Listening to the Better Angels of Our Nature: Ethnicity, Self-Determination, And the American Empire Chapter Thirty-Five Islamism in Africa: Part 2–On the Dilemma of the Horn: Somalia, Ethiopia, Djibouti, and Eritrea David Steven Cohen On October 3, 1993, a group of fifty-two U.S. Army and Delta Force soldiers were transported from their United Nations base on the outskirts of the capital city of Mogadishu on Black Hawk helicopters to be dropped in the center of city. Their mission was to capture two Habr Gidr clan leaders and take them to a detention center on an island off the southern coast of Somali. The United Nations had intervened in in Somalia in December 1992 in what had been called a humanitarian effort. While there were other nations in the peace-keeping mission, including Pakistanis, the United States had provided most of the troops. Known as the Unified Task Force (UNITAF), it was led by retired American Admiral Jonathan Howe, and its mission was to end the famine in the country caused by power struggle between the Darod and Hadr Gibr clans. The mission was approved by President Bill Clinton on the advice of his national security advisor Anthony Lake, and UN ambassador Madeleine Albright, although the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell had reservations. According to Philadelphia Inquirer journalist Mark Bowden, members of the Hadr Gibr clan felt that UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali of Egypt was trying to restore to power the rival Darod clan, which under former dictator Mohamed Siad Barre had ruled Somalia for twenty years but who was overthrown in 1991. Mark Bowden, Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1990), p. 71. But in July 5, 1993, Abr Gidr clan members ambushed and killed twenty-four Pakistanis soldiers, whose bodies were mutilated. The next day the UN outlawed the Somalia National Alliance (SNA), the political/military arm of the Habr Gidr, and put a $25,000 bounty on its leader General Mohamed Farrah Aideed. Mohamed Farrah Aidid, http://www.nightmissiontomogadishu.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/3245.jpg Muhammed Farah was the son of a Somali camel herder. He was educated in Italy and the Soviet Union, and became the army chief of staff and later ambassador to India under Siad Barre, before participating in the effort to overthrow him. He had fourteen children living in the United States, and one of his sons was a Marine reservist, who had come back to Somalia as part of the UNITAF. General Muhammed Farah’s nickname “Aideed” meant “one who does not take insults lying down.” His base was the Hawiye United Somali Congress (USC). In January 1991, Aideed’s militia drove the government out of Mogadishu. The United Somali Congress divided into two opposing factions, one lead by Aideed who was a member of the Habar Gidir sub-clan, and the other by Ali Mahdi Mohammed of the Abgal sub-clan. Meanwhile, in the northwest Somaliland declared it pre-1960 independent status. Secretary-General of the United Nations Boutros Boutro-Ghali, an Egyptian diplomat, wanted what Martin Meredith calls “a more dynamic role of the UN in the post-Cold War era.” Martin Meredith, The Fate of Africa: From the Hopes of Freedom to the Heart of Despair; A History of the Fifty Years of Independence (New York: Public Affairs, 2005), p. 471. The UN had evacuated its staff when the Somali government collapsed in December 1990. A famine gripped the country in 1991 and the International Committee of the Red Cross was the only international agency willing to assist Somalia. In March 1992 Aideed and Mahdi agreed to a ceasefire in Mogadishu, and the UN sent in a team of 50 unarmed observers to monitor the ceasefire, and 500 UN troops to protect them along with relief supplies. But the United Nations Operation in Somalia (Unosom) had few resources. Aideed was suspicious of that the UN was favoring Mahdi, and conditions continued to deteriorate. In December the UN Security Council authorized the Unitaf, the UN military force, to use all means necessary to establish a secure environment for humanitarian relief in Somali. The US military led a force of French, Belgian, Canadian, Italian, and Nigeria troops. Initially, the intervention seemed successful. In March 1993 the leading warlords signed a ceasefire agreement. Under terms of Security Council Resolution 814 Unosom was given the task of establishing a new government in Somalia. A new multi-national force from 23 nations replaced Unitaf troops. The command of Unosom II was given to the American Jonathan Howe, a former US admiral and advisor to George Bush. Aideed became increasingly suspicious that the UN was aimed at him, and the UN inspections of Aideed’s weapons sites led to violent confrontations with Pakistani UN troops. The American ordered Aideed’s arrest. The UN Security Council passed Resolution 837 authorizing all necessary measure to investigate, arrest, and punish those persons responsible for the confrontation with the Pakistani troops. On July 17 a multinational UN force of French, Italian, Moroccan, and Pakistani troops attacked Aideed’s compound in southern Mogadishu with missiles and artillery in which 54 people were killed including four Western journalists. In August Aideed sent a letter to former U.S. president Jimmy Carter asking him to send an independent commission to Somalia to investigate the June 5th ambush. Carter forwarded the message to the White House, and Clinton ordered the State Department to explore the possibility of a cease-fire through the intervention of Ethiopia and Eritrea. However, the plan required Aideed to leave the country. In the October 3rd attack two of Aideed’s lieutenants were captured, but Aideed managed to escape. But two Black Hawk helicopters were shot down. Eighteen American soldiers were killed, one of whose corpse was dragged through the streets of Magadishu, and one helicopter pilot taken captive, Chief Warrant Officer Mike Durand. The day after the battle members of Congress grilled Secretary of Defense Les Aspin and Secretary of State Warren Christopher about how this could have happened when the humanitarian mission had supposedly ended a few months before. Both Democratic Senator Robert C. Byrd and Republican Senator John McCain called on the administration to bring the troops home. In a meeting held in the White House attended by Anthony Lake, his deputy Samuel R. Berger, UN ambassador Madeleine Albright, Vice President Al Gore, Warren Christopher, Les Aspin, and Colin Powell it was decided to end efforts to apprehend Aideed and his top aides, renew an effort to negotiate a coalition government that would include Aideed, and to withdraw American troops by March 1994. Former U.S. Ambassador to Somalia Robert Oakley, who had been appointed by President George H. W. Bush, was sent to Mogadishu and met with the Hadr Gibr clan leaders on October 8th. Oakley had been in Mogadishu when the humanitarian mission had begun in December 1992. He left Mogadishu in March 1993, after the Clinton administration was inaugurated the previous January. Oakley told the clan leaders that the United States was ending Task Force Ranger’s mission and that the United States would exchange the two Hadr Gibr leaders it had taken captive in exchange of the American captive Mike Durand. The clan leaders took the message to Aideed, who was in hiding, and Aideed agreed. A Senate committee held two days of hearings on the incident and issued a report blaming President Clinton and the Secretary of State Aspin for the disaster. Aspin resigned two months later. Clinton wrote that it was a mistake to launch the operation in daylight and it was wrong to think that killing or capturing one man would solve the Somalia problem. Bill Clinton, My Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), p. 552. Madeleine Albright put the blame on the United Nations. She had the following to say about lessons learned. “The UN is only as strong as its members, and UN members did not pass the test. The original humanitarian mission had been broadened for good reasons but without sufficient preparation or resources.” Madeleine Albright, Madam Secretary: A Memoir (New York: Miramax, 2003), pp. 146, 152. Richard Clarke, who was the National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Counterterrorism under presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, wrote: “In retrospect, it is possible that the October Battle of Mogadishu may have been a second case of an al Qaeda role in an attack on Americans,” the first being the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center in February 1993. “Although CIA did not know it in 1993 and 1994, evidence later emerged and was included in the U.S. indictment of bin Laden that al Qaeda had been sending advisors to Aideed and had helped to engineer the shoot-down of the U.S. helicopters. Indeed, al Qaeda had bombed a hotel in Yemen in December 1991, thinking that U.S. Air Force personnel supporting the Somalia operation were living there.” Richard A. Clarke, Inside America’s War on Terror (New York, London, Toronto, and Sydney: Free Press, 2004), pp. 84, 87-88. Robert Oakley in an 1998 interview for the PBS television program “Ambush in Mogadishu” on Frontline said: I don't think there was much appreciation of the military consequences of entering into a conflict with one of the Somali factions. I think people over-estimated their military capabilities. At the same time I think they underestimated the political consequences, because Aideed, having been singled out by the United Nations and the United States and other governments as the enemy became, in the eyes of the Somali people, a hero. Because they are very xenophobic, and they reacted very strongly and would not allow foreigners to come in and single out one of their people even though they didn't like him, those who didn't like him began to rally to his defense, not just politically but he gained a lot of recruits and fighting against the United Nations in Mogadishu came in from other clans. Robert Oakley interview, “Ambush in Mogadishu,” Frontline (September 1998), http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/ambush/interviews/oakley.html Colin Powell wrote in retrospect: “We had accomplished our mission by ending the civil disorder that had disrupted the production and distribution of food and led to the mass starvation. It was now up to the UN force to maintain order. But UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali reasoned that since the catastrophe had been provoked by feuding fourteenth-century style warlords, the solution was a dose of twentieth-century-style democracy. The UN approved a resolution shifting the mission from feeding the hungry to ‘national building,’ . . . From what I have observed of history, the will to build a nation originates from within its people, not from the outside.” Colin Powell with Joseph E. Persico, My American Journey (New York: Random House, 1995), p. 580. http://t1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcS5oOMUzEpiejK7yPxLkCyHo8lOKPPZas8Cwgc-8-q1BnOqWPFv Mark Bowden wrote 29 articles about the incident for The Philadelphia Inquirer. They were re-published in 1999 as a book titled Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War and made into a movie of the same name in 2001 starring Ewan McGregor, Jason Isaacs, and Sam Shepard by Sony Pictures in 2001. The movie won two Academy Awards for Best Film Editing and Best Sound Mixing. However, Somali nationals claimed that depiction of the Somalis in the film did not resemble the cultural traits of the people of the Horn of Africa, nor the Afro-Asiatic language spoken by them. http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-VnMcFwLTp4c/T8HloacLzAI/AAAAAAAACLA/-Q3SKuyYW6E/s1600/Horn-Africa-Map.jpg The Horn of Africa is a peninsula in eastern Africa bounded by the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden on the north and the Indian Ocean on the southeast. Today, it comprises the countries of Eritrea, Djibouti, Ethiopia, and Somalia. The region is characterized by a low lying arid plain along the coast and Ethiopian Highlands in the interior, which is divided into two sections by the Great Rift Valley. The Awash River flows through the Great Rift to empty into a number of Lakes on the border with Djibouti. Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, is located at the foot of Mount Entoto and is part of the Awash River watershed. In northern Ethiopia is the snow-capped Simien Mountain range with Rash Dashen, the largest mountain in Ethiopia. The Blue Nile River has its source in Lake Tana and flows south and then northwest into Sudan, where it meets with the White Nile near Khartoum to form the Nile River. To the north of the Ethiopian Highlands on the border with Eritrea and Djibouti is the Danakil Desert. To the south of the Great Rift Valley are the Mendebo Mountains out of which flows the Juba River and Ahmar Mountains out of which flows the Shebelle River, both of which flow through Somalia to empty into the Indian Ocean. The Ogaden Desert is located in eastern Ethiopia on the border with Somalia. http://www.worldatlas.com/webimage/countrys/africa/lgcolor/etcolor.htm Most of the people in the Horn of Africa speak languages in the Cushitic, Semitic, and Omotic branches of the Afro-Asiatic language family. The Cushitic languages include Oromo (spoken by the Oromo people in Ethiopia), Somali (spoken by the Somali people in Somalia, Djibouti, Ethiopia, and Kenya) as well as Afar, Saho, Hadiyya, Sidamo, and Agaw; the Semitic languages include Amharic (spoken by the Amhara people of Ethiopia), Tingrinya (spoken by the Tigray-Tigrinya people of Eritrea and Ethiopia) as well as Tigre, Gurage, Harari, Silt’e, and Argobba. In addition, there are speakers of the Omotic languages (e.g. Aari, Dizi, Kafa) in southern Ethiopia, Nilo-Saharan languages (e.g. Mursi) in southwestern Ethiopia and Niger-Congo languages (e.g. Bantu and Swahili) in southern Somalia. Greater Somalia linguistic map https://sites.google.com/site/somaliahamradio/_/rsrc/1243229868015/broadcasting-to-somalia/somali%20map.gif The Somalis have a common religion (Islam), a common language (in the Cushitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic linguistic family), and a common descent (from the legendary figure of Somal or Samaal or Samele). Most are herders of camels, goats, sheep, and cattle, while in the southern part of the country there is some agriculture along the river valleys and along the coast the two ports of Mogadishu in the south and Berbera in the north. Among the pastoralist there are four major clan families (the Darod, Hawiye, Isaaq, and Dir) and numerous sub-clan groups. During the 25th century B.C. the region was known to the Egyptians as Punt. Between the eighth and seventh centuries B.C. the kingdom of D’mt was located in Eritrea and northern Ethiopia. After the decline of D’mt in the fifth century B.C. the Ethiopian plateau was divided in smaller kingdoms, which were reunited in the first century B.C. by the Aksumite Kingdom. Aksum became a middle man in the commerce between the Roman Empire and Ancient India. At its height Aksum dominated the Kingdom of Kush and extended its rule over the Arabian Peninsula. Under the King Ezana, who ruled between 320 and 360 A.D., Aksum adopted the Christian religion. Somali merchants became the main suppliers of frankincense, myrrh, and spices to the Egyptians, Phoenicians, Mycenaeans, Babylonians, and Romans in the city-states of Opone, Mosylon and Malao. In the seventh century A.D. the migration of Muslims from the Arabian Peninsula resulted in the transformation of the ancient city-states into the Islamic cities of Mogadishu, Berbera, Zeli, Barawa, and Merka, which became part of the Berber Empire. Mogadishu controlled the East African gold trade. In 896 A.D. the Sultanate of Showa was established in central Ethiopia. It was succeeded circa 1285 by the Sultanate of Ifat with its capital in northern Somalia. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/22/Adal.PNG/220px-Adal.PNG After the fall of Ifat, the multi-ethnic Muslim Sultanate of Adal controlled large parts of Somalia, Ethiopia, Djibouti and Eritrea between 1415 and 1577, but Adal came in conflict with the Solomonic dynasty of Abyssinia in central Ethiopia. From circa 1137 to 1270 the Zagwe dynasty of the Cushitic-speaking Agaw people ruled parts of Ethiopia and Eritrea, but they were succeeded by the Solomonic dynasty of the Ethiopian Empire. In 1508 the Ethiopian emperor Lebna Dengel asked Portugal to send men and weapons to fight off attacks by the Adal Sultanate that was supported by the Ottoman Empire resulting in the Abyssinian-Adal War (1529–1543). Both sides were so weakened by the conflict that it enabled the Oromo people to migrate into the region. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6e/Ajuuraan2.png\ Between 1218 and 1886 the Warsangali branch of the Somali Darod clan ruled the northern coast of Somali today under the Warsangali Sultanate, and from the thirteenth to the late seventeenth centuries the Ajuran Sultanate ruled large parts of the Horn of African. The Ajurans successfully fought off invasions from the west by the Oromo and from the east by the Portuguese. They had extensive foreign trade with East Asia, South Asia, Europe, the Near East, North Africa, and East Africa. They also developed through hydraulic engineering the water resources of the Shebelle and Jubba rivers. During this sultanate many people in the southern part of the Horn of Africa converted to Islam. In the eighteenth century an Ajuran soldier named Ibrahim Adeer established the Gobroon dynasty of the Geledi Sultanate. Sultan Yusuf Mahamud Ibrahim in 1843 consolidated the empire as far as the town of Bardera, and his successor Ahmed Yusuf (who ruled 1848–1878) forced the Omani Empire to pay tribute to the sultanate. The sultanate was eventually consolidated into Italian Somaliland in 1908. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sultanate_of_Hobyo#/media/File:Horn1915ad.png Between 1869 and 1927 the Majeerteen Sultanate under King Osman Mahamuud ruled much of northeastern and central Somalia. Much of the sultanate’s territory today is part of the autonomous region of Puntland in northeastern Somalia. To the south of the Majeerteen Sultanate was the Sultanate of Hobyo, established in the 1878 by Yusuf Ali Kenadid, a cousin of the Majeerteen sultan, Boqo Osman Mahamuud. Kenadid initially wanted to take control of the Majeerteen Sultanate, but was forced into exile in Yemen. He returned in the 1870s with a band of Hadhrami musketeers to seize power from the local Hawiye clans to establish Hobyo. In 1888 Sultan Kenadid signed a treaty with the Italians to make his sultanate an Italian protectorate, and his rival Boqor Osman did the same the following year. In both cases Italy agreed not to interfere in the administrations of either sultanate in exchange for economic concessions. However, Sutan Kenadid balked when the Italians proposed that Sultan Kenadid allow the British to land troops there to pursue the Somali religious and nationalist leader Mohammed Abdullah Hassan and his Dervish forces. The Italian removed him from power and exiled him to Aden, Yemen, and then to Eritrea, and replaced him with his son Ali Yusuf. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/49/EthiopiaRAND1908.jpg “Ethiopia projected an ancient history based on the highlands with its settled agricultural, sometimes loosely referred to as of a feudal character. In that context, state building had developed into a monarchy supported by local lords (ras) and the ancient Coptic Church,” writes Peter Woodward. “Around the highlands were various societies, including large pastoral communities amongst which to the east and the north—in modern day Somalia, Eritrea and Sudan—Islam was the predominant religion.” Peter Woodward, Crisis in the Horn of Africa: Politics, Piracy and the Threat of Terror (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2013), pp. 9-10. In the sixteenth century Imam Ahmed Gran unsuccessfully attempted to invade Abyssinia (as Ethiopia was known prior to World War II) from the Somali plains. The Muslims were allied to the Ottomans, while the Abyssinians were aided by the Portuguese. “For centuries afterwards Abyssinia/Ethiopia was to present itself as a Christian bulwark in a sea of hostile Muslims,” according to Woodward. “In the nineteenth century it not only resisted European imperialism by defeating the Italians at Adowa in 1896, but also embarked on its own empire-building, spreading its control over surrounding lowlands and their Muslim inhabitants.” Ibid., p. 10. According to P. T.W. Baxter, “Abyssinians used to stress their Middle Eastern rather than African cultural roots, as is so obvious in the reiteration of the Solomonic legend, taught in schools as history and justification for imperial rue. Just as the expansion of the European empire in Africa coincided with that of the Abyssinian expansion, so the latter took on some of the same sanctimonious assumption of bringing civilization to the savages.” P. T. W. Baxter, “The Creations and Constitution of Oromo Nationality,” in Ethnicity and Conflict in the Horn of Africa, Katwsuyoshi Fukui and John Markakis, eds. (London, England and Athens, Ohio: James Currey and Ohio University Press, 1994), p. 172. https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&site=imghp&tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1600&bih=719&q=map+of+Oromo-speaking+people&oq=map+of+Oromo-speaking+people&gs_l=img.12...1408.10582.0.12719.28.9.0.19.19.0.108.801.8j1.9.0....0...1ac.1.64.img..0.12.826...0j0i30k1j0i24k1.VYBkV90xs-U#imgrc=9sjUwCHOXZxfWM%3A In the last two decades of the nineteenth century the various Oromo peoples were conquered by the Kingdom of Shoa, which became the Ethiopian empire at the same time that the Italians, French, Belgians, British and Germans were carving out their own colonies in Africa. Oromo-speakers number 20 million or 40 percent of the population of Ethiopia, making them the largest linguistic group in the country. They are made up of a number of groups, including the Arssi, Boran, Guji, Karaiyu, Lega, Macha, Afran Kallo, Raya, Tulama, and Wollo. They adhere to a number of different religions, including Islam, Orthodox Christian, Roman Catholic, Lutheran, and Pentecostal. According to Baxter, few Oromo “have expressed loyalty to the state which would override their obligations as Oromo.” Ibid., pp. 167, 168. The Ethiopian king Menelik was able to conquer the Oromo with arms supplies by the European colonizers. Many of the Oromo were sold into slavery, their land expropriated, and others were reduced to serfdom. The result was the development of a pan-Oromo nationalism. Under Megistu the Ethiopian government imposed the use of the Amharic language on the Oromo. Oromo was tolerated as a “tribal” language, but not for official government use. Map of the Borana tribe http://www.ayyaantuu.