Clan Cleansing in Somalia

The Ruinous Legacy of 1991

Lidwien Kapteijns

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780812207583
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Human Rights
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In 1991, certain political and military leaders in Somalia, wishing to gain exclusive control over the state, mobilized their followers to use terror—wounding, raping, and killing—to expel a vast number of Somalis from the capital city of Mogadishu and south-central and southern Somalia. Manipulating clan sentiment, they succeeded in turning ordinary civilians against neighbors, friends, and coworkers. Although this episode of organized communal violence is common knowledge among Somalis, its real nature has not been publicly acknowledged and has been ignored, concealed, or misrepresented in scholarly works and political memoirs—until now. Marshaling a vast amount of source material, including Somali poetry and survivor accounts, Clan Cleansing in Somalia analyzes this campaign of clan cleansing against the historical background of a violent and divisive military dictatorship, in the contemporary context of regime collapse, and in relationship to the rampant militia warfare that followed in its wake. Clan Cleansing in Somalia also reflects on the relationship between history, truth, and postconflict reconstruction in Somalia. Documenting the organization and intent behind the campaign of clan cleansing, Lidwien Kapteijns traces the emergence of the hate narratives and code words that came to serve as rationales and triggers for the violence. However, it was not clans that killed, she insists, but people who killed in the name of clan. Kapteijns argues that the mutual forgiveness for which politicians often so lightly call is not a feasible proposition as long as the violent acts for which Somalis should forgive each other remain suppressed and undiscussed. Clan Cleansing in Somalia establishes that public acknowledgment of the ruinous turn to communal violence is indispensable to social and moral repair, and can provide a gateway for the critical memory work required from Somalis on all sides of this multifaceted conflict.

Chapter 1

Speaking the Unspeakable: Somali Poets and Novelists on Civil War Violence

“History is the poisoned well, seeping into the ground-water. It’s not the unknown past we’re doomed to repeat, but the past we know. Every recorded event is a brick of potential, of precedent, thrown into the future…. This is the duplicity of history: an idea recorded will become an idea resurrected.”

—Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces

“One of the most productive ways of thinking about discourse is not as a group of signs or a stretch of text, but as ‘practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak.’”

—Sara Mills, citing Foucault, Discourse

Introduction

The research on which this book is based began as a study of Somali popular songs and poetry as mediations of civil war violence. This is a continuation of my earlier work on Somali popular songs of the nationalist era, a genre that, as I have argued elsewhere, proved to be iconic for this era’s will to modernity—its hopes for national unity and economic development as well as for a “modern,” autonomous, and desiring selfhood. In the era after state collapse, some of the most popular and widely known poetic mediations of civil war violence have indeed continued to be popular songs. However, in the course of my research, it became clear that, as an expanding and rapidly changing genre, the popular song was neither the most authoritative genre of popular culture that dealt with civil war violence nor numerically the most significant. This led me to look beyond popular songs to poetry that was not sung or set to music.

These texts and genres of popular culture can be found wherever Somalis live.¹ They are disseminated through Somali music stores, local, national, and international Somali radio- and TV programs, and hundreds of sites in Somali cyberspace, which increasingly forms the junction of all these media flows. From Boston to Toronto, Columbus and Minneapolis, Addis Ababa and Jigjiga, but with particular success in Djibouti, I spent time listening to recordings and talking to the young men who managed or worked in Somali music stores. However, I also received direction. Given that the violence of the civil war has so divided Somalis, I allowed myself to be gently guided toward what my friends and colleagues (especially the literary scholars and specialists in Djibouti) considered legitimate poetry, poetry that does not divide its audience but rather tries to unite it in support of peace. When it deals with Somali civil war violence, this “prestigious” poetry, I have argued elsewhere, has enormous moral and rhetorical power.² However, the very fact of its prestige also produces limitations. Given the latter, the following will include an examination of texts the Somali canon has traditionally categorized as “nonprestigious” genres, including, for example, prose fiction, still a relatively recent genre.

This analysis will therefore address the question of how a selection of Somali popular culture texts of different genres mediate (that is to say, represent, interpret, comment upon, and intervene in) the violence that accompanied and followed state collapse, especially the campaign of clan cleansing of 1991–1992. This involves an examination of the dominant discourses of these texts, as they contain and articulate interpretations of the causes as well as potential solutions to the divide and mistrust that opened up among Somalis as a result of this violence. Before examining the texts, however, it is important to ask how well-known they are to Somali audiences and how representative the discourses are of the wider range of poetry and popular culture about the civil war. A truly authoritative answer must await formal audience research, which has not been part of this study. Informal indicators, however, suggest the following. First, in the hundreds of poems and songs about civil war violence read and listened to in the course of this research, hardly any did not engage the discourses of (anti-)clannism, nationhood and national feeling, and Islam. This is also true for the limited number of women’s poetic contributions and even for texts dealing primarily with exodus and exile. Second, the poets and singers of some of the texts presented below performed them at one or more formal National Reconciliation meetings, as well as many other Somali gatherings in and outside of Somalia. This is true, for example, for Naaji’s “Lament for Mogadishu” and Shube’s “Sound, drum of wisdom.” Somalis everywhere followed the former, first on audio- and videocassettes and later via the Internet. Third, most of the texts below, even those that predate the development of the Somali Internet in the early 2000s, have been included in Somali Web sites, the single, most comprehensive and continuously expanding depository of Somali cultural production in existence.³ This inclusion in well known and popular general sites as well as Web sites specializing in poetry suggests that these texts circulate widely. They have also been included in the many diiwaans or poetry collections Somalis have begun to publish in the past decade. Finally, for some of the poems and songs available online we have the number of “hits” and thus know how often someone accessed them, but this is extraordinarily fragmented and impressionistic evidence.⁴

