Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA)

The Cost of Dictatorship: The Somali Experience by Jama Mohamed Ghalib

Review by: Lee Cassanelli
Middle East Studies Association Bulletin, Vol. 33, No. 2 (Winter 1999), pp. 220-221
Published by: Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA)
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220 MESA Bulletin 33 1999

Revivalism is insufficiently addressed. §erif Mardin's study on Said

Nursi is still the only detailed attempt in English to explain revivalism in
Turkey. Although sociologically driven, it addresses culture and psychology.
Davison's logocentric approach ignores culture as practice and religion as
culture, treating religion only politically, as social movement, and as text to
be hermeneutically interpreted. Emphasizing the subject's "self-under
standing," subject as a Husserlian ego, who intersubjectively "pairs" with
others and understands them by analogy, Davison continues in Modernism
and a subjectivist hermeneutics of a metaphysical kind. His "multiplicity of
interpretations," based on a Gadamerian concept of good will, remains
transcendental, both philosophically and in relation to the question of how to
go beyond Modernism, let alone dismantle it.
Dane Kusic
The College of William and Mary

The Cost of Dictatorship: The Somali Experience, by Jama Mohamed

Ghalib. 267 pages, photographs, map, diagrams, appendices, index. New
York, NY: Lilian Barber Press, 1995. $29.50 (Cloth) isbn 0-936508-30-2
(Paper) isbn 0-936508-32-9

The collapse of Somalia's central government in 1991 and the destructive

civil war that followed have prompted soul-searching by Somalis. Much of
this collective anguish finds expression in oral poetry, the favored medium
for debating current events. However, another form of commentary has
begun to emerge—the autobiographical memoir. Chiefly the work of former
civil servants, such memoirs criticize the dictatorial regime of the late
Mohamed Siad Barre (1969-91), whom they consider responsible for their
nation's descent into tribalism, warlordism, and chaos. Jama Mohamed
Ghalib's The Cost of Dictatorship is part of this emerging genre. Written in a
clear and straightforward style, anecdotal rather than analytical, it draws
effectively on his experience of some thirtyyears as a police officer, head of
police intelligence, and cabinet minister under three Somali heads of state.
Ghalib begins by relating how, as a former nomad, he acquired a
modest education and moved up the ladder of professional police service in
the last years of the British Somaliland Protectorate. The social historian will
find much that is novel in Ghalib's accounts of how the Somaliland police
dealt with petty criminals, smugglers, and militant nationalists. For the
Middle East specialist, there are brief references to the role played by the
young Nasserites (Somalis educated in Egypt) and to Somalia's rather odd
relationship with the Arab League. But Ghalib primarily deals with the
personnel and policies of the post-colonial Somali state. His insider vantage
provides us with information on phone-tapping, election-rigging, and
political nepotism during the parliamentary years (1960-69). He then
chronicles the Siad regime's transformation from an initially popular (and

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MESA Bulletin 33 1999 221

populist) government of social and educational reform to a repressive

dictatorship that manipulated clan and regional rivalries, arrested or
executed many leading intellectuals and religious leaders, undertook an
ill-advised campaign to liberate "western Somalia" from Ethiopian rule, and
then armed refugees to help fight its own domestic enemies. The brutality
of Siad's later years is documented in a grim appendix written by a Somali
who survived seven years of isolation and torture in a maximum security
prison.
As a Somali from the northern region, Ghalib predictably stresses the
abuses visited on the North (and particularly on the Isaaq clan) by Siad's
military and paramilitary forces, and the role of the Isaaq-dominated Somali
National Movement (SNM) in opposing Siad's power. Ghalib overstates the
SNM's role in undermining the dictatorship, which in the end was opposed
by virtually every clan. However, he does not hesitate to criticize the SNM's
leadership for its infighting, poor public relations, and failure to reach out to
other opposition movements, thereby contributing to Somalia's political
fragmentation. And if Ghalib does not adequately explain why he continued
until 1984 to serve a government whose abuses he and his police colleagues
were quite aware of (though not directly involved in), he nonetheless comes
across as one of those dedicated civil servants (too often ignored by
academic critics) who try to uphold the law even when the ultimate wielders
of power are themselves lawless. Sadly, Ghalib and others of his persuasion
are often used by rulers to sustain their legitimacy abroad and divide
domestic opposition.
Finally, Ghalib implicitly confirms that the United States, Western
Europe, and the Gulf states looked the other way in the face of
incontrovertible evidence of human rights abuses in order to retain Somalia
as a base to counter the perceived threats of communism and Islamic
fundamentalism. Somalia demonstrates how both blocs helped sustain
dictatorships and how the Cold War legacy (in the form of weapons and the
militarization of societies) persists in the African civil wars of the 1990s.
Ghalib may blame Siad Barre for Somalia's self-destruction, but Siad had
many collaborators beyond Somalia, and Ghalib might equally well title his
book, "The Cost of the Cold War in the Horn of Africa."
Lee Cassanelli
University of Pennsylvania

The Logic of Conflict: Making War and Peace in the Middle East, by
Steven Greffenius. 202 pages, graphs, tables, figures, equations, appendix,
notes, bibliography, index. New York, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1993. $62.95
(Cloth) isbn 1-56324-073-4

The first section of The Logic of Conflict focuses on international relations

theory in general and international conflict studies in particular, and

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