The Al Qaeda attack on the New York World Trade Center on 11 September 2001 injected a further external element: the “war on terrorism” and the American preoccupation with Islamist movements. When by 2006, the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), some of whose more extreme members had jihadist sympathies, emerged as the dominant faction in Mogadishu and organized the closest approximation to a functioning government in the capital since 1991, the Ethiopian army with American encouragement intervened to drive them out. The deep-seated antagonism of most Somalis toward Ethiopia proved a liability for the TFG; the force was withdrawn in 2009, by which time the authority of the TFG was limited to a small part of Mogadishu. Meanwhile, new dimensions to external intervention opened as American security forces carried out operations aimed at purported jihadist Al Qaeda allies and escalated its military aid to the TFG.54 Eritrea further complicates the situation by providing bases, sanctuary, and arms to Islamist insurgents in Somalia, in the face of AU and UN sanctions.
The second new dimension was the rise of Islamist sentiments. In the Afromarxist phase of the Siad Barre regime, secular currents were strong enough to produce a very liberal family code in 1975; ten leading Muslim clerics were executed for their forceful denunciation of the legislation as an affront to Islam, with no visible protest.55 In the 1980s, underground Islamist factions coalesced, emerging openly during the most intense phase of civil war in 1991–92. Most had similar points of ideological reference, including radical Egyptian thinkers like Sayyid Qutb and Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al Banna. One, al Itihaad al Islami, developed its own militia, made up of urban youth. Others, in the face of governmental collapse, organized schools and health services, with the support of Middle Eastern NGOs. Merchants organizing new mercantile channels in the region found affiliation with Islamist organizations a useful credential.
By 1994, amid continued anarchy, insecurity, and banditry in Mogadishu, one faction leader, Ali Mahdi, gave his blessing to the creation of Islamic courts with militias and judges to restore some degree of order. Over the following years, the scope and role of Islamic courts ebbed and flowed; they were opposed by a number of clan militia. But the role of Islamic charities in urban centers expanded over time in the vacuum left by statelessness. In the face of the failure of the 2004 TFG, headed by Puntland leader Abdadallahi Yusuf, to establish its presence in Mogadishu or most other areas, the Islamic courts movement (now renamed as ICU) gained strength and by 2006 dominated Mogadishu and a number of other parts of the country, triggering the Ethiopian intervention. Under intense external mediation, the leader of the moderate wing of the ICU, Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, became TFG head. He had hoped to create a broader coalition, but the more radical elements regrouped around a pair of Islamist militias, Al Haraka al Shabaab el Mujahideen and Hizbal Islam, whose most visible leader is Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys. In 2010, these merged under al Shabaab. Dominant in south central Somalia, al Shabaab seeks a Somali caliphate; beneath the surface, however, clan politics percolate.
The entirely new saliency of Islamism produced by the internal warfare in Somalia has multiple faces. One is Islamic law and its tribunals, which satisfy a popular craving for order and security that are lacking in the absence of a state-provided judicial system. Another is the network of social services that operates through Islamic structures, drawing on support from Middle Eastern sources, the diaspora, and some of the international humanitarian funds. Yet another face is the Islamic militias, some of whom are guilty of intimidation, beheadings, and other atrocities to enforce their will. A small number of foreign fighters and jihadists with links to global terrorist franchises (Al Qaeda) are found at the fringes.
