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Somalia Harrying of the Hawiye
The Hawiye occupy the south central portions of Somalia
(see Samaal
, ch. 2). The capital of Mogadishu is located in the
country of the Abgaal, a Hawiye subclan. In numbers the Hawiye in
Somalia are roughly comparable to the Isaaq, occupying a distant
second place to the Daarood clans. Southern Somalia's first prime
minister during the UN trusteeship period, Abdullaahi Iise, was a
Hawiye; so was the trust territory's first president, Aadan
Abdullah Usmaan. The first commander of the Somali army, General
Daauud, was also a Hawiye. Although the Hawiye had not held any
major office since independence, they had occupied important
administrative positions in the bureaucracy and in the top army
command.
In the late 1980s, disaffection with the regime set in among
the Hawiye who felt increasingly marginalized in the Siad Barre
regime. From the town of Beledweyne in the central valley of the
Shabeelle River to Buulobarde, to Giohar, and in Mogadishu, the
clan was subjected to ruthless assault. Government atrocities
inflicted on the Hawiye were considered comparable in scale to
those against the Majeerteen and Isaaq. By undertaking this
assault on the Hawiye, Siad Barre committed a fatal error. By the
end of 1990, he still controlled the capital and adjacent regions
but by alienating the Hawiye, Siad Barre turned his last
stronghold into enemy territory.
Faced with saboteurs by day and sniper fire by night, Siad
Barre ordered remaining units of the badly demoralized Red Berets
to massacre civilians. By 1989 torture and murder became the
order of the day in Mogadishu. On July 9, 1989, Somalia's
Italian-born Roman Catholic bishop, Salvatore Colombo, was gunned
down in his church in Mogadishu by an unknown assassin. The order
to murder the bishop, an outspoken critic of the regime, was
widely believed to have had come from the presidential palace.
On the heels of the bishop's murder came the infamous July 14
massacre, when the Red Berets slaughtered 450 Muslims
demonstrating against the arrest of their spiritual leaders. More
than 2,000 were seriously injured. On July 15, forty-seven
people, mainly from the Isaaq clan, were taken to Jasiira Beach
west of the city and summarily executed. The July massacres
prompted a shift in United States policy as the United States
began to distance itself from Siad Barre.
With the loss of United States support, the regime grew more
desperate. An anti-Siad Barre demonstration on July 6, 1990, at a
soccer match in the main stadium deteriorated into a riot,
causing Siad Barre's bodyguard to panic and open fire on the
demonstrators. At least sixty-five people were killed. A week
later, while the city reeled from the impact of what came to be
called the Stadia Corna Affair, Siad Barre sentenced to death 46
prominent members of the Manifesto Group, a body of 114 notables
who had signed a petition in May calling for elections and
improved human rights. During the contrived trial that resulted
in the death sentences, demonstrators surrounded the court and
activity in the city came to a virtual halt. On July 13, a shaken
Siad Barre dropped the charges against the accused. As the city
celebrated victory, Siad Barre, conceding defeat for the first
time in twenty years, retreated into his bunker at the military
barracks near the airport to save himself from the people's
wrath.
* * *
Little literature exists on the history of Somalia. In his
monumental three-volume work, Somalia: Scritti Vari Editi ed
Inediti, Enrico Cerulli provided the research on which most
subsequent writers have relied. I.M. Lewis, the prolific dean of
English-speaking Somalists, offers a valuable survey in A
Modern History of Somalia, revised and updated in 1988 to
cover the 1970s and early 1980s. With The Shaping of Somali
Society, Lee Cassanelli has produced the first book-length
study of precolonial Somali history.
An excellent reference work is Margaret Castagno's
Historical Dictionary of Somalia. Robert Hess's Italian
Colonialism in Somalia offers a detailed review of the
Italian colonial period in the south.
Douglas Jardine's Mad Mullah of Somali Land remains
the classic biography of Sayyid Mahammad Abdille Hasan, the
mystic, poet, and warrior leader of the Somali dervish
anticolonial movement. Said S. Samatar's Oral Poetry and
Somali Nationalism analyzes Mahammad Abdille's poetry and
assesses his nationalist and literary contributions to the Somali
heritage. I.M. Lewis's A Pastoral Democracy and David
Laitin's Politics, Language, and Thought: The Somali
Experience stand as invaluable contributions to an
understanding of the social and cultural aspects of Somali
history. The origins and growth of Somali nationalist sentiment
and political struggles are treated in Saadia Touval's Somali
Nationalism.
Somali irredentism is treated in historical context by John
Drysdale's The Somali Dispute. Tom Farer's War Clouds
on the Horn of Africa deals with the same subject from a
vantage point less sympathetic to Somali revolutionaries. I.M.
Lewis draws on his great knowledge of Somali society and politics
to analyze the background and initial consequences of the
military coup in the "The Politics of the 1969 Somali Coup,"
whereas David Laitin considers the ongoing development of the
coup in "Somalia's Military Government and Scientific Socialism."
Both pieces appear in Socialism in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Laitin and Samatar's Somalia: Nation in Search of a State provides
a detailed analysis of the degeneration of the Somali revolution into a brutal
dictatorship. Samatar's Somalia: A Nation in Turmoil, published as
the Minority Rights Group Report by the London-based organization in August
1991, treats Siad Barre's reign of terror, his precipitous fall from power,
and the collapse of the Somali state into separate regions ruled by clan-affiliated
political groups. (For further information and complete citations, see
Bibliography.)
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