Abdullahi H. Aden

University of North Carolina at Charlotte  

April 12, 1997

            In this paper I will make an attempt to explain the question: why the government's opposition clans of the First Republic did not use an armed insurgency as their collective action strategy?  In my effort to answer this question I will also indirectly answer another historically significant question: why an armed insurgence become the preferred strategy of the clans' collective political action in the Second Republic? 

            The focus of this paper is the post-independence of the Somali clan politics; the historical time it covers is limited to the politics of the late 1960s and late 1980s. During these two political eras, clan politics dominated the center stage of national politics; it overshadowed all other forms of political manifestation. However, the politics of the seventies is an exception regarding clan's political manifestation. Therefore, the seventies politics is beyond the scope of this paper's subject of inquiry for the following reasons.  This decade is distinguished from the other two post-independence decades, the 1960s and 1980s, in terms of national political stability and state effectiveness.  Mainly because the new military regime denied any public space or opportunity clan driven politics, it also constrained the activities of its entrepreneurs in the name of national unity and social modernization.

Furthermore, initial popularity of the regime's reform projects and the destabilizing legacy of clan politics during the parliamentarian era gave the military rulers a brief political free ride. The uniqueness of the 1970s, more precisely the pre-Ogaden war of 1977-78, is essentially rooted into increased state coherence achieved by the military government.  In these years, state rulers had momentarily achieved some degree of the internal cohesion and “autonomy” needed to bypass political constraints of traditional social forces. 

The rise of an energetic executive to power combined with its freedom from clan clientalist ties, enabled government to undertake some effectively reform projects - such as the officialization of Somalia language and illiteracy campaigns.  What accounts to this brief improvement of the state's effectiveness during the 1970s need not only be a function to ruling elite's consensus over government's policy courses. Two other factors played a critical role in this process. First, the introduction of a populist political tactics, with some touch of corporatism, succeeded to tie military government with some key urban popular groups. This shift in the government's cooperative alliance tactics from clan clietalism to populism actually injected a new political energy into the system with the effect of expanding government's urban support base and its legitimacy. Forging a tie between the military regime and some key urban popular groups. This shift of the government's political support base momentarily injected into the system a new political energy.  

Hence, I contend that the rise of an anti-state clan movement, in the national political sense, has been a result, rather than a cause, of diminished state authority, both due to societal disengagement and the decline of the state’s internal coherence.  Situations where clan forces burst into the national political scene coincide with periods where the credibility of state authority was at its lowest point, as in the late 1960s and late 1980s.

            Shared common political traits in the polity of the late 1960s and late 1980s make comparative analysis more tempting, specifically in the areas of administrative ineffectiveness, political unpopularity, internal divisions, and fiscal bankruptcy.  Despite these shared characteristics, however, the two periods differ along two significant parameters.  First, the nature of elite contention is pluralistic in the First Republic, and monopolistic in the Second Republic.  Second, the historical circumstances of these two periods engendered diverse forms of political reaction from disaffected social groups, manifested by ameliorative political demands (reformism) versus revolutionary opposition.  Specifically, in this paper, we will attempt to answer the question: Why did the polity of the First Republic not evoke an anti-state mobilized clan rebellion?  In other words, what are the specific political dynamics and historical contingencies, which made it possible for traditional communal institutions, or clans, to perform contradictory political functions during two different political regimes? 

              In the First Republic, traditional communal institutions served to function as transmitters of state authority to peripheral communities, which otherwise would have been beyond governmental reach, given its limited resources.  In the Second Republic, however, the same communal institutions performed an opposite function, this time as a vehicle for an insurgent mobilization against the state. This was a role that simultaneously undercut the state’s primary instruments for social control at the periphery and expanded the political opportunities for its challengers. 

Threats from Organized Social Groups

            To provide a more comprehensive account of the political life of the First Republic, we need to go beyond observing the pressures exerted by organized political movements upon the state and recognize the political significance of autonomous state initiatives.  Such an interactive approach will allow us to appreciate the reactive character of the societal groups political behavior, particularly in its violent manifestation. Hence, state action or inaction is treated as an independent variable in terms of conditioning the course of national political development.