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/boran_dstrb.jpg One of the subgroups of the Oromo ethnic group is the Garri people who live in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Somalia. They speak both Oromo and Somali, but they prefer to be part of the Somali community rather than the Oromo. Another Oromo subgroup is the Borana people. They are primarily cattle pastoralists who live on either side of the borders between Ethiopia, Somalia, and Kenya. Closely associated with the Borana are the Gabra people, who have a situational ethnic identity. The Gabra Miigo sub-group live in Oromia National Regional State in southern Ethiopia, and the Gabra Malbe in northern Kenya. Like the Garri, the Gabra are pastoralists; but unlike the Garri, the Gabra are not bilingual; they speak their own dialect of Afaan Oromo. Because of a shared pastoral life the Gabra consider themselves closer to the Somali than the Oromo. Yet their Afaan Oromo language makes them part of the greater Oromo nation rather than the Somali. http://jones-somalia.weebly.com/uploads/3/0/4/4/30443866/3755495_orig.jpg After Ethiopia under Menelik II became an independent nation by defeating the Italian army at Adwa in 1896, European powers negotiated several treaties with the Somali clans. Under an Anglo-French agreement in 1888 and an Anglo-Italian protocol in 1894, and Anglo-Ethiopian treaty of 1897 the borders of the British Protectorate of Somaliland was established. Between 1889 and 1925 the Italians established the boundaries of Italian Somalia. The British claimed a large part of the northwestern Somali peninsular as part of the British Somaliland Protectorate. But the Ethiopian victory at Adwa in 1896 and its occupation of Somali-inhabited regions on its eastern border forced Britain to cede its claim to this region in 1897 to Ethiopia. http://vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net/civilization-v-customisation/images/0/0f/AoI_DervishMap.png/revision/latest?cb=20160427205601 But in 1899 a group of religious Dervishes under Maxamed Cabdille Xassan revolted against the colonizers. Most of them came from the Dhulbahante clan of Maxamed’s mother. “Many Somalis perceived the resistance as jihad against Christian invaders. The uprising also included an element of sectarian fighting. Sufi orders which were opposed to the Salihiya, the school of Islamic thought which Maxamed Cabdille Xassan propagandized in northern Somalia, were also targeted. . . . The Dervish revolt was also a fight for power in the region between different clans and their leaders. Besides his matrilateral relatives, Maxamed Cabdille Zassan mobilized the Ogadeen, his patrilineal kinsmen. Dubulbanhante and Ogadeen Dervishes frequently attacked Isaaq groups with whom they were engaged in perennial feuds over water and grazing. No surprisingly, many Isaaq sided with the British and were equipped with weapons against the Dervishes.” The Warsangeeli on the northern coast of the British Protectorate at first supported the Dervishes, but ultimately sided with the British. The rebellion lasted until 1920, when the British decided to use aircraft against them. The British Protectorate became independent in July 1960 and the Italian Protectorate did the same in July. The two were then joined into the Somali Republic. “For the first two post-colonial decades, Somalia was firmly based on Somali nationalism and pan-Somalism,” writes Markus Hoehne. “These concepts comprised the idea of uniting all Somali-inhabited territories in the Horn in one ‘Greater Somalia’ and informed Somalia’s often aggressive foreign policy towards it neighbours.” Markus Virgil Hoehne, “People and Politics Along and Across the Somaliland-Puntland Border,” in Borders and Borderlands as Resources in the Horn of Africa, Dereje Feyissa and Markus Virgil Hoehne, eds. (Suffolk, England and Rochester, NY: James Currey, 2010), pp. 110, 101. http://www.worldembassyinformation.com/mapimg/djibouti.gif “Djibouti had been created as a French foothold at the bottom of the Red Sea, essentially to maintain a strategic presence,” says Woodward. Woodward, op. cit., p. 42. In 1885 France established the port of Djibouti and incorporated the surrounding lands into French Somaliland. The largest clan was the Issas, but the Afars who were related to the Afar community in Ethiopia constitute 20 percent of the population. While the French had favored the Afars, in 1967 they changed the name to the French Territory of the Afars and Issas in order to be more even-handed. There were also some other Somali clans and a small community of Arab traders originally from Yemen. “That tiny Djibouti existed at all was largely down to a combination of French ambition and frustration, says Woodward. “In the late nineteenth century that ambition was similar to that of Britain and Italy: to play a part in the protection of French interests in the international shipping through the Red Sea, and if possible to build a line of connected territories across Africa linking French Equatorial Africa to East Africa. But just as Britain had frustrated France in Egypt by taking effective control there in 1882, so in 1898 it was once more to frustrate France on the Upper Nile during the Fashoda Crisis. And while France did make diplomatic advances in Ethiopia, having defeated the Italians at Adowa in 1896, Emperor Menelik was not about to become overly dependent on the French. In 1977 France agree to the formal independence of Djibouti, and Gouled Aptidon, an Issa, was elected president. He attempted to be balanced in his appointments. But there was a single party, the Rassemblement Populair pour le Progrés (RPP) in the National Assembly. During the Somali-Ethiopian war in 1977 the Issas sided with Somalia and the Afars with Ethiopia, but this did not disrupt the stability of the country. http://www.hiiraan.com/images/gallery/201569635694478513589227Ethio-Djibouti-railway-1280.jpg One lasting legacy of French engagement was its building of the railway from Djibouti to Ethiopia’s new capital in Addis Ababa.” Ibid., p. 155. The strategic importance of Djibouti at the southern end of the Red Sea was shown during the Gulf War in 1991, when France used a military base there for its operations in Iraq. Following 9/11 the United States established a base at the former French Camp Lemonier for its counter-terrorism operations across the region, including Yemen. And Russia, China, India, and Japan all used Djibouti as a base for their anti-piracy activities. “It appears somewhat paradoxical that the Horn’s smallest and most vulnerable state should be the most stable, with no major political turmoil since its independence in 1977, writes Woodward. “[I]t has contrived never to behave in a manner that is perceived as threatening to any of its neighbors, which certainly makes it unique in the Horn. Instead Djibouti endeavoured to capitalize on its vulnerability to play what part it could in a peacemaking role.” Ibid., p. 158. http://www.stampworldhistory.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Italian-East-Africa1.png In the 1930s Ethiopia, Eritrea, and British and Italian Somaliland became part of the Italian East African Empire. After the war the entire region became part of the British Military Administration, thereby cancelling the previous cession. However, in the 1950 Britain returned parts of the borderlands to Ethiopia. An agreement between Ethiopia and Britain attempted to resolve the competing interest in the borderlands between Ethiopia and the British Protectorate of Somalia, but it was plagued by conflicting interpretations of the agreement. Tribal clans such as the Gadabuursi who were undergoing a transition from migratory pastoralist to sedentary farmers were divided. The pastoralists opposed British enclosures of grazing lands for agriculture, but the agriculturalist opposed Ethiopian taxes. http://www.lonelyplanet.com/maps/africa/eritrea/map_of_eritrea.jpg When the European powers of Britain, France, and Italy disengaged from the Horn of Africa after World War II, Ethiopia annexed large areas occupied by Somalis in the southeast and Eritrea in the north. Markakis notes that “Eritrea’s Muslims chose Arabic as the language of education for their children, even though it is not the native tongue of any ethnic group there.” Ibid., p. 236. Eritrea was a former Italian colony. After World War II it was under the control of a British military administration. However, Haile Selassie, the Emperor of Ethiopia, claimed that Eritrea was previously part of the Ethiopian empire. Half the population was Christian Tigrayans who spoke their own language and lived in the highlands. The Tigrayans supported unification with Ethiopia. The other half was Muslims who lived in the highlands, the desert region along the Red Sea, and the western lowlands. The Muslims favored independence. The United Nation suggested a compromise under which Ethiopia and Eritrea would form a federation in which Ethiopia would control foreign affairs, defense, and commerce, while Eritrea would have it an elected government that would control local affairs. Gradually, Ethiopia whittled away the rights of Eritrea, and in 1962 the Eritrean assembly voted to be annexed by Ethiopia. In 1964 Ethiopia was engaged in a brief border war against Somalia, and Eritrean rebels took this opportunity to launch a war for independence against Ethiopia. http://www.geocurrents.info/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Ethiopia-States-Map.png Ethiopia’s annexation of Eritrea in 1952 resulted in the establishment of the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF) in the 1960s, which was challenged in the 1970s by the more radical Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF). “The ELF believed that Eritrea had been tricked into the supposed federal union with Ethiopia in 1952 and it should be reversed,” says Woodward. Ibid., p. 45. The ELF was supported by Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt and Sudan, and Ethiopia was supported by the United States and Israel. “The movement that played the leading role in the overthrow of the military regime in Ethiopia in 1991 represents an ethnic constituency in Tigrai province in northern Ethiopia,” writes Markakis. “Tigrai is the junior branch of the Abyssinian family, closely related to the Amhara, the former rulers of Ethiopia, from whom they are distinguished only by their language. . . . Tigrai was completely bypassed by economic development under the imperial regime and, when that regime collapsed in 1974, there was not a single factory in the entire province. The people of Tigrai . . . blamed the Amhara regime for directly investment and capital to the central and southern regions of Ethiopia. When the imperial regime collapsed, hopes flourished for political reform that would provide fair representation and equal access to power of the state for all groups. Such hopes were soon dashed by the successor military regime, which opted for even greater centralization and rule by coercion. The resulted was the formation of the Tigrai People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) in 1975.” John Markakis, “Ethnic Conflict & and the State in the Horn of Africa,” in Ethnicity and Conflict in the Horn of Africa, Katwsuyoshi Fukui and John Markakis, eds. (London, England and Athens, Ohio: James Currey and Ohio University Press, 1994), p. 230. Meles Zenawi http://addisababaonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/url.png The Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF) under the leadership of Meles Zenawi was the first guerrilla force to revolt against Ethiopia in the 1960s and repel the Soviet-backed invasion of the Ethiopian army at Nacfa. But the ELF was defeated militarily by the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) under the leadership of Issayas Afwerki which became the dominant guerrilla force. “It was partly out of respect for the EPLF that the then Organization of African Unity (OAU), with the support of the United Nations, was willing to make an exception for its claim to independence,” writes Woodward. “Africa had seen a number of secessionist claims . . . but most members of the OAU supported the organization’s charter recognizing the former colonial borders, largely from fear that with any secession a precedent would be set which might be taken up elsewhere on the fragile continent. However, it was agreed that Eritrea would be seen as an exception and not a precedent. Eritrea had been a separate colonial territory under Italian rule, and then a UN trusteeship. The UN had then agreed to its incorporation into Ethiopia in 1952 by a vote of parliament.” Woodward, op. cit., pp. 143-144. Israel allied itself with Ethiopia and along with the United States helped train Ethiopian troops. In return Ethiopia allowed Israel to establish a naval base on Ethiopia’s Dahlek islands. “Ethiopia was historically fearful of Muslim encirclement, and