Siad Barre
Siad Barre ruled Somalia for twenty-one years, and the state collapsed so completely when he fell that it had no functioning government for a generation. He was a police officer under the Italian administration and then an army general, and he took power in a coup in 1969 days after the president was assassinated. The regime called itself scientific socialism, aligned with the Soviet Union, nationalised the banks and the schools, and did two things that outlasted it: it gave Somali a written script for the first time, in Latin characters, and ran a rural literacy campaign that took the rate from a few per cent to a substantial share. It also banned clan reference in public life while governing through clan patronage, which sharpened exactly the divisions it claimed to be abolishing. In 1977 he invaded Ethiopia to take the Ogaden, where most of the population was ethnic Somali. The Soviet Union chose Ethiopia, and Somalia lost the war against Ethiopian troops with Cuban and Soviet support. Barre switched to the American side and received arms for the rest of the Cold War, while the defeat began the unravelling of his government. Through the 1980s he answered clan-based insurgencies with bombardment - Hargeisa was largely destroyed from the air in 1988 - and the opposition converged on Mogadishu. He fled in January 1991 and died in Nigeria. What followed was not a successor government but the absence of one, and the famine and intervention that brought American troops to Mogadishu two years later.
- Lived: 1919 CE – 1995 CE
- Nationality: Somali
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
