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  • Clan Cleansing in Somalia: The Ruinous Legacy of 1991 by Lidwien Kapteijns
  • Michelle Lynn Brown
Clan Cleansing in Somalia: The Ruinous Legacy of 1991 BY LIDWIEN KAPTEIJNS Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2013. 308 pp. ISBN 978081224460 cloth.

Lidwien Kapteijns’s study of 1991 and 1992 as a pivotal moment in Somalia’s post-colonial history is comprehensively researched and carefully narrated. Kapteijns argues that the violence surrounding and following the armed removal of military dictator and President Maxamed Siyaad Barre from power on January 26, 1991, and the resulting state collapse, was “analytically, politically, and discursively something new, a transformative turning point” (1) in the Somali civil war that scholars and historians have largely ignored, denied, and concealed, according to Kapteijns. Indeed, the limited breadth of scholarly research on both Somalia’s twenty-year civil war and the concomitant political activities aimed at reconstruction points [End Page 168] to the need for further research on this rich and complicated moment of historical, political, and sociocultural flux.

Dedicated “to all Somalis whose lives have been forever changed by the seeming endless violence,” Kapteijns’s monograph, thus, makes an important contribution to historical scholarship on postcolonial Somalia, in part by contributing meaningful historical analysis to this under-researched area. However, the study attempts to do more than simply chronicle inter-clan violence during the twenty-year civil war during which Somalia had no stable, acting government. Clan Cleansing is a comparative analysis of historical documents, Somali poetry and literature depicting civil war violence (particularly during 1991 and 1992), and the political discourse of “clans” during Barre’s regime, its disintegration, and in the armed civil unrest that followed. The study argues that 1991, thus, represents a key shift in the use of violence against civilians and a turning point in the Somali civil war because the role of the perpetrators of said violence—formerly agents of the state—shifted to civilian agents acting outside the state’s hierarchical structure. Thus, although targeted violence against civilians continued after Barre’s regime into the resulting civil war, its axis shifted in significant ways.

When the armed United Somali Congress (USC), backed by the Somali Patriotic Movement and the Somali National Movement, expelled Barre in 1991 and occupied the state capital of Mogadishu, it increased in scope and significance the clan conflicts that Barre had instigated or exacerbated during his regime as a means of controlling resistance. While during Barre’s regime the government’s military arm perpetrated such violence against insurgents, the violence became collective after his removal, perpetrated by civilians against one of their own clan groups. In particular, the USC “adopted a politics that defined as mortal enemy” (2) all Somalis with genealogical ties to the Daarood clan group, of which Barre was a member, regardless of whether or not said individuals had previously benefitted from Barre’s insular clan-based regime. The various political-military factions in power after Barre’s ouster marshaled public dissatisfaction over his formerly repressive regime to foster Anti-Daarood sentiment and a cultural movement of outright civilian-perpetrated clan cleansing campaigns against any Daarood clan group member.

Of key importance is the way that the USC and its backers cultivated a socio-cultural rhetoric that accompanied and supported the collective anti-Daarood violence. Such civil war rhetoric normalized collective anti-Daarood violence in Somali social and cultural discourse, permeating its literature, poetry, music, and media. Finally, the rhetoric of violence bred another discourse: that of artistic critique. Clan Cleansing analyzes the way that novelists and poets, like Mustafa Sheekh Cilmi in his popular poem “Disaster,” cataloged and critiqued the collective violence they considered to be “un-Somali behavior” (24). In addition, Clan Cleansing features a timeline of major events from the Republic of Somalia’s emergence as an independent nation in 1960 through clan cleansing episodes in December 1992, indexes of key names and subjects, and a glossary of key terms. [End Page 169]

Michelle Lynn Brown
Shenandoah University
mbrown5@su.edu
...

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