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Somalia

War-ravaged Somalia is often called the quintessential “failed state”—a country where central government effectively does not exist. Its history also illustrates the consequences of superpower intervention in post-colonial societies with scant resources.

The Horn of Africa was the site of labyrinthine Cold War maneuvers. Following pro-Soviet coups in Sudan and Somalia in 1969, Washington upped economic and military aid to its long-time client Ethiopia, while the Soviets established a naval base at a Somali port. In 1977, having received friendship overtures from the US and intimations of Saudi backing, Somalian dictator Siad Barre launched an invasion of Ethiopia’s southeastern Ogaden province, which he claimed as part of “Greater Somalia.” Ethiopia kicked out its US advisers in favor of Soviet ones, and shortly thereafter Barre did the reverse. Soviet- and US-supplied weapons and money fueled another decade of fighting in the Horn, contributing to the horrific famines of the 1980s.

During these years, Somalia became a large exporter of labor. Many Somalis worked in the Gulf at the height of the oil boom. But when the oil boom turned into a glut, their remittances dried up.

Deprived of Gulf cash, Barre’s regime began to rely on a narrowing support base in the dictator’s own sub-clan. Other clans, many of them targets of repression, organized armed resistance. In 1990, a full-fledged civil war erupted and Barre was overthrown. Two years later came the ill-fated UN-US “humanitarian intervention,” intended to ameliorate famine and arrest the warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid, but achieving neither objective. A self-described Transitional National Government has tried to reunify the country, but they appear to have been dislodged by an Islamist militia that took Mogadishu in June 2006. Meanwhile, two mini-states, Somaliland and Puntland, press claims for independence.

Labor remittances are still vital. In 2000, 40 percent of Somali urban households got by on money sent home, much of it through the informal hawala system unfairly stigmatized after the September 11, 2001 attacks as a conduit for financing terrorism.


Facts and Figures »