Tag Archives: mogadishu

1970: Ibrahim Husain Muhammad

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This from a May 7, 1970 London Times channeling of a Reuters report:

Mogadishu, Somalia, May 6 — Almost 50,000 people watched as a Somali soldier was executed by a firing squad today — the first public execution in the republic — for the murder of a girl.

In a statement read out at the execution, Lieutenant Ali Abdul-Rahman, the Attorney General, said: “The aim of imposing capital punishment on any citizen is to teach real justice, without which there can be no discipline here.”

Private Ibrahim Husain Muhammad was sentenced to death by a military tribunal in July, 1968. His appeals to the military High Court and to the Somali Supreme Court were rejected.

Somali dictator Siad Barre had good cause to worry about “discipline here.”

Whether the regime of the onetime Italian carabineire “taught justice” is another matter altogether.

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2011: Ahmed Ali Hussein, enemy cleric

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On this date last year, the Islamist Somali al-Shabaab publicly shot a man named Ahmed Ali Hussein in Mogadishu.

The 44-year-old, reportedly an ecclesiastic member of the rival al-Ictisam sect, was allegedly induced to confess that he’d been working with American intelligence. He was chained up and riddled with hundreds of bullets while neighbors were made to watch.

“In the documents we have, Ahmed Ali Hussein has worked with United States’ Federal Bureau Investigation (FBI) for 16 months,” an al-Shabaab spokesperson explained. Hussein was not permitted to defend himself.

So, extrajudicial killing of cleric on uncontested secret evidence of aiding the enemy. Put Somalia down for the cutting edge of jurisprudence.

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1978: Seventeen officers in Somalia

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Seventeen army officers were shot this day on the outskirts of Mogadishu for attempting to overthrow Somali dictator Siad Barre.

“The executions were carried out by by a firing squad formed of soldiers of the armed forces and were witnessed by thousands of people from all areas of Mogadishu,” said Mogadishu radio.

The abortive April 9 coup attempt seems to have been precipitated by Somalia’s ill-fated intervention in neighboring Ethiopia’s Ogaden region, a bloody little Cold War sideshow that saw both the U.S. (from Ethiopia, to Somalia) and Soviet Union (from Somalia, to Ethiopia) switch sides. Some of the officers concerned feared that Siad would come a-purgin’ after the last Somali forces slunk home on March 15, 1978.

The condemned (per this source) were:

  • Col Mohamed Sheikh Osman “Cirro”
  • Maj Siad Mohamed Jama
  • Maj Ibrahim Mohamed Hersi
  • Maj Siad Jama Nur
  • Capt Mohamed Ahmed Yusuf Aganeh
  • Capt Abdisalan Elmi Warsame
  • Capt Bashir Abshir Isa
  • Capt Abdillahi Hasan Nur
  • Lt Abdi Osman Ugas
  • Lt Abdirahman Maalin Bashir
  • Lt Adan Warsame Abdillahi
  • Lt Abdillahi Mahamud Guled
  • Lt Mohamed Abdullahi Husein (Gorod)
  • Lt Abdulwahab Ahmed Hashim
  • Lt Abdulqadir Gelle Omar
  • Sgt Farah Mohamed Halwo
  • Director Abdulqafar Warsame Abdilleh

But they’re perhaps most memorable for a coup participant not among their number, Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, who fled to Kenya and founded from exile the Somali Salvation Democratic Front, eventually one of the principal entities resisting the Barre regime. Ahmed served as President of Somalia from 2004 to 2008, but his government was unable to gain control of the notoriously fractious state or to end Somalia’s ongoing civil war.

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1972: Three Somali officers for an attempted coup

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On this date in 1972, Somali Generals Muhammad Ainanshe Gulaid and Salad Gaveir, along with Col. Abdulkadir bin Abdulla,* were publicly shot in Mogadishu by a 90-man** (!) firing detail for attempting a coup the previous year.

Forged from the decolonized territories formerly known as British Somaliland and Italian Somaliland, Somalia had weathered a rocky 1960s before Siad Barre seized control in a 1969 military coup.

Muhammad Ainanshe Guleid had been Barre’s second vice-president (the first was also arrested for another supposed plot, though not executed), so the alleged conspiracy would have been treason at the very highest level. It’s obscure at this point to what extent the arrests might be attributed to an actual intended coup as against internecine politics within the ruling Supreme Revolutionary Council, or even whether those categories were wholly distinct.

“They were charged,” according to An Encyclopedic Dictionary of Conflict and Conflict Resolution, 1945-1966 (it makes great bathroom reading) “with treason in a plot to assassinate the president … and other high officials and to return the socialist country to capitalism.”

The Soviet-backed Barre had plenty of problems over the next two decades, but actually managed to hold the tumultuous country until 1991. Then rebels finally deposed the dictatorship. Neither those rebels nor anyone else, however, was able to establish an effective central government — leaving Somalia to become the anarchy/libertarian paradise it’s famous as today.

(Juxtapose: the Barre regime’s attempts (pdf) at establishing a more conventional tourist profile.)

* Each of these names have several possible transliterations. Actually, later this same year, Barre would announce an official choice of Latin script for the heretofore unwritten Somali language; schoolchildren at this time had to learn English, Italian, Arabic, and Somali.

** The source for the 90-man firing squad figure is I.M. Lewis, “The Politics of the 1969 Somali Coup” in The Journal of Modern African Studies, Vol. 10, No. 3 (Oct., 1972). As the title indicates, our day’s principals are not the author’s chief concern, but he adds apropos of Barre’s doomed efforts to shift loyalties away from tribes and towards the state that the massive fusillade party “was anti-tribal in composition, and that the Government would see to the funeral arrangements — traditionally a lineage responsibility.”

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