occurred when Somalis sought to push the Ethiopians out of the Ogaden region but then decided to target European colonists as well. The Dervish State, headed by Mohammed Abdullah Hassan, an Ogaden whom the British referred to as “Mad Mullah,” conducted a religious-based war of resistance against the Ethiopians and British from 1899 to 1920, resulting in the deaths of nearly one-third of northern Somalia’s population. Great Britain defeated Hassan in 1920.

The arrival of the twentieth century saw the northern part become the protectorate of British Somaliland while the south became Italian Somaliland. Italy maintained control of Italian Somaliland as a part of its African empire (including Ethiopia and Eritrea) until 1941. During World War II, Great Britain also took over these areas and ruled them as military protectorates until 1949, at which time the newly-formed United Nations granted Italy a trusteeship over most of present-day Somalia while the British retained a trusteeship over what is today the self-declared state of Somaliland.

Italy dedicated significant effort toward developing its colony, but Great Britain took a more hands-off approach to governance, leaving more responsibility in the hands of local leaders and providing little in the way of infrastructure. These distinctions are often cited as the underpinnings of the incompatibility that would arise between the two areas.

In the aftermath of World War II, as more and more colonies broke free of their colonial shackles, Somalia too went through similar throes, and in 1950, Italian Somalia became a UN trust territory. On June 26, 1960, after the ten-year interim period, the northern protectorate of Somaliland gained independence from Britain. Five days later, the two former colonies united to form the United Republic of Somalia under President Aden Abdullah Osman Daar, Prime Minister Abdirashid Ali Shermarke, and a 123-member national assembly representing both territories.

Daar ruled Somalia from 1960 to 1967. Shermarke succeeded him and led the country for two years until his assassination in 1969. Though northern and southern Somalia were united under one government, they operated as two separate countries, with different legal, administrative, and educational systems.

Since its establishment, Somalia has suffered from political instability and intertribal conflict. The delicate issue of Greater Somalia, whose re-creation would entail the detachment from Ethiopia, Djibouti, and Kenya of Somali-inhabited areas, presented Somali leaders with a dilemma: they wanted peace with their neighbors, but making claims on their territory was certain to provoke hostility. The radicals wanted to include in the constitution an article calling for the unification of the Somali nation “by all means necessary.” In the end, the moderate majority prevailed in modifying the wording to demand “reunification of the dismembered nation by peaceful means.”

Somali Society

The Somalis are a culturally, linguistically, and religiously homogeneous people who are divided along clan lines and sparsely scattered over a harsh, dry land. There are significant distinctions among sectors of the population, related in part to variations in means of livelihood.

The overwhelming majority of Somalis speak the Somali language. Ethnic Somalis number around 20–25 million and are principally concentrated in Somalia (over ten million), Ethiopia (4–5 million), northeastern Kenya (about 1.5 million), Djibouti (350,000), and over a million living in non-East African countries and parts of the Middle East, North America, and Europe because of the Somali civil war.²

Most of the Somali population is Sunni Muslim. But despite the religious homogeny, the Somali society is characterized by tribal division and infinite rivalries against a background of personal and sectarian power struggles.

Although 95 percent of the population are ethnic Somalis sharing a common culture, in traditional society they have segmented themselves into a hierarchical system based on patrilineal descent. The major branches of the Somali lineage system are four overwhelmingly pastoral nomadic clan families (the Dir, Darood, Isaaq, and Hawiye, collectively known as the Samaal) and two agricultural ones (the Digil and Rahanwayn). Their constituent units are the clans, which are made up of lineages that are themselves further segmented.

The four main tribes are

• The Darood is the largest Somali clan. Its members live throughout northeastern and southwestern Somalia and the Jubba River Valley as well as in northern Kenya and in Ogaden
• The Hawiye members live in central and southern Somalia, in larger numbers in Kenya and Ethiopia and in smaller numbers in other countries. As of 2007, the Hawiye are the most dominant clan in the Somali capital of Mogadishu
• The Dir members live mostly in northern, central (Mudug), and southern Somalia, as well as in Ethiopia’s Somali region and in Djibouti
• The Isaaq members live main’y in Somaliland and the Somali region in Ethiopia³

These four tribes are divided into subtribes, extended families and clans, which either cooperate or compete with each other. The strongest basis for loyalty is family and extended family, while on the tribal and national scope, the level of solidarity and loyalty becomes steadily weaker. The confrontations between the various social components have been a frequent phenomenon throughout Somali history; however, there have been various institutions charged with resolving these conflicts, such as councils of the tribal leaders and elders and various Islamic institutions.⁴

Most of Somalia’s population is split between nomadic tribes and tribes with permanent residences. The fertile and cultivated lands are mainly in the southwest, where the country’s two perennial rivers, the Jubba and the Shabelle, are located. This area serves as Somalia’s wheat granary and provided a solution for the years of drought during which the roaming residents relied on the produce of the farmers, either via commerce or by invading the area and forcibly confiscating the food.⁵

The Dir, Darood, Isaaq, and Hawiye, which together make up the Samaal clans, constitute roughly 75 percent of the population. Most Samaal clans are widely-distributed pastoralists, although a growing minority of them are settled cultivators. The Digil and Rahanwayn constitute about 20 percent of the population. They are settled in the riverine regions of southern Somalia and rely on a mixed economy of cattle and camel husbandry and cultivation.

