Mohamed Siad Barre; Led Somalia for Two Decades

Former Somalian President Mohamed Siad Barre, who thrived on Cold War rivalries but left his nation in anarchy and on the brink of famine, died Tuesday.

Siad Barre had lived in Nigeria since 1992, a year after rebels overthrew him in a brutal siege of the Somali capital, Mogadishu. He died en route to a Lagos hospital, said a Nigerian Foreign Ministry official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Siad Barre was diabetic and had been ill for some time, said his son, Dirie Barre, adding that the family was hoping to fulfill his wish to be buried in Somalia.

Most reference books give Siad Barre’s year of birth as 1919, although others say he was born in 1912 or 1920.

Siad Barre rose from being an orphaned shepherd boy to rule Somalia for more than two decades, using a mixture of terror and guile. He left behind a country beset by clan rivalries and drought. War and famine combined in 1992 to kill 350,000 people in the nation of 8 million.

A U.S.-led military operation landed in Somalia in December, 1992, to protect relief supplies from rampaging bands of heavily armed clansmen. That mission is scheduled to end by March when the last peacekeeping troops withdraw.

After leading a bloodless 1969 coup, Siad Barre survived defeat in a long desert war with Ethiopia and maneuvered the country through alliances with the Soviets and Americans. Meanwhile, his country suffered through a succession of droughts.

A tall, austere-looking man with a long face and hooded eyes often hidden behind dark glasses, Siad Barre kept power in a land of anarchic nomads by cunningly playing a myriad of squabbling clans off against one another.

Orphaned at 10, he scratched out a living as a shepherd before joining the colonial police force. He became chief inspector, the highest rank possible for a Somali under Italian administration.

Largely self-taught, he studied voraciously, gaining a secondary school equivalency and going on to a military course at an army college in Italy, a former colonial power.

When Somalia gained independence in 1960, Siad Barre was appointed the new nation’s army vice commander. Five years later, he became commander-in-chief.

After leading a coup Oct. 21, 1969, Siad Barre blended Marxist doctrine, Somali traditions and Islamic precepts into what he called “scientific socialism.”

The Soviet Union formed a close alliance with Siad Barre in 1974, but three years later abandoned him for Ethiopia after the two African nations went to war over territory in the Ogaden Desert, which forms part of their border.

The United States then threw its support to Somalia.

Both superpowers saw Ethiopia and Somalia as crucial to control of the narrow eastern access to the Red Sea, which both countries border. But interest waned in Siad Barre’s government with diminishing Cold War rivalries and because of his government’s brutal treatment of its opponents.

The Somali military killed 40,000 to 50,000 unarmed civilians between June, 1988, and January, 1990, according to the human rights group Africa Watch.