Somalia’s Traditional Clan-Based System Holds Key to the Country’s Future Stability

By Ali A. Fatah

A decade or so ago, Somalia began to capture world headlines as its government began to collapse. The country’s total political breakdown led to America’s brief military intervention to alleviate the massive humanitarian catastrophe that was unfolding during the waning days of former President George Bush’s administration. Now that his son, President George W. Bush, is in power in Washington it is particularly appropriate to analyze anew the crisis in Somalia and offer some solutions to the current impasse.

At the time of its 1960 independence, Somalia lacked any institutional anchors safeguarding the right to meaningful self-rule at the regional and local levels. In an attempt to fill the resulting vacuum a cadre of the country’s urban elite—largely untutored in the art of national politics or the workings of public policy—hastened to cobble together a viable state apparatus. By any objective measure, the new government was underdeveloped in terms of both sociopolitical and economic infrastructure.

Although the new ministers and bureaucrats hemmed and hawed about their responsibilities to the nation, in reality most of them used their government offices as shares in a spoils system—a practice which the recently ousted prime minister of Mogadishu’s so-called Transitional National Government (TNG) once referred to as “the milk camel of the elite.” Although the country became a notorious geopolitical playground for Cold War adversaries, it was the greed of the self-indulgent elite that effectively derailed national aspirations, and thus marked the first of many national disasters to befall Somalia.

The second disaster occurred nine years after decolonization when, in October 1969, the elected civilian government was over-thrown by a revolutionary military regime following the assassination of the popular president, Dr. Abdirashid Ali Shermarke. The coup leaders proceeded to unleash a scorched-earth campaign to strip the society of its cultural heritage in favor of an alien communist construct devised to address social questions from another time and place.

To add insult to injury, although the new regime preached communalism, increasingly it turned a blind eye to the widespread practice of an insidious form of what one might call “neoclanism,” in which government agencies became fiefdoms of powerful clans to the exclusion of all others. Somalis knew at the time that the prevailing system was fraught with social inequities and string-pulling. However, they lacked common ground for devising a plan to successfully dislodge the ruling and armed-to-the-hilt military dictatorship. Nor was there a viable alternative political platform around which the country could rally, if and when the detested regime was removed.

Meanwhile, in an effort to silence all dissent, the regime of Mohamed Siad Barre began to target certain clans for reprisals. As intended, this alienated many clan communities from each other—but not from the regime itself. By late 1976, the country was for all intents and purposes a police state effectively controlled by a clan-based political oligarchy. To many observers, both within and outside Somalia, it was apparent that the national government in Mogadishu was teetering on the brink from its own inherent imbalance.

The ruling elite’s moment of truth did not arrive, however, until the country suffered a needless, humiliating defeat at the hands of its longtime enemy, Ethiopia, in the 1977-1978 Ogaden debacle. (That sophisticated military equipment provided by the Soviet Union, as well as the presence of Cuban mercenaries, played a key role in decimating the Somali armed forces—the only functioning professional organization in the entire country—does not excuse the government’s blunder of sleepwalking into that disaster in the first place.)

From this point onward, things quickly went downhill. To many Somalis and outside observers it was clear that the Somali state indeed was coming apart at the seams, along historic clan fault lines.

Thus when, during the 1990-91 fall of the military dictatorship, thousands of civilians were massacred in Mogadishu and other places for no other reason than their clan origin, the reality of Somalia’s rancorous inter-clan relations burst the bubble of the central government’s simulated state apparatus.

Today, for the first time in the 40 years since decolonization, Somalis grudgingly have come to the realization that the only durable and authentic institution in the society is that of the clan. This is because, within the context of its traditional values, the clan has a system of governance the rules of which all Somalis understand. By contrast, the centralizing policies of the postcolonial elite failed to consider the interests and wishes of the different clans and distinct communities in Somali society. Impressed and influenced by European forms of nationalism, these Somali politicians and intellectuals thought they, too, could construct a modern state without paying serious attention not only to the glaring differences but also to the important cultural nuances and psycho-cultural needs of the disparate clans and ethnic communities. As a result, the necessary building blocks for a modern Somali state never were put in place, and the mechanisms for peacemaking and peacekeeping known to Somalis in pre-colonial times somehow were ignored or forgotten. The crash of the state in the waning days of the Siad Barre dictatorship, and the resulting horrific civil war that broke out along clan lines, underscored the fragility of the central government and the historical amnesia of Somalia’s ruling elite. This constitutes the third and by far most far-reaching national disaster since the 1960 decolonization.

Ten years after the collapse of the postcolonial state, Somalis still are groping—albeit tentatively—for political solutions. Unhinged warlords and the remnants of the political class of past corrupt regimes continue to vie for the country’s helm. Both groups want to turn the clock back to the time when the central government was the domain of rapacious ruling clans and those who performed supporting roles. For this would-be permanent ruling clique, nothing has changed, and its members are baffled as to why they cannot return to business as usual. For the nation as a whole, however, everything has changed irreversibly.

