Getting Somalia wrong? Faith, war and hope in a shattered state, by Mary Harper, London, Zed Books, 2012, 217 pp., £12.99 (paperback), ISBN 9781842779330
The author of this slim, well-received book is the Africa editor at the BBC World Service News. Harper embarked on reporting from Somalia soon after the predatory regime of Mohamed Siad Barre was toppled by a popular uprising in Mogadishu, bequeathing chaos and confusion. Scores of ventures have since been made to reconstitute a Siadist type of state – a hegemonic, interventionist political establishment that only feeds fellow clan cliques to the detriment of others. Until now, these attempts have only managed to perpetuate failure and missed opportunities.
Consisting of six chapters plus introduction and conclusion, the book sets out to rebut Somalia's current reputation as the world's most ‘failed’ state by exploring the proximal factors sustaining it. Harper provides an overview of Somaliland – a wonderful side of the former Somali Republic – the entity which has been able to overcome clan wars and build a successful, secessionist state. While southern Somalia failed time and again to rebuild state institutions, Somaliland has stood out as an example of democracy; not only did it succeed in establishing a viable state, it geared up to emerge as arguably the most democratic state in the conflict-ridden Horn of Africa. Somaliland's advanced political competition compared with the rest is demonstrated by the fact that it was democratically governed for eight years by Daher Rayale Kahin, a former spy under Siad Barre's rule, who hails from a not-so-dominant clan.
Chapters 1 and 2 provide a general introduction to Somali culture, politics, history, clan and country. Harper explains effectively that attempts to reunite Somali communities are quelled by the divisiveness of the clan system, which has ‘an almost endlessly splitting structure and poses serious obstacles to attempts to impose central authority’ (p. 11). Harper describes the recent proliferation of clan mini-states whereby pushiness on a federal system of governance is highly misconstrued. The terms ‘federal’ or ‘federalism’ are employed to buttress the quest and demand for clan self-determination in specific territories and to relieve the fear of a return to a Siadist type of totalitarian central state under which some clans are favoured at the expense of others. Harper claims that Somalia has never had ‘a stable, fully functioning nation-state, democratic or otherwise’ (p. 4).
Chapters 3, 4 and 5 tackle the contemporary phenomena of ‘state failure’, piracy and the role of Islam in Somali politics. Harper's definition of a ‘failed state’ seems sophisticated and generally incisive, but the concept's flaws are revealed in the attempt to employ it in the Somali context. The state of ‘failed state’ means to Somalis a situation when state institutions are completely non-existent or dysfunctional, and thus substituted by clan states and pseudo-institutions, particularly in the case of the former Somalia Italiana in the south. Even though there has been a failure in terms of politics, there are other aspects of Somali society which proved successful in their own ways – such as telecommunications and the hawala money-transfer system.
Chapter 6 offers a critique of the outside intervention in Somalia, which includes a focus on the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC), a conglomerate of alliances between Islamist moderates and extremists that organised themselves along sub-clan lines. Harper is both optimistic and sympathetic to the UIC, which led the 2006 deracination of the infamous warlords in southern Somalia. Harper explores how US policy toward the Horn of Africa has contributed to the resurfacing of the UIC as an al-Shabaab movement with links to al-Qaeda. Preoccupied with its own security interests in the Horn and thus disregarding the relative peace that the UIC restored to most of the southern regions, the US administration refused to work with them, while giving Ethiopia, Somalia's hostile neighbour, a green light to invade South-central Somalia, including the capital Mogadishu in which the UIC's power was concentrated. Harper, intent on proving that the US approach towards Somalia was wrong, overlooks the horrible methods adopted by the UIC to keep (in)security in the areas they controlled. After withdrawing from Somalia in March 1994, it seems that US military strategy is to attack Somalia from the sky, while more generally US policy has always been destructive, moving from propping up dictators to warlords and then to puppets.
The book contains a number of factual errors. First, the Islamic Court in North Mogadishu in 1994–97 was not controlled by President Ali Mahdi. Rather, it operated in a territory under his control, while the court's chair was Sheikh Ali Dheere, who later fell out with Mahdi. Second, the ‘declared jihad against Ethiopia’ (p. 83) did not lead the UIC to its military defeat. The US and Ethiopia, as Harper herself shows, were committed to destroying the UIC even before it came to power. Third, when describing the Somali rebel groups, Harper follows the dominant literature on Somalia which treats these groups as ‘clan-based’, which is misleading. For instance, the first rebel group, Somali Democratic Action Front (SODAF) – later renamed Somali Salvation Democratic Front (SSDF) – was born as a multi-clan movement, but when the late Colonel Abdullahi Yusuf assumed its leadership it would abruptly turn into a sub-clan entity.
Getting Somalia wrong? is an optimistic, sympathetic book in that it attempts to deconstruct a distinct, distorted image of Somalia's trajectory held widely by the US authorities, other Western policymakers and many Somalists. But before the ‘state’ is to be reinstated and before Somalis get Somalia right, they should agree on what had really happened and is still happening in Somalia.