Somalia is a strategically located country in East Africa steeped in thousands of years of history. (The ancient Egyptians spoke of the area as the Land of God.) Situated in the Horn of Africa adjacent to the Arabian Peninsula, Somalia borders Djibouti to its northwest, Ethiopia to its west, and Kenya to its southwest. Slightly smaller than Texas, the country has a long coast to its east (the Indian Ocean) and its north (the Gulf of Aden). A considerable part of the interior of the country is desert and semi-desert grasslands.

Although divided into numerous warring clans that are currently vying for power in the divided country, Somalia does not have the same degree of ethnic diversity as other African states. About 85 percent of the population is designated as Somali and speak the official language Somali as their native tongue. There is a small Arab minority in the country as well as non-Somali African tribal groups, such as the Oromo. Nomadic and semi-nomadic people dependent upon livestock for their livelihood make up a large portion of the population. The vast majority of the population is Sunni Muslim, though there is a small Christian minority there as well.

The modern history of Somalia history is an intricate and complex mix of traditional clan politics, colonialism, and Cold War intrigues. Genealogy and clan politics constitute the heart of the Somali social system, as has been the case there for centuries. It is the basis of the collective Somali inclination toward internecine conflict, as well as of the sense Somalis have of being a distinct national group, two seemingly contradictory impulses. There are six major branches of the Somali lineage system, four overwhelmingly pastoral nomadic clan-families (the Dir, Daarood, Isaaq, and Hawiye, each of which is further subdivided into smaller sub-clan groupings), and two agricultural ones (the Digil and Rahanwayn). The Dir, Daarood, Isaaq, and Hawiye together constitute roughly 75 percent of the population. The Digil and Rahanwayn constitute about 20 percent of the population and are settled mostly in the riverbeds of southern Somalia. Generally speaking, the post-independence politics of Somalia have been dominated by Daarood clan, which includes a number of sub-clans, and an alliance of the Hawiye and the Isaaq clans, which also include several sub-clans. Clan divisions of the Somali variety inherently militate against the evolution and endurance of a stable, centralized state, and as a result institutional instability is actually woven into the fabric of Somali society.

Map of Somali clan groups

In part because of its strategic location, Somalia was divided among three European powers during the colonial period from 1884 to 1960): British Somaliland (north central); French Somaliland (east and southeast); and Italian Somaliland (south). Of these the British and Italian areas were the largest and most important because of their location along the coast. The early 20^th century was marked by strong resistance from northern Somali clans to British rule. A Sufi holy man, Mahammad Abdille Hasan, dubbed the mad mullah by the British, led a persistent resistance movement against the British between 1899 and 1920. The fighting devastated the Somali Peninsula and resulted in the death of an estimated one-third of the population in northern Somalia, as well as the devastation of its economy. One of the longest and bloodiest conflicts in the history of sub-Saharan African resistance to European rule, the uprising was not quelled until 1920 with the death of Hasan, who became a hero of Somali nationalism. The British finally ended the uprising by deploying a Royal Air Force squadron recently returned from combat in World War I, devastating the rebel capital at Taleex in northern Somalia with aerial bombardment. This conflict spilled over into the southern Italian-held territories, but it was mostly contained to the north because the supporting clans hailed from there; thus this early resistance movement against European rule among the Somalis reflected the significance of clan divisions in the divided territories of Somaliland.

Under the rule of dictator Benito Mussolini Italian forces marched into Ethiopia and toppled Emperor Haile Selassie in 1935, and the Italians also seized British Somaliland, uniting for the first time in forty years all the Somali clans that had been arbitrarily separated by the Anglo-Italo-Ethiopian boundaries. The elimination of these artificial boundaries and the unification of the Somali Peninsula enabled the Italians to set prices, impose taxes, and issue a common currency for the entire area. Italian control over the region turned out to be short-lived, however. In March 1941, the British counterattacked and reoccupied northern Somalia, from which they launched their campaign to retake the whole region from Italy and restore Emperor Haile Selassie to his throne in neighboring Ethiopia. The British then placed southern Somalia and the Ogaden (the region on the border between Somalia and Ethiopia) under a military administration.

