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Travel to Somalia — Unbiased reviews and
great deals from TripAdvisorSomalia
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National name: Soomaaliya
President: Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed
(2004)
Prime Minister: Nur Hassan Hussein
(2007)
Current government officials
Land area: 242,216 sq mi (627,339 sq km);
total area: 246,199 sq mi (637,657 sq km)
Population (2007 est.): 9,118,773
(growth rate: 2.8%); birth rate: 44.6/1000; infant mortality rate:
113.1/1000; life expectancy: 48.8; density per sq mi: 38
Capital and largest city (2003 est.):
Mogadishu, 1,208,800
Monetary unit: Somali shilling
Languages:
Somali (official), Arabic, English,
Italian
Ethnicity/race:
Somali 85%, Bantu and others 15% (including
Arabs 30,000)
Religion:
Islam (Sunni)
Literacy rate: 38% (2001 est.)
Economic summary: GDP/PPP (2005
est.): $4.835 billion; per capita $600. Real growth rate:
2.4%. Inflation: n.a. (businesses print their own money).
Unemployment: n.a. Arable land: 2%.
Agriculture: bananas, sorghum, corn, coconuts, rice,
sugarcane, mangoes, sesame seeds, beans; cattle, sheep, goats; fish.
Labor force: 3.7 million (very few are skilled laborers);
agriculture (mostly pastoral nomadism) 71%, industry and services
29%. Industries: a few light industries, including sugar
refining, textiles, wireless communication. Natural resources:
uranium and largely unexploited reserves of iron ore, tin,
gypsum, bauxite, copper, salt, natural gas, likely oil reserves.
Exports: $241 million f.o.b. (2004 est.): livestock, bananas,
hides, fish, charcoal, scrap metal. Imports: $576 million
f.o.b. (2004 est.): manufactures, petroleum products, foodstuffs,
construction materials, qat. Major trading partners: UAE,
Yemen, Oman, Djibouti, Kenya, India, Brazil (2004).
Communications: Telephones: main lines
in use: 15,000 (2000); mobile cellular: n.a. Radio broadcast
stations: AM 0, FM 1, shortwave 5 (2001). Radios: 470,000
(1997). Television broadcast stations: 3; note: two in
Mogadishu; one in Hargeisa (2001). Televisions: 135,000
(1997). Internet Service Providers (ISPs): 3 (one each in
Boosaaso, Hargeisa, and Mogadishu) (2000). Internet users:
200 (2000).
Transportation: Railways: 0 km.
Highways: total: 22,100 km; paved: 2,608 km; unpaved: 19,492
km (1999 est.). Ports and harbors: Boosaaso, Berbera,
Chisimayu (Kismaayo), Merca, Mogadishu. Airports: 60
(2002).
International disputes:
“Somaliland” secessionists provide port facilities to
land-locked Ethiopia and establish commercial ties with regional
states; “Puntland” secessionists clash with
“Somaliland” secessionists to establish territorial
limits and clan loyalties, each seeking support from neighboring
states; Ethiopia maintains only an administrative line with the
Oromo region of southern Somalia and maintains alliances with local
Somali clans opposed to the unrecognized Transitional National
Government in Mogadishu.
Major sources and definitions
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Geography
Somalia, situated in the Horn of Africa, lies along the Gulf of Aden
and the Indian Ocean. It is bounded by Djibouti in the northwest, Ethiopia
in the west, and Kenya in the southwest. In area it is slightly smaller
than Texas. Generally arid and barren, Somalia has two chief rivers, the
Shebelle and the Juba.
Government
Between Jan. 1991 and Aug. 2000, Somalia had no working government. A
fragile parliamentary government was formed in 2000, but it expired in
2003 without establishing control of the country. In 2004, a new
transitional parliament was instituted and elected a president.
History
From the 7th to the 10th century, Arab and Persian trading posts were
established along the coast of present-day Somalia. Nomadic tribes
occupied the interior, occasionally pushing into Ethiopian territory. In
the 16th century, Turkish rule extended to the northern coast, and the
sultans of Zanzibar gained control in the south.
After British occupation of Aden in 1839, the Somali coast became its
source of food. The French established a coal-mining station in 1862 at
the site of Djibouti, and the Italians planted a settlement in Eritrea.
Egypt, which for a time claimed Turkish rights in the area, was succeeded
by Britain. By 1920, a British and an Italian protectorate occupied what
is now Somalia. The British ruled the entire area after 1941, with Italy
returning in 1950 to serve as United Nations trustee for its former
territory.
By 1960, Britain and Italy granted independence to their respective
sectors, enabling the two to join as the Republic of Somalia on July 1,
1960. Somalia broke diplomatic relations with Britain in 1963 when the
British granted the Somali-populated Northern Frontier District of Kenya
to the Republic of Kenya.
