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Somalia LINEAGE SEGMENTATION AND THE SOMALI CIVIL WAR
From the early 1980s to the early 1990s, Somali society
underwent a profound crisis--of identity, purpose, and direction-
-that threatened its very existence. As a result of its
humiliating 1977-78 defeat in the Ogaden War with Ethiopia, the
revolutionary regime began to founder
(see The Ogaden War: Performance and Implications of Defeat
, ch. 5). Confronted by
armed opposition at home and diplomatic isolation abroad, the
regime turned inward. President Siad Barre, an expert in the art
of dividing and ruling since his early days as an intelligence
officer under the Italian fascists, skillfully harnessed the
limited resources of the state. His aim was to pit clan against
clan and to inflame clan passions in order to divert public
attention from his increasingly vulnerable regime.
A civil war began in the early 1980s with an armed uprising
against the regime by Majeerteen clans (Daarood) in southern
Somalia under the banner of the Somali Salvation Democratic Front
(SSDF). Armed resistance spread to the Isaaq clans in the north.
The regime's efforts to suppress Isaaq resistance resulted in May
1988 in the virtual destruction of the urban centers of the
north, most notably Hargeysa, until then the second largest city
in the country, and Burao, a provincial capital. This action was
followed in mid-1989 by a massive uprising by the Hawiye clans in
Mogadishu and adjacent regions under the leadership of the clanbased United Somali Congress (USC). In the escalating waves of
government repression and resulting popular resistance that
followed, Somali society exploded into violence and anarchy, and
Siad Barre and his remaining supporters were forced to flee in
early 1991.
Instead of peace, Somalia experienced a power struggle among
various clan- and region-based organizations: the Somali National
Movement (SNM, Isaaq-affiliated); the SSDF (Majeerteen); the
Somali Patriotic Movement (SPM, Ogaden); Somali Democratic
Alliance (SDA, Gadabursi); and the Somali Democratic Movement
(SDM, Rahanwayn). Lineages and sublineages, fighting over the
spoils of state, turned on one another in an orgy of internecine
killings
(see Somalia's Difficult Decade, 1980-90
, ch. 1). The
state collapsed and Somali society splintered into its component
clans.
The collapse resulted from certain features of Somali lineage
segmentation. Somali clan organization is an unstable, fragile
system, characterized at all levels by shifting allegiances. This
segmentation goes down to the household level with the children
of a man's two wives sometimes turning on one another on the
basis of maternal lines. Power is exercised through temporary
coalitions and ephemeral alliances between lineages. A given
alliance fragments into competitive units as soon as the
situation that necessitated it ceases to exist. In urban
settings, for example, where relatively large economic and
political stakes are contested, the whole population may be
polarized into two opposing camps of clan alliances. To varying
degrees, the poles of power in the politics of independent
Somalia generally have tended to form around the Daarood clanfamily and a confederacy of the Hawiye and the Isaaq clanfamilies .
Two features of lineage segmentation require further comment.
First, the system lacks a concept of individual culpability. When
a man commits a homicide, for example, the guilt does not remain
with him solely as an individual murderer as in most Western
societies; the crime is attributed to all of the murderer's kin,
who become guilty in the eyes of the aggrieved party by reason of
their blood connection with the perpetrator. Members of the
aggrieved group then seek revenge, not just on the perpetrator,
but on any member of his lineage they might chance upon. In the
Somali lineage system, one literally may get away with murder
because the actual killer may escape while an innocent kinsman of
his may be killed. Second, the system is vulnerable to external
manipulation by, for example, a head of state such as Siad Barre,
who used the resources of the state to reward and punish entire
clans collectively. This was the fate of the Isaaq and Majeerteen
clans, which suffered grievous persecutions under Siad Barre's
regime.
The meaning of segmentation is captured in an Arab beduin
saying: My full brother and I against my half-brother, my brother
and I against my father, my father's household against my uncle's
household, our two households (my uncle's and mine) against the
rest of the immediate kin, the immediate kin against nonimmediate members of my clan, my clan against other clans, and,
finally, my nation and I against the world. In a system of
lineage segmentation, one does not have a permanent enemy or a
permanent friend--only a permanent context. Depending on the
context, a man, a group of men, or even a state may be one's
friends or foes. This fact partially explains why opposition
Somalis did not hesitate to cross over to Ethiopia, the supposed
quintessential foe of Somalis. Ethiopia was being treated by the
Somali opposition as another clan for purposes of temporary
alliance in the interminable shifting coalitions of Somali
pastoral clan politics.
Lineage segmentation of the Somali variety thus inherently
militates against the evolution and endurance of a stable,
centralized state. Although exacerbated by Siad Barre's
exploitation of interclan rivalries, institutional instability is
actually woven into the fabric of Somali society. The collapse of
the Siad Barre regime in early 1991 led to interclan civil war
that was continuing in 1992.
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