Did Winston Churchill visit Somalia in 1978? Apparently so ...
It was Churchill's grandson who inherited his name and was a former journalist and Tory MP who died in 2010
In one of my previous posts I reported that delegation of British MPs had visited Somalia at the height of the Ogaden War, in February 1978. The delegation was led by Tory MP Julian Amery who I attempted to partially profile in the post as well as outline some of his motives. Somalia back then, I point out, was “a black, socialist, Muslim republic and Amery was an avowed imperialist and white supremacist committed to free markets.” Very unusual bedfellows.
Among the people in the delegation was another MP named in the Halgan article called Winston Churchill. It initially stumped me and when I asked several Somali historians and people familiar with that time, many expressed a bit of surprise. One thought it was a not-so-slick piece of propaganda by a government desperate to show it had western support. However, another friend of mine who who pours over issues of the magazine said that whilst Halgan was a government propaganda outlet (it doesn’t attempt to disguise this) it wouldn’t so brazenly lie to and disrespect its audience.
The latter was correct and today, whilst going through the archives of British newspapers I stumbled on an article in the weekly Birmingham Post which also reported that Julian Amery was in fact accompanied by Winston Churchill, the grandson of the famous former prime minister by the same name. The dates add up. The story was published in the In Brief section of the paper on the 27th February 1978 under a peculiar headline which probably needs some investigating also: Genocide Fear. If you chose to open the PDF you can see the story in the middle of the spread, tucked in between a story about China’s global aims and another about a shortage of tea, coffee and 50p pieces in the UK.
The article is a concise paragraph and reports the following:
The Conservative MP Mr Julian Amery, who has been in Somalia with his colleague, Mr Winston Churchill, since Friday, said yesterday that any Somali retreat in the face of the Ethiopian counter-offensive would "invite genocide in the area."
The younger Churchill died in 2010 of cancer aged 69 and disappointingly (but not surprisingly I must add) had politics very similar to Julian Amery. In an obituary in The Guardian he is charged with trying “too hard to emulate the grandfather whose name he inherited.” The younger Churchill staunchly defended the oppressive apartheid regimes of Southern Rhodesia and South Africa, firmly aligning himself with their policies. When Margaret Thatcher appointed him as the assistant spokesperson on defence, it didn't take long for Churchill to receive his marching orders. His defiance in voting against the renewal of sanctions against Southern Rhodesia meant that even Thatcher didn’t want him around. Churchill’s eagerness to inflict suffering upon people of colour found a more recent outlet in his fervent support for the Iraq War in 2003.
Granted Churchill was a well-travelled journalist before his grim political career who covered conflicts from Nigeria to Vietnam, it still surprises me that he would go to Somalia in a show of support for the Barre regime. They almost certainly saw an opportunity to affect change in Somalia’s international Cold War orientation, but at what cost? Defeat the Soviets to ensure the survival of an authoritarian socialist regime in Somalia? What eventually transpired in Somalia gave new meaning to the old adage ‘we’re in prison but our ideas are in power’. The Soviets were eventually expelled from Somalia but their style of governance reigned in Mogadishu.
But there is one part of the The Guardian obituary which is very relevant to us here though which summarises a tendency Churchill exhibited all too frequently:
“In his almost mechanical and cocksure imitation of his grandfather, he made the mistake of supporting such regimes when the majority of other Conservatives realised their days were probably numbered.”