Somalia irredenta

 Somalia is a desperately screwed up corner of the world — war, poverty, anarchy, mass famine. It’s also a significant haven for terrorists. So we’re likely to see it in the news a bit over the next little while. That being the case, I thought I’d pass along another one of my personal idiot tests. Here it is: anyone who discusses Somali politics without at least mentioning Ethiopia probably doesn’t know what they’re talking about.

Something that mostly gets missed: Ethiopians are the traditional enemies of the Somalis. The reasons for this are complicated, but here’s the big one: back in the 19th century, Ethiopia clawed off a big hunk of Somalia. Sometimes called Ogadenia, it’s an Arizona-sized territory, mostly arid, with a population of around 4 million people, almost all ethnic Somalis.

This might have worked out OK if the Ethiopians had treated their new Somali minority well and integrated them. Alas: up until the 1990s, various Ethiopian regimes treated the Somalis of Ogadenia with varying degrees of oppression and contempt. The Somalis, of course, responded with guerrilla movements, insurgencies, and rebellion. At one point in 1977 the government of Somalia actually sent troops over the border into Ethiopia to help the Ethiopian Somalis try for independence, It failed, but you can believe it’s remembered in Ethiopia.

I said “until the 1990s” because the current Ethiopian regime — while dictatorial, brutal, and obnoxious in all sorts of ways — actually has a surprisingly good track record in Ogadenia. It’s given the Somalis there limited autonomy under traditional leaders, and has mostly quit oppressing them. This has gone far (not all the way, but far) towards appeasing their grievances. There are still anti-Ethiopian conspiracies in Ogadenia, but they’re fairly small (for now). It doesn’t hurt that Somali is currently such an anarchic hellhole that few Ogaden Somalis want to join up, nationalist sympathies notwithstanding. The Ethiopian government may be a brutal dictatorship, but at least it’s an actual, more or less functioning government.

But! On the Somali side, taking back Ogadenia — whether the Ogadenians want it or not — has become an unquestioned tenet of Somali nationalism. No right-thinking citizen can question it, and all political leaders vie with each other in the intensity of their anti-Ethiopian rhetoric. And as Somalia descended into anarchy back in the 1990s, various leaders decided to show their chops by supporting insurgencies in Ogadenia, raiding across the border, etc. etc.

(BTW, I said that Ethiopians are the traditional enemies of the Somalis. That’s true, but the converse is not. Somalis see Ethiopia as an imperialist power that grabbed a third of their country and that remains a menacing, existential threat. Ethiopians see Somalia as an intermittent annoyance — sometimes negligible, sometimes an obnoxious nuisance. A rough comparison might be, say, Georgia and Russia.)

Anyway: back in 2007, Ethiopia eventually lost patience with this and invaded. Nominally, they were doing it to support the Somali “government” against “insurgents.” This was nonsense; the Somali “government” was just another armed group, and not one of the stronger ones. From Ethiopia’s POV, the invasion had nothing to do with supporting one group over another. It was more about throwing Somalia against a wall, hard. The idea was to demonstrate that Ethiopia was strong, Ogadenia wasn’t going anywhere, and Somali cross-border fun and games would carry a very high price tag. And arguably the Ethiopians succeeded at this, albeit in a way that generated massive negative externalities for all other players. A lot of people died, Somalia got even poorer and more anarchic, and the government that Ethiopia was “supporting” ended up even weaker than it had been, because they’d allied themselves with the hated Ethiopians. But the border quieted down.

Anyway: if nothing else, knowing the history gives you a useful bullshit detector. If someone starts nattering on about the conflict and either (1) never mentions Ogadenia, or (2) tries to frame the Ethiopia-Somali relationship as a religious conflict (as opposed to a classic nationalist-territorial one that Somali jihadism is making worse), then they’re talking crap.

More generally, you can’t talk about Somalia in isolation. That’s true of most countries, of course, but in the case of Somalia its lawlessness and open borders have encouraged all sorts of intervention, good and bad — okay, mostly bad — by outsiders. Kenya shares a border and mostly supports the government, but is wary because there’s a large Somali-speaking minority in Kenya too. (Back in the 1960s, the Somali government supported an insurgency in Kenya. It didn’t work out.) Eritrea supports the largest anti-government group, the Taliban-like Shabab, and other groups that are ferociously anti-Ethiopian. (That’s because Eritrea hates Ethiopia, and the two have their own little regional mini-cold war going.) The Chinese are quietly looking for oil. Even Uganda has a presence in Somalia. (Which resulted in Shabab blowing up a crowded restaurant in Uganda’s capital Kampala last year.) So it’s just impossible to separate Somali politics from regional politics.

But while Somalian politics is fractally complicated and dominated by violent conflict between different armed groups, Somalian political ideology is much more consistent: Somalia should be a united state, the state should be formally Islamic, and Somalia should recover its lost territories — most particularly, the Ogaden. The warring parties may disagree on the details (formally Islamic like Pakistan, or like Iran, or like Saudi Arabia? Attack Ethiopia right away, or wait until they’re weak?) but they’re in firm agreement on those essentials. Somalia has managed to maintain a very high level of intense, ferocious nationalism despite the near complete absence of a functioning state. This may explain why only Somaliland in the north has tried formal secession. And Somali nationalism is still going strong, despite the continuing political violence and some desultory attempts to imitate the Somaliland example.

