Somaliland: Post-War Nation-Building and International Relations, 1991-2006

Abstract
This thesis is intended to explore the international relations of emerging nation-building in the Somali coast, with particular reference to the un-recognised Republic of Somaliland in the north-western Horn of Africa region. This study focuses on the international relations of Somaliland’s international quest for recognition, linked to its own culturally-rooted internal reconciliatory post-war nation-building efforts. Informed by written as well as first-hand research interviews, particular focus is placed in this study on the interplay of internal and external forces in shaping a strategy by Somaliland’s elites for acquiring international recognition and national self- determination.
These are placed within the broader regional and international context of attempts to resuscitate the Somali state, an endeavour offering a fitting assessment of different modalities of African nation-building within the greater Somali environment. In relative analytic terms, the competitive international relations of nation-building in Somaliland and state reconstitution in southern Somalia informs the underlying hypothesis of this thesis: Somaliland’s example as a study in the efficacy of the internally-driven, culturally-rooted ‘bottom-up’ approach to post-war nation-building and regional stability, and the implications this holds for prioritising reconciliation between indigenous traditions and modernity in achieving stability in nation-building. By contrast, the internationally-backed ‘top-down’ approach to reconstituting a Mogadishu-based Somali state remains elusive. Yet, the international status quo regarding the affording of diplomatic recognition to what are normally considered secessionist ‘break-away’ regions of internationally recognised states, complicates Somaliland’s culturally rooted ‘bottom-up’ modalities. It also challenges the African Union (AU) during the ‘good governance’ era of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), a context within which Somaliland fits comfortably as a good citizen of the international community.
The international relations of the Somaliland nation-building enterprise is approached from a ‘quadrilateral framework’ of interactive elements to the Somaliland experience: Reconciliation, Reconstruction, Religion and Recognition. This framework informs the four core chapters of the thesis.
Overview of Hypothesis and Chapters
Chapter 1: Introduction
Ama buur ahaw ama buur ku tirso = Either be a mountain or attach yourself to one (Somali proverb)
This thesis is intended to explore the international relations of nation-building in the Somali coast, with particular reference to the un-recognised Republic of Somaliland. Somaliland has been described as “the inspiring story of resilience and reconstruction and of a truly African Renaissance which has many lessons to teach the rest of Africa, and the international community”.
In this respect, the material has been organised in six chapters, which aim to illuminate key elements of Somaliland’s post-war nation-building and international relations, with specific focus on the virtually unknown interconnected elements of reconciliation, reconstruction, religion and recognition in Somaliland’s quest to sustain its independence and development as an important state actor within its region, the greater Horn of Africa and within Africa at large. The author plans to narrate this important story, informed by written as well as first-hand research interviews. The author sets out the specific theoretical concerns that have informed this thesis and relates his analysis to some of the larger issues in the thin body of available scholarship on Somaliland. It is an attempt to add to the substantive
knowledge of Somaliland’s post-war nation-building and international relations. It is hoped that the findings from this research, as reflected in the chapters that follow, notably the interplay of external and internal forces in shaping a strategy by Somaliland’s elites for acquiring international recognition, will contribute constructively to: (a) developing a new sub-field of international relations dealing with the “internationalization of domestic transformation”2 (virtually non-existent in the case of Somaliland), and (b) to an emerging regional discourse on the Horn of Africa in South Africa, as South Africa takes on the tasks of chairing the African Union’s Ministerial Committee on Post-Conflict Reconstruction in Sudan and engaging the principle of self-determination in South Sudan and Somaliland.
1.1 Exploring the Roots of Somaliland’s Nation-Building
Broadly articulated, the question to be answered is: how did Somaliland succeed in reconciling and cohering the clans that currently comprise its society? How did this “new solution” emerge, ending war and leading to a democratic path?4 How did this process of reconciliation give momentum to nation-building in a turbulent and intractable environment, while navigating the religious extremism of a militant Islamism, accompanied by what has become a reasonably sustained diplomacy for international recognition? As such, this treatise will examine the trajectory of Somaliland’s reconciliatory processes, reconstruction tracks, religious discourse and international relations from 1991 through to 2006. On 18 May 1991 Somaliland’s traditional elders and the liberation elite unilaterally declared their independence from Somalia. On 18 May 2006 Somalilanders in many corners of the world celebrated fifteen years of Somaliland’s independence and freedom.
This inquiry takes on special urgency in the world that has emerged after the September 11, 2001 terror attacks in the United States and what this event brought in its wake in terms of the trans-national movement of Islamic ideas and political currents, terrorism and the quest for international order. The challenges posed by this cluster of dynamics as they impinge on Somaliland are further compounded by the problematic predicament of Somaliland as an unrecognised entity in a continent where the status quo of territorial integrity of colonially inherited boundaries is sacrosanct. The two exceptions to the latter view are the recent ‘African Union Fact-Finding Mission to Somaliland’ and the European Union’s support of Somaliland’s recent 2005 parliamentary elections.
The international relations of Somaliand’s bid to overcome this status quo are further complicated by rival geo-political agendas between major state actors in the Horn of Africa such as Ethiopia, and in Arab North Africa, the Levant and the Persian Gulf, such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia. These geo-politics, in turn, feed into fundamental conflicts over the modalities of nation-building along the Somali coast between proponents of varying federalist formulas and those stressing the need for unitary state centralism; between externally driven ‘top-down’ interventions to reconstruct and reconstitute a pan-Somali state versus internally motivated, culturally-rooted, regionally-based ‘bottom- up’ bids to reconstruct more territorially limited domains of Somali sovereignty.
To a large extent, the different colonial histories and methodologies of dominance have influenced this contemporary contestation in rival attempts at Somali state reconstitution and nation-building. Compounding this history, contemporary external actors interacting with their Somali interlocutors have complicated these contradictory dynamics. In the process, tensions were generated, which reached a new level of complexity in light of yet another in a succession of “rebirths of Somalia” to Somaliland’s south: the 2004 Transitional Federal Government (TFG) of Somalia.6 However, this process, in turn, has been further compounded in its complexity following the June 2006 ascendancy and displacement of the Supreme Islamic Courts Council over warlord rule and rivalry in the south; a development challenging TFG legitimacy and the regional and external forces supporting the TFG.
1.2 Hypothesis, Analytical Framework and Research Objectives: The Efficacy of African Culturally-Rooted Nation-Building from the ‘Bottom- Up’
This latest externally-driven ‘top-down’ attempt to reconstitute Somalia as a, what is now Islamist challenged-TFG remains far from consolidated. Meanwhile, the Somaliland Republic has managed, largely on its own, but with increasing African and international interest and support, to pass the various electoral stages of the transition in order to acquire international recognition. In fact, it could well be that the most recent Islamist and TFG- related events in the south will further enhance the international recognition credibility of Somaliland.
Moreover, this sharp dichotomy between local nation-building success seeking international endorsement, on the one hand, and continuing international state rebuilding failure without local legitimacy, on the other, inspires the central hypothesis of this study: Somaliland’s example as a study in the efficacy of the internally-driven, culturally-rooted ‘bottom-up’ approach to post war nation-building and regional stability and the implications this approach holds for prioritising reconciliation between indigenous culture and traditions and modernity in achieving relative stability in the nation-building project.
As a governance model, the culturally-rooted ‘bottom-up’ internally-driven phenomenon is more often than not associated with grassroots, participatory forms of economic development rather than democratic participation, although notions of ‘participatory democracy’ evoke ‘bottom-up’ forms of popular governance. But, scholars argue governance from the ground-up is often associated with a more technocratic discourse pertaining to debates over the efficacy of centralisation versus decentralisation involving different administrative tiers of government. Alternatively, the interplay between ‘bottom-up’ and ‘top-down’ approaches to governance are examined in terms of arriving at an optimum division of labour between issues of participation that are best addressed at local levels of governance, and problems that can only be solved through a trans-national or global consensus, which necessarily evokes elite-driven approaches to governance.
As an avowedly political nation-building strategy in the African context, the ‘top-down’ versus ‘bottom-up’ discourse has, until recently, tended to be marginalised by prevailing assumptions of the need for strong centralised states wherein decentralisation is viewed suspiciously, along with forms of federalism and confederation, which are perceived as threats to territorial integrity and state security. But the emergence of regionally-based post- colonial challenges to incumbent regimes, as in the case of Eritrea’s independence from Ethiopia and Sudan being forced to accommodate the self-determination of South Sudan in the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) of 2005, has begun to force an African rethink on questions of federalism, decentralisation, popular participation and ‘top-down’ versus culturally rooted ‘bottom-up’ forms of governance.
Somaliland’s experience represents a variation along this theme, having been incorporated under a centralised post-colonial regime at the time of decolonisation in 1960, only to see that system collapse under the weight of repressive centralisation of political power in Mogadishu, which propelled the Somalis of the Somaliland coastal region to opt for a reassertion of independence. But Somaliland’s uniqueness goes even beyond that, as its experience will be shown to have evolved organically out of a different regionally based cultural and post-colonial dynamic than was the case in Italian Somaliland;8 one in which the reconciliation of tradition and modernity played a major role in Somaliland’s ‘bottom-up’ nation-building project. The ‘bottom-up’ nation-building process is rooted in a post-colonial resistance, grounded in the indigenous Somali history and culture of Somaliland, which, it is argued, has contributed to an infinitely greater coherence in Somaliland’s national identity than has been the case in the south of the country.
It is on the basis of this ‘struggle history’, as well as numerous interviews held with key social players as outlined later under the section on method, that the refinement of the variables and elements are painstakingly arranged and articulated into a viable framework. The problem encountered was in finding a unit of analysis appropriate to the study of Somaliland’s post war nation- building and international relations. To resolve this difficulty, the approach that has been taken is that of an interpretive narrative that frames its reconciliation-reconstruction-religion-recognition elements into what the author calls a ‘quadrilateral framework’, in their relation to Somaliland’s culturally rooted ‘bottom-up’ nation-building formation as a strategy of acquiring international recognition.
This approach is suggested partly by the literature reviewed and largely by the interviews undertaken in Somaliland. Within this ‘quadrilateral framework’ as the pivotal points, the research objectives of this study are four-fold:

1. To illuminate and interpret the ‘quadrilateral framework’ mentioned above, by examining the points of convergence that have given Somaliland political and social cohesion;
2. To analyse the processes by which the four elements have evolved and how they interplay;
3. To probe into how the international relations of the Horn of Africa, in terms of inter-African state actors and extra-African state and non-state international influences, have combined to shape this ‘quadrilateral framework’ and how this external realm may affect the future of Somaliland’s prospects and those of the entire North-East African sub- region as they impinge on developments along the Somali peninsula and the Red Sea; and
4. Closely interrelated with this last dimension, to demonstrate how Somaliland’s internal dynamics is a critical factor interacting with these external influences in shaping the international relations of its recognition diplomacy and post-war nation-building.
   However, these analytical parameters surrounding Somaliland’s quadrilateral processes beg further questions that this study attempts to address. These relate to findings from the last four points concerning research objectives that may be drawn from formulating a sub-hypothesis pertaining to the possible lessons to be learned from the particular interplay of internal and external forces in shaping a strategy by Somaliland’s elites for acquiring international recognition and national self-determination, and from the Somaliland Republic’s emergence within the wider quest for the reconsolidating of a ‘greater Somalia’ or the Somali peninsula identity.
   Inter-clan reconciliation has been at the heart of nation-building in Somaliland, to the extent that this process reflects what has come to be recognised as a culturally rooted ‘bottom-up’ approach to reconciliatory peace and nation- building. This study (in the process of answering the question posed earlier of “how did Somaliland succeed in reconciling and cohering the clans …“) seeks to demonstrate that such an approach may have more to offer in stabilising African – and, for that matter, non-African – conflict situations, in terms of sustainable peace-building and post-conflict reconstruction, than the conventional ‘top-down’ approach often imposed by the international politics of such conflicts; that, to the extent that Somaliland has and continues to develop as a “success story”9 in the efficacy of “locally managed peace” and nation-building based on its unique clan politics of reconciliation, it also serves as an object lesson for the rest of Africa in what may be the greater benefits of integrating or balancing tradition and modernity in governance in arriving at optimum formulas for achieving peace and security in Africa.10 State collapse and warfare experienced in Somaliland and Somalia have catalysed the modernisation process, where foreign patronage was abandoned, emerging local political authorities brought into being and free-market capitalism embraced, and in Somaliland, a more self-determined path was developed; and there is ample evidence of this.
   Here, stress must be placed on ‘integrating’ and ‘balancing’ since imbalances between tradition and modernity in African governance may serve as continuing sources of destabilisation and unrest, as amply demonstrated within the southern African sub-region in – like the Somali coast – the mono- ethnic nation-state monarchies of Lesotho and Swaziland (and, post-election 1994 in South Africa, what is now KwaZulu-Natal province). Finally, given the continuing saga of the Somaliland Republic, the challenge of inter-African, North-East African and international politics is to arrive at a realistic accommodation of such on-the-ground culturally ‘bottom-up’ requirements for bringing peace, security and stability to such conflict-ridden regions in the developing world. Here, the political and policy implications of addressing this challenge will be explored.
   Chapter 2: Reconciliation Resistance, Collapse, Conflict, Consensus and the International Community
   hadduu oday jiro, uu u ood rogo, abaaroodkana way orgootaa …If an elder looks after it [the herd] and caters to its needs, it could show heat even during the dry season … (Somali proverb)
   The national reconciliation process that culminated in the declaration of Somaliland independence on 18 May 1991 represents a unique blend of ‘modernity’ and ‘tradition’ out of the travails of the peoples of the north-west Somali coast under the ancien regime of General Mohamed Siad Barre, and the war of repression he waged against this region; a trauma that effectively undermined his ‘Greater Somalia’ project in confirming the defeat of these aspirations in the earlier Ogaden campaign of 1978. The dynamics of Somaliland reconciliation revolve around the complex interplay of accommodation between what might be termed the forces of modernity, represented in the rise of the SNM, Somali National Movement, as an early generation African post-colonial liberation-cum-resistance phenomenon, on the one hand, and the indigenous forces of tradition vested in the north-west region’s clan leadership on the other.
   As a starting point toward the post-colonial readjustment of political identities along the Somali coast in the wake of the 1991 collapse of the Barre dictatorship, this traditional/modern interplay represented a departure from what, throughout much of Africa, had been an essentially ‘top-down’ transfer of power from metropolitan colonial elites to nationalist elites who had negotiated such power transfers, more or less in the absence of deeper socio- cultural mass transformations with pan-ethnolinguistic nationalist content. Even in mono-ethnic geo-cultural regions like the Somali coast – much more so in ethnolingusitically diverse regions elsewhere in Africa amalgamated into single post-colonial polities – such absences of nationalistic social transformations accompanying elite power transfers have, over successive post-independence decades, come back to haunt much of the continent in the form of nominal nation-states with, by and large, weak national identities; situations that, in many instances, have become manifest in post-colonial break-downs in governance, with civil war and chronic unrest threatening the cohesion of many an African state. The ‘failed’ and ‘collapsed’ state syndrome has emerged from many such situations, of which Somalia has become a prime example.
   2.1 ‘Xeer Soomaali’ Under British Colonialism: Elders the Midwives of Somaliland’s Reconstruction
   The Somaliland experience of reconciliation represents a variation on what may be an emerging theme of post-colonial correctives of such oversights in reformulating national identities; and in the process challenging the inter- African and broader international relations impinging on such upheavals. Here, there is a need to revisit the comparative British and Italian colonial legacies along the Somali coast to gain some perspective on the foundations for post-conflict reconciliation that have thus far benefited Somaliland. The veteran British ‘insider’ on the politics of this region, John Drysdale, has shed interesting light on this legacy in observations he made last year on why, from the vantage-point of history, Somalia is experiencing such problems in reconstituting itself in the south.
   In an unpublished paper on ‘A Study of the Somali Hybrid Insurance System and the Consequences of its Rejection by Southern Somalia’s Political Leadership’, Drysdale points out that the former British Somaliland Protectorate of the north-west has three concurrent legal systems: secular law in the English language, Islamic law in the Arabic language, and unwritten Somali traditional law. “The latter, under the British administrative system, was exercised exclusively by Somali elders who were knowledgeable in traditional law. They operated in both town and country in the six districts then administered by British District Commissioners. To help the elders in the execution of their court orders, District Commissioners had informal clan police available”. Because traditional law, according to Drysdale, … was not written, and is still not written, only those elders who had inherited an encyclopaedic knowledge of the time-honoured principles and practices of the traditional law’s tariff systems for the awards of collective compensation to the aggrieved … case histories, the art of peace-making, consensus decision- making, the avoidance of political power in the hands of one person, the liberty of the individual for humanity’s sake – no incarceration or capital punishment since you cannot deprive a family of its desperately needed labour – were qualified as consultants to advise elders in court (the shade of a thorn tree). It was, and still is, a largely unknown subject to the outside world. However ancient traditional law may be, Somalis are comfortable with its judgements to this day, whether disputes coming before the elders are peacemaking in character, or the result of injuries sustained in a road accident, or compensation for injuries inflicted on a person’s pride or wellbeing. Tariffs associated with this system are at the core of Somali justice in terms of applying preventive measures against outbreaks of serious conflict.
   Intimately interwoven with this ‘indigenous knowledge system’ of traditional law vested in clan elders is a guarantee for every Somali of collective support from one’s Tol. A ‘Tol,’ according to Drysdale, is “a self-contained group of genealogical lineage with its chosen elders who run the organisation.” These exist in the thousands as institutions that protect the interest of their respective memberships. Drysdale continues:
   The almost daily voluntary work of elders of the ‘Tol’ is both physically and intellectually demanding and usually independent of government. No free lunches or four wheels come their way, but governments which have no love of them, frequently use or misuse their energy and talents in the interest of good or bad governance. Their re-emergence into the open society of Somaliland in 1991 from the darkness of their two decades of underground work was fostered three years earlier by the Somali National Movement. The Movement consisted of freedom fighters based in Ethiopia in the 1980s to oust Siyad Barre’s formidable and wicked military garrisons in Somaliland …
   The Movement had a problem of recruitment. Reluctantly they called on the elders in Somaliland to persuade surreptitiously their ‘Tol’ followers to join the Movement. They were successful. The Movement’s commanders, impressed by the elders’ aplomb, brought them in as advisers, giving them equal status (italics added). When the Movement ran the garrisons into the sea and formed a government in 1991, the elders were given a place of honour, resuming their open-handed work, with almost ordained honesty, as before.
   This reflection on how ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ came together out of the existential circumstances of historical contingency in Somaliland’s resistance to Siad Barre’s Mogadishu regime is instructive for what it conveys about the extent to which these two realms of Islamic-cultural reality have been alienated from each other in post-colonial African polities. Moreover, in Somaliland’s case, they were not necessarily pre-ordained to make common cause against the southern tyranny, but for the armed struggle that was imposed upon the people of the north-west region and the need for the exiled SNM to firmly root itself among the people of the region, in order to wage a successful military resistance. In this way, the region’s clan elders became the midwives of Somaliland’s rebirth.
   Whether or not Britain’s colonial propensity for indirect rule, through traditional leadership structures was crucial to the continued existence of the system of traditional decision-making described by Drysdale, is not clear. What Drysdale does stress, in contrast to the situation in the Somaliland north-west is the period of the mid-1950s when Somalia, in the south, was still under the administration of the Italian government at the “behest of the United Nations Trusteeship Council”. Referring to the Somali Youth League (SYL) leader, Abdillahi Issa, Drysdale observes that he … had several things in common with the Italian administration. One issue in particular was their mutual abhorrence of ‘tribalism.’ The Italians ignored elders before Abdillahi became prime minister. They felt that Somalis could only modernise if their urban societies could develop bourgeois habits, learn the Italian language and culture, and be Italian in all their beautiful cultural habits including a propensity towards malfeasance. As part of this process the condemnation by the Somali Youth League of ‘tribalism’ was grist for the Italian mill. ‘Tribalism,’ in the Somali political notion at the time, was an embedded culture drawing upon virtually every Somali’s allegiance competitively with the modern concept (to Somalis then) of political parties which were deemed to be more like the United States understanding of a ‘civil society’.
   According to Drysdale, during the first republic (on the dawn of independence from colonialism): Abdillahi Issa, as prime minister, forbade the use of lineage names, with which Somalis heretofore identified themselves, and officially discarded the Somali traditional system known for centuries as Xeer Soomaali. The same policy persisted during the first nine years of the Somali Republic (1960-69) – the union between Somalia and Somaliland – which was not a very successful experiment in democracy. This was followed by Siyad Barre’s ‘burial’ of ‘tribalism’ for twenty-two years which was a farce since he used the members of his own clan affiliations in the security services to intimidate the rest of the country.
   The rebirth of ‘tribalism’ out of a compact based on mutual need between the north-west’s (Somaliland) clan elders and the SNM’s exiled leadership would eventually set the stage for the experiment in reconciliatory nation-building based on a marriage – initially of convenience – between tradition and modernity, which has resulted in the Somaliland of today. However, this was not a smooth process without its own internal contradictions and conflicts. But the Somaliland national experience, as it unfolded, would confirm the elders as arbiters in resolving the region’s conflicts along the way. In effect, ‘tribalism’ as tradition became the midwife of modernity in Somaliland’s rebirth. To arrive where it is today, it is necessary to revisit Somaliland’s first brief taste of independence in the early 1960s. Somaliland, as the former British protectorate, would go through the ‘false start’ of Somali republican union with former Italian Somaliland from 1960-69, followed by the nadir of the era of the Barre dictatorship, which eventually rekindled the north-west region’s nationalist impulses as a result of the repression and near genocide that it had to endure.
   2.2 The SNM: Northern Resistance Takes Shape
   The SNM came into being in response to the repression of the Siad Barre dictatorship. As a regionally-based post-colonial resistance movement, it represented the northern ‘clan-family’ of the Isaaqs, centred on the three major urban centres of Hargeisa, the second largest city along the Somali coast, Burco and the strategic port city of Berbera. Other non-Isaaq clans and sub-clans represented in the SNM’s founding included the Dir clans from the south in former Italian Somalia, individual members of the Gadabursi clan groups, and the Warsangeli and Dhulbahante clans. According to Jack L. Davies, in his ‘The Liberation Movements of Somalia’, it was founded “more or less simultaneously by different groups of individuals in Saudi Arabia, Mogadishu and London,” meeting in London on April 6, 1981.35 Some of the members of the founding committee in London were: Ahmed Mohamed Gulaid (Jimaleh), the group’s President, who became SNM Chairman; Hassan Adan Wadadeed, Vice-President; Ahmed Ismael; and Mohamed Hashi Elmi. The London group that hosted the founding of the SNM has been described as having been “secular and nationalist in its political outlook”, while the Saudi-based members were defined as “religious and quite ardent in their support of the Isaq”. Furthermore, “it seems that the religious element in the organization was most influential during the formative years, but started to wane in importance with the shift of the SNM from London to its base in eastern Ethiopia in 1983 and the subsequent intensification of its ten-year- long guerrilla war against Siad Barre’s forces.” The SNM, as well as the first President of Somaliland, Mohammed Egal, had to contend with strong internal religious sentiments. A case in point is the inscription of the Islamic religious formula on the new flag of Somaliland. This challenge of balancing religion and modernity in Somaliland continues.
   The SNM had been born of a sentiment of marginalisation – a feeling among the Isaaq and allied clans and sub-clans that the Mogadishu dictatorship under Siad Barre had neglected its clan and region. Southern dominance in the Republic of Somalia had triggered sporadic Isaaq unrest throughout the post-independence period. For example, in 1961, Somaliland’s military
   officers, led by Hassan Kayd, attempted to reclaim Somaliland’s independence. Yet, in spite of this periodic unrest, the marginalisation and the savage military repression that ensued in the late 1980s, the SNM’s initial raison d’être was not to secede from the Somali union, but to overthrow the Siad Barre dictatorship. As an inter-clan expression of pan-Somali nationalism, the driving force was a “unified desire to oppose the oppressive socialist dictatorship of General Barre, rather than to support any particular clans, such as the Isaaq clans that provided the largest fraction of its membership. Therefore, it collected intellectuals with a wide variety of political views who shared this common goal.” Short of secession, there was, according to Davies, a longer-term SNM desire, not only to stop the oppression of the central government in Mogadishu, but “to decentralize much of the power of that government.” However, “the short-term motivation of stopping the growing genocide of the Isaq group of clans by General Barre focused the goals of the SNM on a narrower clan basis.”
   The increasingly repressive nature of the Barre regime reflected a confluence of pressures stemming from General Barre’s failed ‘Greater Somalia’ irredentist project. The aim was to detach from Ethiopia its Ogaden Somali region. This was initially undertaken by Mogadishu’s backing of the Western Somali Liberation Front (WSLF) and the so-called ‘Somali Abo’ insurgent forces at a time when the Mengistu regime was also contending with the Tigre-Eritrean insurgencies throughout the Abyssinian highlands and the Red Sea coast. Having over-committed his regime to the liberation of the Ogadeni (to the extent of integrating them into his regime), Siad Barre’s military defeat by the Cuban forces, which intervened in the Ethio-Somali battle for the Ogaden in 1977-78, eventually undermined the rationale and cohesion of his rule. The Somali armed forces (known as the Somali National Army (SNA)) never recovered from the Ogaden defeat. (At one of the war’s turning point engagements, the battle of Jijiga, the SNA lost more than half of its attacking force of three tank battalions, each consisting of more than thirty tanks! Years later, after the outbreak of the SNM-led northern resistance, Ogadeni troops in the national army defected en masse, contributing to the formation of the Somali Patriotic Movement in a process of proliferating southern anti-regime formations.)
   Siad Barre had misplayed his hand amid the changing geo-political balance of forces in the Horn of Africa as a result of Soviet-Cuban adventurism. In fact, the nominally ‘scientific socialist’ regimes in Addis Ababa and Mogadishu were an object lesson in how more mundane agendas of narrowly nationalistic realpolitik had more to do with animating the domestic and foreign policy agendas of such African governments than a commitment to ideology.
   Having already become political and military mentors of Siad Barre’s ‘scientific socialist’ regime in Somalia, the Soviet Union and Cuba had been in the process of extending their influence to the increasingly ‘scientific socialist’ military regime of Mengistu Haile Mariam in Ethiopia. How fitting it seemed then, for both ‘scientific socialist’ Ethiopia and Somalia to join hands in ‘socialist solidarity’, by forming a socialist federation of the Horn of Africa. The only problem was that before this could happen, Siad Barre needed to consummate his irredentist project by liberating the Ogaden. Failing this, the Soviet-Cuban intervention on ‘scientific socialist’ Ethiopia’s behalf ushered in a changed balance of power in the Horn of Africa, as a weakened Somalia became a client of the US and tacitly aligned with other reactionary forces on the continent. Thus, in the bombing campaigns that Siad Barre unleashed on Hargeisa, Rhodesian and South African mercenary pilots are reported to have been employed by the Somali air force.
   It is in the wake of the Ogaden defeat that endemic inter-clan and sub-clan instability gained momentum in formerly ‘scientific socialist’ Somalia. The emergence of an Isaaq-led resistance, with its regional inter-clan as well as clan character, unfolded within this wider context of Somali unrest and resistance against an increasingly defensive Mogadishu dictatorship. SNM resistance was part of a broader insurgency to unseat the Barre regime. The SNM’s military campaign, launched in 1988, resulted in the capture of Burco on 27 May, and the capture of a substantial part of Hargeisa on 31 May 1988.
   The savagery of government retaliation forced some 300,000 Somalilanders to flee to Ethiopia, further fuelling the insurgency. Five thousand Isaaqs were killed between May, when the SNM captured Burco, and December 1988. This chapter in the SNM’s struggle will be revisited later for what it reveals about the larger geo-political context of repressive regime survival in both Ethiopia and Somalia, as both regimes sought quid pro quos to deal with their respective challenges in which anti-regime liberation movements played proxy roles. But first, the SNM challenge needs to be placed within a broader Somali resistance framework to better understand its uniqueness compared to other Somali movements, and how this uniqueness relates to the reconciliatory nation-building process that has been underway over the past several years in Somaliland.
   2.3 Somalia’s ‘Liberation’ Proliferation
   In terms of an historical and contemporary perspective on the politics of conflict and accommodation along the Somali coast, Davies offers a typology of ‘Somali liberation movements’ that may be instructive to locating the SNM insurgency and its legacy. He differentiates between ‘genuine’ liberation movements and ‘new’ liberation movements; the latter mainly reflecting the fission and fusion of political formations during the post-Barre period. Here, however, Davies offers an insightful commentary on the international politics of Somali liberation and ‘reconciliation’ that harks back to the ‘top-down’ versus ‘bottom-up’ dynamics that have distinguished Somaliland’s state-building from statehood failure in the south:
   Any two Somalis can get together and form a new ‘liberation movement’ that claims to represent any group of people they want to claim. International ‘reconciliation conferences’ that give one vote to each faction admitted, use almost non-existent ‘liberation movements’ in order to deliberately distort voting rights at these conferences. This practice began at the two Djibouti Conferences in the Summer of 1991, More recently, the US State Department and the United Nations in particular have been using this technique to inflate the importance of minor liberation groups that support their own stated goals, in order to weaken the influence of genuine liberation movements that oppose some of their views, particularly concerning recognition of the Republic of Somaliland. Therefore, Somalis are beginning to argue that only ‘genuine’ liberation movements who fought against the dictatorship prior to January 1991 should be admitted as real factions to such ‘reconciliation conferences’.
   Besides the SNM, Davies classifies the following as being or having been “genuine” Somali liberation movements:
   The Somali Salvation Democratic Front (SSDF) which at times has been the Somali Salvation Front (SSF);
   The Somali Patriotic Movement (SPM) and the two factions that it split into: SPM Ogadeni and SPM Harti;
   The United Somali Congress (USC) and the two factions that it split into: USC ‘Aidid’ and USC Mahdi;
   The Somali Democratic Movement (SDM) and the two factions that it split into: SDM pro ‘Aidid’ and SDM pro Mahdi.