concerned about Egypt’s claim on the Nile water and thus a danger to her shipping,” says Woodward. “Israel opposed the danger of the Red Sea becoming an Arab lake and thus a danger to her shipping.” Ibid., p. 49. Mengistu Haile Andom, http://ethiomedia.com/adphoto/mengistu_two.jpg Between 1972 and 1974 there was a severe famine in northeastern Ethiopia and parts of Tigra. The situation was made worse by military mutinies and high oil prices. In February 1974 enlisted men stationed in Neghelle in southern Ethiopia mutinied against their poor living conditions. The mutiny spread elsewhere in the army including the city of Asmara, the capital of Eritrea. Civilians in Addis Ababa began demonstrations, which then spread throughout Ethiopia. In September 1974 the army dethroned Haile Selaisse and imprisoned him and his family a committee of low-ranking officers known as the Derg led by General Aman Mikael Andom, a Protestant Eritrean. But General Andom was murdered and replaced by Major Mengistu Haile Mariam, who implemented a Marxist-Leninist agenda. The Derg decided to continue the war in Eritrea. Eritrean guerillas launched an assault and by mid-1976 they controlled most of the Eritrean countryside. The Ethiopian army maintained control only over the capital of Asmara and the ports of Massawa and Assab. By February 1978, Ethiopia was able to defeat the Somalis, and then turned its attention to Eritrea. By this time, Major Mengistu Haile Mariam emerged from being a member of the Derg to the sole ruler of Ethiopia. http://img0105.psstatic.com/159799596_his-imperial-highness-emperor-haile-selassie-i-post-card.jpg Haile Selaisee died in prison in August 1975. During his lifetime Selassie had become a cult figure in the African Diaspora by means of the Rastafarian movement in Jamaica. “The Rastafarian cult is a messianic movement unique to Jamaica,” writes Leonard Barrett. “Its members believe that Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia, is the Black Messiah who appeared in the flesh for the redemption of all Blacks exiled in the world of White oppressors. The movement view Ethiopia as the promised land, the place where Black people will be repatriated through a wholesale exodus from all Western countries where they have been in exile (slavery).” Leonard Barrett, The Rastafarians: Sounds of Cultural Dissonance (Boston: Beacon Press, 1977), p. 1. The name Rastafarian comes from Ras Tafari, the name of Haile Selassie before he became the emperor of Ethiopia in 1930. Ras was a title in Amharic comparable to the English “duke” and Tafari was the name of his family. He was the great-grandson of King Saheka Selassie of Shoa. Haile Selassie took on the title “Lion of the Tribe of Judah,” thus placing him in the legendary line of descent from King Solomon. The movement came out of the slums of West Kingston known as Trenchtown with the preaching of Leonard Howell, who had traveled to Africa and fought in the Ashanti War in 1896. It was spread in St. Andrew by Joseph N. Hibbert, who had been a member of the Masonic Ancient Order of Ethiopia in Costa Rica prior to returning to Jamaica, and his deputy Robert Hinds. Another key figure in the origins of the movement was Archiblad Dunkley, a seaman who worked for the United Fruit Company before starting his mission in Port Antonio. All relocated to Kingston, where the movement took form circa 1934. From Jamaica the movement gave impetus with the founding New York City in 1937 of the Ethiopian World Federation in support for the Ethiopian struggle against Italian colonization. The federation created chapters in the Caribbean, including Jamaica. In 1955 Haile Selassie announced that he was granting 500 acres of land to Africans in the West who would migrate to Ethiopia. This was followed in 1958 by the Rastafarian Universal Convention under the leadership of Prince Edward Emanuel. At the convention was also Reverend Claudius Henry, who had lived for a while in New York City and who in 1959 founded the African Reformed Church in west Kingston. He called himself the “Moses of the Blacks” who would lead them to the Promised Land. In October of that year people from all over Jamaica gathered at his church to depart for Africa, but no ships came for them. Henry was arrested, but the court freed him and only ordered him to pay a fine. However, he was re-arrested on the suspicion that he was planning a violent overthrow of the Jamaican government. While he was in prison, his son Ronald, who came back to Jamaica from New York City, trained a guerrilla band of Rastafarians in the Red Hills overlooking Kingston. Over the years, the Rastafarians developed series of beliefs and rituals. According to Barrett there are at least six basic beliefs: (1)Haile Selassie is the living god, (2) Africans are the reincarnation of the ancient Israelis, (3) whites are inferior to blacks, (4) the situation in Jamaica is a hopeless hell and Ethiopia is heaven, (5) the Invincible Emperor of Ethiopia is arrange for expatriated Africans to return to Ethiopia, and (6) in the near future Blacks shall rule the world. Among the rituals is the smoking of marijuana known as ganja. The use of ganja actually predates Rastafarianism and was used by native herbalists as folk medicine. http://cdn.inquisitr.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/fineartamerica.jpg Perhaps the most lasting influence of the Rastafarians was the music developed in the 1960s by its followers, known as Reggae, and its most famous singer/songwriter was Bob Marley. He was born in 1945 in on the farm of his maternal grandfather in Nine Mile, Saint Ann Parish, Jamaica. His father was a white Jamaican originally from Sussex, England, and his mother was an Afro-Jamaican. As a student in primary and junior high school in Nine Mile, Marley met Neville Livingston (later known as Bunny Wailer). At the age of 12 Marley and Livingston moved to Trenchtown, where Marley’s mother lived with Livingston’s father. There they started playing music together influenced by American Rhythm and Blues and Jamaican Ska music. In 1963 Marley and Livingston (now calling himself Bunny Wailer) formed a reggae group named The Wailers. In December 1976 two days before a free concert organized by Jamaican prime minister Michael Manley to ease tensions between two warning political factions, Marley, his wife, and manager were wounded by unknown gunmen at his home. He went on with the concert anyway. In 1976, Marley relocated in England, where he was arrested for possession of marijuana. In 1978 he returned to Jamaica for a One Love Peace Concert at which at Marley’s request the Michael Manley, the leader of the ruling People’s National Party, shook hands with his rival Edward Seaga, leader of the Jamaica Labour Party. As his reputation spread around the world, he was diagnosed with a malignant melanoma, and he died in Miami, Florida, in 1981at the age of 36. https://joshuaproject.net/assets/media/profiles/maps/m11486_et.png In northeastern Ethiopia on the border with both Djibouti and Eritrea is the Afar region. The Afar language is a member of the Cushitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic family. Historically, the Afar were ruled by individual sultanates, including the Sultanate of Aussa, the Sultanate of Girrifo,, the Sultanate of Dawe, the Sultanate of Tadjourah, the Sultanate of Rahaito, and the Sultanate of Goobad. During the Middle Ages, the Afar like the Somalis were associated with the Sultanate of Adal. In 1577 the Imamate of Aussa was founded by Muhammed Jasa who split the Adal Sultanate into Aussa and the Harari city-state. After 1672 Aussa went into decline, but it was re-established in 1734 as a sultanate under the Mudaito Dynasty. The symbol of the Mudaito sultan was a silver baton thought to have magical properties. After 1865 when Italy purchased Asseb from a local sultan (which became the colony of Eritrea in 1890), the Aussa sultan Mahammad ibn Hanfadhe signed several treaties with Italy. During the First Italo-Ethiopian War (1895-1896) the Ethiopian Emperor Menelik II moved troops near the border with Aussa. During the Second Italo-Ethiopian War (1935-1936) Sultan Mahammad Yayyo (the grandson of Mohammed Hanfadhe) agreed to cooperate with the Italian invaders of Ethiopia. So after the defeat of Italy in 1943, Ethiopia sent a military expedition that removed Sultan Yayyo from power and replaced him in 1941 by his nephew Alimirah Hanfare. Alimirah remained loyal to the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie. He wanted to unite the Afar people under an autonomous sultanate, while remaining within Ethiopia. After the emperor was overthrown by the socialist Derg, Sultan Alimirah was forced in 1971 to flee the country for Saudi Arabia, where in 1975 he founded the Afar Liberation Front in to defend the Afar’s land rights. Ethiopia’s Derg regime established the so-called Autonomous Region of Assab (now known as Aseb in Eritrea). But resistance continued and spread to Djibouti in the 1980s culminating in the Afar Insurgency in 1991. When the Derg was overthrown in that year, the sultan returned to Ethiopia and supported the Ethiopian People’s Democratic Front under Meles Zenawi. In 2008 there were military skirmishes with Eritrea over a border dispute, when Djibouti accused Eritrea of sending troops into the disputed region. Djibouti took the matter to the United States, but there was no resolution. Sultan Alimirah died in April 2011, and he was succeeded by his son, Hanfare Alimirah. “Historically the Muslim community had been peaceable and existed alongside the Coptic Christians with their stronghold in the highlands, but while the regime was resolutely secular in character it was increasingly perceived as having a core from the Tingrinya highland area asserting increasing control over the various other communities,” says Woodward. Ibid., p. 152. After the defeat of the military regime that ruled Ethiopia between 1974 and 1991, the Tigrean Peoples Liberation Front came to power in a coalition government that recognized nine autonomous ethnic-based regional states and two multi-ethnic city states. Two of the regional states were the Oromia and Somali National Regional States. But they became engaged in conflicts over the border between them. The matter was to be settled by a referendum, but this was rejected the pastoralists who wanted regional migration across borders. After the defeat of Somalia in 1978, Meingistu’s forces were able to push the EPLF back to the town of Nacfa. But the EPFL convinced the people across the border from Eritrea to launch their own rebellion through the Tigrean People’s Liberation Front (TPLF). “Tigray had been a historic heartland of Ethiopian monarchs, and the southward drift of the state’s centre towards what became the new capital of Addis Ababa had encouraged a feeling of Tigrean marginalization,” says Woodward. “While the EPLF sought secession, the aim of the TPLF was to replace the military regime at the centre, but the two were generally allies in their struggle against a common enemy.” Ibid., p. 33. In 1988 the EPLF defeated the Ethiopian army in a battle at Afabet. After fomenting additional revolts in Wollo and Gondar provinces, the TPLF created a new umbrella movement named the Ethiopian People’s Democratic Front (EPRDF). In 1991 Megistu was forced to flee the country for refuge in Zimbabwe, and the EPRDF took control of Addis Ababa, and the EPLF established an independent Eritrea. In 1993 a referendum took place in which Eritrea overwhelming voted for independence. The core leadership of the EPLF was from the Christian and Tingrinya-speaking highlands, and they had a Marxist orientation from having been trained in China. They were able to organize food relief from Port Sudan during the famines in the 1980s, and they favored land reform. But their policies were more about Eritrean nationalism than Marxism. The core support of the rival ELF was in the lowlands. The EPLF established a Provisional Government of Eritrea (PGE) with a State Council, of which Issayas Afwerki was Secretary, and a National Assembly. But Woodward says “that within the EPLF was a secret inner party, the Eritrean People’s Revolutionary Party (EPRP), which functioned as the real decision making vanguard, a concept of which the leaders, steeped in Marxist ideology during the war years, approved.” Woodward, op. cit., p. 146. Fighting between Ethiopia and Eritrea broke out in 1998, and by 2000 Ethiopian forces had advanced into Eritrean territory. According to Woodward, “The war with Ethiopia from 1998 also saw a growing prominence of the army alongside the ruling party, providing much of the justification for the growing authoritarianism.” Ibid., p. 148. Following its independence from Ethiopia, the United States established diplomatic relations with Eritrea. But according to the official policy of the United States State Department, “The United States supported Eritrea's independence, but ongoing government detention of political dissidents and others, the closure of the independent press, limits on civil liberties, allegations of human rights abuses, and the expulsion of some U.S. government agencies have contributed to strained U.S.