The Siyad Barre era
On 15 October 1969, President Abd ar-Rashid Ali Shirmake was assassinated by one of his bodyguards, setting the stage for a hastened and radical restructuring of Somalia. As head of the government, Prime Minister Egal assumed his obligations to oversee the appointment of an interim president. However, government critics, particularly those within the military, immediately labeled the subsequent succession process as corrupt, citing evidence of open bidding for National Assembly votes that would decide the Presidency. Once it was believed the National Assembly would approve Egal’s choice of a Darod politician as the next president, the army instigated a bloodless coup and assumed control of the government. General Mohamed Siyad Barre emerged as the leader of a Supreme Revolutionary Council (SRC) and simultaneously catapulted himself into the vacant presidency. Through his policies of ‘scientific socialism’ Barre sought to transform Somalia into a modern nation-state that would “substitute the clan in providing leadership, security, and welfare…” (Scholiswohl 2004). Following the abolishment of the constitution, National Assembly, Supreme Court and all political parties, Barre and the SRC unilaterally mandated themselves as the sole proprietors of the government. Despite public promises to eradicate tribalism and decentralize power, Barre’s policies inversely solidified clan ties while hoarding power in Mogadishu. The President relied heavily on support from the Darod clan family and deliberately manipulated clan rivalries to neutralize all potential opposition (Haldén 2008). Instead of emphasizing the country’s economic and social development, Barre used generous aid from the Soviet Union to build one of Africa’s pre-eminent armies primarily to protect his own power. Clan elders were integrated into the central government in an attempt to marginalize their power within local communities. Despite Barre’s repression of Somalis’ democratic rights and failed economic policies, the president facilitated a number of positive reforms in the country, including the advancement of women’s rights, the expansion of access to education and implementation of the first written Somali language.
The latter half of the 1970s marked the beginning of Barre’s fall from grace in Somalia. The 1974–1975 Dabadheer drought and famine devastated the country, resulting in the death of about 20,000 Somalis while draining the livestock export economy (Simons 1995). Instead of implementing policies aimed at reviving the country, Barre turned his attention to Ethiopia in order to reclaim one of the historically Somali territories, the Ogaden. Somalia’s western neighbor had also suffered greatly from the drought and found itself on the verge of civil war. Looking to reclaim the Ogaden grazing lands, 11 Barre sent his army to fight alongside the Western Somali Liberation Front (WSLF), the primary rebel group fighting against Ethiopia. However, these expansionist aspirations, primarily underscored by a desire to reunite the five territories of Somalia,12 led Barre to pursue a large-scale conflict that he was ultimately unable to sustain.
Following a failed peace conference in February 1977 between Ethiopia, Somalia, and negotiator Fidel Castro, Barre directed more resources towards winning the battle and reclaiming the land many Somalis believed was theirs. However, Ethiopia’s relatively new Marxist regime had recently lost all of its funding from the mass protests in cities around the U.S. against an executive order that would block millions of people from entering the United States, creating an opportunity for the Soviet Union and Cuba to shift the dynamics of the conflict.13 In 1978, the two Communist stalwarts cut their aid to Somalia and quickly redirected significant ground, air, and naval support to help Ethiopia defeat Barre (Haldén 2008).
The devastation brought about by the conflict sparked famine; an influx of refugees; growing public dissatisfaction with Barre’s regime; and subsequently, the formation of an Issaq-based armed opposition movement in Somaliland, the Somali National Movement (SNM). A political organization that promoted a return to “Somali cultural values of cooperation rather than coercion” (Ahmed I. Samatar 1988 reprinted in Walls 2011:123), the SNM’s primary grievances against the Barre government included ethnic underrepresentation within the political structure, unequal distribution of revenue from the livestock exports and discriminate victims of clan-based persecution and violence (Schoiswohl 2004).
Following the SNM’s attempt to establish bases in the northern cities of Hargeisa and Burao, the Somali government launched a full-scale attack against the northern Somali clans (primarily the Issaq), killing over 40,000 people between May 1988 and March 1989 (Lewis 2003). During the final phases of the Cold War, the United States began scaling back its containment policies and severely reduced its foreign aid to Somalia, draining the life-blood of Barre’s military power. Other armed groups responded to aid the SNM and created a united opposition against Barre’s regime. However, as the SNM primarily operated in northern Somalia, a number of opposition clan leaders and armed actors emerged in the south, creating a strong but uncoordinated movement against Siyad Barre; the emerging competing interests would ultimately hinder attempts to create a peaceful transition following the conflict. Anti-government protests and fighting broke out in Mogadishu throughout the latter half of 1990 and culminated in a two-month high-intensity battle through January 1991. On 26 January 1991, Barre fled Mogadishu, collapsing his regime as well as any semblance of functioning government in Somalia.
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