The history of Somaliland (from colonation to Republic of somaliland)

Pre-colonial Origins (circa 615-1881)

Islamic Roots

Somaliland is just one of five nations in the Horn of Africa with large ethnic Somali populations. The others are: Ethiopia, Djibouti, Somalia, and Kenya.

31% of Ethiopia's land area, the Ogaden, is almost entirely populated by Somalis, 60% of Djiboutians are Somali, Somalia is predominantly Somali, and northeastern Kenya is almost exclusively Somali. Although Somaliland has developed a distinct national identity since its colonial experience, its story, like that of the other 4 countries with large Somali populations, begins with the story of the Somali people. And the story of the Somali people begins with Islam.

The early Muslims, like the early Christians, were bitterly persecuted. In response to the hostility Muslims faced in Arabia during the early seventh century, the Prophet Muhammad advised many of his followers to migrate to the Horn of Africa, a region then known for its free governments. Many Muslims heeded the prophet's advice, establishing settlements both in Abyssinia (what is now western Ethiopia and Eritrea) and in lands that would become predominantly Somali (what is now Djibouti, Somaliland, and northern Somalia). Here they found religious freedom and security that was virtually unheard of in Arabia, and peacefully coexisted with their Christian and polytheistic neighbors (Elmi 49, Samatar "Somalia: The Tenets of Islam.", Khwarazmi).

Thus the seeds of both contemporary Somali culture and African Islam were planted in a spirit of peace rather than conquest. Islam spread quickly in the region as a result of Arab traders, and the mix of African and Arab cultures produced the modern Somali identity. Virtually all Somalis are adherents of Sunni Islam, and most Somalis trace their ancestry back to relatives of the Prophet Muhammad that migrated to Africa sometime between the seventh and thirteenth centuries (Samatar, Bradbury 10, Lewis Understanding Somalia and Somaliland 2).

Traditional Society

Up to the time of colonialism, Somali society was largely democratic and egalitarian; the vast majority of Somalis lived as nomads practicing free government (Lewis 28). Families chose representatives, usually elders, to advocate for them in governing councils, which convened only when specific crises arose and made decisions mainly by consensus. Families could recall their representatives if they ruled badly, and, within most Somali communities, representatives had no institutionalized authority and played primarily advisory roles.

With such a decentralized form of government, most Somalis had no concept of a modern nation-state and political organization was primarily limited to the level of the clan, the genealogy network within which a Somali family identified. Although several Arab city states and sultanates, with the characteristics of modern nations, were founded along the coast, these exerted little influence on the nomadic majority in the interior. The free culture of the nomads remained dominant, even as the coastal states linked the nomads, through trade, with international markets (Bradbury 16).

Traditionally, the unity or division of the Somalis varied situationally and was highly dynamic. Although most Somalis were members of at least one clan, agenealogy network traced primarily through the male line, the level with which Somalis politically associated with their clans was highly fluid (Lewis 27-28). Clans were often too widely dispersed to act as stable political units, and each clan was divided into many sub clans (Lewis 27). In addition, all major clans belonged to one of 5 clan families, each encompassing multiple clans, which enabled large-scale organization if necessary (Lewis 3-4). Thus, depending on the situation, an individual Somali could choose to broaden or narrow her political associations, and, due to the nomadic nature of Somali life, often identified more with her sub clan than with her clan or clan family (Elmi 35, Lewis 27-28). Even in the absence of nationalism, however, Somalis would demonstrate an ability to unite against common enemies at the supra-clan level, as clearly illustrated by northern Somalis' fierce resistance to colonialism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. 

The nomadic pastoral life of most Somalis revolved around the keeping of livestock, mainly camels, sheep, and goats. Camels were traditionally the most prized, valuable both as a means of transportation and as a source of milk, meat, and leather. In order to maintain large flocks indefinitely, Somalis frequently moved to new land and, to reduce the strain on pastures, traveled in small family groups. This lifestyle led to a culture of self-reliance and strong families, as only those communities that could take care of themselves while isolated on the savannah could survive and prosper (Lewis 52, 54).

The Early Colonial Era (1881-1920)

The Imperial Invasion (1881-1899)

For over a thousand years, the nomadic Somalis maintained their independence and freedom, and their primary loyalty was to their families. They were not owned by emperors or kings, and they recognized no borders as they roamed the Horn of Africa, grazing their flocks. Although, over the course of the centuries, different governments had laid claim to them, the Somalis had, up to the late 19th century, fiercely and successfully maintained their liberty (Bradbury 10, 15).

In the 1880s, however, the Somalis fell victim to the unprecedented, simultaneous intrusions of four colonial powers, France, Great Britain, Italy, and Ethiopia, onto the lands they inhabited. 

Maps (click to enlarge)

 

France claimed a part of Somali territory around the port of Djibouti in 1881, establishing the colony of the French Somali Coast (Côte Français des Somaliens in French), popularly known as Djibouti or French Somaliland, with Ethiopian cooperation (in return, France helped to construct a railroad from Ethiopia's capital to Djibouti, giving Ethiopia easy access to a port) (Bradbury 24, "Somalia.").

Great Britain, to check France's power on the coast and to secure a supply of food for its garrisons in Yemen, claimed its own swathe of northwestern Somali country and formally established the Protectorate of Somaliland in 1884. This was done despite the fact that agreements previously made with local Somalis guaranteed them "independence," and did not fully cede Somali territory ("Somalia."). Although the Protectorate of Somaliland would be Great Britain's principal Somali territory, it is important to note that Great Britain's East Africa Protectorate (what is now Kenya and Uganda), established in 1895, would encompass a small part of southern Somali country, an area which would be divided into 2 territories: Kenya's Northern Frontier District and Trans-Juba, based in the Juba Valley. Trans-Juba would be ceded to Italy by Great Britain in 1925, and fully incorporated into Italian Somalia by 1926, as a reward for Italy's participation in World War 1.

Italy, with the encouragement of Great Britain (nervous about growing French influence), founded Italian Somalia (Somalia Italiana in Italian), otherwise known as Italian Somaliland, by claiming northeastern Somali territory and "acquiring" the majority of southern Somali territory (including the Ogaden) in 1889 from the Sultan of Zanzibar, who had earlier claimed it despite exercising no control over most of the region (Bradbury 24, "Somalia."). 

And Ethiopia, which had already claimed a significant part of Somali territory near the French Somali Coast in 1884, made the last major acquisition of Somali country in 1896 when, after defeating an Italian army encroaching from the colony of Eritrea, the empire was ceded the Ogaden region by the weakened Italians ("Somalia.").

Somalis cautiously tolerated the new colonial presences on their land at the beginning of the colonial regimes. British, French, and Italian influence was limited mainly to the coasts, and the nomads of the interior were, for the most part, able to maintain their traditional ways of life.

This changed, however, when Ethiopia moved to assert itself in the Ogaden in the late 1890s. Ethiopian authorities circumscribed the movements of Somali nomads, limiting their access to good land, and forced them to pay excessive taxes to imperial authorities, ruining their livelihoods. In addition, Ethiopian colonists settled in the Ogaden and committed atrocities, raiding Somali communities and destroying Somali religious centers. These crimes sparked the Dervish War, a Somali rebellion against all colonial authorities that lasted over two decades (Bradbury 26).

The Dervish War (1899-1920)

Although the actions of the Ethiopians provoked immediate responses from the militant Somalis, these were typically organized merely at a clan or family level; in fact, most Somali political organization did not extend much farther than the extended family network (Lewis 27). As a result, a united Somali resistance against the colonial intruders was not a given, as exemplified in the failure of a united rebellion to occur in southern Somali country despite Italy's increasingly brutal suppression of the natives.

In the north, however, a charismatic leader named Mohammed Abdullah Hassan, born on the border of the Protectorate of Somaliland and the Ogaden, coordinated and led a widespread anti-colonial uprising. Although Hassan was an adherent of the widely unpopular and puritanical Saalahiya sect of Sunni Islam (the vast majority of Somalis ascribe to the far older, moderate Qaadiriya order), by using his strength as a poet (he was widely regarded as one of the greatest of his age), he drew widespread support by rendering a compelling vision of Somali unity that, until then, had been virtually unknown (Bradbury 26).

Photo of a statue of Hassan (click to enlarge)

Leading a broad coalition of Somali clans, Hassan waged a war for independence against the Ethiopians, British, and Italians in northern Somali country (Lewis 18). Ethiopia's actions, taken with British complacency, had made northern Somalis acutely aware of the threat that all colonial powers posed to their liberty, and they eagerly acceded to Hassan's call for unity (Bradbury 26). 

Although colonial authorities had tried to keep firearms out of the hands of Somalis, Hassan was able to acquire them through his contacts on the coasts, and his armed fighters, known as the Dervish, used guerilla tactics to repel colonial forces for over twenty years ("Somalia."). After five major campaigns against him ended in failure, the British finally defeated Hassan in a joint land, sea, and air operation in 1920. The imperials' success was largely due to the use of bomber-planes, never-before-seen by Somalis, which razed the city of Taleex, the center of Hassan's support, from the sky, killing many Dervish fighters along with their families (Bradbury 27).

Although Hassan survived the assault, he died of influenza a few months later before he was able to effectively rally further resistance. With his death, the Dervish War, so-named after Hassan's Dervish, came to an end (Lewis 17).

The Protectorate of Somaliland (1920-1960)

The Origins of the Somaliland Nation

Although declared in 1884, it was not until 1920, with the defeat of Hassan, that Great Britain's Protectorate of Somaliland really came into existence.Before the war, British administration did not extend far past the coast, but after the war, as an act of military necessity, colonial government extended throughout the entire protectorate. As the Republic of Somaliland is a successor state to the Protectorate of Somaliland (the republic claims the same borders as the colony), it is in this development of the protectorate after the Dervish War that a Somaliland national identity first began to form.

Before 1920, nationalism was still a foreign concept to Somalis. Despite speaking the same language and sharing a similar culture, Somalis were never united in a single political entity (Pham). Even the great Somali leader Hassan did not establish a state, and is appropriately called a 'proto-nationalist' by Somali scholars (Barnes, Bradbury 29). It was the colonial regimes, thoroughly established by 1920, that first strongly impressed Somalis with the idea of nationhood.

As supra-clan organization was facilitated both through participation in and mobilization against colonial administrations, and as Somalis were increasingly exposed to Western ideas of the state, using clan loyalty as the primary basis of political identity came to be seen as anachronistic and counterproductive (Bradbury 31, Lewis A Modern History of the Somali 

122). While clans would remain an important part of Somali life, functioning as non-governmental support groups similar to religious communities and extended family-networks, they gradually ceased to be the most important forms of political organization in Somali society. In place of clan, Somalis increasingly gave precedence to national or territorial identity, based on shared institutions, history, land, and culture rather than genealogy (Bradbury 31).

Somaliland's national identity, distinct from those of the other Somali nations, is rooted in its colonial experience. While the other Somali colonies were administered by regimes that extensively interfered in the lives of Somalis, the Protectorate of Somaliland was governed by a colonial authority that largely left the traditional structures of Somali society in place (Lewis Understanding Somalia and Somaliland 30). One of the Republic of Somaliland's most defining features is the strength of its culture, a key contributor to its stability and a legacy of Great Britain's non-interventionist policy in British Somaliland (Howden).

The Protectorate of Somaliland and Italian Somalia

Due to the fact that Somaliland's 31-year-long participation in a union with Somalia and the subsequent disintegration of that union are such important parts of Somaliland's history, it is necessary, while exploring Somaliland's colonial experience, to contrast it with that of Somalia.

Although all the Somali territories were distinct, a result of their unique colonial experiences, the Protectorate of Somaliland and Italian Somalia were the two colonies with the least in common. The union with Somalia, then, is one of the great ironies of Somaliland's history.

Colonial rule in Italian Somalia, what is now Somalia, was authoritarian and highly intrusive. Fascist governors ruled the colony, imposing their ideology on the locals and brutally suppressing dissent. In addition, tens of thousands of colonists (more than in any other Somali colony) settled in Italian Somalia. This led to the erosion of the traditional values that Somalis had always relied upon. 

To facilitate assimilation into fascist society, Somalis were conscripted into military service. In order to justify seizing land for settlers' fruit plantations, the Italians disregarded Somali claims to property (Bradbury 29). In line with their racist beliefs, the fascists undermined the authority of Somali elders in order to strongly distinguish the Italians as the 'natural rulers' of their African subjects (Lewis  30). And, in addition, rapid urbanization in Italian Somalia brought many Somalis under the heel of corrupt and tyrannical bureaucracies, further eroding traditions of independence and democracy (Bradbury 95).

In contrast to the experience in Italian Somalia, however, Somali institutions in the Protectorate of Somaliland were preserved and respected to a greater degree than in any of the other Somali colonies. In addition, the Protectorate of Somaliland had the least colonists of any Somali territory (Lewis 30).

After the Dervish War, the British were extremely wary of provoking another uprising, having borne the brunt of Hassan's rebellion (so much so that the 'Dervish War' is also called 'The Revolt in British Somaliland') ("Somalia."). To discourage further resistance to colonial rule, the protectorate's administration allowed Somali traditions to persist as they had before. 

Rural Somalis, the vast majority of the protectorate's population, were largely left to govern themselves. And while the colonial government did engage in development, such as in the trading centers of Hargeisa and Berbera, the British authorities supported traditional forms of governance as much as possible, relying on family elders to do the most of the basic tasks of administration, such as collecting taxes and running the courts (Bradbury 28-29).

As a result of this hands-off approach by the British, Somalilanders (residents of the Protectorate of Somaliland) largely retained their democratic institutions, and their core values of self-reliance and independence remained strong. The Protectorate of Somaliland was more stable than the other Somali territories where colonial intervention was more extensive, and, after independence, the Somalilanders were able to maintain this stability by drawing on their cultural traditions.

In Italian Somalia (what would later become Somalia), however, disruptions of Somali society caused lasting trauma, and sowed the seeds of Somalia's collapse into anarchy and terror (Howden).

The Road to Independence

From 1920 until 1939, colonial power in the Horn of Africa had been steadily increasing. In the late 1930s, the Italian Empire encompassed both Italian Somalia and Ethiopia, conquered in 1936 during the Italo-Ethiopian War, and the other empires in the region (those of the British and the French) continued to develop their colonies in earnest. The outbreak of the Second World War, however, reversed this trend of increasing imperial entrenchment. 

In 1940, in the midst of war, Italian forces stationed in East Africa invaded neighboring Allied colonies, succeeding in capturing Somaliland but failing in their invasions of Sudan and Kenya. In 1941, British forces struck back and drove the Italian army out of East Africa, liberating Ethiopia and assuming control of Italy's colonial territories in the region.

After the war ended, the British military briefly administered all of the Somali territories with the exception of the French Somali Coast. The British even controlled the Ogaden, which had been seized as a colonial possession. Soon, however, these Somali territories were re-partitioned to their original colonial rulers ("Somalia.").

Despite the protests of the Somalis in the territory, the Ogaden was returned to Ethiopia in 1947 due to the Ethiopian government's staunch support for the British, and because the ceding of the Ogaden was perceived as compensation for the Italian occupation (Lewis 33).

Similarly, in 1950, the Italians were invited to return to their Somali colony but, unlike the Ethiopians, not indefinitely. Italian Somalia was put under UN Trusteeship, becoming the Trust Territory of Somalia, and the returning Italian administration was charged with preparing the colony for independence in ten years (Lewis 32, and "Somalia.").

The Protectorate of Somaliland remained under British charge, but the agitation of the Somalilanders, long ready for self-government and tired of the paternalistic colonial regime, forced Great Britain to accept an accelerated timetable for independence. After a quick transition to self-rule that included two democratic elections within three years, the Protectorate of Somaliland was granted independence as the State of Somaliland on June 26, 1960 (Bradbury 32).

The Union of the State of Somaliland with Somalia (1960-1991)

Pan-Somalism 

When the Protectorate of Somaliland became independent as the State of Somaliland on June 26, 1960, it was accorded full recognition of its sovereignty. The UN was informed by the British of the birth of a new nation, and thirty-five UN members, including the US, immediately gave the state full diplomatic recognition. Nevertheless, just 5 days later, the State of Somaliland entered into a union with the newly independent Somalia. The reason for this was the recent popularity of pan-Somalism (Pham, Bradbury 83).

Maps (click to enlarge)

  Pan-Somalism  was the belief that all Somali people should be united in a single state. The idea originated with Somali intellectuals in Italian Somalia in the early 1940s, and gradually spread throughout all the Somali territories ("eastern Africa.").

In Somaliland, the pan-Somali ideal gained popularity in the wake of Great Britain's decision to cede Ethiopia the Ogaden in 1947. For hundreds of years, Somalilanders had grazed their flocks in the Haud region of the Ogaden. Under Ethiopian administration, however, the people of Somaliland were restricted from using the land. As an area of particularly rich pastures, many of Somaliland's nomads had depended on the Haud for their livelihoods, and they were devastated by Ethiopia's action ("Why Ogaden War."). As the pan-Somali vision encompassed the Ogaden, the union with Somalia was seen by Somalilanders as the first step to regaining full access to this vital territory (Bradbury 32).

Maps (click to enlarge)

 

Somaliland's severe underdevelopment, a result of Great Britain's benign neglect, was also a factor in the decision to join with Somalia. Unlike Somaliland, Somalia had been extensively developed, and Somaliland's integration into Somalia's much larger economy was predicted to accelerate economic growth in the country (Bradbury 32).

Lastly, pan-Somalism was motivated by the acute awareness of all Somalis, especially those in Somaliland, that, although Great Britain and Italy were abandoning the Horn of Africa for good, Ethiopia, the last major colonial power in the region, was there to stay. As a traditional antagonist of the Somalis, one that continued to occupy Somali territory and to harbor expansionist aims (as demonstrated by its recent acquisitions of the Ogaden and the Italian colony of Eritrea, as well as its interest in acquiring the French Somali Coast from France), Ethiopia loomed large as a threat to the smaller, newly independent Somali nations. A union of the State of Somaliland with Somalia was seen as a way to undermine (and perhaps even nullify with a future liberation of the Somali Ogaden) Ethiopian dominance in the region (Lewis "Pan-Africanism and Pan-Somalism.")

The Somali Republic (1960-1969)

Although at first Somalilanders held great enthusiasm for the union with Somalia, it was not long before many became disillusioned with the Somali Republic. As a result of the haste of their union, upon joining together there were no set agreements between Somaliland and Somalia about how to combine the two countries' institutions. This caused many problems due to the extent of their differences: their government languages were different (English for Somaliland; Italian for Somalia) as well as their forms of administration, educational systems, and legal traditions (Bradbury 32).

