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STATE BUILDING E SICUREZZA NELL’ESPERIENZA
DELL’AMMINISTRAZIONE FIDUCIARIA ITALIANA IN SOMALIA

A complex and delicate work for many reasons: the need to guarantee uni-
form representation to the various clans, while ensuring that this need did not
reflect on the reliability of the enlisted persons, the search for favorable conditions
that would stimulate the enrollment of those who had already militated among the
askari or, for the police forces, among the zaptié, so as to have trusted and already
trained elements and, in general, the constant pressure exerted by the reduced finan-
cial resources which, in fact, limited this initiative. In the meantime, in Italy, the pre-
parations had begun some time earlier : the programming was aimed, above all, at
(8)
identifying executives who had experience in Africa, in general, in Somalia, in par-
ticular, and in the census of volunteers for this type of assignment, to be selected
in what still basically was an army of conscripts. The provisional establishment
plans were sent to the HQs on 1 September 1949 and the C.S.S. was set up on a an
Army HQ, a Navy HQ and an Air Force HQ; the main part, referring to the land
troops, consisted of four Infantry and three Carabinieri armored battalions, a of
100/17 artillery unit, two engineers companies (sappers and connections), various
service departments, a nucleus of officers for the first orientation of the Somali
units, all of which have undergone an intense training program since the previous
summer. The Navy initially intervened with a ship, the Cherso launched in 1912,
sold in 1923 as a repair of war damage from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, while
the Air Force had 5 Douglas DC 53 and a DC 47 for transportation and 4 P51
Mustang fighters for aviation safety, as well as 3 Stinson L5 light aircraft for recon-
naissance, liaison and transport of injured personnel. In which way could the
Somalia Security Corps contribute to the building of a new State reality? The deve-
lopment formula, from the point of view of the protagonists of this process, had
to reside, first of all, in the building of a State both for the UN and the AFIS offi-
cials and soldiers, who grew up in a culture which had long since settled the centra-
lity of the State as the primary organizational institution of a social life.
Consequently, it was a question of identifying and providing answers to the consti-
tutive elements of a sovereignty, in the identification of a people, in the definition
of a territory, in the organized monopoly of the use of force. The three elements
of sovereignty, that we intend to examine here, suffered from close and remote dif-
ficulties: a reality without stable and defined borders; an authority concentrated in
the hierarchy of each tribe; the settlement of disputes entrusted to violence in con-
flicts between individuals or groups or to compensatory dynamics of a para-con-
tractual nature such as “diya payment groups”, were all factors that undermined the
idea that the use of force could be a monopoly of a State.

(8) FILIPPO STEFANI in La Storia della Dottrina e degli ordinamenti dell’Esercito Italiano, III Vol. - 1° Tomo
pagg. 919-924, SME - Ufficio Storico, Roma 1987.

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