Disarming Guerrilla Rebels
I just returned from a three-week trip in Somaliland, an unrecognized state north of Somalia. Somaliland was a British protectorate in the 19th and 20th centuries, and then merged with Somalia in the spirit of pan-Africanism that was going around in 1960. Somalilanders now consider this a huge mistake. After 22-year-old Siad Barre, a soldier from south Somalia, overthrew Somalia’s newly independent government, he became a punishing dictator. He marginalized, tortured, killed and bombed Somaliland. By the mid-’80s he had destroyed the whole region and the people fled to refugee camps in Ethiopia.
Somalilanders caught on pretty quick to his hostility towards them. In the ’70s Barre told Arab leaders in Libya that the Isaaq clan in Somaliland was actually Jewish, and should therefore be cleansed from the north east part of the continent, a predominantly Muslim region. But Siad Barre, Somaliland is 99% Muslim! The dictator made a practice of moving Somalilanders far away so they couldn’t be near their families. It sounds remniscent of Stalin’s displacement policy for Soviets.
At this point the bravest and brightest fled Barre’s campaign and started a liberation movement called SNM: the Somali National Movement.
This movement eventually comprised almost every teenager and man from Somaliland. They hid in the jungle of Ethiopia and attacked Barre’s bases. The dictator was eventually overthrown with the help of two other rebel groups, in 1991.
Dr. Omar Dihoud was one of the founders of SNM, and now he is Somaliland’s only psychiatrist. He was conscripted into Barre’s huge military in the 1970s, and educated in St. Petersburg at a Russian military medical school. (Barre was allied with the Soviet Union until the late ’70s.) Now Dihoud lives in London and Somaliland. He is almost blind from a medical condition he’s had since childhood. He is the most remarkable man, and I was fortunate to live across the hall from him at the Imperial Hotel, where we had coffee or food in the garden on an almost daily basis.
After SNM liberated Somaliland, the movement disintegrated into factions that fought each other for several years. The same thing happens in almost all of the aftermaths of African civil wars, but very few, if any countries have successfully addressed the problem of disarming their “freedom fighters.” In most cases, especially Somalia, the guerrillas who were bent on saving their country end up destroying it later. The UN is prepared to spend $7.4 billion this year to solve this perplexing fallout across Africa. Dr. Dihoud has an explanation. It’s not rocket science, but implementation is often more difficult than troubleshooting.
Here is Dr. Dihoud’s story. I highly recommend you listen. His delivery is captivating.
When the people are in a guerilla war, when the people are fighting against the dictator, when the people are in the bush, they resent each other. They disagree with each other. Because, when the people are in the bush, they don’t have clean water, they have no food, hygiene is very poor. Some of them they say: “Let’s speed up the fighting against the dictator!” Others, who’ve got the power in their hands, they say: “It’s too dangerous.” So people, they blame each other because of the difficulties they are going through, because of the danger they are in, because of the condition they are in, they became very suspicious against each other. Some of them, they say, “Ahh, some people are benefiting from the power struggle in civil war, and they are getting more money from the people,” and they are not getting anything.
When we liberated the country, the leaders at that time failed to unite the movement. And the movement disintegrated. And everybody in his area, he put a checkpoint to loot the civilians because they were too poor. The militiamen who liberated the country, they were not unified. And some of the commanders, they were hostile against each other. So the movement split into groups.
They told their militiamen not to obey the order coming from the authority. There was a hidden civil war for nearly three years. So everybody was armed to the teeth, and everyday, the militiamen were attacking each other in Hargeysa — they were different subclans. There was a technical, with a pointed artillery. There were many young people armed with Kalashnikovs. So they used to shoot each other and it was very dangerous to travel from place to place. There were more than 30 checkpoints between Berbera and Hargeysa. In Berbera and Burao, another 30. Even my mother’s side and my father’s side, they were hostile against each other. And my grandmother’s side, they were hostile against each other. Every subclan divided into two or three. At that time, I realized how to disarm the militiamen, how to unify Somaliland.