In addition, almost immediately, the people of Somaliland found themselves marginalized in the new state as a minority, living nearly 1000 miles away from Mogadishu, the new capital. Virtually all state bureaucracy operated out of the southern city, and to get trade licenses, passports, or legal services, Somalilanders had to travel hundreds of miles of dirt roads. And, since most Somalilanders had few contacts or political connections in the new capital, they suffered discrimination in employment and procuring government services.

In the central government, Somalians held most senior government posts and made up three quarters of parliament. In a reflection of the concentration of power in Mogadishu and the south, government development expenditure in Somaliland was less than 10% of government development expenditure in Somalia, even though Somaliland made up about a quarter of the republic's land area and Somalilanders constituted approximately a third of the republic's population (Pham, Bradbury 54).

As a result of these factors, when it came time to ratify the union constitution of the Somali Republic in 1961, the majority of Somalilanders voted against it while the majority of Somalians voted in favor of it. In addition, later that same year, military officers in Somaliland attempted a coup, apparently to end the union (Jhazbhay 32). Although the coup was aborted and charges of treason filed against the officers, in a further sign of discontent, the judge in the case dismissed the charges, alleging that the central government had no jurisdiction over Somaliland (Bradbury 33).

The grounds for the judge's decision were based in the hurried nature of Somaliland's union with Somalia. Although the leaders of both countries had agreed to the union beforehand, the central government of the Somali Republic, and the declaration of the new state, had been made before an actual joint Act of Union had been fully prepared and approved. As a result, although the Somali Republic was internationally recognized in 1960, it was not until 1961 that a joint Act of Union was approved, retrospectively, by the Somali Republic's national assembly, not separate legislatures for Somaliland and Somalia. In light of Somaliland's rejection of the union constitution, the legality of the union of Somaliland with Somalia was dubious, as demonstrated by the dismissal of the charges against the coup leaders in 1961 (Bradbury 33-34).

Nevertheless, the de facto legitimacy of the Somali Republic was not seriously challenged again until the end of the republican government. After failing to stop the ratification of the union constitution (it was ratified because the majority of Somalians, approximately two thirds of the republic's population, voted in favor), Somalilanders largely resigned themselves to participation in the new state (Bradbury 34).

The greatly flawed, yet basically democratic, Somali Republic did not last long. The republic's leaders, rather than building the state from the ground up, chose to build the state from the top down, influenced by the centralization of state power in Italian Somalia under fascist rule. The constant expansion of the reach and size of government during the republic's short history continually outpaced the growth of the domestic economy needed to sustain it. To resource the growth of the state bureaucracy, the government deftly manipulated Cold War tensions to receive large amounts of foreign aid. For several years, Italy and Britain paid for a nearly a third of the Somali Republic's budget (Bradbury 34). 

As a result, the development of a productive domestic economy was largely neglected as the political elite fought over foreign-financed state resources. Ideology became less important in elections than family connections, and incumbents used exorbitant amounts of public funds to finance their campaigns. Access to power was largely limited to wealthy businessmen and the preexisting political establishment, while the majority of the population (some 65% at independence) were subsistence herders (Bradbury 34-35).

The foreign policy of the Somali Republic naturally focused on the issue of Somali self-determination and unification. The pan-Somali cause was the basis for the state's existence. All ethnic Somalis were granted citizenship under the republic's constitution, and the five-pointed white 'Star of Unity,' the republic's national emblem and the centerpiece of the country's flag, signified the five parts of the Somali 'nation' that were to be unified: the French Somali Coast (Djibouti), Somaliland, Somalia, the Ogaden, and the Northern Frontier District in Kenya (Lewis Understanding Somalia and Somaliland 29, 36, Samatar "Somalia: Pan-Somalism.").

Flag of the Somali Republic (click to enlarge)

Attempts by the republic's government to realize the pan-Somali ideal were unsuccessful. Although the people of the Northern Frontier District, populated exclusively by Somalis, voted overwhelmingly in a referendum to unite their territory with the Somali Republic, the British government disregarded both the referendum's results and entreaties from the Somali Republic, and, in response to agitation from Kenyan nationalists, allowed Kenya to keep the Somali territory when it became independent in 1963 (Bradbury 34, "Somalia.").

The Somali Republic, in essence, refused to recognize the decision. The republic broke off relations with Great Britain, and clandestinely supported a Somali guerilla insurgency against the Kenyan government in the Northern Frontier District that lasted 4 years (Elmi 97, Samatar). In 1967, however, the Somali Republic was forced to terminate its support for the conflict in the face of a highly effective Kenyan counter-insurgency, and the Somali rebellion in the Northern Frontier District collapsed ("The Somali Dispute: Kenya Beware."). 

Similarly, the republic did not recognize Ethiopian territorial claims in the Ogaden on the grounds that the indigenous Somalis had not been granted self-determination (Samatar). Emboldened by the Somali Republic's pan-Somali rhetoric and strong stance against Ethiopian authority in the region, Ogaden Somalis rebelled against imperial rule ("eastern Africa."). In 1964, tensions between the Somali Republic and the Ethiopian Empire over the rebellion, which the republic's army had begun to explicitly back, exploded into a brief skirmish between the two nations' militaries. Ethiopia's superior army and air force easily defeated the Somali Republic's soldiers in the Ogaden, and the republic quickly withdrew its forces from the region, preventing an all-out war. As a result, Ethiopia was able to suppress the Ogaden rebellion (Bradbury 35, "Ethiopia.", Samatar).

The status of the French Somali Coast received less attention from the Somali Republic than did that of the Ogaden and the Northern Frontier District, but the French territory was not forgotten by the republic. Although the majority of the colony's population allegedly voted to remain French colonial subjects in a referendum held in 1958, allegations of vote rigging and the disenfranchisement of Somalis (the majority of whom were in favor of union with the Somali Republic) by French authorities marred the legitimacy of the vote. The French government favored the minority Afars over the majority Somalis (Abdi "Independence for the Afars and Issas: Complex Background; Uncertain Future.").

Like the situations in the Ogaden and the Northern Frontier District, the status of the French Somali Coast was not resolved in circumstances favorable to pan-Somalism under the republican government. In a second referendum held in the territory in 1967, conducted under similar circumstances to the first referendum in 1958 (including allegations of vote rigging and the harassment of Somali politicians), a majority of the colony's residents allegedly voted, again, to have their territory remain a French colony ("Djibouti Politics, Government, and Taxation."). In addition, the name of the French Somali Coast was changed soon after the referendum to the French Territory of the Afars and the Issas (the Issa clan is the most populous Somali clan in Djibouti), simultaneously providing greater acknowledgment of the Afars (who were 35% of the colony's population) and downplaying the colony's Somali identity. This outcome naturally strained relations between the Somali Republic and France (Samatar "Somalia: Foreign Relations, 1960-69.").

Although the Somali Republic partially repaired its relations with Ethiopia and Kenya in 1967 by pursuing a policy of detente, the failed pursuit of pan-Somali objectives was highly damaging to the republic (Lewis 37). The conflicts with its neighbors isolated the Somali union both regionally and internationally, and, additionally, were a drain on the republic's already ailing domestic economy ("The Somali Dispute: Kenya Beware."). Ethiopia and Kenya entered into a mutual defense pact to guard against future Somali aggression, and the republic's Western donors, who supported the Ethiopian and Kenyan territorial claims, became more wary in their support of the Somali nation (Elmi 97, Samatar "Somalia: Pan-Somalism."). 

In 1969, the Somali Republic held its last democratic election. Although over 1000 candidates from 62 parties contested the political contest, the result was a turn toward autocracy as, after the new national assembly was formed, almost all of the members joined the governing party, forming a formidable coalition of the country's ruling elite and turning the republic into a de facto one-party state. Public dissatisfaction with this event manifested itself in the surprise assassination of the president by one of his bodyguards. In the chaos that followed amongst the country's political establishment as they scrambled to choose a successor, the military seized power (Lewis 37-38).

The political oligarchy the army replaced had become increasingly undemocratic, and endemic corruption, years of economic stagnation, and the failure to gain any headway in the pan-Somali struggle had largely discredited the republican regime. The coup encountered no opposition, and would later be recast by the military government as a 'bloodless revolution' (Lewis 38-39). 

The Development of the Military State (1969-1977)

Upon seizing control of the state, the military, under Commander of the Army Siad Barre, immediately consolidated political power. The elected government was replaced by a Supreme Revolutionary Council (SRC), a governing body composed of leaders from the military and police, the constitution was suspended, all political parties were banned, and leading politicians were arrested. Barre became Head of State as President of the SRC (Bradbury 35-36, Lewis 38).

The military justified its seizure of power by contrasting its own organization with the ineffectiveness and corruption of the old regime, and promised to vigorously address the country's underdevelopment. Soon the new administration began the task of reform, and, on the first anniversary of the coup, officially adopted Scientific Socialism as the ideological framework for its policies (Bradbury 36). Both to differentiate Barre's state from the old republic, and to affirm the new government's commitment to socialism, the union was renamed, despite the regime's totalitarianism, the Somali Democratic Republic, although the union's flag was kept the same. 

The regime's most successful reform was the adoption of a Latin script for the Somali language in 1972. As a result, Somali became a written language for the first time (previously Somalis had written in either Arabic or European languages), and mass literacy campaigns in urban and rural areas proved immensely popular. Another generally popular reform was the adoption of a new Family Law, which increased women's legal and economic rights when it came to inheritance (Bradbury 32).

Despite these reforms, however, Barre's regime was one of the most oppressive in Africa. The national security agency, headed by Barre's son-in-law, was given unlimited power to suppress opponents. Confiscation of private property, torture, rape, extrajudicial executions, and forced disappearances by security forces were commonplace. Severe restrictions were placed on the freedoms of speech and association, and virtually all public forms of expression and association were put under strict government control (Bradbury 37, 38, 60).

In an expression of the regime's totalitarian nature, Barre cultivated a personality cult, influenced by the model of North Korea's Kim Il-sung (Lewis 39). Barre claimed the title of the "Father" of the nation whose "mother" was the revolution. Public posters of Barre were widely distributed throughout the country, and, attesting to the regime's commitment to socialism, proclaimed the ruling trinity of "Comrade Marx, Comrade Lenin, and Comrade Siad" ("Somalia."). 

The problems of corruption, nepotism, and economic mismanagement, which had allegedly been the impetus for the coup, were made worse under Barre's socialist government. Almost all industries were brought entirely under state control with disastrous consequences. Experiments with cooperative production failed, and productivity decline (Rebuilding Somaliland: Issues and Possibilities : WSP International Somali Programme 57). The reach and size of state institutions, however, continued to increase under Barre's regime even more rapidly than under previous governments, and, as a result, the state became increasingly dependent on foreign assistance. 

Between 1972 and 1989, the Somali Democratic Republic was the highest per capita recipient of foreign aid in Africa, and, by the end of Barre's regime, 75% of the country's wealth would be foreign development assistance. This dependence was sustained first, with aid from socialist bloc countries during Ethiopia's pro-Western tenure under Emperor Haile Selassie, and, second, with aid from Western donors during Ethiopia's communist period under Colonel Mengistu Mariam (Bradbury 40, 42). 

There were two main reasons for the extensive foreign investment in the Somali Democratic Republic. The first reason was that the Somali coast, the longest in Africa and bordering the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean, was a vital strategic resource for projecting power in the Middle East, a volatile but important region due to its immense oil wealth (Bradbury 40). The second reason was that both sides of the Cold War considered Ethiopia to be the most important power in the Horn of Africa, and, as a result, whichever side lost influence in Ethiopia turned to the Somali Democratic Republic to maintain their presence in the region and check Ethiopia's power. 

Barre's government maintained its authority through a combination of patronage and the severe repression of opposition. Virtually 75% of all government spending (an amount exceeding the Somali Democratic Republic's export revenues) went directly to the armed forces and to strengthening security institutions, the ultimate means by which the new political elite exerted influence (Bradbury 38). Development of the country's civil and economic infrastructure was, as under previous governments, neglected.

Hypocritically, while Barre publicly attacked loyalty to clans or genealogy networks, the traditional basis of Somali political organization, as an "impediment to progress," he simultaneously, through the use of state power, deepened and exacerbated clan divisions in order to stay in power (Elmi 39-40, Lewis 39). When it came to government positions and patronage, the military regime strongly favored the three clans that Barre was most strongly connected to. The extent to which Barre relied on these three clans, the Marehan (the clan of Barre's father and, consequently, Barre's clan), the Ogaden (the clan of Barre's mother), and the Dhulbahante (the clan of Barre's son-in-law), was so great that his regime was popularly (but clandestinely) referred to as 'MOD,' an acronym for the three clans that dominated his government (Lewis A Modern History of the Somali 222). Additionally, Barre used his influence to pit various clans against each other in competition for state resources and influence, reducing the chances of a united opposition to his rule, and, in the later part of his regime, collectively punished the clans of his political opponents (LewisUnderstanding Somalia and Somaliland 76, Samatar "Somalia: Entrenching Siad Barre's Personal Rule."). This heightened politicization of genealogy would play a large role in the collapse of Somalia in 1991 (Bradbury 14, Lewis 46).   

Barre's exploitation of kinship ties was not only unscrupulous, but anachronistic. Since the 1950s and the rise of pan-Somalism, nationalism and (notably in the case of post-union Somaliland) regional loyalty had come to supersede clan as the primary basis of Somali political identity and organization. As a result, Barre's public efforts to reduce the role of clanism in Somali life, such as his 'Campaign against Tribalism,' had broad public support (Bradbury 31, 36). Nevertheless, in the face of Barre's blatantly clan-based politics and the insecurity that stemmed from his regime's political totalitarianism and economic mismanagement, Somalis were increasingly forced to rely on their clans as their only dependable sources of protection and support (Lewis 76). Yet even as clan identity increased in importance under Barre's regime, regional identity continued to be significant as well, as demonstrated by the case of Somaliland. 

Under Barre's government, Somaliland continued to be politically and economically marginalized in the union. Somilanders were underrepresented in Barre's government: they made up less than a quarter of the governing council, the SRC, and Barre was a Somalian who, although born in the Ogaden, had grown up and spent most of his life in Mogadishu (Rebuilding Somaliland: Issues and Possibilities : WSP International Somali Programme 56). Under Barre, "[Somalilanders] were discriminated against in terms of public employment, international appointments, and even business opportunities" (Rebuilding Somaliland: Issues and Possibilities : WSP International Somali Programme 12).In addition, despite producing 80% of the Somali Democratic Republic's export earnings, and, consequently, much of government wealth, Somaliland continued to be severely neglected in terms of development. By the late 1980s, only 7% of the development budget would be allocated to Somaliland while 41% would be allocated to the city of Mogadishu, Barre's hometown, alone (Bradbury 58).

The Road to War

While the active pursuit of pan-Somali objectives had been temporarily sidelined in 1967 as a result of repeated failures, the pan-Somali cause was never forgotten, and, as discontent rose with his regime, Barre stoked the dream of a pan-Somali state to draw support (Rebuilding Somaliland: Issues and Possibilities : WSP International Somali Programme 11). As conditions began to emerge in the 1970s that were conducive to the resumption of the pan-Somali struggle, it was not long before a war erupted between the Somali Democratic Republic and its traditional antagonist, Ethiopia, over the former country's irredentist claims.

Ethiopia became vulnerable in the 1970s due to internal conflicts. Rebellions broke out throughout the empire, and the suppression of Eritrean nationalists alone occupied one-third of the Ethiopian military ("Ethiopia.").  

Map (click to enlarge)

In 1974, dissatisfaction with the way the imperial elites were addressing the country's problems provided the impetus for a coup. The new military government, called the Derg, abolished the monarchy and adopted Marxist ideology for its policies. The Ethiopian Empire became the state of Ethiopia, but the new socialist regime, led by Colonel Mengistu Mariam, was not willing to relinquish any of the former empire's territories, and was far more oppressive than the imperial regime it replaced ("Ethiopia."). The insurrections continued in earnest, including an insurgency of particular interest to Barre: a rebellion led by the Western Somali Liberation Front (WSLF), an Ogaden-based organization that advocated union with the Somali Democratic Republic for its region ("Western Somali Liberation Front.").

Ethiopia was also made susceptible to invasion due to its failure, since the early 1970s, to maintain parity with the Somali Democratic Republic's military. By 1977, Barre's regime had built, with extensive Soviet aid, one of the most powerful armies in Africa, one that included an air force unmatched in the region, in addition to a tank force three times as large as Ethiopia's (Rebuilding Somaliland: Issues and Possibilities : WSP International Somali Programme 11, Ofcansky "Somalia: The Ogaden War: Performance and Implications of Defeat."). In light of the Ethiopian state's weakness and the citizens of the Somali Democratic Republic's strong sympathy for the people of the Ogaden, war was virtually inevitable.

It is important to note, however, that on the eve of the Somali Democratic Republic's war over the Ogaden, the popularity of the pan-Somali ideal was on the decline. While in the 1960s, under the domination of an Afar minority, Somalis in the French Somali Coast were in favor of uniting their territory with the Somali Republic, in the 1970s, after regaining power, they became Djiboutian nationalists (Lewis 43). On June 27, 1977, only a few weeks before Barre's invasion of Ethiopia, the French Territory of the Afars and the Issas became independent as the Republic of Djibouti under a Somali president. 95% of the colony's voters had chosen independence in a referendum held a little over a month before, one free of the manipulation that characterized previous votes on the territory's status (Ofcansky "Somalia: Irredentism and the Changing Balance of Power.").

The War with Ethiopia and the Destabilization of the Union (1977-1980)

As the WSLF gained ground in their struggle against the Ethiopian government, pressure mounted for a direct intervention by the Somali Democratic Republic's military in support of the insurgency, and, in 1977, after 2 years of clandestinely supporting the WSLF, Barre launched a full-scale invasion of the Ogaden, beginning a conflict that would become known as the Ogaden War(Rebuilding Somaliland: Issues and Possibilities : WSP International Somali Programme 11).

At first, the Somali Democratic Republic's army advanced rapidly through Ethiopian territory, capturing 90% of the Ogaden within a few months. The tide changed, however, when the Soviet Union, unable to mediate the conflict between the two socialist nations, was forced to choose between Mariam's state and Barre's. It chose Ethiopia, determining the successor to empire to be more geopolitically valuable than the smaller Somali nation, and the decision changed the course of the war ("eastern Africa.", Ofcansky).

