ABSTRACT
The Somali civil war, one of the most protracted in Africa, offers a series of paradoxes for students of contemporary African history. First, the nation of Somalia comprises a largely homogeneous ethnic group, sharing faith, language, and culture, which seemed to make a bitter civil war less likely. Second, it was one of the most commercially and technologically backward of African states, yet the regime of Mohammed Siad Barre from 1969 to 1991 was one of the continent’s most totalitarian systems. Finally, even though the country seemed to have little value to East or West at the end of the Cold War in the 1990s, it drew the international community into its intractable disputes. Still, the Somali civil war was bloody and destructive-and one of its chief victims was the Somali state itself, which was still seeking to become
a viable political entity fifteen years after the fall of Barre.