-Eritrean relations. Eritrea's authoritarian regime is controlled entirely by the president, who heads the sole political party, which has ruled the country since 1991. National elections have not taken place since 1991 and the constitution has not been implemented. Regionally, Eritrea has long-standing border disputes with Ethiopia and Djibouti that, in the past, turned violent. Eritrea remains subject to two UN Security Council sanctions resolutions which impose an arms embargo, and restrict the travel of some individuals and freeze their assets.” “U.S. Relations with Eritrea,” Bureau of African Affairs Fact Sheet (December 2, 2016), http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/2854.htm http://www.geocurrents.info/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Ethiopia-States-Map.png After the fall of Megistu in 1991, Ethiopia politics became characterized by what has been called “ethnic federalism.” Woodward writes that “There was supposedly clearly formed ‘nationalities’ with distinctive languages and cultures, and the approach should have been to recognize and incorporate these rather than seeking to combat and perhaps replace them with a single new externally imposed identity.” Ibid., p. 52. The new government formed the Transitional Government of Ethiopia (TGE) to rule the country for the next two years. It included a Council of Ministers consisting of representatives of seven ethnic groups and a Council of Representatives. The government also established nine federal states, in which six of the nine had a dominant ethnic group, including Tigray, Amhara (the latter dominated by the old ruling people of Ethiopia), and Oromo (the Muslim Oromo people being the largest ethnic group comprising a third of the population of the county), Afar (the Afar people living also in Eritrea and Djibouti), the Harari city-state, Somali (largely inhabited by the Somali people). There were also several multi-ethnic states consisting of some of the 64 officially recognized ethnic groups in Ethiopia. These states were incorporated in the 1994 Constitution of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia consisting of a bi-cameral legislature. Under the new constitution every “Nation, Nationality, and People in Ethiopia has an unconditional right to self-determination, including the right of secession.” Ibid., p. 54. Mades Zenawi, a former student leader of the Tigrayans, was elected prime minister. While the government had agreed to Eritrean independence, in 1998 a war erupted in Eritrea followed by a renewal of fighting in 2000. Following the 2005 national elections, which according to Woodward “are regularly described as the first truly competitive elections since the EPRDF took power,” there were accusations of fraud. The EPRDF responded by cracking down on dissent and on the free press. “Ethiopia was in the process of becoming a dominant party system,” says Woodward, “a move that Meles Zenawi sought to justify with reference to the country’s political culture, which he depicted as not having ‘internalize’ the building of a competitive democratic system.” Ibid., p. 67. Meles Zenawi died in August 2012. http://blog.crisisgroup.org/assets/files/somalia-17june14.jpg The Kenya-Somali borderland between the Juba and Tana rivers was established as a geographic buffer zone between British Kenya and Italian Somaliland. These plains were viewed as a suitable only for nomadic pastoralism between the fertile highlands between of Kenya and the Shabelle and Juba river valleys of Italian Somaliland. The Italians acquired Jubaland province from the British in 1924 as a reward for Italy’s joining the Allies during World War I. It was inhabited primarily by Harti clan members. Following the collapse of the Italian East Africa Empire in 1941, Italian Somaliland came under the control of the British Military Administration, but a UN Four-Power Commission decided to return southern Somalia to Italy as a trust territory. Between 1950 and 1960 British Kenya was preoccupied by the Mau Mau rebellion in its Central Province and the Italian Trusteeship had little interest in the borderland. Ina referendum held in 1962 the majority of Kenya’s Somalis wanted to join the newly independent Somali Republic, but their desire was rejected by the outgoing British and the incoming Kenyatta administration. This resulted in a series of border skirmishes by armed Somalis. The Borana people are primarily cattle pastoralists who live on either side of the border between Ethiopia and Kenya. They are one of the sub-groups of the Oromo ethnic group. The Garri live in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Somalia. They speak both Oromo and Somali, but they prefer to be part of the Somali community rather than the Oromo. The Gabra people have a situational ethnic identity. The Gabra Miigo sub-group live in Oromia National Regional State in southern Ethiopia, and the Gabra Malbe in northern Kenya. Like the Garri the Gabra are pastoralists, but unlike the Garri the Gabra are not bilingual; they speak their own dialect of Afaan Oromo. Because of a shared pastoral life the Gabra consider themselves closer to the Somali than the Oromo. Yet their Afaan Oromo language makes them part of the greater Oromo nation rather than the Somali. The Garri and Borana sought the support of the Republic of Somalia, which sponsored the Somali Abo Liberation Front in its struggle against their rival ethnic group the Borana and the government of Ethiopia. Under both Haile Selassie and Mengistu Ethiopia provided the Borana with arms because of Ethiopia’s concern about the security threat posed by the Somalis. But in the 1990s the pattern of alliances changed. The Borana were suspected by the Ethiopian government of being in league with the Oromo Liberation Front, and following the collapse of the Republic of Somalia in 1991 the Garri and Gabra allied themselves with the Ethiopian government. In Kenya the Borana, Garri and Gabra sought support of their fellow ethnic groups on the Ethiopian side of the border in the elections in Kenya by obtaining Kenyan identity cards. http://bdeco.tripod.com/somalia/clan.jpg Somalia was divided into a complex of clans and sub-clans, which were eventually federated into five “clan-families”: the Darod, the Hawiye, the Isaq, the Dir, and the Digil-Mirifleh. “But it remained the overriding ambition of Somali nationalists to establish a ‘Greater Somalia,’’’ writes Meredith. “Reuniting Somali communities in the ‘lost lands’ of Kenya’s Northern Frontier District, the Ogaden and Djibouti, where about one-third of the 4 million Somalis lived.” Meredith, op. cit., p. 465. According to Hoehne, “For the first two post-colonial decades, Somalia was firmly based on Somali nationalism and pan-Somalism. These concepts comprised the idea of uniting all Somali-inhabited territories in the Horn in one ‘Greater Somalia’ and informed Somalia’s often aggressive foreign policy towards it neighbours.” Hoehne, op. cit., p. 101. http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/304/media/images/59311000/gif/_59311791_somalia_elbur_0312.gif In November 1925 Omar Samatar, one of Sultan Ali Yusuf’s commanders, captured the town of El Buur in central Somalia. The Royal Somali Colonial Troops (the Corpo Zaptié) attempted to retake El Buur from Omar, but failed. A third attempt was tried, but the Italian commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Splendorelli, was ambushed and killed. The Italian Governor Cesare Maria De Vecchi request additional troops from Eritrea, but the Italian government in Rome blamed De Vecchi for the rebellion and put the commander of the Eritrean troops in charge of the military effort to defeat Omar. But before the reinforcement arrived, De Vecchi offered money to any clan that would support the Italians. With their support and the forces from Eritrea, the Italians were able to retake El-Buur in December 1925, and Omar Samatar retreated into western Somaliland. By 1935 Mogadishu had been a major naval base and port for the Italians. Prime Minister Benito Mussolini sought to unite Greater Somalia by annexing the Ogaden region to which Ethiopia laid claim. This was his rationale for invading Ethiopia from Somaliland in October 1935. After defeating Ethiopia, Italy included Italian Somaliland into Italian East Africa that also included Ethiopia and Eritrea. In 1940 Italian troops invaded British Somaliland and occupied the Kenyan areas bordering Jubaland. Somali troops fought on the Italian side in the Royal Somali Colonial Troops. But in the spring of 1941 Britain regained control of British Somaliland and conquered all of Somaliland, Ogaden, and Eritrea and put them under the British Military Administration. But in November 1949 the United Nations agreed to grant Italy a trusteeship over Italian Somaliland with the understanding that Somalian would gain its independence within ten years. In the 1950 Britain returned parts of the borderlands to Ethiopia. An agreement between Ethiopia and Britain attempted to resolve the competing interest in the borderlands between Ethiopia and the British Protectorate of Somalia, but it was plagued by conflicting interpretations of the agreement. Tribal clans such as the Gadabuursi who were undergoing a transition from migratory pastoralist to sedentary farmers were divided. The pastoralists opposed British enclosures of grazing lands for agriculture, but the agriculturalist opposed Ethiopian taxes. In July 1960 the Trust Territory of Somalia and the former British Somaliland were united to form the independent republic of Somalia with Mogadishu as its capital. Britain and France encouraged their two colonies to unite as the independent nation of Somalia. “There were hopes that with a common language, culture and religion Somalia might be well placed to forge a new nation,” writes Peter Woodward. “However, from the outset the new government was keen to remind the international community that there were still many Somalis in the neighboring territories of Ethiopia, Dijbouti and Kenya . . .” Woodward, op. cit., p. 34. Somaliland had gained its independence from Britain in 1960, but it had decided to join former Italian Somalia in the new country of Somalia. “Instead of the proposed fair and democratic state,” writes Woodward, “political and economic power had shifted south to Mogadishu where in time it had been taken over by a military regime that proved to be cruel and rapacious, especially with regard to Somaliland in the 1980s.” Ibid., p. 84. While an independent Somaliland was supported by the United States and Britain, the Organization of the African Union (OAU) and its successor the African Union (AU) did not. The reason, says Woodward, was “In particular, existing African states have felt the potential threat of secessionist movement