            The political policies enacted by the (Somali Youth League SYL); the governing party of the First Republic were, at best, gradualist in their views of social and economic change.  The domestic policy initiatives of the SYL’s governments were essentially designed to preserve, rather than upset, the political balance that grew out of the nationalist agitation of the 1940s and 1950s, culminating in the negotiated decolonization of the 1960s.  During its tenure in power (1960 - 1969), the SYL, responding to organized group pressures, managed through trial and error to diversify and widen its support base in a manner that forged pacts among diverse clan politicians.  Genuine political bargaining practice among diverse elite factions in collaborative alliance building had the effect of both moderating the endemic disintegrative pressure from clan claims and shoring up “governmental legitimacy” of the ruling party, as the Digil/Rahanweyne and SNC (Somali National Congress) cases suggest.   

            Moreover, this bargaining practice had the effect of neutralizing the disruptive potency of clan forces on the “territorial legitimacy” of the Somali state, as in the Isaaq case. Dislocating governmental actions, such as a radical societal and economic reconstruction that could galvanize a conservative revolt, were missing from the political measures of the civilian governments.  State initiated violence designed to conserve threatened governmental authority were also absent.  These facts themselves reveal something about the nature of the opposition, which the state encountered: by using nonviolent strategies for claim making, the opposition denied the state the opportunity to rationalize the use of violence as a means of social control.  The political projects of the clan opposition parties in the First Republic, and their strategy for collective action, did not pose a threat to governmental institutions and the territorial integrity of the state.  As a result, the use of conventional political channels by the opposition left the regime with no alternative but accommodation.  In contrast, the strategies of both the state and its opposition were violent during the Second Republic.

            The lack of violent political disorder during the First Republic did not preclude other forms of public disorder.  Public disorder in this period was confined primarily to political riots in the urban centers, mobilized by opposition parties, and social banditry and clan conflict in the rural areas.  These latter two types of public disorder signify more the absence of state authority in the countryside, rather than an overt political challenge.  Ahmed Samatar, for example, rightly observed an absence of rebellious rural protest in the polity of the 1960s, though the explanation he offered has proven to be both apolitical and ahistorical.  Samatar’s analysis explains away the absence of rural rebellion in macro-structural terms: “broad underdevelopment” and rural psychological properties.  He lightly dismisses the rebellious potential of the nomads by simply presenting them as passive and backward.  However, the political events of the 1980s brought rural clan insurgence to the center stage of national political development in way that defies Samatar’s explanatory formulation.             

            Another political factor that we consider for comparison is the deaths resulting from political violence.  Juxtaposing the human death toll resulting from group contention in these two political eras illustrates the marked difference in the magnitude and intensity of elite power contention, as well as the conflict management strategies employed by the state rulers of the First and Second Republics.  The most violent political episode during the parliamentary regime period caused forty deaths, an event Ahmed Samatar characterized as the “bloodiest election since the independence.”  In contrast, during the Second Republic, a single counterinsurgency state operation against clan challenge (Isaaqs) in the northern regions in 1988 resulted in tens of thousands of deaths, primarily among noncombatant civilians.   

Threats from Within the State

            The absence of an insurgent political movement challenging the integrity of the state in the First Republic did not make the Somali post-colonial political community immune from subversive political action.  The forces that threatened or disrupted the political developments in the First Republic came exclusively from within the state, particularly institutional groups which commanded powerful political resources, such as the army.  The army’s first political assault against the polity of the parliamentary regime was the “short-lived and abortive military coup” attempt in December 1961, led by a group of disenchanted young northern army officers.  What inspired this aborted military action is a controversial issue.  To some it reflected a narrow corporate officer interest. To others, it represented the existence of a “broader northern secessionist manifestation.”  Nonetheless, the northern coup episode did, momentarily, threaten the "territorial legitimacy" the state and the less than one-year-old Union between the South and North.

           In 1969, the second military political action against the polity of the First Republic succeeded in overthrowing the elected civilian government, and thus supplanted the transient political experiment of clan pluralism.  The 1969 coup ushered in the Second Republic with the hallmark of an authoritarian form of governance.  The Coup was primarily a political expression of those social groups, specifically newly rising elites, who had the least stake in the parliamentary political system.   

