Southern Soldiers marched to the outskirts of the city and began powering up their loudspeakers.
There, screaming out into the void, they would one by one name the clans who they would allow to leave.
Who would be spared.
And then, one by one, they named the clans that wouldn’t.
They confiscated every vehicle in town.
They cut off power, water.
And then anyone who stepped out of their homes, they shot on sight.
If you remained behind in this town, you were not meant to survive what was to come.
By the time the first airplanes began to bomb their homes,
the civilians of this city had nothing left to do but pray.
The only way out of here was death.
The Hargeisa Holocaust had begun.
Surrender or starve.
These are the options provided by Siad Barre, dictator of Somalia.
But they weren't options being provided to a POW, or an invading army.
They weren’t being provided to a criminal or someone who defied Somali freedom.
It was democide.
These were his people.
Under his rule, the clans that wouldn’t accept his military coup weren’t bribed,
they were crushed.
And even as it became clear that the centre couldn’t hold under such oppression,
the only solution he could come up with was more oppression.
Unity has never been Somalia’s strength.
Despite sourcing their ethnicity from a single dynastic Somaaliye patriarch, clan divisions,
historic rivalries, and hundreds of years of imperial separation have meant
that a single Somali nation under one banner will always be a challenge for even the craftiest statesmen
or the most powerful militaries.
Despite their geopolitical position, shared religion and culture, and multiple millennia of self-rule,
centralized power has always just been out of reach for the Somali clans.
The larger their realm, the more likely it collapses into internal divisions.
Famed sultanates such as Adal and Adjuran, Warsangali and Majeerteen may have reached
from modern day Eritrea in the North deep into Kenya in the South, but for all their greatness,
none could rule the entire region.
None could unify the Somali people.
Yet despite all that history of division, the dreams of unification have never been far from their minds.
To many, even today, Barre’s rule was righteous because he preached unity.
He would be the strong arm that forced the clans to their knees.
He would declare war on Ethiopia for the Ogaden, and inspire rebellion in the North of Kenya.
His military would be the sword of conquest that the Sultanates had failed to be.
But Barre wasn’t superhuman.
He was just a military dictator.
And his rise to power left few options but war.
It isn't as if his coup was upending some long-standing stability,
he was just a another large change in a series of large changes.
As the colonial European armies packed up and headed home, the voices of independence
across the region finally heard themselves speak.
Centuries of oppression gave way to the possibility of a brighter future.
Finally, East Africa could rekindle the flames long since extinguished and begin to rewrite their own stories.
This was the political dream of generations, and there was intense pressure to make it work.
Even those with the deepest reservations knew that they had to give it try.
So in 1960, the former colonies of Britain and Italy merged
into what would become the largest Somali-led state to ever exist.
They called themselves the Somali Republic.
And they would last for less than nine years.
In 1969, after two previous failed attempts to take the country by force,
the military made its move.
The democratically elected president of Somalia was murdered by his bodyguard,
and soldiers took control of the country.
Under the leadership of soon-to-be-dictator Siad Barre, the new government undertook
a massive public works campaign aimed to show its ability to make change where democracy had failed.
They claimed to have committed the coup under the auspices of socialism, and for a few years,
they even attempted to play that role.
But as Barre consolidated power and purged his rivals, his grip on the nation naturally tightened.
The ideologies that he had once espoused took the backseat to unrelenting military control.
The unity he’d promised to deliver was falling further and further away from view,
but conversely his power was only growing.
Small oppressions beget larger ones and by 1976, he’d established a one party state.
Never again would opposition be allowed in his lands.
At least, not without a gun in their hands.
With total control of Somalia’s political system, his gaze turned outwards.
To win back the minds of the people he'd lost, he launched a disastrous war against Ethiopia.
The war itself is fascinating on its own, with Barre starting with USSR support
and ending as a puppet of the US, but the only thing I’ll mention here is that it failed.
His army was defeated, his rule was weakened, and the image of pan-Somali reunification
was dashed before everyone’s eyes.
The last major piece of his propaganda machine, dead in the water.
On top of that, in 1986, Barre got in a car accident that forced him to fly abroad for medical help.
