The New York Times reports that at least 14 radio stations in Mogadishu stopped broadcasting music on Tuesday, “heeding an ultimatum by an Islamist insurgent group to stop playing songs or face ’serious consequences.’”

Because of these threats from Hizb Islam, the director of one of the radio stations said:

We have replaced the music of the early morning program with the sound of the rooster, replaced the news music with the sound of the firing bullet and the music of the night program with the sound of running horses…It was really a crush. We haven’t had time to replace all the programs at one time; instead, we have chosen these sounds.

In solidarity with the people of Somalia and music lovers there especially, I thought it would be an appropriate time to highlight Somali rap phenomenon, K’naan.  The powerful lyrics from his song entitled “Somalia” help paint the painful, oftentimes grotesque, and heroic stories of his people:

This is where the streets have no name and the drain of sewage

You can see it in the boy how the hate is brewin’

‘Cause when his tummy tucks in, fuck, the pain is fluid

So what difference does it make entertaining, threw it

Some getting high mixing coke and gun powder, sniffin’

She got a gun, but could have been a model or physician

Have a listen…

Cross-posted at Poets and Policymakers…

Maps: A novel by Nurrudin Farah begins with a quote by Charles Dickens: “No children for me. Give me grown-ups.” Farah indeed depicts his main character, Askar, as a precocious child beyond his years and the novel tracks his struggles in identity from birth to near adulthood. Misra accompanies Askar, an ethnic Somali born in the Ogaden (eastern Ethiopia) on most of this developmental journey. She is his Ethiopian adopted mother and soul mate – an identity that engenders conflict given that the novel takes place in the late 1970s.

In the summer of 1977, the power of nationalism propelled Somalia and Ethiopia into the Ogaden War. By this point, Ethiopia had lost control of the Ogaden to an insurgency and there was clear evidence that the Somalis were supporting the rebel movements. This assistance, once the war began, climbed to upwards of 75,000 Somali troops supported by tanks. Somalis overwhelmingly supported this invasion of eastern Ethiopia.

Calculating the worth of their two alliances, the Soviet Union broke off relations with Somalia in the fall of 1977 and upped their arms sales to the Ethiopians. Ultimately the Ethiopians pushed the Somali forces to withdraw completely from the Ogaden. In the end, over 25,000 Somalis died in the war, as well as thousands of Ethiopians. The failed campaign fought in the name of Somali nationalism also brought humiliation to the Siad Barre regime as roughly 700,000 refugees from the Ogaden flooded across the border into Somalia – creating a humanitarian crisis.

In the novel, Askar is sent to Mogadishu from a small village in the Ogaden at the height of the war to stay with a well-educated uncle and aunt. Misra stays behind, only to be accused within a year of betraying the village to the Ethiopian army, elements of which carry out a brutal massacre of many of her fellow villagers. She ultimately flees and finds her way to Mogadishu a decade later. Before her sudden arrival, Askar and his new family are informed of the alleged betrayal. And, thus, Askar is forced to manage his loyalties and love to Somalia with his intense connection to the woman that raised him.

Askar’s fascination with maps provides a way for him and the author to explore the character’s identity through the ravages of Ogaden War, as well as the colonial past that set the boundaries and the ever-present national aspirations of the Somali people. The basic question asked repeatedly by Misra and Askar is: who are my people? And what are my responsibilities to them, especially in the face of multiple loyalties? The novel reveals that the answers for people with complex relationships are never as clear as the boundaries fought over by the belligerents.

These painful questions likely endure for the people of the Ogaden as a low-level insurgency continues against the Ethiopian government, which now blames the Eritrean government of providing support to the rebels. In addition, immediate irredentist claims on the Ogaden by some members of the Islamic Courts Union that took power in Mogadishu in 2006 helped provoke Ethiopia to invade Somalia later that year. The Ethiopians quickly removed the Islamists from power – but in the process ushered in three chaotic years of displacement and bloodshed in Somalia.

Like Dickens, Farah undoubtedly would also prefer grown-ups rather than children to demonstrate the horrors of his age. Yet in choosing children, he faces the cruel realities directly. In Somalia today, in fact, the United Nations reports about half of Somalia’s population of seven million is in a state of humanitarian emergency. And, half of those are children. An official stated last month:“There is no child in central south Somalia who knows what it is to live in peace. And to now try to recover from that as communities and society, of course, will take at least a generation.”