            These social elements represented sectors in society that resented the political process that defined mechanisms of representation in the framework of clan intermediaries, as well as those sectors, which aspired to an activist “developmental state”, or “integral state.”   The military overthrew the civilian government, acting in the name of these social groups, using the pretext of a political crisis that stemmed from the assassination of President Sharmarke in October 1969, and the subsequent inability of the SYL to agree on a presidential candidate.  The military coup, known as the “October Revolution,” led by Siyad Barre, is generally perceived as an act that shored up the Somali state in a deep constitutional crisis.  Thereby, the army takeover averted further erosion of the central government’s authority, effectively making use of its strategic position and organizational unity.  The opportunity of  “revolution from above” is only available in a situation in which strategically placed and united elites within the state are in favor of political change. The pre-coup political situation of 1969 met the required conditions for the kind of change that advanced state power, though by no means in a democratic manner.          

            Another political difference between the two eras pertains to the political language and idioms of protest themes adopted and the type of social solidarity chosen for collective action. In the 1960s, largely popular protest themes were couched in secular nationalist idioms, largely centered on the pan-Somali irredentism and/or economic nationalism framed in an anti-neocolonial Third World populist rhetoric.  Furthermore, the political entrepreneurs who articulated these themes of protest were also the same elite groups who were yearning to transform the existing clan pluralist regime into an “integral state”, with the end goal of eliminating the practice of traditional power management (clan clientalism) and evicting its politicians from the national body politic.  Their ambitious political project was to create an activist state aimed at expanding the government’s productive and distributive roles in the economy, as well as de-pluralizing politics in order to achieve the desired ideal of social cohesion and political stability.   

            The political reconstruction enacted by the military government and the social character of its chosen political collaborators reflects the ambitious political agenda embodied by the populist agenda of an integral state.  In the late sixties, centralized statehood had been a widely popular and preferred nostrum among Third World dissident political elites. Thereby, political vision up held by Somali coup leaders of the 1969 mirror the intellectual climate of the era.

            In contrast, the post-Ogaden political crisis of the 1980s lacked any strategically positioned and united elite within the state who could sponsor meaningful preemptive political reform and save the country from embarking on a course of radical “monopolistic” clan mobilization.  Thereby, the anti-authoritarian protest movements evoked by the Ogaden debacle provided space for the emergence of revolutionary opposition in the 1980s.  These were armed insurgency movements that drew their support base from exclusionary clan groups.  Under Barre's authoritarian regime, there was no political space for “legitimate opposition” which could articulate an agenda for a cross-clan alliance.  Furthermore, these movements articulated their political grievances and identity in political authenticity language, a discourse that embraces exclusionary political claims defined in terms of clan identity and/or Islamic values.  The political vision articulated by these movements repudiates previous secular discourse, focused on state-centered political project and Third World economic nationalism, while it also utterly fails to offer an alternative vision on how to rationalize “politics of clan pluralism.  As these movements emerged politically victorious in the l990s, after overpowering the post-colonial state, their social identity and political discourse are certainly bound to define the features of any reconstructed Somali state or states.

Other Explanatory Factors

            The resource mobilization model helps us to account for the absence of anti-state challenges from organized clan political forces during the reign of the First Republic.  The analytical frame of this model shows the explanatory deficiency of those analyses that treat grievances (stemming either from anxiety over political exclusion or economic distress) as a primary causal variable explaining the rise of a revolutionary collective action. 

            Adherents to this theory maintain that though grievance is a necessary ingredient, it does not in itself constitute a sufficient causal explanation.  The aggrieved social groups need to be more than just aggrieved.  They need political resources in order to force the system to redress their grievances or to challenge the discriminating status quo.  Drawing on the insights of resource mobilization theory, we argue that the absence of a mobilized clan force threatening the state in the 1960s could be attributed to the lack of some key causal conditions necessary to spur large-scale radical mobilization, such as sizable aggrieved clan families and “structurally based provocation.