   Without enumerating the ‘new’ movements of dubious credibility, the SNM insurgency in the north complemented the emergence of the SSDF/SSF and USC, which eventually forced Siad Barre to flee Mogadishu in 1991. Here, some analysis of this larger resistance context is in order as a means of gaining more insight into SNM’s comparative advantage vis-à-vis these other movements, as well as to reference the dynamics that have a bearing on current developments between the Somaliland Republic and the latest – 2004/05 – peace conference rendition of a reconstituted Mogadishu government: the Transitional Federal Government (TFG).
   The SSDF/SSF was an older Ethiopian-backed movement formed in 1979, headquartered in Addis Ababa with funding and military aid provided by Libya. As the SSDF/SSF sought to broaden its predominantly Majerteen clan group base, its founding leaders, in reaction to what they perceived as a threat to their leadership, worked a deal with the Ethiopian and Libyan governments which transformed the movement into as much a proxy of Ethiopia against Somalia as an authentic liberation movement. In this transformation, Colonel Mengistu arrested one of the main key SSDF/SSF leaders, Colonel Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed and several of his key aides. They languished in jail until the overthrow of the Mengistu regime. Upon their release, Yusuf, currently
   President of the new Somali TFG and formerly leader of the autonomous region of Puntland, reclaimed SSDF/SSF leadership.
   Closely intertwined with what has been ongoing contemporary border tensions between Somaliland and Puntland over the Sool and Sanaag regions, Davies recounts that “there were jealousies between the SSDF and the SNM, whereby the SSDF tried to force the SNM to join it and the SNM refused. Ultimately, Colonel Mengistu dropped the SSDF and sided with the SNM” although the “SNM was never as cooperative as the SSDF … refusing to take orders from the Ethiopian Dictatorship and refusing to accept the ‘Green Book’ of Colonel Qaddafi as the pre-requisite for receiving financial and military aid from him”.
   The SNM’s uniqueness compared to the other movements, according to Davies, lay in the fact that, apart from having a preponderant clan-base in the Isaaqs, it did not try to expand further to include members from even more clans and groups of clans, although it had an ideological thrust that attracted individuals from other clans. “In sharp contrast to other liberation movements at that time, the SNM did make a serious effort to use internal democratic procedures to develop political goals based upon an internal consensus – and to publish them.”43 Davies cites a typical published statement from 1981: “We propose a new political system built on Somali cultural values of co-operation rather than coercion; a system which elevates the Somali concept of ‘Xeer’ or
   inter-family social contract in which no man exercised political power over another except according to established law and custom, to the national level”.
   A different take on the SNM’s social base in the north-west is provided by Ahmed Yusuf Farah (1999) in a contribution he made to a Project Ploughshares inquiry into ‘Civil-Military Relations in Somaliland and Northeast Somalia’.45 In a presentation entitled ‘Political Actors in Somalia’s Emerging De Facto Entities: Civil Military Relations in Somaliland and Northeast Somalia’, Farah contends that, in fact, Somaliland is “socially and politically more complex than Northeast Somalia” – referring to Puntland – that Somaliland supports a “population of mixed (and rival) clan origin belonging to three large clan families (Dir, Isaq and Harti/Darood).” This more pluralistic perspective on Somaliland may account for the Isaaq/non-Isaaq clan strategies that the SNM has pursued in its approach to interacting with traditional authorities in the region. But it may also account for the movement’s motivation in producing a clearly articulated pan-Somali ‘national democratic’ ideology on which Davies further elaborates. Instructive, in this regard, are the following, taken from the eleven guidelines published by the SNM that stipulated:
   • “The structure of the central and regional government will be as simple as possible. They will be designed to reduce hierarchy and bureaucracy to a minimum and enable the average man and woman to understand and relate to regional and national governments;
   • It will integrate effectively traditional Somali egalitarianism and the requirement of good central government;
   • It will maximise the effectiveness of the representative and democratic process at all levels; and
   • The freedom of the press in accordance with the constitution and the laws of the country will be guaranteed by law.”
   2.4 SNM’s Comparative Advantage in an Escalating Struggle
   Building on a cohesive clan base, combined with an essentially pan-Somali democratic ethos, the SNM strategy, according to Davies, was to assist other clan and regional groups to embark on their own resistance against the Barre dictatorship. He went on to say that “it assisted the Hawiyes in forming their USC and the Ogadenis in forming their SPM as sister liberation movements in the fight to oust the socialist dictatorship of General Barre in the war-of- liberation.” Nevertheless, the SNM succeeded in attracting non-Isaaqs though Siad Barre also did well in trying to undermine this attraction. “General Barre was extremely irritated by the growing number of Hawiyes joining the SNM and the fact that the Vice Chairman was a Hawiye. He succeeded in creating a conflict between the Chairman and Vice Chairman of the SNM, which led to the resignation of Vice Chairman, Ali Mohamed Ossoble (‘Wardhigley’). Other foreign countries appear to have co-operated with General Barre in developing the theory that since the SSDF had stopped its armed resistance to General Barre, only the SNM was left. If the SNM could be induced to give up its armed struggle, there would be no further conflict and opposition to General Barre. Despite the various bribes offered, the SNM refused to end its war-of-liberation. Many other leading Hawiye members of the SNM also left the SNM in 1987 as a result of this episode.
   This attempted ‘divide-and-conquer’ ploy on Barre’s part forms a crucial backdrop to the escalation of the SNM insurgency within the north during 1988 and the regime’s savage retaliation. This escalation is directly linked to mutual sell-outs of liberation proxies by Mengistu and Barre in the interests of their respective regime survivals.
   In April 1988, Colonel Mengistu of Ethiopia struck a peace deal with General Barre, to their mutual convenience, whereby each agreed to stop supporting the liberation movements based in their countries and launching raids in the other country. The basic idea was to force the SNM to withdraw from the border, deeper into Ethiopia, from where they would not be able to launch any more raids across the border. However, with the ‘rug pulled out from under their feet’, the SNM went in the other direction and moved its militias to within Somalia”. The rest is history in the escalation of Somalia’s civil war, to the point of the Barre regime’s eventual collapse in 1991.
   The fact that the SNM was able to make the transition from external cross- border raids to full-fledged internal insurgency is a commentary on the accommodation that its ‘modern’ nationalist leadership had arrived with the traditional authority of the region’s clan elders in the spirit of ‘Xeer Soomaali’. Nevertheless, the SNM had its own internal contradictions which, according to Ahmed Yusuf Farah and Ioan M. Lewis, would come back to haunt Somaliland in the post-independence declaration period. During the armed struggle phase, the SNM managed to suppress, according to Farah and Lewis, long-held civilian-military leadership rivalries that eventually erupted after the overthrow of Barre and during the early phase of state formation. To some extent, this appears rooted in the movement’s clan dynamics. The military leadership of the SNM had, during the struggle period, been “eager to transform the organization into a professional and efficient military and political body; but efforts to do so were frustrated by the clan character of the SNM.” Yet, as Farah and Lewis also acknowledge:
   The vital dependence of the SNM on Isaq clansmen made it responsive to the wishes of the wider population, particularly traditional leaders who administer the affairs of local clans. Along with the majority of the public, traditional leaders supported the civilian leaders in the power struggle within the SNM – an inclination that seems to have endured in the post-military period.
   This tilt toward civilian ascendancy, based on the SNM’s popular base, was the key to its survival during the nadir of the Barre regime’s savage reprisals. Tellingly, Farah, in underlining the breadth of SNM dependency on its social base, points out that the struggle of the SNM depended on support from different sectors of the Isaq population, including the Isaq diaspora, refugees in camps in eastern Ethiopia, and Isaq nomads. It received relatively little external military and financial assistance as both interested governments in Ethiopia and Somalia worked to subvert its objectives.
   Thus, civilian elite ascendancy, for the SNM, was critical to its survivalist self- reliance and self-sufficiency during the armed struggle. But this proved to be at the cost of deferring the resolution of civil-military leadership tensions within the SNM. When they violently resurfaced during the early phase of Somaliland’s state formation in 1991, they would operate to further entrench the traditional leadership of clan elders as the society’s leading agents in conflict prevention, management and resolution. In a very real sense, the clan elders have served as Somaliland’s guarantors of peace and security; the nation’s ultimate fall-back as an ‘insurance policy’ against a descent into anarchy. The clan elders became the SNM’s main fall-back during the ensuing state-building phase of democratic post-conflict stabilisation.
   2.5 Enter the Clan Elders: Post-Conflict Stabilisation
   From the late 1980s until the Barre regime’s collapse, the SNM apparently did most of the fighting in the resistance war. It seems that only toward the end, in the last one to one-and-a-half years, did it receive substantial assistance from the USC and the SPM. Once this armed struggle phase ended, the initiative within Somaliland shifted to the clan elders as the SNM handed over to them to navigate what would become a complicated and delicate process of post- conflict reconciliation and political consolidation of a brutalised society that had been under prolonged siege. The backdrop to the unfolding of this clan elders-led national reconciliation phase in the north-west is the state collapse in Mogadishu, which followed on the heels of the regime collapse of the General Barre’s government. It was the USC, a powerful force in Mogadishu, that seized control of the capital only to have the situation deteriorate into a round of factional fragmentation and in-fighting that ushered in what became an era of stateless warlordism in former Italian Somalia. The shift of the initiative from the SNM, as the politico-military vanguard of the struggle against Barre to the more popular based leadership of the clan elders, was underlined by the manner in which Somaliland moved from insurgency toward the outright declaration of independence. Immediately after General Barre’s defeat in January 1991, followed by a February peace conference in Berbera that proclaimed a formal cease-fire, the SNM called a March meeting of the elders of all non-Isaaq clans “to reconcile any potential differences between them and the Isaq clans – as agreed upon by all liberation movements before the end of the war-of-liberation.”
   The Berbera peace conference had established the SNM’s policy of peaceful co-existence among the clans of Somaliland. The post-Berbera non-Isaaq meeting was followed up by an April meeting with the Isaaq clan elders in Hargeisa, setting the stage for an end-of-April SNM Congress, together with representatives of all clans, Isaaq and non-Isaaq alike. This became the Guurti Congress of the Elders. The elders and other democratically-selected representatives forced the SNM, against its will, to announce the creation of the independent Republic of Somaliland on May 18, 1991. “After a one-day pause, the SNM leadership bowed to public pressure and declared Somaliland’s independence.” 53 This declaration was accompanied by the establishment of an SNM-led interim government. Its administration was based on the SNM’s organisational structure, with its Chairman, Abdulrahman Ali ‘Tuur’ appointed as the country’s first executive President. The SNM central committee functioned as the government’s first parliament.
   Reflecting the accent on reconciliation, the interim administration was tasked with accommodating non-Isaaq communities by enlisting their participation in the new regime. It also had to start the process of constitutional development and preparing Somaliland for an elected government. However, the new interim regime was acutely vulnerable to the consequences of the devastation that the war had left in its wake, not to mention long-deferred civil-military leadership tensions in the SNM. “Bereft of a revenue base with which to rebuild an administration, a decimated infrastructure, and with a large number of people displaced from the south or in refugee camps, the government had little capacity to deal with the growing number of freelance militia who were making a living through robbery and extortion.” particularly critical political deficit that needed tending to.
   While the Burco conference restored relations between the Isaaq and other northern clans, “it failed to heal the schisms within the SNM and among the Isaaq that had developed during the war.”55 Wartime rivalries within the SNM, which carried over into peacetime, resulted in the outbreak of fighting in Burco. In March 1992, fighting erupted in Berbera when the interim government sought to establish control over the port and its revenue. Pacifying this situation deepened the role of the clan elders in stabilising the country. The Berbera confrontation threatened to push Somaliland into a state of protracted civil war. This would have replicated the southern deconstruction of former Italian Somalia in the former British colony.
   2.6 Sheikh and Borama Conferences: Toward a Traditional-Modern Compact
   Somaliland’s elders stepped in to re-establish peace through the convening of two major clan conferences in the towns of Sheikh and Borama. According to Mark Bradbury et al.,
   … the Sheikh conference was significant for several reasons. First, resolving the conflict over Berbera port and confirming its status as a public asset, ensured that future Somaliland governments had a source of revenue with which to build an administration. Second, the conference established a framework for the participation of clan elders in Somaliland’s post-war system of governance by creating a council of elders – the guurti. In Somali pastoral society, a guurti is traditionally the highest political council comprising titled and non-titled clan leaders. At Sheikh the guurti of Somaliland’s different clans were constituted as a national guurti and given responsibility for controlling the clan militia, preventing acts of aggression against other communities, and for defending Somaliland. This framework for internal security, which was consolidated in the subsequent Borama conference, was important for what Bron has described as a “society-rooted process towards state formation.”
   Third, the intra-Isaaq nature of the Berbera conflict required the mediation of non-Isaaq elders, in this instance, the Gadabuursi guurti. Their participation at Sheikh indicated that the influence of the SNM was declining and that if it was to be sustained, Somaliland needed the buy-in of non-Isaaqs.
   The defining event in Somaliland’s post-conflict politics was the shir beeleed in Borama, which lasted for five months between January and May 1993. Here, “an electoral college of elders who made up the national guurti, oversaw the peaceful transfer of power from the SNM government of Abdulrahman ‘Tuur’ to a civilian government headed by Mohamed Haji Ibrahim Egal, who had been Somalia’s last civilian Prime Minister before the 1969 military coup.” The Borama process produced an interim Peace Charter and Transitional National Charter. The Peace Charter re-established the basis for law and order by setting out a code of conduct (or xeer, unwritten contracts, laws, agreements or social codes between clans) for the people of Somaliland in accordance with their traditions and the principles of Islam. The National Charter defined the political and institutional structures of government for a transitional three year period, until a constitution could be adopted.”
   Bradbury et al. contend that, “In the post-war context, the Borama conference was important for the way in which issues of representation and power- sharing were dealt with, by institutionalising clans and their leadership into the system of governance. The National Charter established what has become referred to as a beel (clan or community) system of government”.59 Described as a “dynamic hybrid of Western form and traditional substance”,60 this consisted of an Executive (Golaha Xukuumadda) with a President, Vice- President and Council of Ministers, a Legislature, comprising a bicameral parliament with an Upper House of Elders (Golaha Guurtida) and House of Representatives (Golaha Wakiillada) and an independent Judiciary. “The Charter also established state offices such as an Auditor General, as well as regional governors and mayors. The role of elders was formally recognised by giving them responsibility for selecting a president, for ensuring state security by managing internal conflicts and demobilising the militia, and by incorporating the guurti into the Upper House of the new legislature. The purpose of this was to act as a check on the executive and the representatives.”
   The beel system of government established at Borama recognises kinship as the ‘organising principle’ of Somali society. In essence, government became a power-sharing coalition of Somaliland’s main clans, integrating tradition and modernity in one holistic governance framework; a framework for fostering “popular participation” in governance or participatory governance, which might best define the essence of ‘democracy’ without the encumbrance of a ‘Western’ connotation. Presidential appointments to the executive were made to ensure a clan balance. In the Upper and Lower houses of parliament, seats were proportionally allocated to clans according to a formula that allotted seats in this legislative body. However, the patrilineal clan system meant that women were excluded from representative politics, because it was ambiguous whether a woman would represent her husband’s clan or that of her father.
   Bradbury et al. point out that “the inclusion of traditional leadership in the state apparatus has its antecedents in British colonial rule, when clan elders were incorporated into the administration as salaried chiefs in order to extend control over the rural areas.” Again, reiterating Drysdale, they go on to point out that under “post-independence nationalist governments, who viewed the ‘problem of tribalism’ as an impediment to unity and modernisation, the traditional leadership became marginalised from politics”, whereas the SNM “challenged this by incorporating a guurti of Isaaq elders into its organisation structure.”62 The purpose was two-fold: “to mobilise support for the struggle and to lay the basis for a more participatory form of democracy in the post- Barre era. Indeed, the National Charter reflected much of what was proposed in the SNM’s constitution for a post-Barre government” for Somalia proper. The government would be built on Somali cultural values, the elevation of xeer to the national level, the incorporation of elders in a two-chamber legislature, and combining traditional Somali egalitarianism with the requirements of good central government. The beel system of government established at Borama was intended to be in place for only three years. It lasted a decade.
   2.7 Reconciliation, A Divergent Perspective: Somaliland and Puntland
   The magnitude of Somaliland’s achievements in constructing what Ahmed Yusuf Farah has referred to as a “culture of locally based reconciliation processes” may be better appreciated from his critical assessment of strengths and weaknesses of Somaliland and Puntland as divergent examples of “two relatively stable de facto political entities in northern Somalia”, responding to the larger post-Barre upheavals along the Somali coast.64 This comparison is not just academic, given the fact that Somaliland and Puntland, as neighbours, have long been at logger-heads over the future political reorganisation of the Somali coast; a predicament that has been taken to another level now that Puntland’s former leader, Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, has become the Ethiopian-backed interim president of the latest attempt at reconstituting southern Somalia – the TFG – which emerged from the Inter-Governmental Authority for Development (IGAD) sponsored Nairobi reconciliation peace talks. Comparing and contrasting Puntland’s and Somaliland’s reconciliation strategies may also be instructive for revealing how both, taken together, point toward some major shifts that may be underway in contemporary African thinking about governance and the reconstitution of the African state in the new age of the AU.
   Within the contested terrain of how the Somali coast region of the Horn of Africa is to be reconstituted, Somaliland, Puntland65 and southern Somalia may be approached conceptually as a continuum of alternative futures:
   • The reconstitution of Somalia as a centralised state along the lines of the first post-independence republic;
   • The reconstitution of Somalia as a federal state comprising autonomous regions as reflected in the Puntland initiative;
   • The reconstitution of Somalia as a region comprising independent sovereign states as reflected in the emergence of an independent Somaliland Republic.
   The centralised state option that would, in effect, take the region back to the status quo ante, prior to the overthrow of the Barre dictatorship, has been rejected. Yet, there remains no consensus between the federalist and sovereign independence options. Indeed, they are in confrontation, as reflected in the outbreak of border hostilities that occurred soon after Ahmed’s selection as the TFG’s new interim leader – SNM-SSDF rivalry by other means? As such, the confrontation between Somaliland and Puntland/TFG challenges the sustainability of Somaliland in two respects in terms of the following questions:
5. Is Somaliland’s ‘’culture of locally based reconciliation processes’ sustainable within a regional environment where it is in confrontation with the rest of the Somali region?
6. To what extent are Somaliland’s gains in national reconciliation increasingly contingent on a broader reconciliatory process gaining hold within the Somali region as a whole?
   It is against this backdrop that the strengths and weaknesses of Somaliland’s national reconciliation can be assessed in gaining an understanding of its achievements, in comparison with its Puntland neighbour. Farah has distinguished Somaliland and Puntland in the following terms:
   Culturally, Woqooyi Bari Soomaalia (north-east Somalia) is clearly defined by clan exclusiveness and the traditional territorial control of the large Majerteen clan and allied Darood groups (Leylkase, Awrtable and others). In this sense, north-east Somalia differs from Somaliland, as it constitutes a more socially cohesive political entity. Somaliland, on the other hand, supports a population of mixed (and rival) clan origin belonging to three large clan families (Dir, Isaq and Harti/Darood). This makes Somaliland socially and politically more complex than north-east Somalia
   … While Somaliland’s experience in peacekeeping and governance had been relatively violent (yet constructive), north-east Somalia has witnessed domestic stability at the cost of political stagnation … traditional leaders in both Somaliland and north-east Somalia emerged as paramount political actors in the post-military period. In Somaliland, the guurti have been politicized since 1993 when they were institutionalized as one of the two chambers of parliament in the new administration formed in Borama. The Interim Charter of Puntland, however, failed to legislate a similar status for the Isimo who themselves have played a similar role in north-east Somalia, securing internal stability and driving the grassroots political process that culminated in the Garowe conference.
   In Farah’s estimation, Somaliland has presented a much higher risk proposition than Puntland, though the Somaliland experiment has progressed much further. Given the reasons he cites, this may be instructive for the future of both Somaliland’s nation-building future and the prospects of the TFG. Both Puntland and Somaliland, relative to the rest of the Somali region, have benefited from the reconciliatory role of the clan elders. In Puntland’s case, however, as Farah points out, prolonged competition for the chairmanship of the SSDF by “two prominent Majerteen political leaders, Col. Abdillahi Yusuuf (ex-military officer and now first president of Puntland State) and his arch-rival Gen. Mohamed Abshir Musa (ex-police commissioner and vigorously opposed to Yusuuf) paralyzed the SSDF since 1994.” This essentially military – as opposed to civilian – leadership rivalry prevented the SSDF leadership and the Isimo – ‘titled clan and sub-clan heads and lineage leaders’ – from achieving any progress in the area of political rebuilding. Indeed, according to Farah, “the process of building basic institutions of
   Undoubtedly, in the case of Somaliland and the SNM, the relatively more clearly defined and coherent articulation of a political programme by a civilian nationalist elite, with a more organic connectivity to its social base, benefited the political rebuilding process, which has since steadily advanced. Hence, Farah would venture: “The relatively more constructive experience of Somaliland in governance in the post-military period and its multi-ethnic composition makes it an interesting case to watch in the process of rebuilding wider political structures from a patchwork of clan-fiefdoms.” Yet, to Puntland’s credit, “unlike in the SNM, competition for control of the organization and local administration did not degenerate into” what he described as “the devastating internal power struggle witnessed in Somaliland in the transitional period.”69 Here, unlike in many renditions of the Somaliland experience, Farah delves at some depth in unpacking its contradictions, rooted in the history of the SNM.
   Old divisions within the military and civilian wings of the SNM resurfaced more intensely in the post-military period, in the absence of a common foe. Opposition to Tuur’s administration coalesced around the alan cas faction of the SNM, which accused the government of having a civilian bias and deliberately under-representing the military wing. Dominated by the military elite of the SNM (who were either dissatisfied with their status in Tuur’s
   Against this backdrop, Tuur’s attempt to expand the interim government’s authority outside Hargeisa – as successive Modagishu regimes have failed to do in the south – by establishing a national army from the clan-based SNM militia only exacerbated matters by helping to trigger inter-clan warfare. In March 1993, the administration organised a multi-clan force in order to establish control over the vital port of Berbera, which brought Somaliland to the brink of civil war. This prospect motivated the clan intervention, which set off the series of successful reconciliation conferences that have managed to stabilise Somaliland ever since.
   Writing in 1999, Farah was hoping that a “peaceful and constitutional transition” would spare Puntland a similar internal conflict. Unfortunately, this hope did not come to the fore. Veering from the path of constitutionalism, Abdullahi Yusuf, instead pursued the route of strongman, warlord rule over Puntland while vying for ultimate leadership of a successor to the failed Transitional National Government (TNG) in Somalia, and, at the same time, stoking border tensions with Somaliland. In following this route, Puntland’s experience has exposed the limits of clan power in deterring warlord political ambitions. In 2001, the region’s clan elders had elected Jama Ali Jama as the new head of Puntland. This was immediately rejected by Colonel Yusuf, who alleged the vote was “futile and illegal,” thus triggering a war against Jama’s forces, which ended in May 2002 with the defeat of the latter’s forces at Qardo.
   Somalilanders, meanwhile, saw Yusuf’s strongman rule in Puntland as merely a stepping stone for his real objective of ultimately heading up a successor to the failed TNG in Mogadishu which, with Ethiopia’s support – Ethiopia, also widely seen as pro-Somaliland – he ultimately achieved. In commenting on his stewardship in Puntland and candidacy for heading up the new TFG, SomalilandNet, on 17 September 2004, commented that:
   … he has shown to the IGAD states and Somalis alike that no other person other than him would govern Puntland. With the exception of Mohamed Abdi Hashi, Vice president of Puntland who regularly disagreed with and publicly challenged him, Abdullahi Yusuf has often gotten his way and treated Puntland as his fiefdom. For example, he has been taking almost $250,000 monthly for the last 22 months from the region for his campaign use in Nairobi. This was done over the objection of the vice president and the House of Representatives who would have liked to give more priority to the worsening drought conditions in the Sool, Sanaag and Buuhoodle regions.
   2.8 Somaliland’s Contested Consolidation: From Reconciliation to Constitutionalism
   While constitutionalism did not take root in Puntland’s experiment in regional autonomy, the clan reconciliation process in Somaliland took that trajectory after the post-Berbera conflict series of reconciliation conferences, though this did not end the violence. Nevertheless, the aim, unlike in Puntland, whose leader hitched its fate to the broader reconstitution of the southern-based Somali republic, was to consolidate the independence of the north-west Somali coast. Putting in place the constitutional underpinnings of this process; one which confirmed civilian ascendancy over the military elites, has been examined in considerable detail by Bradbury et al.,74 starting with their review of the administration of Mohamed Haji Ibrahim Egal – the old Somali republic’s last civil Prime Minister before the 1969 Barre coup. The transfer from the SNM interim administration of Abdulrahman ‘Tuur’ to Egal was effected peacefully within the implementation framework of the Borama process.
   Egal is, in effect, the ‘founding father’ of the Somaliland Republic. But his tenure would undergo a ‘baptism by fire’ that would test, yet again, the sustainability of reconciliation in Somaliland. Over the first 18 months of his new post-Borama administration, the Republic’s foundations were secured; the institutions of government were established, the militia was demobilised, a revenue system was created (where the outcome of the battle over the Berbera port had been critical) and a secure environment for economic recovery was provided. Constitutional progress, however, was initially slow, as contested issues from the Borama conference still remained.
   According to Bradbury et al., as Egal’s government “sought to extend its administrative control dissatisfaction grew among certain Isaaq clans with the formula for sharing political power adopted at the Borama conference. This, combined with political opportunism by certain politicians, pushed Somaliland into civil war.” This conflict underlined the fragility of the reconciliation process and Somaliland’s independence, when a section of the opposition to the Egal administration declared its support for a federal Somalia. The war lasted from November 1994 to October 1996, displacing over 180,000 people and causing severe damage to Burco and Hargeisa – areas that were still trying to recover from the devastation of the war of resistance against the Barre dictatorship. A second national reconciliation conferencing process (or Shir Qarameed), held in Hargeisa between October 1996 and February 1997, ended the civil war and, in the process, accelerated Somaliland’s constitutional development. Egal’s political leadership survived the war, due to the fact that an electoral college of elders extended his tenure in office by another four years. The group also increased opposition and minority seats in the house of parliament, while an interim constitution was adopted, which superseded the Borama charters and provided the basis for a multi-party system of government. The Hargeisa conference was financed and managed with little foreign support. However, it was largely financed by government, thereby strengthening the reality of a central government in Hargeisa, which was constantly eluding the warring factions in southern former Italian Somalia. Twice the number of voting delegates were present at the conference than at Borama, with a number of women permitted to observe the proceedings. The fact that there was no change in governmental leadership meant that the civil war had failed to disrupt the country’s governance, thereby providing for continuity in Somaliland’s continuing transition. Since this last reconciliatory conferencing process in 1997, Somaliland has experienced a period of uninterrupted security. Security, in turn, has facilitated the country’s continuing constitutional, political and socio-economic development.
   Here, it is instructive to quote at some length Bradbury et al., who explain how, within the dynamics of conflict and accommodation, Somaliland’s reconciliatory capacities, time and again, prevailed over the centrifugal tendencies that have been the feature of politics in southern Somalia.77 Drawing on an observation by political economist William Reno,78 who pointed out that Somaliland illustrates how changes in the global economy do not inevitably produce predatory war economies and the end of political order, Bradbury et al. suggest several explanations why Somaliland has not followed the path of the south into protracted civil war: “The political system adopted at Borama which integrated traditional authorities in the state administration guarded against the re-emergence of authoritarian rule.” It has been argued that due to the particular experience of British colonialism these are more entrenched and stronger in the pastoralist communities in the north compared to southern Somalia. The Sheikh and Borama conferences were only two of 33 clan peace conferences that took place in Somaliland between February 1991 and 1996. This explanation, however, overlooks the influence of other factors. These include the different political experience of northwest Somalia within the Somali Republic, the legacy of democratic practices within the SNM, the relatively good relations between the northern clans, a different resource base than the south, and the lack of international intervention in Somaliland in the early 1990s, which in the south had served to strengthen the power of the warlords. The experience of the war in the north was also very different from the south. It was fought mostly within Isaaq territory and the SNM, while some elders worked to maintain social and economic relations between the clans and neutralise the potential for violence. The war served to create a political community among the Isaaq which was reinforced by the experience of self-organisation in the refugee camps in Ethiopia … The creation of Somaliland also reflected a broad consensus on the need for some form of government to manage internal conflict and external relations. This consensus is apparent from the financial support given to peace conferences by communities and business people. The SNM’s stated vision of a government which integrated traditional authorities in the state administration … established a political system that guarded against the re-emergence of authoritarian rule.
   There is more to this explanatory reflection by Bradbury et al. that will be revisited in the next chapter on reconstruction. After all, what is described here – which reinforces earlier insights provided in this chapter by Drysdale on the region’s progressive ‘clanism’ – is the unfolding of a uniquely self- reliant and self-contained path toward political and economic development; one that is the essence of ‘popular sovereignty’ as opposed to the more prevalent ‘national sovereignty’ that tends to euphemistically provide protection for ruling elites against local and international accountability. Somaliland’s constitutional phase of reconciliatory nation-building, the stage it is currently experiencing, which formally culminated in successful parliamentary elections in September 2005, was intended to further entrench and institutionalise the emerging political culture described by Bradbury et al. and many others.
   2.9 Post-Conflict Constitutional Development
   In the aftermath of the civil war, the interim constitution adopted at the Hargeisa conference, enshrined principles intended to enhance the development of stable civil-military relations. According to Ahmed Yusuf Farah, a possible solution was to introduce a constitution that clearly defined the “institutional functions and mandates of security and civilian institutions, while at the same time adopting democratic rules governing access by the elite to high public office regardless of professional bias.”83 Farah then cites the following articles that were introduced to regulate the distribution of power and authority between the civilian and military elites:
   Article 38: Freedom of Association
   It is forbidden [for] any organisation with aims and objectives that are deemed detrimental to the wider interest of society, including covert and underground organisations, armed and with military structure, or any other organisation that violates the constitution regardless of its form.
   Article 61: Joint Sessions of the Two Chambers of the Parliament
   The two chambers of the parliament (council of elders and elected legislature), will hold joint sessions to deliberate on the following issues:
   x. The decision and the declaration of war when the Republic of Somaliland is faced with a state of war.
