The Politics Of The 1969 Somali Coup

THE MILITARY REVOLUTION OF OCTOBER 1969

In this situation where the Republic was now completely dominated by the longest-lived and most comprehensive party organization in Somali political history, it is clear that the big clan blocs had, for the moment at least, lost much of their political identity. Two factors seem of major importance here.

First, the Republic’s markedly improved relations with Kenya and Ethiopia very much reduced the external pressures bearing on the state as a whole, and thus tended to encourage the mobilization of loyalties at the lowest levels of lineage organization.

Secondly, within the state, the continuing schism in the ranks of the Darod elite and the fact that the Head of State was drawn from this group reinforced the same trend. For as long as the leading Darod politicians were incapable of working together there was little incentive for those of other equivalent lineage blocs to unite against them. But although this might be taken to imply that tribalism’ in its special Somali form had also disappeared, this was far from being the case.

As the 1969 elections to forcibly showed, effective political solidarity had simply reverted to much lower levels in the segmentary system. Political commitment was indeed mainly — although not solely — en­gaged at levels which were so parochial that they could only be directly served by one-man parties which in the national political context were simply not viable entities. Nor, of course, were there sufficient seats in the National Assembly to accommodate a representative from each primary lineage in the country.

Yet the very large proportion of dis­appointed candidates (almost 90 percent) cannot be taken as any direct measure of the disequilibrium between the total number of grass-roots constituency units seeking representation and those which actually managed to return a member to the assembly.⁷ Most of the competing local units fielded several candidates under different party banners, some of which were frankly parochial electoral formations, whereas others were truly national organizations.

The situation was further confused and complicated by the provisions of the new electoral laws modifying the existing system of proportional representation. In a vain effort to discourage the proliferation of small lineage parties, each constituency was assigned an `electoral quotient’ which was determined by dividing the number of votes cast by the number of seats available.

On this principle, only parties that polled more votes than this figure were allocated seats. The precise effect of this procedure is hard to establish: certainly it did not achieve the aims for which it was claimed to be designed. With its 122 deputies, the S.Y.L. Government was almost literally bursting at the seams, and could not be other than an extremely heterogeneous assemblage of competing personal, family, and lineage interests. The maintenance of any semblance of unity with such an ill-assorted crew would clearly prove a most costly business.⁸

Stability has never been a conspicuous feature of Somali govern­ments, but on no previous occasion since independence had the internal forces favoring instability been so many or menacing. In the backlash of discontent and frustration following the elections, therefore, the President had been steadily consolidating his position by every means at his command, and the Premier was acting in the same fashion with little regard for the steadily mounting public criticism which his actions encouraged.

It had now become plain that if the Government had not completely rigged the elections, it had certainly done its best to do so, and that numerous irregularities had occurred. Disturbances which were hushed up during the electoral campaign were subsequently reported to have accounted for as many as 40 deaths although this figure may be exaggerated. The chief of police, the widely respected General Moham­mad Abshir, had himself resigned before the elections in protest at increasing political interference in his work. And under its newly appointed president the Supreme Court now conveniently reversed a previous decision and denied that it had the authority to judge the mass of electoral petitions alleging irregularities which complainants brought before it.

There was still also the delicate issue of the Government’s increasingly cordial relations with Kenya and Ethiopia, which did not seem to bring Somali unification any nearer and certainly offered a convenient stick with which to assail Egal’s policies. Finally, official corruption and nepo­tism seemed to be flourishing on a scale hitherto unknown in the Republic. Some previous governments (and particularly that led by Husseyn) had attempted to curtail these activities, but there was little sign that either the Premier or the President were unduly disturbed by their persistence.

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