In the first three years, the president and the vice president, they failed to unite the Somali National Movement army. Then we called a conference in Boruma. In that conference, we decided to appoint as a president the man who was the first prime minister after independence [from England in 1960]. We thought, “This man is not in the movement, nobody is blaming him, and that was the man who liberated the country from the colonial power. Maybe, if you appoint him as a President, everybody will support him.”
So we appointed Egal as a President. But it was very difficult for Egal, immediately. Some big tribe blamed him that he was always – even as a prime minister – against them. They didn’t want to give arms to him, other tribes also didn’t want to give up their arms to the government. So, I said, what to do?
One day my subclan leaders, elders, they came to me. And they said, Dr. Omar, give us $200. I asked them, what do you want to do with it? They said, “We want to sit together, we want to discuss whether we will disarm ourself or not. Whether we will give our arms to the government or not.”
I said, okay.
They said, “another two problems: we will also want to discuss that man from our tribe who killed three men from the northern part of Hargeysa.”
And we are in the southwest part of Hargeysa. I said, “Okay, I will come to you at 4:00, because I don’t chew khat [a local plant stimulant.”
I came to them at 4:30. I listened to discussion. I said after one hour, “Can I talk?” They said yes.
I said, “What have you reached?”
“Nothing,” they said. “We failed. We have not reached anything about the disarmament. And the other case, the man who killed three men from another tribe, we will hand that man to that tribe.”
I said, “Let me talk.”
They said, “Go ahead.”
“I am a psychiatrist,” I said. “And as I am a psychiatrist, we are all paranoid after the war. We are all traumatized. We developed suspiciousness during the civil war. We had blood on our hands, we fought against a dictator, and we killed each other. So everybody is paranoid that somebody is following him. And we think that if we give up the arms, that other tribes will attack us. Let us disarm ourselves and give the arms to the government.”
“Ohhh!” they said. “If we give our arms to the government, we will become like the ladies. Other tribes, from the east and from the west, they will attack us!”
I said, “Uhuh. I tell you what.”
They said, “What?”
I said, “We will disarm ourselves, but our boys and the guns will remain together! They will go into the military camp, they will get to keep their guns, but they will be out of the town, out of the city. If our tribe will be attacked from the west, from the Sa’ad Muse subclan, or from the east and the airport, our boys with the Kalashnikovs — they will jump over the fence, and they will come to defend us. Don’t worry!”
They said, “Uhuh….and what is the benefit?”
“The benefit,” I said, “our boys will REST. Our boys are traumatized from what they experienced and witnessed during the civil war – the life threatening they have gone through. They killed some people and they lost their loved ones, so they experienced and witnessed the deaths of their friends and disintegration of their families. They will rest. They will sleep. They will have a shower. They will cut their hair. They will clean their teeth. They will clean their clothes.”
They said, “That’s a very good idea.”
“They will get rid of the nightmare,” I said. “They will get rid of the trauma symptoms, they will become human. They will marry our girls. They will think about their families.”
They said, “very good! What else?”
I said, “And they will be paid by the government because the government will collect tax! And if somebody will attack you, with good military training, they will jump over the fence and protect you.”
Dr. Dihoud continues relaying his advice to the elders that fateful day. “Number two: Your children, every night they hear gunfire from your boys. That gunfire will be shut down. The children, and the mothers, and the elders – your fathers – they will sleep quietly as well.”
They said, “Very good, doctor. You gave us counseling. But Dr. Omar,” our sultan said, “don’t tell anybody that you give us this advice. And we will not tell anybody except the president.”
I said I will not tell. So, in February 1994 they disarmed our tribe. They transferred the weapons to the government with the boys. And how we benefited: In one year, our people, no one killed another boy. So gradually, Somaliland was disarmed in 1998, and we established a unified army.