Somalia And US The desire for an organization that would help the international community”avoid future conflicts” and the recognized need for a global body that would “promote international economic and social cooperation” led the powerful states emerging from the rubble of WWII to develop the United Nations. The newly formed United Nations “represented an expression of hope for the possibilities of a new global security arrangement and for fostering the social and economic conditions necessary for peace to prevail” (Mingst and Karns 2). The need for mutual cooperation amongst the states following the second of the global wars was vital to the reconstruction of war-torn Europe, and for the development of a new world order. This attempt at cooperation was not the first of its kind. According to Mingst and Karns, “The UNs Charter built on lessons learned from the failed League of Nations created at the end of World War I and earlier experiments with international unions, conference diplomacy, and dispute settlements mechanisms” (2). Despite this “experience” in mutual cooperation, the founding states still faced many problems in the security arena due to the advent of the Cold War.
In order to effectively deal with security issues facing the UN, the Security Council turned to “peace- Mulligan 2 keeping” as an alternative to armed aggression. According to the United Nations Department of Public Information, “Peacekeeping was pioneered and developed by the United Nations as one of the means for maintaining international peace and security” (1998), and the UN deals with particular problems through “the prevention, containment, and moderation of hostilities between or within states through the use of multinational forces of soldiers, police, and civilians” (Mingst and Karns 3). This was a very different approach to quelling conflicts that had never before been practiced. Peacekeeping was “a creative response to the breakdown of great-power unity and the spread of East-West tensions to regional conflicts” (Mingst and Karns 3). Before the Committee on Foreign Relations of the United States Senate, John R.
Bolton, Senior Vice President of the American Enterprise Institute, stated further reasoning for the evolution of peacekeeping. He notes: Traditional U.N. peacekeeping evolved when it became clear that the broad intentions of the Framers of the U.N. Charter were rendered largely meaningless by the onset of the Cold War. U.N. involvement in international crises, far from being the central dispute-resolution mechanism envisioned by the Framers in Chapters VI and VII, became episodic and incidental to the main global confrontation between East and West.
Since “Cold War tensions have subsided, peace has been threatened by resurgent ethnic and nationalist conflicts in Mulligan 3 many regions. As a result, U.N. peacekeeping operations have grown rapidly in number and complexity in recent years. While 13 operations were established in the first forty years of U.N.
peacekeeping, 28 new operations have been launched since 1988″ (UNDPI 1998). The following map shows the many regions of the world in which the United Nations has become involved in a peacekeeping mission: Mulligan 4 Due in part because of the extraordinarily limited dimensions within which U.N. peacekeeping was feasible, a clear set of principles evolved to describe the elements necessary for successful U.N. operations. These rules would become the standard from which future U.N.
peace-keeping missions would be drawn. The first criterion for a U.N. peacekeeping mission was consent. According to Bolton, “All of the relevant parties to a dispute had to agree to the participation of U.N.
peacekeepers in monitoring, observing or policing a truce, cease fire, or disengagement of combatants” (2000). This agreement must not only grant the U.N. the right to intervene in the states internal affairs, but also detail the “scope of its mission and the operational requirements for carrying out that mission” (Bolton 2000). A nation-state, at any time, could withdraw its consent at which point the U.N.
forces would withdraw. One example of revoking consent occurred in “May, 1967, when Egypt insisted on the withdrawal of the U.N. Expeditionary Force (established after the Suez Canal Crisis of 1956) from its territory along the border with Israel” (Bolton 2000). U.N. forces were forced to leave, and as a result, the Six Day War followed.
Mulligan 5 A second requirement was the notion that the U.N. forces would not take sides in the conflict. Bolton states that ..U.N. peacekeepers were [to be] neutral [amongst] the parties to the conflict, not favoring one or another of them. It was understood to be elemental that the United Nations could not take sides in a conflict without itself becoming involved in the very situation it was trying to stabilize or resolve (2000). Remaining neutral, however, would prove to be difficult as we will witness further along in this work.