Upon deciding to back Ethiopia, the Soviet Union sent massive amounts of military aid to Mariam's army while freezing all arms shipments to the Somali Democratic Republic (Ofcansky). Other socialist governments backed the Soviet Union's decision, and North Korea, East Germany, the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen, and Cuba, which provided Mariam with 15,000 Cuban troops, made their own contributions to Ethiopia's effort to repel the invasion ("eastern Africa.", Lewis 44, Ofcansky).

In response to the Soviet Union's decision, Barre promptly broke off diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union and Cuba, expelled all Soviet personnel from the Somali Democratic Republic, and appealed to the West to aid the Somali nation in the fight against Soviet-backed Ethiopia (Ofcansky). While the Western powers, having lost all their influence in Ethiopia and desiring to retain a presence in the Horn of Africa, reluctantly moved into the vacuum left by the Soviet Union's departure, they were unwilling to support the Somali Democratic Republic's offensive into Ethiopia, and were willing to provide Barre with only enough military aid to maintain internal security in the Somali Democratic Republic and defend the state's borders ("Ethiopia.", Samatar). As a result, Barre's army was no match for the combined forces of Ethiopia and its allies, and, within a year, the Ogaden was retaken and Barre's army driven backinto the Somali Democratic Republic by the Ethiopian military ("eastern Africa.").  

The war was extremely costly to the Somali state in both lives and resources. One-third of the Somali Democratic Republic's soldiers were lost in the fighting, in addition to most of the country's air force and armored units (Ofcansky "Somalia: Irredentism and the Changing Balance of Power."). More importantly, however, the withdrawal of Barre's military from the Ogaden precipitated a massive influx of refugees into the Somali Democratic Republic, the presence of which would have devastating consequences for the Somali state. 

By 1981, refugees from Ethiopia, numbering approximately 1.5 million, made up roughly 40% of the Somali Democratic Republic's population (Rebuilding Somaliland: Issues and Possibilities : WSP International Somali Programme 59, Samatar "Somalia: Refugees."). The majority of them were Somalis, fleeing Ethiopian retaliation for their involvement in rebel movements in the Ogaden, although some of them were Oromos, residents of southern Ethiopia who had fought for the independence of their people in the provinces of Bale and Sidamo (Abdi A History of the Ogaden (Western Somali) Struggle for Self-Determination 95, Lewis 64). Although the refugees were distributed throughout the Somali Democratic Republic, about a third of them were settled in Somaliland alone (Rebuilding Somaliland: Issues and Possibilities : WSP International Somali Programme 11).

The refugees placed a huge strain on the weak economy of the Somali nation. The refugees' livestock diminished already scare grazing land in the Somali Democratic Republic, and the refugee camps' need for fuel led to widespread deforestation (Lewis 65). Disastrous socialist economic policies had caused the country to go from a food surplus to a food deficit, and supplies for the refugees had to be imported at large cost (Lewis 65-66, Rebuilding Somaliland: Issues and Possibilities : WSP International Somali Programme 57). While large amounts of international aid to the Somali Democratic Republic were forthcoming in order to help ameliorate the effects of the crisis, much of these funds only served to enrich Barre's political cronies or to bolster the ability of Barre's security forces to suppress domestic opposition to the regime (Rebuilding Somaliland: Issues and Possibilities : WSP International Somali Programme 59).

Although the refugees' presence caused anxiety throughout the Somali Democratic Republic, nowhere was the situation more tense than in Somaliland. Somalilanders had always felt marginalized by the regime, and the creation of a massive, foreign-financed, state bureaucracy to administer international aid to the refugees, which dispensed jobs and resources to political insiders, exacerbated their feeling of exclusion (Bradbury 55). Additionally, many of the refugees in Somaliland were from one of the MOD clans favored by Barre, the Ogaden, while the vast majority of Somilanders were not. When it came to access to services, licenses, and contracts, things Somalilanders had long experienced difficulty procuring from the government, refugees in Somaliland were given preference to natives (Bradbury 55).

Far more alarming to Somalilanders than these transgressions, however, was the increasing role of refugees in local administration. In Somaliland, unlike in Somalia, the government worked not only to integrate the migrants into local society as an element of rehabilitation, but to actively secure their predominance in virtually all aspects of local affairs, most significantly in the task of maintaining security. Barre preferred the effectively captive refugees, bound as they were to him through both clan and dependence on government aid, to the native Somalilanders when it came to exercising authority in the northern territory, as, beside the Ogaden refugees, Barre's only substantive link to the region was through his son-in-law's clan, the Dhulbahante, a minority in Somaliland that straddled the territory's eastern border (Bradbury 55, Lewis 46, 67). In violation of international refugee law, Barre conscripted the male population of the refugee camps into the armed forces active in the region, and organized and armed refugee militias under the umbrella of the WSLF, the Ogaden-based guerilla organization (Bradbury 55,  Rebuilding Somaliland: Issues and Possibilities : WSP International Somali Programme 12). At the behest of the regime, the WSLF and Ogaden garrisons supplanted native forces when it came to maintaining security in Somaliland, and Ogaden refugees were favored for positions in local government (Rebuilding Somaliland: Issues and Possibilities : WSP International Somali Programme 12).  

Barre's actions in Somaliland were motivated by an awareness of his vulnerability in the wake of the Ogaden War. Not only did Barre's regime become more unpopular as a result of the failure to hold the Ogaden, but the Somali Democratic Republic's new Western donors, which had turned to the Somali state as a buffer against Soviet-backed Ethiopia, were more reluctant than the Soviet Union had been to fund security institutions, the source of Barre's power (Samatar "Somalia: Entrenching Siad Barre's Personal Rule."). In addition, the Ethiopian government began to support Barre's domestic opponents in retaliation for Barre's intervention on behalf of the rebellions in the Ogaden (Samatar).

The opposition to the regime was emboldened. This was highlighted by the fact that, only a month after the war with Ethiopia had ended in 1978, a group of disaffected military officers from north-central Somalia had launched a coup against Barre's government (Samatar "Somalia: Persecution of the Majeerteen."). Although the attempt had ended in failure and most of the ringleaders had been summarily executed, some of the coup's plotters had escaped arrest and fled to Ethiopia (where they found haven due to the Ethiopian government's anti-Barre stance) to form an opposition group called the Somali Salvation Democratic Front (SSDF) in 1979 (Lewis 67, Rebuilding Somaliland: Issues and Possibilities : WSP International Somali Programme 59).

Barre responded to the increasing insecurity of his regime by both expanding the scope of his political repression and introducing illusory civilian rule to increase his regime's legitimacy. In 1979, a new Constitution was propagated, and a "people's parliament," made up of members of the Somali Revolutionary Socialist Party, was created to replace the military SRC (Lewis 45). Despite these trappings of civilian government, however, real authority remained in the hands of President Barre and the military: decision-making power was monopolized by a central committee of the Somali Revolutionary Socialist Party called the Supreme Council, composed of Barre and other former SRC members (Samatar "Somalia: Creation of the Somali Revolutionary Socialist Party.").

With regards to Barre's treatment of political opponents after the Ogaden War, Barre's response to the coup in north-central Somalia inaugurated a new phase of the regime's political repression: one marked by the extensive use of collective punishment. Barre not only executed all of the coup's ringleaders that he arrested, but, since most of the coup's plotters were members of the Majeerteen clan, he marked all Majeerteen for retaliation. A campaign of terror was launched against the clan by Barre's security forces, one that included the mass seizure of property, the raping of Majeerteen women, and the destruction of Majeerteen water reservoirs, causing thousands to die of thirst (Samatar "Somalia: Persecution of the Majeerteen."). Partly through this brutal suppression of much of its clan base, Barre was soon able to contain the SSDF opposition group to the point that it no longer posed a significant threat to his regime (Lewis 67). Nevertheless, he remained extremely wary of another revolt, especially by military leadership. 

In this context, Barre worried with good reason that Somaliland, a region long disaffected with the central government, was ripe for rebellion, and his actions were intended to forestall or prevent an insurrection in the region by undermining native power structures. Nevertheless, while his manipulation of the refugee crisis had the intended effect of increasing his influence in the northern region, it also increased local dissatisfaction with his regime. And, despite his attempts to marginalize them in favor of Ogaden transplants, native Somalilanders cleverly resisted Barre's efforts to subjugate them: when Barre made the Ogaden-based WSLF the primary force in charge of maintaining security in Somaliland, Somalilanders responded by forming a 'Fourth Brigade' of the WSLF composed entirely of native soldiers, which sought to protect the local population against the predations of Barre's conscripted Ogaden fighters (Bradbury 55).

The Occupation of Somaliland (1980-1982)

By 1980, Barre felt his current measures were no longer adequate to maintain his authority in Somaliland, and he feared the Somaliland elements of his national army and the WSLF. As a result, he declared a state of emergency, appointed a new military governor to rule the northern territory, disbanded the Somalilanders' 'Fourth Brigade' of the WSLF, transferred Somaliland officers to Somalia, placed the entire State of Somaliland under harsh military rule with the sanction of emergency laws, and sealed off the region from the rest of the union, severely restricting the movement of civilians and goods between Somaliland and Somalia (Bradbury 55, 59).

In addition, Barre tried to turn the northern territory's population against itself. The Dhulbahante, the member of Barre's MOD alliance that inhabited the eastern border of Somaliland, and the Gadabursi, another minority clan, were armed to aid the Ogaden in providing 'security' to the region, while the majority of Somaliland's people, most of them members of the Isaaq clan family, were increasingly disenfranchised in their own homeland, excluded from most positions of power and under the domination of a foreign military force: Barre's conscripted refugees from Ethiopia (Bradbury 55).

The repression in Somaliland escalated when, in 1981, the rebellion that Barre had so long anticipated seemed to materialize in the form of the Somali National Movement (SNM), an opposition group formed by Somalilanders in-exile who had fled to Great Britain in order to escape Barre's totalitarianism in the 1970s. The SNM "declared war on the Barre regime," and by 1982 it had established a headquarters in Ethiopia (the Ethiopian government supported the SNM as it did the SSDF as a part of its anti-Barre stance) from which it could launch attacks into the Somali Democratic Republic (Bradbury 55). The movement called for the return of democracy to the Somali union, as well as a decentralized form of government that would provide for more regional autonomy. And, although the organization aspired to free both Somaliland and Somalia from Barre's tyrannical rule, the SNM made its first priority the liberation of Somaliland, the home of its founders, and the movement operated primarily from the northern territory's border with Ethiopia (Bradbury 63).

In response to this development, Barre further restricted movement within the region and targeted the locals of Somaliland, whose support for the SNM was assumed, with severe harassment from his security forces. Identity cards were introduced to Somaliland, and government permission required to travel between towns (Bradbury 59). Suspected SNM sympathizers were frequently detained, tortured, and, not uncommonly, executed, and Somalilanders' private property was arbitrarily seized by military personnel and government officials(Lewis 68, Rebuilding Somaliland: Issues and Possibilities : WSP International Somali Programme 13). In a particularly devastating attack on the small community of independent businessmen still left in Somaliland since the advent of the socialist period, 50 million US dollars worth of privately imported goods were seized from Somaliland's Port of Berbera at one time in 1982 (Rebuilding Somaliland: Issues and Possibilities : WSP International Somali Programme 12). Although these measures were effective in reducing the ability of the people to aid the SNM, however, they also reinforced Somalilanders' determination to rid themselves of their oppressive government, and they were not passively endured.  

As much as Barre feared the influence of the emigrant-formed SNM, he found the non-violent actions of 28 reform-minded local Somalilanders, called the Hargeisa Group, who brought attention to the injustices committed against Somaliland, just as, if not more, threatening to his regime than the armed insurgency, and his suppression of the organization would be a turning point in Somaliland's history. The Hargeisa Group was formed in the late 1970s by a group of young professionals, educated abroad and in Mogadishu, who returned to their hometown of Hargeisa in Somaliland to address their region's underdevelopment (Bradbury 56). The organization gained popularity after they succeeded in drastically improving the quality of Hargeisa's public hospital through a self-help initiative they organized as their first project (Bradbury 56). Nevertheless, the group openly addressed the political and economic marginalization of Somaliland in their public meetings, and this made the regime uncomfortable (Bradbury 56). After the Hargeisa Group refused a government order to relocate itself to Mogadishu in Somalia, a delegation was sent from the government to meet with local leaders in Hargeisa to gauge the organization's popularity (Bradbury 56). When these Hargeisan community leaders nominated the Hargeisa Group to take their place in the meetings, and the regime's representatives were confronted with a blunt presentation of the Somalilanders' grievances, including condemning facts about the disparities between Somaliland and Somalia, it became clear to the authorities that the Hargeisa Group was not only very popular, but that it posed a threat to the regime; accordingly, the National Security Service was instructed to build a case against the organization (Bradbury 56-57).

Even with the increasing scrutiny of the government, however, the Hargeisa Group continued with their political activism: in 1981, they started a newspaper called Ufo (meaning 'the whirlwind before the rain') that exposed government corruption and highlighted the discrimination faced by Somalilanders, and, in addition, they began to proliferate anti-government pamphlets, which they signed 'Men Born of the City' (Bradbury 57). In a further provocation, the group commemorated Somaliland's independence from Great Britain on June 26, 1981, by raising a Somali Democratic Republic flag that had been altered to retain only one point on its star, representing Somaliland, in a symbolic gesture that seemed to be dually an assertion of Somaliland's sovereignty and a protest against the region's marginalization in the union (Bradbury 57). These actions were, of course, entirely unacceptable to the government. Soon members of the Hargeisa Group were arrested and detained, and, after being tortured and 'interrogated' for several months, were put on trial to face charges of "planning to overthrow the government" (Bradbury 57).

On February 20, 1982, the day on which the members of the Hargeisa Group were expected to be sentenced to death, the natives of Hargeisa rioted. People threw stones at the soldiers in the city to protest the trial, and the soldiers responded by firing live ammunition into the crowds, killing and wounding many protestors (Bradbury 57). While the demonstration succeeded in delaying the trial, and many of the Hargeisa Group members' death sentences were commuted to sentences of life imprisonment, over 218 people were arrested in the aftermath of the riot, and a curfew imposed on Somaliland (Bradbury 56). The repression increased. For Somalilanders, this day marks the beginning of the civil war (Bradbury 56).

The Civil War (1982-1991)

In the wake of the riot and the trial of the Hargeisa Group, on March 30, 1982, several elder members of Somaliland's major clans composed a formal memorandum addressed to President Barre, expressing the grievances of the people. In it, they warned that the Somali union faced "the threat of disintegration" as a result of the regime's discrimination toward Somaliland, and implored Barre to confront Somaliland's chronic underdevelopment, end economic policies that disadvantaged Somaliland merchants, and address the predations of the armed forces in the region (Bradbury 58, Rebuilding Somaliland: Issues and Possibilities : WSP International Somali Programme 12).

Barre responded by arresting and imprisoning two of the most prominent Somalilanders in the national government on trumped up charges of "plotting against the regime" in an effort to intimidate his opposition (Bradbury 58). He did not address the issues brought up in the memorandum, and the Somalilanders' condition further deteriorated. Somalian officers sought transfers to Somaliland as "an opportunity to make money" through arbitrary arrests, and, in Hargeisa, the confiscation of capital became so commonplace that the local police station earned the egregious nickname: 'the meat market' (Bradbury 60). Suspected or actual critics of the regime continued to be severely persecuted (Rebuilding Somaliland: Issues and Possibilities : WSP International Somali Programme 13).

Nevertheless, by the beginning of 1983, Barre seemed to recognize the precariousness of the situation in Somaliland and, in an effort to discredit the SNM, relieved some of the harsh restrictions on Somalilanders and offered "amnesty to Somali exiles" (Bradbury 64). This respite, however, did not last long. That same year, the SNM launched a daring attack on Mandheera Central Prison and Adaadle armory in western Somaliland that succeeded in freeing over 1,000 political prisoners who the regime had sentenced to death, and in acquiring guns and ammunition (Bradbury 61, Rebuilding Somaliland: Issues and Possibilities : WSP International Somali Programme 13). In response to this raid, which vividly demonstrated the SNM's continuing potency, the government launched a brutal counter-insurgency, and increased repressive measures in the region to levels unprecedented in Somaliland's history.

Further economic restrictions were placed on the territory. Import-export licenses were denied to Somaliland merchants, and all international trade in the region, which had been a large source of income for Somalilanders, was severely curtailed by new government regulation (Rebuilding Somaliland: Issues and Possibilities : WSP International Somali Programme 59). The cultivation and sale of Khat, a mild stimulant popular among Somalis that was grown primarily in Somaliland, was banned for "health reasons," although the trade, once denied to Somalilanders, continued illicitly under the control of the military (Bradbury 59). 

The war against the SNM became, in practice, a war against the civilian population of Somaliland, especially in the rural areas. In the cities, Somalilanders became virtual prisoners in their own homes, under the strict surveillance of the military. Curfews were imposed, and arbitrary arrests, detentions, and executions of suspected dissidents greatly increased. In 1984, especially prominent massacres of civilians were committed by the security forces in the cities of Hargeisa and Burao (Rebuilding Somaliland: Issues and Possibilities : WSP International Somali Programme 13, 59). When historian I.M. Lewis visited Somaliland in 1985, he observed that the region looked and felt "like a downtrodden colony," and that Hargeisa resembled "a city under foreign military occupation" (Bradbury 55, Lewis 68).

Outside of the urban areas, conditions were even worse. Rural towns were effectively quarantined, prevented from receiving food and medicine from the cities. Smaller villages suspected of housing SNM supporters were razed to the ground. In addition, to eliminate the threat of the nomads, the government poisoned wells and mined grazing areas (Rebuilding Somaliland: Issues and Possibilities : WSP International Somali Programme 13). Rural Somalilanders were, of course, also subject to the routine harassment that was commonplace throughout Somaliland.

Especially savage treatment was meted out to all members of the Isaaq clan family, to which most of Somaliland's people, and consequently, most of the SNM's fighters, belonged, giving rise to accusations of genocide (Bradbury 60,Jhazbhay 32). Some of the most heinous atrocities of the war were carried out by members of Barre's security forces known as the 'Isaaq exterminating wing,' who terrorized the countryside, and the military governor of Somalilanddescribed his counter-insurgency strategy in terms of policies to 'liquidate the Isaaq problem' (Bradbury 60). The portrayal and treatment of the SNM as a 'tribalist' organization, working primarily for sectarian Isaaq interests, was partially an attempt by the government to discredit the Somaliland rebellion in the eyes of the public (Lewis A Modern History of the Somali 253).

