Tropic of Chaos_ Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence - Christian Parenti [37]
The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.
—WINSTON CHURCHILL
IN 1969 A LEFT-WING military coup brought an end to newly independent Somalia’s experiment with electoral democracy. The new strong man was Mohammed Siad Barre, who the following year proclaimed “scientific socialism” to be the official ideology, insisting it was “fully compatible with Islam and the reality of the nomadic society.” All political opposition and any public mention of clans were strictly forbidden.
However, the early Siad Barre regime also brought some important social reforms. As I. M. Lewis, the preeminent scholar of Somali history, has explained, the new regime provided community health programs, rural education, and literacy campaigns and encouraged local communities to build schools, hospitals, and dispensaries. Cooperatives and tree planting were encouraged, and the roman script was adapted for the Somali language.1
Alas, Siad Barre was a virulent nationalist and irredentist. The Somali national space had been fragmented into five pieces by European and Ethiopian colonialism. Somali independence in 1960 reunited only the Italian (southern) and British (northern) controlled parts of Somalia. And, for Siad Barre, that was not enough. In Mogadishu, nationalist intellectuals and political elites seethed with resentment as they coveted the Somali-speaking regions of Kenya, Djibouti, and Ethiopia. In particular, they wanted the Ogaden, a poor, dry, rugged, Somali-populated wedge of Ethiopia that juts into Somalia, giving that country its boomerang shape. Siad Barre pledged to reunite the fragments of the Somali nation, and when in the mid-1970s Ethiopia entered a period of political instability, he saw an opportunity to begin his project.
The story of Somalia’s implosion is a parable of how the Cold War’s grand ideas and noble alliances too often left only suffering and disorder. More broadly, that dynamic is a constitutive element in the catastrophic convergence.
Fall of the Lion
The pampered, autocratic Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie—though feted by western elites and, bizarrely, worshipped by impoverished, ganja-smoking Rastafarians in Jamaica—was increasingly hated at home. His pet lions ate meat while the people went hungry. Labor organizing of any sort was banned until 1962.2 The emperor enjoyed warm relations with Washington and even sent a battalion of his best troops to aid the United States during the Korean War. The American military had a communication outpost at Kagnew Station and trained Ethiopian troops. From 1953 to 1973, half of all US military aid to sub-Saharan Africa went to imperial Ethiopia.3
By 1974, the emperor’s rule was in trouble. The Sahelian drought was decimating Ethiopian farmers, oil prices were quadrupling, and the global economy was in the doldrums; inflation and fuel price hikes led to riots in Addis Ababa. The emperor sent out his military to restore order—but the troops mutinied. Chaos gripped the nation, and amidst this arose a leftist revolutionary junta of lower-ranking officers called the Dergue, or “Committee.” The new regime moved fast, implementing the largest land reform in Africa, nationalizing all industry, and establishing workers’ committees down to the local level. But for all its high-minded radicalism, the Dergue was beset by vicious, internecine struggles. Meanwhile in the countryside, there was resistance from landlords and multiple obscurantist revolts.4
Across the border, Siad Barre saw the chaos as an opportunity to seize the Ogaden. Never mind that both Ethiopia and Somalia were socialist states, both claiming to put economic development, solidarity, and the well-being of the masses above all else. Nationalism ruled the day.
Paved with Outside Help
In a pattern familiar around the world, Siad Barre began his war covertly, by training and arming Ethiopian-based Somali clans who became the Western Somalia Liberation Front. But,