On Oct. 15, 1969, President Abdi Rashid Ali Shermarke was assassinated
and the army seized power. Maj. Gen. Mohamed Siad Barre, as president of a
renamed Somali Democratic Republic, leaned heavily toward the USSR. In
1977, Somalia openly backed rebels in the easternmost area of Ethiopia,
the Ogaden Desert, which had been seized by Ethiopia at the turn of the
century. Somalia acknowledged defeat in an eight-month war against the
Ethiopians that year, having lost much of its 32,000-man army and most of
its tanks and planes. President Siad Barre fled the country in late Jan.
1991. His departure left Somalia in the hands of a number of clan-based
guerrilla groups, none of which trusted each other.
Africa's worst drought of the century occurred in 1992, and, coupled
with the devastation of civil war, Somalia was plunged into a severe
famine that killed 300,000. U.S. troops were sent in to protect the
delivery of food in Dec. 1992, and in May 1993 the UN took control of the
relief efforts from the U.S. The warlord Mohamed Farah Aidid ambushed UN
troops and dragged American bodies through the streets, causing an
about-face in U.S. willingness to involve itself in the fate of this
lawless country. The last of the U.S. troops departed in late March,
leaving 19,000 UN troops behind.
Since 1991 Somalia has been engulfed in anarchy. Years of peace
negotiations between the various factions were fruitless, and warlords and
militias ruled over individual swaths of land. In 1991, a breakaway
nation, the Somaliland Republic, proclaimed its independence. Since then
several warlords have set up their own ministates in Puntland and
Jubaland. Although internationally unrecognized, these states have been
peaceful and stable.
In Aug. 2000, a parliament convened in nearby Djibouti and elected
Somalia's first government in nearly a decade. After its first year in
office, the government still controlled only 10% of the country, and in
Aug. 2003, its mandate expired. In Oct. 2002, new talks to establish a
government began; in Aug. 2004 a 275-member transitional parliament was
inaugurated for a five-year term. Parliament selected a national president
in September, Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, the president of the breakaway region
of Puntland. The new government, however, spent its first year operating
out of Kenya—Somalia remained too violent and unstable to
enter—eventually settling in the provincial town of Baidoa.
In May 2006, the country's worst outbreak of violence in 10 years
began, with Islamist militias, called the Somali Islamic Courts Council
(SICC), battling rival warlords. On June 6, the Islamist militia seized
control of the capital, Mogadishu, and established control in much of the
south. Somalia's transitional government, led by President Abdullahi Yusuf
and situated in Baidoa, spent months engaged in unsuccessful peace
negotiations with the Islamic Courts Council. In the meantime, neighboring
Ethiopia, which has clashed in the past with Somalia's Islamists and
considers them a threat to regional security, began amassing troops on the
border. In mid-December, Ethiopia launched air strikes against the
Islamists, and in a matter of days Ethiopian ground troops and Somali
soldiers loyal to the transitional government regained control of
Mogadishu. A week later most of the Islamists had been forced to flee the
country. Ethiopia announced that its troops would remain in the country
until stability was assured and a functional central government had been
established, ending Somalia's fifteen years of anarchy. In Jan. 2007, the
U.S. launched airstrikes on the retreating Islamists, who they believed
included three members of al-Qaeda suspected of involvement in the 1998
bombings of the American embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. The air
strikes were strongly criticized in a number of Muslim countries, which
accused the Americans of killing Somali civilians. Battles between the
insurgents and Somali and Ethiopian troops intensified in March, leaving
300 civilians dead in what has been called the worst fighting in 15 years.
The fighting created a humanitarian crisis, with more than 320,000 Somalis
fleeing the fighting in Mogadishu in just two months. In July, a national
reconciliation conference opened in Mogadishu but was quickly postponed
when leading opposition figures failed to appear. The fighting intensified
once again in October. The Alliance for the Reliberation of Somalia, a
coalition of moderate Islamist leaders, and the transitional government
agreed to a cease-fire in June 2008 that called on Ethiopian troops that
were propping up the fragile government to be replaced by UN troops. The
future of the deal was tenuous from the start and was greeted by much
skepticism. Indeed, it was unclear if the UN could assemble a force
willing to be deployed to the troubled region, and several powerful
Islamist groups did not participate in the negotiations.
Prime Minister Ali Muhammad Ghedi resigned in October 2007 after a
protracted feud with President Yusuf. He was succeeded by Nur Hassan
Hussein.
See also Encyclopedia: Somalia.
U.S. State Dept. Country Notes:
Somalia
Information Please® Database, © 2007 Pearson
Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
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