The Beginnings of Mohammed Siad Barre’s Tribal Cleansing

"Jaalle Mohamed Siad Barre was a Somali politician who served as the President of the Somali Democratic Republic from 1969 to 1991.

Barre, a major general of the gendarmerie, became President of Somalia after the 1969 coup d'etat that overthrew the Somali Republic following the assassination of President Abdirashid Ali Shermarke. The Supreme Revolutionary Council military junta under Barre reconstituted Somalia as a one-party Marxist-Leninist communist state, renaming the country the Somali Democratic Republic and adopting scientific socialism, with support from the Soviet Union. Barre's early rule was characterized by attempts at widespread modernization, nationalization of banks and industry, promotion of cooperative farms, a new writing system for the Somali language, and anti-tribalism. The Somali Revolutionary Socialist Party became Somalia's vanguard party in 1976, and Barre started the Ogaden War against Ethiopia on a platform of Somali nationalism and pan-Somalism.

Barre's popularity was highest during the seven months between September 1977 and March 1978 when Barre captured virtually the entirety of the Somali region. It declined from the late-1970s following Somalia's defeat in the Ogaden War, triggering the Somali Rebellion and severing ties with the Soviet Union. Opposition grew in the 1980s due to his increasingly dictatorial rule, growth of tribal politics, abuses of the National Security Service including the Isaaq genocide, and the sharp decline of Somalia's economy. In 1991, Barre's government collapsed as the Somali Rebellion successfully ejected him from power, leading to the Somali Civil War, and forcing him into exile in Nigeria. He was in power for 21 years and had one of the worst human rights records in the world. He died in exile in 1995." Wikipedia 

Towards the end of our stay in Somalia, Siad Barre's government was unpopular and the Somali Rebellion was very much in evidence. We had friends who belonged to different clans and tribes and we heard their stories about the terrible state of affairs in the country. Barre was hanging on to power by a thread, and there was a terrible atmosphere of fear. We knew folks who went missing and we heard the occasional gunshot on the beach not far from our house where people were shot and their bodies were thrown into the sea. There seemed to be no International news coverage and telephone lines and electricity in the capital were routinely cut. Soon after we left Somalia, the Civil War began in earnest, and Siad Barre was ousted from power in 1991. 

A friend Amina, whose husband was a writer and an artist went missing and she was desperately trying to get information about his whereabouts. Around that time I was getting ready to leave Mogadishu to go on holiday to the US with Adil. Robert, Michel and Farhad were joining us a couple of weeks later. Amina came to see me and asked if I would hand carry a letter and deliver it to the Amnesty International's Office in New York. She explained that Amnesty could only act if they had the specifics of people who had disappeared, names, locations and dates. Along with her friends she had compiled a list but she could not mail it, as all mail was being intercepted, and  there was no email at the time!! Amina was sure that as a UN spouse, I would not be searched. I told her I would talk to Robert, and when I did, he absolutely forbade me to carry it. Not only was it dangerous for me, but if the letter were found  on me, he could lose his job! I told Amina I would not be able to help her and she burst into tears which made me realize I was probably her only hope and I decided to carry the letter without Robert's knowing.

The following morning, Amina gave me the envelope and I carefully taped it to the bottom of my carry-on bag under a cardboard flap. I placed my books, toilet bag et all on top of it and said a prayer. Robert drove us to the airport and waved us goodbye, I tightly held Adil's hand and we pushed and shoved our way into the departure lounge. To my surprise and delight  I came face to face with Dominique, our Irish friend with whom I sang in a choir. He was the Director of Concern Ireland, they had a large program in Somalia and dispensed humanitarian aid all over the country, especially in the North. We had met a few days ago and he hadn't said anything about leaving the country so I heartily greeted him to find out where he was goin! No sooner had I begun to talk to him when I was surrounded by army and police personnel who carried their guns in an intimidating way and indicated that I should follow them. Fortunately for me, Mr Senagama a colleague from UNICEF witnessed what was going on and was on the same flight that I was taking. His son and Adil were good friends and Adil was reassured by his presence. Mr Senagama tried to come with me but was rudely told to keep away so he took Adil by the hand and assured me all would be well. He told me not to panic, to go with the men and to answer their questions honestly and briefly.

