During formal meetings, Security Council members debated whether or not its actions in Somalia should constitute a precedent for future council action. The council was divided between members who specifically sought to use the Somalia case to set new standards of response for the council and to serve as a warning to perpetrators in other places and those who emphasized that the conditions in Somalia were sui generis, warranting an exceptional and non-precedent-setting Security Council response. As later chapters illustrate, the Security Council response in Somalia did become a precedent, often cited by members in meetings on other conflicts. Yet it was exactly because the characteristics of the Somalia crisis were sufficiently different from other internal conflicts, namely that it lacked a legitimate government, that the UNSC was able to undertake early forcible military action there in defense of humanitarian principles when it was not prepared to elsewhere in the early 1990s.
The Somalia intervention, its successes and failures, helped to delineate the conditions under which the emerging practice of humanitarian intervention would and would not become possible in future conflicts. The most prominent of these factors include the importance of widespread agreement among council members on the causal story, and after Somalia around an intentional story and the degree to which new ideas about humanitarian intervention brought human rights norms into conflict with highly internalized norms of state sovereignty. The sequencing of Security Council decisions is also important with regard to humanitarian intervention. In the early stages of norm emergence, the factors required to trigger the application of a new norm against prevailing path-dependent behavior may be more numerous and significant than the conditions that are necessary when the norm has become more developed. As Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink write, “new norms never enter a normative vacuum but instead emerge in a highly contested normative space where they must compete with other norms and perceptions of interest.”4 When norm entrepreneurs seek to promote a new norm, they must do so within the standards of appropriateness already created by existing norms, even when those standards are exactly the behavior that is being contested.5 In Somalia, humanitarian intervention was possible because of Security Council unity and because the exercise of human rights norms and the emerging practice of humanitarian intervention did not significantly challenge existing sovereignty norms.
The Humanitarian Crisis in Somalia
The people of Somalia share the same ethnicity, language, religion, and culture but are distinguished by clan affiliation—that is, by their lineage and family custom. Clan and subclan loyalties are important to Somali identity and politics and have fostered a culture of decentralization.6 Their manipulation by power-seeking leaders has been a source of political and social instability since Somali independence in 1960. Initially, Major General Mohammed Siad Barre, who seized power in a 1969 coup, sought to erode the clan system and replace it with a form of “scientific socialism,” but he ultimately relied on clan loyalty to maintain his personal power.7 Three clans of the Darod clan-family—his own, his mother’s, and his son-in-law’s—largely controlled the Somali state, which exacerbated interclan tensions. Barre’s military support for Ogadeni revolutionary forces inside neighboring Ethiopia in 1977 and their crushing defeat caused an upsurge in interclan tensions as Ogadeni refugees crossed into Somalia and occupied Isaq pastoral lands.8 Barre survived a coup attempt the following year and tightened his grip on power but opposition to his rule continued to grow among disaffected clans, including the organized Isaq and Hawiye.9 Barre stayed in power by using divide-and-rule tactics internally and by externally supporting insurgent groups fighting in neighboring Ethiopia. In January 1991 the twenty-one-year dictatorship of Barre ended when he was forced from office by a Hawiye rebel group, the United Somali Congress (USC). By the time Barre was removed from power, the entire country was awash in small arms. Barre had maintained his rule by manipulating clan loyalties and fostering rivalries among them, then arming them to fight one another. He had outlawed opposition parties, suppressed civil society, and destroyed all independent institutions.10 Thus his removal created a political vacuum in which competing rebel groups and their factions vied for political control throughout the country. After 1991, Somalia was a state without a legitimate sovereign authority. The USC, which had removed Barre and controlled the capital city Mogadishu, splintered into two rival factions, one headed by Ali Mahdi Mohamed, a wealthy Somali businessman who declared himself the interim president of Somalia, and the second headed by General Mohamed Farah Aideed, the main military commander of the USC and Mahdi’s competitor for political power. By mid-November, full-scale war between the two factions of the USC erupted in Mogadishu, primarily over which group would control the presidency and the territory that included Mogadishu. The conflict between them resulted in an estimated fourteen thousand deaths and thirty thousand wounded in Mogadishu alone.11
The factional fighting in Mogadishu was replicated throughout the country—scorched earth tactics, looting, and violent attacks against members of rival clans, including the rape of women and the killing of the elderly and children. Civilians were at risk of death from two primary sources: the hostilities and the food scarcity that resulted from a combination of years of fighting, the destruction of farmland, and drought. In March 1992, Africa Watch and Physicians for Human Rights issued a report that described the character of the conflict and its human cost:
Mogadishu has become a place of unpredictable death, with no one in authority and no one capable of enforcing a social commitment to order. Everyone appears armed. Whoever draws first carries the day, since there is no civil authority to punish someone who robs or kills. Many people are short-tempered, stressed by hunger and fear and many men—and boys—are consuming too much qat (a widely used mild stimulant that comes as a chewable green leaf) which is more powerful when eaten on a hungry stomach. In this climate of marginally contained chaos, the ICRC and NGO community working in Mogadishu are stretched to the limits of their own endurance and institutional integrity.12
The World Food Program described the situation in Somalia as “an unparalleled disaster” and estimated that half of the population of the south central region had died by mid-1992.13 In July of that year, Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali warned, based on figures provided by the UN high commissioner for refugees, that one million Somali children were at immediate risk of starving to death.14 The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) estimated that 95 percent of Somalia’s population suffered from malnutrition and almost 70 percent suffered from severe malnutrition and disease.15 Although international humanitarian relief organizations were on the ground working to alleviate the hunger, warlords restricted their movement and armed gangs regularly looted food and relief supplies intended for Somali civilians. Violence interfered with the distribution of humanitarian aid—by December 1992 it was estimated the half of all Somali children under the age of five had already died.16
Security Council Involvement in Somalia, 1992–1995
The character of the Security Council response to Somalia can be described as having three distinct phases: the use of nonmilitary enforcement measures (January–November 1992), forcible military humanitarian intervention (December 1992–January 1994), and reversal of enforcement measures and UN withdrawal (February 1994–March 1995). The first phase began in January 1992 when the Security Council passed Resolution 733 establishing an arms embargo. Then in April 1992, Resolution 751 established the United Nations Operation in Somalia (UNOSOM)—a traditional peacekeeping operation with primarily humanitarian ends. The Security Council response changed from a traditional peacekeeping mandate to a forcible military intervention in December 1992 when Resolution 794 established the U.S.-led United Task Force (UNITAF). UNITAF was authorized to use “all necessary means” to establish a secure environment for humanitarian relief operations. Resolution 814 transferred authority back to the UN in March 1993, and also expanded the size of the force and the scope of mandate denoted by the revised name of the UN mission, UNOSOM II. The use of forcible