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Somalia: the archetypal failed state

In 1941, Conrad Norton and Uys Krige wrote of the ‘White City of Mogadiscio, Capital of Italian Somaliland, [a] town won by man from the desert. . . . Literally without a tree, a shrub or a bush, Mogadiscio clings to the edge of the desert, strikingly picturesque with its snow-white buildings, many of great antiquity, its slender white towers, minarets and cupolas, and its rose-red Arab mosque. Towards evening, the town is invested with the most delicate pastel colours, and the encircling red sand-dunes glow like rubies lit by an inner fire.’1

Today, the picture is very different.2

As one measure, the language associated with the Horn of Africa country of Somalia (from which the self-declared Republic of Somaliland broke away in 1991) is virtually uniformly negative. It is usually deemed to have been ‘destroyed’, is ‘failed’ or ‘ravaged’, ‘a territory without a state’ or ‘stateless’. British Foreign Secretary William Hague referred to Somalia as ‘the world’s most failed state’.3 Mogadishu is ‘Africa’s most wounded city’, the capital of a country where ‘descriptions of chaos, hunger and anarchy’ abound, with problems ranging from ‘religionist authoritarianism’ to ‘clans’ to ‘foreign interests’.4

To take a somewhat more quantitative benchmark, by 2012 Somalia had been listed for five straight years at the bottom of the ‘Failed States Index’ published annually by the Fund for Peace and Foreign Policy magazine.5 Indeed, it has become the archetypal failed state,6 a caricature of misery, dearth and excess to which photojournalists travel in search of images of destruction, collapse, human suffering and helplessness. And it’s not hard to find them.

Parts of Mogadishu today look like those pictures one sees in sepia of Ypres or Amiens or Stalingrad or Berlin. In the old part of town, in the area around the once-prestigious Lido Beach, the shells of buildings, pockmarked carcasses of war, form monuments to more than two decades of fighting, most recently between the African Union’s peacekeepers (known widely as Amisom – the AU Mission in Somalia) and the militant jihadist Al-Shabaab movement. The roads are unpaved, less a path than bucking bronco, testament to decades of no investment; there is rubbish everywhere, smouldering underneath the human and goat scavengers, with plastic bags flying and lying around. The grandstand at Tarabunka, where the former dictator Mohamed Siad Barre took the salute of his armed forces, is a tangled mess of concrete and reinforced steel, discarded car chassis and panels, and pathetic refugee shelters and shops.

Somalia has more than 1.2 million refugees, including 300,000 in Mogadishu alone, among them these in Camp 77.

And the locals say things have really improved recently.

On the western outskirts of the city there are thousands of refugees crammed into Sonak and Camp 77, enveloping the once-proud Gaheyr University facilities. When one turns off towards the old stadium (now a camp for some of the 300,000 internally displaced people in Mogadishu, from more than 1.2 million countrywide) just after Village Restaurant where two suicide bombers killed themselves and a dozen civilians in an attack shortly after the election by parliament of a new president in September 2012, the Bakara market complex beckons, a site for regular Al-Shabaab suicide bombings and assassinations. Regardless, it remains a hive of commercial activity. People go about their business on foot and donkey carts, peddling petrol, fussing outside brightly decorated premises advertising building material and auto spares, with women constantly moving in brightly coloured scarves and veils like flares in the dusty gloom.

Years of war have placed Somalia at the bottom of the ‘Failed States Index’ for five straight years, and the effects are visible everywhere.

But Somalia is also said to be a ‘place of great promise’, one of those ‘opportunities in a lifetime,’ as a Mogadishu businessman has put it, ‘when you can start at the bottom, all over again’. It has bountiful fisheries, as befits a country with a 3,300km coastline, the longest in continental Africa, now that the pirates have forced those fishing illegally to think again. It has a great Dubai-like location, ‘a portal’ between the Gulf and Arabia and Africa. It exported a record 4.2 million head of livestock in 2010,7 mostly to the Gulf and Saudi Arabia through Berbera (in Somaliland) and Bossaso (in Puntland), and has the potential for as much as 110 billion barrels of oil.8

And it is remarkable how, for all the outward destruction, much of the economy has survived. In fact, the failed state of Somalia has actually served some segments of the population rather well. This is one reason why Somalia cannot be rebuilt unless Somalis change their attitude toward each other, whatever the African Union or the wider international community offers and does.

For now, however, the country remains massively dependent on external assistance for both security and the institutions of central government. In January 2007 Amisom took over from Ethiopian forces that had attempted since 2006 to quell the activities of Al-Shabaab. By October 2012, more than 17,000 AU troops were fighting on behalf of the Somali government with this aim. Equally, the donors were supporting Somalia to the tune of more than $1.5 billion in aid,9 excluding the financing for the AU mission, estimated at $247 million in 2011 and to between $450 and $500 million in 2012 with the absorption of 5,000 Kenyan troops, with some €300 million paid by the European Union mainly towards Amisom’s salaries.10

A 57-year-old educator and civil society activist, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, was elected as president by MPs on 10 September 2012, the first leader to be chosen inside Somalia since the overthrow of the Siad Barre regime more than twenty years before. This was hardly a transparent process: the new president was elected by MPs themselves selected by tribal elders, some of whose status was vehemently contested by the members of the very clans they supposedly led. Parliamentary seats were bought and sold for as much as $25,000 cash.11

In the process, Mohamud defeated the incumbent, Sheikh Sharif Ahmed, whose United Nations-backed Transitional Federal Government was accused of diverting as much as 70 or even 90 per cent of aid to corruption.12 The report by the UN Monitoring Group was rejected by the Mogadishu government, with the prime minister’s office describing the allegations as ‘absolutely and demonstrably false’.13 Other donors agree, pointing to the fact that the government never received aid direction along with the UN’s own inefficiencies and predilection to use sub-contractors without the necessary controls.14

The educator and civil society activist Hassan Sheikh Mohamud was elected as Somali president by MPs on 10 September 2012.

