Apr
25
Clan system – unifying or dividing a nation?
April 25, 2008 | | Leave a Comment
By Emily Tsang
One of the biggest headache in handling Somalia has been the endless civil wars between clans to rival for power. Very often, as many as 12 different clans have their warlords come to power and represent their own clan to fight for the limited resources in their country. Clans have been the largest political units among Somalia. The number and size of clans within a clan-family varied; the average clan in the twentieth century numbered about 100,000 people. Clans controlled a given territory, essentially defined by the circuit of nomadic migration but having unspecified boundaries, so that the territories of neighboring clans tended to overlap.
The west find it painstaking to negotiate with Somalis since there are too many clans and warlords, and they will be immediately replaced by another clan-man if one warlord loses power. Some scholars have express the need to destroy such kind of clan system before any peace talk can be taking place.
To the ordinary Somalis people, such kind of clanmanship has been part of their tradition and is a necessity to their own survival. The clan system provides everyone a form of identity while the nation as a whole could not. It is important in uniting people and giving them hope. When an unstable country fails to provide the sense of security to its ordinary people, the people naturally turn to the group of people they are connected by blood and by nature for protection. It just feel safer for them to know there is always a group of people that they can turn to, where they can find their own identity and unit to defend themselves and their families. It has always been the way most African tribes have been running before the west sets foot to the continent, and it is the way it is running after they are gone.
There is nothing wrong with the way it was running, until the clans and warlords are equipping themselves with much destructive weapons such as AK47, artilleries, RPG, and anti-tank flyers to replace knives and archives in old days. With killing weapons as such, even children can easily and horribly turned into killing machines in the name of protecting their own clans. Clans rivals nowadays, unlike the good old times, have become unimaginably bloody and deadly.
Such kind of bloody and inhumanity power struggles, are , of course, being perceived as the biggest obstacle in imposing democratic system in Somalis politics. But it is unable to reach any progress in trying to downplay the importance of clanmanship when the general public feels hostile and uneasy to outside support. The transitional government the west is backing received little recognition. A large among of Somalis still seems to be clinging onto different warlords of their own clans.
It is hard to be optimistic when the clan system still deeply attached to the mind of Somalis. But after all, the people separated by clans do have hope of being a one ethnic community. For one, their sense of security can be build by sharing the same piece of land if the people feel that they are backed and protected by a representative government who care about their benefit. It is perhaps, the most appealing solution for a fragmented Somalia to build up a deep seed of sensing on a Somalis nationhood.
