By Adam Muse Jibril
Alongside with the policy of big-stick over the heads of the Somali people, the Siyad Barre regime’s propaganda machine was another effective weapon to deceive, disorientate and distort the most precious God-given power to humans, the Consciousness, which the two most aggressive leaders of Fascism in Europe, Hitler, and Mussolini excessively been practicing in their own countries and the territories they had occupied. The following verse was one of countless poetries devoted for the creation of personal cult built around Siyad Barre’s self-glorification as the Supreme leader, the verse says: ‘’Victorious Siyad, the Father of knowledge of our Universe, Socialism remains the system which will lead us to prosperity’’. Somali Version: Guul-wade Siyaad, Aabihii Garashada Geiygayagow, Hantiwadagu waa habka Barwaaqo noo horssedaye’. The entire country’s population had to recite loudly every morning, and every meeting no matter how the number of participants is large or small.
The extent of personal glorification of Siyad Barre can be explained by reviewing how serious were these set of Sadist ideas and practices, and how biased and brutal they acted against human rights. These practices uncovered the barbaric character associated with the regime; All-out annihilations that led to human cleansing had been enacting in the Somaliland territories in 1988-9. “These actions did not happen accidentally, but came as a result of official policy based on ideology with global dimension known as ‘Fascism in action’ that had been in practice in different parts of the world” (Kariim Morouh, Al- Horiya Arabic News Paper Lebanon 89). Painfully however, events like that magnitude had not been given the attention they deserved by the forums of democratic minded world.
The wiping out of the basis of life in the (supposedly) Northern part of the country at that time in 1980s was not the only a sample representative of the nature of Fascism, but there had been other horrible violations that had taken place in another battleground between the military regime and the Somali people in the Mudugg region -the Central Somalia- where the military expedition better known as “Water-Ponds campaign” in 1980s aimed to demolish the basic sources of human life, the water reservoirs in that region, where the regime’s cheap allegation was that some politicians from that region were opposition to the government.
The critical extent of these crimes justified the reasoning that in any form the tragedy might take place and for any interests the regimes might stand Irredentism and Fascism remained a destructive material force. In all those instances the central idea is to have a set of political, cultural and moral values that would endure in line with subversion and devastation against human dignity and social progress.
Worthy to underline here is the indisputable truth that Siyad Barre who had been a soldier in the Italian Fascist army invasion against Ethiopia and Somaliland Protectorate in 1937-41, had political and cultural attachment to Fascism that shaped his life-style and political thinking, not only Siyad Barre as a person, but several generations of the Italian educated elite (the majority of those whom I knew them personally) had political and cultural influences by one of the two prominent Italian schools of thought, the Communist party or Machiavellian school of thought. Continue to the next week.
