The Pirates of Somalia_ Inside Their Hidden World - Jay Bahadur [12]
“Wrong clan,” said my flaming-haired friend. “He should have borrowed the ancestors of a friend.”1
If not quite as inborn as DNA or fingerprints, amongst Somalis the concept of clan operates almost like a mental grammar, an innate neural structure that defines how one processes and interprets the world. Before Siad Barre’s time, it had been customary for a Somali to greet someone he was meeting for the first time with the question Yaa tahay? “What clan are you?” In his efforts to weaken the clan system (and thereby buttress loyalty to the state), Siad Barre outlawed the question, but to little effect; to this day, clan strongly determines how Somalis assess one another’s social position, motivations, and trustworthiness.
Like the Bedouin, Somalis have traditionally been pastoralists, their resource-poor desert environment giving rise to a rigid and strictly territorial tribal system in which members are fiercely defended and outsiders ruthlessly attacked. Indeed, the oft-quoted Bedouin saying “Me against my brother; my brother and I against my cousin; my brother, my cousin, and I against the world” could well be adapted to Somalis: “My sub-sub-clan against my sub-clan, my sub-clan against my clan, my clan against the world.” In order to avoid mutually destructive vendettas, a system of clan law, known as heer, developed to resolve disputes through traditional rules of blood compensation, which stipulate the number of camels, goats, and so on paid to expiate each offence. The murder of a man, for instance, would demand a restitution of one hundred camels (the equivalent of about $20,000); a woman, fifty camels.
Despite Siad Barre’s attempts to dismantle traditional patterns of Somali life, clan loyalty remained a more dominant force than Somali national identity, to the point where it eventually tore the country apart. In a sense, the whole idea of Somalia was a contradiction—an attempt to graft the trappings of a modern state onto a mode of social organization suited to a centuries-old nomadic lifestyle. Jobs, business opportunities, military appointments, government posts, and patronage were all awarded through clan networks, reinforcing ethnic divisions and undermining the legitimacy of the central state. Ironically—given its role in sparking Somalia’s descent into civil war—the clan system has since ensured a degree of order and social cohesion in many areas, including Puntland and Somaliland, that otherwise might easily have degenerated into their own versions of Rwanda or the Democratic Republic of the Congo. For a country in “anarchy,” law and order in some parts of Somalia is remarkably well-preserved.
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Many of the Darod lucky enough to escape Mogadishu’s urban killing fields fled north to their ancestral clan homeland, which at the time was under the control of the SSDF, headed by the squabbling duo of Colonel Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed and General Mohamed Abshir. Towns that had been little more than underpopulated crossroads along nomadic migration routes swelled into urban centres. In the years following the outbreak of the civil war, Garowe grew from a population of five thousand to a current estimated thirty to forty thousand.2
Though the desert provided a safe haven against the persecution suffered by the Darod in the south, without political unity they remained vulnerable. Leaders of the Harti Confederacy (see Appendix 1), a grouping of the three Darod sub-clans inhabiting Puntland (the Majerteen, Dhulbahante, and Warsangali), looked on with apprehension at the formation of clan polities around them. With the Isaaq-inhabited self-declared Republic of Somaliland to their western flank and the Hawiye poised to extend their control from Mogadishu to much of south-central Somalia, the fear was that without a unified front the Darod would be at a disadvantage in the clan-centred scramble for Somalia’s territories.
In May 1998, a conference of Harti clan elders in Garowe proclaimed the creation of Puntland State of Somalia, with Abdullahi Yusuf as its first president.3 Unlike