From Grievance to Greed in Somalia

In the existing academic literature on Somalia, the armed opposition movements that emerged at the height of the Cold War are treated as unidirectional and uniform. This article challenges this tendency by tracing the emergence and evaporation of the once popular mass armed opposition movement, the United Somali Congress (USC). The article provides comparisons with the experiences of Somali and other regional armed opposition movements to argue for a case of institutional and organisational faults in the USC. Most armed movements across the African continent became successful in overthrowing authoritarian regimes during the end of the Cold War, but few of them succeeded in their attempts to seize state power. Unlike the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) in Ethiopia in May 1991, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) in Rwanda in April 1994 and, a bit earlier, the National Resistance Army (NRA) in Uganda in January 1986, the USC leadership in January 1991 failed to form a stable state and, instead, turned their weapons on each other. Why did the USC fail in 1991 to reconstitute the state which it had fought to rule? What was the power configuration of the USC? How did power contestation of the movement, from the outset, set the stage for chronic conflicts? In seeking answers to these questions, the article explores the internal USC political dynamics by utilising extensive oral interviews with key figures (players, protagonists, proponents and political brokers), visual sources, intelligence reports and the movement’s pamphlets.