Read Online The Road to Hell by Michael Maren - Free Book Online

of Greater Somalia.
    T he dream of Greater Somalia could be seen in the maps hanging on the walls of government offices. There were no borders where we’re used to seeing borders, just uninterrupted stretches of brown and green reachingacross through central Kenya, over into Djibouti, and across the Ogaden into the Ethiopian highlands, the area that Somali officials called Western Somalia. These were the lands inhabited by ethnic Somalis, one people divided by old colonial lines.
    In the absence of any other forces uniting this nation of solitary nomads, the idea of Greater Somalia provided them at least with a common quest, some common enemies. The Somalis who live in these three other countries are represented by three of the points of the five-pointed star on the Somali flag. The other two points represent the regions of the former Italian Trust Territory of Somalia, that is, southern Somalia, and the former British Somaliland Protectorate, the northern region around Hargeysa.
    The idea of uniting the five Somali groups has long been at the root of Somali nationalism. The former British region became independent on June 26,1960. The Italian region achieved its independence five days later, and the two joined to form one country.
    In 1963, as Kenya verged on independence from Britain, Somali Nationalists looked southwest to the part of Kenya known as the Northern Frontier District (NFD). Its population was more than 60 percent Somali, predominantly Muslim, and overwhelmingly in favor of unification with the Somali state. Their wishes were ignored in favor of those of Kenyan nationalists, who opposed partition of the colony. When Kenya became independent in December 1963, Somalis in the NFD began a long, futile war against the new government. The Somalis called them freedom fighters and the Kenyans called them
shifta
, a term applied to bandits and cattle thieves.
    To this day, Kenya’s Northeastern Province is a dangerous place to travel.
Shifta
still attack convoys and raid towns on occasion. And both the Kenyans and the Somalis are right: the
shifta
are usually bandits who call themselves freedom fighters, and occasionally freedom fighters who behave like bandits.
    The situation in the Ogaden, however, proved much more explosive. For centuries Amharic Emperors had, through intimidation and agreements, controlled the Muslim lowlands of the Ogaden. As in Kenya, the freedom fight sputtered along, but the Somali military had little chance of any victory against the superior American-trained Ethiopian army under Emperor Haile Selassie.
    In 1967, the elected Somali government of Prime Minister Mohamed Ibrahim Egal began a process of making peace with the nations that stood in the way of the pan-Somali dream. Egal realized that the dream was fruitless,that all of Africa, confronted with secessionist minorities, had lined up against Somalia. Though Egal’s peace efforts weren’t appreciated by Somalis, his coalition won the fraud-laced 1969 election. Yet in the process of assuring his own power, Egal had angered the military, which then overthrew him in October 1969. The coup leader, Major General Mohamed Siyaad Barre, ascended to the leadership of the country.
    Several years after the coup, Barre announced that his government, led by the Supreme Revolutionary Council, would pursue the path of “scientific socialism.” A loose military alliance with the Soviet Union became codified, and Barre began a massive military buildup with armored units, MiG-21 fighter-bombers, and Ilyushin bombers. Thousands of military advisors began to train the 20,000-man Somali army. The Ethiopians and Kenyans, with reason to be scared, turned to their American allies.
    All of this might have turned into a typical Third World, Cold War arms race had it not been for the 1974 coup in Ethiopia that booted Haile Selassie from the imperial palace and installed a socialist government. The Soviets, seeing that Ethiopia was probably the