The third new vector in the age of anarchy is the enhanced role of the diaspora. Expanded in numbers by chaotic circumstance in Somalia, there are now well over a million Somalis in the Middle East, Europe, North America, and Australia. Their remittances, estimated by the World Bank at $1 billion by 2010, flow not only to relatives but also to political factions, warlords, and social service agencies;56 one may compare this figure to the approximately $10 million monthly customs proceeds from Mogadishu port, which are the sole domestic revenue for the TFG.57 They are actively involved in Somalia factional rivalries; a significant fraction of the TFG parliament members come from the diaspora, which has always been well represented at the successive peace conferences. In recent times, they have tended to divide in support or opposition to the TFG; this overlapped a Darood (TFG) versus Hawiye clan polarity.58
As the internal warfare in Somalia nears its third decade, no end is in sight. Beneath the recent surface appearance of a contest between the internationally backed TFG and Islamist insurgents, the reality is far more complex. Outside of Somaliland and Puntland, no group exercises real control over much territory, although some militias can deny access to a given region to others. Taxable nodal points of commerce—ports, airports, boundary zones between clans—provide locations for revenue extraction. Substantial funds flow into the country from external sources: the diaspora, international aid agencies, the international community, neighboring countries in the region. These resources finance some humanitarian undertakings and are inevitably subject to some diversion by various militias. They also fund the multiplicity of parties to the conflict that aim to influence the ultimate outcome. By 2007, a wholly new source of revenue became visible with the rapid development of piracy on the northern coast, which press estimates suggest may have generated over $100 million annually. During 2009, some 214 ships were attacked and 47 successfully captured and held with their crews for ransom.59 Indeed, if one sums the five important new sources of revenue, the piracy ransoms, the diaspora remittances, aid to the TFG, $100 million for the African intervention force, and humanitarian relief, the external sums flowing into the Somali economy may come close to the amounts in the 1980s. Various “suffer-manage” mechanisms spring up to supplant state structures. An informal banking system manages currency transactions, facilitated by the recent spread of cell phones. Clandestine trade in livestock, narcotics (qat, a widely used narcotic produced in Ethiopia and Yemen), and other commodities flourishes.
Nonetheless, the costs to the population of permanent statelessness are heavy. Chronic insecurity affects both urban and rural livelihoods. Many are forced into refugee camps by disorder or drought, and aid deliveries are uncertain. Although NGOs, Islamic charities, and others provide some social services, these are inevitably sporadic and irregular. The armed youth that populate the militias intimidate, extort, and abuse. Although existence in the prolonged anarchy of Somalia is several steps above the classic Hobbesian forecast of life in the state of nature as “nasty, brutish, and short,” few long for the perpetuation of statelessness. Yet the stubborn fragmentation of Somali society militates against any one faction gaining sufficient strength to enforce the erection of a new state. Nor is it conceivable that any international actors would have the will or capacity to do so.
Still, there have been important limits to the degree of violence. After an initial moment of intense civil war in the first two years of state collapse, military combat became more scattered and sporadic. The casualty toll over two decades is far less than in Sudan or Congo-Kinshasa. Some atrocities have occurred, but they fall well short of ghastly crimes directed against civilian populations in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Congo-Kinshasa, Sudan, and Mozambique during their internal wars. Mass rape has rarely been a weapon of Somali conflict.
The large stretch of ungoverned space will continue to bedevil neighboring states and the international community more broadly. Various criminal and terrorist enterprises can find operating bases, provided that they can blend into the social environment. Thus the recently developed piracy industry, now operating on an industrial scale, offers coastal Somali groups a lucrative franchise, far more rewarding than their previous fishing livelihoods. The invasion of their fishing grounds by factory ships had threatened their way of life and supplied a grievance that could justify the turn to piracy in
local eyes. To date the enterprise has been relatively low risk; a few pirates have been killed and a small number captured, but difficult issues of a reliable venue for prosecution and punishment and legal grounds for trials elsewhere limit the effectiveness of deterrence by possible interception and confinement by the various navies now patrolling the offshore zone. Ship owners, once the seized vessel is brought into a Somali port, invariably negotiate down the ransom demanded and pay to secure release of their vessel and crew. Warlords and militias operating in the area doubtless share in the profits.
