The Somali community in the UK: What we know and how we ... - ICAR

when retaliating against Soviet support for Ethiopia,
and turned to the United States. But when Somalia
continued to renege on debt repayment, foreign
donors, including the IMF, withdrew funding in 1988,
and the economy collapsed.
These economic factors played their part in
the downfall of Siad Barre’s regime, but it was
internal military opposition that finally brought
him down. Despite their internecine rivalries upon
which Barre could capitalise, various opposition
groups formed and reformed from the mid-1970s
onwards, organising militias both internally and
from neighbouring Ethiopia. It was fighters from the
United Somali Congress (USC) that finally expelled
Barre from Mogadishu in January 1991.
Continued conflict: 1990-2003
The aftermath of Siad Barre’s regime in southern
Somalia has not been reconstruction, but further
fighting and the disintegration of civil society.
Although much of the disorder has been caused
by the individual ambitions of local warlords in
the absence of a central state, the idiom in which
conflict continues is that of clanship, an issue to
be explored below (p. 78). The force behind the
SNM was the Isaq, the dominant clan in northern
Somalia, while Siad Barre, as did most of his cronies,
came from a Darod subclan, the Marehan. The
various groups that opposed him also had clan
identities, and after Barre’s defeat, the common
political purpose of these factions, always tenuous
and complex, fell away, leaving a chaos of competing
claims to power. The authority of the USC, which
represented the dominant clan family in Mogadishu,
the Hawiye, was challenged by rival militias, and
Somalia descended into civil war. The fighting
escalated when the USC itself was torn apart by
two contenders for power: the head of the military,
General Mohamed Aideed, and the President,
Ali Mahdi, supported by rival Hawiye subclans.
Barre was also fighting for a comeback, and armed
local clan elders struggled for power. The ensuing
mayhem resulted in the devastation of Mogadishu
and cost over 30,000 lives. Ten times as many died
of starvation, thousands were displaced, and Somali
refugees streamed into neighbouring Kenya.
The combination of war and drought produced
devastating famine. Hundreds of thousands died,
and pictures of starving babies that appeared on
western television produced substantial foreign
aid. But the avarice of local leaders prevented its
distribution, and in 1992 the United Nations moved
in. The first mission’s brief was keeping the peace
and providing humanitarian aid. But with ‘Operation
Restore Hope’ and its UNOSOM successor the
following year, the aim of national reconciliation
and economic reconstruction was more ambitious.
Both proved impossible. The UN became
embroiled in armed clan factionalism opposing
Aideed, causing hundreds of Somali deaths as
well as UN casualties. 17 In March 1995 the UN
abandoned the chaos and beat an ignominious
retreat.
In a maze of complex shifting clan alliances, local
warlords pursued their interests and fought for
dominance in Mogadishu. In 1996 high hopes for
peace were raised by the presidential appointment
of Aideed’s son, Hussein Mohammed Farah Aideed,
a naturalised American from California. But he too
turned his back on international efforts to broker
peace, and deployed his militias in military action.
For the rest of the decade, further peace efforts
foundered and fighting escalated, exacerbated by
Ethiopian military intervention into the complex
Somali scene. With no protection from a central
state, the civilian population continued to suffer
the brutality of the warring factions. In March 2001
Amnesty International declared that “the future
for human rights in Somalia looks very bleak
indeed”, 18 a forecast endorsed by subsequent
events. International humanitarian efforts have been
constantly frustrated by the decimated state of civil
society and attacks on their personnel.
After a peak in violence at the end of the decade,
the new century did see some de-escalation of
conflict. In 2000 the Arta peace conference elected
members to a new parliament, the Transitional
National Assembly (TNA). This was the first peace
initiative to work around civilian groupings
17. For details of UN intervention up to March 1993 see Human Rights
Watch, 7.3.93.V: 2 (http://www.hrw.org/reports/1993/somalia).
18. Amnesty International News Service nr. 57, 28.3.01 (http://web.
amnesty.org/library).
20 The Somali community in the UK