across the continent would be boosted were Somaliland to be successful. . . . An exception was made for Eritrea because of the agreement for a referendum on separation by the new post-Mengistu regime in Ethiopia. . .” Ibid., p. 84. Under Somalia’s 1961 constitution, modeled on the Italian constitution, there was a unicameral National Assembly elected by proportional representation. The assembly then elected the president, who would appoint the prime minister. But the northern region that had been British did not ratify the constitution. . . . However while the SYL continued to win elections, but 1967 more than 63 different parties emerged based on clan and sub-clan identities.” Ibid., p. 36. Haji Bashir Ismail Yusuf (from the Majeerteen sub-clan of the Hardi Darod) became president of the Somali National Assembly, Aden Abdullah Osman (of the Daar clan) the president of the Somali Republic, and Abdirashid Ali Shermarke (also from the Majeerteen clan) the prime minister (later president from 1967 to 1969). Major General Mohamed Siad Barre https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/52/Siad_Barre.png In 1969 a military coup led by Mohamed Siad Barre seized power and established the Somali Democratic Republic under a Supreme Revolution Council. Barre was born in 1919 in the Ogaden Somali Region of Ethiopia. His family was members of the Marehan Darod clan. His parents died when he was ten years old, and he moved to southern Somalia to receive his primary school education. He then moved to Mogadishu, the capital of Italina Somaliland, for his secondary education. In 1940 he joined the Italian colonial police (the Zaptié). During the British military administration of Somalia he rose through the ranks. In 1950 under the Italian Somaliland Trust Territory, he attended the Carabinieri (police) school in Italy. After two years, he returned to Somalia and rose to the ranks of the Somali military to became the Vice Commander of the Somali Army, when the country obtained its independence in 1960. Barre had been exposed to Marxism during joint military exercises with the Red Army, and he went about establishing a socialist regime under which all industry, banks, and businesses were nationalized and cooperative farms were promoted. His government banned clannism, but the government’s inner circle was referred to by the code name MOD, an acronym for Marehan (Siad Barre’s clan), Ogaden (the clan of Siad’s mother), and Dhulbahante (the clan Barr’es son-in-law, Colonel Ahmad Sulaymaan Abdullah, who headed the Somali intelligence agency). Somalia had tried to convince the United States, West Germany, and Italy to provide equipment and training of an army to regain the territory it claimed in Kenya and Ethiopia, but the western powers were unwilling. The Soviet Union, however, agreed, and in 1964, Somalia waged an unsuccessful war against Ethiopia. After the advent of military rule in 1974, Ethiopia switched from an alliance with the United States to one with the Soviet Union. At the same time Somalia switched from the Soviet Union to the United States. Because the Somali government was now anti-Soviet, the western powers began to send support to the regime. http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-hY5Cqbd9lVo/VPazuWPv6_I/AAAAAAAACLA/z_TDRbewYWY/s1600/m00309.png In July 1977 with the Ethiopian army under siege in Eritrea, Barre attempted to forcibly annex the predominantly Somali-inhabited Ogaden region of Ethiopia and the agricultural lands of southeastern Ethiopia as far as Djibouti. “The Oromo are one of the largest and most widely dispersed ethnic groups in the Horn, ranging from northern Kenya to norther Ethiopia, writes Markakis. “Many Oromo, including all the pastoralists, espoused Islam and developed an affinity with their Somali neighbours, while others were converted to Christianity, and were partially assimilated by the Abyssians who conquered their lands in the second half of the last [i.e., the nineteenth] century.” Markakis, op. cit., pp. 230-231. By September the Somali army occupied 90 percent of Ogaden and was threatening the railroad between Dire Dawa and Djibouti. At this point the Soviet Union intervened in support of the communist Ethiopian Derg regime by sending several thousand Russian troops with Communist Cuba sending another 20,000 troops. Faced with a war between two Marxist countries in Africa, the Soviet Union and Cuba decided to side with Ethiopia. “The Soviet Union warned against invading Ethiopia, seeking instead the building of friendly socialist relations between the two countries, but that hope was in vain,” writes Woodward. “Somalia’s invasion in 1977 led to its abandonment by the USSR which instead gave massive support to Ethiopia, which turned the tide in the conflict.” Ibid., p. 44. With the aid of Soviet and Cuban troops, the Somalis were defeated in March 1978 and withdrew from the Ogaden. “Interestingly,” writes Markakis, “the Ogaden clan in Ethiopia, who have long fought to join their ethnic kinsmen in the Somali Republic, now shifted their sights toward Addis Ababa, where ethnicity had become legitimate as the principle of group recognition and political mobilization.” Ibid., p. 233. After the Somali defeat in Ethiopia there was an attempted coup against Somali president Barre by a group of Somali Majerteen officers. They were unsuccessful and fled into Ethiopia where they established the Somali Salvation Democratic Front (SSDF) with its support primarily by the Isaaq clan. A Somali National Movement (SNM) was established in the north, which was supported by Ethiopia and South Yemen, after Barre switched his loyalty from the Soviet Union to the United States. The defeat resulted in various Somali clan-families warring against each other. In 1988 Ethiopia and Somalia reached an agreement to no longer support for each other’s opponents. In the same year the United States suspended military aid and in 1989 economic aid to Somalia. “Without Western support,” writes Meredith, “Somalia began to disintegrate, fragmenting into a patchwork of rival fiefdoms, controlled by clan chiefs, all armed to the hilt.” Meredith, op. cit., p. 469. In the 1980s Somalia suffered from a drought that affected much of northeast Africa which was worsened by refugees from the conflict in Ethiopia coming into Somalia from Ogaden. In an effort to suppress the SNM in the north, Barre signed a pact with his former enemy Mengistu of Ethiopia under which Mengistu agreed to stop his support of the SNM and in return Barre would end his support for the Somalis in Ogaden, thus permitting Mengistu divert troops to the conflict emerging in Eritrea. “While Barre’s action was seen by many Somalis as a betrayal, it failed to allow him to crush the SNM despite widespread devastation by his forces in the north,” states Woodward. Ibid., p. 38. “With no state over which to fight in order to gain resources, militias had to look to other target for their incomes,” writes Woodward. This came from widespread looting of farms and the growing market for the mild-narcotic known as qat. “It was this lawless environment, as much as natural famine, that contributed to the necessity of food aid.” Ibid., p. 74. But the food aid distributed by the United National Operation in Somalia (UNOSOM) was often hijacked by armed groups. The authoritarian regime of Mohamed Siad Barre in Somaliland turned the port of Kismaayo into a livestock export center, while Kenya suffered from draught and desertification. Refugees from Ethiopia and Somalia began coming to the borderlands, which increased in 1991 after the collapse of the Somali state. Lee Cassanelli writes: “it is certainly the case that many economic activities associated with the border areas such as livestock raiding, banditry, smuggling, gun-running and the like were and still are considered illegal by state authorities, and as such required policing and occasional military intervention by the authorities. Other forces of quasi-legal business that crossed the border, such as the long-standing commerce in miraa [qat] (a mild plant stimulant used widely in the Horn of Africa) or livestock, usually fall into the category of informal or second economies, which by definition are difficult to document and not readily susceptible to formal economic analysis.” Lee Cassanelli, “The Opportunistic Economics of the Kenya-Somali Borderland in Historical Perspective,” in Borders and Borderlands as Resources in the Horn of Africa, Dereje Feyissa and Markus Virgil Hoehne, eds. (Suffolk, England and Rochester, NY: James Currey, 2010), pp. 133-134. For generations miraa has been associated with the Meru people who cultivated it in the Nyambene Mountains of central Kenya. Its leaves were chewed as part of initiation ceremonies and meetings of the councils of elders. Barre’s regime resulted in an increase in inter- and intra-clan conflicts, and Barre finally was forced from power in May 1991 by a coalition of armed opposition groups, including the USC (United Somali Congress), the SPM (Somali Patriotic Movement), and the SNM (Somali National Front). Lidwien Kapteijns blames the inter-clan violence in Somalia on the legacy of Barre. “When Barre, who had been the president of Somalia since his military coup of October 1969, was toppled, his regime was morally, politically, and financially bankrupt,” writes Lidwien Kapteijns. “Moreover, in order to contain political and popular resistance against it, the Barre regime developed a calculated policy of using clan sentiment to exacerbate competition, conflict and grudges among Somalis. . . . [W]hen Mogadishu passed into its hands, the leaders of the USC, followed by USC fighters and civilian supporters, adopted a politics that defined as mortal enemy all Somalis encompassed by the genealogical construct of Daarood, which also included the president. . . . It did not just represent violence against civilians based on clan, which is in itself not new in Somalia, but a shift to a new kind of collective, clan-based violence, namely that of clan cleansing, in a new political context with a new dominant discourse.” Lidwien Kapteijns, Clan Cleansing in Somalia: The Ruinous Legacy of 1991 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), p. 2. By 1991 the United Somali Congress (USC) made up mainly by members of the Hawiya clan based in and around Mogadishu. Woodward says that in Somalia “the collapse of the internationally recognized state in 1991 has been seen as a major factor in the later emergence of piracy among other things.” Woodward, op. cit., p. 8. In April 2009 the American container freighter Maesk Alabama carrying food to Somalia was attacked by pirates in the Indian Ocean. Its captain Richard Phillips was taken hostage in one of the ship’s lifeboats. After several days in the lifeboat, Captain Phillips was rescued by U.S. Navy Seals. Woodward notes that “It was noticeable in the Maesk Alabama incident that US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared that the pirates were criminals and not terrorists.” He explains that “if the pirates were regarded as operating for ideological reasons, notably in Somalia’s case as part of an Islamist agenda, then it would be regarded as terrorism and it would be illegal for payments to be made. The pirates thus have a strong interest in avoiding being linked to the Islamist factions increasingly active on the mainland . . .” Ibid., p. 105. http://t3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcS09vCXT5e6jp9acJkG86LFDDMV3WYR1QMbtqP-rUVzvEDihL8x Phillips wrote a book about the incident titled A Captain’s Duty: Somali Pirates, Navy SEALS, and Dangerous Days as Sea, which was published in 2010. Richard Phillips with Stephan Talty, A Captain’s Duty: Somali Pirates, Navy SEALS, and Dangerous Days at Sea (New York: Hyperion, 2010). The book was made into a film in 2013 titled Captain Phillips starring Tom Hanks as Captain Phillips. It was nominated for six Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Supporting Actor for the