The International Crisis Group's ‘Somalia Conflict History’ reproduces the received wisdom that ‘removal of long-time Somali leader Siad Barre in 1991 led to anarchy and violence in Somalia’. The first and arguably most necessary task accomplished by Lidwien Kapteijns's superb history is to remind us that Somalia's civil war began in 1978 and escalated in 1988. The most important shift of 1991 was, she persuasively argues, that state violence mutated into inter-communal violence, and that clan militias, which had been the modus operandi for both government and rebels in the late 1980s, became clans-in-arms. Kapteijns thereby reopens two profoundly important debates for Somalis and scholars of Somalia. First, she interrogates the idea of clan, contextualizing it in armed struggle for state power. Second, she reopens the debate on why the Somali state collapsed.
Kapteijns uses diverse and illuminating approaches. Her book is part political history, part analysis of Somali poetry and literature, and it includes testimonies of the wave of violence and destruction that accompanied the ending of Mohamed Siad Barre's rule in January 1991. The political history is broadly familiar, but the combination of the extraordinary brutality and venality of Siad Barre's regime and the armed opposition's ready resort to clan politics bears retelling.
Kapteijns makes excellent use of Somali poetry and novels. The more prestigious, authoritative, and public poetry, especially that written in 1991–2, provides graphic descriptions of bodies lining the streets, three generations of women raped on the same mat, and wild youth let loose by politicians to destroy the nation and debase Islam. They attribute blame to society at large, reserving specific guilt for the deposed president and his contenders. But these poets do not take the viewpoint of their own clan. In contrast, more recent literature and non-prestigious genres include poems that cheer on the poet's clan, for example by deriding the Daarood clan family, which was the main target of the 1991 pogrom. Kapteijns also quotes and analyzes recent writers who make clan-hatred narratives explicit, with the avowed aim of exposing the dirty secret and helping Somalis address this shameful and hidden element in their recent past.
Clan Cleansing in Somalia explores the question of why ‘clan’ became the ‘absolute and monolithic conclusion drawn at this particular juncture of history from a multitude of clan stories and hate-narratives that were already available’ (p. 208). Clan became the ‘master file’, drawing upon the power of earlier clan-based grievances and political histories, now hitched to the ambitions of leaders who wanted to use it for their goal of seizing the state. Clan also served as a frame for popular anger and pain. Kapteijns describes how, once the mega-narratives of the Hawiye/Irir versus the Daarood had failed to deliver state power for either of the rival contenders for the leadership of the United Somali Congress, those leaders then reached across these clan-family lines to build new alliances, all in the idiom of clan, to defeat the other.
In seeking out and reproducing testimony from the 1991 violence, Kapteijns brings the widely obscured extent of the killing, rape, and looting of that period, mostly targeted at the Daarood, to the surface. It was a uniquely horrible period, not only because of the scale of the violence (matching that of the destruction of the north-western cities in 1988), but because of the way that civilians were drawn in, not only as victims, but also as perpetrators. Kapteijns explores what one should call such violence: she finds the term ‘genocide’ unhelpful but finds that genocide studies as a sub-discipline has much to offer. And in turn, genocide scholars have much to learn from Kapteijns's analysis of the 1991 violence.
Kapteijns explores reasons why the USC headed by General Mohamed Farah Aidiid was ready to organize such destructive communal violence. He promised the wealth of the Daarood to his supporters, he cast the political divide in clan terms thereby encouraging Hawiye leaders from the Siad Barre government to defect, and he helped neutralize the political rivalry of Daarood leaders of rebel groups. Here, perhaps, Kapteijns is less persuasive, in that she neglects the day-to-day organizational demands of running an irregular army that lacked an institutional ethos, discipline, or centralized finance. At each stage in his military campaign, Aidiid's tactical calculus – including his determination to stop his rivals in ‘Manifesto Group’ inside Mogadishu from forming a government to pre-empt his seizure of power – led him to escalate the war by appealing to the basest motives. This minor quibble aside, Kapteijns has written a brilliant book that reopens some of the central questions of Somali history and politics in a compelling manner.