The SNM, however, was not an exclusively Isaaq organization, nor was it fiercely partisan. While the organization was, by virtue of Somaliland's demographics, predominantly Isaaq, its leadership as well as its rank-and-file included many non-Isaaq, and its membership was open to any Somali older than the age of 15 (Bradbury 66-67, Jhazbhay 31). In addition, secession was not a goal of the movement for most of its history, and the SNM only became a de facto separatist organization after 1988, a change that was not endorsed by its leadership. In fact, Somaliland's independence was never a part of the SNM manifesto, and many SNM leaders would resist the formation of the Republic of Somaliland even after the fall of Barre's regime (Bradbury 65, 80). When it came to the Somali Democratic Republic, the group's founders advocated the continuation of a unitary state, albeit with more power devolved to regions (Bradbury 63, Jhazbhay 32). Nevertheless, as the brutality of the central government increased, a consensus began to emerge among the movement's grassroots that the union with Somalia should be reviewed, a sentiment that would eventually lead most of the group's fighters to support Somaliland's full independence (Bradbury 67).

Yet even if separatist inclinations had been incipient in much of Somaliland since 1982, it was not until the severe escalation of hostilities in 1988 that popular opinion began to harden in favor of independence. The turning point in the war was Barre's signing of a peace agreement with Ethiopia's Mariam, in which both leaders agreed to cease supporting each other's opposition (LewisUnderstanding Somalia and Somaliland 71). Up to that point, the SNM insurgency had mainly consisted of cross-border raids from rebel bases in Ethiopia (Bradbury 61). Faced with the termination of their Ethiopian support, however, the insurgents were forced to conduct a major offensive in order to establish a foothold within Somaliland.

In May, 1988, the SNM launched an all-out assault, concentrating on liberating the region's major population centers, and succeeded in capturing the cities of Hargeisa and Burao (Bradbury 62). In response, the government decided to destroy the cities rather than try to retake them (Rebuilding Somaliland: Issues and Possibilities : WSP International Somali Programme 59). Making no distinctions between civilian and military targets, Barre's military subjected Hargeisa and Burao to heavy aerial and artillery bombardment, killing an estimated 50,000 civilians and destroying or damaging between 70 and 90 percent of the cities' buildings (Bradbury 62, 83-84, Rebuilding Somaliland: Issues and Possibilities : WSP International Somali Programme 59). Over 300,000 urban Somalilanders left their homes and fled the onslaught for Ethiopia, strafed by government fighter-bombers as they raced toward the border (Dowden 95, Rebuilding Somaliland: Issues and Possibilities : WSP International Somali Programme 13). The last of the cities' SNM defenders were driven off by August (Bradbury 62). After Hargeisa was depopulated and three-quarters of it reduced to rubble, the military mined what was left (Dowden 95). The conflict in Somaliland had escalated to a state of total war.

In the wake of the destruction of Hargeisa and Burao, Barre's forces moved throughout the region, destroying and looting other settlements (Rebuilding Somaliland: Issues and Possibilities : WSP International Somali Programme 13). As the army crossed the country, Somaliland was strewn with over two million landmines by marauding soldiers (Bradbury 85). Hundreds of thousands of Somalilanders followed in the example of the urban population and fled for Ethiopia, raising the number of people displaced by the crisis to over 600,000 (Rebuilding Somaliland: Issues and Possibilities : WSP International Somali Programme 277). Ghost towns emerged in Somaliland, and Barre's Ogaden fighters were "encouraged to take over the remains of [Somalilanders'] shops and houses" (Bradbury 55). Nevertheless, the military was fiercely resisted by the SNM, which, despite losing virtually half of its forces in the defense of the cities, was still active in Somaliland's countryside; with regards to gaining a foothold within Somaliland, the SNM's 1988 offensive was a success (Bradbury 62-63).

Both sides of the Somaliland conflict sought to widen the war. Barre urged solidarity among the Somali Democratic Republic's non-Isaaq clan families against what he deemed a 'tribalist,' sectarian Isaaq insurgency in the union's northwest, but his attempts to mobilize broad support for his counter-insurgency were largely unsuccessful (Lewis 72). In particular, he had trouble inciting minority clans that straddled Somaliland's western and eastern borders to fight the predominantly Isaaq SNM (Ahmad 11, Rebuilding Somaliland: Issues and Possibilities : WSP International Somali Programme 14). Despite significant pressure from the government to join with the army, many of these groups chose to oppose the regime, even the Somaliland branch of the Dhulbahante, one of Barre's favored MOD clans (Bradbury 79, Rebuilding Somaliland: Issues and Possibilities : WSP International Somali Programme 14). What little assistance the military did receive from members of minority clans proved insignificant in the course of the war (Rebuilding Somaliland: Issues and Possibilities : WSP International Somali Programme 14).

Unlike Barre, however, the SNM was successful in expanding the conflict in their favor, and the organization used their position within Somaliland to funnel supplies to opposition groups in Somalia (Bradbury 63). Although disaffection with Barre's regime had been increasing throughout the Somali union since the end of the Ogaden War, it was not until 1988, with the support of the SNM, that this manifested itself in the widespread establishment of armed insurgencies in the south (Bradbury 45-46, Rebuilding Somaliland: Issues and Possibilities : WSP International Somali Programme 13). The SSDF saw a resurgence after it lost its Ethiopian support along with the SNM, and new Somalian guerilla groups formed with the encouragement of the rebels in Somaliland (Bradbury 46).

Nevertheless, while both the Somaliland and Somalian insurgencies were fighting the same government, the conflicts in Somalia and Somaliland were different. The war in Somalia was a civil war in the classic sense: Somalian versus Somalian, and, on the clan level, primarily Darod (the largest clan family in the Somali Democratic Republic and the clan family of both the ruling MOD clans and the rebel SSDF and SPM) and Hawiye (the second largest clan family in the Somali Democratic Republic) versus Darod. The war in Somaliland, on the other hand, resembled a war of liberation: Somalilander versus occupying Ethiopian Ogaden and Somalian, and, on the clan level, primarily Isaaq versus Darod. The extent to which the civil war is viewed differently is demonstrated by the fact that while Somalilanders date the start of the war to the 1982 Hargeisa riot, many historians, from a Somalia-centric point of view, date the start of the war to 1988 when, with SNM support, Somalia first saw the rise of a major insurgency (Ahmad 8, Bradbury 45, Lewis 71, Meagher).

Unlike the people of Somalia, Somalilanders had perceived themselves as being under foreign occupation since the early 1980s (Lewis 68, Brons 259). Those projecting government power in Somaliland from 1980 onward were primarily outsiders, and the callousness with which the regime's southern soldiers treated their northern hosts reinforced the feeling of separateness that Somalilanders had felt toward Somalians since the advent of the Somali Republic (Bradbury 67, Brons 259, Rebuilding Somaliland: Issues and Possibilities : WSP International Somali Programme 11). To the people of Somaliland, the escalating cruelties they faced at the hands of the government in the 1980s were the culmination of over 20 years of subordination to Somalia and deteriorating self-rule. The willingness of the Somalian-dominated military to destroy Hargeisa and Burao, and then systematically lay waste to the surrounding countryside convinced many Somalilanders that they had nothing in common with their neighbors to the south (Bradbury 67). In response to the brutality of the 1988 government counter-offensive, secessionist agitation among Somaliland's population greatly increased. For the SNM rank-and-file, many of whom were recruited from the recently displaced, the purpose of the war was no longer to simply remove Barre's government, but to end Somalia's domination of Somaliland forever (Bradbury 67). At the grassroots level at least, the SNM began to transform into a separatist organization, and full independence for their region became the aspiration of many of its fighters (Bradbury 67).

Over the next 3 years, the SNM gradually took control of Somaliland's countryside as insurgents in Somalia did the same in their territory. As the war increased in ferocity, many of the Ogaden refugees returned to their homeland in Ethiopia where regime change began to look imminent, gradually leading to a virtual restoration of the Somali Democratic Republic's pre-Ogaden War demographics and weakening the military that had relied, especially in Somaliland, on Ogaden conscripts (Jhazbhay 32, Lewis 72, "Somalia."). Barre's attempts to forestall his downfall by trying to play clans against each other and meting out increasingly brutal collective punishment to those groups that opposed him succeeded in sowing distrust and division among the people of the Somali Democratic Republic, but they also galvanized opposition to his rule. By 1991, Barre, having lost almost all popular support and exerting little control beyond the capital, was derogatively referred to as the 'Mayor of Mogadishu' (Lewis A Modern History of the Somali 253).

He had made the mistake of closing ranks around a single clan, the Marehan, in response to his growing opposition: in the late 1980s, he had engineered a Marehan-dominated government at the expense of the other MOD clans (LewisUnderstanding Somalia and Somaliland 69). As a result, the ruling coalition had begun to crumble (Lewis 69). Disaffected Ogaden soldiers stationed in southern Somalia mutinied in 1989 and formed an opposition group called the Somali Patriotic Movement (SPM), and, inside Ethiopia, Ogaden who felt betrayed by Barre's peace agreement with Mariam switched their allegiance from the pro-Barre WSLF to the anti-Barre Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF), a nationalist insurgent movement that was ambivalent about a union of its 'nation,' the Ogaden, with the Somali Democratic Republic (Jhazbhay 32,Lewis 71, 73, "Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) - Political Objectives.", "Somalia."). As mentioned earlier, parts of the Dhulbahante proved undependable allies in Somaliland (Bradbury 79, Rebuilding Somaliland: Issues and Possibilities : WSP International Somali Programme 14).

Perhaps an even greater mistake of Barre's was his marginalization, in the late 1980s, of the Hawiye clan family, a group that, while not as powerful as the MOD clans, had held important positions in Barre's military and bureaucracy (Samatar "Somalia: Harrying of the Hawiye."). As the civil war escalated, the Hawiye found themselves increasingly persecuted as Barre tried to foster solidarity among his own Darod clan family in the face of the many rebellions against his predominantly Darod government (Lewis 72-73, Samatar: "Somalia: Harrying of the Hawiye."). As the Hawiye were the majority in central Somalia, specifically in the areas around Mogadishu, the decision to alienate them from the regime was a huge tactical error. In 1989, the formation of the United Somali Congress (USC), a major Hawiye insurgent group, marked the beginning of the end for the totalitarian government (Samatar: "Somalia: Harrying of the Hawiye."). In January 1991, the USC captured the capital at approximately the same time that the SNM drove the last remnants of Barre's army from Somaliland (Rebuilding Somaliland: Issues and Possibilities : WSP International Somali Programme 14). Soon after, Barre fled into exile to Nigeria where he would die 4 years later (Lewis A Modern History of the Somali 280). For Somalilanders, the war had ended. For Somalians, it had merely entered a new stage.

Upon the USC's entrance into Mogadishu on January 27, a new round of violent conflict was launched as the Hawiye fighters indiscriminately attacked the city's Darod citizens in retaliation for Hawiye persecution, and the USC fell into infighting (Bradbury 46-47, Lewis Understanding Somalia and Somaliland 74). Just before Barre had been driven from the capital, he had incited the Darod in Mogadishu to kill their Hawiye neighbors, and had even fired heavy artillery at Hawiye neighborhoods (Lewis 73). When the USC finally drove the military from Mogadishu, distrust and hatred toward the resident Darod were widespread among the Hawiye, and, under USC occupation, these feelings were vented explosively in a campaign of 'clan-cleansing' that saw almost all of the city's Darod killed or sent fleeing (Lewis 126). In response, Darod militias, some led by commanders of Barre's defeated army, mobilized to repel the ravaging Hawiye, leading to heavy fighting in central Somalia that produced thousands of refugees (Lewis 74).

Further problems were created by the decision of one faction of the USC, led by businessman Ali Mahdi, to unilaterally form an interim government two days after the capture of Mogadishu. This move was opposed by the other major faction of the USC, led by General Mohamed Aideed, as well as the SNM and the SPM, as it violated a previous agreement made between them to form an administration collaboratively (Bradbury 47). Members of Aideed's faction were distrustful of Mahdi's motives in establishing a government without consulting them, and fierce fighting broke out between the followers of Aideed and the supporters of Mahdi's regime (Lewis 73).

Despite these problems, however, the SNM leadership continued to pursue a unitary state (Bradbury 80-81, Brons 245). In May, a conference was called by the SNM to determine the fate of the northwest, and secession was not even on the SNM central committee's agenda (Bradbury 80). Nevertheless, as much as this event was essentially a popular consultation, the issue of Somaliland's independence could not be ignored. For many Somalilanders, the USC's unilateral formation of a government without the input of Somaliland's leaders and the widespread sectarian violence in the south only reinforced their desire to secede; the developments in Somalia were perceived as evidence that Somalilanders would continue to be marginalized and persecuted within the union (Bradbury 81, Brons 245-246). By the time of the SNM conference, separatist sentiment ran high.  

The event, called the 'Grand Conference of the Northern Peoples,' gathered together clan elders, religious leaders, business people, and intellectuals from throughout Somaliland at the city of Burao to consult the SNM leadership on the direction the region should take, and popular agitation brought the issue of Somaliland's independence to the fore (Bradbury 82). A news report that the SNM was negotiating with Somalian rebels at the time of the event even provoked a protest: chanting, 'No more Mogadishu,' Somalilanders crowded the SNM headquarters and demanded an end to the union (Bradbury 82). By May 15, the last day of the conference, it had become abundantly clear to the SNM leadership that popular opinion was strongly in favor of independence, and, lacking the external support to resist, the SNM central committee reluctantly acceded to the demands of the public (Bradbury 82, Jhazbhay 39, Rebuilding Somaliland: Issues and Possibilities : WSP International Somali Programme 14). The conference at Burao was concluded with a resolution ending the State of Somaliland's union with Somalia, and, on May 18, 1991, the Republic of Somaliland was officially declared (Bradbury 82, Jhazbhay 39).

The Collapse of Somalia (1991-present)

The Civil War Continues

Although the various so-called national governments that have emerged in Somalia since 1991 have continued to lay claim to both Somaliland and Somalia, after Somaliland reasserted its sovereignty at the Burao conference, the Somali Democratic Republic, what is now popularly known as the 'Republic of Somalia' but also officially called the Somali Republic, effectively ceased to exist, and its two constituent parts became two independent nations. 

Map (click to enlarge)

Nevertheless, as much as the international community still considers these two countries to be parts of the same state, their stories are deeply linked. Therefore, although this is a history of Somaliland, it is relevant, before continuing with the story of the new republic, to relate developments in Somalia proper since the end of the union.

In the wake of Somaliland's independence, the war that had been raging in Somalia continued as before; although all the major Somalian guerilla groups opposed secession, they were too embroiled in their own conflicts to threaten the SNM administration (Lewis 75). Repeated attempts by the international community to mediate the dispute between Mahdi and Aideed failed, and the country was left without a government. Bitter fighting in Mogadishu between the rival USC factions left 25,000 dead within a year, and, throughout the country, high animosity and distrust between the Darod and Hawiye led to war between the two clan families' militias (Bradbury 47, Lewis 73-74). Amidst the anarchy that arose from the unmitigated violence, the widespread displacement of civilians as a result of clan-cleansing, and the breakdown of government institutions, leaders of armed bands, who would be deemed 'warlords,' opportunistically carved their own lucrative fiefdoms out of what was left of the state (Bradbury 47, 49). As what had once been a war primarily about politics degenerated into a war primarily about resources, the Darod-Hawiye dichotomy became less relevant to the conflict: Darod fought Darod, Hawiye fought Hawiye, and Hawiye and Darod joined forces to fight other Hawiye and Darod (Lewis A Modern History of the Somali 265).

As the fighting was particularly fierce in the rich agricultural region of southern Somalia, famine broke out in 1992 as the pillaging factions ravaged the country's breadbasket ("Somalia."). Over 300,000 people died of starvation as a result, and over a million fled the country as refugees (Bradbury 47, Elmi 86, Lewis 265). Attempts by the international community to ameliorate the situation with food aid were largely unsuccessful, as the warring armies extensively looted and hoarded the supplies for themselves, leaving much of the civilian population to starve (Richburg 56, "Somalia."). This setback prompted the UN to authorize a major, US-led military-humanitarian operation, codenamed 'Operation Restore Hope,' with the aim of securing the delivery of food aid with overwhelming force, and, in December, 1992, 33,000 international troops, over 80% of them Americans, entered Somalia, prompting an uneasy ceasefire among the country's belligerents (Bradbury 48, Lewis 269, "Somalia."). It is important to note that this operation was limited primarily to central Somalia around Mogadishu; the UN mission had virtually no presence in Somaliland. The only substantive UN operation planned for the northern region, the deployment of international soldiers to secure the port of Berbera, was cancelled due to superseding concerns in Somalia (Bradbury 93). Needless to say, attempts at reconciliation in the south were a failure.

Internationally facilitated peace and disarmament agreements made between the various Somalian faction leaders in the spring of 1993 were not respected (Lewis 271, "Somalia."). While the delivery of food relief greatly improved and violence somewhat decreased as a result of the UN intervention, Somalia's insurgents continued to resist reconciliation and, albeit more discreetly, to battle each other. In response, the UN's behavior became increasingly aggressive: international soldiers raided arms markets and escalated their presence on the country's streets (Lewis 269). A surprise inspection of a weapons cache belonging to Aideed provoked an ambush by Aideed's henchmen that killed 24 Pakistani troops in the UN force, leading to a war between Aideed and the internationals (Lewis 271-272). Despite their superior fire power, the UN forces were unable to defeat Aideed, as it was difficult to distinguish Aideed's forces from the general population and the insurgent leader was able to wage an effective resistance (Lewis 272).

This conflict produced the 'Black Hawk Down' incident, which precipitated the end of the UN presence in Somalia: several 'Black Hawk' helicopter gunships were shot down during a US assault on one of Aideed's Mogadishu bases in early October, resulting in 18 US servicemen dead and many more wounded; Aideed remained at large (Richburg 66). The failures of the attack convinced many in the American public and military of the futility of US involvement in Somalia, and, as a result, all American forces were withdrawn from the country by March 31, 1994 (Lewis 273, "Somalia."). Other countries, dissatisfied with the UN mission's results and increasingly skeptical of the intervention, followed in the example of the US and withdrew their soldiers soon after (Bradbury 48, Lewis 274, "Somalia."). With dwindling international support, all the UN's increasingly frantic attempts to negotiate a meaningful settlement between Somalia's warring factions failed, and, on March 31, 1995, the UN terminated its operation in Somalia having made no substantive achievements (Bradbury 48, Lewis 280, "Somalia."). Somalia still lacked a government, and various factions continued to fight over Mogadishu.