performance by Barkhad Abd, a Somali-American, who was born in Mogadishu, moved with his family to Yemen during the Somali Civil War, and relocated to Minneapolis, Minneapolis, in 1999. He had no previous acting experience. The earliest Somali immigrants to the United States were sailors from northern Somalia who arrived in the 1920. Upon obtaining American citizenship, they actively participated in the Somali independence movement. Following independence in 1960 Somali students began to arrive to pursue their higher education. Many returned to Somalia after their graduations. During the Somali Civil War in the 1990s the number of refugees coming from Somalia increased dramatically. They settling in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul, Minnesota; Columbus, Ohio; Seattle, Washington; San Diego and San Francisco, California; Washington, D.C.; New York City; and Portland, Maine. The largest concentration, however, is in Minnesota. http://www.criticalthreats.org/sites/default/files/AEI_Somalia_Map_Political.gif In May 1991 with the collapse of the Republic of Somalia, the former British Protectorate of Somaliland seceded as the separate state of Somaliland. But in August 1998 the autonomous regional state of Puntland in northeastern Somalia contested the boundary with Somaliland. The Dhulbahante and Warsangeeli clans ended up in Somaliland, which was dominated by the Isaaq clan, but they identified with the Harti clan confederation in Puntland that includes the Dhulbahante, Warsangeeli, and Marjeerteen clans. The conflict over this borderland has made it dangerous for NGO (non- government organizations) to enter the region. “The Dhulbahante in particular refer to the anti-colonial struggle of the Dervishes when talking about contemporary politics in norther Somalia, recalling a heroic episode in which many of their grandfathers were involved,” says Hoehne. “Beyond clan history, the Dervish uprising is also part of the corpus of Somali nationalism, which is, in the absence of a strong Somali state, promulgated by Puntland.” Hoehne, op. cit., p. 117. With the establishment of Puntland in 1998 to the east and south of Somaliland at the tip of the Horn there development a border conflict between the two. The name came from the ancient name of the land known as Punt. It was dominated by the Majerteen branch of the Darod clan under the leadership of Abdullah Yusuf, who was succeeded in 2005 by Mohamed Muse Hersi ‘Adde’ and later by Abdirahman Mohamed Farole. By 2009 the stability of the country was threatened by the growth of Islamist groups and tension between the Majerteen and other groups within in the Darod clan. But unlike Somaliland, Puntland sought only to became an autonomous part of a federal Somalia. In fact, Abdullah Yusuf wanted to become the president of Somalia. Also unlike Somiland, Puntland’s economy was based not only on livestock raising but also for fishing. This presented a particular problem for it with the increase after 2000 in piracy. Although Puntland has been willing to address this problem, it has been unable to deal with it. Since 1997 Muslim leaders in Somalia have been gaining importance in part due to local sharia courts which formed a network known as the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) under the chairmanship of Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed. These courts were successful in 2006 in reducing the level of violence in Mogadishu as well as the attacks on international shipping by pirates. But the ICU was opposed by the old warlord militias and the United States that was concerned about the growing Islamist movement, especially with the emergence of Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, who had been associated with an offshoot of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood known as al-Ittihad. He is a member of the Ayr group within the Habar Gidir sub-clan of the Hawiye clan. He had been a colonel in the Somali National Army during the 1977 Ogaden War with Ethiopia. In 2006 Ethiopian forces with the support of American air power attacked Mogadishu in an effort to force the Islamic courts from power. The Ethiopian troops remained into 2007 and were seen as foreign occupiers. The African Union established a peace-keeping force called the African Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) that was comprised primarily of Burundi and Ugandan troops. What emerged from wreckage of the Islamic Courts Union was a new movement named Harakat al-Shabaab al-Mujahideen (Mujahideen Youth Movement), which spread in central and southern Somalia in opposition to the Ethiopian invasion. According to Woodward, “It was not so much that al-Shabaab was widely popular for its own teaching, as that its core members were ideologically committed, had a common Somali cause against the Ethiopian invaders—the traditional enemy—and were organized and capable of being ruthless in imposing their tough interpretation of sharia.” Woodward, op. cit., p. 90. But the co-founder of Al-Shabaab, Hassan Dahir Aways, was critical of Ahmed Abdi Godane of the Isaaq clan of northern Somalia, who became emir of al-Shabaab in December 2007, for blocking aid to the famine strikcne parts of southern Somalia. By August 2011 Al Shabaab was challenged by another Islamist group named Hisbul Islamiyya (the Party of Islam) under the leadership of Sheikh Aweys, who had fled to Eritrea and then returned to Somalia with Eritrean backing. Finally in 2009 Ethiopia withdrew its troops, but the struggle continued between two the Islamist groups in the south. Al-Shabaab now with links to al-Qaeda controlled much of south-central Somalia, but an Ethiopian-backed group known as Ahlu Sunna Wal Jaa’a (Followers of the Prophet Way and Consensus) stood between Al-Shabaab and Puntland and Somaliland. In 2008 the United States added al-Shabaab to its list of terrorist organizations. Al-Shabaab continued to impede the flow of humanitarian aid to the Somali victims of a drought in the south-central region of the country in 2009 forcing refugees to cross the border into Kenyan refugee camps. In September 2009 U.S. Special Forces attacked Shabaab-controlled territory south of Mogadishu, killing Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, an Al Qaeda member from Kenya who was involved in a 2002 attack on an Israeli-owned hotel in Mombasa, India, and bombings in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Al Shabaab claimed responsibility for bombing bars in Kampala, Uganda, during the 2010 World Cup in retaliation for Uganda’s lead role in AMISOM. In December 2009 the United Nations Security Council imposed sanctions on Eritrea, accusing it of providing arms and financial to militia groups in southern Somalia, including al-Shabaab. African Union peacekeepers also captured some Eritrean soldiers in Somalia. Eritrea denied these accusations and continued to support the rebel groups. In July 2012 the Obama administration froze the individual assets in the United States of Eritrea’s intelligence chief and a high-ranking military officer. http://media.web.britannica.com/eb-media/51/70151-004-68CC6C18.gif In the north of Somalia two small states were taking shape: Somaliland and Puntland. The Republic of Somaliland declared its independence in May 1991 under the Somali National Movement (SNM), which was dominated by the Isaaq clan. SNM leader Ahmed Ali ‘Tour’ became its first president, but he was replaced in 1993 by the former prime minister, Mohamed Ibrahim Egal. But political rivalries culminated in a civil war between 1994 to 1996 ending in a reconciliation rather than a victory for any side. President Egal died in 2002, and he was replaced by his deputy Daahir Rayah Kahin. But he was defeated in 2010 by Ahmed Mohammed Silanyo. The situation was further complicated by the founding of a number of radical Islamist madrasas (religious schools) in Somaliland aided by the high unemployment among Somali youth. There were reports in 2010 that the secessionist government in northwestern Somaliland under its president Ahmed Mahamed Silanyo had ties with Islamist groups, including al-Shabaab, that were waging war against the Somali government and its African Union allies. Puntland in January 2011 accused Somaliland of providing a safe haven for Mohamed Said Atom, an arms smuggler allegedly with ties to al-Shabaab. Puntland also accused Somaliland soldiers of fighting alongside Atom’s militia against the government of Puntland. But in June 2014 Atom split with al-Shabaab and surrendered to the Somali government. http://www.hiiraan.com/images/2012/June/somalias_President_Sharif_Sheikh_Ahmed.jpg In January 2009 Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed was elected president of Somalia. Later that summer the Obama Administration announced that it was sending military arms and with French military personnel were training Somali security forces in Djibouti where the United States maintains an air base as part of the U.S. military command for Africa. Jon Lee Andersons wrote in The New Yorker magazine: “This was a remarkable turn of events. As recently as two years ago, sending American arms to Sharif would have been unthinkable—he was a Western pariah, the titular head of the Islamic Courts Union, or I.C.U., an amalgam of local Islamic Sharia courts. The Courts, formed to rein in Somalia’s anarchy after years of clan-based warfare, had evolved into an armed movement that encompassed extremists linked to Al Qaeda. The Shabaab itself had grown out of the Courts. Sharif and his allies had taken power by defeating warlords who were supported by the United States.” Sharif was born in 1964 in the town of Mahaday in the southern Middle Shabelle region of Somalia to a family of Sufi scholars. He was a member of the Abgaal clan. He was educated civil and sharia law in Egypt, the Sudan, and Libya. In 2002 he returned to southern Somalia, where he worked for Muhammad Dhere, a warlord from the Hawiye clan, the largest clan in Somalia that traditionally controlled Mogadishu. But he had a falling out with Dhere, and returned to Mogadishu to teach in a primary school. When one of his students with kidnapped, he and the school principal arranged to free the student without any bloodshed. He told Anderson that the incident prompted him to establish the Islamic court system. However, the Islamic courts evolved into an armed militia, and in June 2006 Sharif and the courts seized control of Magadishu and drove the warlords, who had been receiving covert aid from the C.I.A., out of the city. The courts then established Sharia law. However, an Ethiopian invasions force endorsed by the United Nations and supported by the United States drove the courts from the city in January 2007. Sharif fled across the border to Kenya, where he was taken into custody by the police. He was freed the next month and went to Eritrea, where he organized a nationalist resistance movement to conduct a jihad against the Western “Crusaders.” Finally in January 2009 the United Nations sponsored peace talks in Djibouti resulted in Ethiopia agreeing to withdraw from Somalia and Sharif agreed to stop fighting. Somalia’s Parliament was expanded to include Sharif’s allies, and he was elected president. But Shabaab then declared war on the new Somali government. “It has become an article of faith among Sharif’s advisers,” says Anderson, “that, before the Ethiopian invasion, they were duped by the Shabaab, and did not know the extent of its extremism or its ties to Al Qaeda. There is a certain amount of historical revisionism in such claims.” John Lee Anderson, “The Most Failed State: Is Somalia’s New President a Viable Ally?” The New Yorker (December 14, 2009), http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/12/14/the-most-failed-state But internal disputes arose first between President Sharif Ahmed and Prime Minister Omar Abdirashid Ali Sharmarke of the Majeerteen clan and then between President Sharif Ahmed and the Speaker of Parliament Sharif Hassan