The traditional social structure was characterized by competition and conflict between descent groups. Among the Samaal, the search for pasture and water drove clans and lineages physically apart or pitted them against each other. The Digil and Rahanwayn (cultivators of the south) had a history of warfare over trade and religious matters and of fighting the encroachments of camel-herding nomads.⁶

Whatever their common origin, the Samaal and the Digil and Rahanwayn evolved differently as they adapted to different physical environments. With some exceptions, the Samaal lived in areas that supported a pastoralism based mainly on camels, sheep, and goats. The Digil and Rahanwayn lived in the area between the rivers where they raised cattle and came to enslave the non-Somali cultivators who were there when they arrived. After the demise of slavery in the 1920s, the Digil and Rahanwayn undertook cultivation themselves.⁷

The Samaal considered themselves superior to settled Somalis. Lineage remained the focal point of loyalty for pastoral nomads. Some texts refer to these two mainly-agricultural clans of Digil and Rahanwayn as Sab. However, members of the Digil and Rahanwayn and most Somalis consider the appellation Sab derogatory. Used as a common noun meaning “ignoble,” the term sab was applied by the Samaal to groups that pursued certain disdained occupations. The Samaal felt that the Sab had lowered themselves by their reliance on agriculture and their readiness to assimilate foreign elements into their clans. Traditionally, the Rahanwayn are considered a Digil offshoot that became larger than the parent group. The Digil and Rahanwayn developed a heterogeneous society that accorded status to different groups on the basis of origin and occupation. Group cohesion developed a territorial dimension among the settled agriculturists.⁸

Relations between and within groups underwent changes during the colonial era and after independence. Armed conflict between descent groups (or in the south, territorial units) became rare during the two decades (the 1960s and 1970s) following independence. However, in the 1980s and early 1990s, as President Ziad Barre incited and inflamed clan rivalries to divert public attention from the problems of his increasingly unpopular regime, Somali society began to witness an unprecedented outbreak of inter- and intra-clan conflicts. The basic modes of social organization and relations persisted, however, particularly among the pastoral nomads. Moreover, national politics often operated in terms of relationships between segments of various kinds.⁹

Along the southern coast, in the valleys of the Jubba and Shabelle Rivers and in a few places between the rivers, small groups live— probably totaling less than 2 percent of the population—who differ culturally and physically from the Somalis. Some are descendants of pre-Somali inhabitants of the area who were able to resist absorption or enslavement by the Somalis. The ancestors of others were slaves who escaped to found their own communities or were freed in the course of European antislavery activity in the nineteenth century. The Somali term for these people, particularly the riverine and inter-riverine cultivators, is habash.¹⁰

Tradition, as transmitted orally from father to son, has the force of law among the nomads. That nomad order prescribes what to do in every conceivable situation and directs the nomad’s attitude toward life. The nomad’s value system is all embracing and clearly defined. It draws its content from tradition and mainstream Islamic beliefs.¹¹

There is strong belief in Allah, upon whose mercy and compassion one finds prosperity and luck or whose wrath destroys whole populations. It is Allah who is worshipped, his prophets professed, the saints revered, and the ancestors appeased and respected. Only then can a society lead a decent life protected from natural catastrophes.¹² The corollary of these values is manifested in the fatalist philosophy that the nomad holds true. Any conceivable situation, social or ecological, depends on the will of God. To the nomad, nothing in the world of nature functions but in accordance with God’s will. The other corollary is to profess Islam, the religion ordained by the Almighty through his prophet, Mohammed, and to abide by its tenets.¹³

Because the Somali family is an extended unit, ancestors are revered and accorded holy or saintly status. Members of a clan aspire to appease their ancestors through offerings and ritual ceremonies, in the hope that they will take care of their offspring and will avert any evil that may fall on them.¹⁴

Religious men, wadaad, play a vital role among the nomads. They treat the sick and initiate the rituals of offerings, ceremonies, feasts, marriage, and death. Traditionally, the wadaad were the first to teach students in a classroom.¹⁵

Another component of Somali society is the urban class, mainly consisting of merchants and clerks that are closer to the secular culture, having moved a relatively long way from the religious and tribal systems.¹⁶

Most of the internal conflicts in Somalia during the modern era have erupted due to the uprising of one of the tribal groups against an attempt to impose a collective Somali identity and its desire to protect its self-definition and freedom as a group.

The Islamic faith is one of the id...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half title
• title
• copy
• Content
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Somalia: Historical Review
• 2 Islam in Somalia
• 3 The Islamic Courts Union in Somalia
• 4 Peacekeeping Mission in Somalia
• 5 Al-Shabaab al-Mujahideen of Somalia
• 6 The Battle of Mogadishu
• 7 Operation Linda Nchi: The Incursion of Kenyan Armed Forces into Somalia
• 8 International Involvement in Somalia
• 9 The Democratization and Peace Process in Somalia
• 10 Intercultural Conflicts, “Failing States,” and al–Qaeda: Reciprocal Links
• Summary and Conclusions
• Index