I was terrified, and my thoughts immediately went to the envelope in the bottom of my bag, I hoped that it would not be discovered. I was taken to a small room where I was searched, my checked bags were recalled and everything in them was removed and thrown on the counter. They kept asking me one question "how you know that man?" (Dominique) and I kept replying "I sing in a choir with him" I had no idea what they were searching for or what my crime was! When it came to my carry-on bag they destroyed and tore the pages from my diary and address book, they turned the bag upside down and tapped it, the cardboard flap held and the letter remained where it was! I had never been so fearful nor had I ever prayed so fervently as in those few minutes of my life! 

I was summarily dismissed, escorted and marched to the plane, the passengers were all in their seats and buckled up, Adil burst into tears when he saw me! Dominiqe was seated with two armed army officers on either side of him, and we both avoided eye contact. He was clearly being escorted out of the country, I had no idea what was going on!

It was only much later that I found out that Dominique had been made persona non grata and was given twenty four hours to pack up and leave Mogadishu. He had sacked an incompetent employee who had connections with some powerful people in government who wanted him reinstated. Our friend refused to do this and consequently was forced out of the country. Concern Ireland as a result of this incident, closed its operation in Somalia and all further assistance to the country was withdrawn. I still don't know why I was treated the way I was, or what they thought they would find on me.

I handed over the list of missing persons to a representative of Amnesty International at the UNICEF headquarters in New York, where I was also asked to brief some senior officials on the current situation in Somalia and my experiences there. Sadly, Amina's husband was never found.    

Towards the end of our stay in Somalia I was visiting Renuka, a Sri Lankan friend at her home in the city. We were having a leisurely cuppa, when we heard a terrific banging on the garden gate and a rumbling and rattling down the street. We ran outside, opened the gate and Renu’s watchman rushed in. He was shivering and shaking as he bolted into the compound and disappeared in a flash! We stood at the open gate horrified by what we saw. Rumbling towards us was a Municipal truck normally used to round up stray dogs, filled with men. Several were tied together and being pulled by chains from the back of the truck, their legs dragging along the muddy road! We had heard rumors that government troops had been roaming the city in these vans rounding up people from rival clans. We saw it first-hand and that terrible sight remains with me to this day! I shudder to think of the fate of those poor men!

 The Power Situation in Mogadishu

In the first year of our stay in Somalia while we were lounging around at home the electricity went off, not an uncommon occurrence, but what happened next was bizarre! There was a loud knocking at the gate, it was our friends who asked us to follow them in our car to the airport and to do it quickly. We hurriedly followed their instructions and when we got there we joined lots of other cars lined up on either side of the runway with their headlights on to guide incoming aircraft. In addition to the electricity going off that day, the emergency lights on the runway had also failed! 

The power situation was getting from bad to worse. People believed that oil from the transformers would make their skin white so oil was routinely stolen and sold to women and this added to the chaos and confusion at the power plant. Our electricity randomly went off till eventually in 1987 the plant shut down till the part needed to get it going again arrived from overseas. That took more than five months and most folks who could afford a generator had one. This brought the noise and pollution level in the city up to unbearable levels and though UNICEF gave us a small generator, we chose not to use it as we preferred silence to power. We ran a cable over the wall from Kamphil's large generator and it powered a single light, a fan and our microwave oven. The Microwave oven was a lifesaver for me, it was that or cooking on coal, we had no cooking gas and the electric stove never worked because there was no electricity.

Our good friend Chris Von Karltenborn found a great solution to the problem of the noise of the generators around him. He brought back two sets of construction earphones from Germany and once he and his wife had those on, they couldn't hear a thing around them! 

One evening Chris went downstairs from his study to get a drink of water from the kitchen. As he descended the stairs he was shocked at what he found. The living, dining and guest rooms as well as the kitchen were completely bare! The furniture and appliances including a large refrigerator and stove were gone! He called his wife to come down and they stood in a bare room in stunned silence as they contemplated the audacity of the thieves. They had been wiped out! Everything had gone but surely the neighbours must have seen something? they went out to find out and yes, they most certainly had! They had seen several men enter the house and go in and out carrying furniture and appliances which they swiftly loaded onto a waiting truck. The neighbours assumed the Von Kartenborns were on the move again and the packers were taking things to their warehouse for packing and forwarding to Germany! 

