Countries of the World/COUNTRYS.BIN/dp/0328/03288.txt

Text File | 1991-06-25 | 38KB | 587 lines

$Unique_ID{COW03288}
$Pretitle{286}
$Title{Somalia
Chapter 1E.   Challenges to the Regime}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Robert Rinehart}
$Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army}
$Subject{somali
somalia
src
soviet
siad
barre
military
somalia's
country
ogaden}
$Date{1981}
$Log{}
Country:     Somalia
Book:        Somalia, A Country Study
Author:      Robert Rinehart
Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army
Date:        1981

Chapter 1E.   Challenges to the Regime

     Potential opposition to the SRC following the coup and subsequent
challenges to Siad Barre from within the revolutionary regime were unorganized
and subject to intense surveillance by the security apparatus. Siad Barre also
proved to be a skillfully manipulative politician who preferred to win over
the opposition by a mixture of coercion and blandishments or to find
compromise solutions if those solutions would move the country in a direction
compatible with his ideas. From 1971, when the second of two coup attempts
against him failed, until the war in the Ogaden in 1977, no divisions within
the SRC became public. On a few occasions civilian members of the CSS resigned
to protest specific policies of the SRC, but no reprisals were taken against
them.

     Within certain undefined limits, criticism of personalities and policies
was permitted. What was not tolerated was anything that seemed to indicate
active support for the old order, opposition to the major lines of the
government's ideology, or anything that the authorities thought might serve as
the basis on which significant opposition might build. The NSS attempted to
ferret out and arrest those who verbally attacked the SRC, and stiff jail
sentences were imposed for "rumor-mongering" against the revolution. Security
forces were assisted in surveillance activities by members of the Victory
Pioneers (Gulwadayal), a youth militia whose symbol was an ever-vigilant eye.
At village meetings people were told that they must destroy the old order by
isolating hostile elements who were still heeded by sections of the
population. Political officers bragged that members of religious communities
had been arrested for counterrevolutionary activities and that merchants had
been jailed for "refusal to accept the new order." In the most notable case of
this type, ten religious leaders were tried and executed in 1975 for accusing
the SRC of violating the teachings of the Quran by attempting to improve the
position of women before the law.

     The SRC announced on two occasions that it had discovered plotters
initiating coup attempts against it. Both involved SRC members. In April 1970
Korshel, the first vice-president, was arrested and charged with treason.
Korshel had not been among the 1969 coup leaders who brought the SRC to power
and was believed to have opposed them during the first few hours, so that he
may have remained the odd figure in the ruling body. The detailed charges
against him included the allegation that he had organized mercenaries among
the nomadic clans to provoke border incidents with Ethiopia that could be used
as an excuse for foreign intervention in Somalia. Whatever the basis for this
indictment, Korshel apparently represented the more conservative elements
within the police and army and thus was potentially if not actually in
opposition to the socialist orientation of the majority of SRC members. He was
convicted of treason in a trial before the National Security Court and
sentenced to a prison term.

     In May 1971 the second vice-president, Major General Mohamed Ainanche,
and a fellow SRC member, Soviet-trained Lieutenant Colonel Salah Gaveire
Kedie, who had served as head of the Ministry of Defense and later as
secretary of state for communications, were arrested along with several other
army officers for plotting the assassination of Siad Barre. The conspirators,
who had sought the support of clans that had lost influence in the 1969
overthrow of the democratic regime, appeared to have been motivated by
personal rivalries rather than by ideological concerns. Accused of conspiring
to assassinate the president, the two key figures in the plot and another army
officer were executed after a lengthy trial.

     By 1974 the SRC felt sufficiently secure to release Korshel and most of
the leaders of the democratic regime who had been detained since the coup.
Egal and three other former ministers were excepted from the amnesty, however,
and were sentenced to long prison terms, Egal to thirty years on charges of
embezzlement.

Siad Barre and Scientific Socialism

     Somalia's adherence to socialism became official when Siad Barre
proclaimed on the first anniversary of the military coup that Somalia was a
socialist state, despite the fact that the country had no history of class
conflict in the Marxist sense. For purposes of Marxist analysis, therefore,
tribalism was equated with class in a society struggling to liberate itself
from distinctions imposed by lineage group affiliation. At the time, Siad
Barre explained that the official ideology was composed of three elements-his
own conception of community development based on the principle of
self-reliance, a form of socialism based on Marxist principles, and Islam.
These were subsumed under the title of scientific socialism, although such a
definition was clearly at variance with the Soviet and Chinese models to which
reference was frequently made (see The Ideological Base, ch. 4).

     The theoretical underpinning of the state ideology was a melange that
combined aspects of the Quran with the influences of Marx, Lenin, Mao, and
Mussolini, but Siad Barre was pragmatic in its application. "Socialism is not
a religion," he explained, "it is a political principle" of use in organizing
government and managing production. Somalia's close alignment with communist
states, coupled with its proclaimed adherence to scientific socialism, led to
frequent accusations by critics that the country had become a Soviet
satellite. For all the rhetoric extolling scientific socialism, however,
genuine Marxist sympathies were not deep-rooted in Somalia. But the ideology
was acknowledged-partly in view of the country's economic and military
dependence on the Soviet Union-as the most convenient peg on which to hang a
revolution introduced through an essentially nationalist military coup that
had supplanted a Western-oriented parliamentary democracy.

     More important than the Marxist ideology espoused by the SRC for the
success and popular acceptance of the revolutionary regime in the early 1970s
was the personal power exerted by Siad Barre and the image he projected.
Styled the Victorious Leader (Guulwaadde), Siad Barre fostered the growth of a
cult of personality around himself. Portraits of him in the company of Marx
and Lenin festooned the streets on public occasions. The epigrams,
exhortations, and good advice of the paternalistic leader who had synthesized
Marx with Islam and had found a uniquely Somali path to socialist revolution
were widely distributed for handy reference in Siad Barre's little
blue-and-white book. For some Somalis he had become the "Big Man," the warrior
often possessing a religious charisma who was a traditional figure in Somali
history. Despite the revolutionary regime's avowed intention to stamp out the
particularism that had led to political competition among clans and clan
families under the democratic regime, the government was commonly referred to
by the code name MOD-standing for Marehan (Siad Barre's clan), Ogaden (his
mother's clan), and Dolbahante (the clan of a son-in-law who was head of the
NSS), whose members formed its inner circle. In 1975, for example, ten of the
twenty members of the SRC were from the Darod clan-family, of which these
three clans were a part, while the Digil and Rahanweyn, the sedentary
interriverine clan-families, were totally unrepresented.

The Language and Literacy Issue

     One of the principal objectives of the revolutionary regime was the
adoption of a standard orthography for wri