Introduction
On October 15, 1969, on a humid Wednesday around noontime at the front gate of the municipal headquarters of Laas Aanood in Northern Somalia, a 22-year-old assassin by the name of Said Yusuf Ismail, nicknamed “Said Orfano,” fired seven bullets into Somali President Abdirashid Ali Sharmarke. The president suddenly fell down on a stone opposite the gate and died.1 Elected to the office on June 10, 1967, assuming the presidency on July 1, 1967, Abdirashid was the second civilian leader after President Aden Abdulle Osman “Aden Adde,” who had ruled Somalia since independence on July 1, 1960. When he was shot, Abdirashid was on his last leg in a visit to drought-stricken areas in the northeast where rain delays hit hard on pastoral nomads of the country populated by his clan.2 The assassination was so swift and sudden that the question of complicity was attributed to clan grievances. He was killed at “the hand of one of his own subclan,” as John Drysdale put it, or by “one of his bodyguards,” as Mohamed Diriye Abdullahi maintained, or similarly “by one of his police guards,” as I. M. Lewis pointed out.3 His prime minister, Mohamed Haji Ibrahim Egal, while holidaying in the United States, had to cut his visit short and return to Mogadishu. Once he arrived at the capital city he appointed General Mohamed Farah Aideed (then a lieutenant colonel in the army) to lead the military commission tasked for the funeral proceedings.4
The assassination has been placed in brackets in Somali historiography.5 Scholars who touched on the murder have made transitory comments on how Abdirashid became a victim of a clan vendetta between his subclan and the subclan of his assassin. Political scientist David Laitin and historian Said Samatar highlighted that the assassin, who they thought was a “soldier,” had hailed from a subclan that was a rival of the president’s; Abdirashid’s assassination was seen as “a payment for the suffering of the soldier’s subclan.”6 Anthropologist Anna Simons also briefly discussed the political dimensions of clan dynamics of the assassination.7 The Somali scholar Amina Haji Adan was perhaps the only one who hinted in writing that the president was assassinated “allegedly by a soldier acting alone.”8 But she did not provide further mention about the conspiracy behind the assassination. Thus, crucial and critical questions remain unanswered as to why the president was assassinated. Was the murder purely about a clan vendetta or something else such as a military coup connected to Cold War geopolitics? If clan predetermines Somali politics, why was the president killed by none other than one of his own clansmen? The clan thesis may conceal more than it reveals.
The political mystery surrounding Abdirashid’s assassination has been ignored by scholars of Somalia who have based their work on broad surveys concerned with the consequences of contemporary conflicts while overlooking their causes. Taking into account the assassinations of Patrice Lumumba in January 1961, Alhaji Abubakar Tafawa Balewa on January 1966, the Sardauna of Sokoto (the northern Nigerian prime minister) in January 1966, the Burundian Prime Minister Pierre Ngendandumwe in January 1965, and Togolese President Sylvanus Olympio in January 1963, Africa in the 1960s was a place of political eliminations. The mysteries surrounding these assassinations are still unresolved. Few have noticed the decisive roles the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (KGB) might have played in the assassinations. Abdirashid’s was the third political assassination in East Africa in 1969, and it was not fully investigated compared to the assassinations of Tom Mboya and of Chivambo Mondlane. Like these high-profile assassinations, Abdirashid’s murder deserves a special investigation as a significant national issue.9 Critically, but crucially, his assassination speaks more to Cold War politics than to the regional dynamics or to local Somali clan politics. For many years, it has been unclear whether the assassination was “by chance” or by a “conscious plan.”10 Whether it was planned or unplanned, the military coup d’état closely coincided with the assassination of an elected civilian president. Within less than a week, General Mohamed Siad Barre, the chief commandant of the army, was sitting in Abdirashid’s seat.
Whereas other assassinations have been investigated, no research study has been conducted on Abdirashid’s assassination. In line with other scholars, such as Susan Williams who investigated the assassination of Dag Hammarskjöld, the UN secretary-general who was killed in a plane crash September 18, 1961; Ludo de Witte, who studied Lumumba’s assassination; and Luise White, who probed the assassination of Herbert Chitepo, this article provides the first research investigation into Abdirashid’s assassination.11 A plethora of studies have been written about the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy. Though there are heated debates over Kennedy’s assassination, not least whether the bullets fired by Lee Harvey Oswald hit the right front or from the back, there is little dispute over where the bullets hit Abdirashid’s body.
This article counters the conventional explanations over the aims of the assassination by considering the broader geopolitical dynamics, even as it does not ignore the political plunders of the last civilian government. The plot of the assassination and how it was carried out lie at the core of this article. In uncovering the hidden aspect of postcolonial Somali history, the article argues that the Soviets and Barre played a central role in Abdirashid’s assassination: for the former, removing a pro-Western administration was important, and for the latter his aim was to project power through the ideology of Soviet-style socialism.
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