The Post Office

For over a month we had not received any mail through the Somali postal service. Many of us went to the post office to complain and were told to be patient, there was a backlog and they were short staffed, the mail would soon be delivered. Chris ran out of patience and insisted on seeing the mail. He was taken into a backroom where he saw a mountain of letters and packages thrown in piles all over the place. He decided to complain to the German Embassy and pressure was put on the postmaster to act and act fast. The Foreign Ministry was apologetic and assured us all that the mail would soon be delivered as the Minister of Posts and Telegraphs himself was to supervise the operation. But we never did get our mail and Chris decided to follow up. He again barged into the backroom and to his surprise found no piles of letters, the room was bare and everything looked spic and span and spiffy. Chris continued his probe and finally found out that on the eve of the Minister's visit, the post master had burned the pile of letters as he wasn't able to deliver them! He was complimented on his efficiency and as far as the Foreign Ministry was concerned there were no letters to be delivered!

Teaching Air Traffic Controllers Functional English 

Tom McKee was a friend and the director of ICAO, the International Civil Aviation Organization which is a specialized agency of the UN that codifies the principles and techniques of International Air Travels. He hired me to give elocution lessons to Somali Air Traffic Controllers whose English was heavily accented and consequently pilots from different parts of the world had difficulty understanding it.

I taught in a room at the airport and was issued a security pass that enabled me to drive on the runway in order to get to it. Security was most lax and the gates were often open and unmanned. One morning I almost had a heart attack as I drove on to the tarmac and came face to face with an enormous airplane. I don't know who got more of a fright, the pilot looking down at the speck of a person or me!

Teaching young adult males who had zero motivation to learn was quite a challenge and the manuals from which I taught were necessary but most unimaginative!  I knew I had to find a way to motivate my students and make the class interesting and fun!

Somalia had no official written script till 21st October 1972 when one was devised. The Somalis had a thriving oral literature in which poetry played a major role. K'Naan a Somali born hip-hop artist said "everything revolves around poetry. Conflict resolution is written in poetry, our laws are too. Everything about Somali people, the only way we know how to communicate is poetry." I decided to use poetry to teach these Air Traffic Controllers how to pronounce words in English that they needed to use every day in their jobs.

It was a brilliant idea and the class was was energized and excited to work in groups, and create poems using words and phrases such as "after departure climb straight ahead" "turn right on bravo" and "follow the greens" and were delighted to learn how to correctly pronounce the words in the poems they created! Tom was happy at the progress made and I am sure many pilots were most relieved to be able to be understand what was being said to them as they came in to land at the Mogadishu airport! 

Dealing with the Government

Robert Tyabji

Having worked in India and Bhutan and dealt with government officials on a daily basis, my apprehension in working with Somali counterparts was understandable. However, I soon discovered to my delight that government officials tended to be informal, approachable and accommodating. Even the customs were often so! As the months passed and my relationship with key information and health ministry officials became familiar and relaxed, I got to meet people to ministerial level, and would often be invited to their offices for an discussion over cups of a strong concoction of tea and coffee. Official communication was almost always face-to-face and very rarely were letters or any form of communication exchanged, so much so that a written communication from a government department was usually expected to bring unwelcome news! Since the phones never worked (and there was no internet), this system was appropriate and worked for everyone, although it did mean spending hours visiting government offices and locating the right people.

Driving in Somalia

Robert Tyabji

Watch this video - an aerial tour of Mogadishu in 2016

The video above was shot 31 years after we came to Somalia, and Mogadishu has changed dramatically during that period, but it does convey an impression of the post-conflict city.

In our time in Somalia, one was supposed to drive on the right hand side of the road. However, as I learned the hard way, this was more a guideline than a respected rule. One day, soon after we had arrived in Mogadishu, I was driving a UNICEF Fiat through town. The streets are narrow so one has to drive slowly and carefully to avoid various obstacles, meandering pedestrians and people shaking each others' hands in the middle of the road. In front of me was a Suzuki 4WD (Jimny genre). Suddenly, the Suzuki stopped in the middle of the road, naturally without signalling, and so I stopped behind him. Then without warning, he backed up and crashed into me! Stunned, I just sat there wondering how to react (Somali is possibly the world's most eloquent and difficult of languages and my use of it was zero. All attempts to learn Somali were fruitless). Then, without any indication that the driver was aware of what he had done, he drove off and disappeared, leaving me to explain the damaged radiator to a skeptical UNICEF transport manager.