Farah also in the midst of the darkness though offers hope through the story of Askar as well as many of his other characters. For those who may hear Somalia and just shake their heads to forget or to despair of the situation, here is a great excerpt from an interview in 2007 in which he explains his motivations and intentions of his fiction:

NURUDDIN FARAH: …I have tried my best to keep my country alive by writing about it, and the reason is because nothing good comes out of a country until the artists of that country turn to writing about it in a truthful way.

JEFFREY BROWN: You mean, this is the role of an artist, the role of a writer.

NURUDDIN FARAH: This is the role of the artist, the role of the artist who also is, well, shall we say, probably courageous, probably mad, probably terribly ambitious writer, who wants to say, “This is what Somalia is like, and this is what I’m going to write.”

It is possible that the way I see Somalia is not the way that some other Somalis or some other foreigners who do not know Somalia may see it that way. But I have continually seen Somalia as a country full of hope, and yet that are being held back from, you know, accomplishing that hope, that dream.

To end, such words remind me of those arguing for constructive disengagement from Somalia by the international community. The idea is to free Somalis as much as possible from the distortions and obstacles inherent in foreign interference. It would only be then, they argue, that Somalis could face other challenges like that of clan politics and local and national governance openly and honestly. Unfortunately, for many reasons (some good and some bad), the international community remains stuck in the failed status quo of Somalia which supposedly keeps the country from falling further into the abyss, but also prevents Somalis from fully seizing control of their futures.

Variations of this predicament exist in Afghanistan and Sudan. Looking forward to another post, Niloufer and I hope to write more on the topic soon.

Yesterday, I highlighted the recommendations of Somali experts – notably Bronwyn E. Bruton and Ken Menkhaus – for how the United States should contribute to counter-terrorism, conflict resolution, humanitarian relief, economic development and state-building in Somalia.  Their pragmatic and cautious approaches argue against knee-jerk American responses to the real or perceived threats posed by al-Qaeda, the al-Shabab, and piracy.

Last spring at SAIS, I put together an extensive backgrounder on Somalia. The paper traces the  history of state formation in Somalia from the colonial period to the collapse of the state and its current crises. At the end, I provide a brief analysis of the current challenges to peace-making and state-building placed in their historical context – something missing from much of the current writings on Somalia. I must confess that much of my understanding of Somalia has been influenced by Menkhaus, my former advisor.  In reading Bruton great piece in Foreign Affairs, I also found that her recommendations closely match the findings that I developed. So if you are interested, enjoy…

Introduction

The five points on the star of the light-blue Somali flag proclaim a nation’s dream deferred. The predominantly nomadic Somalis met the era of nationalism and independence with high hopes. They and observers of the time saw a “well-defined geographic and ethnic unit…as a natural base for a sovereign state.” Ethiopia and the colonial powers, however, had different visions for the boundaries of a Somali state. Three points of the star – Djibouti, the Ogaden (in Ethiopia), and the Northern Frontier District in Kenya – were stripped from the Somalis before the official birth of the Somali nation. The subsequent experiments with democracy and ‘scientific socialism’ attempted to develop a modern state and in some ways rebuild a forcibly contracted national consciousness. These processes ultimately failed and led to the collapse of the state in 1991. What emerged in replace of the state were still uncongealed fragments of a dismembered nation. For external and internal reasons, Somali leaders until this day have not found a means to unite these disparate and usually warring pieces.

Final Analysis

Emerging from a dismembering birth at independence, Somali elites have constantly attempted to breed irredentist nationalism to legitimize their control of the state. The early politics of democracy challenged each government to push a hard line on securing the stripped Somali lands of French Somaliland, the Ethiopian Ogaden, and the Northern Frontier in Kenya; former dictator Siad Barre could not concede the right of self-determination for the Ogaden Somalis in the late 1970s; and most recently the Islamic Court Union (ICU) could not muzzle threats against Ethiopia long enough to consolidate and defend their military and political successes in 2006.

Why do the elites retreat to this expansionist Somali nationalism each time in the face of clearly stronger neighbors? The answer may be that little else has thus far shown a capacity to forge a national consciousness across the real economic and social cleavages of Somali society. In addition to clan divisions, the rural/urban divide has shaped Somali politics for centuries as seen in the ebb and flow of power between the coastland to the hinterland. In the beginning of his regime, Barre recognized the importance of improving the agricultural sector, but the implementation of ‘scientific socialism,’ a product mostly of cold war convenience, could not begin to address the growing gaps between urban and rural populations. Then in the 1980s, the regime used state resources to inflame cleavages between various Somali communities.  As such, there were no defenders of the state when it collapsed and, likewise, no foreign agents to blame as a means of rallying Somali nationalism to revive the state.

