Issue No. 941

Echoes of the RRA: Identity and Power in South West State

The Rahanweyne Resistance Army (RRA) did not emerge from a shir (conference) in October 1995 to defend a government, nor to overthrow it. Rather, the militia —whose name was even explicit in its defence of a unified Digil-Mirifle identity —arose from the ruin of Bay and Bakool in the years prior, and decades of structural inequalities. Over 30 years later, with the violent grapple for the political future of South West State resuming, the potent histories of the RRA are similarly resurfacing in the rhetoric from both regional President Abdiaziz Laftagareen and his Mogadishu-backed rivals. But who were the RRA? And why-- over three decades since it was formed-- does its recollection still invoke such intense feeling?

For centuries, the Rahanweyne, an agro-pastoralist community, have resided in the fertile riverine lands of southern Somalia, making up the majority of Bay, Bakool and significant parts of Lower Shabelle. But in Somalia's highly stratified society, the Digil-Mirifle too have long been considered near the bottom of the totem pole, regarded and referred to as 'Sab'- positioned outside the 'Samaale' clan lineages, such as the Darood, Hawiye, and Isaaq. Across the 20th century, colonial and post-colonial social engineering compounded such discrimination, epitomised by the standardisation of Af-Maxaa as Somalia's official language in 1972, the dialect of northern Somalia, rather than Af-Maay, that of the Rahanweyne. 

Such exclusion and subjugation extended to all facets of life, with Siyaad Barre's regime's structural reorganisation of the south-central regions in 1975 fragmenting the Rahanweyne's political weight across multiple regions and diluting their influence. In the following years-- particularly after the calamitous Ogaden War-- the Rahanweyne and other disadvantaged agrarian communities further suffered from state-sponsored land dispossessions, with regime clients gifted vast tracts of their arable territories as Barre in vain sought to shore up his collapsing regime. Neither the Digil nor the Mirifle had accumulated arms on a scale comparable to the Hawiye or Darood, leaving them systematically vulnerable once central authority disintegrated.

By the early 1990s, Bay and Bakool had been the site of the bubbling civil war for several months, with the limited Rahanweyne force of the Somali Democratic Movement-- formed in 1989-- proving unable to defend its communities. Through late 1991 and into 1992, Bay and Bakool became a killing ground for successive militia invasions — first Barre's retreating Mareehan forces, which systematically looted grain stores, and then Mohamed Farrah Aydiid's United Somali Congress (USC), which arrived as 'liberators' and stayed as occupiers. And so, by mid-1992, the twin effects of civil war and engineered famine had killed an estimated 500,000 disproportionately Rahanweyne people, mostly children, whose agricultural base had been systematically eroded by looting.

Though US-led intervention in late 1992 did restrain some of the extremes of the brutal inter-clan fighting, Aydiid's forces continued to weaponise the famine by extorting the UN relief intended for the dispossessed. And across the country, Somalia fragmented into warlord-administered fiefdoms, with minority clan communities — the Rahanweyne foremost among them — remaining subject to land and livestock predation. Even so, the UN's presence was notable in enabling the Rahanweyne to occupy administrative positions in their own territory, with the RRA later reviving elements of these governance structures in the early 2000s. But with the withdrawal of the ill-fated UNOSOM II, Aydiid's faction of the USC reasserted control over Bay and Bakool in 1995, removed the Digil-Mirifle Supreme Governing Council, and established domination over the Rahanweyne once more.

But the USC's extinguishing of the brief glimmer of Rahanweyne self-governance proved the trigger for the creation of the RRA. In October 1995, military officers, elders, and intellectuals drawn across the Digil and Mirifle convened west of Baidoa with the express intent to defend pan-Rahanweyne interests, with Colonel Hassan Mohamed Nur Shaatiguduud (Red Shirt) elected chair of the new movement. Though a former mid-ranking security officer, recollections of Shaatiguduud suggest a capable and broadly moderate leader, cut from a different cloth than most other Somali warlords aspiring for state control elsewhere in the country.