   Article 77: The Power and Obligation of the Council of Representatives
   The decision by the executive to introduce emergency rule throughout the country or parts of the country should seek the approval of the two chambers of parliament.
   Article 115: The Powers of the President
7. Nomination and change of high public officials of the government after consultation with the responsible Minister, and having considered the constitution and by-laws.
   Article 148: Commanders of the Armed Forces and their Deputies
8. The armed force is responsible to defend and secure the integrity and independence of the country from external aggression, in addition, it will act in response to necessary emergency as circumstances demand, in accordance with the constitution.
9. The armed force must always abide by and ensure the execution of the constitution and by laws of the country.
10. The formation of the National Army is an internal matter limited to the different parts of the country.
11. The individual nominated to be the Minister of Defence must be a citizen and a civilian.
12. A by-law defining the structure of the National Army will be formulated.
    Article 149: Police Force and Prison Corps
    The police force is responsible for domestic security and stability and ensuring the execution of the constitution and laws of the country, their structure and functions will be defined in a by-law.
    The prison corps are responsible for keeping and rehabilitation of the prisoners, their structure and functions will be defined in a by-law.
    In addition to institutionalising the regulation of civil-military relations within a constitutional framework, the interim constitution set out a schedule for the legalisation of political parties and the holding of democratic elections. It would take four years, however, before a referendum was held on the new constitution. According to Bradbury et al., “Egal linked the transition to multi- party democracy with Somaliland’s desire to gain international recognition, arguing that the international community would not recognise Somaliland’s independent status unless it adopted such a system.” Here, they point out that “a major impetus for implementing the constitution was the formation of Puntland in 1998 and the TNG in 2000,” stressing that “Puntland, which claims authority in areas of eastern Somaliland, and the TNG, which claims sovereignty throughout Somalia, directly challenged the legitimacy of Somaliland.” Somaliland’s constitutional consolidation, therefore, was intimately intertwined with its regional security interests within the broader fluid context of the reconstitution of the state along the Somali coast.
    As Bradbury et al. state, with Article 2 of the constitution affirming Somaliland’s independent status, the constitutional referendum of 31 May 2001 was effectively a vote on the status of Somaliland vis-à-vis the rest of the Somali region. This constitutional confirmation of Somaliland’s status set the stage for the institutionalisation of the country’s multi-party political system, in a phase that would now extend the constitutionalisation of reconciliatory nation-building toward a consolidation of democracy. The Somaliland parliament legalised the formation of political organisations on 6 August 2001, and scheduled presidential elections for February 2002. President Egal followed up this legalisation of political organisations by announcing the formation of Somaliland’s first such organisation – the Democratic United Peoples’ Movement (UDUB). With a further six organisations registering by the end of September 2001, the politics of Somaliland began making the transition beyond the ‘liberation movement’ era of the SNM and its turbulent aftermath, toward a more normalised phase of civilian democratic governance. Bradbury et al. describe this as a transition “from community politics to multi-party politics.” As this transition unfolded, the power-sharing system of governance established during the Borama process has proven critical to the process of reconciliation and recovery in Somaliland, succeeding where numerous efforts in Mogadishu have, to date, failed.
    2.10 Somaliland’s Electoral Transition
    The new constitutional system introduced the principle of universal suffrage, thereby extending to women the right to vote. Within the context of the electoral system, under the new constitution, the installation of the different tiers of government has been a ‘bottom-up’ process, starting with local district elections. These involved electing 379 councillors to 23 district and municipal councils in Somaliland’s six regions. According to Bradbury et al., “the reason for starting with a district election was to determine which three parties would contest the presidential and parliamentary elections.” Besides the UDUB, President Egal’s party, “the local elections were contested by six organisations: ASAD, HORMOOD, Kulmiye, SAHAN, UCID … who were able to demonstrate adequate support in six regions.
    In December 2001, an Nationa Electoral Commission was established to oversee elections. A number of problems became apparent:
    • Electoral commissioners lacked experience in managing elections;
    • The political organisations had no experience in contesting elections or resources for mounting one;
    • No consideration was given to selecting women candidates;
    • There had been no voter education;
    • Somaliland’s media lacked experience in elections coverage;
    • There was a mutual lack of trust between political organisations, and between them and the electoral commission;
    • The participation of the Sool and eastern Sanaag regions was controversial due to local ambivalence in those regions toward Somaliland (and, undoubtedly, their being contested terrain with Puntland); and
    • The lack of a census and an electoral register proved problematic.
    Civil society organisations played an important role in addressing some of these problems. Such involvement helped generate an environment of popular participation that, with outside technical assistance and expertise, as well as funding for training from such quarters as the European Commission and the US-based International Republican Institute (IRI), helped to carry Somaliland through an important learning curve.
    By the time voting in local elections were underway in 2002, President Egal had passed away in South Africa, and was succeeded by his minority clan Vice-Presidential successor, Daahir Rayale Kahin of the Gadabuursi clan. Voting in the district elections occurred on 15 December 2002, at 726 out of 800 polling stations. Because of security considerations, they did not take place in Sool, eastern Sanaag and parts of the Buudhoodle district in Togdheer region. A total of 440,067 valid votes were counted and 332 District Councillors were elected. Kaahin’s party, the UDUB, was the clear winner, followed by a cluster of close competition between UCID (30,676 votes), Kulmiye (29,923 votes) and HORMOOD (29,104 votes). Because of the problems experienced with the district elections, making additional electoral legislation necessary, the presidential and parliamentary election time-tables were delayed. The presidential election took place in April 2003.
    Civil Society organisations again provided training for polling station staff, domestic observers and party representatives, while the Integrity Watch Committee worked with the parties to recommit themselves to the Code of Conduct.
    Efforts were made by the Somaliland National Electoral Commission (NEC) to ensure that democratic practices were followed by all parties. Yet the NEC had few powers to control the parties’ campaigns. Kulmiye outspent the governing UDUB party of the president, raising money from the Somaliland business community and the diaspora. Kaahin, however, was elected in a poll that generally received favourable reviews from international and domestic observers, though various irregularities were noted. As a result, the closeness of the contest “presented a harsh test for Somaliland’s aspiring democracy”,89 as the UDUB outpolled Kulmiye by a mere 80 votes. What is more, according to Bradbury et al., UDUB supporters as well as the supporters of Kulmiye had expected the latter to emerge victorious. The outcome triggered small protests in Burco and Gabiley, which are Kulmiye strongholds. However, in spite of fears that there might be outbreaks of violence, such destablisation failed to materialise. This was the result of government’s emergency precautions and the Kulmiye leadership’s decision not to contest the outcome, though it did present evidence of mathematical miscalculations by the NEC.
    In the end, in accordance with the Electoral Law, the Supreme Court delivered the final verdict in favour of the ruling UDUB, increasing its victory margin to 214 votes after submissions by all parties and the NEC; an outcome that was immediately contested by Kulmiye, in the process, raising questions about the court’s competence as well as highlighting Somaliland’s weak judicial system. This is a point of increasing concern by Somalilanders who, in fact, question the Supreme Court’s independence from the Executive. Bradbury et al. drew the following implications from the April 2003 presidential elections and their district election antecedents:
    • In spite of the contested nature of the electoral outcome, there was no ‘political entrepreneurial’ constituency for violent or even massive non- violent opposition amid timely civil society interventions (such as the Integrity Watch Committee) to mediate and advise parties on settling matters peacefully;
    • The regional distribution of votes illustrated a demographic and socio- political division between western and eastern Somaliland related to “the non-participation of eastern Sanaag and Sool regions,” which accounted for significantly lower voter participation in the east – an area contested with Puntland;
    • To some extent, this east-west differentiation reflected partisan divisions between more western support for UDUB and more eastern support for Kulmiye;
    • Much of Somaliland’s population (or at least politically active population) is concentrated in the west as reflected in the Woqooyi Galbeed (Hargeisa region), Awdal and Saxil, areas accounting for over 60% of voting in both district and presidential elections;
    • The fact that 40% of all voting centred in the Hargeisa region “dramatically illustrates the urban drift towards Hargeisa and its growing dominance as the capital”;
    • Elections in Somaliland, based on these perceived patterns, are largely an urban event as there was “limited campaigning and voting taking place in rural areas”;
    • Successive Somaliland governments will face a major challenge in preventing eastern, primarily rural and nomadic marginalisation and feelings of alienation from the rest of the country, especially within the context of ongoing contestation between Somaliland and efforts to reconstitute a Mogadishu-based Somalia;
    • The elections – district and presidential – have facilitated an electoral transition from an electoral college of elders to individual voters though the introduction of multi-party competition has not seemed to adequately solve problems of representation;
    • At local levels, people appear to vote along clan lines irrespective of a shift from an electoral college of clan elders to individual voters;
    • Given the continuing clan influence on voting preferences and the majoritarian voting system, “minorities have no representation on any of the new councils”;
    • Given the fact that the UDUB has a majority in 11 out of 15 district councils and shares an equal number of seats with Kulmiye in two such councils, with the majority of mayors also being UDUB, “the district and presidential elections have therefore given UDUB sweeping authority over Somaliland’s political institutions”;
    • The extent of UDUB dominance is important because “the elections … drew attention to the issues of the decentralisation of government and political power” which, given the disastrous experience of centralised authoritarian rule from Mogadishu, influenced the 1993 Borama Charters and the subsequent constitution in the direction of institutionalising a decentralised system of government “as a way of preventing a return to authoritarian rule and strengthening popular participation in government,” thus:
    … the election of district and municipal councils that are accountable to the local electorate holds great potential for creating a form of government that is responsive to local needs and one that will prevent the recentralisation of political power. This last implication drawn from the district and presidential electoral experience has broader regional significance within the larger Somali coast context. Decentralisation within Somaliland and the existence of an autonomous Puntland, linked to the federalist outcome of the Nairobi talks, resulting in the current TFG, indicate an overall direction in post-Barre Somali political culture toward a decentralised reconstitution of the state within the greater Somali region. Whatever the outcome in the contestation between Somaliland and the rest of the Somali region, a future centralisation of power along the Somali coast is highly unlikely. This fact will dictate the terms of a future reconciliatory dynamic within the region if such a process emerges. Here, to bring the problems and prospects of Somaliland’s reconciliation experience up to date, it may be useful to speculate on these broader reconciliation prospects vis-à-vis Somaliland and the rest of the Somali region.
    2.11 Reconciliation: A Lutta Continua
    The effective ascendancy of decentralised state-building in Somaliland and the greater Somali region grew organically from the political, territorial and military fragmentation that has been so much a feature of the destabilisation of the region, in the wake of the collapse of the Barre regime. The fracturing of Somali society emerged dialectically in over-reaction to the hyper- centralisation of power during the Barre period coupled with, in Somaliland’s case, the marginalisation and ultimate alienation of an entire region and its peoples. Reversing fragmentation appears to have led naturally to a decentralising ‘equilibrium’, which has given impetus to another ascendant trend: the re-assertion of the very ‘clanism’ depicted derisively by some ‘modernisers’ but which, in fact, has played a pivotal stabilising role, as expressed in the interventions of clan elders as the arbiters of conflict and accommodation.
    In the case of Somaliland, clan leadership ascendancy was facilitated by the modernising nationalism of the SNM which, ideologically, sought to bridge the cultural gap between tradition and modernity and which, from the standpoint of self-reliant pragmatic survival, depended on the clan elders as pillars of support in mobilising the social base for insurgency and post-conflict governance. Because of external isolation, Somalilanders have had, as Bradbury et al. put it, “certain freedom to craft an indigenous model of modern African government that fuses indigenous forms of social and political organisation within a democratic framework.” Herein may reside one path toward transcending the African post-colonial predicament of “the bifurcated state”, as interrogated by Mahmood Mamdani.
    Organised differently in rural areas from urban areas, the governing inheritance bequeathed by colonialism was a state that, according to Mamdani, “was Janus-faced, bifurcated. It contained a duality: two forms of power under a single hegemonic authority”, which counter-poised the
    modernising “civil power” of rights and freedom to the “customary power” of custom and tradition, each signifying “one face of the same bifurcated state.”
    Clan leadership, as the arbiter of national reconciliation in Somaliland, appears to have assisted the north-western brand of Somali nationalism in overcoming this bifurcating legacy. And so has this same social stratum of leadership emerged as a key actor in the ongoing efforts to revive a semblance of government in former Italian Somalia, where ‘clanism’ was once anathema. Only here, unlike in Somaliland (or at least to the same degree), inter-clan dynamics were to become complicated by the militarised balkanisation of a factionising southern Somalia; a process that gave rise to that region’s ‘warlord’ phenomenon, and the parasitic political economy and culture it has spawned. While the logic of decentralisation ultimately prevailed over external pressures for a ‘unified’ – read, unitary centralised – Somalia, the jury remains out on whether or not the TFG, led by Somaliland’s nemesis, Abdullahi Yusuf, can replicate the reconciliatory dynamic that has characterised the north-west in the south, much less reconcile with the reality of an independent Somaliland. Somaliland itself is still undergoing its own process of consolidating reconciliation into sustainable statehood.
    Provided that the IGAD states, the AU and key state actors like South Africa and neighbouring Ethiopia, are able to prevent hostilities between Somaliland and Somalia, the latter’s five-year transitional phase that its TFG must navigate, could provide ample space for Hargeisa and Mogadishu to work on their respective nation-building/re-building projects and, perhaps, converge toward a workable accommodation. Throughout the Mbagathi talks, which gave rise to the TFG, Somaliland was vigilant on the question of those talks not presuming to incorporate its region into the scope of the settlement being sought. However, as recently as President Kahin’s trip to South Africa in late January 2005, his Foreign Minister Edna Adan Ismail made it clear that Hargeisa sought good relations with Mogadishu:
    … Let the other side (Somali Republic) set in motion a credible government, accountable to its people and we will think of having a relation like we have with other neighbours … Let them salvage the country and the people from destruction and nightmare. It is only then we can talk of relations and issue of mutual interest.
    In the process, she downplayed border tensions between Somaliland and Puntland, while indicating that whatever happened in the Republic of Somalia, it had to address the interests of Somaliland.
    There are a number of issues to which the new TFG and its parliament must tend, which have a bearing on establishing the preconditions for a wider regional reconciliation. Over the next five years, Somalia must conduct a national census, draft a new constitution and have that constitution approved by an internationally supervised national referendum. This process, in turn, would establish the playing-field for national elections. With the current process of dialogue amongst Somalia’s new MPs in Jowhar and Mogadishu in progress, and the eventual return of their president and his cabinet (some of whom, at the time of writing had already returned) to Mogadishu, the security situation within Mogadishu and environs has been a major preoccupation of all interested parties in getting the new Mogadishu government’s mandate underway. The region is still at the mercy of factional warlord-strongmen and their ‘technicals’, and several murders of TFG security personnel and officials are indicative of what could be an uphill struggle for the TFG to prevent itself from going the way of the former Djibouti-backed TNG.
    Although clan leadership has figured importantly in the Mbagathi process, its role has not produced an inter-clan security consensus – that would necessitate warlord buy-in – which would guarantee the safety and security of the incoming government. As critical as this should be to the integrity and legitimacy of the TFG, that part of the Mbagathi settlement calling for an African peacekeeping presence in Mogadishu, has proven controversial. President Yusuf’s appeal for a 20,000-strong AU peacekeeping force – seemingly without Transitional Federal Parliamentary approval – has apparently been seen by elements in Mogadishu as a ploy by him to impose his authority through the multilateral instrumentality of a ‘foreign’ force. Thus, “a number of Somali leaders, including several key Islamists, have since flagged their opposition to the plan, reportedly sending the price of weapons and ammunition in Mogadishu skyrocketing and a reported flood of new stock entering the city’s arms markets”. Though initially supported by IGAD members Kenya, Uganda and Ethiopia, Yusuf’s request was subsequently deflected by both the AU and the UN Security Council as a means of avoiding “a repeat of the disastrous ‘Black Hawk Down’ episode of 1993”. Instead, the AU is reported to be continuing plans for the introduction of a modest peace support mission, possibly accompanied by a small “protection force.” Even these limited deployments, however, would require prior approval, which may hinge on the TFG managing to obtain credible militia approval by the new parliament, along with a measurable cease-fire arrangement put in place – both disarmament and disbanding which, again, would seem to require on- the-ground agreement/acquiescence from clan-cum-warlord leaders.
    The AU peace support mission that is contemplated would, among other things, be charged with training the new Somali security forces. So far, only Uganda and Sudan has pledged troops – 1,700 – in the hope that other member states, “especially frontline states Kenya, Ethiopia and Djibouti, follow suit,” though there is opposition to Ethiopian involvement in such a force. One Somali intellectual ventured an opinion that “African forces should come here … they are welcome … but not Ethiopians,” reflecting also a suspicion that Abdullahi Yusuf, as President, is a puppet of Addis Ababa. Meanwhile, with the inclusion in the cabinet of four factional leaders, who were left out of the initial line-up, “sources close to the transitional government
    believe that the main task of the government now is to disarm the militias through persuasion.” Priority though this may be, whether it is a realistic prospect, could be judged by a Nairobi-based mid-January report from a Maxamed Xaaji Ingirilis, stating that “lately, fierce fighting has flared up across the country. Inter-clan war backed by the fiendish business community of both sides is currently going on in the central regions of Hobyo and Gelinsor”101 (italics added). More reassuring may be the reception received by 50 Somali MPs, including the Speaker of Parliament and the Minister of National Security, when they entered Mogadishu from Kenya on the 6th of February. They were met by a crowd of 5,000 people as they entered a stadium in Mogadishu.
    Assuming that the security situation pans out sufficiently to allow the interim government to settle down, another crucial hurdle is the establishment of a Federal Commission, as stipulated in the Transitional Federal Charter (TFC). This Commission would be mandated to set in train “the elaboration of a federal framework for the state – with or without the inclusion of Somaliland”, as a precondition to laying the ground for free and fair elections.102 Donors, at least initially, would be expected to support these “regional federal states of Somalia”, which introduces another dimension with implications for Somaliland advancing its cause in the international community: “the jostling by frontline states for strategic positions in readiness for the reconstruction programme”, which will introduce major donor resources and possible investments into the region.
    This prospect, in fact, has been cited as a major impetus behind Kenya’s pressure on the TFG to relocate back to Somalia. Sections of Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki’s cabinet have been pushing for a quick relocation of the TFG and Parliament back to Somalia, “lest Kenya lose out on the reconstruction programme to other stakeholders who have been positioning
    themselves to clinch major project deals”. Kenyans view their country as the natural gateway for Somalia’s reconstruction in terms of proximity, human resources and facilities which, undoubtedly, may also reinforce the gateway role that Kenya is positioned to play in another post-conflict reconstruction challenge: southern Sudan, in the wake of its hosting of the recently- culminated Naivasha peace process. Otherwise, with respect to Somalia, some Kenyans see their reconstruction gateway role threatened by others, notably Ethiopia, the latter which has been hoping for a peaceful and stable Somalia as a means of expanding its access to the sea.
    The building up of momentum toward a political economy of post-conflict reconstruction for the TFG is likely to escalate pressures for the TFG’s diplomatic recognition which, in turn, will complicate Hargeisa’s campaign to gain sufficient international recognition to break out of its current isolation. The international politics of Somaliland’s quest for recognition is the subject of the concluding chapter, and will thus not be elaborated on here. However, there may be a dialectical relationship between Somaliland’s internal and external reconciliation prospects and its competition for recognition vis-à-vis yet another – the 14th – transitional government in Somalia. The politico-economic dimensions to Somalia’s reconstruction, in terms of external aid and supporting investment, which will benefit IGAD member states, could prove irresistible in undercutting the politically constructive diplomatic role they might play in calibrating a managed process of conditional recognition of the TFG, accompanied by a serious consideration of recognition options that might also benefit Somaliland and, in the process, move the politics of reconciliation in both countries toward an eventual convergence that could conceivably lead to a wider reconciliation process in the Somali coast region.
    2.12 Somaliland, Reconciliation and the New Logic of Continental Union
    The prospects for a convergence in reconciliation between Somaliland and Somalia is not a purely academic exercise when viewed in the broader context of the trajectory of the politics of the AU. Unlike its predecessor, the Organization of African Unity (OAU), the AU’s vision departs significantly from the constraints of non-interference, the inviolability of ‘national sovereignty’ and, ultimately, the dictum of territorial integrity. The AU Commission under Prof Alpha Konare and his deputy have made efforts to change the political and institutional culture of the AU significantly and to convince member states to follow. Most member states have been slow in enracing the new AU ethos. Otherwise, Somaliland might have already become an officially recognised member of the AU. But the conceptual framework of the AU, its fledgling organs and its vision of promoting a regional integration process that moves the continent toward a confederation of sub-regional federations, radically changes the terms of reference pertaining to the age-old debates about the sanctity of territorial integrity and the options for self-determination, including secession. Based on the AU’s commitment to continental federation and its Constitutive Act of Union, what is emerging in the transition from the OAU is a continental proto-government; a conception that, theoretically, at least, creates a situation wherein the territorial integrity of any member nation-state of the AU is ultimately superseded by the territorial integrity of the continent itself. Though political thinking in Africa has not fully assimilated this new paradigm, it is one that should facilitate a new flexibility and creativity in addressing regional tensions within and between countries that are part of the unresolved legacies of colonialism.
    No sub-region of the continent has been as ill-served by the OAU’s inflexibility on issues of territorial integrity and self-determination as the Horn of Africa. Here, for example, Eritrea’s independence had to be resolved militarily, because the OAU’s strictures combined with ingrained antipathies – rooted in post-colonial fears of divisive external ‘divide-and-rule’ threats to ‘national unity’ (and territorial integrity) – made it impossible for the Organization to accommodate the Eritrean liberation movement and its people’s aspirations for self-determination. A politico-diplomatic conflict prevention-management- resolution option did not exist until the ‘facts on the ground’ dictated ultimate OAU recognition of Eritrean sovereignty. In large measure, the AU has already seen an advance over this inflexibility in the case of the Sudan, where the Naivasha interim settlement allowed for a self-determination option exercised through a referendum after six years of south Sudan autonomy. This amounts to the first time in Africa’s post-colonial history that the right of secession has been politically and diplomatically accommodated in a political settlement to a conflict. However, interestingly, in southern Sudan’s case – with implications for Somaliland – this AU and internationally recognised self- determination/secession option is likely to be wrapped in a broader geo- political dynamic that will forestall and/or contain the fragmenting logic of this option that has been afforded to the southern Sudanese.
    By the time south Sudan’s six year interim period culminates in a referendum on self-determination, there is likely to be in existence an East African federation, which would come into being in 2010 – in a mere four years’ time; the self-life allotted for Somalia’s TFG. The logic of south Sudan’s self- determination could likely lead it out of a federation with ‘New Sudan’ and into one with the East African Community (EAC); and an expanding one at that, as Burundi, Rwanda and possibly even the Democratic Republic of the Congo may join the greater East Africa. Alternatively, a ‘New Sudan’ in its entirety, south Sudan included, could link to the prospective East African federation – all within the framework of the new AU logic of continental federation-building. Moreover, Sudan’s possible post-conflict integration into an expanding East African federation, automatically places the Horn of Africa, including the Somali coast, into this eventual new emerging geo-political reality.
    In short, Somaliland is by no means a ‘finished product’ within the larger context of reconciliation along the Somali coast. Should a convergence in the politics of reconciliation in Somaliland and southern Somalia progress toward an eventual co-equal political arrangement between the two, the logic of such an evolution would dovetail with the larger logic of federation-building in greater East Africa and the continent as a whole. The year 2010 is not far off. With that in mind and the fact that 2010 is also the year in which Somalia’s federal transition would culminate in a reconstituted republic, there should be ample room for the AU and key members of its PSC, such as South Africa and Ethiopia, to work with Somaliland and Somalia in nurturing a reconciliation process that informs new approaches to the question of diplomatic recognition; that expands their and the AU’s options within the larger unfolding geo-political context of a greater East Africa, and that possibly revisits the aspirations of pan-Somali reconciliation within a broader pan- African framework, as opposed to the old OAU nation-state constraints. By implication, these constraints meant that pan-Somali nationalism could be nothing more than the destabilising irridentist force that it, in fact, turned out to be. Somaliland’s reconciliation process, which has been an ‘example’105 for
    the rest of the Somali coast could, if reconciliation takes hold in the south, return the region to a pan-Somali future, intimately intertwined with the larger unfolding pan-African future of greater East Africa.
    Chapter 3: Reconstruction Rubble to Rebuilding
    Rag waa kii kufa ee haddana kaca … A man is he who stumbles and then pulls himself up … (Somali proverb)
    There is no neat distinction or cut-off point between reconciliation and reconstruction, though reconciliation is first and foremost a political process. Reconciliation lays the political foundation for the post-conflict reconstruction of an embattled polity. In the process, it mutates into a multi-faceted phase of reconstruction; reconstruction constituting a more elaborate radiation of reconciliation into institutional and socio-economic dimensions of societal rebuilding and, in the case of a new nation-state, nation-building.
    Reconstruction, in essence, is reconciliation by other means; reconciliation ‘in depth’ or, if you will, ‘deep reconciliation’, with the political process of reconciliation continuing apace and dialectically interacting with institution building and socio-economic development.106 This can be graphically seen in the case of Somaliland, which, at the time of writing, was entering what could be the last phase of its reconciliatory process of political transition from a largely clan-based representational enterprise, to a fully-fledged parliamentary system of governance. This continued unfolding of the politics of reconciliation remains a hotly contested terrain that is open-ended, even as Somaliland’s post-conflict reconstruction and recovery has long been underway and has continued to gain momentum. As such, reconciliation and reconstruction in Somaliland can be viewed as mutually reinforcing imperatives.
    As an internationally unrecognised state that has had to compete with successive attempts by the international community to underwrite the reconciliation, reconstruction and recovery of Somalia in the south, Somaliland’s recovery has necessarily evolved along a self-reliant path as “an example of the importance of the bottom-up approach to building societies from local communities upwards, gradually widening the arena of political agreement and political consensus”.108 Hargeisa, and its communities, have had to pursue a political and developmental path that has made a virtue of necessity for self-reliance, based on the political realities of international isolation. Within these parameters, post-conflict reconstruction has been embedded in the actual protracted process of reconciliation itself. This process required instituting the demilitarising of the country amid the construction of a national army and police force as the guarantors of peace and security.
    Therefore, this chapter will commence with reviewing the demilitarisation of Somaliland’s polity and society – a process that has been intimately intertwined with the political transition which, in terms of reconstruction, has made mandatory the institutionalisation of government and its democratisation. This politico-demilitarisation process has, in turn, been intimately tied in with a securing an enabling environment, in which the fledgling Somaliland government could generate its own revenues.109 This was a particularly critical imperative in the light of its having to pursue a self- reliant path of development; one that necessarily ruled out external assistance due to the country’s popularly chosen political route of independence, and the realities this carried with it of being diplomatically unrecognised and, as a result, internationally isolated. “It was achieved without any external demobilisation or security sector reform assistance whatsoever”.
    The ongoing process of political reconstruction sets the stage for a more detailed look at Somaliland’s economic reconstruction. This involves surveying the country’s social economy in historical and contemporary perspective. Here, ‘social factors of reconstruction’ are examined for determining their developmental reconstructive role: how they contribute to levels of participation in development, in terms of the role played by Somaliland’s civic leadership; the extent of women’s participation and the gender dimensions of development; the role of NGOs and civil society as well as the status of the rural areas and their development for overcoming the proverbial African predicament of ‘bifurcation’, as conceptualised by Mamdani.111 This interplay of social forces, in turn, ties in with social service delivery. This crucial area is augmented by what has been a very active diaspora. The Somaliland overseas community has played a major role in Somaliland’s development and sustainability, therefore warranting more than a passing focus as a critical social factor in its reconstruction. It is a constituency that also brings with it its own political significance in terms of an ongoing assessment of Somaliland’s internal balance of political forces.
    How these actors have interacted with one another in meeting the challenges of post-conflict recovery lays the framework for examining other factors of reconstruction in Somaliland’s ongoing attempt to rebuild its economy. In what is a largely agricultural and pastoral society, this panorama includes different sectoral factors of reconstruction: pastoral production, trade and services, fisheries, frankincense and salt, as well as such critical sub-sectors as finance and infrastructure. How these are managed brings into focus the issue of ‘economic and corporate governance’, which is discussed in terms of the following dimensions: reconstruction without aid; the growing international presence within Somaliland, despite its being internationally unrecognised; external trade and investment within an emerging geo-economic and political context, conditioned by the growing importance of hydro-carbon resources; and finally, how Somaliland’s self-reliant reconstruction prospects relate to the
    bigger changing picture of international commitments to Somalia’s reconstruction and the African Union’s focus on sub-regional economic co-operation and integration.
    3.1 Political Governance: Reconciliation as Political Reconstruction
    3.1.1 The Security Preconditioning of Political Reconstruction
    The fact that Somaliland has a Ministry of Rehabilitation, Reintegration and Reconstruction (MRRR) serves as a fitting point of departure for exploring the country’s post-conflict recovery. This process is one that emanates from its disarmament – demobilisation – rehabilitation – reintegration – reconstruction (DDRRR) experience, which was crucial to establishing a foundation of stability and a secure environment for reconstructive development to gain momentum. Somaliland, after all, had to go through two periods of conflict and instability before its politics of reconciliation produced the current period of sustained stability in governance. Otherwise, up until early 1996, Somaliland was as much a battleground as was the stateless south.
    There was the crucial 1992 confrontation between the fledgling central authority in Hargeisa and the militia in control of the vitally strategic port of Berbera – a confrontation that had to be resolved in the government’s favour, if the diplomatically unrecognised Republic was to secure a major source of revenue from international trade and transport via the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean. Once government had extended its control to this vital sector, what continued was a much longer, drawn out and destructive post-Borama conference civil war during the initial tenure of the Egal administration, which lasted from 1994 to 1996.