While he was there, his illness and the complete lack of control from the top made the government
that had underpinned his rule erratic and violent.
An already vicious dictatorship was taking off its velvet glove.
In the wake of all of this, a number of rebellious groups began to pop up around the country.
In the Northeast, Northwest, and South, major revolutionary movements began to take hold.
Some merely wished to oust the dictator and return the country to its democratic ideals,
while others wanted to break away entirely.
Here in Somaliland, where I’m filming this story, they chose the latter of the two.
Only having just joined the republic less than thirty short years before,
they decided it was time to leave for good.
Originally they’d simply wanted to remove Barre from power, but as their cities were razed to the ground
and their clanspeople raped and murdered, they decided that they’d had enough
trying to keep Somalia united.
It’s hard to stay friends with the people who killed your family.
But leaving was easier said than done.
Even after the disastrous war in the Ogaden, Barre had one of the most powerful militaries
the continent had ever seen, and these weren’t the first rebels he’d destroyed.
Despite the nation rising into flames around him, he still held many of the cards.
He had US support, and total control of the government.
He held the wealth of the nation and had no clear successor.
Those that benefited from his rule would do virtually anything to sustain it.
As the nation slipped into chaos, the military that propped him up lashed out in ways
normal Somalians had never imagined possible.
Each movement had its own failures and successes, and each deserves a video all its own.
But the only place that I'm able to film any of this video safely in Somalia is in Somaliland.
Specifically, in the city of Hargeisa.
So naturally, I’m going to focus there.
With the rebellion in the North encroaching on the second and third largest cities in the country,
Barre’s troops started an open genocide against their own people.
The government instituted a policy that any able bodied male from the northern clans would be subject
to murder on the spot.
Those with any means to help the cause would be imprisoned.
It wasn’t a targeted attack at the rebellion, it was aimed at their clans.
At their families.
At their cities.
At their homes.
As the rebels pushed into the city of Burao, the government forces declared open season
on anyone who moved.
Street by street, they looted buildings, killed the occupants,
and opened fire with heavy artillery directly into civilian areas.
Nobody was spared.
When the airforce arrived, they finished off whatever still remained.
Virtually every building was destroyed.
Days later, the government turned their eye on Hargeisa.
It was more than just a potential stronghold for rebels.
It was the second largest city in the country.
One of the most important centres for trade, education, and culture in all of Greater Somalia.
They razed it to the ground.
Soldiers, now unrestricted in their actions, looted the citizens, markets, warehouses, and mosques.
Anything of value was stripped and taken.
Those that disagreed were killed on the spot.
Once emptied, the government forces again set the eye of their heavy artillery on the city.
Airplanes bombed residential neighbourhoods, aiming primarily at civilian targets.
Hundreds of thousands of refugees fled the city, but tens of thousands would never make it out alive.
Those that did survive would return to rubble.
More than 80% of the city’s buildings would be completely destroyed.
Those that remained standing were little more than hollowed out shells.
They call this the forgotten genocide.
The Holocaust of Hargeisa.
The Dresden of Africa.
But it was more than just the cities that were destroyed.
It hit small towns, it hit the countryside, it hit individual farms.
Barre's troops went where the rebels never were.
They killed people who had nothing to do with the war.
It was a truly scorched earth policy.
And they would sacrifice every Isaaq to make sure that they won the war.
But in the end, they still lost.
Despite the genocide, despite the destruction, despite everything.
Or perhaps because of it.
Before they razed Burao, before they razed Hargeisa, the rebels still wanted unity.
They still intended to be part of a united Somalia.
But when they came home to see what they’d lost, when they took stock of the people who’d died,
they couldn’t stomach it anymore.
When you give people two options, surrender or starve, there will always be someone who sees the third.
You cannot achieve unity at the point of a gun.
You can bomb people to dust, but it’s from dust that we’re made.
Humans resist.
Even in the face of total annihilation, humans resist.
The Somali people took a great leap of faith in attempting to unite.
Yes, it failed, but not because it wasn't a dream worth fighting for.
It failed because of who they chose to fight.
Themselves.
This is Rare Earth.