In the aftermath of World War II Somalia was caught amid the conflicting interests of the victorious allies. Initially, it was decided at the Potsdam Conference in 1945 not to return southern Somalia to Italian rule, but rather to form a Council of Ministers representing Britain, France, the USSR, and the US to decide the fate of the colony. No agreement among the four could be reached, however, and the question of the status of Somalia was passed to the United Nations to decide. In November 1949, the General Assembly of the UN voted to make southern Somalia a trust territory to be placed under Italian control for ten years, following which it would become independent. The General Assembly stipulated that under no circumstance should Italian rule over the colony extend beyond 1960. Northern Somalia would remain under British control indefinitely. The General Assembly seems to have been persuaded by the argument that Italy, because of its experience and economic interests, was best suited to administer southern Somalia. This decision clearly went against the increasing demands of educated Somalis, many of whom were organized as of 1943 into the Somali Youth League (SYL), that all areas populated by Somali-speaking people be united in an independent state.

As the ten-year period of UN-Italian rule in the south neared an end, moves were made for a transition to independence. Meanwhile, the British acquiesced to the force of Somali nationalist public opinion and agreed to terminate its rule of northern Somaliland in 1960 in time for the protectorate to merge with the trust territory on the independence date already fixed by the UN commission. Accordingly, British Somaliland received its independence in late June and united with the trust territory to establish the Somali Republic on July 1, 1960. (The French-controlled territory, by the way, became the independent state of Djibouti in 1977).

The legacy of colonial rule was very important in Somalia. Although unified as a single nation at independence, the south and the north were, from an institutional perspective, two separate countries. Italy and Britain had left the two with separate administrative, legal, and education systems in which affairs were conducted according to different procedures and in different languages. Police, taxes, and the exchange rates of their respective currencies also differed. Their educated elites had divergent interests, and economic contacts between the two regions were virtually nonexistent. Many southerners believed that, because of experience gained under the UN-Italian trusteeship, theirs was the better prepared of the two regions for self-government. Northern political, administrative, and commercial elites, meanwhile, were reluctant to recognize that they now had to deal with Mogadishu. Indeed, Northern misgivings about being too tightly harnessed to the south were demonstrated by the voting pattern in the June 1961 referendum on the constitution, which was in effect the first national election in Somalia Although the draft was overwhelmingly approved in the south, it was supported by less than 50 percent of the northern electorate. The newly independent country clearly had some major regional divisions to overcome.

Another significant issue facing the newly independent state of Somalia was the existence of large Somali populations outside its borders, in neighboring Kenya, Ethiopia, and Djibouti. As we have seen, this is one of the common legacies of colonialism with the imposition of artificial borders in Africa and throughout much of the formerly colonized world. Between 1960 and 1964 Somali bands carried out raids across the Kenyan border, and in 1964 a small-scale war erupted between Ethiopia and Somalia over its disputed border regions. Hostilities ended through the mediation of Sudan, acting under the auspices of the Organization of African Unity (OAU), with the disputed Somali-inhabited territory remaining under Ethiopian control. Meanwhile, Ethiopia and Kenya concluded a mutual defense pact in 1964 in response to what both countries perceived as a continuing threat from Somalia. The pact was renewed in 1980 and again in 1987. Most OAU members feared that if Somalia were successful in detaching the Somali-populated portions of Kenya and Ethiopia, the example might inspire their own restive minorities divided by frontiers imposed during the colonial period. Pan-Somalism remains an important domestic political issue within the country, although two decades plus of clan warfare there seems to have diminished the importance of territorial disputes with neighboring states.