For the next 5 years, the Somali Democratic Republic's UN seat remained empty as it had been since the end of the Barre regime, and little changed in Somalia. Aideed's faction, after somewhat consolidating its position, formed an 'interim government' in the June after the UN's withdrawal; the administration was not internationally recognized and was vigorously opposed by Aideed's rivals, who controlled much of the country (Lewis 280). Within a year, Aideed was killed in a skirmish in Mogadishu, and, in the wake of his death, the state disintegrated further: his former associates began infighting and divided up his territory (Lewis 281). By this time, most of the country was carved into small fiefdoms, constantly warring with each other over resources and influence, the usually autocratic rulers of which were mainly former officers, far flung from the traditional clan leadership as well as the political and military elite of the Barre regime (Lewis 265). The only place in Somalia where this was not entirely the case was the SSDF-controlled north, which attained relative stability and, in the absence of a central government and incessant violence in the south, declared itself an autonomous region, the Puntland State of Somalia, in 1998, with the intention of being integrated into a future federal republic (Bradbury 129, "Somalia."). It is notable that, outside of this small region, traditional informal forms of governance, such as the authority of clan elders, were unable, as they did in Somaliland, to reassert themselves and mediate widespread reconciliation, a palpable legacy of the weakening of indigenous institutions under Italian colonial rule (Bradbury 95, Howden).

Nevertheless, after 9 years of anarchic violence in Somalia, the most promising attempt so far of forming a government for the troubled state was launched when the international community endorsed a plan by Djiboutian president Ismail Guelleh to host a national reconciliation conference for the Somali Democratic Republic in Arta, Djibouti (the country was perceived to be especially appropriate for hosting such an event due to its large Somali population) (Bradbury 130, Lewis Understanding Somalia and Somaliland 81). The conference differed from its predecessors, which had focused primarily on accommodating the demands of various insurgent groups and their leaders, in that its delegates were drawn widely from all segments of the collapsed state's society. Business people, artists, religious scholars, traditional leaders, and intellectuals all participated (Lewis 69). All the clan groups determined to be major clan families by the conference's organizers were allotted an equal number of delegates, and quotas of minorities and women were included as well (Lewis A Modern History of the Somali 292). While warlords were not entirely excluded, they were marginalized and other representatives given predominance (Bradbury 130, Lewis 292). Despite this apparently broad participation, however, which earned the resulting government a high degree of international legitimacy, the conference was highly problematic. 

The biggest problem was the degree to which the delegates were actually representative of the people of the Somali Democratic Republic. The UN did not substantially test the legitimacy of those who showed up to participate in the conference. Many of the so-called representatives were simply self-appointed or did not have the support of the communities they claimed to represent. In a prominent example of this, although the conference leaders' unwillingness to recognize Somaliland's independence or to accommodate Puntland's desire for autonomy and a federal system led the democratically-elected administrations of both Somaliland and Puntland to not participate in the event, delegations claiming to represent the populations of Somaliland and Puntland still eagerly participated, even though it was dubious how accurately they reflected their presumed constituents' interests (Lewis 292, 294). The fact that the conference's participants included expatriates and emissaries of warlords whose support for a national government was only tentative was also problematic (Lewis 293). In a further blow to the conference's legitimacy, when the participants finally formed an administration, the Transitional National Government (TNG), in August, 60% of the ruling assembly were former members of the hated Barre regime (Lewis 293).

Thus it was not surprising that when the TNG entered Mogadishu in October, 2000, it was not greeted with much popular support, especially not from the warlords who had few incentives to restore a central government (Bradbury 108, Lewis Understanding Somalia and Somaliland 69). Primarily contained to a few blocks of Mogadishu by hostile armies for the two years of its existence, the UN-backed TNG effectively collapsed in early 2002, having failed to gain any significant support from Somalia's major power-brokers (Lewis 82). Its refusal to recognize Puntland as an autonomous entity was especially costly, as it lost the new national government what should have been its greatest bastion of support: the most peaceful part of Somalia proper and the only region with restored civic institutions and formal governance on a large scale. Furthermore, it made an enemy of Puntland's President, Abdullahi Yusuf, who was hostile to any non-federal system and, as a result, vigorously supported the TNG's warlord opposition (Lewis Making and Breaking States in Africa: the Somali Experience 185). Beside reverting the name of the Somali union back to the Somali Republic and occupying the Somali state's long-vacant UN seat (which it would continue to do until a successor government was formed in 2004), the TNG made no lasting impact on the country at large (Bradbury 49). By the fall of 2002, internationally facilitated negotiations to establish a successor administration were already undergoing.

These 'peace talks,' hosted in Mbgathi, Kenya, attempted to improve on the conference held in Djibouti by giving Somalia's foremost warlords, all of whom participated in the negotiations, primary rein in driving the process, as well as by being open to a federal system of government (Lewis Understanding Somalia and Somaliland 83, "Somalia."). Consequently, Puntland fully participated in the conference, leading to the resulting government's adoption of federalism as well as the elevation of Puntland's acting president, Abdullahi Yusuf, to president of all the Somali Republic (Bradbury 133, Lewis 83). Needless to say, Somaliland refused to participate because its independent status, recently bolstered by a 2001 referendum, deemed free and fair by international observers, in which 97% of voting Somalilanders approved independence, was not recognized (Bradbury 133, Somaliland National Referendum May 31, 2001 Final Report of the Initiative and Referendum Institute's Election Monitoring Team). Regardless of Somaliland's non-participation, however, hopes were high that the new administration of the Somali Republic, by virtue of the extensive involvement of all of Somalia's major faction leaders in the Mbgathi conference, would possess real national influence. These hopes soon proved ill-founded.

Although it could claim to be somewhat of an improvement over its predecessor due to its sensible adoption of a federal system, when the new regime, the Transitional Federal Government (TFG), officially succeeded the TNG in 2004, its authority was largely disregarded by the influential faction leaders who had created it and justifiably perceived as illegitimate by much of the general population (Lewis 85). The warlords, being themselves personally in control of virtually all military force capable of enforcing a government mandate, saw little reason to curb their usual behavior or significantly alter their relationships to each other, and they continued to manage their affairs largely as they had before, even while some of them nominally acted as 'ministers' and assemblymen in the new regime (Lewis 85). Some armed groups, however, showed outright hostility to the TFG; in fact, the government remained based in Kenya for its first few months due to security concerns and, when it finally relocated to Somalia in 2005, was unable to enter its proclaimed capital, Mogadishu, and was confined to the city of Baidoa, under the guardianship of a local warlord, about 150 miles away (Lewis 84, "Somalia."). 

Map (click to enlarge)

In these conditions, the TFG was unable to administer any kind of national government (Lewis 85). The only region of Somalia from which the administration drew unequivocal support was Puntland, owing to its enthusiastic participation in the Mbgathi conference, the new regime's commitment to federalism, and the fact that the TFG's president, Abdullahi Yusuf, was Puntland's first president and one of its founders. While the backing of the federation's only real federal state was greatly appreciated by the TFG, however, it had limited utility to the authorities in Baidoa. Even if it had the will, the northern territory did not have the strength to pacify the south and, in the absence of a constitution delineating the relationship of the federal government to the nation's constituent 'states,' Puntland remained largely self-governing. As a result, the TFG's authority was limited primarily to its southern provisional capital for its first 2 years of existence and the most notable aspect of Yusuf's presidency during this time was its unsuccessful campaign to bring international peacekeepers (i.e. foreign fighters) to Somalia to help the TFG maintain order (Bruton 7, 17, Lewis 88, 105). These developments reflected the fact that, 13 years after the collapse of Somalia's last functioning central government, the country's political and economic elite, chiefly the warlords, had found perpetuating state collapse to be in their best interest (Bradbury 108). In 2006, however, warlord rule in the south, largely unchallenged for over a decade, faced a potent threat, and the Somalian civil war entered a new phase: that of the Islamist insurgency.

Although Islam had not been a significant political force in Somali country for almost a century, in the wake of state collapse, political Islam saw a revival in Somalia as religious organizations took the place of state institutions that the so-called national governments and the warlords were either unable or unwilling to provide (Bradbury 20, Elmi 62, Lewis A Modern History of the Somali 299). Throughout Somalia, Islamists established schools, hospitals and, most significantly, courts, which the general population considered to be much fairer than the arbitrary edicts imposed by the various faction leaders that fought over the country (Elmi 63-66, 70, 113, Shay 51, 93). Although major Islamist militant groups had been rare up to 2006, what few had existed had been successfully suppressed by the warlords, who were only too happy to solicit foreign funds to eliminate real or perceived terrorists, and who frequently accused each other of harboring Islamic extremists as a pretext for war (Elmi 58, 60-61, 81, Lewis Making and Breaking States in Africa: the Somali Experience 187). Minor Islamist militias, however, were common even at the height of warlord predominance.

These militias acted as local law enforcement for communities that had established Islamic courts in the absence of reliable secular authorities, but they rarely challenged the power of the major faction leaders (Shay 93). For the most part, their authority did not extend beyond the petty criminal (Elmi 65). A major impediment to their exercising more influence was their lack of unity: each militia typically belonged to a different sharia court, most of the courts were established and operated independently, and the courts' leaders, mainly local clerics, were usually not politically affiliated and varied greatly in their interpretations of Islam (Lewis Understanding Somalia and Somaliland 86, Shay 93). Nevertheless, as chaotic and abusive warlord rule persisted, cooperation and coordination between Somalia's Islamic courts, facilitated by their shared commitment to Islamic jurisprudence, gradually increased with the strong encouragement of the business community, which provided the courts with extensive financial backing in return for reliable security (Lewis 93, Shay 93, 102). An especially significant development in the Islamists' consolidation was the decision of Mogadishu's sharia courts to combine their militias in 2004 (Shay 94).

This move naturally heightened tensions between the Islamic courts and the Mogadishu warlords, who recognized the courts' growing power as a threat to their rule and, in early February 2006, suspended their fighting with each other to form a coalition, which they deceptively named the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism (ARPCT) so as to garner international support, to dismantle the Islamists' organization, and launched an all-out assault on the Islamist-controlled areas of Mogadishu (Elmi 82-83). The result was not favorable to the warlords. With extensive popular support, the alliance of sharia courts, calling itself the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), repelled the attack and, after four months of fierce fighting, drove all of the warlords from the Somalian capital on June 4 (Bruton 7, Elmi 83, Shay 95). 10 days later, the organization's militia pursued the fleeing warlords to the town of Jowhar about 50 miles away, captured the town, and crushed the remnants of the warlord coalition's army as it attempted to regroup, securing the ICU's position as the dominant power in the Mogadishu area by mid-June (Shay 95).

The victory of the ICU brought a new class of individuals to the forefront of the south's struggle for leadership. Unlike the warlords, who had sustained themselves through a predatory relationship with the public maintained by violence, the ICU's rulers were beholden to a civil society that had voluntarily, albeit conditionally, bankrolled them, especially the business community and Islamic charities (Shay 102). In addition, the Islamists' leaders were generally not affiliated with the discredited groups that had produced the warlords, such as the Somali Democratic Republic's now-defunct military or the insurgent factions that had overthrown Barre before tearing the country to pieces, and none of them were members of the ineffectual TFG (Elmi 60). Thus when the ICU came to power, it energetically restored civic administration with a large degree of popular legitimacy and support.

Within a month of governing, the Islamists accomplished more toward restoring order in the south than any of the so-called national administrations since 1991. Public utilities that had been largely out of service for over a decade due to fighting between rival warlords were renovated and reopened, most notably Mogadishu's long-defunct sea port (Elmi 83, Lewis 88). Long neglected civic litigation, such as that involved in determining the ownership of property abandoned or stolen during the civil war, was finally addressed (Barnwell). Perhaps most importantly, the Islamist militias provided a security that was unprecedented since state collapse and, for the first time in 15 years, people in Mogadishu could move freely throughout the city without fear of being robbed or assaulted (Dowden 123, Lewis 88, Shay 99). The restoration of security and public infrastructure, in conjunction with the lifting of exorbitant taxes imposed by the warlords, spurred an economic boom, and residents of the ICU-controlled areas were delighted to find food prices drop by as much as 20% within two weeks of the Islamists rise to power (Lewis 88, Shay 95).

In addition, the ICU inaugurated a more participatory government than most southerners had known since the brief republican era in the 1960s. In line with its grassroots origins, the ICU generally worked closely with locals from a broad swathe of civil society to establish municipal administrations in the areas it occupied; long-marginalized business people, clan elders and intellectuals were given direct roles in decision-making (Shay 95). At the core of any local administration set up by the ICU was an Islamic court, which had a high degree of autonomy when it came to governing its area of jurisdiction (Shay 95). As far as a central government, the ICU consisted of a large advisory council made up of representatives from all of the courts as well as a smaller executive council led primarily by the founders of the movement (Shay 96).

Despite this devolved structure, however, the ICU was still repressive.Regardless of the amount of popular participation the ICU allowed in government, which varied from area to area, ultimate authority in the ICU always resided with the courts' Islamist militias and their leaders. Although the ICU coalition included both moderate and radical Islamic courts, the organization as a whole enforced a stricter and more extreme version of sharia law than most Somalis were used to (Elmi 138, Lewis 87, Shay 95-101). Within all ICU territory, gender segregation in public life was enforced, women were required to be veiled (although the extent varied depending on the local court),and there were extensive restrictions on the media. The ICU outlawed the playing of songs and films that they deemed 'immoral' as well as all media that was "likely to create conflicts between the population and the Council of Islamic Courts" ("ICU authorities censor radio station, detain journalist.", Lewis 87, Shay 99-100). Many activities that Somalians had previously taken for granted, such as dancing and singing in public, and even watching the World Cup during Ramadan, were banned because the ICU thought they were un-Islamic (Lewis 87, Shay 99, Sparre). These restrictions had no basis in traditional interpretations of Islam and were rightly perceived as radical and dangerous by many Somalis (Dowden 124, Lewis 87, Shay 100).

For those that had long suffered under the neglectful, capricious tyranny of the warlords and their incessant internecine fighting, however, the peace and stability afforded by the technocratic Islamists were largely worth the reduction in personal freedoms. Upon its defeat of the ARCPT and restoration of order to Mogadishu, the ICU became widely popular throughout the south and, empowered by this support, determined to spread its brand of Islamic governance far beyond the capital (Bruton 7, Elmi 84, Lewis 87-88). Beginning in early June, the ICU's development of administrative structures coincided with a campaign of conquest that rapidly expanded Islamist-controlled territory ever further, ousting squabbling regional warlords and replacing them with unified Islamic governments, often with extensive assistance from local populations (Bruton 7, Shay 95-118). The ICU's avowed goal was not to take over the whole country but simply to restore order to those areas plagued by lawlessness through the imposition of Islamic sharia ("Somalia's Union of Islamic Courts Calls for Jihad.").

Map (click to enlarge)

Nevertheless, the meteoric rise of Islamist influence greatly threatened the TFG. Although the Islamists stated soon after their capture of Mogadishu that they did not wish to supplant the TFG and that they were willing to work with the official national administration of the Somali Republic to achieve their aims, in reality these assurances were understood to be little more than a tentative commitment not to attack Baidoa and Puntland. Restoring order in Somalia meant overthrowing TFG warlords and, from the ICU's perspective, establishing ICU-controlled Islamist governments in their stead; there was an intrinsic contradiction between the Islamist organization's conciliatory rhetoric and its actions. As the ICU continued to expand, it quickly became apparent that the TFG would find it difficult to defend itself in Baidoa. The national administration had little popular support among southerners and its military, consisting primarily of Puntland's security forces plus a loose coalition of demoralized, quarrelling warlord militias, stood little chance in a southern standoff with the court's relatively disciplined and emboldened army, which grew with new recruits after every ICU conquest. The TFG's supporters feared that the ICU would negotiate, through military coercion, an integration with the internationally-recognized government that would essentially replace the secular TFG with the ICU and retain little, if any, of the original administration's institutions, including federalism, while giving the Islamists the legitimacy to impose their rule on the entire nation. Especially disturbing to the TFG's primary domestic backer, Puntland, was the prospect of the unitary state's return, which most of the clans around Mogadishu and, by extension, in the ICU were in favor of (because it would likely concentrate resources in the capital, now an Islamist stronghold).

Consequently, Yusuf tried to rally international support for his rule by demonizing the ICU. Soon after the Islamists' capture of Jowhar, he insinuated that the Islamists were in cahoots with international Islamic terrorist networks and accused them of harboring dangerous fugitives. Furthermore, he juxtaposed the supposed 'legitimacy' of his own administration, as the internationally-recognized government of the Somali Republic, with the illegitimacy of the ICU, which he claimed was extensively foreign extremist-backed and had little popular support, and reiterated his request for international peacekeepers to pacify the country. Yusuf especially appealed to Ethiopia and the United States for help, two countries that were particularly concerned about the Islamists' ascendancy in the Somali Republic. In the context of the War on Terror, the Americans were worried that ICU-controlled Somalia could become a haven for Islamic terrorists and, specifically, that 3 al-Qaeda members responsible for the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were hiding there (Elmi 82). Ethiopian interest in the ICU stemmed both from the Ethiopian government's acute fear of the spread of Islamic radicalism (due to Ethiopia's large Muslim minority) and, perhaps more importantly, the long-problematic 'Western Somali.'

To understand the latter cause of Ethiopia's preoccupation with the ICU requires a brief summary of events in Ethiopia and the Ogaden since 1991. In 1991, the same year Barre was ousted in Somalia, an alliance of Ethiopian rebel groups, the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), working in close collaboration with Eritrean nationalists, overthrew Ethiopia's communist government and took power. The new regime, led by EPRDF chairman Meles Zenawi, facilitated a quick recognition of Eritrea's independence (which had already been militarily secured by separatists) and, to rectify the problems created by the colonial nature of the previous Ethiopian state, reorganized long-unitary Ethiopia into a federation made up of 9 ethnic-based regions and 2 'chartered cities' (ethnically mixed city-states). One such region was the 'Somali Region,' with boundaries roughly corresponding to those of the historic Ogaden, which had previously been divided between three provinces (Hararghe, Bale, and Sidamo).

