New evidence on a full light
The outcome of the criminal court proceedings, not to mention the violent means in which Abdirashid was murdered, reveals that Barre played a part in the plot.49 The first moves and measures taken by Barre after the successful staging of his coup provide further evidence of who was responsible for the assassination plot. Within a few months upon coming to power, Barre issued a presidential decree ordering a special stipend for the late Captain Saadaq Mohamed Farah’s family.50 The captain was a man who had attempted to assassinate the president before. Married to Abdirizak’s niece, the captain sought more than twice to blast the president’s car. Earlier, a bomb thrown into the Abdirashid’s car had failed to explode. The captain later, on March 30, 1968, accidentally blew himself up while testing explosive devices in the outskirts of Mogadishu. When he died, he was training a group of would-be assassins to murder the president. Upon their arrest, the trainees admitted that the captain was showing them how to detonate a bomb in the president’s car.51 Ambassador Mohamed Ahmed Aalim, the captain’s colleague in the army, recalled that no inquiry was appointed to investigate who accompanied the captain in the plot.52 According to Colonel Mohamed Ismail Ibrahim “Sero Sero Sete,” Captain Saadaq had a close friendship with Barre.53
Apart from what the official regime bulletin suggests, there were other confirmations that clearly link the assassination to the military coup. The testimony given by Shukri Aden Shire, the daughter of Aden Shire Jama, the then minister of justice in the civilian administration, weighs the evidence. On the night of the coup, the house of Aden Shire was raided by a group of army officers and soldiers led by Barre’s son-in-law Ahmed Saleebaan Dafle, who was then head of army intelligence. Shukri documented that they arrested her father and took the file of the initial investigations of the assassination.54 Why her father kept the file at home rather than in his office is a question that she did not raise in her memoir. However, it appears that her father felt that due to the sensitive nature of the case the file would not have been safe in the cupboard of his office. The file taken by Barre’s son-inlaw included the cassettes of the interviews conducted by the police with the assassin. No one has seen them since.
In light of all the evidence, there appears a clear link between the coup and the assassination. Accumulating all these facts adds evidence on who were the culprits and who were the accomplices. This also settles a matter that was obscure not only to the public but to the pundits as well. The assassination appears to be a covert plot orchestrated within the army headquarters with the supervision of Soviet surveillance.55 The speed with which the military removed the remnants of the Abdirashid-Egaal administration, within a week of the assassination, also seems sufficient to demonstrate that the preparation behind the plot to murder the president and to seize the state had preceded the mission. In particular, the role and responsibility of Barre and his patrons played were clear, although after ascending to power he obviated any investigation of the assassination.56
With this newly discovered evidence, Barre was clearly part of the plot that eliminated an incumbent civilian president whose tenure would have ended in 1973. Colonel Abdullahi Yusuf stressed in his memoir that Barre played “a lion’s share” in the assassination.57 Though Yusuf’s emphasis can be driven by his clan genealogical affiliation with the president, Abdirashid himself was not a saint, considering his role in a Cold War realpolitik, a politics he barely understood.
Abdirashid steered the state from the West to the Soviets in 1962 and from the Soviets to the West in 1967, later flirting with the Arab world. Abdirashid put himself in real danger, as it was most likely that the Soviets infuriated by his decision were about to react very soon to prevent Somalia from reverting back to the Western fold.58 Apart from the Cold War dynamics, the president domestically became a target of public grievances against how his administration handled the March 1969 parliamentary election, an outcome in which fraud and fabrication had reached an unprecedented level.59 The untouchable elites in his inner circle were also undeterred by the state system, which allowed those who were at the top to embezzle public funds and compete for moneyed political positions.60 The whole government was so abhorred by the public that it became a synonym for corruption, clan cronyism, and clientelism. Faduma Ahmed Alim, the first female civil servant in Somalia, noted that once the integrity of the administration was tarnished, the ordinary people began to pray “for the downfall of the parliamentary government.”61 This was one of the reasons why the military coup d’état was perceived from the outset—as the Somali scholar Ali Jimale Ahmed put it—a “divinely symbolic act” to the mysterious assassination of Abdirashid.62
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