            There were no large aggrieved clan groups, with sufficient political resources, outside of the SYL’s alliance network or its external ties (clan clientelism), and hence no major clan groups had the political motive to challenge the post-independence political order.  Politicians of the major Somali clan groups (Majerteen, Hawiye and Isaaq), who were also the most politically organized, had no incentive to promote insurgent politics, since they had a stake in the established pluralistic political order of the First Republic.  Their demographic weight, in terms of votes, as well as their privileged standing in the existing social hierarchy, situated the elites of these clan groups in a competitive position in the bargaining process of coalition formation and interclan elite alignments needed for government formation.

            Challenges from small clan groups were even less threatening to state security.  Disadvantaged small clans in parliamentary politics were less capable of exerting pressure on the government on their own behalf, mainly because of their lack of necessary political resources.  In addition, parliamentary politics offered an opportunity for smaller clan groups to seek alliances with the major clan groups in the political bargaining process.  These two factors made smaller clans less likely to resort to costly insurgent strategies, which were extremely unlikely to succeed. The Xisbia (Rahanweyne) and USP (Daarood and Dir alliance in Somaliland) parties, in the south and north, respectively, skillfully exercised their minority status to advance their clan groups' political interests within the pluralist political system of the 1960s.   

            At different political junctures during the First Republic, these minority parties had effectively attained political leverage over the political bargaining process by being able to sway the balance of power by joining one side or the other of the major contending clan groups.  Xisbia leaders adeptly played the role of power broker in the formative years of the southern parliamentary clan politics of the 1950s, while the USP party had been instrumental in allaying the integrative political tension that grew out of the unification between the south and north in the early 1960s.            

            In addition, what was missing in the political climate of the First Republic was an occurrence of a "structurally based provocation".  These are events that have the potential to produce widespread loss of elite confidence in the government and/or to prompt popular revolt.  Political strains generated by severe domestic economic crisis or international conflict, with a similar magnitude to those in the Second Republic, were utterly missing in this period: such as prolonged costly wars or socially dislocating economic hardships that radically eroded elite status (downward mobility) and profoundly altered the societal power distribution.  Rather, elite status security (both traditional and modern) appears to have been unchallenged by the economic and political events of the First Republic.  Moreover, there was a congenial relationship between the central authority and traditional local political notables, as the composition of regional and district authorities attests.  Government's external clan tie proven to be politically stabilizing and beneficial to both state rulers and traditional authorities.

            Furthermore, government's economic policies of this period was market-centered, hence the private sector was left largely to its own devices without state interference — a policy that preserves, if not promoting, the privileged social position of the merchant class. In contrast to statist economic policies of the Second Republic had the effect of alienating politically this key social group, given its liaison function in the connecting between the center and periphery. Reflecting this role, their defection into the opposition camp has been instrumental in opening opportunity for anti-government clan mobilization at the periphery.  On the other hand, the upward mobility opportunities among newly emerging elite status aspirants were also relatively safe, mainly because of the expansion of the state structure immediately after independence. 

            This expansion took the form of colonial turnover (“Africanization”), as well as bureaucratic enlargement and military build up.  In reference to public sector enlargement, Laitin and Samatar observed, “the most significant change in the first nine years of independence was in the growth of public employment ... and 500 percent increase in the size of the Somali army.”

           The relative state expansion in the first decade of Somali self-rule, in conjunction with adequate opportunities for overseas scholarships, momentarily postponed the familiar mismatch between educational output and valued public jobs, and also deferred the political consequences of such an imbalance. Normally, the political consequence of this mismatch makes unemployed educated youth available for radical mobilization. Elite status insecurity, manifested in the form of defection from the state in favor of its challengers, and the blocked mobility of the growing youthful urban population, were both virtually absent in the First Republic.  In contrast, these two factors were the driving force behind popular revolt in the Second Republic, both in its armed insurgence phase and in the street politics of Mogadishu, actions that ultimately lead to the demise of the Barre regime and the concomitant violent collapse of the Somali state.

            The Somali state’s international conflicts, specifically with Ethiopia, constitute another exogenous causal factor that had a diametrically opposite effect on the politics of the First and Second Republics.  The 1964 Ogaden war was politically beneficial to the First Republic in several ways.  First, the war provided Sharmarke’s government with a patriotic theme to galvanize mass support for the government.  Second, the war proved to be a valuable electoral campaign issue, which assisted the ruling party (SYL) in surmounting its electoral political rivals and helped it to silence its pan-Somali nationalist critics.  Most importantly, the war increased the willingness of state leaders to ally with the Soviet Union, a foreign patron willing to allay its sense of insecurity in the face of the Ethiopian threat, by sponsoring a military build up.   