Map (click to enlarge)

According to the transitional charter and, eventually, constitution of Ethiopia instituted by Zenawi's administration, every region was given substantial autonomy. The new laws guaranteed the regions the rights to form their own governments, maintain their own security, conduct official business in their native languages (rather than just Amharic, the language imposed on people colonized by the Ethiopian Empire), and, most controversially, exercise 'unconditional' self-determination up to secession (1991 Transitional Charter of Ethiopia, 1995 Ethiopian Constitution). Although no Somali groups had been a part of the EPRDF's victorious coalition or had participated in creating the new constitution, the residents of the Ogaden, who had long fought for their autonomy, welcomed the reforms and enthusiastically prepared for self-government (Abdi 137). By the time it came to elect the regional and federal governments in 1992, however, it had become clear that Eritrea had been a case of the exception rather than the rule and that for territories such as the Ogaden, which had not been militarily secured by separatists and where the EPRDF could employ a repressive state apparatus, the Zenawi regime would only very reluctantly accede to secession, if at all.

Ogaden National Flag adopted by the ONLF (click to enlarge)

In the Somali Region, the federal government attempted to head off a strong movement for independence by fracturing Somalis politically (Abdi 133). The creation of many clan-based parties with narrow support-bases were sponsored by the federal government and the strongest Somali political organization, a separatist Islamist group called al-Itihad, was subject to violent harassment by EPRDF security forces that pressured it out of the democratic process (Abdi 133-134). Despite this tampering, however, when elections, free but certainly not fair, finally did take place in 1992, Ethiopian Somalis overwhelmingly voted for the ONLF, arguably the group most in favor of Western Somali independence, awarding it 84% of the Somali Region's governing assembly seats (Abdi 134).

The ONLF responded to this mandate by announcing, after a little over a year of preparation, that it was formally pursuing the Somali Region's independence (Abdi 137). Following the due process required of it by Ethiopian law, the ONLF followed this declaration by promptly submitting a motion to the Somali Region's state assembly calling for a referendum on the region's status. On March 25, 1994, the motion was approved nearly unanimously (Abdi 137). According to the national constitution adopted by the EPRDF later that year, the actions of the Somali Region's administration in March legally obligated the federal government to organize a referendum on secession to take place within 3 years (1995 Ethiopian Constitution).

Instead of honoring this commitment, however, the Zenawi regime ignored the request and, within a month of the assembly's approval of the independence motion, sacked the elected government of the Somali Region on the grounds of alleged "incompetence" and "expropriation" of state funds, and imprisoned many of regional government's top cabinet members, including the president and vice-president (Abdi 163). Furthermore, the EPRDF launched an attack on all separatist agitation in the Ogaden. Politicians publicly in favor of secession were arrested and pro-independence rallies were violently suppressed. Within a few months, the ONLF, along with al-Itihad, was effectively declared illegal by the federal government; its members were subject to severe harassment by security forces and its leaders were targeted for assassination (Abdi 165). While, by 1995, the EPRDF had succeeded in engineering, through the outlawing and intimidation of its political opponents, the election of a federal government-sponsored, unionist administration in the Somali Region, it had also sparked a war (Abdi 164).

Excluded from the political process, the ONLF resumed its militant struggle for the Ogaden's independence. Unable to take on the vastly larger and better-equipped Ethiopian military directly, the Western Somali fighters engaged the government using guerilla warfare (as they had done under previous regimes), producing a costly and protracted conflict that was stalemated as of 2006. Although the ONLF held little territory, the EPRDF, which had gradually transformed Ethiopia into an authoritarian state under Meles Zenawi, had made little progress toward eliminating the insurgency, which struck targets throughout the region using subterfuge and hit-and-run attacks. Repeated failure to defeat the ONLF and fear that the movement's success could galvanize further armed resistance to the regime led Zenawi to consider the Ogaden insurgents, who constituted the most active Ethiopian rebel group since 2002, a serious threat.

Of course, this concern was reflected in Ethiopia's policy toward Somalia.Beside Eritrea (which was avowedly hostile to the EPRDF government since losing a 1998 border dispute with Ethiopia), the Somali Republic was the only neighboring country that had any significant potential for supporting Ethiopia's militant opposition. Kenya, Uganda, and Sudan were all on good terms with the Ethiopian government and, despite Somalis' historical sympathy for Ogaden self-determination, Djibouti and Somaliland (vulnerable as an unrecognized state), too, were close allies with Zenawi in return for support and investment. Since an Ethiopian boycott of Eritrean ports (which began in 1998 and was still ongoing), landlocked Ethiopia had turned to Djibouti's port of Djibouti and, increasingly, to Somaliland's port of Berbera for over 90% of its import-export trade, producing extensive revenue for the two Somali states. In addition, although as of 2006 Ethiopia had withheld full diplomatic recognition of Somaliland's independence, the country accepted Somaliland passports and currency, formally received Somaliland diplomats, and even had a consulate in the breakaway republic. Not surprisingly, these actions bought the Ethiopian government considerable goodwill among Djiboutians and Somalilanders.

Map (click to enlarge)

Ethiopia was far less successful in reducing deeply rooted Somali antipathy in Somalia, where it was widely blamed for the dismemberment of the country (which most Somalians considered to include Somaliland). Somalis distrustful of the Ethiopians were quick to point out that not only had Ethiopia, with extensive foreign help, devastated the Somali state's economy and morale with its victory in the Ogaden War, but that it had also supported the fractious, often clan-based rebel groups that, after Barre's ouster, had torn the nation apart. Leading more credence to the cynical view of Ethiopian intervention in the erstwhile Somali Democratic Republic was the fact that the Zenawi regime had, since state collapse, extensively colluded with the forces that had most divided the country: the warlords and the separatists. Ethiopia had backed the warlord coalition that destroyed the TNG, a government that, for all its flaws, was fairly warlord-independent, and the EPRDF had sponsored (and continued to sponsor) warlord allies to pursue its interests in Somalia, repressing potentially radical Islamists and Somali irredentists, and preventing the Somali state from becoming a refuge for the Ethiopian opposition. Ethiopia's support for Somaliland's secession while giving lip service to union (the Zenawi administration officially favored a united Somali Republic) was, for the great number of Somalians still committed to Somali unity (the Somali Republic did, after all, fly the same flag it had at independence, complete with its 'Star of Unity'), analogous to abetting the warlords and recalled the trauma of the imperial division of Somali lands. Inevitably, the close association of Ethiopia with what many Somalians considered to be the Somalis' most regressive political developments, combined with Ethiopia's ongoing persecution of its resident Somali population, caused anti-Ethiopian sentiment, ingrained in most Somalis since the 19th century occupation of the Ogaden, to run high in Somalia, albeit mostly concentrated in the south. 

In the north, Ethiopia had won the gratitude of some Somalis by being supportive of Puntland's state-building efforts there. For its part, Puntland, under the leadership of Abdullahi Yusuf, had strongly solicited Ethiopian backing for its federalist approach to reconstituting the Somali Republic, which, at the time of Puntland's formation in 1998, had few supporters within southern Somalia and the international community (as evidenced by the UN-sponsored TNG's highly centralized unitary structure and non-recognition of Puntland). By offering its extensive cooperation to Zenawi's government, Puntland had earned Ethiopia's support for its campaign to destroy the TNG and replace it with a regime that legitimized Puntland's autonomy; Ethiopian lobbying was decisive in Yusuf's election to President of the Somali Republic by the TFG's warlord-dominated assembly.

In light of this relationship, Ethiopia's involvement in Somalia appeared to be driven more by pragmatism than the animosity toward Somalis that many Somalians, especially southerners, attributed to the Ethiopian state. Realistically, war-ravaged Ethiopia could not be expected to invest its resources and energy into a major state-building project aimed at restoring the Somali Republic. Neither, however, could Ethiopia be expected to not intervene; the stakes were too high. Not only was Zenawi's regime threatened by internal opposition but the Ethiopian state itself was at risk of total disintegration at the hands of ethnic separatists (foremost among which were the Ogaden Somalis). As a country with a long history of supporting Ethiopian rebels, the former Somali Republic was too much of a liability to be left alone. But rather than going the extremely difficult route of trying to establish, from the top down through intervention, a single new, unified, super-accommodating government over the entire territory, Ethiopia had chosen to follow the much easier, albeit less visionary, path for its involvement in Somalia and Somaliland: engaging what administrative authorities, however disparate and contradictory their goals, organically emerged there. This meant working with the separatists in Somaliland, the federalists in northern Somalia, and the warlords in the south. It mattered little to the EPRDF if this antagonized the vast majority of southern Somalia's thus far (as of 2006) largely powerless public. Ethiopian support for the northern federalists, a group with substantial democratic legitimacy and a sincere desire to reconstitute a unified Somali Republic, demonstrated that Ethiopia did not simply wish to sabotage (as many Somalis accused it) the project of Somali nationhood. That said, Ethiopia's employment of warlords that brutalized Somalia's southern population evidenced that the Zenawi regime pursued its self-preservation ruthlessly and amorally.

Of course, the success of the EPRDF's policy of making clients of Somalia's political elites in order to safeguard its interests was contingent on the preservation of those elites (or, at least, their replacement by other Ethiopian clients). This was especially true given the hostility that many Somalians felt toward Ethiopia; especially in Somalia's south, where there existed a large community of Ogaden clansmen, there was extensive Somali support for the Western Somali insurgency. In this context, the rapid rise of the ICU, a southern Somalian populist movement that was not in any way beholden to the Ethiopian government, posed a grave threat to the EPRDF. Thus it was not surprising that, soon after the Islamists' capture of Jowhar, the Zenawi regime acceded to Yusuf's call for help by deploying several hundred Ethiopian soldiers around Baidoa and by reiterating the Somalian government's accusations of dangerous extremism in the ICU.

The deployment marked the beginning of a dangerous escalation in the conflict between the Islamists and TFG. Although the incursion was categorically denied by both the Ethiopian government and Yusuf's administration, knowledge of the intervention spread quickly in the south and the ICU used it to attack the legitimacy of the TFG, depicting the internationally-recognized government as complacent in an Ethiopian 'invasion' of Somalia and announcing that it would not negotiate with the TFG until Ethiopian troops were withdrawn. For its part, the TFG refused to negotiate with the ICU until the Islamists withdrew from the territories they occupied outside of Mogadishu. Tensions rose further when, on June 19, the TFG's entreaties for international support found partial success in the form of an AU announcement that the organization was mulling sending peacekeepers to help stabilize Somalia. The ICU responded by declaring that it was unequivocally opposed to any such move by the AU (on the grounds that it was unnecessary, considering the security the Islamists were already providing) and that it would treat the deployment of a peacekeeping force as an act of aggression. Nevertheless, as a result of intense pressure from the UN, the ICU and the TFG agreed to meet for peace talks without preconditions from June 21 to June 22. The resulting talks concluded in the ICU's formal recognition of the TFG as the 'legitimate' government of the Somali Republic in return for the TFG's recognition of the 'reality' of ICU power. More importantly, the TFG and the ICU consented to a ceasefire as well as made a tentative commitment to renew negotiations in mid-July. This accord, however, proved to be a shaky foundation for peace.

While the TFG interpreted the agreement to mean an end to ICU expansion, the Islamists saw it differently. The ICU treated the ceasefire as applying only to the TFG in Baidoa and (tentatively) to Puntland, the special autonomous status of which the ICU generally respected, and so it continued to seize territory throughout the south; on the whole, the Islamists did not regard warlords who ruled in the TFG's name (but had not de facto submitted to TFG authority) to be protected by the June accord. As a result, although the ICU was willing to negotiate, Yusuf's administration boycotted peace talks scheduled for July 15 on the grounds of Islamist aggression. Just a few days later, however, the ICU, too, boycotted negotiations to protest an escalation of the Ethiopian interference in Somalia: in response to the Islamists' capture of the city closest to Baidoa on July 19, the Zenawi regime publicly threatened to "crush" the ICU if it attacked the TFG's provisional capital and covertly sent a column of troops to defend Baidoa, raising the number of Ethiopian soldiers in Somalia to several thousand (this deployment, although widely verified, was denied by both the TFG and the Ethiopian government despite its already hostile pronouncements toward the ICU). Peace talks continued to be stalled for another month as neither side was willing to back down: the TFG continued to incense the ICU by allowing Ethiopian troops to deploy around Baidoa (while implausibly denying any intervention); the ICU continued to expand, even up to the Ethiopian border in central Somalia.

For the most part, these developments were in the ICU's favor. With each passing day, the Islamists increased their control of the country while the TFG became weaker. Despite its rhetoric, the ICU was wise enough to largely avoid armed confrontation with the TFG's superiorly-equipped allies around Baidoa, and Yusuf's Ethiopian support force was hesitant to act offensively to halt the Islamists' advance. The Zenawi regime neither wanted the TFG to look like an EPRDF puppet nor to expose the itself to possible international condemnation for an actual invasion of Somalia. Still, the Ethiopian presence was apparent enough that it widely tarnished the TFG's image in the eyes of the Somalian public, especially in the south, and allowed the Islamists to position themselves, fairly successfully, as the defenders of Somali independence and sovereignty. In addition, starting in July, Yusuf's government was wracked by a string of high profile defections. The fact that the defectors cited administration corruption and failure to make peace with the ICU as the reasons for their resignation further undermined the TFG's legitimacy. The Islamists, meanwhile, continued to foster a reputation for good governance in the areas under their control. 

Not all southerners, however, were content to be ruled by the ICU, and the one exception to the trend of diminishing support for the TFG was the formation of a new federal state, Galmudug, in mid-August. Galmudug was formed by a few communities on Puntland's southern border that had largely escaped the warlordism that had plagued much of the south and yet had not done much toward creating a single administration for themselves up to 2006. The establishment of their 'state' was prompted by the rapid encroachment of Islamist militias from the south; many of their people feared absorption into the ICU, which they perceived to be alien and repressive, and saw the creation of their own democratic, autonomous state in the model of their northern neighbor as the best way to promote their interests in the post-ARCPT Somalia, which was increasingly polarized between pro-TFG and pro-Islamist camps. 

Map (click to enlarge)

Yet while this move was comforting to Yusuf's administration and its supporters as much as it demonstrated, in the very least, some popular support for the TFG's federalist model, it did little to deter the ICU's expansion as the Galmudug State was beset with problems. Its government was weak with virtually no military capability and was limited almost exclusively to a few western settlements near its capital, South Galkayo, the southern part of the city of Galkayo on Puntland's border (North Galkayo was to continue to be administered by Puntland). Furthermore, the state's supporters claimed far more territory than they actually controlled or inhabited, and much of what they deemed to be their land had been and remained under the authority of warlords and bandits. Most importantly, however, support for Galmudug was, at best, only moderate among its residents.

Many, perhaps even a majority, of the people within the new state's proclaimed boundaries were in favor of a takeover by the ICU, who they considered far more capable, based on a proven track record, of administering law and order than the Galmudug authorities. While this support for the Islamists extended well into Galkayo, it was especially pronounced in the more lawless areas of the region. For example, at around the time of Galmudug's formation, Islamist militias were welcomed into the pirate strongholds of Harardhere and Hobyo as liberators where, at the invitation of the towns' law-abiding inhabitants, they drove out the powerful gangs that had not only preyed on international shipping but had long terrorized the local citizenry. The legitimacy of Galmudug was further hurt by the fact that it relied for its local defense force on the militia of a resurgent ARCPT warlord, Abdi Qeybdid, whose kinship ties to the state's founders had allowed him to find refuge in Galkayo. In these adverse conditions, the long term survival (and therefore relevance) of Galmudug can be attributed to one primary factor: its proximity to Puntland. While it would become more significant in later years as a key stakeholder in the federal system, in 2006, Galmudug's nascent existence was just a small side note to the principal struggle between Puntland and the TFG in Baidoa and the ICU.

This contest seemed to be headed toward an uneasy truce by the end of August. The Islamists northern push toward Galkayo, which they plausibly claimed to have been invited into (albeit, by rival administrations to that of Galmudug), was halted by threats of war from Puntland, which massed troops in the city and made clear it would not brook any ICU presence on its doorstep; on August 16, the two sides signed a peace agreement in which they vowed to not advance on each other and to cooperate in providing security to Somalia as a whole. Despite the fact that neither the TFG nor the ICU fulfilled each other's preconditions for peace talks (the ICU had not ceased to expand and the TFG had not expelled Ethiopian troops), responding to international pressure, they reluctantly went to the bargaining table on August 31. They concluded negotiations on Septemer 4, committing to join forces at an unspecified dateto form a national army and agreeing to jointly resist foreign military intervention in Somalia; they planned to meet again in late October. The disingenuousness of these gestures, however, was soon apparent.

Yusuf's government continued to unequivocally deny the existence of its Ethiopian support force and took no action to send it home. More provocatively, only a day after the peace talks ended, the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), the Horn of Africa's seven-country regional development organization of which Ethiopia was a dominant member, authorized, with the tacit approval of the TFG, the deployment of IGAD peacekeepers to defend the 'internationally legitimate' government of the Somali Republic. Although the IGAD plan faced several months worth of bureaucratic hurtles before it could be put into effect, the most significant of which being to lift a UN arms embargo on Somalia, the eventuality of an internationally sanctioned intervention on its behalf, in addition to Ethiopia's covert support, made the TFG significantly more threatening to the Islamists.Consequently, the ICU harshly denounced the action as a "plot against our country," reiterated its vows to violently resist any foreign military intervention on the TFG's behalf, and moved to increase its military control of the south to strengthen its leverage in future talks. 

In the proceeding weeks, the conflict between the TFG and the Islamists continued to escalate and the likelihood of a peacefully negotiated settlement became slimmer and slimmer. On September 18, the Somali Republic experienced its first suicide bombing in a failed assassination attempt on President Yusuf. The ICU denied responsibility and accused Ethiopia of engineering the attack as a pretext for its invasion; the TFG blamed the attack on Islamic extremists although fell short of directly blaming the ICU. Tensions soared, and were exacerbated further when, the next week, the Islamists seized Kismayo, the south's fourth largest city and second largest port after Mogadishu, denying the proposed peacekeepers a strategic gateway into the country and greatly advancing the Islamists' goal of controlling all of southern Somalia. The TFG considered the conquest an especially egregious violation of the cease fire and more evidence that the ICU was pursuing a military solution to the conflict, and, as the perceived threat to the TFG increased, so did Ethiopian involvement, infuriating the Islamists. Ethiopia sent thousands more troops to Baidoa, and the ICU, whose key demand had always been the withdrawal of Ethiopian forces, became even more distrustful of Yusuf's administration. Further marking an increase in hostility, Puntland banned all flights from southern Somalia (except those from Baidoa) about a week after Kismayo's capture, accusing the ICU of flying radical clerics to Puntland to harm its stability. In October, this steady deterioration of relations culminated in two major events: on October 18, at a conference originally intended to revitalize negotiations, President Yusuf explicitly accused the ICU of plotting his own assassination as well as those of other TFG members and begged the international community to close ranks around his embattled regime; on October 28, the ICU's leadership formally declared war on Ethiopia, citing its intervention on behalf of the TFG as justification. Serious peace talks between the TFG and the ICU never recommenced. 