Two days after his election, Mohamud survived an assassination attempt. Little wonder that he was moved to say: ‘Security is my number one, number two and number three priority.’15 Lauded as the head of a ‘constructive elite’ coalition (one that built ‘universities, hospitals, charities, and businesses in the country during the long civil war’) which ‘defeated a parasitic elite coalition’ of ‘warlords and moneylords’ that had ‘devoted all its energies to diverting public funds’,16 he is seen to offer Somalia its best chance in twenty years of emerging from devastating civil conflict. But he will have his work cut out for him.

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With the above in mind, this ebook uses Somalia, the most extreme of examples, to examine three issues associated with whether external intervention can be successful at ‘putting back together’ or ‘stabilising’ failed states: First, why did Somalia collapse? Second, does Somaliland’s experience to the north offer any pointers to would-be state-builders in the south and further afield? And third, what can be learnt from the history of external intervention?

1 Conrad Norton and Uys Krige, Vanguard of Victory: A Short Review of South African Victories in East Africa – 1940-1941. Pretoria: Government Printer, 1941, p. 35

2 This ebook is based on three research trips each to Somalia (December 2011, June-July 2012 and September 2012) and Somaliland (June 2010, May 2011 and September 2012). Where not specifically footnoted, the quotes are taken directly from meetings during these visits.

3 On his visit to Mogadishu in February 2012. At http://english.alarabiya.net/articles/2012/02/02/192105.html.

4 For a most readable literary summary involving descriptions of modern Somalia and the harrowing life this produces, see Nuriddin Farah, Crossbones. Johannesburg: Penguin, 2012. See also Peter D. Little, Somalia: Economy without State. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2003.

5 See, for example, http://www.foreignpolicy.com/failedstates2012.

6 Political scientist Robert Rotberg even invented a special category of ‘failed state’ to describe Somalia: the ‘collapsed state’, which he defined as a ‘rare and extreme version of the failed state’ that is ‘a mere geographical expression, a black hole into which a failed polity has fallen’, where ‘there is dark energy, but the forces of entropy have overwhelmed the radiance that hitherto provided some semblance of order and other vital political goods to the inhabitants (no longer the citizens) embraced by language or ethnic affinities or borders’. Robert I. Rotberg, ‘The Failure and Collapse of Nation-States: Breakdown, Prevention, and Repair’, in When States Fail: Causes and Consequences, ed. Robert I. Rotberg. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004, pp. 9-10.

7 See http://www.somaliareport.com/index.php/post/370/Livestock_Exports_Drop_Dramatically_in_2011.

8 At http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-09-11/help-somalia-s-new-president-cut-off-aid.html.

9 Somalia’s total aid flow was $497m in 2010, of which $239m was in humanitarian assistance. See http://www.globalhumanitarianassistance.org/countryprofile/somalia. By 2012, this had increased substantially. Turkey, for example, is supplying $300 million in direct aid (projects conducted by Turks), including refugee camps, roads, hospitals and schools. The UN requested $1.5 billion in 2012, partly to prevent a return to famine. For example, the World Food Program was, by 2012, bringing in 5,000 tonnes of food aid into Mogadishu alone each month. See http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-202_162-20092927.html. This fed around 420,000 people on a continuous basis. See http://article.wn.com/view/2012/08/18/Somalia_food_support_for_420000_people_in_Mogadishu/. The benefits of such aid are, however, held to be dubious. See ‘Help Somalia’s President: Cut Off Aid’, at http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-09-11/help-somalia-s-new-president-cut-off-aid.html.

10 At http://somalianewsroom.com/2012/07/06/kenya-defense-forces-officially-integrate-into-amisom-to-save-money/; and http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/world/2012-05/03/c_131564771.htm.

11 See http://www.economist.com/node/21560905.

12 See, for example, Ken Menkhaus, ‘The Somali Spring’, Foreign Policy, September 2012, at http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/09/24/the_somali_spring?page=0,1; see also J. Peter Pham, ‘State Collapse, Insurgency, and Famine in the Horn of Africa: Legitimacy and the Ongoing Somali Crisis’, Journal of the Middle East and Africa 2, no. 2 (2011): 153-187.

13 At http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/insidestory/2012/07/201272081233390153.html. The UN report found inter alia that of every $10 received by Somalia’s transitional government between 2009 and 2010, seven dollars are unaccounted for. In May 2012, the World Bank reported that $131m in government revenues were unaccounted for from that same period. The UN report notes that almost a quarter of government spending in 2011 – over $12m – was ‘absorbed’ by the office of the president, prime minister and the parliamentary speaker, and that a further $40m in government revenues in 2011 could be missing.

14 Discussion, Turkish ambassador, Mogadishu, 27 September 2012.

15 Cited in the (Kenyan) Daily Nation, 24 September 2012.

16 Menkhaus, op cit.