ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the transfer of southern land resources from local clans to other, favored ones was on the agenda of Somalia's national leaders at least from the early 1970s. But that this agenda was obscured for outsiders by international preoccupation with a succession of other, more visible conflicts: the Ogaden War in 1977-1978, the Barre government's efforts to quell opposition movements in the Northeast and North in the 1980s and, after Barre's ouster in 1991, the Hawiye factional struggle for control of the capital city of Mogadishu. The interest of Somalia's new political elites in appropriating rural assets for their own use had precedents in the 1950s and 1960s, but national competition for the resources of the southern riverine areas began in earnest in the early 1970s. Land and water rights, always objects of contestation at the local level, now became embedded in state policies and programs.