Sheikh Adan of the Adan Mirifle (Siyeed) Ashraaf sub-clan of the Rahanweyn (Digil and Mirifle) clan. Puntland’s President Abdirahman Mohamud Farole of the Ciise Mohamud sub-clan of the Majeerteen Darod clan tried to get the federal government officials to put aside their differences to no avail. In September 2010 Prime Minister Sharmarke resigned, but the conflict between President Sharif Ahmed and Speaker Sharif Hassan continued. In October President Sharif appointed Mohamed Abdullahi Farmajo of the Marehan sub-clan of the Darod clan as the new prime minister, but President Sharif Ahmed and Speaker Sharif Hassan disagreed over when to hold a vote of confidence on the new prime minister. Finally, in June 2011 Sharif Ahmed and Sharif Hassan reached an agreement in Kampala mediated by Ugandan President Yoweri Museneveni and UN Special Envoy Augustine Mahiga that would postpone elections for the speaker and president for another year in exchange for Prime Minister Mohamed resigning as Prime Minister. The deal resulted in protests in the streets of Mogadishu demanding the reinstatement of Mohamed as prime minister. President Sharif Ahmed warned that Al-Shabaab, which was still waging war against the federal government, would take advantage of the protests. In June 2011, Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed resigned as prime minister, and he was replaced as interim prime minister by Abdiweli Mohamed Ali, a Somali-American who had a Ph.D. in Economics from George Mason University in Virginia. Al-Shabaab’s head of policy and region, Sheikh Hussein Ali Fidow charged that the Kampala Accord was “an example [of how] the country is managed by Uganda.” In October 2011 Kenyan troops crossed into southern Somalia in response to Al-Shabaab kidnapping several foreign tourists inside Kenya. At first President Sharif and Prime Minister Ali opposed the deployment of Kenyan troops in Somalia. But after a Somalian delegation met with the Kenyan prime minister, Raila Odinga, in Nairobi, the two countries agreed to a coordinated military offensive against Al-Shabaab in what became known as Operation Linda Nchi. They also requested that the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) peacekeepers police the regions captured from Al-Shabaab and that the International Criminal Court (ICC) investigate Al-Shabaab’s commanders for crimes against humanity. In February 2012 Somali leaders met in the town of Garowe and agreed to draft a new constitution that was approved by the National Constituent Assembly the following August. Meanwhile in June of that year President Sharif Ahmed signed an agreement in the city of Dubai in United Arab Emirates with President Ahmed Mahamoud Silanyo of the separatist Somaliland region in northwestern Somalia calling for reconciliation between all Somali parties. In the same month Godane announced that Al-Shabaab was joining al-Qaeda under Ayman al-Zawahiri. In June the United States offered financial rewards information about Godane and other al-Shabaab leaders. In response, al-Shabaab mocking offered 10 camels for anyone providing information about US President Barack Obama and 10 cocks and 10 hens for information about Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Godane was killed by a US drone strike in Somalia in September 2014, and he was succeeded by his head of al-Shabaab’s internal secret service, Ahmad Umar. In early 2015 the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) tried to get al-Shabaab to switch it allegiance from al-Qaeda to ISIS’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, but al-Shabaab refused the offer and detained any of its fighters who supported the change. Nevertheless, in October 2015 a senior al-Shabaab commander, Abdiqadir Mumin, and his followers in Puntland pledged their allegiance to ISIS resulting in warfare between these two factions. In September 2016 a twenty-year-old Somali-American named Dahir Adan, wearing a security guard’s uniform, went on rampage in the shopping mall in St. Cloud, Minnesota, stabbing 10 people before an off-duty police officer shot him in a Macy’s store. Adan moved with his family from Kenya to the United States at the age of two. He grew up in St. Cloud and graduated from Apollo High School in 2014, where the played basketball and soccer. The high school had one of the largest Somali students in the area, and there had been incidents of bullying and discrimination against them. Adan was a student at St. Cloud University. A news agency attached to the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq (ISI) stated that Adan was “a soldier of the Islamic State” and was responding “calls to target citizens belonging to the crusader coalition,” but local officials found no direct links to the organization. Within twenty-four hours of the incident, a truck flying the Confederate flag escorted by several motorcyles drove around the predominantly Somali neighborhoods of St. Cloud, according to the Minnesota Council on American-Islamic Relations. Washington Post (September 19, 2016), https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/an-unassuming-life-before-a-suspects-rampage-in-a-minnesota-mall/2016/09/19/f2a608f0-7e7a-11e6-9070-5c4905bf40dc_story.html?tid=a_inl&utm_term=.18f8444bc54d Two months later, Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Trump at a rally in Minnesota said: “Here in Minnesota, you’ve seen firsthand the problems caused with faulty refugee vetting, with large numbers of Somali refugees coming into your state without your knowledge, without your support or approval, and with some of them then joining ISIS and spreading their extremist views all over our country and all over the world.” Ibid. (November 11, 2016), https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/11/07/why-trump-warned-about-somali-refugees-and-why-it-could-backfire/?utm_term=.929fa99b561a In November 2016 a Somali student named Abdul Razu Ali Artan at Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, drove his car into pedestrians on campus and then began slashing people passing by, injuring eleven students, faculty, and staff before being shot and killed by a campus police officer. Artan was born in Somalia, but sought refuge first in Pakistan in 2007 before coming to the United States in 2014, where he was granted permanent residence status. The previous summer, he gave an interview to the student newspaper The Lantern in which he said: “I was kind of scared with everything going on in the media. I’m a Muslim, it’s not what media portrays me to be,” he told the newspaper. “If people look at me, a Muslim praying, I don’t know what they’re going to think, what’s going to happen. But I don’t blame them. It’s the media that put that picture in their heads.” The New York Times (November 28, 2016), http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/28/us/active-shooter-ohio-state-university.html?action=click&contentCollection=U.S.&module=RelatedCoverage&region=Marginalia&pgtype=article In Facebook posts Artan wrote: "America! Stop interfering with other countries, especially the Muslim Ummah [the Arabic term for the world’s Muslim community]. We are not weak. We are not weak, remember that." In another post he urged fellow Muslims to “honor Anwar Awlaki, our hero imam,” referring to the American-born Yemeni-American who moved to Yemen, joined Al Qaeda, and posted anti-American sermons prior to his being killed by an American drone in September 2011. In another he wrote: }If you want us Muslims to stop carrying lone wolf attacks, then make peace with 'Dawla in al sham,'" which is a reference to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). But the FBI noted that there was no evidence of contact between Artan and ISIS. U.S. and World in Partnership with NBC News (November 29, 2016), http://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/national-international/Ohio-State-University-Attacker-Angry-About-Treatment-of-Muslims--403618966.html Despite this, President-elect Donald J. Trump tweeted: ISIS is taking credit for the terrible stabbing attack at Ohio State University by a Somali refugee who should not have been in our country.ISIS is taking credit for the terrible stabbing attack at Ohio State University by a Somali refugee who should not have been in our country.”ISIS is taking credit for the terrible stabbing attack at Ohio State University by a Somali refugee who should not have been in our country.” “Donald Trump Blasts OSU Attacker: Says Somali Refugee Shouldn’t Have Been in the U.S.,” AOL News (November 30, 2016),’ http://www.aol.com/article/2016/11/30/donald-trump-blasts-osu-attacker-says-somali-refugee-shouldnt/21617297/s top national and international news In conclusion, the Horn of Africa provides examples of several themes that we have seen elsewhere in the world, including the artificial creation by European powers of political boundaries that divided ethnic groups, the American policy of anti-Communism during the Cold War that exacerbated these divisions by creating proxy conflicts between the United States and the Soviet Union, and the erroneous War on Terrorism policy in the present that masks the underlying ethnic conflicts that are the reason why people resort to radical Islamist jihad. But the region also provides some new issues as well. It wasn’t only European interference in the creation of British Somaliland, French Djibouti, Italian Somalia and the Italian occupation of Ethiopia during World War II, but also the historical conflict between Christian Ethiopia and Muslim Eritrea, Djibouti, and Somalia that were also factors behind the conflicts in the region. Furthermore, within Somalia there were conflicts between clans within the overall Somali ethnic group that were worsened by the United Nations and the United States taking sides during the Somali Civil War in the 1990s. Then, the United States took the side of Ethiopia in its invasion of Somalia in 2006. American movies have celebrated the American military in its dealings with Somalia: first in the 2001 movie Black Hawk Down about the disastrous attempt to arrest Mohamed Aideed, the warlord leader of the Hadr Gibr clan in Mogadishu, and then in the 2013 movie Captain Phillips, starring Tom Hanks, that casted Somali immigrants from Minnesota as the Somali pirates who hijacked the American container ship Maersk Alabama in 2009. The Black Hawk Down incident, which began as an well-meaning effort of the United Nations and the United States to provide humanitarian assistance to the starving Somalis during one of the regions repeated famines, resulted in a mission creep into taken sides between the rival Darod and Hadr Gibr clans. Although there has been a problem with Somali fishermen having resorted to piracy as a last resort to alleviate the poverty in the region, the Maersk Alabama incident has created the stereotype that all Somalis are brutal terrorists. And now with the 2016 election of Donald J. Trump as president of the United States, his anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim statements have made the matter even worse given the fact past American involvement in the region has provided fodder for the growth of the anti-American, pro-Al Qaeda al-Shabaab that controls much of Somalia today. The fact that there is a significant Somali refugee population in Midwest has brought the conflict home as seen in the September 2016 attack on shoppers in the St. Cloud, Minnesota, shopping mall by a Somali immigrant and the November attack the same year at Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, by another Somali immigrant. In both cases, the attacks seemed to have been done by home-grown terrorists. The answer, my friend, is not blowing in the wind. It’s not more saber rattling or immigration restrictions, it’s getting to the underlying reasons why people are attracted to radical jihadism: one of which is anti-Muslim prejudice and the other is taking sides in complex ethnic conflicts in the name of the War on Terrorism.