Maj. General Siad Barre

Maj. Gen. Siad Barre (1910-1995) was a military leader and the president of Somalia who led a coup following the assassination of President Abdirashid Ali Shermake. He is remembered as a brutal dictator whose regime fostered conditions leading to the 1991 civil war. A member of the Marehan Darod subclan, he was raised an orphan in Italian Somaliland, working in the police force and later becoming chief inspector under the British. At the time of independence, Barre was a colonel in the Somali National Army, and within the decade was made commandant of the army.

Following the coup, Barre proclaimed that Somalia was a socialist republic, forming the Somali Revolutionary Socialist Party in 1976 and banning all other political parties. He oversaw the nationalization of all major Somali industries, and forged an alliance with the Soviet Union and Arab League. Though he claimed to reject clan based politics and promoted “Scientific Socialism” as an alternative to clan infighting, he himself favored his own clan and was, at times, deeply hostile to others. Following a disastrous war with Ethiopia in an attempt to regain the Ogaden, the Siad Barre regime was crippled by corruption and venality as well as the external pressures of a severe refugee crisis and opposition from various clan groups.

Sources:

Richard Greenfield, “Obituary: Mohamed Said Barre,” The Independent, January 3, 1995, accessed February 18, 2014.

Mark R. Lipshutz, Dictionary of African Historical Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).