To ensure the U.N. forces neutrality, the peacekeepers were “almost always only lightly armed, or unarmed, and they frequently depended on the cooperation of the parties to a dispute for logistical support or cooperation” (Bolton 2000). Lacking the appropriate offensive capabilities would deter possible outbreaks of aggression on the part of the peacekeeping forces. According to Mingst and Karns, “Peacekeepers use military force only as a last resort and in self-defense. This precedent was a response to the difficulties encountered in the Congo in 1961 when the Security Council authorized the United Nations Operation in the Congo (UNOC) to use force to prevent civil war and to remove foreign mercenaries in that country. The use of force even limited force is fraught with political and legal controversy” (79).
As a result of the limited military Mulligan 6 capabilities, the U.N. peacekeepers “had no right of enforcement, and their missions were deliberately non-coercive, not intended to compel any party to accept a particular settlement. U.N. rules of engagement, through long-established practice, provided for the use of force essentially only in self-defense” (Bolton 2000). The use of force by a U.N.
force would be questioned in future peacekeeping endeavors. U.N. involvement in Somalia would prove to be one such example of the problems experienced by the occupying forces. Somalia has been described as the textbook example of a “collapsed” or “failed” state. Throughout the period of intervention, those involved in”restoring hope” from the military and civilian sides no doubt understood too little about the sources of state dissolution and the respective roles of the Somali clan system, colonialism, and Cold War geopolitics in the horn of Africa. Prior to British and Italian colonialism, “there was no common Somali identity or centralized control over the territory of what became Somalia.
Although more homogeneous than other countries in Africa with a common ethnicity, language, culture, and religion (Islam) Somalias geographical area was occupied by nomadic Mulligan 7 pastoral groups, organized predominately by paternal kinship” (Weiss 71). The continually moving population made establishing a centralized governmental body difficult and there was no recognition of a “hierarchical system”. This lack of a controlling body led to conflict among the indigenous peoples. Thomas G. Weiss states that conflict was “common among lineages, especially in competition for land and resources necessary for survival. But there were conflict resolution mechanisms within the lineages, known as the xeer, which prevented the escalation of conflicts by inhibiting the excessive economic stratification in society” (71+).
He goes on to say that, “The spread of Islam modified conflict management by adding a mild form of the Shariah Islamic Law. Acts of vengeance were diminished through the concept of the dia, or the payment of blood money compensation to the victim by the violator” (Weiss 72). Despite the lack of a governing body to enforce laws, social institutions were there to control behavior. While the basis of organization was direct lineage, groups were also structured by subclans and then clan families, each predominantly associated with sometimes overlapping geographical areas.
The six overarching major Mulligan 8 clan families are the Darod, Digil, Dir, Hawiye, Issaq, and Rahanwein. Traditionally, lineages continually created and shifted alliances among other groups and subclans. The end of colonialism in 1960 further shifted alliances amongst the clans. The transition from a lineage/clan based society to a centralized state authority posed new problems for the independent Somali government.
However, governmental attempts to rid the political environment of clan-influence failed when an army coup in 1969 placed Mohammed Siad Barre in power. Thomas G. Weiss explains the result of Barres rise to power. He says, Rhetorically, Barres policy of scientific socialism aimed to eliminate clanism, but the end result of his twenty-two-year rule was strengthening of clan-based politics.
He forbade the use of clan names; however, his primary method of obtaining and maintaining power was to draw support from his own clan and those linked by lineage and to pit other clans against one another. Virginia Lung has described this policy as a form of clan clientelism, in which arms, money, and land were distributed to clans in order to maintain his power (73). Thus, the clan-based system was not eliminated; it was reinforced. The late 1980s saw the steady decline in Barres power.
“The combination of food crises, economic collapse, and the end of Cold War competition in the horn, along with the resulting decline in foreign aid, began to erode Barres base” (Weiss 75). Further, the rise of clan-based national movements and their success in challenging Barres Mulligan 9 rule led to the multiplication of clan based factions. “Spurred by the fear that one groups assumption of power would be detrimental to anothers own position,” says Weiss, “clan-based opposition led to extreme fragmentation of Somali society” (75). In the end, Barres own policy backfired on him. By 1990, his power base was limited to only one clan the Marehan. In 1991 and 1992 “civil order in Somalia totally collapsed as warring clans seized control of parts of the country” (Mingst and Karns 92).
The fighting that followed, with clans and subclans constituted in loose alliances without central control, took place at a time of serious drought. That combin …