    Thus, the difficulties of 1992-96 belie the current perception of Somaliland as an oasis of stability in an otherwise chaotic Somali regional environment. At least, compared with the south, throughout this period Somaliland possessed a central government, embattled though it was. But the post-unilateral declaration of independence violence underlined the tenuousness of this distinction. Overall, these conflicts, on top of the previous periods of violence emanating from the Barre repression, had turned Somaliland into a nation of internally and externally displaced persons. Somaliland’s demilitarising DDRRR process, therefore, had to cope with a larger process of reintegrating refugees. As the Somaliland Centre for Peace and Development (SCPD) report of 1999 – ‘A Self-Portrait of Somaliland: Rebuilding from the Ruins’ – graphically points out, “Somaliland, for all practical purposes, is a land of returnees”, where virtually every Somalilander has been displaced at one time or another over the past decade up to that point. The MRRR reported that 682,000 people were involved in the massive exodus to Ethiopia that followed the escalation of the war in 1988 and a “similar, although undetermined number, are believed to have become internally displaced during the same period” with a much smaller number taking up refuge in Djibouti.113 During the 1992 strife, associated with the conflict over the Berbera port, a large portion of the population of Burco and almost the entire population of Berbera were displaced. During the second round of fighting during the Somaliland civil war of 1994-1996, over 150,000 people were displaced from Hargeisa and Burco, approximately 90,000 of whom crossed the border to Ethiopia.
    In 1999, when the SCPD report was written, nearly 200,000 people were still registered in refugee camps in Ethiopia and Djibouti, awaiting repatriation. For the most part, repatriation and reintegration was accomplished without significant external assistance. Members of Somaliland’s diaspora figured significantly in this process, through their efforts to help family members re- establish their homes and businesses by contributing a portion of their earnings. Ethiopia’s closure of refugee camps, catering to displaced Somalilanders in 2001, was seen as a fitting testimony to the new Republic’s hard-won peace and security, evidenced by the momentum that repatriation and reintegration had on reconstruction. It is within this context that the DDRRR of former combatants in Somaliland’s conflicts took place; a process which, according to the late South African peace and security specialist, Rocky Williams, was one of Africa’s most successful, alongside South Africa’s.
    Along with returnees, government assigned top priority to veteran guerrilla fighters, ex-militia and former government soldiers. One must bear in mind that the Somaliland DDRRR unfolded against a backdrop of division and in- fighting between the country’s former SNM military and civilian political factions – dynamics at least in part attributable to Somaliland’s instability during the much of the first half of the 1990s. According to the SCDP report, the demilitarisation and demobilisation process passed through several phases. The first step, after reconciliation, was to distinguish between regular (and therefore authorised) and irregular (or ‘non-statutory’ in South African parlance) security forces. “This was achieved through the formation of a national army, which absorbed many members of the wartime militia units,” along with the establishment of a civilian police force achieving a similar purpose.
    The central police training school in Mandheera has emerged as a key institution in the reconstruction of Somaliland’s police force.117 However, it has suffered from resource shortages, compounded by the challenge confronting instructors of transforming former militia members – many illiterate and initially exhibiting little respect for discipline and authority – into reliable guardians of law and order.
    The disarmament dimension of this process was crucial in so far as separating militia and their armaments from the direct control of their clans, which enabled government to minimise the likelihood and consequences of further inter-communal violence, though some heavy weapons did remain cantoned in their clan areas. In exchange, each clan was given an allotment of recruits in the national army, which provided them with a profession and a steady income. The process, however, has been costly, with the SCPD report pointing out that government was maintaining approximately 18,000 members of its security forces on its payroll, “nearly three times as many as it requires, at a cost of 70% of the national budget”. Government’s security rationale: “better to keep the militia busy in camps, away from the cities and roads, than to return to the days of banditry and insecurity before the national army.”
    Demobilisation, meanwhile, has not constituted a formal programme as much as a spontaneous and voluntary process. The fact that training camp numbers were being reported by military officers to be declining as some recruits quit voluntarily, meant that there was an attrition of quiet integration into civilian life. There are opportunities for demobilised soldiers to acquire civilian- relevant skills through the Sooyaal or veterans association. Under their auspices, a Vocational Training Centre (VTC) was established in Hargeisa in 1994. It has offered a variety of courses to ex-combatants, war-widows and returnees from the refugee camps. On a critical evaluative note, the SCPD report had this to say:
    The fact that the government payroll has not decreased in line with the shrinking population of the training camps has been a subject of some controversy. It is widely believed that various interest groups within government, military, clan and commercial circles seek to benefit from the lucrative contracts involved in maintaining the army, and therefore work to undermine the transparency of the system…Disarmament and demobilisation has worked best in areas where confidence in peace and security is high. In the less settled eastern regions, much remains to be done. As long as the risk of conflict lingers, however remote, then communities are unlikely to surrender their militia and their arms.
    3.1.2 Contradictions in Centralising Security and Decentralising Governance
    On this critical note, the issue of governance looms as a continuing variable in determining the viability of the reconstruction process. This process has been intimately tied in with the imperatives of demilitarising Somaliland’s society as the key to establishing the peace and security foundations for development.121 The politics of demilitarisation, as reflected in the DDRRR process, has essentially aimed at aggregating the disparate and decentralised bases of coercive capability into a consolidated and centralised coercive power for the functioning of the new state. This would help counteract the emergence of the warlord tendencies of southern Somalia which also have their clan links. The consolidation of the coercive powers of the state, through the building of a national army and a civilian police force, has gone hand-in-hand with the institutionalisation of other arms of government and their democratisation. This is an ongoing process unfolding through the evolution of the electoral and judicial systems and the representational institutions – the latter being a process that has yet to run its course, and one that has become highly contentious.
    Stabilising the security environment has naturally reinforced the basic tendencies toward state centralisation, as the national government has had to aggregate unto itself the monopoly of coercive power that defines ‘state power’:
    One universal expectation of the central government is that it should provide security throughout Somaliland – albeit in a benign, unthreatening way. Somalilanders everywhere recognize the importance of peace and security as a precondition to economic and social development.
    Otherwise, these centralising tendencies associated with security have been offset by governing tendencies toward decentralisation, though the SCPD report pointedly cautions that the “theoretical debate over decentralization” has been gradually pre-empted by the “facts on the ground”, as central government and local administrations have expanded their writ and elaborated their structures in what has been described as “haphazard and sometimes contradictory ways.”
    Thus, while decentralisation has become a preferred governing framework in reaction to the Somali coast’s past experience of centralised misrule from Mogadishu, demands have been placed on the central government in Somaliland that reflect pressures for it not to neglect the regions and districts. This is reflected in criticism that Hargeisa has been “too slow to establish administration in the regions and districts,” contradictions that are seen as epitomising “the legacies of past governance practices: a deep distrust of central government on the one hand, elevated demands of it on the other.”
    These, in essence, apart from the centralising imperatives of security, reflect the centralising implications of a developmental state, which is under pressure for ‘delivery’ in reconstructing the socio-economic foundations of a fractured society. Security, being a function of governance, has inevitably reflected some of the pressure emanating from competing interests in Somaliland’s DDRRR process, as indicated in the SCPD report.
    3.2 Political Reconstruction Continued: Parliamentary Elections in the Balance
    The SCPD report’s critique, which alludes to the politics of diverse groups with a vested interest in maintaining a bloated government payroll linked to the DDRRR process, may be indicative of a larger phenomenon of contestation over the political terms of governance in Somaliland. As such, its political reconstruction as a fledgling state would have to be considered as remaining quite fragile. The stability of political reconstruction may be largely contingent on the capacity of the Somaliland government to remain the preponderant coercive force in society while retaining a loyal security establishment – military and police – and sufficient popular legitimacy from a population that, however exercised over contentious political issues, would not wish for a return to the violence and civil strife that has characterised the anarchic state of the south. Nevertheless, each phase of this process appears fraught with uncertainty, as was the case with the parliamentary elections. These constitute the last step in Somaliland’s transition from a clan-based representational to a conventional parliamentary representational system.
    Pending a decision on whether or not to delay the parliamentary elections planned for March 2005, renewed questions and doubts about sustainable political stability in Somaliland were raised. These concerns may have been prompted by the closeness of the contestation between the ruling UDUB government and the leading opposition Kulmiye; a competitiveness that placed noticeable strains on the legitimacy of the governing system in the wake of the presidential election of 2003. In February 2005, the Chairman of Kulmiye, Ahmed Mohamed Silanyo, called on the people of Somaliland to demonstrate peacefully if elections were not held by the end of March. This came after the interim parliament, under its UDUB majority, passed an electoral law calling for a census and a full registration process as preconditions for the end-of-March elections, articles that were seen as unrealistic and unworkable within the targeted time frame for the elections.
    Voicing suspicions that the parliamentary elections, therefore, might be postponed amid an extension of the term of the house of representatives, on the basis of such articles of the election law not being implementable, Silanyo elaborated further on concerns about the electoral system that might militate against a free and fair election: the alleged usage of public funds by the government, the public media, an increase in the number of members of the National Electoral Commission (NEC) that had not been requested, and also that Kulmiye had no part in nominating new NEC members.
    Given the importance attached to Somaliland culminating its democratisation process as integral to its political reconstruction, the possibility which arose at the beginning of 2005, that this accomplishment might go unfulfilled as a result of a delay in the parliamentary elections, began eliciting critical comment. Steve Kibble and Adan Abokor, democratisation is so intimately tied in with its gaining de jure international recognition, amid comparison with the chaos in the south, and what appear to be increasingly uphill efforts to kick-start the TFG, emerging from the Mbagathi process. They consequently express their fear that “if there is not an election the one stable part of ‘greater Somalia’ will relapse from the democratic path, thereby rendering useless the internal and international goodwill, investment and work that has been undertaken so far.” Kulmiye and other opposition parties allege that parliamentarians, especially those allied to the ruling UDUB, are more committed to retaining their seats in the interim parliament than furthering the democratisation process as a result of the census and registration preconditions; and this amid the correct prediction, according to Kibble and Abokor, that “many Somalilanders also expect UDUB to lose to Kulmiye.”
    Kulmiye, in their assessment, appears to have strong support from women and the youth, as well as from the ex-combatant veterans of the SNM, together with a strong base in the Somaliland diaspora. This latter dimension, in fact, has reportedly prompted the UDUB to counter charges of its reliance of the advantages of incumbency with the greater diaspora remittances going to Kulmiye. Kibble and Abokor perceive a possibility that, given President Riyale’s commitment to the electoral process and hope for donor support, a lack of substantial funding for the parliamentary elections might, in itself, contribute to a questionable outcome which could “at least demand a great deal of consensus,” by inference, adding additional strain to the legitimacy of the political reconstruction process. “The worry is that without support the cash-strapped government will not be able to run an election that can be shown to be free and fair and therefore that instability will result …” Given the fact that Somaliland’s self-reliance has generated an attraction among donors,128 in spite of its lacking de jure international diplomatic recognition, Kibble and Abokor express a concern that sustaining such external support, in the absence of credible parliamentary elections, could be further complicated by these very same donors re-engaging in funding the reconstitution and reconstruction of southern Somalia.
    The fulfilment of Somaliland’s political reconstruction at the national level, therefore, is intimately tied in with the international politics of Hargeisa’s quest for recognition and external assistance within the fluid context of the international relations of reconstructing a new regime in Mogadishu. Meanwhile, this political reconstruction process within Somaliland has been seen to be uneven at the local level. Given the geo-politics of the greater Somali region, this carries implications for Somaliland’s stability. In the western regions of Awdal, Woqooyi Galbeed and Saaxil, government administration was well established by the end of the 1990s. In the eastern areas that border Puntland, government authority had been slower to take root. Notably, “where local government has gained ground, progress appears to be more a function of community leadership and initiative than of central government support”,130 an observation which may make Somaliland an excellent barometer on the extent to which popular participation in development, as espoused in the 1990 Arusha African Charter on Popular Participation in Development and Transformation,131 can advance the good governance objectives of NEPAD. As such, however, this may have to factor in an inevitable ‘dynamic tension’ between local government and participatory development and central government. Thus, the SCPD report132 cites the fact that while local leaders in both Gabiley and Boorame were proud of the achievements they have made in establishing their own local administrations and revived taxation systems, their relationship with Hargeisa was awkward, especially when local government may be expected to foot the bill of visiting officials and ministers.
    The Burco municipality’s revival of local government has been cited as a particularly note-worthy achievement.133 After it was almost totally destroyed in the civil war in 1996, it had re-established its administration by July 1997. By the end of the 1990s, all local departments were functioning, except for an office of census and statistics. An impressive range of rehabilitation initiatives have also been undertaken – such as rebuilding the regional hospital, repairing and furnishing several schools and developing a new 1,200-stall market, intended to become the largest in Somaliland – relying mainly on locally raised funds and community contributions. Self-help initiatives have also been cited for spurring development in smaller communities, though, on the other side of the local reconstruction ledger, the involvement of extended families and clans in lobbying for civil service appointments and entitlements are judged to have retarded effective governance. In fact, it may well be that as essential as the clan system has been as a partner in Somaliland’s development, from its pre-independence struggle phase to the present, the viability of the state in reconstruction will hinge on the extent to which a more modernising and rationalising of governance occurs. The same strengths of the clan system, as a generator of participation, can also work against good governance to the extent that clan and kinship networks promote and sustain conflicts of interests underpinning corruption – a major challenge facing government at all levels in Somaliland.
    Nevertheless, it is worth recounting the extent to which popular participation has become a major preoccupation in the country’s fledgling political culture. In reflecting how Somaliland’s governance has evolved, the SCPD report noted that the early transition from SNM rule to more broadly-based civilian administrations had “already gone some way towards the realization of participatory government.” It proceeded by saying that:
    The importance of broadly consultative fora at which decisions are reached through consensus is one notable feature; the growing confidence and seriousness with which Parliament approaches its responsibilities is another.
    Still, to the extent that popular participation tended to remain linked to the traditional beel system, there are limits to how such a framework could cope with the demands of modern governance. The inevitable bureaucratisation of governmental management and administration, along with the technocratic nature of problems in any number of sectors in demand of solutions, ensures that such a system, on its own, is unlikely to cope, though the report cites such observations as “people need to be consulted, educated and their awareness raised, about government and its activities”, as indicative of how the culture of consultation that has emerged in Somaliland’s various phases of development can be brought to bear in enhancing participation. Rural participation and women’s participation are special challenges. Here, a very basic and fundamental challenge is posed: The rural population – particularly the nomads – has long been estranged from the political process. Improving the pastoral population’s participation in governance poses a formidable challenge, raising the question of what form of government is best suited to Somaliland’s rural majority. Many are concerned that the shift to a party system might alienate pastoralists even further. According to one Hargeysa intellectual: There is no government outside Hargeysa, and unless the rural man participates in and benefits from government, we cannot talk about [political] parties.
    3.3 From Clan Limits to Political Reconstruction: Rural and Gender Dimensions
    The challenge of rural participation in governance is compounded by local representational issues, where there are tendencies for clans to want their own districts, thereby generating pressure from below for a proliferation of administrative units which may have nothing to do with effective local governance and decentralisation. Women, on the other hand, have traditionally enjoyed no formal role in the clan-based political process, though this is slowly changing as a result of the democratic transition.136 Despite such exclusion, women have played an active role in mobilising for both peace and war.137 Some took on the role of combatants against the Barre regime. Others raised funds to sustain the war effort and nursed the wounded. Here again, it is expected that Somaliland’s political transition from a clan-based to a more modern multi-party parliamentary system will effect the necessary changes to enhance women’s participation. The constitution, for example, affirms the rights of women to vote and hold public office, while women’s NGOs have emerged as important actors in Somaliland’s burgeoning civil society.
    With respect to the provisional constitution and women’s right to vote, Somali human rights activist, Rakiya Omaar, implies that the underlying clan foundations of Somaliland’s transition may be emerging as double-edged sword producing “an ineffectual government.”139 This she sees as reflective of the fact that “sadly, but perhaps not surprisingly, the political landscape of Somaliland today resembles the multiparty politics of the early 1960s” where Hargeisa is “intent upon claiming the meagre resources of the country to fund its own political interests” – amplifying opposition claims that emerged early in 2005 regarding the prospect that parliamentary elections would be delayed or postponed. In her opinion, the clan system – as opposed to the promised multi-party system that is trying to emerge – which excludes decision-making and leadership roles for women “no longer offers a very real mechanism for accountability” in the political reconstruction of the country. Omaar contends that “the elders should have withdrawn from active political service once they had delivered peace” that, unfortunately, “their extraordinary success in the early 1990s proved too strong a temptation” whereupon they “transformed their role from community representatives and peace-makers to power- brokers.” The successful recent intervention of the House of Elders in calming the political “scuffles” as a result of the stalemate between the ruling UDUB party and the opposition, suggests that the Elders have a select role as Somaliland’s “custodians of the peace and harmony.” With this ‘bifurcated’ impasse, Mamdani proposes “that the way forward lies in sublating both, through a double move that simultaneously critiques and affirms”.
    Omaar’s sentiments, while contentious, are echoed in Somalia: The Untold Story: The War Through the Eyes of Somali Women. In the section on ‘Post- War Recovery and Political Participation’ that addresses ‘Women’s Participation in the Governance of Somaliland’, which draws on papers prepared by Shukri Hariir and Zeynab M. Hassan, and interviews with Noreen
    Michael Mariano, a member of the Women’s Political Forum of Somaliland ventures that:
    Women have no chance of competing with men while clan remains the main basis for political life in Somaliland. Male candidates are supported by their clans but women are not.
    In the absence of a fully-fledged multi-party parliamentary system, women’s participation is largely dependent on the political calculations of male politicians. That the current incumbent, President Rayaale, saw fit to name women as ministers of family and social welfare and foreign affairs is indicative of the president’s awareness that in today’s world, the politics of gender must be factored into Somaliland’s interactions with the international community. Thus, Foreign Minister Edna Adan Ismail, as the most senior ministerial position held by a woman in the Horn of Africa, has been an asset in the country’s diplomacy. However, pending a full transition to multi-party democracy, it is the NGO sector where women’s participation has had its greatest impact. The extent of women’s participation at this level is extensively elaborated on in Somalia: The Untold Story: The War Through the Eyes of Somali Women. By the beginning of the 1990s, the leading women’s organisations operating in Hargeisa were the Somaliland Women’s Development Association (SOWDA) and the Somaliland Women’s Organisation (SOLWO). Both organisations played a leading role in lobbying the interim Tuur administration for the establishment of a police force and a judiciary system. SOWDA promised that women would contribute to a police programme, and did so by donating 500 police uniforms, bedding and utensils to different police stations.
    Later, organisations such as the Women’s Advocacy and Progressive Organisation (WAPO) – which became the Women’s Advocacy and Development Association (WADA) – and Dulmar began moving away from a purely social welfare reconstruction role toward the open advocacy of women’s rights. After the beginning of the new millennium in 2000, Somaliland women were moving toward seeking a greater political voice through the formation of the Women’s Political Forum (WPF), which decided to create its own political party, Qoys (Family) to represent women’s concerns. Importantly, a recent World Bank (WB) study found that women constitute 70% of breadwinners in Somaliland’s households. The challenge remains for this critical role to be appropriately represented in the political sector.
    3.4 Economic (and Corporate) Governance: The Parameters of Economic Reconstruction
    3.4.1 Somaliland’s Social Economy of Reconstruction: Geo-Cultural Contours
    Between the conundrums of rural development and women’s participation in the political reconstruction calculus, the cultural contours of what might be depicted as Somaliland’s ‘social economy’ emerge as the backdrop to its economic reconstruction. Here, the SCPD report makes reference to the optimism that has been attached to Somaliland’s prospects as an inheritance from what was “the relative prosperity it enjoyed in the decade prior to independence” – referring to its immediate post-colonial independence and amalgamation with the south. “During the 1950s, the Arabian oil boom generated an unprecedented demand for Somali livestock. The central towns of Hargeysa, Berbera, and Burco became the hubs of that trade, forming a triangle that would eventually become the core of economic development in the region.” The report further states:
    During the same period, in the Hawd region, the colonial authorities…built a chain of earth dams along the Ethiopian border to collect run-off water. These man-made depressions prolonged the period nomads could graze their livestock in the Hawd, and thus changed the face of the land forever. Permanent settlements began to appear, raising surplus livestock for export to Arabia through the markets of Somaliland’s central economic hub. In the years following independence, this zone became increasingly specialized in the commercial production of livestock and related export services. The relative dominance of this central triangle, and its relationship with the Arabian livestock markets, has changed very little up to the present day.
    This narrative provides a fitting backdrop for the current geo-political- economic context and gaining an understanding of the current political predicament confronting Somaliland’s economic reconstruction; an environment that the country’s unilateral declaration of independence transformed into a hostile neighbourhood. Geo-politically, a Somaliland independent of the rest of the Somali coast has come to be seen by the Arab governments bordering the Red Sea as a challenge to an inter-regional status quo which balances the Afro-Arab, Christian-Muslim power equation on the Horn of Africa side of this ‘Afrabian’ corridor. Hence, the 1998-1999 Arab regional boycott of the North-East African livestock economy was not unrelated to Arab hostility to Somaliland’s independence bid. This complicated the country’s economic reconstruction struggle, in what Rakiah Omaar has defined as a “context of international neglect.”
    Tellingly, however, with implications for Somaliland’s current predicament vis- à-vis the rest of the Somali coast, and Puntland especially, the SCPD report points out that “eastern Somaliland (composed essentially of present day Sool and Sanaag regions) was affected relatively little by the livestock export boom” before and after Somalia’s post-colonial independence at the end of the 1950s and beginning of the 1960s. Within a political reconstruction context relevant to economic recovery, this history puts into perspective the challenge of rural participation confronting Somaliland’s nation-building project:
    Nomadic pastoralism has historically been the predominant social and economic mode in eastern Somaliland, but the area has nevertheless evolved somewhat separately of the central economic zone between Hargeysa, Berbera and Burco. Sanaag region has long maintained independent, sometimes clandestine, trade ties with the Arabian countries, especially Yemen. Export of livestock and frankincense in exchange for consumer goods from the Arabian side evolved into a strong commercial and cultural relationship of central importance to Sanaag’s social and economic life. Further south, the inhabitants of Sool region long ago developed a niche as an economic and social gateway between Somaliland and Somalia – a role the region still plays.”
    While less marginalised than the east, western Somaliland, comprising the Awdal and western Woqooyi Galbeed regions, is also depicted as having experienced a slightly separate development” from the Hargeisa-Berbera- Burco central economic zone. Around the turn of the 20 century, inhabitants of the area began to borrow ox-plough farming techniques from the neighbouring Oromo groups (in Ethiopia) and have since developed an agropastoral mode of production in which cattle raised in sedentary agricultural villages have replaced camels as the principal stock. The region has since become increasingly specialised in the production of cereal crops – chiefly sorghum and maize – which are traded throughout Somaliland. More recently, cereal production has been supplemented by fruits and vegetables grown on small scale irrigation farms for domestic consumption (italics added).
    Of particular importance here, relative to eastern Somaliland’s gravitation toward a more Arabian geo-cultural and economic sphere of influence, is the extent to which western Somaliland’s social economy integrates it regionally into an Ethiopian Ogaden geo-cultural/economic sphere-of-influence. Thus:
    The sedentary agricultural mode of production in the west created a concentration of settlements unmatched elsewhere in Somaliland, including Gabiley, Tog Wajaale, Dila and Boorame. Furthermore, this zone came to serve increasingly as a transhipment point in the trade linking Djibouti, Jigjiga and Dire Dawa to the major population centres of Somaliland. Despite the region’s ‘separate development,’ western Somaliland’s relative prosperity, the metropolitan influences from neighbouring towns, and the settled nature of the population have encouraged its gradual integration within Somaliland’s broader economic and political context.
    This relative stability of western Somaliland’s sedentary social economy vis- à-vis the central economic zone compared to the more marginal pastoral- nomadic linkages of eastern Somaliland to the Hargeisa-Berbera-Burco ‘triangle’ revisits the relative success of local government, as cited by the SCPD report; the fact that, “in the western regions of Awdal, Woqooyi Galbeed and Saaxil, government administration is well established, whereas in the east, government authority has been slower to take root.”151 These dichotomies within Somaliland may prove crucial for future reference in a broader stabilisation of the Somali Peninsula inclusive of both Somaliland and Somalia as the challenge of governance in the Somaliland east may be amplified more broadly in the governance challenges of political reconstruction in and around Mogadishu and its hinterland. As the SCPD report (1999) makes clear, by the end of the 90s, Somaliland’s social economy had become configured around an essentially west-central axis dominated by the central economic zone:
    The growing importance of central Somaliland over the past century has been matched by the gradual decline of the coastal areas. The importance of ancient settlements like Seylac, Bullaxaar, Xiis, Maydh, Laas Qoray and Ceelaayo was diminished when the British colonial authorities shifted their administrative centres from the uncomfortable coastal climate to the cooler Oogo zone, and was further eclipsed by the development of major ports at Berbera and Djibouti. Among the coastal towns, only Berbera, by virtue of its port facilities and its key role in the central ‘triangle’ export trade, has gained in size and importance.
    The current use of the Berbera port by Ethiopia for its critical imports within the context of regional tensions, and the EU plans to facilitate regional infrastructure by developing a Berbera-Addis Ababa corridor, which augurs well for Somaliland’s economic development prospects.
    3.5 Somaliland’s Sectoral Factors of Reconstruction
    The foregoing survey of the geo-cultural contours of Somaliland’s social economy – between a declining pastoralist eastern region that has been traditionally influenced by Arabian/Red Sea inter-regionalism and an economically more vibrant sedentary agricultural economy in the west, linked to the Djibouti-Ethiopian Ogaden axis – contextualises the challenges of economic reconstruction. These efforts are confronted by what might be termed Somaliland’s ‘sectoral factors of reconstruction’ in terms of the country’s productive sectors (its livestock economy and agricultural sector, the coastal marine economy, comprising employment and entrepreneurial activities in fisheries); the social sectors of water and sanitation, and the ‘HEW’ cluster of health-education-welfare and the environment, as well as a revisiting of security and the post-September 11, 2001 preoccupation with anti-terrorism; the infrastructural sectors of transport communications via roads (surface transportation), civil aviation and sea transport revolving around the strategic Berbera port; the fuel and energy sectors which are attracting foreign direct investment; communications inclusive of telecoms and national broadcasting; and programme funding efforts involving assessments and project cost estimates. Economic reconstruction in these sectors is also accompanied and/or complicated by drought, which has had a particularly severe impact in eastern Somaliland.
    A major precondition for the economic and corporate governance dimensions of reconstruction in Somaliland revolves around human resource capacity. This is perhaps the most central preoccupation of government in reversing the legacies of war-induced economic and social decline. As Somaliland’s Ministry of National Planning and Coordination makes clear in its 2005 report on the ‘Somaliland Economic Overview’,156 the country, as a result of “the civil war and severe loss of all its professionals at all levels through brain drain,” has had to cope with a system is very weak as far as personnel is concerned. The personnel are characterised by low levels of education, inadequate professional skills and lack of work experience “contributing to poor delivery of the Government services to the public.”157 There are technical and institutional shortfalls at almost all levels of government. To rebuild its civil service capacity, Somaliland’s government has embarked on a “bold step of carrying out the most feared Civil Service Reforms,” aimed at addressing major impediments in the civil service and at stimulating private sector economic growth.
    Economic and corporate governance, within this context, will mean confronting the following reconstruction challenges outlined in the report:
    • Most ministries lack the capacity to articulate clear national development visions, strategies, objectives and policy directions for public institutions.
    • Almost all ministries lack the capacity to set long-term national development plans as guides to their overall functions and operations.
    • The capacity to design and implement concrete action plans and systems that can ensure good governance, efficiency and accountability in the public sector is inadequate.
    • Periodically monitor and evaluate outputs and expected results are limited.
    • Foster mutual co-operation and collaboration among public and private institutions for wider economic development are almost non-existent.
    3.6 Capacity-Building Support: A Brief Survey
    In trying to address these challenges, Somaliland’s government has been engaging the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). In spite of Somaliland’s lack of international recognition, the fact that it has in place a functioning government helps to facilitate the UN’s developmental objectives in the Somali coast (see the UN Offices in Somalia/Somaliland map). Thus, in seeking to fulfil its objectives of enhancing the delivery of basic services in public institutions through training, institutional capacity-building and public sector reform, the UNDP has engaged Hargeisa in the establishment of an Institute of Public Administration (IPA) and its curriculum development. Under the rubric of ‘Northwest Somalia’, it has prepared and finalised Somaliland’s first ‘Development Plan for Northwest Somalia (Somaliland)’ in what has been termed the ‘Economic Development and Poverty Reduction Strategy 2004- 2006’.
    As part of a broader objective of strengthening the governance capacity preconditions for development, the UNDP has supported the development and strengthening of Somaliland’s legislative bodies (specifically the Guurti/Upper House of Somaliland) and, notably, in terms of economic development, supported a needs assessment conducted by the Ministry of National Planning and Coordination, for the purpose of strengthening its strategic economic planning capacity. Related assistance has gone to supporting registration and ground-breaking cadastre establishment in Somaliland under its Ministry of Agriculture, and toward training courses in Law and Business Administration for civil servants, with the aim of skills re- qualification at the University of Hargeisa. Accomplishments cited by the UNDP have been the finalising of the Cadastral Survey in Gabiley in Somaliland, and the extension of this survey to Borama as a means of facilitating title ownership to the area’s farmers (thereby reducing conflict over land), the conducting of a training and study tour of Somaliland women leaders to Uganda, and of traditional elders to South Africa. In the urban sector, the UNDP has supported a Land Management Information System survey for the capital, Hargeisa; development of the first ever Hargeisa City Charter and its translation into Somali; and rehabilitation work of the Hargeisa/Borama/Hudur municipal buildings. On the distance education front, the UNDP has made use of resources from the African Virtual University (AVU) and other online sources to establish satellite technology at the Universities of Hargeisa and Amoud and has helped them create local area networks, and in the process, allowed them to network their computers at the learning centre.
    In all this, the capacity-building reconstruction challenges have been many. In public administration, the challenge has been to overcome obsolete managerial, technical and administrative cadres, which have suffered from the disruption of academic institutions, emigration of skilled human resources, and overstaffing of institutions, resulting in high recurrent costs and low productivity amid a climate of high social tension and insecure employment conditions. In the area of governance, the challenge has been hostility and resistance to the discussion of women’s issues in the political arena. The urban sector, meanwhile, has been challenged by the return of refugees and internally displaced persons to areas such as Hargeisa, which has placed the limited resources of the local authorities under immense pressure. This is compounded by returnees’ unwillingness to move and the inadequate capacity and resources of the local authorities, thus making urban planning difficult.
