"While the world as a whole, without distinction of race, creed or religion was sympathetic with our agony and willing to reach across vast distances to assist us, we the Somali people were not ready to help ourselves.

The world has with pain learned that Somali is indeed a difficult patient who refuses to be tested, fed and cured.....The result was a self inflicted social suicide. And after the Americans left, it was this 'cultural propensity' that led to an initial instinct among Somalis for revenge" -Gassem Mariam, Hostages, as quoted in Me Against My Brother, London: Routledge 2000 Page157

"The Republic of Somalia was created in 1960 when the British Somaliland and former Italian Somaliland merged on the eve of Independence. After 1960 under the new political leadership, the 'Greaterd Somali' goal became the pre-eminent national agenda.

Tragically, it was this national obsession of liberating the Somali lost territories at the expense of everything else that contributed to the actual demise of the very existence of the Somali state." - Prof. Hamdesa Tuso, Institute of Conflict Studies, George Mason University, Virginia.

African experts and scholars of Conflict Studies did not see it coming. The contemporary assumptions and the basic pontifications held by these theoreticians, politicians and policy makers closely associated with the administration of a modern state were shattered as a helpless world watches the gradual and steady plummet into chaos, of the state of Somalia.

Granted that unlike most other African states, Somalia is endowed with natural attributes which are presumed essential for smooth governance of a modern state: unlike most other African states which were carved out of a plethora of ethnic groups, the Somali population is homogeneous; all speak one mother tongue, Somali. The majority of Somalis adhere to Islam; they all share a common culture and colonial experience and by all accounts there has been less social stratification.

They ascribe to some notion of a 'pastoral ethic of clan socialism.' Thus, it is safe to argue that the glaring failure in the case of the Somali nation debunks the position attributed to the contemporary school; which proclaims that that the modern nation is bye and large on a safe ride, once the native population is homogeneous.

The steep level conflict and the simmering war-lord confrontation in the streets of Mogadishu and beyond was the second stage of a three era war which have decimated generations of the Somali manhood and pulled the nation over the precipice. Indeed, the new political order established in the post colonial Africa with respect to the question of unifying those people and territories partitioned during the European scramble for Africa was sealed by the Organization of African Unity.

The OAU adopted the colonial boundaries as legitimate demarcation for the newly independent African states.

Utilizing OAU's principles of 'territorial integrity' and 'non interference' in the "internal affairs' of a member state, Somali neighbours, Ethiopia and Kenya, rebuffed every attempt made by Somalia on its claims to the territories within their respective states.

In 1977, General Muhammad Siad Barre with the support and military assistance from the United States invaded Ethiopia. The Soviet Union and Castro's Cuba poured in over 10 million dollars assistance and manpower into Ethiopia. Suddenly the Horn of Africa became very attractive and the bordering states, pawns in the new international political order which emerged during the post world era.

The two Super Powers; the United States and the Soviet Union were unrelenting in their support for their respective allies as they elbowed their way to establish presence in the strategic Horn. It did not matter if the Powers changed sides, they did not bother if dictators shared their beds.

The Super Powers propped up dictators from the Congo to the Mediterranean and the Horn of Africa would not be an exception. These dictators survived on their allegiance to the political goals of a Super Power rather than on the needs and wishes of their people. In the case of Somalia, it was General Muhammad Siad Barre (a member of the Mareehaan clan), having captured the seat of power in Somalia in October 1969, who became the beneficiary of the Super Power politics in the Horn.

From 1969-1976, with the Soviet Union on his side, he moved Somalia to the left, preaching Socialism and denouncing America. The Red revolution of Haile M. Mengistu in Ethiopia shifted the alliances on the Horn.

When Siad Barre invaded Ethiopia in 1977, the later was defending the hilly and the stone topography of the Judah kingdom with the latest Russian tanks under the command of Cuban officers.

The General's intention was to liberate and incorporate the Ogaden into the state of Somalia, and restore the national obsession of reclaiming the lost tribes of the Greater Somali nation. His invasion of Ethiopia, a nation that was never conquered or colonized by any power throughout its spectacular history that is beyond memory, turned out to be a political miscalculation of colossal proportion.

His divisions were masticated and the losses of the Somali army was enormous. From that battlefield, Somalia would never recover. The nation had suffered a national psychic injury resulting in the loss of the Somali soul.

What precipitated the final fall of Siad Barre was the end of the Cold war. Somalia, was suddenly irrelevant to the East-West politics. Thus, in 1988, the US Congress, concerned with the human rights violations in Somalia and having determined that Somalia was expendable, blocked aid to Somalia.

Rakiya Omaar, Somali born executive director of 'Africa Watch' in an early warning article, wrote; "Nineteen ninety-one is the year Somalia died" Subsequently, James Jonas the then UN envoy from Sierre Leone, returned from Somalia with the following reports: "In Somalia you cannot talk of an organized civil society ...by all accounts, there is no central authority to keep law and order and bring a halt to the rampant violence, every aspect of the state system has been destroyed , there is no central government with the authority and capacity to collect taxes and raise revenues for the purpose of providing services to the people."

At about that time some one million Somalis fled to the neighboring countries of Kenya, Ethiopia, Yemen and Egypt. Currently, thousands perish daily due to starvation. Food and medicine donated by international community rarely reach the forlorn civilians.

In explaining the reasons for the collapse of Somalia, we argue that the clan based politics and the cold war reflexes as practiced by the Somalia's last dictator did not provide for the impending global new world. With one of Africa's highest birth rates and faced with dwindling resources at home and also at sea, (the Somali fishermen lost the sea and fishes to more efficient Chinese, Russian and European rivals), the nation needed to affect the dream of every Somali.

The liberation and incorporation in one entity, of the Greater Somali. That failed project ate up the Somali peoples' hopes.

The calamitous loss, in the pursuit of that obsession, what the Germans refer to as its 'Lieberstrum,' the need to "preserve the German Heartland," became the driving force behind the national propensity to engage in suicidal operations. Hence, everyone took to his tent. Every street has a different command under an independent war lord.

And the sea lanes away from the Somalia ports are ravaged by Pirates under the command of unknown dollar suckers whose orders to wrought mayhem on the high seas may be issued by a Long John Silver or another one legged General, Igala Atamuna, of the Vanguard Canal Combat fame.