Beyond piracy, the abiding fear of terrorist cells with Al Qaeda links joining forces with the radical Islamist militias to secure operating bases continues to motivate Western, and especially American, policy. Successive efforts to fund and supply cooperating warlords, to promote a TFG security capability, or to carry out strikes against terrorist suspects have been inconclusive or even counterproductive; Somali specialist Bronwyn Bruton argues that such efforts “have alienated large parts of the Somali population, polarized the country’s diverse Islamist reform movement into moderate and extremist camps, and propelled indigenous Salafi jihadist groups to power.”60 The sporadic operations of the Western Somali Liberation Front in the Ethiopian Ogaden and their cross-border links and a broader Ethiopian apprehension of radical Islamism continuously draw in Ethiopian security forces. The Eritrean regime, though it detests domestic jihadists, eagerly supports them in Somalia as a proxy weapon against the Ethiopian foe. The vacuum created by protracted anarchy is a permanent attraction to external interventions in pursuit of agendas unrelated to Somali welfare.
Meanwhile, the empty shell of the collapsed Somali state continues to enjoy international sovereignty. But not all space is ungoverned; the northwestern segment, coterminous with former British Somaliland, declared in dependence in 1991 following a clan conclave; though interclan fighting continued until 1993, a further gathering of clan and community leaders adopted a provisional constitution, provided for a bicameral parliament incorporating clan heads, and negotiated a more enduring peace among the clan and community leaders. The SNM militia commanders, who had initiated the revolt against Siad Barre’s exactions in 1988, were set aside in favor of an institutionalized state structure featuring civilian leaders, a formal bureaucracy, and a new currency; by 1997, regularized elections were held, and Somaliland took on the attributes of stateness. The unrecognized state did face dissidence in its eastern precincts, populated by Harti subclans resentful of Isaaq dominance of the new institutions, but it otherwise attracted admiring comment from visiting observers for its well-ordered institutions.61
Still the critical attribute of international sovereignty eluded Somaliland. Repeated efforts to breach this barrier, in spite of the relative effectiveness of its government, failed to overcome the embedded antagonism of the international system to nonconsensual fragmentation of one of its constituent units. As one international law specialist put the matter: “Firstly, governments are protected by a presumption in favor of their effectiveness and continuity. Therefore, the temporary ineffectiveness or absence of a government . . . does not affect statehood. Secondly, state identity also enjoys legal protection by a presumption in favor of its continuity and against extinction.”62
As noted, in 1998, Puntland along the northeast coast of Somalia followed suit by creating a regional array of state institutions. Civil war was much less intense here than further south and mostly ended by 1993. A militia linked to the Darood clans dominant in the area, the SSDF, led by Abdullahi Yusuf (later to become TGF head from 2005 to 2009), was the most prominent force. Though committed to a united Somalia, the prolongation of anarchy eventually generated local pressures to create a functioning regional administration. In 1998, a clan-based conclave, similar to those in Somaliland, erected a set of institutions largely modeled on those of Somaliland. With the support and participation of Harti clan elders, a regularized administration emerged, with a paid bureaucracy, offering a modicum of state-like governance. In search of legitimacy, carefully avoiding invocation of a clan name for the region, the Puntland leadership appropriated the storied name of Punt from classical Egyptian sources (though the wondrous land of incense visited by Egyptian voyagers was probably well to the northwest). But Puntland remained committed to membership as an autonomous unit in a federated revived Somalia state.63 A long wait is in prospect.
But the Nolutshungu citation that opens the chapter has singular application to Somalia; the idea of the state appears indestructible, despite the disappearance of its physical manifestations outside of Somaliland and Puntland. In strife-torn southern Somalia, populations painfully adapt to permanent disorder. The resilience of the clan structures provides some shelter, a basis for local solidarities, and mechanisms for coping with quotidian conflicts. Many even profit from disorder; any number of merchants, warlords, pirates, and militia members carve out lucrative niches, finding benefit from the absence of state regulation and attendant taxation. But the dream of a reborn state lives on in the social imaginary.