    3.7 Overcoming the Livestock Achilles’ Heel
    This brief highlighting of capacity problems illuminated by the UNDP assistance to Somaliland, within the context of the UN’s assistance in the Somali region, is illustrative of the overall challenges confronting the sectoral factors of reconstruction. Post-conflict reconstruction, after all, is a particularly sensitive sphere of political and economic governance contingent on capacity. Equally critical, is the extent to which Hargeisa is able to manage Somaliland’s regional economic interdependencies within the Red Sea/Somali Peninsula/Gulf of Aden geo-economic zone. Here, the vagaries of the livestock economy has proven to be particularly challenging during Somaliland’s first independence decade, given Arab opposition to its unilateral declaration of independence in 1991.
    As a draft report from 2002 by Somaliland’s Academy for Peace and Development on ‘Regulating the Livestock Economy of Somaliland’ points out, “pastoralism, in one form or another, is the primary production system in Somaliland” wherein the livestock economy has played a central role as a revenue generator. “Taxation on livestock exports is the main source of government revenue and of funding for the re-establishment of government institutions.” As the SCPD report emphasises, livestock exports are the Achilles’ Heel of Somaliland’s economy in the absence of diversification, although it is the “leading exporter of livestock among eastern African states and among the world’s leaders in live animal trade.
    In February 1998, the government of Saudi Arabia imposed a livestock ban on all animals originating from Horn of Africa countries and Yemen due to an outbreak of Rift Valley Fever in north-eastern Kenya and southern Somalia. The blanket import ban was seen as having especially serious consequences for Somaliland and the Ogaden ‘Ethiopian Somali National Regional State’, both being areas where local economies depended heavily on the export of livestock. At the time of the ban, Somaliland was seen as likely to suffer the most, since normally 80% of hard currency earnings, as well as the bulk of the government’s tax revenue, are derived from livestock exports. Furthermore, the Saudi ban came at a time when the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) was implementing a regional refugee repatriation programme which, it was feared, could be undermined by the boycott.
    The 1998-1999 ban had a dramatic impact in terms of its ‘collateral damage’ beyond the livestock sector itself. “Somaliland national income suffered a sudden drop of as much as 40% …The ban affected all sectors of Somaliland society including urban dwellers, many of whom previously believed that only nomads depended on livestock. Even beyond the central ‘triangle’ of Somaliland’s livestock trade, economic activity slowed to a crawl.”
    Immediate relief was experienced in mid-1999 when the ban was lifted. But then, less than three years later, another ban was imposed by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Yemen, only to be partially lifted by the UAE in June 2001. At the time of the 2005 ‘Somaliland Economic Overview’s’ release, the ban was at least partially in force, as made apparent in the report’s discussion of “sector modernisation” of the livestock economy; the fact that as “the ban of Somaliland’s livestock export had been triggered by Rift Valley disease outbreak, modern laboratory establishment would prevent livestock exposure to such disease and control any new epidemic …”.
    The Academy for Peace and Development report, drafted in 2002, tabled several recommendations, one set addressing the role that could be played by international donor agencies, which serves to highlight Somaliland’s precarious predicament, given its lack of even partial or preliminary international recognition. Thus, at the top of the list of actions “required from international aid agencies” was “providing diplomatic support for lifting the livestock ban”. Otherwise, it was noted that “despite the central role that livestock trade plays in the reconstruction and well-being of the people of Somaliland, the contribution of donor agencies to the promotion of livestock trade has been virtually zero”, although “the engagement of the aid agencies in the sector would contribute to the county’s development, and the nation’s food security and socio-economic wealth”.
    Diversification, according to the Academy report, should take two forms in terms of developing new non-pastoral economic resources and sectors such as those cited in the SCPD report – such as coal mining, oil exploration, cement production, tourism, an economic free zone, financial services and internet commerce – along with the diversification of pastoral products and markets. Within the context of such a strategy, government should give priority to:
    • Provision of basic human services and essential infrastructure to encourage movement to coastal areas;
    • Provision of support for the voluntary migration of pastoralists to coastal areas, and assistance for those who seek to engage in fishing;
    • Diversification of the livestock trade, which will demand greater domestic processing and an aggressive international marketing strategy. To achieve this will require leadership of the government collaborating with the chamber of commerce;
    • Encouragement of the development of a domestic processing plant for chilled meat and hides for export, by offering credits, tax breaks and free land for construction;
    • Periodic inspections by government inspectors and international experts of the Somalia/Somaliland chilled meat processing infrastructure and procedures and the submission of the report to the relevant authorities in the exporting countries;
    • Technical support to the private sector in facilitating chilled meat so that international standards are met;
    • Provision of an environment that encourages foreign investment in this sector and that safeguards this investment.
    These recommendations amplify one of the observations made by the SCPD report concerning rationalisation and diversification, with regard to alleviating rangeland pressures. Exploiting other economic options would be “unlikely to yield much revenue unless they are linked to greater domestic processing capacity, and aggressive international marketing strategies.”
    Diversification into a broader agricultural complement to livestock would, among other things, mean reversing the severe erosion of arable land, which is compounded by periodic droughts. According to the ‘2005 Economic Overview Report’, arable land in the country is roughly estimated at 150,000 hectares, approximately 60% of which has been subjected to severe erosion. This means that an integrated ecosystems-based economic recovery strategy would have to be at the foundation of further agro-pastoralist development. “For natural erosions, agriculture restoration projects are envisaged by the government who is conscientious that it would not be feasible without foreign investments or substantial international community assistance.” One productive sector contemplated by the report for revival is date production. Before the civil war, there were many date plantation projects. These were among the economic casualties of war. Date plantations had been envisioned as a key to raising the social and economic standards of people living in the coastal areas. The report recommends an urgent rejuvenation programme that would require the development of thousands of hectares, which, in turn, would necessitate importation of hundreds of thousands of shoots. “For the up-keep of deteriorated existing palms and planting on new lots, it is desirable to acquire initial investment for the purchase of more pumps and digging earth wells. The groves to be rehabilitated will start fruiting from 2008 onward and assuming that 70% of the palms will be rejuvenated, annual production will probably be thousands of tons.”
    3.8 The Neglected Marine Economy
    Developing the marine economy is recognised as a major alternative to dependence on agro-pastoralism, as the coastline, stretching for over 850km along the southern shores of the Gulf of Aden, is seen as having great fishing potential that could generate employment and income for many people, enlarge and enhance the nutritional intake of consumers and increase Somaliland’s foreign exchange earnings through exports to international markets. At the time the ‘2005 Economic Overview Report’ was published, the challenges facing the development of this sector as an alternative to agro- pastoralism, were:
    • The number of communities that depend on fishing was very small and poor;
    • The demand for fish in Somaliland is very low as seafood is not popular;
    • The seafood export market is non-existent due to lack of proper infrastructure and information;
    • There is a shortage of qualified manpower in the sector;
    • Marine resources have not been properly studied and estimated, yet;174
    • Those very resources are already prey to unscrupulous poachers and polluters.
    Clearly, fisheries would appear to be more of an export market resource than one for internal consumption. Measures are being contemplated – or implemented – in licensing and registration, the provisioning of fishing gear and processing equipment, marine resources conservation, and in the realm of laws and regulations. To develop this market, the ‘Economic Overview Report’ indicated that the Ministry of Fisheries and Coastal Development would have to undertake an extensive fisheries and marine resources research and survey programme.
    In the ‘HEW’ social sectors of health, education and welfare, the war and conflict situations have reinforced the top priority of addressing Somaliland’s water and sanitation problems. Since there are no rivers in Somaliland, the harvesting of run-off water in surface reservoirs and tapping the subterranean aquifer are the country’s only two key water sources. Growing urbanisation, as well as rural welfare during the current ongoing reconstruction period, underline the importance of development in this sector. In fact, overcoming this problem is basic to rural development. Here, “immediate priorities” based on the 2005 Somaliland Economic Overview are:
    • Rehabilitation of surface water sources, especially that of the Hawd public water reservoirs;
    • Rehabilitation of existing bore-wells;
    • Creation of permanent dry season water sources (bore-wells) to Hawd pastoral zones, to the hot western coastal plains and to the eastern Sool plains;
    • Enhancement of drought preparedness capability at both the regional and national levels to supplement existing private operational capacities (an area of development that, in fact, makes regional co-operation with neighbouring countries imperative); and
    • Improvement of rural and village sanitation facilities.
    With regard to urban water systems, providing this resource to new returnees and internally displaced person (IDP) settlements and other outlying communities highlights the need for several medium-term undertakings, such as the construction of subterranean dams, weirs and bunds to conserve underground water levels; the compilation and updating of available hydrological data; and the establishment of a water data/information centre within the Ministry of Water and Mineral Resources, in collaboration with the Ministry of Pastoral Development and Environment.
    3.9 Education: Somaliland’s Reconstruction Generator
    Given Somaliland’s human resource deficits and capacity-building challenges, the education (and training) sector is an emergency priority. Here, reconstruction has to be seen within the broader context of how Somaliland is drawing upon the participation and resources of its far-flung diaspora, as well as on efforts aimed directly at reviving the qualitative and physical infrastructural aspects of the country’s education system. This was all diluted and ultimately destroyed during the era of military rule from Mogadishu and as a result of the subsequent wars.
    The development of the education sector has been a critical ‘social reconciliation bridge’ for Somalilanders abroad. For example, the setting of Somaliland’s first Amoud University cohered Somalilanders abroad across clan divides, in cities such as Abu Dhabi, and inspired many other university initiatives on the Somali coast. Today, Amoud University is seen as a key symbol of Somaliland’s resilience. Often the University’s survival track record is seen as an example of Somaliland’s stability and self-reliance. Clearly, this tertiary institution has played a pivotal role in the consolidation of Somaliland’s reconciliation agenda and its emerging identity. Amoud University was transformed from Amoud High School seven years ago and has been successful in drawing on its symbolic capital as the first Somaliland Protectorate secondary boarding school and the alma mater of generations of Somaliland’s educated class, including leaders such as the current Chairperson of the Kulmiye Party, Mr Ahmed Silanyo.
    On the schooling front, since 1991 when there was an enrolment of 10,000 students in 47 primary schools organised through community initiatives, the combined public and private primary school enrolment had jumped to 96,201 in 354 functioning schools by 2000/2003. There are currently 15 functioning secondary schools serving a population of 4,380 students. The total number of teachers, both public and private is 2,346. Here, international engagement, despite diplomatic non-recognition, has played an important role. With such help, Somaliland succeeded in operating functioning schools with 2,386 rehabilitated classrooms. Meanwhile, according to the Somaliland Economic Overview, “a long process of primary school curriculum reform has borne fruit, with the first consignment of new textbooks already in use.” Now, as a complement to this, attempts are underway “to develop a multi-purpose non-formal education curriculum.” What is more, overall, the educational revival process is attempting to mainstream gender issues by integrating such issues into educational resource materials and programmes. Such gender mainstreaming in education is reinforced by what is also becoming an emerging focus on the education of girls – an area highlighted as among the sector’s “immediate priorities”, along with the more medium-term priority of rehabilitating rural education.
    Although Somaliland’s educational system achieved early success in disseminating rural education well into the 1970s, the current education revival is seen as being overly biased toward urban areas. Within this context, there are “serious regional disparities of access to educational opportunities”182 with Ministry of Education official statistics showing that most of the country’s schools are now concentrated in the Galbeed region, which accounts for 47.1% of total student enrolment in Somaliland; the other 52.9% is divided up among Awdal (14.4%), Sahil (7.9%), Togdheer (9.7%) and Sool and Sanaag with 10.6% each. This urban bias is reinforced by the fact that most teachers are concentrated in towns as a result of these being venues where other income-generating opportunities can be accessed. In the medium term, priorities focused on reviving education in the rural areas include:
    • Supplementary sources of income for rural teachers;
    • Expanding primary schools into rural communities and urban settlements that are currently not being served;
    • Establishment of regional level technical institutes;
    • Support studies on the sustainability of the present cost-sharing system for financing public education and that of private education and potentialities for improved payment of teachers, improving educational access for the pastoral population, feasibility of expanding non-formal education and the instilling of moral values in education.
    Overall, the key to education’s revival is overcoming the teacher bottleneck. “There has not been a supply of new teachers for more than a decade now, and older generation teachers are leaving the profession because of age or because of change of occupation.”184 Recently, a teachers’ training college was opened in Hargeisa, while Amoud University is producing a limited number of secondary school teachers, which is expected to increase. The capacity of such institutions to produce a new generation of primary and secondary teachers for public and private schools, highlights the role that tertiary education institutions are playing in Somaliland’s reconstruction and educational revival.
    With the opening of Burco University in August 2004, Somaliland now has four institutions of higher learning, namely, Burco, Amoud University, Hargeisa University, which graduated its first-ever students in 2004, and Berbera University. As Afrol News reported, “this exceptional density of educational centres has been made possible by bold government policies and the financial support of many Somalilander exiles,” referring to the impact of the diaspora communities overseas, which contain many individuals who not only make financial contributions but travel back and forth to Somaliland in a variety of support capacities related to institution and capacity-building. From the standpoint of attracting external assistance – despite Somaliland not being recognised – Burco University’s founding represents one route to this goal by emphasising the school’s German roots as a means of attracting this nation’s support. According to Afrol News, Burco University “takes up the heritance from a technical institute that was constructed with German state aid but left in ruins by earlier hostilities. Consequently, the town’s new university plans to specialise on engineering and technical studies.” In the process, it is hoped that, as a matter of continuity, German funding can be attracted to support the institution. Former graduates of the old Technical Institute of Burco have been among the many contributors to its revival as Burco University, a reflection of how “the Somaliland Diaspora has played an important part in financing the country’s four universities” as well as in raising funds to reconstruct Burco.
    The density of Somaliland’s tertiary education sector, given the small size of the country, reflects a broader renaissance of an institutionalised civil society as another source of reconstructive capacity-building. In addition to the women’s NGOs mentioned above, institutions like the SAPD interact with the universities, international organisations and government in augmenting the kind of research and analysis into Somaliland’s manifold developmental challenges, which is hoped will sustain reconstruction momentum. The SAPD, formerly the Somaliland Centre for Peace and Development has, for example, worked closely with the War-Torn Societies Project (WSP) in profiling Somaliland’s reconstruction and developmental needs. Prior to its 1999 report, SAPD, in its SCPD incarnation, had identified four strategic areas (Entry Points) in Somaliland society for prioritising the rebuilding process:
    • Regulating the pastoral economy;
    • Consolidating government institutions at central and local levels, including decentralisation;
    • The role of the media and oral culture in rebuilding;
    • The legacy of war on the family, culture and values.
    Through the kind of participatory research that such institutions undertake, in this case enlisting the involvement of a private sector (by and large livestock traders), linkages have been forged between Somaliland’s indigenous ‘knowledge sector’ and the larger society. This larger society, in terms of the private sector, also includes an organised business community in the form of the Somaliland Chamber of Commerce which, with the assistance of the UNDP, has published its own directory providing a comprehensive list of products and services, as well as public and private institutions. This civil society complement, inclusive of the universities, makes Somaliland potentially the hub of reconstruction throughout the greater Somali region as a whole.
    In the health sector, the priority areas of intervention pertain to the need for constructing a comprehensive health care system, which does not exist due to the lack of resources.190 The lack of medical supplies and equipment, as well as the need for training, is seen as vital in expanding health delivery services which, at present, must also cope with the HIV/AIDS/STD pandemic cluster of health threats. Again, like the education system, the health care delivery system is seen as heavily biased toward Somaliland’s urban areas. Developing the health infrastructure interacts intimately with the development of urban and rural water and sanitation systems which, in turn, tie in closely with increasing environmental concerns. Environmental concerns have become more manifest with recurring droughts affecting Somaliland and the Horn of Africa as a whole, exacerbated by coal production, resultant deforestation, population growth and expansion. Here, the salient issues of great concern to Somaliland have been summarised by the ‘2005 Economic Overview’ as: An encouraging indicator is the range of regional meetings convened in Hargeisa. See for example, Amnesty International’s regional Horn of Africa meeting: Amnesty International, ‘Human rights in Somaliland: Awareness and action. A report of a workshop held in Hargeisa,
    • Environment information and research;
    • Environmental impact assessment of policies, programmes and project components;
    • Environmental education;
    • Sustainable management of the environment and natural resources;
    • Environmentally sound management of pollution;
    • Improvement of living and working environments; and
    • Providing a national framework for integrating conservation and development.
    Again, this is an area that demands major capacity-building in human resources development to deal with interrelated health, sanitation and environmental issues in a challenging ecosystem.
    3.10 Transport Communications and Tapping the External Realm
    There is a broad cluster of sectoral factors of reconstruction that link Somaliland’s fate to the outside world; factors of regional and global economic interdependence that impinge on the country’s continuing reconstruction and recovery prospects. These have to do with transport communications within Somaliland, which are interlinked with the rest of the Horn of Africa/Red Sea/Gulf of Aden geo-political-economic region; Somaliland’s access to foreign donor assistance, private investment and international expertise, which brings into greater focus the role of the Somaliland diaspora; and the interaction of Somaliland’s self-reliant development path with the imperative sub-regional economic co-operation and integration within the framework of an overlapping array of regional economic communities (RECs) within the AU.
    Despite Hargeisa’s unrelenting bid for internationally recognised independence, the transport communication interdependencies that tie its economy to the rest of greater North-East Africa and the Red Sea/Gulf of Aden region are critical to its continuing post-conflict recovery.
    Moreover, Somaliland has a regional comparative advantage in its strategic Berbera port on the Gulf that, potentially, could make it the gateway to the entire IGAD195 community of nations that are among Somaliland’s neighbours. Because of Berbera’s berthing capacity, coupled with a landing strip that is one of the second longest on the entire continent, Berbera’s port development and rehabilitation could benefit a range of regional and external transport communications requirements, from peacekeeping to humanitarian aid and disaster relief deliveries, to a range of commercial export and import trafficking of goods to and from the region.
    However, Berbera must be seen within a wider matrix of transport communication rehabilitation requirements identified in the ‘2005 Economic Overview’. Rehabilitating surface transportation along with aviation and maritime-port capacity constitutes a major dimension of recovery, as much of this vital infrastructure was either destroyed or degraded during Somaliland’s conflicts, dating back to the days of military retribution by the Barre regime, or was left to perdition due to neglect and disrepair as a result of successive deployments, military build-ups, build-downs and redeployments by the former Soviet Union and the US during the Cold War, when Berbera’s strategic value was a major geo-political prize. Within this context, rehabilitating surface transport has been a basic priority in re-establishing internal and external economic linkages. The ‘Economic Overview’ cites, in this regard, the role of the Somaliland Road Authority (SRA)197 in co-ordinating and seeking external financing, as well as engaging the private sector in the maintenance and provision of services. These include: hiring professional and technical expertise to assist the SRA in developing maintenance plans, programmes, schedules and budgets, as well as providing site supervision services; delegation of maintenance responsibilities to other agencies such as local authorities; and outsourcing physical works to commercial contractors, communities and individuals.
    Somaliland’s road network is estimated to comprise around 2,200km of paved road, including the road link to Erigabo and the unpaved roads to Ethiopia via Hargeisa. The maintenance cost of priority roads has been estimated in the neighbourhood of US$5.3 million. Particularly high priority is attached to the maintenance of the unpaved road from Burco to Erigabo and the cross-border road network linking Wajale, Inu-Guha and Allay Baday. These two roads total 500kms. The government is committed to raising about 35% of the capital needed for the Burco-Erigabo axis, with the remaining 75% being sought from international donors. Meanwhile, regional, district and village communities are being encouraged to formulate their own road rehabilitation projects for integrating into the larger surface transport communications matrix.
    Hargeisa has, with the support of the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO), prepared feasibility studies for upgrading the airports of Hargeisa, Berbera and Burco. Such upgrading would come at an estimated cost of between $18 and 32 million. This is critical given the high volume of air traffic coming in and out of Somaliland, despite its lack of international recognition. The civil aviation reconstruction aims are to: maintain high standards of flight safety; review and update legislation to keep abreast with international standards; and expand existing airport capacity. Air transport reconstruction is intimately tied in with sea transport upgrading, especially in the case of Berbera. According to the economic overview, the port will require significant investment in infrastructure development and management if it is to serve as a regional port. This will entail expanding services and facilities at the port as a basis for growing maritime services and stimulating greater employment and economic activity. This will strengthen the IGAD region’s economic co-operation and cross-border trade and technical co-operation in Somaliland, as the government of Ethiopia has started using the Berbera port for government imports, while the EU has used the port for the humanitarian shipment of food aid. Such sectoral rehabilitation and expansion should also fuel the momentum of external investment in other sectors, especially in energy.
    For the past few years, there has been a growing interest in Somaliland’s off- shore hydrocarbon potential. A British-Chinese joint venture (China’s Sinopec and Britain’s Rova) were granted exploration licenses in 2000 to explore oil deposits in two offshore blocks totalling 7 million acres. Recently, the South African owned Ophir energy corporation acquired 75% of the issued share capital of Rova, which is a special purpose company established to develop the Somaliland interests.200 In 2003, leading South African businessman, former Gauteng Premier Tokyo Sexwale, Chairman of Mvelaphanda Holdings, led a five-man delegation to Somaliland to assess mining and oil development prospects. This visit paved the way for active offshore oil prospecting by Mvelaphanda, which is part of the company’s pursuit of African investments in its upstream energy business201 (see Map of Oil Concession in Berbera).
    In Somaliland’s case, such prospects will enhance the need for a rehabilitated Berbera port within the context of expanding external oil and natural gas exploration along coastal East Africa. Given the escalating demand for oil and Liquified Natural Gas (LNG), combined with Somaliland’s relative stability in the Somali region, exploiting its energy potential may well offer the best prospect for generating foreign investment in the development of Somaliland’s natural resources sector, thereby building momentum for increased international involvement in its economy, despite what is still an uphill diplomatic struggle for recognition.
    In 2001, the European Community-funded Progressive Interventions, was engaged with the Somaliland government and its private sector, in an effort to organise the mining and marketing of the country’s gemstone deposits.
    Among the issues that were embarked upon by Progressive Interventions were: investment in exploration and mining, including equipment; training of local miners to identify the different gem minerals; organising the miners and dealers into a mining and trading association; setting up marketing channels for the gemstones, including inviting overseas gemstone wholesalers to visit the country; and looking at ways to add value through cutting and polishing. According to South African gemologist, Dr Judith Kinnard, Somaliland has two known emerald producing areas, one at Alihiley and another at Simodi in western Somaliland. To the east of the emerald gem belt in this region, the gemstones are still in what are called ‘pegmatite,’ and they can, reportedly, be seen as white criss-crossing bodies on the hillside. Thus, beside emeralds, in this generally neglected eastern region, miners are working on pegmatite with aquamarine, according to Kinnard. Rubies and sapphires also occur in the gem belt, in metamorphic rock instead of pegmatite. A bright red ruby said to be similar to the ruby from Longido in Tanzania, has been found in a metamorphic rock. However, the most abundant gemstone in Somaliland, according to Dr Kinnard, is garnet: “Everywhere I went there were garnets by the bucket loads – garnets in varying sizes and colours from red to orange, grossular garnet, pyrope and almandine garnets.”202 Somaliland also has an abundant supply of a variety of quartz.
    In short, the development of Somaliland’s minerals and energy potential, at a time of growing external market minerals and energy demand offers, perhaps, the best route for Somaliland to diversify its economy out of its dependency on livestock exports.
    Indeed, the successive Horn of Africa livestock bans imposed by Arabian peninsular states have spurred the country’s efforts to attract foreign involvement in developing these sectors. One additional comparative advantage that Somaliland may enjoy in attracting foreign investment as a means of overcoming its political isolation and, in the process, developing commercial services, including retail trade, transportation and professional services as bases for generating urban employment, alongside developing the minerals and energy extractive sector, is the fact that, out of circumstances of necessity, it has developed what could be one of the largest African indigenous private sectors relative to the governmental private sector.204 This is a phenomenon that ties in with the Somaliland – and larger Somali – diaspora, spawned by the upheavals along the Somali peninsula. Over the decades, conflict throughout the region has generated a far-flung diaspora of refugees and exiles alongside an already existing pool of migrant labourers, who have worked in countries throughout peninsular Arabia and the Persian Gulf. This diaspora, in turn, has spawned a remittance economy which has helped to sustain the people of Somaliland and act as a stabiliser to the benefit of a government hard-pressed to deliver public services. Thus, it is important to gain some appreciation for the role that the Somaliland diaspora (and migrants), and the remittances it generates, has played in Somaliland’s reconstruction.
    3.11 Somaliland’s Diaspora
    Roughly half of Somaliland’s 3.5 million nationals have been estimated to live outside its borders. The past 15 years and more have meant numerous cross-border displacements, leaving the entire population as either repatriated/repatriating refugees or IDPs. In producing this exodus, Somaliland’s wars have, in the process, displaced a substantial middle class of Somalilanders, who have had the means to relocate overseas and, therefore, transfer portions of their income to their relatives back home while, on the other hand, remittances have been flowing into Somaliland from nationals working as migrant labourers in the Middle East/Persian Gulf. The Somaliland diaspora/remittance phenomenon has been fairly well studied.
    Findings have highlighted the fact that, as a result of the socio-economic nature of much of the exodus, most remittances from the diaspora flow to the cities and middle classes within Somaliland and that “these large capital flows have contributed to rapid economic recovery in post-war Somaliland and the development of a dynamic private sector”.
    The socio-economic composition of the Somaliland diaspora thus – in comparison to labour migrants – comprise families who already have access to financial resources and have thus been able to establish themselves largely in the West. Many diaspora Somalilanders have been engaged very actively in conflict resolution and developmental projects aimed at alleviating the Somali region’s humanitarian crises. They have, in effect, been employed in what might be characterised as the international “development industry” with local and international NGOs and private voluntary organisations (PVOs); organisations that are and have been involved in rehabilitation and reconciliation, in the process, helping fuel the development of Somaliland’s civil society. Since 1997, many have in fact returned to Somaliland and countless travel back and forth, living abroad for part of the year as well as remaining for the other part of the year in Somaliland. Many are heavily involved in political, economic and judicial processes within the country. The remittance economy that ‘diasporisation’ has generated, is estimated to be in the neighbourhood of US $500 million annually for Somaliland. According to a paper published in 2000 by Ismail I. Ahmed on ‘Remittances and their Economic Impact in Post-War Somaliland’, this intake was around “four times the value of livestock exports. In fact, the livestock export ban by Saudi Arabia in 1998 in response to the Rift Valley fever outbreak in Kenya and southern Somalia was predicted to lead to the collapse in international trade and market exchange. It was feared that the shortage of hard currency needed to finance imports would spell disaster for the country. The ban lasted 14 months and the number of animals exported from Somaliland fell sharply from 2.9 million in 1997 to just over 1 million in 1998. However, this failed to affect the volume of imports mainly because remittances financed the entire import bill” (italics added).
    Tracking the Somalia/Somaliland remittance economy, according to this report, has been extremely difficult in terms of quantifying and monitoring such flows. The channels are diverse, with cash flows often taking place on the black market. Ahmed writes that estimating remittances in Somaliland is problematic for a number of reasons:
    First, remittances are transferred in a number of forms and through different channels. They can be cash in kind e.g. cars, furniture, jewellery, clothing or electronic goods and they can also be channelled through trusted merchants or hand carried by migrants when they visit home. Second, there is no data available on the global numbers of migrants and refugees from Somaliland. Third, Hawaalado (money transfer companies) who are responsible for a significant part of transfers, sometimes deliberately under-report the size of the flows for fear of government interference in the form of taxes or new regulations.
    The study found that the average annual remittance received by households was US$4,170 and that there were approximately 120,000 recipient households throughout Somaliland – roughly one-third of the population. Interestingly, it was found that “for agro-pastoralists internal remittances from migrant workers in urban areas are more important than international ones”, which makes an important statement on the impact of internal rural-to-urban migratory labour and income flows within the country. Further, because of what the report sees as “recent changes in the demographic structure of migrants, an increasing proportion of those receiving this kind of income are women”. In broader socio-economic terms, though diaspora remittances have undoubtedly been an economic – and hence, social – stabilising factor for the country, they may constitute something of a ‘double-edged sword’ in that the study finds that “remittances have increased income inequality” and probably, by inference, reinforced an urban-rural economic divide in the process. For although the effect of remittances on households, according to the report, has been considerable in providing secure livelihoods. “The migrant workers and refugees, themselves, were found generally to come from better-off families who could afford the relatively high investment costs involved in sending someone abroad”.
    Yet another off-setting impact of the diaspora-remittance dimension of Somaliland’s recovery and reconstruction, apart from its relationship with growing socio-economic inequality, is the fact that this phenomenon has been the source of large capital flows that have contributed to a relatively rapid post-war economic recovery and dynamic private sector development. This latter outcome is particularly noteworthy as, given the capacity deficits of the state, the Somaliland private sector within and outside the country has, of necessity, played a major and strategic role in Somaliland’s governance and development. A study conducted by Peter Hansen entitled ‘Migrant Remittances as a Development Tool: The Case of Somaliland’ notes, for example:
    Partly because of the absence of a functioning state with its financial, economic and social institutions, the private business sector has grown tremendously in Somaliland. Even though Somaliland has the most stable administration in the former Republic of Somalia, traditional government services such as the provision of education, health services and electricity have largely been taken over by private companies or at least have been privatized in practice. Somaliland may not officially be a state providing these services, but, in fact, Somaliland is a free trade zone where it is possible to import and export goods almost without taxation. Many Somalilanders from the West come to invest in the supposedly booming and unregulated economy. Their investments have created jobs and stimulated the provision of services (italics added).