Over the following two months, the Islamists aggressively expanded and consolidated their control of southern Somalia while the TFG and its allies remained largely on the defensive militarily. In line with its declaration of war, the ICU took a more hostile stance toward the Ethiopian government, calling on the Ethiopian people "to revolt and remove the oppressive regime led by Meles Zenawi" and reviving the Somali Republic's irredentist claims to the long-disputed Ogaden as well as to northeastern Kenya. Still, the Islamists refrained from a large scale military confrontation with Ethiopian forces; in fact, their statements seemed intended more to increase their popularity among largely anti-Ethiopian southerners and to deter an Ethiopian offensive than to provoke an all out war. Zenawi had already displayed his reluctance to play his hand too openly in Somalia and, being vulnerable to dissent at home, was highly sensitive to the possibility of a revolt occuring against his rule in response to a costly invasion of Somalia. Both the ICU and the Ethiopian government had much to potentially lose from war, and, if the Islamists were betting on this fact to safeguard themselves from a major Ethiopian assault during their advance, they were initially successful. Ethiopia offered only minor assistance to Puntland and most of the TFG's proxy warlords, and what minor skirmishes did break out between Islamist and Ethiopian troops directly did not escalate into a wider war between the two sides.

With Ethiopia refraining from bringing its full force to bear, the ICU was able to rapidly expand, not only easily defeating southern warlords but even challenging Puntland in the north, disregarding the state's warnings and advancing deeper into Galmudug; the Islamists succeeded in repelling a counter-offensive by Puntland's army, forcing it to retreat to Galkayo.Although the TFG was somewhat emboldened when the UN Security Council unanimously authorized the deployment of IGAD peacekeepers to defend Baidoa on December 7, for the most part, it seemed powerless to stop the ICU's momentum in gaining control of the country. Yusuf's administration could not exert much influence while trapped in Baidoa and discredited in the eyes of most Somalians, who saw it as a warlord government and an Ethiopian puppet, regardless of how secure it was.  

Map (click to enlarge)

By mid-December, the Islamists appeared guaranteed to dominate any future settlement. The ICU was the strongest military force in Somalia beside the Ethiopians, was wildly popular among Somalians (albeit, mostly outside of Puntland), and was the first administration to come close to uniting the entire south under its banner since the beginning of the civil war. Only a sparsely populated swathe of land around Baidoa, in which the Ethiopians were most firmly entrenched, and northernmost Galmudug, remained outside of its control. If the TFG agreed to seriously negotiate a power-sharing deal, the Islamists' authority over much of Somalia proper (and most of its population) would allow it to bargain from a position of strength. If the TFG remained unwilling to brook an agreement favorable to the Islamists, there was some indication that the ICU would declare sovereignty as 'the Islamic Republic of Somalia'; given that the ICU's track record in governance was so superior to that of the TFG, it was not unlikely that, in a direct competition for international recognition as the legitimate Somali government, the ICU would win. Yet the fact that their long term success in driving policy in Somalia seemed all but assured did not prevent the Islamists from apparently calling Ethiopia's bluff and trying to secure a quick victory. On December 13, the ICU issued an ultimatum: if the Ethiopian troops did not leave Somalia within 7 days, the ICU's forces would advance on the TFG's capital and drive them out.

In light of past developments, this move was not so outrageous. Ethiopia had been unwilling to militarily engage the Islamists on a large scale in the past, when they were weaker, and thus it seemed even less likely to fight a war with them now that they had consolidated their control over most of the south. It appeared plausible that, if faced with a real threat of a severe escalation of its military involvement in Somalia, Ethiopia might back down, withdrawing its troops and leaving previous peace agreements and (eventually) IGAD peacekeepers to protect Baidoa, while opening the door for further ICU expansion in the south. It had already permitted the Islamists to gain control of enough of southern Somalia that it would be virtually impossible for the TFG and its domestic allies to oust them; letting them conquer the rest of the region would not substantively alter the internal dynamics within Somalia and it might benefit Ethiopia if it averted a war. For the ICU, there was little cost to the measure, as, if Ethiopia did not back down, it could simply renege on its threat. In fact, it did just that, declaring, when it became clear that the Ethiopians were not moving, that it would not attack after the seven days were up and that it still hoped for a peaceful settlement. When, however, war did break out on the day of the ultimatum's expiry, it became clear that the Islamists had made one major strategic blunder: underestimating the United States.

While the American government had publicly portrayed itself as taking a backseat to regional powers, such as Ethiopia, when it came to policy toward Somalia amidst the rise of the Islamists, it had covertly been taking a leading role to protect its interests. What the Americans dreaded most was that Somalia under the ICU would resemble Afghanistan under the Taliban or Sudan under the National Islamic Front (NIF): an Islamist-run rogue state that would offer sanctuary and material support to international Islamic terrorists aligned against the United States. This fear was made more acute by the fact that American intelligence believed that a number of Islamic terrorists, among them those responsible for the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, had been hiding in the Somalian capital for a number of years under the protection of local Islamists. In fact, the United States had secretly contracted the ARCPT warlords as bounty hunters in a failed bid to eliminate this threat.

Thus when the ICU rose to power, having just defeated American proxies in the War on Terror, it was already distrusted by the United States government, which grudgingly began to negotiate with it to secure the extradition of the very terrorists that the Americans had long suspected the group's founders of sheltering. If the ICU's leadership had much cared to win American support, they would have been wise to either hand over the fugitives if they were indeed hosting them or, if not, to be extremely cooperative and amicable toward the United States government. Furthermore, they would have benefited from reigning in extremism in their movement that could convince America that they were ideologically aligned with its enemies. They did none of these things. While the Islamists' leaders unequivocally denied any connection to al-Qaeda or knowledge of the terrorists behind the 1998 embassy bombings, they were brazenly dismissive of the United States' concerns, almost mocking the American intelligence that indicated Mogadishu to be a terrorist refuge. In addition, they made little effort to curb the Taliban-like excesses of some of their militia, notably al-Shabaab, a militia that functioned like a shock trooper unit for the ICU. This behavior made the Islamists alleged harboring of al-Qaeda operatives seem more plausible, and, ultimately, doomed their movement to failure, as the Americans soon determined that the ICU was too threatening to remain in power. 

Although publicly, throughout the Somalian conflict, the United States remained a voice of restraint, urging all sides to avoid violence, secretly, it began lobbying Ethiopia to forcefully remove the Courts not long after the Islamists capture of Mogadishu. Despite his distrust of the ICU and his close ties to the TFG, Zenawi had actually been extremely reluctant to launch a costly invasion of Somalia while he faced extensive opposition at home. His reliance on American aid, however, meant that the United States government was able to successfully pressure him into initiating a war. While the ICU had easily expanded their grasp of southern Somalia, American money had been funneled into Ethiopia to pay for an offensive and American military personnel had trained Ethiopian soldiers. When the Islamists finally came close to advancing on Baidoa in late December, it provided the perfect pretext for an invasion that had been months in the making.

Starting on December 20, Ethiopia's military, one of Africa's largest and strongest, invaded ICU-controlled territory; on December 24, the Ethiopian government publicly acknowledged for the first time that it had entered Somalia in force, avowedly to take "self-defensive" measures in response to ICU aggression. Ethiopian tanks, warplanes, and superiorly-equipped professional soldiers, with American material and logistical support, devastated the Islamists' lightly armed militias in what was, at first, a conventional war. Most of the Islamists' fighters were either slaughtered or driven underground; some chose to flee the country. In the face of an Ethiopian onslaught that was, apparently, unanticipated, and that saw most of its land conquered within a week, a demoralized ICU collapsed. Its top political leadership resigned and, soon after, fled into exile, and much of its organization disbanded or fractured. After distributing some of the arms that they had previously confiscated to the local population, the group gave up the Somalian capital without a fight, possibly because of pressure from supporters in the business community that did not wish to see their considerable investments, made under past months' peace, destroyed by warfare. After the abandonment of Mogadishu, much of what was left of the ICU's organization made a short-lived stand at Kismayo that lasted only 2 days; after a crushing defeat at their defenses outside the city, the Islamists retreated, most fleeing into the bush or to Kenya, where many of them were caught by Kenyan authorities and handed over as prisoners to the TFG. By January 7, 2007, Ethiopia had occupied virtually all of southern Somalia, including Galmudug, and President Yusuf, with Ethiopian support, had installed himself in the Somalian capital for the first time in his presidency.

Nevertheless, what seemed like an easy victory for the TFG, the Ethiopians, and the Americans (who still denied any culpability for the invasion) quickly became an unmitigated disaster. The arrival of 'warlord government' to Mogadishu at the hands of a foreign occupier was not welcomed by most people in the south, and it was not long before Yusuf's administration and its Ethiopian allies faced an intractable popular insurgency. Despite being politically fragmented in the wake of the ICU's defeat, southerners, organized in a plethora of clan-based and Islamist movements (many claiming to be the rightful successors to the ICU), were still able to mount an increasingly effective resistance against the TFG and the Ethiopians while also competing with each other, often ruthlessly, for power and influence. Deadly ambushes, remote detonations, and mortar attacks directed at Ethiopian and government personnel became common in the weeks following the invasion, and it was soon clear that, despite the weakening of its enemies by the initial Ethiopian offensive, the TFG's 'national army,' a combination of Puntland troops and warlord paramilitaries, remained unable, by itself, to secure the south. As countries that had previously committed to a peacekeeping mission began to back down in the face of an escalating crisis, the beleaguered Somali government was left with only an inadequate force of about 1000 Ugandan peacekeepers from the AU, which had subsumed the IGAD mission in mid-January, to defend itself in the case of an Ethiopian withdrawal. Consequently, the Zenawi regime, which had previously insisted that its intervention would last a little over a month, was forced into carrying out a prolonged occupation that, it itself admitted, impoverished Ethiopia could ill afford (Shay 121). If Ethiopian troops were withdrawn immediately, the Ethiopian government and its American backers faced the prospect of leaving Somalia even more threatening than it was before the invasion: highly destabilized and dominated by hostile groups.

Despite waging a brutal counter-insurgency, however, Ethiopia, its TFG allies, and the small AU peacekeeping force were unable to stabilize the south. This was in part due to their methods of responding to the crisis: Ethiopian troops, TFG security forces, and Ugandan soldiers (albeit, to a much lesser degree than the TFG and the Ethiopians) unleashed a wave of terror against the recalcitrant population of Mogadishu, murdering, raping, and looting with impunity as well as responding to guerilla attacks with disproportionate force, indiscriminately shelling entire neighborhoods suspected of harboring insurgents and often preventing the wounded from getting access to humanitarian aid. On the political front, Yusuf's administration became more authoritarian rather than more inclusive, stifling internal dissent and making only token attempts at reconciliation, seemingly determined to enforce a winner's peace, by the barrel of AU and Ethiopian guns, on its opposition. This brutality not only highly discredited the TFG and the foreign occupiers in the eyes of Somalians, but also in the eyes of the international community, making the occupation much less politically tenable as well as galvanizing the resistance, which was becoming increasingly organized both in Somalia and abroad.

In September 2007, the ICU's exiled political leadership joined with defectors from the TFG (former members of the TFG's internal dissent that Yusuf had increasingly suppressed) to form the Alliance for the Reliberation of Somalia (ARS), based safely in Eritrea, Ethiopia's arch nemesis. The group's primary aim was to 'reliberate' Somalia from the despotic leadership (the warlords and their associates) that the ICU had marginalized under its reign but that now, at the hands of the Ethiopians, had been ingloriously returned to power. It lobbied in international forums for ending the Ethiopian occupation and the TFG, and it presented itself, somewhat successfully, as both a viable alternative to Yusuf's administration and the legitimate political representative of the rebels. In reality, however, the ARS as an institution had little authority on the ground in Somalia, despite the fact that many insurgents remained loyal to the original leaders and vision of the ICU, and its role in combating the occupation was generally limited to propagandizing and cheering on the insurgents from exile.

Meanwhile, within Somalia itself, al-Shabaab (meaning "the Youth" or "the Lads" in Arabic), a secretive organization that had served as the vanguard of the ICU's military and police force, was gradually maneuvering itself to the forefront of the resistance, crushing or coopting rival insurgent groups while gaining a reputation as the most effective enemy of the TFG and its allies. The core of al-Shabaab was comprised of the ICU's top military leaders as well as the movement's most battle-hardened and fanatical veterans, who, unlike the movement's political leadership, had not fled into exile in the face of the Ethiopian invasion and had instead chosen to stay and fight. The group rejected any ties with the ARS, which it emphatically denounced for hiding among an "infidel" (Eritrea's often violently-secular president) rather than fighting for its country and religion on the ground. Further threatening the ARS, Al-Shabaab showed little propensity for power-sharing outside of its organization, and it considered itself to be the only true heir to the Islamic Courts' mantle in the south although, unlike some other competing Islamist groups, it did not adopt the ICU label.

For all its attempts to appear a successor movement, however, al-Shabaab differed notably in both its practices and ideology from the broader ICU that it had broken off from. While the ICU had been a big tent Islamist movement that sought to accommodate a wide variety of political Islam within its organization, al-Shabaab rigidly adhered to an extremely radical interpretation of Islam and was generally intolerant of more moderate or orthodox interpretations of Islamic practice. As much as sharia under the ICU had seemed extreme to many Somalians, it was nothing compared to Islamic law under al-Shabaab, which not only proscribed far more behaviors than the ICU as 'un-Islamic' but which also frequently used harsh punishments, such as amputations and beheadings, that the ICU had employed only very infrequently. In addition, while the ICU, despite its repressive tendencies, had, on the whole, been a pro-democracy movement and likely in favor of establishing an 'Islamic Republic,' al-Shabaab was an authoritarian movement that did not tolerate dissent and that sought to create an 'Islamic Emirate' (kingdom) in Somalia. Furthermore, while the broader ICU had been relatively public about its internal structure, al-Shabaab had always been and continued to be fairly secretive about its organization, a quality that may have given it an advantage over some of its opponents; this secrecy had been maintained even when it was a part of the ICU, in which al-Shabaab had possessed substantial autonomy despite being somewhat accountable to the ICU's more moderate political leadership. Another important difference was that while connections between al-Qaeda and the ICU as an entire organization were flimsy, al-Shabaab, consistent with its radical ideology, maintained a substantial relationship with the terrorist organization; in fact, the al-Qaeda suspects that the United States had sought from the ICU had, at the time, been sheltered by al-Shabaab (although this would only be determined after the Ethiopian invasion), although, to the credit of the ICU, al-Shabaab's secrecy meant that is unclear to what extent, if at all, the ICU's political leadership had been aware of this reality.

These traits (ideological rigidity, authoritarianism, secrecy, and strong links to al-Qaeda) did little to endear al-Shabaab to most Somalians, highly individualistic and generally in favor of democracy, but the group had other notable qualities that allowed it to wage an effective insurgency and earn some popular support. Like the ICU before it, al-Shabaab benefited from having relatively disciplined fighters (many of them fanatical veterans of the ICU) and it generally brought much-appreciated stability to the areas it firmly controlled, albeit, at very high price to personal freedom. In a departure from the ICU, however, al-Shabaab's chief political accomplishment was navigating Somalia's volatile clan politics (a major cause of state collapse) especially deftly. To avoid starting violent clan disputes and being accused of partiality toward one clan or another, the organization (when fighting Somalis) almost always had its members strike targets from their own clans. More importantly, it maintained a truly heterogeneous clan composition, even in its top leadership, a feat that neither its predecessor (the ICU was dominated by clans from the Mogadishu area) nor any of its significant rivals had accomplished. Al-Shabaab's ability to transcend clan divides not only helped it to resist the occupation by reducing its distractions (in the form of clan conflict) from the war, but it also gave it popular appeal as a vehicle for overcoming one of the most intractable problems in Somali history: clanism. Nevertheless, the group's extreme repressiveness prevented it from gaining much popularity, and what genuine support it did receive from the general population owed far more to Somalians' hatred of the Ethiopians and the TFG rather than admiration for al-Shabaab. Ultimately, the primary cause of the organization's preeminence in the resistance struggle was its ability to crush its rivals and to get results toward crippling the occupation, owing to the strength of its organization and the ruthless dedication of its core fighters.

Within a little over a year, al-Shabaab, along with other weaker insurgent groups, made the TFG's original course unsustainable; they captured large swathes of southwestern Somalia and maintained a fierce insurgency in the capital that kept Yusuf's administration in a state of siege. Ethiopia was moving toward ending its occupation, wary of a military quagmire: its army was making no real progress toward stabilizing Somalia and was sustaining unacceptably high losses to do so. Furthermore, the AU peacekeeping force, although it had begun to grow with a gradual infusion of Burundian soldiers, stood no chance of holding the TFG's meager gains if the Ethiopians withdrew, even if all of the approximately 7,000 troops pledged by the AU were deployed.Consequently, the TFG began to seek a meaningful political settlement in early 2008, spurred by heavy pressure from both the Ethiopians, who wished to facilitate an honorable withdrawal, and the broader international community, which wanted to end Somalia's destabilizing chaos as soon as possible. The insurgents on the ground, however, were difficult to negotiate with, being divided and, in the case of groups with aims extremely at odds with those of the TFG, such as al-Shabaab, very resistant to compromise.

Thus the TFG negotiated primarily with the ARS in its attempts at reconciliation and, by June, 2008, reached an agreement that, while controversial within both camps, appeared to have a good chance at producing peace. The deal set a timetable for an Ethiopian troop withdrawal, committed both sides to a ceasefire, and stipulated that the TFG's parliament would be doubled in size and that half of it would be composed of ARS members (mostly southerners that were formerly members of the ICU). Furthermore, it called for a new president to be elected by the new parliament and (surprisingly, considering the earlier stances of the ICU) for an international peacekeeping force, from which neighboring countries would be excluded, to help stabilize Somalia for the coalition government. While the pact was lauded by many in both Somalia and the international community as a necessary power-sharing agreement, there was extensive opposition to it from all quarters. On the ARS side, about half of the organization, under the leadership of one of the ICU's two former chairmen, Hassan Aweys, boycotted the peacetalks, opposing them as an unnecessary capitulation to a illegitimate government that was bound to be totally overthrown, sooner or later, by Islamist insurgents. On the TFG side, President Yusuf (whose prime minister had negotiated the deal in lieu of himself) and the government of his native Puntland attacked the agreement as tilting the balance of power too far in favor of the southern clan family that most ARS members belonged to, the Hawiye.