Sudan
I turn next to completing the narrative of the Sudan internal war, a combat that resumed in southern Sudan in 1983 and then acquired a crucial new dimension with the lethal warfare in Darfur beginning in 2003. The era of good feeling between south and north that opened with the equitable peace settlement of 1972 gradually eroded, as did the authority of the Nimeiri regime in Khartoum. The promised autonomy for the south was diluted, and divisions within the region encouraged. Tensions also mounted over natural resource issues. Oil was discovered in the south about 1976; by the early 1980s, Nimeiri had taken steps to ensure that the crude oil would go north by pipeline and then be refined and exported from Port Sudan. He also pushed through the controversial Jonglei Canal project to assure greater Nile flow to the north (and Egypt), impacting the pastureland of southern cattle herders; the Jonglei project was begun but interrupted by renewed rebellion, and it remains unfinished. But the immediate precipitant of renewed civil war came when the by-now embattled ruler tried to restore his flagging legitimacy in 1983 with the sudden proclamation of the September Laws, imposing a rigorous version of shari’a on the entire country. He also unilaterally abrogated the Southern Regional Constitution, dividing the south into three administrative zones and expunging the 1972 guarantees of southern taxation rights on natural resources. One of the SPLA commanders, Lual Diing Wol, described the impact of the September Laws: “In the past, our people never used to talk about being African or Christian or non-Arab because they did not need to prove to anyone what their identity was. . . . But since 1983, it has become a question of showing the government and its Muslim zealots that we are proud of our identity and do not want anybody to change us. This insistence of northern rulers that one must become Arab or Muslim has only created a sense of extremism to prove the opposite.”64
By the late 1970s, as Nimeiri erosion of the 1972 accord was becoming evident, scattered revolt by veterans of the earlier insurgency emerged in the south, under the label Anya-nya 2. By 1983, a high-ranking southern officer in the Sudan army, John Garang, had defected and launched a new and more sustained insurgent movement, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), with a military wing (SPLA), absorbing and marginalizing Anya-nya 2, whose main support was in Equatoria bordering Ethiopia. The SPLM was a far more coherent movement than its Anya-nya predecessors; it was only an indirect successor of Anya-nya 1, whose commander, Lagu, remained in Khartoum. Garang was a radical intellectual (and holder of an American doctorate), whose primary aim at the outset was to create a new Sudan, shorn of Islamism and Arabism as state ideologies. Garang held that a thus renovated Sudan could then tackle the underlying issues of inequality between north and south. Once a member of the Sudanese Communist Party, he had served as minister of southern affairs under Nimeiri and had not been involved with the earlier Anya-nya.65 After the 1972 accord, he had been absorbed into the army, rising to the rank of colonel. His core support was among his eth
nic community, the Dinka, a very large umbrella identity whose subgroups, mainly cattle-herding agriculturalists, populated a sizable part of the south. However, initially the SPLA/M enjoyed broad backing in the south. The period following 1972 had been marked by massive Christian conversion in parts of the south, making the September Laws the more offensive.66 The SPLA by the late 1980s had eliminated Khartoum’s authority in much of the south.
The desperate gambit by Nimeiri of reinventing himself as an Islamist leader failed in the face of growing popular unrest, and he was ousted by a military junta in 1985. The army agreed to elections and a return to civilian rule in 1986; the enduring alignment patterns reflecting the followings of the major Islamic brotherhoods, the Ansar (heirs to the Mahdi movement that ruled Sudan from 1885 to 1898) and Khatmiyya, represented by the Umma and Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), respectively, and the National Islamic Front (NIF), emanation of the Muslim Brotherhood. The NIF received only 17% of the vote. The two largest parties, Umma and the DUP, formed a coalition under Sadiq El-Mahdi; by 1989, this group was close to arriving at a negotiated settlement with the SPLM that would have ended shari’a implementation in the south and restored a regional government.
The prospect of such an accord triggered a coup by an officer clique linked to the Muslim Brotherhood led by Omar al Bashir; its initial mentor was the enigmatic Islamist scholar Hassan al-Turabi. Political parties were banned and a state of emergency was declared; a reign of terror followed, driving opposition far underground and ending negotiation with the SPLM. The NIF supplied the cadres and doctrine for the Bashir regime, which sought presentability through a new constitution tailored to Islamist standards; 1996 elections in the north, boycotted by the opposition, were widely viewed as a sham. Turabi himself was ousted from power in 1999 and then imprisoned for a time the following year.
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