Incidentally, the government — after a bewildering series of twists and turns — seems to be on the upswing at the moment; they drove the Shabab out of the capital last month. I wouldn’t count on that being a harbinger of much, but it isn’t a bad sign.

Comments

[private money lenders]

"It doesn’t hurt that Somali is currently such an anarchic hellhole that few Ogaden Somalis want to join up, nationalist sympathies notwithstanding. The Ethiopian government may be a brutal dictatorship, but at least it’s an actual, more or less functioning government."

At least this brutal dictatorship is functioning? So any government is good, even if it is brutal. Nice. Did you ever condider that Somalia might be better off without it's government?

[Noel Maurer]

Is this a serious question? If it is, we'll take it on ... but ask, where are lifespans longer and political freedoms greater, Ethiopia or Somalia?

[hard money lender]

Yes, of course it's a serious question, one you seem to have neglected to ask.

Again, you make the wrong comparison. The relevant question is, are the people of Somalia better off with or without a government?

And the scholarship on the matter clearly answers the question with the latter.

Please watch this presentation:

http://fee.org/wp-content/uploads/audio/YSC/2009/Stateless%20in%20Somalia.mp3

and see here:

http://www.peterleeson.com/better_off_stateless.pdf

and here:

http://mises.org/daily/2066

[Doug M.]

"the scholarship on the matter clearly answers the question with the latter"

The stupid, it burns.

The "scholarship" is a paper by Peter 'Pirates!' Leeson, using carefully cherry-picked data from a period when Somalia was briefly doing relatively well.

That period has passed. Currently, Somalia has over a million displaced people (out of a population of less than 10 million) and another 500,000 people have fled the country. The current famine has already killed tens of thousands of people, and is expected to kill several hundred thousand before it is done; currently, about 4 million people -- nearly half the country's population -- are "experiencing food insecurity". Human development indicators have been stagnant at a very low level for years now, and are expected to decline sharply in the next couple of years as the famine sends things like infant mortality and disease rates soaring.

But even in terms of 2005, the Leeson paper is crappy scholarship. Two quick examples: he emphasizes that the Siad Barre government was heavily dependent on foreign aid, but completely neglects to mention that much of the post-Barre improvement in HR indicators was the result of targeted foreign aid as well. Childhood immunization, for instance: Somalia's inoculation programs have been entirely foreign-funded for decades now. So noting that they've improved their numbers and then chalking this up to the wonders of anarchy is pretty fucking idiotic. Or life expectancy: he notes that Somalia's nudged up slightly while, for instance, Kenya's stagnated. But 1990s Kenya was going through the worst of the AIDS epidemic, which Somalia largely escaped. Whoops, he just forgot to mention this.

And, oh yeah, he doesn't disaggregate Somaliland. A third of the country actually has a functioning government. Leeson airily dismissed them because they don't collect taxes, but that was bullshit -- between customs revenue and foreign aid, they were able to function, albeit at a low level. And they've been growing steadily in size and competence for a while now; Somaliland's government budget nearly quadrupled between 2003 and 2010 (from $16 million to a still pretty low $61 million -- but it's an actual budget, with collected taxes, voted on by the legislature and everything). More to the point, they're recognized as legitimate, and are able to impose some degree of peace, order and economic development in northern Somalia/Somaliland.

Unsurprisingly, Somaliland's HR figures are significantly higher than the aggregated "Somalia" average. Somaliland's literacy rate, for instance, is around 40%, and about 50% of its kids are in school. That's low -- but those figures are roughly double the average for Somalia as a whole. Leeson completely ignores this.

The paper is full of crap like that. It's not scholarship; it's a contrarian piece that's shooting for some cheap PR.

-- There are governments that are so godawful, so malevolent, so utterly destructive, that anarchy is preferable. Nobody questions this. And arguably Siad Barre was in that category. But the relevant question isn't whether Somalia did better after Siad Barre was gone; he's been gone for a while now. The question is whether they'd be better with or without a government today. And if you look at Somalia today... well, it would have to be a pretty horrible government to be worse than this.

There's also the counterfactual. If you look at Somalia's neighbors, most of them saw their governments get somewhat better over the last 20 years. Ethiopia, for instance, went from being ruled by Mengistu, a Barre-like incompetent, malignant brute, to being ruled by a noticeably more competent and slightly less malevolent dictator. Ethiopia has seen hothouse growth over the last decade, more than doubling per capita income since the late 1990s. So, while Somalia might have continued to stagnate, it's probably not the way to bet -- and a Somalia that had done as well as Ethiopia over the last 15 years would be a much, much better off country than the Somalia that actually exists.

[Mary]

Somalia has had a negative publicity due to its significance to haven terrorists. The Somali government should help other countries to fight terrorism