The current political troubles for Somalia began in October 1969, with a military coup that overthrew its short-lived democracy. In the wake of voting irregularities and the assassination of President Rashid Shermaarke, the military moved to take power in a bloodless coup under the leadership of Major General Muhammad Siad Barre. The new governing body, the Supreme Revolutionary Council (SRC), arrested and detained leading members of the democratic government, including Prime Minister Muhammad Ibrahim Igaal, though they were not executed. The SRC banned political parties, abolished the National Assembly, and suspended the constitution. The new goals of the new regime included an end to tribalism, nepotism, corruption, and misrule and the unification of all Somali people under a single state. The country was renamed the Somali Democratic Republic.

The SRC retroactively defined the military coup as a Marxist revolution and reorganized the political and legal institutions, formulating a guiding ideology based on the Quran as well as on Marx. (Barre even published his own equivalent of the little Red Book by Mao Zedong in China, calling it the Blue-and-white book). The SRC took its toughest political stance in the campaign to break down the solidarity and political power of the six main clans in Somalia. Tribalism was condemned as a form of class rule and as the most serious impediment to national unity. Clan leaders, whom the previous government had paid a stipend, were replaced by SRC-appointed local dignitaries known as peacekeepers. Siad Barre often contrasted the benefits of socialism to the evils he associated with tribalism. The SRC also began a policy of settling the nomadic peoples of Somalia into fishing and farming communities as a way of breaking clan identities. However, despite government efforts to eliminate it, clan consciousness persisted. Likewise, the attempts by the SRC to improve the status of Somali women were unpopular in this traditional Muslim society, despite the insistence by Barre that such reforms were consistent with Islamic principles.

In the mid-1970s Somalia received considerable military aid from the USSR, building up one of the largest military forces in sub-Saharan Africa, while allowing the Soviets to establish a naval base in the port city of Berbera. In 1977 Somali troops invaded the disputed border region with Ethiopia, sparking the Ogaden War (1977-78). During the conflict, the USSR switched sides and began supporting Ethiopia, where leftist military officers had overthrown the government of Emperor Heile Selassie in 1974, with military supplies. In response, Barre expelled Soviet advisors and ousted them from the naval base in Berbera in late 1977. Soviet aid to Ethiopia turned the tide in their favor, and the subsequent loss by Somalia in the war led to increasing political pressure and repression at home. Barre began to clamp down on any form of perceived political dissidence and to collectively punish entire clans whose members may have engaged in organized political resistance. The war also led Somalia to shift to a pro-Western stance in the Cold War, with the US replacing the Soviet Union as the main supplier of weapons and economic aid to the country, as well as becoming the main user of the naval base at Berbera.

Thus by 1980 Somalia and Ethiopia had completed one of the most bizarre turnarounds in Cold War politics, with the latter, a staunch US ally from the end of World War II to 1974, now firmly in the Soviet camp, and the former, still under the leadership of Siad Barre, now firmly in the US camp. In 1986 the US and Somalia held joint military exercises in the Indian Ocean, while that same year Amnesty International criticized the Somali regime as among the worst abusers of human rights in the world. In fact, wholesale human rights violations documented by Amnesty International, and subsequently by Africa Watch, prompted the United States Congress by 1987 to make deep cuts in military aid to Somalia.

Meanwhile, economically between 1983 and 1987 the IMF and World Bank pressured the Somali regime to liberalize its economy through a series of market reforms. To meet IMF standards for Structural Adjustment loans, the government terminated its policy of granting guaranteed employment to everyone with a secondary school education. In general, international lending agencies active in Somalia in the 1980s encouraged the elimination of civil service jobs (a common IMF/WB reformist policy). As of 1985, although 5,000 civil servants had been dismissed, Agency of International Development (AID) officials felt that 80 percent of the civil service was still redundant. At the same time, privatization of banking and other state-dominated sectors of the economy was encouraged, as was devaluation of the currency, the Somali shilling. As elsewhere in Africa and the developing world, the immediate, short-term results of these reforms were disastrous:

• Unemployment soared, leading to a growing sector of disgruntled, educated former civil service employees;
• Manufacturing declined 0.5 percent per year from 1980 to 1987;
• Exports decreased by 16.3 percent per annum from 1979 to 1986;
• A negligible 0.8 percent rise in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per annum from 1979 to 1986 did not even keep up with population growth.

