Over the past several months, the United States has confronted continually the problems of the Horn of Africa in the form of Somali pirates, political instability, and the rising threat of Al-Qaida. Daring rescues, supportive resolutions, and assassinations of terrorist leaders have formed the major part of the U.S. response. Although these decisive actions emerged out of immediate crises, they remain part of a long pattern of drift in American policy towards Africa and its decolonization over the past half-century. The pattern of inaction, disinterest, and inconsistency followed by crisis management with a quick return to somnolence clearly emerges in the history of U.S.-Somali relations.
It is little remembered that in 1947 State Department officials visited Mogadishu as part of the Council of Foreign Ministers’ Commission of Investigation to determine the disposition of Italian colonial holdings in the aftermath of the Italian Peace Treaty. The historian Scott Bills touched on this investigation in his excellent study of the role that the U. S. played in the eventual independence of Libya. Bills noted that the commission’s seven-month journey uncovered rising nationalism and familiarized several future State Department officials to the powerful anti-imperial impulses of the colonized. Like many of the future American forays into Somalia, the Commission of Investigation’s visit in 1947 was marred by violence, as the pro-independence Somali Youth League demonstrations clashed with pro-Italian forces in the very same markets that would see U.S. troops fighting Somali militias in 1993. Unfortunately, American officials learned from this experience to let other nations handle the problems that might arise from nationalist challenges and to distance themselves from the very nationalist movements that would lead African nations to independence.[1]
The ultimate outcome of the Commission’s efforts led to the return of southern Somaliland to an Italian trusteeship under the United Nations. Having washed its hands of responsibility for the area, the U.S. relied on Italy, Great Britain, and France to organize the emergence of Somalia as independent state. Over the next decade, Somalia would remain divided into three distinct colonial territories with limited development towards economic or political independence. Throughout the 1950s, the U.S. continued to allow its policy towards Somalia and its policy towards Africa as a continent to drift between rhetorical support for independence and material support for continued European imperial presence and delayed decolonization. Whether in North, West, Central, or East Africa, the U.S. offered its concept of evolutionary decolonization as a vehicle for political development to forestall feared movements towards independence. Indeed, C.D. Jackson, a long time foreign affairs advisor and senior executive officer of Time-Life International, informed President Dwight D. Eisenhower in early 1957, “The malaise [about emerging nations] arises….out of the growing realization that far too many of these nations are political teen-agers, and quite a few of them show signs of being or becoming political juvenile delinquents.”[2]
Despite these concerns, Somalia gained its independence during 1960, known as “the year of Africa.” Both Great Britain and Italy grew weary of their protectorates and trusteeships and agreed to merge northern and southern Somaliland into one independent nation with an Italian designed constitution that weighted clans. The Somali Youth League, a nationalist movement in a land dominated by clans, emerged as a major force in organizing the early nation, but soon faltered under the pressures of clan based multi-party democracy.[3] It was these failures that led to the emergence of the Siad Barre government in 1969. Barre’s ties with the East led to a continued disconnect from the U. S. and limited interest from the U.S. It was only during the crisis of the 1977-1978 Ogaden War that the U.S. awakened to a potential opportunity to develop relations. When Somali forces faced defeat at the hands of Ethiopia after the Soviet Union shifted its military and political support to Ethiopia, the U.S. focused on supplying weapons for Siad Barre’s forces as they fought off further Ethiopian incursions in 1982. As the U.S. again stepped into the breach of a crisis, the emphasis remained on military training of an apparent ally in the Cold War. With the Cold War’s demise, the U.S. drifted back to disinterest and failed to develop a concerted response to the internal challenges to Barre’s government, problems which ultimately led to the collapse of his government in 1991. Political chaos and economic dislocation that developed into a famine crisis quickly followed. Ironically, U.S. focus on the Iraq and the Middle East led it to miss a possible opportunity to foster peace and stability in East Africa.
With a full blown humanitarian crisis apparent by the end of 1991, the U.S. lurched into action in August 1992. The initial successes of Operations Provide Relief and Restore Hope triggered efforts to reshape Somalia under United Nations auspices. However, the role of the U.S. in attempting to reshape the political forces on the ground through military operations against the Somali warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid in October 1993 led to significant U.S. casualties and a decision to remove the U.S. forces directly supporting the United Nations mission. With this removal, the United Nations mission faltered and came to an end in the middle of 1995. While political chaos continued, an uneasy peace settled on Somalia and American focus drifted away from East Africa.
Despite the warnings of Al Qaida attacks in Kenya, Tanzania, and Yemen, the U.S. failed to take assertive actions to challenge the growing terrorist organizations which now found a safe haven in Somalia. In the aftermath of 9/11, the U.S. jumped into crisis management of the Afghanistan question, but it seemingly failed to notice the shared characteristics of Somalia. Only now, as the U.S. faces the crisis of Somali piracy, another looming humanitarian crisis, and Islamist groups such El Shabab pledging loyalty to Al Qaida, does Somalia reenter the American imagination. Unfortunately, the current responses of the U.S. government have been military. While immediately effective in freeing American captives or killing those responsible for the 1998 bombings, these actions do not build long-term structures with which to develop a peaceful and viable Somali nation. As with past periods of drift, the U.S. is now faced with crisis. However, if we can learn from our past mistakes, we may be able to build a concerted and continuous policy of engagement that will prevent future need for military intervention and the avoidance of quagmires like Iraq and Afghanistan.
The U.S. needs to present a concerted and consistent effort to forge policy to integrate Somalia into East Africa, the continent, and the world. It must avoid the use of military and covert operations as the central agent of policy. It needs to put resources into not only development and state building, but also into cultural awareness and integration of the questions of tribalism, religion, and economic dislocation. While the likelihood of the U.S. being sucked into an Iraqi or Afghani quagmire remain slim for Somalia, the U.S. should commit resources and long-term planning to insure that military action remains only a last option, as opposed to our only option in the next moment of crisis. However, if the Somali born terrorists in Minneapolis had succeeded in their efforts, the U.S. would have been awakened, would have surged troops to the area, and might now be opening a third front in the war on terrorism. To avoid this reaction, we need not only good police work at home, but also a more active, multi-faceted, and concerted foreign policy that brings the many sides together in ways that strive to avoid crisis management by unilateral American action.
[1] Scott Bills, The Libyan Arena: The United States, Britain, and the Council of Foreign Ministers, 1945-1948. (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1995).
[2] Memorandum by Mr. Galantiere forwarding C.D. Jackson’s “Intensified Neutralism and Nationalism within the Western Community,” 28 January 1957, Dwight David Eisenhower Presidential Library, CD Jackson Papers (1931-1967), Box 69, Folder-Log 1957 (1), 6.
[3] Basil Davidson, Modern Africa: A Social and Political History, (New York: Longman, 1995), 79 and 90.