Somali Mediations of Violence: “Prestigious” Poetry

Poems of the Early 1990s

The first four texts presented here, three from the early 1990s and one from 2000, were authored by highly regarded members of that generation of artists that witnessed both the birth and collapse of the Somali state. They were key players in the creation of a national popular culture that emerged in the decade before independence (1960) and became an intrinsic part of the cultural nation-building project that the Maxamed Siyaad Barre regime first (in the 1970s) actively sponsored and, later, especially after defeat in the Somali-Ethiopian war of 1978–1979, subverted and helped destroy.

“Disaster”

“Disaster” (Masiibo) was authored in the early 1990s by Mustafa Sheekh Cilmi, a well-known poet who witnessed the clan cleansing in Mogadishu. Since 1991, the poet lived in exile in Nairobi, returned temporarily to Mogadishu, and has recently moved to Sweden. In “Disaster,” a long poem in the genre of gabay alliterating in “m,” Mustafa Sheekh goes into great detail about the violence that was committed in the first stages of the war.⁵ First, he positions himself morally and explains how he despaired of the situation in his country when he saw that violence, greed, and other forms of unethical, unjust, irreligious, and un-Somali behavior went unchecked, without any possibility even for talks or mediation.

When people moved away from religion and the path of justice,

when greed turned sincerity and selflessness into something shameful,

when people abandoned our way of life,

I became an outcast.

When they attacked any place that was at peace

and readied themselves to prevent people from ever coming together again,

when killing and robbing became permanent with no discussion possible,

and there was no one to be seen who told the perpetrators to stop,

that is when I gave up on the country, and folded and packed up my concern for it. (stanza 1)

However, it was the magnitude of the violence he saw that made the poet want to bear witness about the fighting; the loss of lives and property; the deaths of people of all kinds, from the poorest and weakest to the wealthy and strong; the destruction of houses, large and small; how people fled in a panic because of the shooting and the bombardments; how, as they ran, they were exposed to the wild animals of the bush and the sea; their exhaustion and starvation, and the rape of women of all generations, sometimes in each other’s presence, even in mosques.

Let me explain what moves me to speak today:

Dear God, how much wealth was obliterated in the fighting.

How many poor and destitute folks went down with it, people and property both destroyed.

How many capable individuals and strong, brave, and brilliant men did we lose.

How many tall houses were reduced to rubble, how many multi-storied houses brought down and burned.

How many mat- and mud houses were blown high into the sky.

How many cannons were let loose on us without interruption.

How many bullets did they shower down on us like rain.

How we scattered in all directions indiscriminately!

How people moved now forwards and then backwards!

How they cut the ropes of our ships, throwing us to the wild beasts!

How many were thrown as food to the wild animals in forest and plain!

Every enclosed space they turned into a grave.

On how many bodies, dead since yesterday or the day before, did flies throng!

As we staggered on, we were no longer able to move our legs from exhaustion!

Our lips crusted over, none of their shine remaining.

How did exhaustion show itself on Dahaabo and Faduumo!

How they mounted sweet-smelling girls and married women!

How many hijab-wearing girls had their belts torn from their waists?

How were women pursued into mosques they deemed safe!

Three generations of women raped on the same mat.

Time and again they stabbed virgin girls who had not yet been deflowered. (stanza 3)

To whom does the poet attribute responsibility and culpability for the events? First he mentions the Mooryaan, as the destitute young men who committed much of the actual violence came to be called in Mogadishu (Marchal 1993; Mohamed-Abdi 2001). The poet characterizes them as youth brought in from the countryside to do...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Note on Transliteration
• Introduction
• 1. Speaking the Unspeakable: Somali Poets and Novelists on Civil War Violence
• 2. Historical Background to the Violence of State Collapse
• 3. Clan Cleansing in Mogadishu and Beyond
• 4. The Why and How of Clan Cleansing: Political Objectives and Discursive Means
• Time-Line of Major Events
• Notes
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Name Index
• Subject Index
• Acknowledgments