Estimates by the World Bank itself show that between 1980 and 1989 real Gross National Product (GNP)--the measure of all wealth produced in a country--per person had declined in Somalia at a rate of 1.7 percent per year. These economic problems further compounded the political tensions that eventually erupted in civil war by the late 1980s.

By 1986, faced with shrinking popularity and a growing, clan-based armed resistance, Siad Barre resorted to the one thing he had so vehemently preached against earlier in his reign--clan warfare. He unleashed a reign of terror against the Majeerteen, the Hawiye, and the Isaaq clans, relying on thugs dubbed the Red Berets, a dreaded elite unit recruited from among the Mareehaan clans to which Barre himself belonged. One of the worst atrocities of the clan conflict of the late 1980s was directed at the Isaaq clan, which in 1988 had initiated an armed movement under the auspices of the Somali National Movement (SNM) in the north to unseat Barre. The SNM captured two northern cities, but government forces loyal to Barre responded by bombarding the cities heavily in June 1988, forcing the SNM to withdraw and causing more than 300,000 Isaaq to flee to Ethiopia. After re-imposing its control in the north, the Somali regime conducted savage reprisals against the Isaaq. In a particularly nefarious form of warfare, they destroyed or poisoned water wells, burned the grazing grounds of Isaaq pastoralists, and systematically raped Isaaq women. An estimated 5,000 Isaaq were killed in the conflict by the end of 1988, about 1,000 of whom, including women and children, were alleged to have been bayoneted to death.

Barre calculated that dealing harshly with resistance would nip it in the bud; he was wrong, however, as resistance continued and even escalated. In 1989, his hold on power increasingly tenuous, Siad Barre ordered the Red Berets to massacre civilians. Torture and murder became commonplace in Mogadishu. On July 9, 1989, an Italian-born Roman Catholic bishop, Salvatore Colombo, was gunned down in his church in Mogadishu by an unknown assassin. The order to murder the bishop, an outspoken critic of the regime, was widely believed to have originated in the presidential palace. On the heels of the murder came the infamous July 14 massacre, when the Red Berets slaughtered 450 Muslims and injured thousands more who were demonstrating against the arrest of fourteen leading Muslim clerics. The following day, July 15, forty-seven people, mainly from the Isaaq clan, were summarily executed on a beach near Mogadishu. The July massacres prompted a shift in US policy, as the administration of President George Bush Sr. decided to distance itself from Barre. Much of his political career had rested on one of the two major Cold War superpowers, and as the Cold War receded in importance by the late 1980s, Barre was suddenly no longer important to either side.

With US support cut off and domestic pressures against him increasing, it was only a matter of time before the brutal regime led by Barre came to end. In late January 1991, the Hawiye clan-based United Somali Congress (USC) entered Mogadishu led by General Muhammad Farah Hassan Aideed, forcing Barre and his remaining troops to flee the capital. A period of looting and chaos ensued in the capital, and hundreds of thousands of Somalis were internally displaced throughout the country as they relocated to areas that their clans controlled (including Siad Barre himself, who fled to the safety of southern Somalia controlled by his own Mareehaan clan). In place of the centralized government, armed clan militias emerged to fight one another for political power: the Isaaq-affiliated SNM, which declared an independent Somaliland Republic in the north in accordance with the borders of the former British colony there; the Majeerteen-based Somali Salvation Democratic Front (SSDF); the Ogaden-supported Somali Patriotic Movement (SPM); the Gadabursi-based Somali Democratic Alliance (SDA); and the Rahanwayn-based Somali Democratic Movement (SDM). By 1992 the centralized state constructed on the Somali Peninsula had all but disintegrated into its constituent lineages and clans, whose internecine wars were drenching the country in bloodshed. A drought in the country in the early 1990s compounded problems, leading to a potential humanitarian disaster.