Yet without the necessary firepower, it would take another three years before the RRA retook Huddur in October 1998, and only then spurred on by the emergence of Ethiopian support, which had been formalised during UN-facilitated conferences in 1996 and 1997. At that time, Addis's interest in securing its border was shaped by the conflict with Al-Ittihad al-Islamiyya (AIAI), a broader strategy of cultivating proxy forces to establish a buffer zone along its Somali frontier, and concerns about Eritrea's sponsorship of anti-Ethiopian forces in southern Somalia. The RRA, with Ethiopian backing, eventually ousted Hussein Aydiid's forces from Baidoa in June 1999, and by September, his USC faction had entirely withdrawn from Bay and Bakool. Yet so great was the destruction of Baidoa and the displacement of the preceding decade that only 3,000 people were estimated to remain in the city. Unsurprisingly, much like Somaliland, these militias were considered as liberators from outside clan brutality, imbuing them with genuine legitimacy that endures to this day.

In the months following the ousting of Hussein Aydiid, the RRA subsequently expanded its administrative structures across Bay and Bakool, broadly following the pattern of rewarding military participation with political representation. Nevertheless, several district commissions did include non-Rahanweyne minorities, and some strides were made in revenue collection and security, such as through the absorption of former fighters into local police. And unlike the riverine areas of the Juba and Shabelle valleys, inter-clan competition in the agricultural areas of Bay and Bakool was comparatively limited, in part due to the scarcity of state-driven extractive landholding. Moreover, the Rahanweyne's land tenure norms-- particularly the practice of sheegad, the integration of non-clan into their genealogies-- helped mollify internal conflicts. Unsurprisingly, the emerging administration was also explicitly federalist-- continuing a long legacy of the Rahanweyne's support for decentralised authority-- and would oppose the stuttering attempts to impose a monopolistic government in Mogadishu.

The RRA did not last, however, as internal factionalism over the direction of the administration cut through in 2002. In particular, Shaatiguduud's attempts to lay claim to 6 regions in April under the banner of South West State stalled. Timed to reposition Shaatiguduud as a regional president rather than faction leader at the IGAD Nairobi reconciliation conference, it exacerbated tensions within the RRA's leadership. And, in turn, Shaatigaduud's two deputies, including a key ally of Villa Somalia and Speaker of Parliament Aden Madoobe today, mobilised their sub-clans against his faction. By late 2002, the RRA had fragmented and the administration had collapsed, with Baidoa representing the epicentre of renewed intra-Rahanweyne violence and checkpoints proliferating through the region. The resulting governance vacuum would, in the years that followed, contribute to the conditions that enabled Al-Shabaab's expansion into the interriverine areas.

The RRA may not have endured, with the subsequent years for Bay and Bakool marked by the fraught attempts to 're-birth' the Somali state, the Ethiopian invasion of 2006 and the rise of Al-Shabaab. But the RRA's most important contribution arguably-- and which persists in the rhetoric today-- relates to the political-sociological consolidation of a unified Rahanweyne identity, subsuming the agro-pastoralist Digil and Mirifle groupings into one. It provided a vehicle for the historically marginalised and demobilised agro-pastoralists to construct a unified identity and, for the first time in post-independence Somalia, assert autonomous territorial control.

Today, though, the two factions vying for supremacy in South West are not invoking the RRA out of fidelity to its legacy, but rather to claim its political capital. Laftagareen remains deeply unpopular amongst many of the influential Mirifle sub-clans with good reason, with the South West president having comprehensively shunned inclusion within Baidoa and subsumed his region within Mogadishu's centralising agenda for years. But for many, even despite Laftagareen's unpopularity, the prospect of renewed incorporation by a Hawiye-dominated government in Mogadishu sits equally uneasily with memories of the RRA's independence, particularly whilst the internal divisions of the Rahanweyne are once again being actively weaponised. Indeed, President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud's explicit exultations to the Leysan to rise up against Laftagareen speak to a centralising project that echoes the very hierarchies the RRA once rose to resist. And so, with the complex memory of the RRA remaining very much alive as a political force, the nature of power, legitimacy, and belonging is once again at stake in South West.

The Somali Wire Team