            In contrast, the 1977 Ogaden war was disastrous for the government of the Second Republic in several ways.  First, the patriotic symbolism of state-centered nationalism had lost its integrative power as a result of the Ogaden war loss.

            This outcome created an ideological vacuum, a void quickly filled by new social movements employing the politics of authenticity as a counter-state ideology — clan nationalism and the Islamic movement.  Second, the increased vulnerabilities of state security added an extra strain to an already frail relationship between state and society, and magnified the tyrannical and corrupt behavior of the state elite.  The rise of a serious armed domestic insurgency and an imminent external threat from Ethiopia, coupled with a sharp economic downturn (high inflation and fiscal bankruptcy) further intensified intra-elite conflict and depleted an already shrinking ground for elite cooperation. Third, as a result of the humiliating defeat in the Ogaden war (1978), Barre’s government lost its external security benefactor, the Soviet Union, but gained no commensurate substitute from its new patrons in the West, in terms of a security provision that could adequately meet the existing threats to the governing elite.

            Therefore, the 1960s war with Ethiopia strengthened the domestic political standing of the SYL government, and, to some degree, invigorated fading state nationalism.  Moreover, it created an opportunity for the state to ally with the Eastern Block during this period of the Cold War.  In contrast, the 1970s war extremely weakened Barre’s government by corroding the state’s internal cohesion, as factionalism and defection created institutional paralysis.  At the same time the war weakened the ties between the state and the larger society, and eroded the state’s external geopolitical connections. 

            Finally, in the 1980s, the international environment in which the Second Republic operated was relatively conducive to the rise of an anti-statist clan insurrection.  First, the International Monetary Fund began to enforce more stringent requirements for governments facing balance of payment difficulties.  Access to international capital was less stringent and more permitting politically in the 1960s, a period characterized as "borrowing boom," than it was in the 1980s.  The latter coincides with austere period of the "IMF conditionality," which curbed pervious support building strategy based on fiscally unaccounted state expenditure. Second, the international ambiance of the late 1980s gave more political scope and sympathy to state opponents than it accorded to defenders of unpopular authoritarian regimes. 

            Reflecting on the security implications of such change in international attitude from its previous pro-state position, Ayoob notes: “The major capitals of the world now take a more relaxed view of transformations in boundaries and even of the failure of states in the Third World."  From a state security perspective, in the post-Ogaden war period, the Ethiopian threat served as an external disintegrative force, as the Somali domestic political conflict intensified to a level where it became openly susceptible to outside manipulation through insurgence sponsorship.

            The political circumstances that gave rise to the mutually reinforcing state-dissolving forces in the Second Republic — a surge of a domestic clan insurgence as a reaction to mono-clan political domination (by the Marehan), sharp economic downturn, and hostile external actors willing to pay the cost of waging an insurgency war — had, therefore, been utterly absent in the political milieu of the First Republic.  Because they lacked the required resources, clans' need cross-border support in order to wage a viable challenge against the territorial integrity of the state.  Scholars probing into Africa’s insurgency movements have found that, in the absence of neighboring governments willing and able to provide sanctuary, support, and supplies, domestic rebellion forces could scarcely challenge the territorial legitimacy of even a weak government.

Conclusion

            In retrospect, the merit of the First Republic and its parliamentarian political institutions laid in its capacity to avert the emergence of political absolutism, which has meant clan political domination in the Somali context, as much as it deterred elite political contention from taking an extremist political form.  Almost all of the structural conditions that activated popular rebellion in the eighties and channeled its destructive impulse against the state — depressed macro-economic conditions (limited upward mobility opportunities outside political power), autonomous traditional social and religious institutions (clan and Mosque) and widespread elite political disaffection — were also present in the sixties.  Yet, grievances stemming from such conditions could only engender a powerful impulse of political rebellion under specific political circumstances.