    This is, indeed, a revealing insight into the nature of Somaliland’s post-war reconstruction as a harbinger of the country’s future economic development; in essence, a country embarked on a development path imposed by circumstances that dictated the fashioning of an indigenous African public- private partnership state integrated into the global economy through a diaspora spawned by Somaliland’s adversity but which has become intimately involved in the home-country’s development. This carries both internal domestic and external geo-political implications. Internal domestic political implications are evident in Somaliland’s culminating governance reconstruction, which revolved (at the time of writing) around the country’s parliamentary elections, which were expected to conclude the transition from clan-based governance to multi-party parliamentary governance. With the fact that the opposition Kulmiye and Ucid parties emerged as serious contenders in the election, this signalled the emergence of the diaspora and its remittance economy as an ascendant socio-economic political force in Somaliland’s governance. A major part of Kulmiye’s political base is reported to be in the diaspora. Because of the already referred to class composition of this diaspora, Kulmiye’s emergence also signifies, perhaps, the beginning of a consolidation of political dominance by Somaliland’s middle class and educated elite, over more traditionalist sources of power and influence in the society. Whether this could lead to a widening polarisation between urban and rural Somaliland is still questionable. The latter’s increased marginalisation would depend on how inclusive Kulmiye’s leadership and allied coalition of forces prove to be, and how committed they are to preventing such polarisation; an important consideration in as much as rural Somaliland has provided the country its reconciliatory base which, up to now, has successfully bridged ‘bifurcation’ between urban modernity and rural tradition. Otherwise, the diaspora provides Somaliland with a crucially strategic link to the outside world in a way that has helped it to overcome the diplomatic isolation imposed by non-recognition. Somalilanders from the diaspora have provided much of the person-power for implementing any number of international ‘development industry’ humanitarian and rehabilitative activities not just in Somaliland, but throughout the Somali region. In the process, as has already been indicated by the involvement of the UN, international organisations and NGOs have been, because of the chaotic political circumstances in southern Somalia, unavoidably drawn to co-operating with Somaliland in undertaking any number of reconstruction and development undertakings.
    Although concerns exist that southern Somalia’s post-Mbagathi transition, under its new TFG, may draw donor support away from Somaliland, the latter may have already established itself, de facto, as the centre of gravity of the Somali region’s recovery by dint of the fact that this is where the region’s indigenous capacity resides. Even with Somaliland’s own capacity deficits, the country’s diaspora has helped to offset these shortcomings by their own devotion to rebuilding their country as a base of political and economic stability in an otherwise chronically unsettled region. Somaliland has thus developed an ambivalent relationship with the international community that, in a sense, cannot ignore its presence. This is amply reflected in the case of the UN which, at a political level, has up to now felt committed to recognising whatever regime emerges in Mogadishu while, in practice, is engaging Hargeisa as a necessity in implementing development undertakings.214 In this regard, the June 2004 update report to the UN Security Council is instructive: In general, areas in the north of the country offer a more secure environment for aid operations than parts of the south where continuing instability poses greater challenges. This is far from saying, however, that the north is secure. In June, ‘Somaliland’ authorities are reported to have arrested several members of militant groups in Burao who were alleged to be carrying explosives. Such groups, also reportedly based in Mogadishu, are believed to oppose international activity in Somalia, including the deployment of foreign troops, even as observers.
    This relative security has led the UNDP into anchoring its public administration support programme on the Somali region with the Civil Service Commission of Somaliland; an initiative aimed at making the Somali civil service more effective in delivering services to the general public and which “required a comprehensive training needs assessment”. This was carried out in late 2003 by a team drawn from the Somaliland Civil Service Commission. The project’s terms of reference were intended to develop capacity for the TFG. Hence, Somaliland seems inextricably linked, within the context of the international politics of aid to the Somali region, to developments in Mogadishu wherein its relative stability and capacity have conferred on it a degree of de facto international recognition at certain operational levels of multilateral engagement. Moreover, this is an engagement that reinforces the diaspora connection in the Somaliland equation through UN programmes such as the Qualified Expatriate Somali Technical Support (QUEST) project, a modified version of the UNDP’s global Transfer of Knowledge through Expatriate Nationals (TOKTEN) initiative.217 Nevertheless, as the report makes clear in its reference to ‘the north’, the risk of terrorism in the region is a high one and the proximity of Somaliland to the instability of southern Somalia has made it vulnerable to such pressures. Thus, in almost siamese twin-like fashion, the US-led anti-terrorist international crackdown on the largest Somali remittance agency, Al-Barakat, has affected Somaliland and Somalia alike. However, Somaliland has remained resilient in the face of this challenge as the Hansen report makes clear, noting that: “Despite the fear that the closing down of Al-Barakat would cause a severe hardship to people in Somaliland, international financial transfers to Somaliland have not declined. Quite the contrary, remittance companies have noticed an increase in the period 1998 and 2003.”
    This resilience, within a ‘rough neighbourhood’, may also benefit Somaliland in a larger regional co-operation context, where it stands to benefit from its proximity to Ethiopia which, as a landlocked incipient sub-regional power locked in a stalemated confrontation with neighbouring Eritrea, has a security interest in a friendly Somali coast outlet to the sea. Within this context, a fitting conclusion to this chapter’s survey of Somaliland’s post-war reconstruction is to note the 2005 Economic Overview’s “commerce and industry” references to its reliance on a larger regional environment, in which to grow and develop its economy. With potentially decisive implications for its ultimate international recognition within Africa and beyond, the report reveals that, “on the external side, the government is negotiating with Ethiopia on entering in agreement on [sic] a customs union” while also “embarking on active participation in regional and international integration and cooperation schemes such [sic] as the East African Community, COMESA and ACP-EU.” This is a dimension to Somaliland’s economic development that ties into a broader diplomatic recognition agenda. In the final analysis, Somaliland’s positioning as a strategic outpost of democratising stability along the Somali coast/Gulf of Aden littoral may ensure that its post-conflict reconstruction and economic recovery gains momentum, pending the ability of Hargeisa to sustain an effective governance track record.

Chapter 4: Religion
Somaliland and the Upheaval within Global Islam
Gaal dil oo gaartisa sii = You may kill an infidel but do it justly (Somali proverb)
4.1 Preface
This chapter, written in 2005, is particularly relevant in placing in context the most recent 2006 developments in southern Somalia, which saw the eclipsing of US-backed warlords by Somali Islamists. In many ways, the scenario implications outlined in the body of this chapter anticipated the events that actually unfolded and remain relevant to the continuing saga of developments in the Somali region.
A major factor that will have a continuing bearing on the sustainability of Somaliland’s stability in terms of ongoing reconciliation and reconstruction, ultimately affecting its international recognition prospect, is the influence of Islam; the interaction between Islam as it has been practised in Somaliland over the centuries in its pastoral Sufi forms with the more recent rise of ‘political Islam’, ‘jihadi Islamism’ and ‘missionary activism’ and the geopolitics of the so-called ‘war on terror’.
This chapter, therefore, will delve in more detail into Somaliland’s Islamic identity within that great swathe of geo-cultural terrain defined by Ali Mazrui as ‘Afrabia’. This entails looking at the evolution of Islam in the manner in which it has constituted the religious foundations of Somaliland society interacting with Somaliland’s links with the Arabian peninsula. The Arab/Islamic dimension of Somaliland society forms the historical backdrop for exploring the more recent contemporary developments associated with the rise of political Islam in North-East Africa.
The rise of political Islam, especially in the wake of the September 11, 2001 hijacking terror attacks in New York and Washington, D.C., brings into view the contemporary context of Islam as a religious and political force along the Somali coast. How this impinges on Somaliland entails locating the rise of political Islam and its links with the post-9/11 ‘war on terror’ within a much broader context of the upheavals underway throughout the Muslim world.
Political Islam’s impact within North-East Africa generally and along the Somali coast in particular may be seen as representing one theatre in what might be defined as a Global Islamic Civil War. This larger struggle taking place within Islam, it will be argued, has shaped the geo-political terrain of the ‘war on terror’ wherein the anti-US sentiment has become a convenient organising prop around which to mobilise the different revolutionary tendencies at play within the Muslim world. The Somali coast forms an integral part of this geo-political terrain of Islamic civil war-cum-war on terror dynamics. The localised manifestation of this larger upheaval, in turn, inevitably impinges on the influence of Islam in Somaliland given the fertile ground for jihadi militant Islamist tendencies that have gained a foothold in southern Somalia amid the different geo-political forces attempting to determine the current and future trajectory of the greater Somali region. A major agency for disseminating Islam as a religion and culture in Somaliland, as elsewhere throughout the Muslim world, has been through education. The funding of religious and/or religious-based education by Arab/Islamic charities which have emerged as a major vehicle for channelling what are identified as Wahhabist-Salafist expressions of Islamic fundamentalism and jihadist tendencies, comes in for major scrutiny in terms of how the education-charities link is influencing Somaliland society. This examination relates directly to a prognosis of Somaliland’s current and future stability in terms of Islam’s impact on the country’s political and security environment. The prospects for sustainable stability, in turn, are a constant factor in Somaliland’s politics and diplomacy of gaining international recognition, which becomes the focus of the following chapter.
4.2 Somaliland’s Islamic Identity in ‘Afrabian’ Perspective
Somali Islam is what Said S. Samatar, in a March 2005 presentation titled, ‘Unhappy masses and the challenge of political Islam in the Horn of Africa’, labelled a “frontier Islam”; an Islam “hemmed in on all sides by pagan and Christian interlopers” characterised by bellicosity, xenophobia and what Abdi I. Samatar describes as “profoundly suspicious of alien influences”. Islam emerged in the Somali region during the 9th century. Although virtually 100% of the population are Muslim, there are many recognised interpretational differences in social practices among Somalis with regional differences. These differences are reflected between northern and southern Somalia and may, in fact, shed light on differences in their contemporary comparative stability. Thus, writing in Islamism and its Enemies in the Horn of Africa, edited by Alex de Waal, Roland Marchal points out, when referring to Somaliland, that: “The former British colony of Somaliland (north-western Somalia), being the closest to Arabia, has more cultural bonds with Arab culture than other parts of the country” which “is reflected by the fact that women’s public life is less developed than in the South and that up to now, fewer girls are sent to school than in the South, while the influence of the state has been weaker. The pastoral way of life, which is the main mode of production in Somaliland, does not encourage schooling and the reluctance to send children to school was certainly reinforced by the impact of the indirect rule practised by British colonisers who, for budgetary reasons, tried to minimise any disruptions to Somaliland’s social fabric.”
Abdi Samatar contends “The country’s colonization and the economy’s commercialization induced contradictory social processes. These processes simultaneously intensified men’s control over women and their resources and created new opportunities for women’s advancement. The dynamics generated by these twin processes conditioned emerging patterns pertaining to women’s role and social location in northern Somalia” (Somaliland).
Roland Marchal’s brief commentary is illuminating in terms of its implication regarding Somaliland’s relative stability compared to the anarchy in the south, the strong possibility that Somaliland’s current stability is a function of its comparative conservatism due to British colonial policies that did not encourage assimilationist modernity. Hence, in a sense, southern Somalia’s instability is a function of an urbanising modernity that fragmented the southern Somali social formation formerly under Italian rule. Another view by William Reno opines that “evidence below shows, colonial experiences were not decisive in shaping contemporary identity and political organisation, though they are important for their significant influence on shaping social categories and social distribution of resources”.
This observation also reinforces earlier observations about the role that tradition has played in mediating modern expressions of Somali nationalism in the north-west as a contribution to the region’s relative stability though, as has been clear, Somaliland’s transition to its current stability has been far from smooth. To be picked up on later, the reference to the low level of schooling may also be instructive in terms of the current role of Islamic education in Somaliland and elsewhere in North-East Africa within the current climate of post-9/11 turbulence in the Muslim world. In the meantime, however, it is important to get a better handle on the historical background of the Somali region’s encounter with Islam. Overall, the Somali Islamic experience is depicted as unique within the North-East/Horn of Africa context.
Marchal points that, apart from the Somali’s long intimacy with Islam, “the social structures and organisations in the country, including the low level of urbanisation, the co-existence of pastoral production systems in a large part of the country and agriculture in the inter-riverine area, and clanship” have combined to shape a form of Islam distinct from that in other countries in the Horn of Africa. In a dissertation written by Ali Abdirahman Hersi in 1977 on ‘The Arab Factor in Somali History: The Origins and the Development of Arab Enterprise and Cultural Influences in the Somali Peninsula’, Hersi contends that “Somalis today are all Muslims largely observing the Shafi’i Sunnite school of law.” Moreover, Somalis “do not only constitute one of the two most thoroughly Islamized societies in tropical Africa (the other Zanzibar), but they also boast one of the highest percentages of adherence to Islam anywhere in the world. Islam as a religion and a system of values so thoroughly permeates all aspects of Somali life that it is difficult to conceive of any meaning in the term Somali itself without at the same time implying Islamic identity”.
According to Hersi, despite the geo-cultural presence of Somalis in Africa, including ethno-linguistic and cultural affinities with other neighbouring African communities, “the Somalis identify through their religion, emotionally and culturally with Arabia and the wider world of Islam.” But how, what he terms, an “Arabico-Islamic identity” came to be in terms of the when and whom of conversion was not well established. Given the fact that the Islamisation of the Somali region was one of the least documented aspects of Somali history, one of Hersi’s objectives was to attempt to reconstruct, with the help of Somali oral traditions and external written sources, a “fairly well defined outline” of this process. However, to start with, ethnographically, Hersi points to Somalis belonging to “Eastern Cushites” and that the original movement of Somalis in North-East Africa was northward and eastward into the Horn rather than south and westward out of it. These movements placed them in close proximity to the Oromo ethno-linguistic bloc that is also heavily Islamic and constituting a major if not majority population within current day Ethiopia, Africa’s second most populous country. The introduction of Islam into this region is associated with the emergence of Arab and other south- west Asian Muslim influences in the North-East African region though it appears, from Hersi’s account, that Somalis gravitated more toward Islam than an Arab-Islamic identity. 1974 witnessed Somalia’s formal entry into the Arab world’s multi-lateral body, the Arab League, with economic advantages in mind. Ioan Lewis concluded that this move “did, however, make the Somali government’s internal policies and external alignments much more directly susceptible to the powerful scrutiny of the conservative Arab states”.
In summary, the introduction of Islam into the Horn of Africa, according to Hersi, and its subsequent spread inland was an essentially peaceful phenomenon; the region being spared the Arab wars of conquest when Muslims were forcibly exploding into the regions of Byzantium and the imperial realms of Persia. The explanation offered for this relative non- violence and Arab restraint is the unavailability at the time of a Muslim navy.
Further, it is suggested that African territories across the Red Sea were less attractive to Arabs than those regions in and around their south-west Asian locus of Islamic expansion, including the Byzantine province of the Levant, Egypt. Five Muslim armies are recorded to have penetrated into North-East Africa prior to the 16th century, according to Hersi. Of these, only the one despatched by the Umayaad Caliph Abdulmalik Ibn Marwan (685-705) to East Africa in the closing years of the 7th century, had the intention of spreading Islam. In the absence of conquering Muslim armies, the task of teaching Islam to the Somalis, at least in the initial stages of its introduction, devolved upon individual missionaries and Muslim merchants, “and the more so upon the latter since there never was a properly organized program of missionary effort in Islam during this early period.”
With particular reference to Somaliland, Hersi contends that some authorities maintain that Islam was introduced to the Zaila region of “northern Somaliland” in the early years of Muhammed’s teaching by Muslim escapees who sought refuge from Meccan attacks in “Abyssinia” though, in fact, “there is strong evidence to show that Islam was present in Somalia within the first century of its history.” Hersi places the period of Islamic proselytising and conversions on a significant scale as only taking place after the arrival of immigrant groups into the Somali region towards the end of the 7th century. Initially, in the north-west of what is now Somaliland, the introduction of Islam is associated with the arrival of a few Arab sheikh notables. Hersi refers to there being “three Arab notables who are in northern Somalis traditions most closely associated with the spread of Islam in the Horn of Africa during the first five centuries of the Islamic era”. The first to arrive was a Sheikh Abdurahman Ibn Ismail Jabarti followed by Sheikh Ishaq ibn Ahmed of Alawi pedigree, having left Baghdad in. 498 A.H /1104-5. The third was Sharif Yusuf Aw Barkhadle a.k.a. Yusuf al-Ikhwan, “the single most accomplished missionary saint in Somali popular memories”.
It is estimated that in the neighbourhood of the Banaadir coast of southern Somalia, there would have been no awareness of Islam before the convergence there of the Omani Julanda refugees and Abdulmalik’s Syrian forces in the 690s. An early sectarian Sunni-Shiite divide is suggested by Hersi by his reference to the Shiite Zaidis arriving on the Banaadir coast in the year 739-740 and dominating this region for almost two centuries, though, on the basis of Ibn Battuta’s reports, the influence of Shia Islam in the Somali region is generally overlooked. “These authors … conveniently overlook the obvious Shii elements in the contemporary Somali Islam as well as the occasional reports by mediaeval authorities of Shiite presence in the Horn of Africa.”240 The Shia presence was apparently the source of no small amount of tensions between the Islamic presence in greater eastern Africa and Middle Eastern seats of Muslim authority. Hersi notes that “one cannot help but suspect that the reported antagonism between the East African coast and the Baghdad Caliphate during the eighth and ninth centuries, and the repeated East African rebellions against Abbasid suzerainty were in part at least expressions of sectarian hostilities inspired, or led, by these Zaidis.”
It appears that from both local oral traditions and supportive external sources that in the first few centuries, Islam was confined to what Hersi calls “the coastal Asiatic settlements” and neighbouring Somali groups. According to contemporary Chinese reports of that period, 9th century Berbera in what is now Somaliland, was either non-Islamic or hardly touched by Islam. However, by the 13th century, Islam had become well-entrenched throughout the Somali region. Islamisation appears to have occurred fairly rapidly along the coast, given its proximity to the Arabian Persian Gulf, but was slow to disseminate in the countryside. It took many more centuries of dedicated, and sometimes concerted, effort of Arab missionary labour before anything approaching universal acceptance of Islam was reflected amongst the nomads of the interior. Arab missionary activity, which, at its initial stages concentrated on the coast, was, by the 12th century, beginning to move inland and have impact in the interior. This momentum was accompanied by a larger body of Arab and Persian political, and sometimes, religious, dissidents fleeing the persecution of south-west Asian Islamic Caliphates.
The movement of Islam inland was given further impetus by the 14th century polarisation between Abyssinian Christendom in what is now Ethiopia and the Muslim principalities to its southeast. Contestation between Islam and Christianity for dominance in the Horn of Africa dates from the 7th century advent of Islam in North-East Africa. This struggle was accompanied by internal ‘jihads’ within Islam as war was waged against semi-nomadic groups and remnants of indigenous non-Christian as well as non-Islamic faith communities. These struggles were fuelled by the larger struggle against the Christian Abyssinian highlands. As this sectarian war unfolded, by the 16th century, according to Hersi, Islam had become the “national religion” of Somalis. Somalis “bore the brunt of the struggles against Christianity on the Horn of Africa, and from that time on became culturally and, especially, emotionally tied to the Arab world”.
The irony of this account by Hersi is that Abyssinian Christendom has been depicted by some, such as Said Samatar, as an early refuge for Muslims fleeing persecution. In Samatar’s account, “Islam may well have come to the Horn of Africa before the new religion flourished in Arabian soil” since some years before the Prophet Muhammed’s … flight from Mecca in 622, a party of more than seventy Muslim converts fled fearful persecution in Mecca to seek refuge in the Christian court of the Abyssinian king in Axum (Axum is today in the province of Tigrai in Ethiopia). Astonishingly – and mysteriously – the king promptly gave sanctuary to the fleeing Muslims. The pagan chiefs of Mecca gave chase and demanded the immediate surrender of the Muslim refugees, but the king adamantly refused to hand them over risking “irreparable damage to the cordial relations in trade and goodwill between the two Red Sea neighbours.” This prompted a later Hadith, a canonical prophetic statement that “Abyssinia is a land of justice in which nobody is oppressed” conveying the unmistakable point: “no jihad against Abyssinia”. In Samatar’s view “the Hadithal injunction of no jihad against Abyssinia does more to explain the survival of Abyssinian Christianity in the age of Islamic eruption on the global scene” of that period.245 Of course, the Christian-Islamic contestation referred to by Hersi erupted centuries later, especially during the 16th century after the 14th century polarisation between the faiths referred to earlier by Hersi and, as Samatar describes characterised by “the devastating invasions” carried out by Ahmad al-Ghazi in an outbreak of hostilities between Muslims and Ethiopian Christians that Samatar attributes to “the threat felt by the Muslims of an expansionist, re-energized Christian empire steadily – and inexorably – pushing eastwards towards the Muslim lowlands.”
The above account by Samatar may be instructive in terms of explaining the relative inter-faith détente that has existed between Christian and Islamic spheres of influence in the Horn of Africa. This tolerance has coincided with something of a natural geo-cultural co-existence between the Abyssinian Christian highlands of alternating Amhara-Tigrinia dominance and the coastal Red Sea Muslim lowlands stretching from Eritrea to the Somali coast. Attempts have been made by the Saudi version of Wahhabi Islam to upset this religious ecology. Some analysts are of the view that Samatar and others overlook the simple fact that Somali xenophobia does not extend to other fellow Muslims, thus Muslims foreigners (including Arabs, Pakistanis and others are welcomed easily into Somali society), which would mean that Somalis are open to their influences. The interaction of Sufi Islam with East Africa and Iraq, including political Islam’s interaction with Egypt and Sudan, Wahhabism and other forms espoused by them is a case in point. Islam is a profound cohesive factor in Somali society, more so than in other non-frontier Muslim countries, not surrounded by non-Muslims.
This base-line historically-rooted cultural geography may account for the relative stability that has existed in the Horn of Africa as far as religious rivalries are concerned. With respect to Somali Islam, however, this tolerance is reinforced by other attributes which, in Samatar’s view, militates against the emergence of a militant political Islam in the region. Apart from the frontier quality of the Somali region’s Islamic identity, bringing with it a bellicose xenophobia and aversion to external influences, the underlying social disorganisation endemic to the “segmentary lineage system” of Somali culture and what Samatar asserts to be its individualistic self-preservation tendency further inhibits sectarian political mass mobilisation and agency. The political potential of militant Islamism will be discussed at greater length later in this chapter. Suffice it to stress here, however, that Somaliland’s Islamic identity within the broader context of Somali Islam appears to be solidly located within a tradition of regional geo-cultural peaceful co-existence between Christianity, Islam and indigenous animistic tendencies. This tradition is defined by adherence to “the Shafi’i school of Islamic jurisprudence” and what Samatar describes as a tenuous affiliation to Sufi brotherhoods.
Such brotherhoods, or ‘religious orders’, have played a significant role in Somali Islam following Islam’s initial expansion into the region. Furthermore, they appear to reinforce a pattern of Islamisation of the Somali coast that starts in the north and penetrates into the Ethiopian Ogaden before disseminating south. The three Sufi orders in the order of their introduction into the region are: the Qadiriyah, the Idrisiyah and the Salihiyah; the Qadiriyah being the oldest order in Islam with its introduction into Harar (Ethiopia) in the 15th century. Northern Somali sheikhs were the agents of the order’s spread amongst Oromos and Somalis in Ethiopia and later into the southern Somali interior. The Salihiyah also spread initially in the Ogaden region following its emergence out a rupture in the Idrisiyah among the latter’s Arab founders. Membership in a brotherhood is theoretically a voluntary matter unrelated to kinship though, in reality, “lineages are often affiliated with a specific brotherhood and a man usually joins his father’s order”. During the military regime of Mohammed Siad Barre, this historically-rooted and avowedly Islamic social and cultural infrastructure was largely suppressed. An example many human rights activists recall is Siad Barre’s ghastly execution by a firing squad of eleven clerics or Imams who opposed the reform of women’s Family Laws on inheritance and branded it un-Islamic. This incident and the uproar expressed by the then Syrian ambassador and dean of the Arab diplomatic corps, led to his expulsion from Mogadishu.
As a result, charting the evolution of Somali Islam into the more contemporary phase of its expression in the region is difficult. As Roland Marchal points out, “there is very little information on modern Islamist groupings during the Siyaad Barre regime,” though before the end of the 1980s there seemed to be a number of mostly underground formations that began taking shape. Based mostly on conjecture, what was to become Somaliland again figures importantly in these developments. According to Marchal, a movement called ‘Waxda’ – and he stresses that this formation was established in August 1969 in Hargeisa as an “Islamic institution whose teaching referred increasingly to Islamists such as Sayyid Qutb, Mawdudi, Nadawi and other new Islamist thinkers. When the secularist trend became prominent in the regime, they went underground and started publishing leaflets against the ‘socialist’ state.” By the late 1970s, they had spread south.
After the Barre regime wreaked devastation on Hargeisa and Burco in 1988, Waxda resurfaced in Ethiopian refugee camps as a supporter of the SNM.
A counter-perspective contends that most of the young Waxda adherents immigrated to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf and many engaged in further studies in the West. They did not figure at all in the SNM movement. Waxda has not been revived as an institution, but many of its members remain together informally and in trade, NGO work, etc. Existing evidence suggests that the Waxda movement has adapted a long-term strategy of developing a Muslim society by influencing by example via schools, charitable work, trade, etc, much in the same way of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. They have given up any radical appearance including the adoption of secular-like clothing such as western suits and ties.
Importantly, after Somaliland’s declaration of independence in 1991, Waxda “became deeply involved in educational institutions, keeping close links with Kuwait”. Apart from Waxda, other proto-Islamist groupings in the Somali region appeared to have their origins and locus in southern Somalia in and around Mogadishu. This pre-September 11, 2001 evolution of Islamist precursor groups before and after the demise of the Barre regime sets the stage for examining the rise of political Islam in the greater North-East African sub-region amid the emergence of Somaliland as an independent, though unrecognised state.
4.3 Somaliland and the Rise of Political Islam in North-East Africa
The rise of political Islam in North-East Africa, the Middle East and south-west Asia is intimately linked to the legacies of cold war destabilisation resulting from proxy wars that raged throughout these regions, fuelled by US-Soviet
competitive militarisation. Somalia is an exemplary case in point. Mamdani contends, though this view remains contentious, that “under the presidency of Ronald Reagan, who was eager to use the Saudis as foils for the Soviet Union, Wahhabism was elevated to the status of a liberation theology – one that would free the region of communism”.
Under Siad Barre, ‘scientific socialism’ was imposed as the official ideology which, combined with the suppression of clan-based affiliations, was a basis for political mobilisation. This fuelled resentment amongst Somalis generally as a result of their continued adherence to more relaxed traditional forms of “eclectic, Sufi Islam,” according to a recent conference presentation on ‘Strategic Security Challenges: The Special Case of the Horn of Africa’, by Ruth Iyob and Edmund Keller.257 Similar ‘scientific socialist’ and/or military- nationalist suppressions of traditional culture and Islamic observance in the Muslim world, in Algeria and Afghanistan for example, helped stoke even more intense backlashes of resentment.258 These ultimately fuelled Islamist political mobilisation in opposition to such regimes. This was especially the case in countries like Somalia and Afghanistan that had been closely aligned with the Soviet Union; more so in the case of Afghanistan than in the case of Somalia. However, the politicisation of Islam in Somalia occurred in a larger sub-reional North-East African context that saw Sudan emerge as the epicentre of Islamic militancy in the run-up to 9/11.
Iyob and Keller make reference to the coup d’état in the Sudan that occurred in 1989, leading to the establishment of a theocratic Islamist state. In their view, this was “a culmination of the long struggle of Islamists against local communists and liberal capitalists” while “indicating the opening of a new chapter of open animosity against the West in general and the United States in particular”.
Meanwhile, the unravelling of the Barre regime in Somalia and escalating warfare in the north generated an exodus of Somalis to the Middle East and to Italy and throughout the world. Thus, the rise of political Islam in the Middle East and North-East Africa coincided and interacted with a repression and conflict-generated social upheaval throughout the Somali coast. This resulted in the growth of a globalised Somali diaspora community with increasing exposure to the outside world and the creation of expanded links between Somalis in the homeland and the rest of the world.261 This process reflected a growing integration of all Somalis into the escalating process of globalisation through remittances of foreign currency referred to in Chapter Three along with Somalis’ adaptation of modern communications technologies, receptivity to new ideologies and concepts of political alignment. In fact, “the large-scale migration of Somali workers to the Middle East and elsewhere from the 1970s until the early 1980s led to the growth of a remittance economy (much like that of the Sudan during the same period) and the emergence of a diasporic community with political clout as has already been demonstrated in Somaliland’s politics”.
One of the socio-ideological spin-offs of this diaspora phenomenon among Somali migrants in the Middle East were conversions to Saudi-based Wahhabism. According to Iyob and Keller, this resulted in clashes with the Somali region’s indigenous brotherhoods. The interesting twist here is that in the north-west region that has emerged as Somaliland, the comparative stabilising influence of the Qadariyyah is a positive development. “The north, historically linked to the Wahabbists because of the preponderance of adherents of the Salihiyya … proved more amenable to the gradual Islamization of its society” compared to southern Somalia. There, southerners, according to Iyob and Keller, tended to view the revival of Islam as part of a “faith-centered conflict” in a continuing proliferation of fragmenting internal differences among Somalis.
This serious tension between the Wahhabi inclined Salihiyya order (Arabic: tariqah) and the Qadariyyah tariqah, emerged in 1909 when Sayyid Muhammad ‘Abd Allah Hasan and his followers killed the Qadariyyah Sufi leader Shaykh Uways bin Muhammad and his followers. Sayyid Muhammad was head of the Salihiyya order and was influenced by the most conservative reformist voices in the Arabian peninsula, including the teachings of Muhammad bin ‘Abd al-Wahhab (d.1787). Much has been written on Sayyid Muhammad’s credentials as a nationalist leader who opposed British colonialism, but little has been written on the Somali Shaykhs and ‘ulama who opposed the Sayyid’s austere interpretation of Islam. As the case of Shaykh Uways demonstrates, many opposed the pro-Wahhabi approach of Sayyid Muhammad’s teachings.