Islam presents a more indigenously suited alternative, as it can be easily conflated with Somali nationalism and has shown the ability to bridge both rural/urban and clan divisions. The slow rise of Islamic activism and the ascendancy of the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) demonstrate its cross-cutting mobilizing utility in Somali politics. Nevertheless, the ICU eventually encountered the common problem of clan division, with certain groups effectively characterizing it as Hawiye-dominated. The success of Islamic activism in Mogadishu, however, pales in comparison to the regional solutions that have endured in Somaliland and to a lesser extent in Puntland.

What the success of the ICU and Somaliland have in common, however, is that they are at their base Somali-derived solutions that depart in some key way from current Western models of governance. Yet, these accomplishments have been virtually unacceptable from the point of view of regional and international powers. Ethiopia views both an Islamist-oriented government in Somalia and greater autonomy or independence in Somaliland as threats to its national security.International actors also obviously fear the rise of an Islamist government in Somalia and want to avoid the division of Somalia into smaller units for fear of the encouragement that such a development would give minority groups in other countries, especially Africa. Despite these internationally imposed constraints on state-building in Somalia, the international community paradoxically continues to demand a state from the warring parties.

If such is still the objective, the process of national reconciliation and state formation must derive from Somali-driven processes. As theorized by as diverse an array of scholars as Ibn Khaldun and Francis Fukuyuma, social cohesiveness (or capital) and trust are key components in the formation of society and the building of a state. By all measures, these bonds have broken down in Somalia today. As such, Somalis have relied almost exclusively on their familial connections. This outcome is a result of a state that intentionally destroyed cross-cutting societal linkages in the 1980s – a process that began during the period of colonial partition. International intervention has only inflamed differences more and done nothing to rebuild trust among Somali political actors. Still both Ken Menkhaus and Peter Little have written about the “malleability of interests” even within the clan system in Somali society. They point to the way that the clan system has adapted to “the changing demands of the international community as well as to the challenges of statelessness and pastoralism.”  Little provocatively asks, “Is it surprising then that Somali clans began to fracture and/or consolidate along sub-clan and lineage lines when external agencies worked within a clan idiom themselves?”

In order then to identify the true interests of each constituency and search for a workable compromise, it is necessary to remove the foreign influences as much as possible. The involvement of the United States, Ethiopia, Egypt, Eritrea, and even the United Nations are inherently distorting to Somali politics.  As such, Menkhaus encourages the new Obama administration to seek “[p]olicies which privilege Somali-driven processes, rely mainly on Somali interests and actors to drive outcomes, and respect Somali preferences.” Were Somalis able to take control of the process in this way, perhaps finally as Samatar advised in 1988 “moral and intellectual commitments from leading classes” could emerge to take charge of the state and the economy. Western countries though must realize that in the current Somali political climate some solutions – such as regionalism or elements of Islamist governance – may emerge. It must accept, therefore, these outcomes and then support the new-born Somali state in making the central government and its governing mechanisms mean more to the Somali people than a threatening source of predation.

Heavily armed men in Somalia

The United States Institute of Peace held a talk yesterday focusing on “International Engagement with Somalia.” Bronwyn E. Bruton of the Council on Foreign Relations and Abukar Arman, an independent policy analyst originally from Somalia, addressed the immensely complicated topic of how the United States and its international partners should approach the interlocking and enduring political, security, and humanitarian crises in Somalia.

In his remarks, Arman emphasized the need for a “paradigm shift” in policymaking by highlighting the colossal mistakes of recent American policies toward Somalia. While he gave general recommendations for a new blueprint, he failed to outline in a systematic way any real contours for this new approach.

Given the shortage of viable national leaders, bottom-up governance strategies might appear to be a solution to Somalia’s messy, perpetually shifting decentralized politics. For instance, the experience of the ICU, which brought unparalleled stability to an unruly Mogadishu almost overnight in 2006, is instructive…Such arrangements,although admittedly fragile, have emerged in the northern regions of Somaliland and Puntland. The best of them depend on local, rather than international, resources to deliver economic growth and other concrete benefits to the public and respect relations among clan and religious leaders, business groups, and civil society