In 1992, after more than 50,000 people were killed in the war and more than 300,000 people starved to death, the United Nations ecided to intervene. The UN peacekeeping force, led by the US Marines, supervised the distribution of food and other humanitarian aid, averting an even worse humanitarian problem, and tried to organize a provisional government. In March 1993, a ceasefire was proclaimed between rival warlords in southern Somalia after tedious negotiating by UN officials. The UN peacekeepers took control of southern Somalia, but the militias were not disarmed. In June Aideed, leader of the Hawiye clan-based USC that had ousted Barre in January 1991, broke the ceasefire and attacked the UN peacekeepers. Clashes between the USC militia and the UN peacekeepers intensified, making it impossible for the UN mission to operate in Somalia. Thus, the US and the UN made the removal of Aideed a primary goal of the mission, which had not been the case at the outset of the intervention. Aideed, however, was backed by a well-armed militia group and resisted US and UN calls that he turn himself in, setting up one of the most gruesome engagements in recent US military history: the street battle in Mogadishu in October 1993, in which 18 US Marines and countless Somali civilians were killed. Days later, after major US media outlets aired footage of celebrating Somalis dragging the corpse of an American soldier through the streets of Mogadishu, US President Bill Clinton decided to abruptly end the mission and withdraw US troops from the country. While the US left in disgrace, Aideed remained in charge of his clan-based militia (the USC) until his death in 1996, when he was replaced by his son Hussein Aideed.

In March 1995, the UN humanitarian mission in Somalia was aborted amid continued fighting and all UN personnel left the country. With the departure of UN officials, Somalia descended back into chaos and civil war (perhaps best described as internecine clan warfare), which unfortunately has become the norm in Somalia over the past 20 plus years. In December 1997 Somali clan leaders met in Cairo and agreed on a plan to select a new unified national government. The summit was delayed for two years, however, as clan leaders failed to secure a ceasefire between the various warlords. In 1998 three northeastern areas seceded from Somalia to form the independent republic of Puntland. Finally, in May 2000, a national reconciliation summit was held in Djibouti. Over the course of four months, Somali clan leaders, warlords, and politicians discussed the future of Somalia. In August the Somali delegates elected a transitional assembly representative of the various clans and elected Abdulkassim Salat Hassan as interim president of Transitional National Assembly (TNA). However, this summit did not bring all the Somali factions to the discussion table as Somaliland and Puntland boycotted the summit. Initially, promises made in Djibouti were respected, and the TNA established control over southern Somalia; however, factional fighting erupted once again and by May 2001 the TNA lost control over most of the country. Today Somalia is still engulfed in chaos and anarchy, and warlords remain the real power in the country. The TNA controls Mogadishu to some degree; however, the rest of the country is divided into various militia-controlled areas.

The legacy of clan-based conflict, colonialism, and the Cold War have left Somalia a very divided and torn nation, despite the fact that it began as an independent state with a potentially promising future over fifty years ago. The economy remains plagued by external debt, estimated in 2000 at $2.6 billion. The suffering of the population is immeasurable, but a telling statistic is that life expectancy in Somalia is ~47 years, comparable to that of Afghanistan as one of the lowest in the world. Finally, to make matters worse, Somalia has been one of the countries pegged by US leaders as a possible haven for Al-Qaeda and ISIS terrorists wanting to take advantage of the chaotic situation in the country to set up camps there. The home-grown Somali terrorist group Al-Shabab, is allied with Al-Qaeda. According to a 2019 Human Rights Watch report:

Fighting, insecurity and lack of state protection, and recurring humanitarian crisis had a devastating impact on Somali civilians in 2018. The number of internally displaced people, many living unassisted and at risk of serious abuse, reached an estimated 2.7 million. The Islamist armed group Al-Shabab subjected people living under its control to harsh treatment, forced recruitment, and carried out deadly attacks targeting civilians.

Somalia, in short, is a country with a difficult and divided past and a very uncertain future.