Clearly, the Qadariyyah tariqah of Uways as a pan-Muslim order far outstripped Sayyid Muhammad’s Salihiyya order in membership and territorial scope. Under the Qadariyyah banner, the tariqah spread throughout southern and central Somalia and along the East coast of Africa, as far south as ‘Abd al-Rahman, Ibn ‘Umar, Jala al-Aynayn fi Manaqib al-Shaykhayn al-Shaykh al-Wali Hajj Uways al-Qadari wa al-Shaykh Abd al-Rahman al-Zayla’i, Cairo: Matba’at al-Mashad al- Husayni, (1954). This work provides anecdotal evidence of Uways’ activities in rural and urban centres and the social make-up of the order’s leadership. See also ‘Muslim Politics and Mozambique. Of particular note, Qadariyyah leaders permitted the practice of xeer, Somali customary law in local communities as long it did not violate the sprit of Islam too seriously. On the regional front the Qadariyyah tariqah developed active links in regional town such as Harar in Ethiopia and Jigjiga. The Qadariyyah were popularised in the Horn of Africa by many Shaykhs notably by Shaykh ‘Abd al-Rahman bin Ahmed al-Zayla’i (c.1820-1880), who hailed from the Somaliland northern coastal town of Zayla’. Shaykh Zayla’i is credited with the foundation of a new sub-order of the Qadariyyah known as Zayl’iyya.
A closer examination of Qadariyyah sources not only reveals the existence of early Somaliland ulama who were vehemently opposed to the spread of pro- Wahhabi ideology but shows that they were also in touch with the intellectual currents of the wider Muslim world. Qadariyyah sources introduced their followers to the writings of the classic Sufi scholars such Ibn Al’Arabi and Sahl Tustari. Shaykh Uways’ poetry was a strong medium of literacy and in one of his noted poems he defamed the followers of Sayyid Muhammad referring to them as:
“They make a clamour, a wailing and groaning “And howling like mournful dogs”(lahum zajij wa ineenun wa janeenun wa fahihun kal kilab al-nahiya) Often, in popular trading circles in the 1950s and early 1960s, Somaliland traders who had been to Saudi Arabia referred to all poorly trained religious teachers as “Wahhabis who did not know much about Islam”.
This regional difference between north and south is additionally ironic in as much as the progressive collapse of the state in southern Somalia would come to be viewed as a facilitative breeding ground for the very Wahabbist- aligned Islamist terrorism that was reasonably absent in an increasingly stable and autonomous north-west with closer historical ties to Saudi Arabia. This is suggestive of differing social impacts linked to comparably different political outcomes between north and south; the fact that this distinctly Islamist revival associated with new Somali converts to Wahhabism carried with it a growth in Islamic charities established by adherents of the local brotherhoods that, according to Iyob and Keller “loosened the hold of state institutions on both urban and rural communities” throughout the Somali region.273 Though Iyob and Keller do not carry their analysis into how the migratory-rooted influence of Wahhabism impacted on the state’s hold on Somali society into the growth of regional autonomies in Puntland and Somaliland, what is suggestive from their account is a situation whereby a comparatively less urbanised and centralised north was better able to cope with these new influences which, in the southern context, only reinforced the south’s centrifugal tendencies toward state collapse amidst the privatising balkanisation of southern Somali’s warlord political economy in the post-Barre period.
What emerges then, with the rise of political Islam in North-East Africa in terms of the Somali region are differential impacts of external forces – in this case, Wahhabism – on the north and south as these influences interacted with local brotherhoods (or tariqas) which, in turn, were interlinked with clans. In the north-west that became Somaliland, the centrifugal tendencies of such developments did not materialise and/or were contained. In the south, things were different. As Iyob and Keller describe:
In an environment where the boundaries of the Somali body politic had been shattered by violence, chaos, famine, and the ineffective yet disturbing presence of foreign troops, Somalis divided along clan lines, ideologies, and religious tariqas throughout the 1990s. They were plunged into a Hobbesian world, where communities were turned against each other in the pursuit of power, resources, and legitimacy. Submerged historical conflicts, which had been subordinated to the larger goals of Pan-Somalism and nationalism, re- emerged with the collapse of state institutions and superpower patronage … The north-south divide – between the former British Somaliland and Italian Somalia – exploded into full force, bringing with it the religious-cum-clan cleavages that had characterised the two regions’ relationship in the colonial and postcolonial period.
Esa believes the above conclusion is not entirely correct. The North-South cleavages were already in place from the very beginning of the Union. It did not re-emerge. It only found expression in the collapse of the state. Islamic sectarianism did not figure in this and had no influence at all.
In Iyob and Keller’s view UN-sponsored and US-led humanitarian intervention in 1992 accelerated what they depict as the “globalization” of Somali political and ethno-regional conflicts of which Somaliland is seen as an outcome.
This evolution of the interaction between religion and politics in a disintegrating Somali environment coincided with the evolution of political Islam in the crucible of anti-Soviet conflict in south-west Asia centring on Afghanistan. This cold war struggle facilitated a convergence between the US and Pakistan under the Islamist-oriented military regime of Zia-ul-Haq and Saudi Arabia in nurturing the jihadist tendencies within political Islam that would blossom into the insurgent force currently challenging the status-quo throughout the Arab/Muslim world and international stability generally.
In terms of setting the stage for a more religiously-charged political environment in the North-Eastern Horn of Africa, the jihadist momentum emanating from the anti-Soviet victory in Afghanistan was further fuelled by the growing US military presence in the Persian Gulf following the first US-led war against Iraq in 1990. This brought about a shift in focus from a jihadist challenge to the eventually defeated Soviet occupation in Afghanistan to a new focus on challenging the growing US strategic presence in the Persian Gulf and the Middle East generally, interacting with mounting frustrations over US-backed Israeli occupation of the Palestinian West bank and Gaza.
East Africa emerged as the initial battleground in the rise of the anti-US jihadist challenge with the 1996 US embassy bombings that occurred in Kenya and Tanzania, followed by retaliatory US bombing raids in the Sudan and in Afghanistan. This explosion of anti-US jihadist attacks helped contribute to a growing militarisation of North-East Africa in the encirclement of Islamist Sudan by Ethiopia, Eritrea and Uganda in an anti-Khartoum coalition bolstered by US military aid. At the same time, the Islamist bombings in Kenya and Tanzania that ushered in the international awareness of al- Qaeda, placed the spotlight on greater east Africa and the Horn as an emerging base of operations for jihadists; a development seen as facilitated by the destablising influence of state collapse in Somalia. According to some observers the rise of political Islam in North-East Africa appears part of a growing sectarian trend that includes Ethiopia as well.
In an assessment last year of the state of federalism in Ethiopia, a report by Tom Patz in Federations referred to the growing sectarian dimension to ethnic clashes in Ethiopia associated with a lack of clear border demarcations between the country’s provinces: “In sharp contrast to the past, conflicts based on religion are rising. Aggressive campaigns by Protestants and Wahhabis – a fundamentalist Muslim group – have led to violent clashes.”
This observation sets the stage for one of Ethiopia’s major terrorist-related preoccupations emerging from Somalia’s state collapse; the emergence of the Somali Islamist insurgent group, Al-Itihaad al Islaami (hereafter Al-Ittihaad). In 1992, according to Marchal, Al-Ittihaad emerged as the most visible of several Somali Islamist movements located in and around Mogadishu (the others being Ahlus Sunna wa Jama’a as a loose gathering of prominent Islamic traditionalists in the south; Ansar-e Sunna, a Wahhabist organisation; and Al- Majma al-Islami which tried to play the role of a Supreme Islamic Council in the wake of the collapse of the Siad Barre regime).
Al-Ittihaad was the only Somali Islamist grouping that became armed and, according to Marchal, “established organisational rules to differentiate between sympathisers and full members and thereby exercise effective organisational discipline, including keeping the confidentiality of its internal discussions.” Marchal continues:
Its strategy of taking power by violence was one major point of difference with the others. There is also another striking difference: it was recruiting urban and semi-educated youth while other armed groups were giving priority to nomads. To a large extent it is the only group that set up a national or at least regional strategy and tried to organise its activities all over Somalia and in the Ethiopian Ogaden. Since very little is known on its internal coordination and membership, it is difficult to describe the conditions in which it developed. What is sure is that it obtained support and training from Sudan and invited ‘Afghans’ to help establish training centres for its new members. Since some of its cadres were senior officers from the former national army, it had informants in all factions and was seen by them in a very ambivalent way. At certain times, it was instrumental in challenging a contested leader or weakening his political discourse but, despite all its connections, Al-Ittihaad was never accepted among the factions because this would have allowed it to monopolise the Islamic reference.
In summarising the Islamist identity of Al-Ittihaad and other such groups, Marchal saw difficulty in establishing their ideological profile; Al-Ittihaad had never spelled out an international terrorist agenda, except for expressing solidarity with other radical Islamist groupings. Its involvement in Ethiopia was linked to a twenty-year history in which many Ogaden Somalis found refuge in Somalia and later played a role in connecting Somali armed factions with Ethiopian ethnic insurgent nationalist movements such as OLF and ONLF. The Ethiopian government’s vested interest in portraying Al-Ittihaad as a terrorist-driven movement inhibited an independent assessment of its influence and alleged threat level within Ethiopia. Otherwise, according to Marchal, it is debatable to closely associate Al-Ittihaad with al-Qaeda.
In as much as Al-Ittihaad and similarly inclined groups appeared to all have the same Islamic reference points, there has been no clear-cut doctrinal or ideological boundaries between them and their sympathisers, many of whom, have shifted from one group to another. This seemed to be attributed to the fact that religious education was not impressive in Somalia for lay people as compared to the Sudan. Otherwise, Al-Ittihaad and an Islamist NGO called al- Islaah further distinguished themselves by establishing social welfare support infrastructures that helped fill gaps left by the collapse of government. This included the managing of orphanages, schools and health centres manned by recruited staff who had no future in the context of a civil war and state- collapse environment. In terms of security, the instability of Mogadishu encouraged Al-Ittihaad as early as 1991 to redeploy its militias elsewhere in the southern Somalia and even more northerly in Puntland’s Boosaaso community. This latter proximity is what has presented the potential of Al- Ittihaad as a destabilising security threat to Somaliland. The idea of the redeployments from Mogadishu was to establish coastal strongholds that would allow the movement to take over the ports and get resources from them to underwrite other activities, at first “military reinforcement and then other socially-oriented projects including control of mosques, schools and the like”.
The emergence of Al-Ittihaad and other Islamist formations in the Somali region during the 1990s coincided with the early stages of the Somaliland national experiment in the north-west. The emergence of these groups reflected what has been described as an ‘Islamist revival’ in Somaliland. During the first decade of Somaliland independence when the new republic, isolated by non-recognition from the rest of the world, was struggling internally to establish itself as a credible state alongside the neighbouring regional autonomy experiment in Puntland, the existence of an Islamist threat to Somaliland’s integrity does not seem to have emerged as a major factor. In any case, the region’s historic geo-cultural affinity with the Arabian Persian Gulf and its conservative Islamic influences may have obscured the impact that such tendencies could have on its local politics relative to a more urbanised south dominated by Mogadishu where the polarisation between modernity and tradition within the Somali national project appeared more pronounced. After all, as indicated earlier by John Drysdale’s observations (op cit), there was more aversion to tradition in the south than in the north-west where the brand of post-colonial Somali nationalism embodied in the SNM made allowance for an accommodation between tradition and modernity that would, no doubt, have reinforced the conservatism of Somaliland’s Islamic identity as an integral part of the society’s new republican identity vis-à-vis the rest of the Somali region. A case in point is the Islamic creedal formula in Arabic that appears on the new Somaliland national flag (La ilaha illa Allah Muhammad Rasool lul-Allah).
The Islamic groups in Somaliland often have tried to influence state building and reconstruction. Compromises were made. Often their efforts were curbed and kept in check. The late President Egal was wary of the Islamic movement and did not allow any intrusions from Islamic leaders. During the 2001 constitutional referendum, when a religious elder denounced the referendum as non-Islamic, Egal went on to Radio Hargeisa to publicly taunt him to a debate on that subject. Later, when the Wahhabist inclined self-proclaimed Authority for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice (al-Hay’ah bil amri bil mahruf wan nahyi an al-mukar) tried to influence legislation in Parliament, Egal put their chief in prison for almost a full month.
But then, throughout this period, the politicisation of Islam within a broader geo-political context had yet to become the phenomenon that it was to become later in the 90s beginning with the al-Qaeda US embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania and reaching its international flash point in the jihadist suicide attacks in New York and Washington, D.C. on September 11, 2001. The September 11, 2001 attacks transformed the global environment as well as the regional security context in the Afrabian Red Sea and Persian Gulf regions embracing North-East Africa and the Middle East.
The close association that began to be made between state failure and collapse as a breeding ground and safe-haven for terrorism placed the turbulent politics of successive state rebuilding initiatives in the Somali coast in a new light. Within this context, Somali brands of militant Islamism and their international links in the Arab/Islamic world began to take on more of a sense of urgency which, in turn, has over time heightened the political and security risk factors impinging on Somaliland’s lone governing experiment as well. For as the geo-political stakes surrounding the reconstitution of a Somali government have escalated in terms of the Arab stake running up against the security interests of Ethiopia, the political role of Islam within this mix has come to take on a greater importance and, in the process, has emerged as a factor in Somaliland’s survival prospects.
Thus, it becomes necessary to take a closer look at the nature of the international and regional dynamics at play surrounding the rise of political Islam in North-East Africa in the new post-9/11 environment as it affects Somaliland. This new environment has come to be billed as one characterised by what, in the West is considered the ‘war on terror’ being led by the United States but which may reflect something much more profound in terms of how this preoccupation with ‘terrorism’ relates to the international upheaval unfolding within the Muslim world which, necessarily, engulfs the Somali coast as well, including Somaliland.
4.4 The Geo-Politics of the War on Terror and the Global Islamic Civil War
This thesis holds that the so-called ‘war on terror’ as it affects the Somali coast in general and Somaliland in particular relates to a more seminal conflict within the Islamic branch of the Abrahamic inter-faith complex (which also includes Judaism and Christianity, hence belying notions of a civilisational clash between Islam and the West); what in effect involves the emergence of a ‘global Islamic civil war’ in which the West emerges as a convenient and unwittingly willing accomplice through its predictably militarist responses to jihadist provocations which may not be aimed at the West as their main target, as much as at mobilising support throughout the Arab and Islamic worlds for a thorough-going internal transformation within the Ummah.
While this concept has emerged as only a tentative interpretation of contemporary ‘call and response’ in the dynamics of conflict between Western, primarily Anglo-American-led militarist interventions in the Muslim world and that world’s jihadist vanguard, it requires substantial fleshing out in the light of the actual conflicted internal dynamics unfolding within Islam. Somaliland and the Somali coast generally are caught up in the eye of the storm of this conflict. The Somali coast provides this strategy a proving ground and an opportunity that is not yet available to them in the Middle Eastern incumbent regimes.
One commentator, Francis Kornegay, in analysing the post-9/11 backdrop to the ongoing war in Iraq and efforts by the US to extricate itself from this conflict, contended that “what the Bush administration and allies have not grasped is that they transformed Iraq into a major theatre in an essentially global Islamic civil war, one featuring a transnational guerrilla ‘terror war’ against the US, though America, arguably, is not the main target”. Kornegay continues:
September 11 has been misdiagnosed as an attack against America as a beacon of freedom and prosperity. More probably it was a means of baiting the world’s lone superpower into assuming the kind of militarist patsy role it is currently performing; of unwittingly helping the jihadist coalition associated with al-Qaeda in mobilising a world revolution within Muslim lands against incumbent regimes and elites. In the process, it aims to decouple these regions from western-led globalisation while realigning them into a neo- traditionalist Islamist version of world federalism through a network of local and regional caliphates. This revolution would target moderate Islamic democratic alternatives to jihadism such as pro-western, secular Turkey as well as more authoritarian regimes such as Saudi Arabia. It has the potential to fracture into a many-sided intra-Islamic upheaval among different Sunni and Shi’ite tendencies interacting with an array of ethnic, tribal, class, inter- generational and regional rivalries throughout the Muslim world …
The political geography of this conflict tracks the militarisation of the entire ‘Afrabian’ expanse with the US-supported activities and/or basing presences and operations from the north-west African trans-Sahara to Djibouti which has served as a major backstop to US military activities in the Persian Gulf and south-west Asia. The Djiboutian Horn of Africa US military presence, in turn, extends across the Indian Ocean into America’s Asia-Pacific theatre of operations supporting the Philippines in its counter-insurgency against Islamic guerrillas and terrorists. It is, therefore, against this backdrop of the US-led ‘war on terror’ centred in its occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, that this broad upheaval within the Muslim world interacts locally with the geopolitics of political Islam in North-East Africa; North-East Africa having been very much caught up in this ‘war on terror’-cum-Islamic civil war as witnessed in the alignments of both Ethiopia and Eritrea on the side of the US and Israel in waging the anti-terrorist war against jihadism in North-East Africa even as they confront one another in their stalemated border war.
The apparatus of jihadism’s geo-political dissemination into the Horn of Africa, as elsewhere in the Muslim world, took shape during the anti-Soviet collaboration principally between Pakistan and the US under the ‘Reagan Doctrine’ of supporting anti-communist ‘Vietnams’ in the Third World regional conflicts in Africa, Asia and Latin America. In Afghanistan, this was in support of Islamic fundamentalist mujahideen; a project that also involved the emergence of a strategic Sunni Pakistan-Saudi Arabia funding and recruitment nexus with Islamabad’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and Riyadh’s Islamic charities-education infrastructure at the coalface. This collaboration became instrumental in disseminating what has come to be widely identified as the most intolerant strands of Wahhabist ideology throughout the Muslim world. In a review by Max Rodenbeck of The Economist, of a new book entitled No god but God: The War Within Islam, by Reza Aslan, the author argues that what Kornegay terms a global civil war within Islam “is nothing less than a struggle over who will ultimately define the sweeping ‘Islamic Reformation’ that he believes is already well under way across much of the Muslim world.” In support of an Islamic global civil war thesis, Rodenbeck goes on to report that in Aslan’s view, “The West … is ‘merely a bystander – an unwary yet complicit casualty of a rivalry that is raging in Islam over who will write the next chapter in its story’.” Hence, the strategic importance of the Islamabad-Riyadh axis in nurturing the world that produced Osama bin Laden, with the covert connivance and funding of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), combined with the anti-Soviet alchemy of such intellectual gurus as Zbigniew Brzezinski, which was hell-bent on defeating the Soviets and, beyond that, balkanising the Russian successor federation.
Post-9/11, the umbrella of global jihad associated with bin Laden and al- Qaeda was identified to be the so-called International Islamic Front (IIF), operating through such fund-raising entities as the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET), which is linked to several madrassas in Pakistan. The extent of the reach of this network into Africa (as well as Asia) was described almost two years ago in an Asia Times Online article by B. Raman:
A report carried by the News, the largest circulated English daily of Pakistan, on September 23, said that 147 foreign students were studying in the madrassa Jamia Abu Bakar of Karachi and that they have come from Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Uganda, Djibouti, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, the Philippines, Maldives, Australia, Ghana, Somalia, Cambodia, Cameroon, Kenya, Senegal and Afghanistan (italics added).
This birds’ eye view provides a context for honing in on the functioning of the Islamic charities-education connection in Somaliland. However, before focusing on this institutional ensemble, it is important to further recapitulate the geo-political environment impinging on the Somali region, within the context of this global Islamic civil war. To some degree, it could be argued that the climate generated by this internal upheaval to Islam, provided a convenient tool for maintaining a destablised region by external powers, principally Egypt and Saudi Arabia, allegedly under the guise of the Arab world desiring a regime of Arab/Islamic unity along the Somali coast as a countervailing force for containing Ethiopia. To be sure, none of the governments in this region have an interest in stoking a jihadist momentum, which could conceivably mutate into a threat to these very governments. But geo-political pragmatism might also dictate (or could have dictated in the past) the encouragement of such extremist tendencies as a means of disrupting the consolidation of any political experiments, which counter their geo-political and geo-cultural interests, and containment of Ethiopia. In short, this could discourage developments that might strengthen Ethiopia’s regional position.
This is where the threat of an insurgent movement like Al-Ittihaad becomes relevant to Somaliland’s stability, though this movement was dismantled during the mid-1990s. Such concerns would also extend to jihadist infiltrators who might, as a result of statelessness in the south, extend regional terror networks into Somaliland and threaten the foreign expatriate presence that has come to make that country its base of operations.
Heightened concern about Somaliland’s vulnerability in this regard was generated by the murder of two British nationals outside Hargeisa on 21 October 2003. The deaths of Richard and Enid Eyeington followed closely on the heels of the killing of an Italian nurse, Annalena Tonelli, at a hospital in Boroma. Then, in April 2004, a German GTZ vehicle was attacked on the road between Hargeisa and Berbera, killing a Kenyan woman and injuring a German project manager. Noteworthy about these murders and attacks, at the time, was that these developments coincided with the perceived interest of Somaliland’s detractors in its destabilisation, which would put it on par with Somalia in the south and deflect from its eventual – though elusive – recognition prospects.
Somaliland’s former Foreign Minister, Edna Adan Ismail, claimed that the murders were carried out by al-Qaeda-linked terrorists. This possibility appeared to foreshadow the unbalancing of North-East Africa’s finely tuned co-existence between Islam, Christianity and indigenous faiths throughout a region characterised by stable religious pluralism. More specifically, if the murders were harbinger to more sinister trends, Somaliland’s pastoral-Sufi296 Telephonic religious, cultural and social ecology could be placed under threat amid the expanding influence of extremist Saudi Wahhabism. In the wake of 9/11, the Saudis had come under increasing pressure from Washington to rein in their tendency toward exporting Wahhabist extremism. The prospect was that, under the circumstances of war and occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with the growing US military presence in Central Asia, plus anti-terrorist pressures in this region from Russia and China, Saudi Wahhabism could be shifting its export focus to the Horn of Africa.
According to Somalilander Bashir Goth, at the time the British murders occurred, “anyone who followed recent press reports from Somaliland would have read that a group of Saudi-oriented clerics calling themselves ‘the Authority for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice’ (Hay’at al- amri bil mahruf wa al-nahyi an al-munkar), an offshoot of its Saudi counterpart, has been demanding the enforcement of draconian rules on what Somalilanders wear, say and do in their private lives, compared with the historically relaxed harmony between Islam and Somali culture”.297 Goth’s observation and the al- Qaeda claim made by former Foreign Minister Edna Ismail signalled, at the time, the possibility that a growing al-Qaeda presence might reflect a growing Wahhabist influence. Such a trend would converge with the interests of those regional actors in frustrating the Somaliland experiment. These possibilities were seen as ample indication of the need for an escalated and intensified peace diplomacy in the region to defuse conflicts in the Sudan, and tensions between Ethiopia and Eritrea, as well as reinforce the stabilisation of the Somali coast.
Particularly unsettling, were the results of an investigation into the 2003-2004 killings, indicating the establishment of a Somaliland jihadi network, which was linked to jihadist influences in Mogadishu. One suspect suggested the existence of a highly organised network headed by a self-styled Jihadist from Mogadishu, who had earlier been linked to Al-Ittihaad. These links also reportedly included contacts to al-Qaeda. At least two of the Somaliland assassins connected to these crimes had trained in al-Qaeda’s Afghan camps. According to the International Crisis Group’s research, while al-Qaeda never adopted the Somali region as a major base area, it has apparently maintained a “close association” with the region since the early 1990s. “Somalia’s lack of a functioning central government, unpatrolled borders, and unregulated arms markets make it a useful platform for actions aimed at foreign interests elsewhere in the region.”
The International Crisis Group, however, also points out that the fortunes of Somali militants and/or those with jihadist tendencies, had been in decline, though the 2003-04 incidents are indicative of the extent to which such influences could penetrate into Somaliland. In fact, Al-Ittihaad or not, the ICG report contends that al-Qaeda’s cell is still considered a regional security threat. More recently, the arrival of a new Somali settlement in Kenya, ushering forth the formation of the TFG, appeared to re-energise Somali jihadists, who were quick to denounce the settlement and any external peacekeeping intervention to help re-establish the TFG as a new government in Mogadishu. The ICG references the pronouncements of prominent Somali jihadist Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, who denounced the proposed deployment of an AU peacekeeping force, especially the prospect of such a force containing Ethiopian contingents.
Even without Ethiopian forces in such a deployment, the very prospect of external intervention – even an African peacekeeping force under AU auspices – generated warnings and forebodings that popular opposition to such a development would, in effect, galvanise southern Somalia into a transition from stateless warlordism to an incipient theocracy. Many feared that popular resistance would propel Islamists into leadership roles with intervention tilting the balance toward the jihadists, as opposed to more moderate Islamists. To head off such a development, the US came out against such a deployment with the EU, IGAD’s Partners Forum and the UNSC, following suit.
Fear of sparking a ‘jihadist movement’ effectively retarded peacekeeping progress, accompanied by an expeditious transfer of the TFG from Kenya to Somali soil. This and more general threats of endemic violence and instability generated further complications, surrounding whether or not the UN should exempt prospective AU peacekeeping forces from a 1992 arms embargo on Somalia, in order for such a force to bring weapons into the country as a means of reinforcing its ability to protect the TFG’s transitional institutions. Apart from the fact that the embargo has reportedly “had no practical effect – with the exception of barring the deployment of the AU-backed peacekeeping mission that would initially draw troops from Uganda and Sudan,” this issue and the matter of external intervention and where the TFG should be located, have split the new transitional regime down the middle, threatening to result in yet another failed Somali peace process.
It is not clear, however, how the disintegration of the TFG, amid the contradictions inherent in the transition process, interacting with the threat of a militantly Islamist upsurgence in the south, will resonate within Somaliland itself. Based on past developments becoming seeminlgy militant, if not jihadist in Mogadishu, infiltration into Somaliland from the south, which is a particularly dangerous prospect, may in turn create a situation in which the TFG fails to fill the governing vacuum. This vacuum would then be filled by a more avowedly Islamist presence; a presence that could, in Taliban fashion, bring order out of the chaos of warlord statelessness while assuming the mantle of uniting all of the Somali coast, possibly even rekindling the irredentist dynamic of the old, under the motivation of an expansionist Islamist militancy.
Such a scenario could conceivably rebound to Somaliland’s benefit politically in terms of its quest for recognition being forthcoming, to strengthen it as a bulwark against a militantly Islamist southern Somalia which, in turn, would represent a clear and present danger to the more moderately Islamist order in Somaliland. Alternatively, the historic cultural roots of co-existence between Islam and the clan system in Somaliland could well serve as something of an indigenous inoculation of Somaliland society from a militant political Islam. Somaliland, given its history of closer geo-cultural proximity to the Arab/Islamic Middle East, represents a comparatively ‘soft’ Islamism underpinning an increasingly secularised polity. Secularisation of the social order in Somaliland appears to organically emerge from what Marleen Renders identifies as the co-existence of Islam and the indigenous clan system in the north-western Somali region, emanating from the very beginning of Islam’s introduction into the region. According to some sources, “during the very first century of the Islamic calendar, Islam immediately blended with the emerging Somali clan system” in the north-west coastal region of what is now Somaliland.303 The emergence of the clan system in the Somali north-west is believed, according to Renders, to have occurred with “the advent of Islam to the Somalilands: thus, Somali clans take pride in never having known ‘paganism’ ”. This organic integration between religion, society and polity in Somaliland forms the context within which to look more closely at the Islamic-based system of charity and education.
As is the case with the more militant Islamist tendencies within and external to Somali society, Somaliland’s Islamic – as opposed to Islamist, in the sense of an avowedly political Islam, whether militant or moderate – social order embraces the same network of charitable and educational institutions and services as is characteristic in differing variations throughout the Muslim world. Given the importance of education as a vehicle for Islamist dissemination, a discussion of educational institutional arrangements in Somaliland may be instructive in assessing the country’s susceptibility to a more general Islamist ascendancy.
4.5 Somaliland’s Islamic Culture of Education:
The Influence of Arab/Islamic Charities From an historical perspective, the organisation of education, according to Renders,305 was a prerogative that Somaliland’s ‘religious men’ were said to guard jealously during Britain’s ‘indirect rule’ colonial administration between 1890 and 1960 in north-west Somalia. Quite a few British officers were chased away or stoned when trying to set up schools in Somaliland. This seems to have constituted mainly an expression of local cultural nationalist resistance to colonialism rather than an overtly political challenge. Renders contends that the Qadiriyah leaders seemed “politically quietist”.306 Within their indirect rule accommodation with the British, the brotherhood’s leaders would have presumably had no need to challenge British authority in as much as this authority refrained from intervening in the social and cultural affairs of Somaliland society. The prime Qadiriyah concern was the introduction of Christianity into Somaliland. Once this was ironed out, it was the Qadriyah leaders who welcomed the establishment of schools, especially into the Sahil area of Sheikh. In fact, according to Renders, the Qadiriyah leaders cultivated excellent relations with some among the colonial regime. Fast forward to the contemporary period of north-west Somalia’s ‘second coming’ as Somaliland, where education, along with other social services such as health, are enshrined in the constitution. The problem, however, is that the state has had little in the way of resources to oversee the provision of education. “… there is hardly any money to keep existing schools more or less running, let alone to prop up the quality of teaching or to extend the state school network.”309 This is where Islamic charities enter the picture, in what amounts to something akin to an Islamic version of the ‘public-private partnership’. A substantial part of the private initiative in the education, health and welfare sectors is deployed by Islamic charity initiatives. These are usually funded by zakaat, the religious tax on income. Renders explains:
The concept of zakaat is profoundly connected with the idea of social jjustice in Islamist ideology: an Islamic welfare system driven by zakaat would guarantee the collective welfare of the Ummah through social and distributive justice…The alms tax is collected and re-distributed by private actors, to such an extent that it is of course difficult to trace origins as well as destination. Moreover, money moves freely and unregistered in Somaliland and Somalia: there is no official banking system, though this may be changing or about to change in Somaliland.
A portion of the zakaat which funds Islamic charities in Somaliland is likely to come from the Persian Gulf, although, according to Renders, “this is vehemently denied by people concerned with these charities.” One study devoted to Arab funding of education in Somaliland, which may shed more light on this sensitive issue, is one carried out by Oxfam Netherlands and the World Association of Muslim Youth, supported by the EC Somalia Operations. In a report issued in September 2004 titled ‘Arab Donor Policies and Practices on Education in Somalia/land’, Arab assistance to Somalia and Somaliland was said to take several forms:
• Official government donors;
• International NGOs (or Islamic charities) registered in one of the member states of the Arab League;
• Arab-based multilateral institutions; and
• Local Somali NGOs that receive support from organisations based in Arab countries.
