Continuing Governance Crisis in Somalia: The Bitter Fruit of the Somalis’ Faulty Approach to the Practice of Statecraft

Dr. Ali Abdirahman Hirsi
June 26,2006

Editor’s note:  Dr. Ali A. Hersi, employing his trade as a historian, unabashedly writes an unbiased short history of Somalia since the inception of its independence.  Decidedly posted this article by WarhdeerNews on the eve of the 47th year of the birth of an African nation with the utmost hope for a nation state, Dr. Ali carefully walks us through the hopes, despairs and destructions, experienced by the Somali state and its society.  Devoid of any ideological bent on the spectrum of Somalia’s archaic politics, Dr. Hirsi’s piece is a unique product by a Somali historian that may force all of us to look deep into our souls and hopefully find out where things went wrong and what can be rescued of the Somalia state.

Dr. Ali A.Hirsi is a former Dircetor of African Studies, University of Florida at Gainsville, fellow of Fullbright scholar at UCLA (1983 - 1984), President of the Somali Acadamey of Science and Arts, Dean of the College of Education, Somali National University. Dr. Hirsi currently resides in Mogadishu, Somalia


Introduction: Anomalies of Somalia’s Political History

Somalia has had an out of the ordinary political history full of sad and ironical twists. It has a uniquely homogeneous population blessed with a manifestly democratic traditional system of social and political organization. Though envied by most other African states and touted by most political pundits of the 1960s to be the most likely African state to successfully experiment with democratic governance, Somalia never had the strongly resilient democratic rule or the otherwise happy political future predicted for it. After only 9 years of corrupt and generally inefficient rule by elected civilian regimes, the military staged a coup d'état and forcefully took the reins of state, rudely terminating the era of democratic governance in Somalia.

From then on, the Somalis endured 21 years of oppressive misrule under a military autocracy followed by 15 years of lawlessness and civil strife that have yet to come to an end. Instead of becoming the predicted shining example of a well-governed democratic state, Somalia has ironically become an archetypical failed state that has wallowed
in civil conflict for 15 long years and has also earned the dubious honor of being the only country in the world that has been without a functioning central authority since the early 1990s.

During this period, the international community attempted as many as 14 times to revive the fallen Somali state but these efforts have all failed with repeated and tedious regularity. In spite of their obviously unhappy situation, the Somalis have shown inexplicable resistance to the idea of their ever having a political authority again. Even a late 1992 strong international military intervention failed to impress the recalcitrant Somalis. By the middle of the 1990s, a sympathetic but now confounded international community despaired of realizing success in its efforts to revive the Somali state and gave up altogether on Somalia.

The paradox in Somalia’s political history does not end here. Throughout the 30-year period of its existence as an independent state, Somalia sought self-aggrandizement by waging a strenuous but lonely campaign to bring about the reunification of all ethnic Somalis and the territories they inhabit into a single state. Attempts by the Somali authorities to effect the reunification of the Somali nation flew in the face of a world order, which emerged after the 2nd World War as the antithesis to nationalism and was disinclined to show sympathy for Somalia’s anomalous nationalistic policy pursuits. As might be expected, the irredentism that Somalia pursued in defiance of this world order ended in failure and the search for
Somali national reunification came to a sudden and inglorious end when the Somalia state collapsed in 1991. Instead of bringing ethnic Somalis living beyond its borders into the fold, Somalia has itself, as luck would have it, undergone serious political fragmentation in the course of a prolonged civil strife. Worse yet, the Somalis who have strived so hard during 1960-90 to enlarge their state through the reunification of all ethnic Somalis are behaving now with the ultimate irony of enigmatically resisting the revival of their lost state.

This essay considers three primary factors, given support variously by a host of secondary factors, to be at the base of the noted catalog of ironies that have made Somalia’s political history so anomalous. Introduced in the order of their chronological precedence, they are:

(1) Difficulties born with the arrival of the modern state in the Somali peninsula.

The modern state is an unfamiliar and essentially alien form of political and social organization, forcefully imposed on the Somalis by colonial authorities. One notices an inherent incompatibility between the libertarian nature of the Somalis’ traditional culture and the restrictive demands of the modern state. Concerned authorities failed to pay due
attention to this intrinsic divorce between the Somali culture and the modern state and the ever present danger this divergence posed to the country’s evolving political culture;

(2) Disreputable governance record of political authorities that has resulted in practice failure of the state to serve the Somalis well.

Since the late 19th century advent of colonial rulers that have introduced the modern state to them, the Somalis have persistently suffered misrule at the hands of a series of uncaring colonial and Somali governments that have behaved, intentionally or out of ignorance, with little or no regard for legitimacy. Their consistently inappropriate governance has consequently not only driven Somalia to civil strife but it has very significantly also predisposed the Somalis to be distrustful of the powers of state. The difficulty of finding concordance between the Somalis’ traditional culture and the modern state and the inappropriate governance of the past foreign and Somali regimes have conspired together and are jointly responsible for the Somalis’ present baffling reticence and lack of enthusiasm for the restoration of their state; and,

(3) Unvarying use of an unhelpful peace making technique that literally made efforts of the international community to revive the Somali state an exercise in futility.

One obvious reason that admittedly provides only partial explanation for the repeated and ironical failure of the past attempts to revive the fallen Somali state is the uniform application of a flawed methodology in the running of these peace conferences. The repeated use of this faulty procedure, which paid only lip service to the issue of reconciliation, has hastily given birth time and again to illegitimate authorities composed of the same rival warlords, in the event not yet reconciled, that have given rise to Somalia’s continuing political crisis in the first place.

To properly evaluate the unfortunate ramifications of these issues for the evolving political culture of Somalia, characterized by continuing and unbecoming governance crises, we will have to throw a glance back at Somalia’s modern history. And so, we turn now to a
brief consideration of this country’s anomalous political history. Continue....

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