Only the major roads in Mogadishu were paved. All the side streets were unpaved sand and there was no drainage. In the monsoon, the rain would turn the streets into rivers, leaving behind huge potholes and piles of sand on the shoulders. One day I was driving home in the rain when a car swerved dangerously alongside and the driver shook his fist at me screaming that I had insulted him by splashing his car!

The main roads connecting the towns had been built by the Italians as two-lane highways without any center line, markings, or drainage. They were dangerously eroded and potholed, so driving to Merka or Kismayo or anywhere outside Mogadishu was a daunting experience. One had to weave between potholes and be careful to stay off the shoulders while avoiding any oncoming traffic (which may be approaching on the wrong side of the road) and occasional wildlife such as wild boar and dik dik. The Somali bush is undulating semi desert with a thick covering of acacia thorn trees, which camels love to feed on. This is where the nomads roam with their large herds of camel and goats. One has to be on high alert to avoid at all costs any accidents involving the nomads or their livestock. Hitting a camel would certainly cripple it and if it was a female one would have to pay a huge sum of money in compensation for an untold number of future generations lost.

At beach parties my little Toyota Tercel 4WD station wagon looked puny and weak beside those brawny Land Cruisers and humongous Chevy and Ford wagons belonging to our more well-heeled diplomatic and oil industry friends. But like the toilet, the sands of the beach can be a great equalizer! In the sand, our little Tercel would leave those brawny beasts floundering and skidding as they ate our dust!

Our Somali Friends

Hootoksi Tyabji

Though the living conditions in Mogadishu were very difficult, Somalia and its people are very dear to our hearts. They are a handsome, proud and resilient race and most of them consider other Africans, and indeed most others, as inferior beings. The Somali nomad is a proud individual, completely independent and self-sufficient, with a direct line to God. We had some wonderful friends whose simplicity, honesty, resilience, hope and drive touched me in ways I find difficult to describe and we were so fortunate in the friendships we forged.

We were able to talk and have discussions on all manner of subjects from literature to politics, from female circumcision and genital mutilation to ecology, from world economics to family values and cultural differences. Our conversations and debates were lively and passionate and we spoke to each other not just from our minds but through our hearts.

We knew men and women who suffered degradation and hardship and yet were able to carry on with their lives with hope. I was forever being showered with generosity, gifts given freely from friends who had very little to give. In this respect, friendship to the Somali is akin to a family and clan relationship and presupposes total commitment, without reservation. When clan members arrived at our friends' doorsteps destitute from the war in the Ogaden, they were welcomed unconditionally, irrespective of their numbers, taking up residence and becoming part of the household. When a Somali friend "borrowed" something,  it was never returned. Unaccustomed to this, initially I found it most irksome but I soon began to value my Somali friends who I knew were always there to help me with no questions asked and no expectations.

Goethe said "To know someone here or there, with whom you can feel there is understanding in spite of distances or thoughts expressed…
That can make life a garden"  This is true of my Somali friends, I have lost touch with most of them but they remain in my heart forever.

 Postscript

Robert Tyabji

As it happened, our 4 years in Somalia were drawing to a close as some of the northern clans, disenchanted by Siad Barre’s increasingly violent populist and terror tactics, started insurgencies which soon spread into full-scale warfare between the clans (traditionally, there was always tension between the clans due to competing grazing rights for their camel herds). What followed is history; the attempted assassination of Siad Barre, the mass killings, the siege of the American compound, Black Hawk Down, the mass emigration of Somalis, and the complete disintegration of the once-proud Somali Republic. While all this was happening, I was transferred to the Republic of Yemen. News of our friends passing away, disappearing, or moving to Europe and North America, kept trickling in. From the safety of Yemen we painfully watched as the terrible events were unfolding just around the corner from us.

We finally said goodbye to Somalia with a sense of relief as the deteriorating situation was making it riskier by the day. But Somalia, with all its challenges and difficulties, had been good to us professionally and socially and we departed with great sadness but with wonderful memories.

Click here to read about the three stage productions Hootoksi was a part of: The Thurber Carnival in 1986, and The  Bespoke Overcoat and Open Sesame in 1988.

Following are some pictures to remember our times and life in Somalia.

Click here to view "Our Friends in Somalia" photos on Flickr

Click here to view "Growing Up in Somalia" photos on Flickr

Memories to Keep by Hootoksi Tyabji. Click on the image to view or download the book.

 Click for further reading on Somalia