Despite these criticisms, however, the integration went forward. The dissenting ARS faction was largely ignored as irrelevant, and, when Yusuf tried to stonewall the implementation of the accord by dismissing his prime minister (the one who negotiated it), most of the TFG's parliamentarians and ministers (including those from his own clan) turned against him, denouncing him as a tyrant and an obstacle to peace. Abandoned by virtually his entire administration, which apparently saw the extreme urgency of reconciling with the Islamist insurgency, Yusuf resigned and moved to Yemen, where he was granted political asylum. Although Puntland retained some misgivings regarding the inglorious ouster of a Puntlander from the presidency and its former enemies being in a position to circumscribe its prized autonomy, it reluctantly accepted to the integration after its main grievance, clan imbalance, was addressed: shortly after Yusuf's resignation, the ARS agreed to have the clan composition of its parliamentary delegates approximately match that of the country as a whole. Thus the way was paved for much of the old ICU to become the internationally recognized government of the Somali Republic and for the Ethiopian occupation to come to a swift end. On January 25, 2009, Ethiopia fully withdrew from Somalia and on January 31, 2009, a new TFG parliament, with half of its members from the ARS, elected Sharif Ahmed, former head of the ICU, President of the Somali Republic. As anticipated by those who orchestrated the TFG-ARS merger, the new government commanded significant support among southerners who had supported the ICU, and several insurgent groups allied themselves with Ahmed's administration in early 2009. Nevertheless, the regime still had two major sources of opposition. 

The first was al-Shabaab, which, during the events leading up to the Ethiopian withdrawal, had substantially consolidated its strength; by late 2008, it had captured much of southwestern Somalia and had declared the formation of an "Islamic Emirate of Somalia," a sovereign state that claimed all of the territory of the erstwhile Somali Republic (Somaliland and Somalia). Despite having once fought under Ahmed in the ICU, al-Shabaab publicly denounced its former leader as a traitor for joining with the secular TFG, which it dismissed as a puppet of Ethiopia and the West, and vowed to fight the "apostate" government until its until its radical vision of sharia were enforced on the entire country.

The second major threat to Ahmed's administration was a new movement, Hizbul Islam (meaning the "Islamic Party" in Arabic), formed in early 2009. This organization was produced by the merger of 4 Islamist groups: the ARS faction that had boycotted negotiations with the TFG, and 3 insurgent groups that had been active on the ground in Somalia throughout the occupation. Hizbul Islam declared war on Ahmed's administration for virtually the same reasons as al-Shabaab, namely, that the TFG's pre-existing institutions were so corrupt that any collusion with it was nothing less than a betrayal of Islam. The fact that Hizbul Islam agreed with al-Shabaab ideologically, however, did not mean that it worked closely with other insurgent movement; rather, it set itself up as a competitor for followers and territory.

Together, these two factions continued the civil war, fighting against moderate Islamist groups allied with Ahmed, the remnants of the original TFG, and the AU forces, mostly Ugandan and Burundian soldiers, that remained in Mogadishu as peacekeepers at the invitation of the new government. Scoring victory after victory against their weaker and less organized opposition in the south, al-Shabaab and Hizbul Islam consistently rebuffed all diplomatic efforts to appease them and bring them into the TFG fold; after all, they were winning. Even after Ahmed had made the TFG, in early 2009, the first internationally-recognized Somali government to accept sharia as the basis of all national legislation, his opponents insisted that they would settle for nothing less than the total destruction of the transitional administration, regardless of whether it ruled by Islamic law or not, ostensibly on account of it still being a foreign puppet with a secret anti-Islam and anti-Somali agenda.

Outgunned and with virtually nothing to offer its armed opposition, the TFG was forced to play into its opponents' characterization of itself by relying on foreign intervention to survive. By May, al-Shabaab and Hizbul Islam had managed to capture most of the capital in a ferocious joint-assault as well as conquered almost all of the deep south, and Ahmed's regime only barely held out in a sliver of land around the presidential compound and Mogadishu airport, protected primarily by 4,000 AU peacekeepers. Only a month later, the TFG's President, former leader of the ICU, was alarmed enough by the extremists' growing power that he asked Ethiopia to re-invade Somalia to save his government; Ethiopia politely declined the offer. Nevertheless, although virtually no countries were willing to launch an invasion, costly in both lives and treasure, of rebel-held territory, there was a growing consensus in the international community that Hizbul Islam and al-Shabaab (with its strong links to al-Qaeda) were too threatening to be allowed to conquer all of Somalia. Thus the Somali government did receive extensive support for the strengthening of the AU force that defended it in the capital, and many neighboring countries agreed to help train Somali soldiers that could, if a political settlement was not reached, eventually lead a TFG offensive. The hope of the international community was that, in the meantime, any outstanding terror-threats (to countries other than Somalia, where terrorism was happening frequently) could be addressed through pinpoint strikes.

This response, however, did not provide for any quick change of fortune for the TFG and its allies, the situation of which remained precarious as the war raged on. Al-Shabaab and Hizbul Islam, while focusing much of their strength on retaining a strong presence in the capital, continued to expand their control of the south despite the fact that, after only a few months of fighting together, they turned on each other over a territorial dispute. Nevertheless, although they were not able to advance as far northward as the ICU had, largely due to resistance from well-organized, pro-government Islamist militias in central Somalia, within a little over a year, they controlled a greater area than the ICU had even at its height. In late-December, 2010, the entirety of this territory was united within al-Shabaab's Islamic Emirate when, after months of fighting, al-Shabaab finally defeated and subsumed its rival, Hizbul Islam.

Map (click to enlarge)

Ironically, however, at the same time that al-Shabaab approached what was, in many ways, the zenith of its legitimacy (being effectively the sole opposition to the TFG and controlling, virtually uncontested, a large, contiguous portion of the country), it made itself completely untenable to the international community, expressing its radicalism to a much greater degree. In early 2010, it publicly declared its allegiance to al-Qaeda, and, just a few months later, it orchestrated its first international terrorist attack: a devastating suicide bombing in Uganda that killed 74 people in retaliation for the presence of Ugandan peacekeepers in Mogadishu. In response, the AU reiterated its commitment to its peacekeeping mission, supported substantially bolstering the amount of its soldiers in Somalia, and authorized its force to take more aggressive action against insurgents, making the extremists' position, in the long run, more tenuous. Still, the fact that the international community seemed determined, at least, to deny al-Shabaab victory did not mean that the success of Ahmed's administration was secured.

The TFG continued marred by massive corruption and ineptitude, and, with the administration's transitional phase scheduled to end in August 2011, it was unclear, at the end of 2010, in what form, if at all, the TFG would become a permanent government. Ahmed was a weak leader who did little to challenge the primacy of the TFG's self-interested elite, and he quickly lost the popular support he initially enjoyed due to his central role in the ICU. Likely due to his lack of experience in formal government, he began his presidency by relinquishing most authority to the new Speaker of Parliament, Sharif Aden, a member of the ARS that had earlier served in the TFG from 2005 to 2007 before being ousted due to his opposition to the Ethiopian invasion. When Aden turned out to be extremely corrupt as well as an adroit political operator, Ahmed made some lame, and ultimately unsuccessful, attempts to regain control before largely retreating from leadership, while his Speaker colluded with the entrenched interests within the government, notably the warlords, to loot the state treasury (mostly foreign aid). As a result, although a few figures within the TFG distinguished themselves as fairly committed public servants, notably the prime minister, Mohamed Farmajo, that Ahmed appointed in late 2010, the administration as a whole became characterized primarily by the jockeying of its elites for control of government patronage at the expense of the country at large.

Needless to say, the task of nation-building was neglected. The TFG made no serious effort at creating national institutions, and so the country went without a constitution and the relationship between the central government and the states remained highly informal. Furthermore, within the tiny areas under its direct control, the regime barely provided even the most meager public services, and its national army, despite thousands of its troops having been trained in allied countries, remained undisciplined and ineffective, an amalgamation of militias, totally incapable of successfully defending the government without the extensive assistance of AU peacekeepers. While the TFG's failures in Mogadishu spurred a high level of doubt as to whether the regime could, in the long term, effectively consolidate any control over territory once al-Shabaab was ousted, it was its failures beyond the capital that most threatened its short term existence. At the beginning of 2011, the central government's lack of progress in creating a legal framework for federalism, combined with a number of other factors, resulted in a breakdown of its partnership with Puntland, which proved to be the most pressing challenge to its legitimacy in the run up to transition's scheduled end in August later that year. 

The blame for the relationship's deterioration lay almost entirely with Ahmed's regime, which had marginalized Puntland over the course of its tenure by not only failing to create federal institutions (and thus leaving the state in a frustrating legal limbo) but also by consistently rebuffing the northern region's efforts to play a larger role in national affairs and, at times, even seeming hostile to its advancement. With the inauguration of the new TFG, Puntland saw its representation in the central government progressively decline, beginning with Ahmed's replacement of Prime Minister Omar Sharmarke, a man who was considered a Puntlander by virtue of his family being from Puntland, with a southerner in 2009 and culminating in Ahmed's looting of two of Puntland's three reserved cabinet positions in 2010. Sharmarke's replacement marked the first time in the TFG's history that not one of its three top positions (President, Prime Minister, and Speaker) was held by a Puntlander. These changes, while symbolically important, were less significant by themselves than as reflections of an increasingly antagonistic stance toward Puntland on the part of the central government. Despite repeated entreaties from the state, Ahmed's regime refused to build national security infrastructure, such as military training camps and anti-piracy bases, in Puntland, instead choosing to establish such facilities abroad. Additionally, the TFG tried to ensure that the vast majority of foreign aid marked for Somalia was concentrated in its own (often corrupt) hands rather than distributed to regional administrations (most notably Puntland, but also including Galmudug and the swathes of central Somalia controlled by moderate Islamists) that persistently requested a greater share of international assistance to help them consolidate their security gains. Perhaps most provocatively, in late 2010, Ahmed and other leading figures in the national administration met with delegates from an insurgent group aimed at carving a new state out of Puntland-claimed territory.

The ostensive justification given for most of these actions by the TFG was that it was its prerogative to lead the decentralization process and that it was in the best interest of the country as a whole for resources to be concentrated toward the creation of a strong central government. Considering the dismal track record of Ahmed's regime, however, this was a hard sell, and it appeared that the TFG's marginalization of Puntland had far less to do with patriotism than with self-interest: a desire to maintain Mogadishu as the nexus of power in Somalia even at the expense of the self-governing loyalist territories north of the capital. Consequently, Puntland, after many months of trying unsuccessfully to garner greater TFG support for its initiatives, decided to withdraw its recognition of Ahmed's regime as the legitimate federal government in January 2011. 

Works Cited:

Abdi, Mohamed Mohamud. A History of the Ogaden (Western Somali) Struggle for Self-Determination. [S.I.]: Mohamed Mohamud Abdi, 2007. Print.

Abdi, Said Yusuf. "Independence for the Afars and Issas: Complex Background; Uncertain Future." Africa Today 24.1 (1977): 61-67. JSTOR. Web. 16 Sept. 2010.

Ahmad, Liban. A Map of Confusion: Somaliland, Puntland and the People of Sool Region in Somalia. Manchester, UK: Hilin, 2005. Print.

Albin-Lackey, Chris, and Letta Tayler. Harsh War, Harsh Peace: Abuses by Al-Shabaab, the Transitional Federal Government, and AMISOM in Somalia. Rep. Ed. Leslie Lefkow, Joanne Mariner, Andrew Mawson, and James Ross. Human Rights Watch, 2010. Print.

Barnes, Cedric. Somali Poetry and Proto-Nationalist Discourse. Thesis. British Academy, 2004. British Academy. 21 Apr. 2004. Web. 30 Aug. 2010.

Barnwell, Robin, dir. "Somalia: Hearts, Minds and Holy War." Unreported World. Channel 4. United Kingdom, 15 Dec. 2006. Youtube.com. Google Inc., 2 Jan. 2011. Web. 24 Feb. 2011. .

Bradbury, Mark. Becoming Somaliland. London: Progressio, 2008. Print.

Brons, Maria Helena. Society, Security, Sovereignty and the State in Somalia: from Statelessness to Statelessness? Utrecht: International, 2001. Print.

Bruton, Bronwyn E. Somalia: A New Approach (Council on Foreign Relations-Center for Preventive Action). New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 2010. Print.

"Djibouti Politics, Government, and Taxation." Encyclopedia of the Nations - Information about Countries of the World, United Nations, and World Leaders. Web. 17 Sept. 2010.

Dowden, Richard. Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles. New York: Public Affairs, 2010. Print.

"eastern Africa." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2010. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 01 Sep. 2010.

Elmi, Afyare Abdi. Understanding the Somalia Conflagration: Identity, Political Islam and Peacebuilding. London: Pambazuka, 2010. Print.

"Ethiopia." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2010. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 15 Sep. 2010 <http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/194084/Ethiopia>.

"Ethiopian Troops Enter Somalia to Resist Islamic Militia." PBS: Public Broadcasting Service. PBS.com, 20 July 2006. Web. 14 Apr. 2011. .

Howden, Daniel. "Somaliland: Africa's Best-kept Secret." Editorial. The Independent Online. Independent Print Limited, 6 May 2009. Web. 28 Aug. 2010.

"ICU Authorities Censor Radio Station, Detain Journalist." Press Freedom Online - Committee to Protect Journalists. Committee to Protect Journalists, 11 Sept. 2006. Web. 27 Feb. 2011. .

Jhazbhay, Iqbal. Somaliland: an African Struggle for Nationhood and International Recognition. Midrand: Institute for Global Dialogue, 2009. Print.

Khwarazmi, S. T. H. "Background of the Birth of Islam - F) Migration to Abyssinia."Background of the Birth of Islam (2010): 49. Rafed.net. Rafed Network for Cultural Development, 30 May 2010. Web. 12 Aug. 2010.

Lewis, I. M. A Modern History of the Somali, Nation and State in the Horn of Africa. 4th ed. Oxford: J. Currrey, 2002. Print.

Lewis, I. M. Making and Breaking States in Africa: the Somali Experience. Trenton, N.J: Africa World, 2008. Print.

Lewis, I. M. "Pan-Africanism and Pan-Somalism." The Journal of Modern African Studies 1.2 (1963): 147-61. JSTOR. Web. 2 Sept. 2010.

Lewis, I. M. Understanding Somalia and Somaliland: Culture, History, Society. New York: Columbia UP, 2008. Print.

Meagher, Chris. "Somaliland Hero Speaking at UCSB on Thursday." Independent.com. Santa Barbara Independent, 5 Oct. 2010. Web. 29 Jan. 2011.

Ofcansky, Thomas "Somalia: Irredentism and the Changing Balance of Power." Country Studies. Library of Congress, 27 July 2010. Web. 12 Aug. 2010.

Ofcansky, Thomas "Somalia: The Ogaden War: Performance and Implications of Defeat." Country Studies. Library of Congress, 27 July 2010. Web. 12 Aug. 2010.

"Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) - Political Objectives." Onlf.org. Ogaden National Liberation Front. Web. 11 Jan. 2011. .

Pham, J. Peter. "Ballots and Bullets: The Tale of the Two Somalia." Somaliland Press. 7 July 2010. Web. 29 Aug. 2010.

Rebuilding Somaliland: Issues and Possibilities : WSP International Somali Programme. Lawrenceville, NJ [u.a.: Red Sea, 2005. Print.

Richburg, Keith B. Out of America: a Black Man Confronts Africa. New York: Basic, 2009. Print.

Samatar, Said S. "Somalia: Creation of the Somali Revolutionary Socialist Party." Country Studies. Library of Congress, 27 July 2010. Web. 12 Aug. 2010.

Samatar, Said S. "Somalia: Entrenching Siad Barre's Personal Rule." Country Studies. Library of Congress, 27 July 2010. Web. 12 Aug. 2010.

Samatar, Said S. "Somalia: Foreign Relations, 1960-69." Country Studies. Library of Congress, 27 July 2010. Web. 12 Aug. 2010.

Samatar, Said S. "Somalia: Harrying of the Hawiye." Country Studies. Library of Congress, 27 July 2010. Web. 12 Aug. 2010.

Samatar, Said S. "Somalia: Pan-Somalism." Country Studies. Library of Congress, 27 July 2010. Web. 12 Aug. 2010.

Samatar, Said S. "Somalia: Persecution of the Majeerteen." Country Studies. Library of Congress, 27 July 2010. Web. 12 Aug. 2010.

Samatar, Said S. "Somalia: Refugees." Country Studies. Library of Congress, 27 July 2010. Web. 12 Aug. 2010.

Samatar, Said S. "Somalia: The Tenets of Islam." Country Studies. Library of Congress, 27 July 2010. Web. 12 Aug. 2010.

Schoiswohl, Michael. Status and (Human Rights) Obligations of Non-Recognized De Facto Regimes in International Law: The Case of 'Somaliland' Leiden, The Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 2004. Print.

Shay, Shaul. Somalia between Jihad and Restoration. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2011. Print.

"Somalia." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2010. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 18 Aug. 2010.

"Somalia's Moderate Islamist Leader." News.bbc.co.uk. British Broadcasting Corporation, 22 Jan. 2007. Web. 10 Feb. 2011.

"Somalia's Union of Islamic Courts Call for Jihad." BBC News. BBC. London, United Kingdom. Youtube.com. Google Inc., 27 Oct. 2006. Web. 2 Mar. 2011. .

Somaliland National Referendum May 31, 2001 Final Report of the Initiative and Referendum Institute's Election Monitoring Team. Rep. Initiative and Referendum Institute, 2001. Print.

Sparre, Kirsten. "Islamic Rulers in Somalia Label Sport a Satanic Act." Playthegame.org. Danish Institute for Sports Studies, 20 Nov. 2006. Web. 27 Feb. 2011. .

"The Somali Dispute: Kenya Beware." GlobalSecurity.org. Web. 02 Sept. 2010.

"Western Somali Liberation Front." Dictionaries and Encyclopedias on 'Academic' Web. 18 Sept. 2010.

"Why Ogaden War." GlobalSecurity.org. Web. 02 Sept. 2010.

Source indepedency Somaliland