As a significant step toward peace and reconciliation, Somalis must return to the source of their political tradition and wisdom. Long before the colonial powers imposed an alien, centrally controlled, highly stratified state apparatus as the nucleus for a new social order, Somalis lived in the Horn of Africa region as fully autonomous, yet interactive, clans and ethnic communities. They did so according to codified traditional laws, known as the xeer system, that afforded them varying degrees of self-rule informed by the consent of the governed.

The administrative state introduced by the colonial regimes—a perverse version of which guided successive Somali governments, both civilian and military—was marked by querulous impulses. It operated under cavernous byways marked by contentious inter-clan struggle—an officially prescribed system fraught with waste, fraud and abuse. Over time, it became the de facto rule for doing both public and private business in the land. This “neoclanist” system, with its high tolerance for corruption, seemed ready-made for the urban elite, who are adept at manipulating the laws of the land. Indeed, many in today’s clan-stacked TNG are beneficiaries of the brazen looting spree in which the nation’s assets in its former capital city of Mogadishu, along with the country’s most productive farmlands, were expropriated by wicked warlords from in and around the city following the onset of the civil war.

“Politics of the Belly”

All the more reason, therefore, for Somalis to return to the old political culture of the xeer system and think through the requirements and structure of a new social order. Such an approach would address the immediate needs of what Howard University Prof. Sulayman Nyang calls the “politics of the belly,” while laying the groundwork for genuine national reconciliation in the years ahead. For starters, each clan and ethnic community must be able to define its mandatory political and economic needs within a constitutional framework.

The attempt to impose a central government at the behest of a small clan that stands accused of innumerable atrocities during the savage civil war of the 1990s is only courting disaster, on two counts. First, as a nation of clans, any central government in the Somali peninsula that is not organized by bona fide representatives of all the clans and identifiable communities will of necessity lose credibility and fail. Secondly, such an attempt carries with it the real possibility of the resumption, on a large scale, of hostilities between clan communities—and thus of the cycle of famine and human misery.

At the root of the current Somali imbroglio is the competition for meager available resources: which clan (or small consortium of clans) will control those resources, and which will beg for crumbs off the table? During the 1960s, representatives of international aid organizations dubbed the country “the graveyard of foreign aid.” That unfortunate but apt description referred to the then-prevailing system of roguery that led to the military takeover, which ultimately ruined the economy. The ensuing civil war saw the destruction of the scant infrastructure assets inherited from the colonial powers as opposition clans all but obliterated the remaining vestiges of a thousand years of human civilization in the vicinity of the once-beautiful city of Mogadishu. The incalculable devastation visited upon the country by marauding warlord-led clan militias resulted in tens of thousands of Somali refugees scattered in the four corners of the world, with many more thousands displaced within the country. Never in the history of the Somali people has so much been done to so many by so few.

The country’s political elite should take note of this fact and change their thinking and attitudes. The same goes for the intellectual elites in North America and elsewhere in the Somalia Diaspora. It is particularly distressing that, after all that has happened, the most vocal advocates of “Somali unity” also happen to be major supporters of political actors and faction leaders who are hell-bent on the futile pursuit of clan hegemony.

The Somali peninsula as the homeland of all Somalis is not a piece of real estate without resources. Although chaos still reigns in some parts of the country, conditions have improved in others. In many areas, free and unfettered trade activities, ranging from basic economic thresholds to boomlets, are flourishing—a result of the ability of local communities to reach consensus on important sociopolitical matters. At the regional level, Somaliland and Puntland in the north, Bay and Bakol, and Hiranland in the south—by no means paragons of democracy—have surpassed the so-called Transitional National Government in Mogadishu in creating a semblance of relative stability in their respective areas.

The road to peace and reconciliation in the Somali peninsula, therefore, lies in the recognition and appreciation of these different political experiments emerging out of the ashes of the disintegrated Somali state. What is needed now is for genuine representatives of all Somali communities and of the international community to work together to lay the foundations for a new Somalia. This Somalia must be a weak federation of free, canton-like, fully sovereign republics. Each of these republics (of which there ultimately may be eight) would be free to act independently, coming together only to form a weak national government addressing limited issues of mutual interest—such as national defense, coordination of international affairs and the like. If successful, after a few years this federation would become a full-fledged federal system that could assume additional responsibilities, such as being the final arbiter of the rule of law throughout the society.

The weak federal government must work at fostering a national culture in which the rights of all clans and communities, as well as of individual Somalis, will be appreciated and respected as God-given, and not as privileges conferred by others. Without such a new dispensation the quest for peace and reconciliation in the Somali peninsula will remain elusive for many years to come.

Ali A. Fatah, a resident of Washington, DC, has written extensively on Somalia.