Among the Arab donors in the education sector are some “governments that maintain consular presence in Somalia/land. These include Egypt, Libya and, on a temporary basis, Sudan”.
Although this report tends to refer to “Somalia/land”, much of the Arab funding sources concentrate on Somalia rather than on Somaliland, in keeping with the political bias that Arab governments and most non-governmental entities have against Somaliland and for Somalia. As such, the study’s conflation of Somalia and Somaliland in one terminology is somewhat less than edifying in terms of pinpointing Arab donor involvement and educational links with Somaliland. Nevertheless, Arab countries in Somalia/land are enumerated as:
• Africa Muslims Agency (AMA), Kuwait;
• African Relief Committee (ARC), Kuwait;
• World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY), Saudi Arabia;
• International Islamic Relief Organisation (IIRO), Saudi Arabia;
• Red Crescent Society, United Arab Emirates (UAE); and
• Munazzama al-Dawa, Sudan.
According to the study, there is no uniform policy for funding projects in Somalia/land among Arab/Islamic donor organisations. Among the organisations interviewed for the study, older organisations and international organisations tend to understand the policies of their donors more than younger or local organisations. Some donors provided a list of criteria for funding, and policies varied according to the kind of funding; conditions for dispersal of zakaat funds were different to those provided for programme support. The predominant reasons for funding projects in Somalia/land given by Arab donors (both individuals and organisations) were humanitarian and socio-cultural. An important source of funds for charities, which has been omitted in many studies, but included therein, was the voluntary out-of-pocket collections at mosques and other religious locations.
In an attempt to gauge the anti-Western potential of Arab-linked organisations in the Somali region, the research findings indicated that “it was apparent that there is a huge interest on the part of Somali-based Islamic and Arab charities to co-operate with Western donors. Citing the observations of a recent article at the time of the study, it was noted that “[c]ontrary to what one would expect of organisations rumoured to be preaching against the West, Somalia’s Islamic charities are generally open to relations with Western governments, non-governmental organisations and international institutions such as the United Nations and the European Union”.315 In another study by Andre Le Sage and Ken Menkhaus, it was observed that “probably the most important distinction of Islamic charities is the widespread public perception in the West that their activities are inherently political”,316 when, according to an ICG study, the majority of Islamic social welfare organisations around the world are politically unaffiliated. Nonetheless, the studies cited thus far do not shed much light on the Islamic charities funding situation inside Somaliland with regard to the education and other social sectors.
The picture that emerges is not one that would suggest considerable Islamic donor funding flowing into Somaliland’s social sectors. Thus, in a study of ‘Old institutions, new opportunities: the emerging nature of Koranic schools in Somaliland in the 1990s’, Erasmus U. Morah found that Somaliland’s 15% enrolment in upper primary school (grades 5-8) was almost double that of ‘Greater Somalia.’ This was seen as “all the more impressive in view of the fact that no primary schools in Somaliland were operated by international NGOs, compared to Greater Somalia where 23% of the schools were managed and financed by NGOs and aid agencies”.317 Instead, “more schools are managed and supported by local authorities (48%) and parents (27%) in Somaliland compared to 39% and 22 % Somalia-wide”.318 Perhaps this is why there was vehement denial of Gulf donor support for zakaat. Nevertheless, Renders refers to Islamic charities as a major source of educational funding in filling the gap that the government cannot address,319 while key individuals also help fund schools in Somaliland.
In a summary of Renders and Morah, the provision of education in Somaliland can be pieced together as a pragmatic combination of religious and secular education relying on heavy doses of self-help initiative combined with private funding. What follows is a condensation of Renders and Morah’s accounts. Education in Somaliland has, for centuries, been primarily Koranic, wherein religious education is traditionally viewed as a moral and religious obligation. This was the only kind of education available until 1945 and such education continues to play a major role today. This, in combination with the fall of the military regime, the collapse of all state institutions in the whole of Somalia and the incapacity of the Somaliland successor government in the north-west to kick-start a new state-sponsored education system, provided Islamic charities with the opportunity to fill the gap.321 Through a combination of self- help and support from international aid agencies, the Somaliland Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports (MEOYS) had 159 primary schools in operation by 1995-96 with 27,178 pupils (25.3% girls). Some public funding was provided, though in 2000 this was reportedly equivalent to only 3% of recurring costs.
Teachers are paid US$8 per month, with parents paying an equal amount in monthly fees. The total of US$16 covers 10-20% of the living costs of teachers, who are forced to double-up by taking on other jobs and/or entrepreneurial activities to survive. Renders contends that education in Somaliland receives very little donor funding (about 10% or US$11 million per year for the whole of Somalia/land). This, according to the UNDP, sharply contrasts with what it calls ‘non-traditional’ donors, such as Islamic charities, for whom long-term educational investment is a priority. Given the cultural importance of religious education in Somaliland, such funding dovetails conveniently with the need to fill the educational funding vacuum. Such charities are said to have established educational institutions similar to the écoles franco-arabes in the West African Sahelian region. These institutions offer a broad curriculum but with what Renders calls a “sometimes strong religious orientation”. They teach Arabic and Islamic sciences, as well as courses in Maths, English and geography. There are estimated to be some 65 such schools in Hargeisa. The Somaliland government does not aim to curtail these private initiatives, nor do such initiatives seek a high profile or confrontations with the Somaliland authorities. Moreover, this type of Islamic education is seen as commendable in the eyes of Somalilanders. The schools appear of better quality than state schools and sometimes belong to a formalised and internationally recognised system, which gives direct access to further education at Arab or Islamic universities worldwide. Perhaps because of the importance of such ‘non-traditional’ donor support, the Somaliland MEOYS, as a means of compensating for the limited opportunities of acquiring formal education, established its own department of Non-Formal Education. As a result of both pressure and support from aid agencies and women’s groups, it has managed to open 12 family life centres for women since 1995, with more than 1,300 students, many of them women. Furthermore, new types of business schools have emerged in major urban areas providing training in management, computers and secretarial skills. But beyond such initiatives, the Department of Non-Formal Education and the handful of non-formal education programmes in Somaliland are seen as weak and lacking in effective co-ordination.
According to Morah, the non-formal Koranic school education in Somaliland has not been properly studied since 1988.326 A UN survey in 1996 showed only 17% of Somaliland children were enrolled in primary schools, of which 60% were enrolled in the Koranic schools. Koranic schools are not closely linked to mosques or places of worship, as stated by Morah. They are administered by single private teachers who set up Koranic schools in each neighbourhood. In Somaliland, Koranic schools are pre-schools, not part of the governmental or private post-kindergarten school system.
As a result of the affordable tuition of Koranic schools, which is carefully keyed to the means of the population, and simplicity of learning materials, no interested parent is ever turned away because of costs. This practice, apart from the current concern about intolerant, pro-jihadist content, is sustained by the fact that Koranic recitation is universally considered a responsibility of every good Muslim.
In a survey of 58 Koranic schools conducted by Morah, it was found that they were 100% financed by parents. This financial support, contrary to old beliefs, took the form of cash payments made directly to the teacher by the parents. Some 32% of teachers state that they received less than US$40 per month in fees whereas 60% reported receiving between US$40 and $80 per month.327 Contrary to popular belief among Somalilanders and foreigners alike, there was hardly any evidence of community involvement in the management of the Koranic schools beyond the payment of fees by parents. What pupils learn and how they progress is entirely the prerogative of the teacher and possibly the student. Morah concluded his study with some of the following observations:
• Many of the Koranic schools in the survey have begun transforming themselves by acquiring some of the characteristics of formal schools, such as permanent physical structures and the introduction of components of basic education;
• Virtually all the Koranic schools surveyed offered more than the memorisation of the Koran: 87% taught at least two subjects in addition to the Koran; 43% offered up to three courses, namely Arabic, arithmetic and the Somali language;
• The Koranic schools are undergoing transformations completely on their own, using self-help and ad hoc methods with no coordination with formal guidance; a process that might be bridged via the department of Non-Formal Education as the interface between such schools and the formal system;
• These new, mutated forms of Koranic schools seem to have gained substantial maturity and popularity since the early 1990s, as the state- sponsored public schools reeled and tried to recover from years of wartime devastation and pre-war neglect;
• Koranic schools have certain advantages such as their high coverage, low cost and willingness of parents to pay but unless an effective bridge can be built to link formally Koranic schools and primary schools, Somaliland may never be able to achieve the global objective of education for all;
• Somaliland will also not meaningfully aspire to any future developmental objectives that are based on a large educated labour force;
• On the other hand, the introduction of basic education in Koranic schools will contribute both immensely and instantly to the goal of education for all, by targeting the large number of in-Koranic-school but out-of-primary school children;
• The Koranic system learned its first major lesson from the public schools by introducing co-education;
• In the 1990s, the Koranic schools learned their second major lesson by beginning to integrate elements of basic education on its own with the added emphasis that this trend and consequent transformation deserves to be encouraged deliberately and without delay – something that would seem to imply a more proactive role for the MEOYS department of Non-Formal Education;
• Koranic education has remained remarkably strong since its introduction in Somaliland about 700 years ago, demonstrating continuing longevity and resilience, however, parents were found to be agreeable to the systematic introduction of formal basic education in Koranic schools, provided that cultural/religious sensitivities are respected and there is no interference with the existing provision of Islamic education;
• The challenge of upgrading the intellectual knowledge base and class- teaching skills of the Koranic teachers will prove the biggest threat to success. With training and learning materials costs borne by the government and donors, the teachers should not have a problem charging parents a marginal cost for the basic education component, thereby facilitating basic education-Koranic schooling integration.
From a political and security perspective, the Koranic school system in Somaliland has warranted attention because of the growing international awareness of the role the Islamic charities-education nexus has played in disseminating militant brands of political Islam, jihadist tendencies in particular.329 The apparent lack of control that government exerts over this sector, amid some of the violence that occurred during 2003-04, has suggested that the Koranic school system linked to Islamic charities, might pose a threat of destabilisation.
Such anxiety has been heightened by the fact that Somaliland remains dependent on the Koranic school system as a means of ensuring that education is accessible to Somalilanders, in spite of government’s lack of capacity and resources. However, the decline of overt Islamist movements, such as Al-Ittihaad, the dismantling of their militia capacity and the adoption by its members of non-violent modes of proselytising along with the more recent turn-around of Somaliland’s relations with its neighbours, principally Djibouti, may combine to defuse these concerns about Islamic charities and religious education in Somaliland. The TFG settlement in the south has contributed to this less threatening environment, irrespective of the stability of that settlement.
The fact that there has been an unfolding trend toward integrating Koranic schooling with formal basic education, within the context of an already entrenched Islamic social order, may also bode well for the role of religious education as a factor for stability, rather than destabilisation in Somaliland. This may hold for other aspects of interaction between religion and society and polity within Somaliland. Here, the role of Sharia, within the context of Somaliland’s legal system, may reinforce this profile of what could be termed a modernising co-existence and pragmatic accommodation between Islam and more secular tendencies in the social order.
Although Somaliland has a conventional court system in place, officially Sharia law is recognised as having precedence in Somaliland society. In Renders’ account, “in principle, this is a situation that seems to be endorsed by the large majority of the country’s population.” This is said to especially be the case since the Islamic revival challenged Somaliland policy-makers after its inception as a state independent from the rest of the Somali coast. In fact, this sentiment seemed to coincide with a similar Islamic revival in the south which, for a while, saw the flourishing of Islamic courts. Sharia, however, is not codified law and it is not the only law that applies. As indicated in the first chapter, John Drysdale enumerated the existence of three concurrent legal systems: English language secular law, Islamic law in Arabic, which would refer to Sharia, and Somali traditional law.
Apart from the Sharia, Somaliland relies on a codex of laws dating from various periods in the society’s history. In criminal cases, according to Renders, Somaliland uses the Somali Penal Code of 1962, together with the Sharia. Customary law is supposed to be the lowest in this eclectic hierarchy, after Sharia and positive law. However, Renders reports that the reality on the ground proves to be different in as much as many of the country’s judges are barely trained in either Sharia or positive law. The judges who do have legal training did so under the military regime of Siad Barre. This has heavily influenced the post-war rule of law in Somaliland, as the system obtained under Barre is that with which they are most familiar. Thus, the unified civil code and procedure enacted in the mid-1970s is used rather than the pre-1969 law.
Courts, police and legal professionals in Somaliland, all tend to use positive law. The reason given is that, in this way, the penal system and the law enforcement system are complementary and adapted to one another. Furthermore, as a practical consideration according to Renders, legal professionals are “profoundly unfamiliar” with the interpretation and application of Sharia law.333 Thus, Sharia is actually hardly used in legal proceedings at all. On the other hand, positive law, while applied in some instances, often gives way to judges applying or taking into account customary law. And here, there is the view that customary law “effectively undermines the application of other legal codes”.334 Whether in fact this is the case, Drysdale’s account of the Xeer system, as cited earlier, stresses the exclusive role that Somaliland’s clan elders played in the application of customary law under the British colonial administrative system, which deferred to indirect rule.
Given the central role played by these elders in the political development of the Somaliland Republic, this would seem to guarantee a central role for customary law, hence the strategic role played by Somali culture and tradition in mediating religion and modernity. Within this context, Somaliland society has evolved its own approach to navigating the application and interaction of the different codes. This is illustrated by an example that Renders provides on how ‘the law’ applies to criminals. A Commander of the Custodian Corps in Burco explained as follows: … the police catches him and puts him in prison after which he is tried before a district or regional court. Meanwhile his relatives negotiate with the victim’s relatives about a settlement. If they agree, the case is solved. When a settlement is reached, the sentence is reduced, but police will hold him in prison for some more time to have him re-educated in Islamic faith. When he comes after some time, he will be a changed virtous man.
Such is the pragmatism in the action of drawing upon an eclectic mix of religion, tradition and modernity in adapting Somaliland’s Islamic conservatism to current-day realities. The episode cited by Renders illustrates how something of a division of labour has been arrived at, that, in effect, is mediated by tradition. Renders concludes by referring back to how Somali Islamists, at their inception in the context of secular military rule under Barre, wanted to establish an Islamic public order in the course of establishing an Islamic state based on the Sharia. The fact that, as she points out, their top- down strategies of attempting to forcibly impose Islamist rule were compelled to give way to a grassroots approach, attests to the apparent power and resilience of the Somali traditional sphere presided over by clan leaders. As Renders makes clear, “Islamist personnel turned to the traditional roles of ‘religious men’ (wadaads) in the traditional Somali clan-system.” What she describes, in effect, amounts to a defusing process of assimilation and co- optation of the Islamist challenge into the already existing Somaliland traditionalist-Islamic public order. An Islamic order did not have to be established – it already existed, albeit on Somali terms.
Thus, while at the same time challenging traditional Sufi beliefs as well as religious and societal practices, the Islamists took on “very similar socio- political roles. Like the wadaads, they engaged themselves in peace-making and social service provision, caring for the sick, handicapped and orphaned, providing religious (added with marketable) knowledge, mediating in conflicts and clan fights. They are part and parcel of their own clans … but have a horizontal solidarity with ‘religious men’ in other clans because of their common role.” This absorptive capacity of Somaliland’s culture to adapt Islam to Somaliland’s traditions again reflects on the niche role played by Sharia. As Renders observes:
Shari’a is an important notion in the political context of Somaliland. People insist that it be used. Yet, the importance of Shari’a does not lay in its official status as source of all laws and all legal dealings in Somaliland, but in its role as a part of customary law as interpreted and administered by clan elders and ‘religious people’ of various denominations. The application of codified law based on the Shari’a is an ideal which is duly professed by politicians, sheikhs and the population, but it is not applied in reality. Because of the lack of a strong central government authority that is able to enforce the law, this is not likely to change any time soon. The various actors: government, judges, citizens and ‘new’ as well as ‘old’ wadaads know this and act accordingly, dealing pragmatically with any given situation that arises”.
This, in Renders’ view, interacts with a security situation associated with the lack of strong enough government institutions, not in the least the judiciary branch, to preclude any initiative to give priority to any other law than customary law, hence, the ascendancy, indeed hegemony, of the traditional customary sphere over the religious realm of Islam in dictating the terms of Somaliland’s social order. The conclusion that Renders arrives at is worth exploring at some length as it may well provide the clue to Somaliland’s stability over the long term and capacity to cope with the destabilising pressures that could emanate from yet another conflicted attempt to reconstitute the Somali state in Mogadishu.
Renders concludes: One could contend that the Islamists who wanted to introduce the Shari’a and the Islamic state, have now in fact become ‘new’ wadaads in a clan-based polity. The Islamists now seem (like the Sufi brotherhoods) to be perceived as just a particular doctrinal affiliation a wadaad could have. As ‘new’ wadaads, they keep the community together, morally upright and cared for. This does not mean that these religious actors are a-political. They are political actors as individuals and as a collective: religious affiliations can just as well as clan affiliations be used in the power game … What does seem new, however, is perhaps the economic status of the new wadaads. The old wadaads were (in theory at least) to an important extent economically dependent on their clansmen…The ‘new’ wadaads, showing outright contempt for this practice, emphasise their ability to make their own money by doing business. They do not want to be dependent on their clansmen. The question whether and how their presumed economic independence makes for enhanced political independence in a polity which is to an important extent still determined by clan-driven politics is a matter for further research.
4.6 Religion and Stability: the Somaliland Prognosis
What projections can be made about the implications of post-9/11 Islamism for Somaliland’s stability during the current period of upheaval within the Muslim world?
Renders’ account of the pragmatic interplay between tradition, Islam and modernity in Somaliland amplifies Drysdale’s observations about the stabilising influence that nationalism’s accommodation of traditional culture has had, in comparison to the lack of equivalent accommodation in the south. The allowing of ‘Xeer Soomaali’ to exert an apparently culturally stabilising influence on Somaliland’s politics and observance of the role of religion in society may, based on what Renders’ has drawn from the country’s heterodox legal order, proved decisive for Somaliland. Jama Gabush argues that “if the democratisation process is to be accelerated, the careful integration of Islamization and democratization is indispensable in Somaliland politics”.
The Somaliland system of clan elders has served as something of a mediating force in managing pragmatic interaction between custom and tradition, Islam and the secular realm of modern nationalism. During an age of upheaval within the Muslim world, where political Islam has emerged to challenge the Islamic authenticity of incumbent regimes and social orders, Somaliland may be unique as an organically Islamic society; one in which the intimate interplay between the clan-state, as it transitions into a modern polity, Islam may be pre-empting and/or containing Islamism’s impact in Somaliland.
The organic relationship between Somali culture and tradition on the one hand and Islam on the other appears to guarantee a stabilising role for religion in the society as a whole and, by extension, in the fledgling political system. Because of this integration, Somaliland society appears to have an inherent resiliency that allows it to absorb and co-opt change in meeting the challenge of political Islam. The taming of the Islamism of the ‘new’ wadaads would appear to be a fitting case in point alongside the manner in which the ‘public-private partnership’ between Somaliland’s resource and capacity- starved public education system, and the Koranic schools, have allowed the two spheres of education to find one another in pragmatic compromises. In fact, these two instances of system resiliency and adaptability may be instructive in terms of the potential for Somaliland to withstand the challenges of the global Islamic civil war.
The ideological apparatus of a nexus between charities and education has been political Islam’s means of proselytising jihadist sentiments. In Somaliland, however, on the basis of Renders’ account, the ‘new’ wadaads took on the same mediating and peace-building role in the interest of promoting social and political stability at a grassroots level as had the ‘old’ wadaads. This culture of mediating tensions and contradictions in Somaliland society is what has stood the republic in good stead in overcoming its challenges. The erstwhile Islamists, in effect, appear to have been co- opted by the system at the very time when an Islamic revival was underway.
The authenticity of Somaliland’s brand of Somalised Islam is reflected in its popular support among all sectors of society. The Koranic schools apparently enjoy popular support and society as a whole feels committed to paying tribute to Sharia as the system of law at the apex of Somaliland’s legal system, even as customary law prevails, again with the underpinning of an apparent social and cultural consensus that this is how the system must be made to work. To reiterate Drysdale’s earlier observation about the decisive role of tradition in this pragmatic mix: “… However ancient traditional law may be, Somalis are comfortable with its judgement to this day, whether disputes coming before the elders are peacemaking in character, or the result of injuries sustained in a road accident, or compensation for injuries inflicted on a person’s pride or wellbeing”.
Somaliland custom, therefore, represents an ‘indigenous knowledge system’ that mediates the sacred and secular realms in the country’s Islamic public order. But is such a religio-social compact sustainable over the medium to long term? This is where Renders’ intriguing speculation on where the ‘new’ wadaads may be heading is worth exploring.
Renders closes her analysis by observing that the new wadaads show outright contempt for the older practice of wadaads accepting a dependency on their clansmen; the newer generation that has emerged from the Islamic revival is emphasising a desire and an ability to make its own money by pursuing business initiatives. These are wadaads with an entrepreneurial spirit. They are not concerned with acquiring gifts and services or in any other way relying on the clan system. Could this indicate the potential for the new wadaad generation to mutate into a ‘new class’ among Somaliland’s religious elite?
To reiterate the question posed by Renders: “… whether and how their presumed economic independence makes for enhanced political independence in a polity which is to an important extent still determined by clan-driven politics is a matter for further research”. Could this mean a rupture in the clan system in the making? Or, further still, a rupture in the centuries-old compact between Islam and the clan system, to the extent that the new wadaads remain the repository of Somaliland’s spiritual guidance while, at the same time, seeking to make themselves economically independent from the clan system. Of course, such a socio-economic transformation in religious leadership, which is linked to the clan system, would not be unfolding in isolation from a wider environment of upheaval in the Muslim world and the Somali region.
It seems reasonable that Somaliland society, as currently constituted, is capable of containing challenges of Islamist infiltration. A new group of the traditional Somali Sufi orders have recently been emboldened to revive the Sufi Mawlid ceremonies in Borama, while very recently Sh. Cabdirasaaq Yuusuf Aadan, Head of the Ahlu Sunna Wal Jamaaca of Southern Somalia, has lectured in Borama and Hargeisa, where he preached to people to return to their traditional Somali Sufi Islam and condemned Wahhabism publicly.
After all, it would appear that Somaliland has already weathered the Islamist upsurge in as much as the organisational cohort of movements like Al-Ittihaad have come and gone without traumatising Somaliland society. But, as the entrepreneurial new wadaads may indicate, what would have seemed as likely insurgent challenges to Somaliland’s fledgling political order, may not be where the challenges lie. Rather, it may be the emergence of a new echelon of social power that becomes a ‘class for itself’, expressing a commitment to Islam that converges with what could be a similar mutation taking place to the south. This scenario could reflect a trend where warlordism in the south is eventually overtaken by the already perceived threat of an extremist political Islam filling a new vacuum – or a continuing vacuum – that fails to be filled by the TFG.
Meanwhile, a second generation of Islamism resurfaces from the ascendancy of a new class of politically conscious and entrepreneurially aggressive wadaads in Somaliland, who would compete for political leadership within the country’s democratic system. Whether or not this new challenge will reflect a moderate Islamism or something more militant, in line with what some fear could be looming behind a failed TFG, is unclear. Should such an eventuality emerge, this could be accompanied by a destabilisation of the traditionally integrated Islamic-clan partnership, which seems predicated on an interdependency of which the new wadaads, according to Renders, are contemptuous. For, as this new wadaad class becomes more economically independent and less interdependently interlinked with their clansmen, this would seem sure to cause a rupture in the social system, which would become beset by increasing social/class conflict between an ‘old guard’ with a vested interest in such interdependence which, after all, is centuries old, and those who want to break free from this system. Alternatively, Somaliland may very well weather this new speculative challenge as well and deal with nascent Islamic organisations. This could lead to yet another configuration of the Somali coast, should the TFG fail to gain traction in the south. In other words, this could lead to an increasingly stable Somaliland, reflecting the resilience of its Islamic-clan system compact uneasily co-existing within the same region with an increasingly Islamist southern Somalia, either reflecting the clear ascendancy of militant political Islam in the south or some combination of partnership, collaboration or co-existence between militant Islamism and faction warlord rule. This would undoubtedly heighten the dilemmas of recognition in an era of upheaval in the Muslim world, amid the ‘war on terror.’
Chapter 5: Recognition
Recognising the Unrecognised
Nin aanad saacad ku baran, sanad kuma baratid = The man whom you failed to know within an hour, you will not know within a year (Somali proverb)
5.1 Recognising the Unrecognised
The Somaliland international relations and politics of reconciliation, reconstruction and religion dovetail into what has become the ultimate ‘bottom-line’ in the quadrilateral framework nexus of this thesis: the achievement of international diplomatic recognition – or, at the very least, some workable contingent status that will facilitate the normalisation of Somaliland’s international relations, where the “absence of recognition of Somaliland’s status is hindering our economic development”.
This, in turn, would facilitate the country’s ongoing post-conflict reconstruction and recovery. Hargeisa’s uphill quest for recognition amid the continuing unsettled collapsed political environment in the southern Somali non-state, has worked as an incentive for Somaliland’s leaders to demonstrate effective governance. Effective governance in Somaliland translates into ongoing consolidated politics of reconciliation and reconstruction, while keeping the extremist politics of Islamism – as opposed to the religion of Islam itself – at bay in the process of nation-building.
The advancement of reconciliation into the construction of workable institutions of governance and sustained reconstruction (however imperfect this process may appear to some critics of Somaliland’s internal politics) has steadily sharpened the contradictions of how the rest of Africa and the international community should relate to the Somali coast in light of the struggling efforts to reconstitute Somalia as a ‘federal republic’ in Mogadishu. Given the fourteen unsuccessful attempts to re-establish Somalia as the status quo in the Somali coast and in the five ‘transitional governments’, and Somaliland’s steady progression toward credible statehood, a stalemate has ensued. This stand-off confronts Africa and the world with difficult questions on how to proceed toward an acceptable de jure framework for interacting with Hargeisa as well as Mogadishu. If Somaliland’s quest for recognition is an uphill struggle (as surely it is), given the AU members’ reluctance to set a precedent which departs from the old OAU strictures on perceived secession and ‘territorial integrity’, Somalia’s internationally-backed efforts to reconstitute itself as a functioning state have proven to be equally uphill to the point of exhausting international patience with conferring automatic international recognition on Mogadishu. Most “… external actors with interest in Somalia [and Somaliland] have proven unable to adapt to the rise of the [Islamic] Courts and the collapse of the T.F.G. with coherent strategies, and have remained at least one step behind events on the ground”. In addition, external actors have to come to terms with the reality, which Professor Ali Mazrui describes as:In the post-colonial history of the Muslim world the two worst cases of such spousal abuse concerned the marriage between former British and former Italian Somaliland, and the marriage between the old East Pakistan (of Bengalis) and the old West Pakistan (partly led by Urdu speakers).
5.2 Somaliland Quo Vadis I: Overcoming Africa’s Post-colonial Self-Determination Conundrum
The OAU’s tendency, partially inherited by some member states of the African Union (AU), toward non-recognition of entities viewed as break-away secessionist fragments of recognised established states, has established a track record regarding conflict resolution in the Horn of Africa that has to be considered discouraging for resolving the Somaliland-Somalia recognition conundrum. To be sure, as Africa (under the AU) becomes increasingly committed to sub-regional consolidation and regional integration, the conferring of diplomatic recognition on new states emerging from established ones is a hard sell. This is something that Somaliland’s leaders early began showing signs of factoring into their diplomatic calculus as they sought to advance Somaliland’s case for recognition.
The AU’s continental integrationist agenda, after all, places all outstanding self-determination questions in a new light. That said, the track record the AU inherits from the OAU in dealing credibly and effectively with such issues is a dismal one. This is especially so in the Horn of Africa, in light of the unique nature of its self-determination/ ‘national questions’. In summary, these include: the forcible Ethiopian annexation of Eritrea which clearly enjoys a distinctive history vis-à-vis the rest of Ethiopia, irrespective of whether this justifies its status as a state independent from Ethiopia; Arabicised northern Sudan’s relentless campaigns to forcibly incorporate the non-Arabicised Christian-animist south under a racist cultural imperium, now compounded by Khartoum’s attempts to militarily centralise power over all other regions in the country, even as it has reached an interim accommodation with the south; and the question of Somali irredentism emanating from the colonial fragmentation of Somali-speaking communities throughout North-East Africa and the Red Sea coast. This challenge merges with the ethno-regional/religious pluralism of the Ethiopian state which, in turn, revisits tensions between Ethiopia and Eritrea, the latter forming an integral geo-cultural component of the Tigreyan Axumite-Abyssinian highlands which is fundamental to Ethiopia’s historical identity.
The dynamic tensions surrounding Ethiopia’s cultural unity and pluralism as the sub-region’s land-locked ‘empire state’ form part of the Horn of Africa’s exceptionalism on questions of self-determination, which the OAU never had the will to confront. This was the predictable result of Emperor Haile Selassie’s successful bid in making Addis Ababa the effective diplomatic continental ‘capital’ of Africa. Somaliland forms part of this historical baggage. This includes the contested status of Ethiopia’s Somali-speaking Ogaden region, to which Somaliland is regionally contiguous, though Hargeisa has renounced the ‘Greater Somalia’ irredentist agenda.362 The resolution of these issues, including the status of Somaliland within the context of relations between Ethiopia and the Somali coast, contains broader regional security significance regarding the importance that Egypt attaches to its access to Nile Basin waters, for the survival of its economy.363 “Egypt has a long historical interest in Somalia and has in the past used Somalia as a pawn to distract Ethiopia. Egypt, for example, supported Somalia during its war against Ethiopia in 1977.” It’s also known that Egypt supported Somalia against Ethiopia in the1964 war when Egyptian President Nasser sent rifles to the Somali army with the Arabic inscription “Mautul Habash, Wa Hayat al-Somal” (Death to Ethiopia and Long Live Somalia). Significantly, Egypt was active in Somali politics during the colonial era. It administered a Somali language radio programme directed at the Somali-speaking people of the Horn to counter British, Italian and French policies.
Egypt’s concerns, in turn, expand into a wider Arab League interest in the political outcome of the reconfiguration of the Somali region in contradistinction to the security interests of Ethiopia. These geo-political questions surrounding the status of the Somali coast underlie the tug-of-war between rival conceptions of ‘unitary state’ centralism versus federal and confederal options which, heretofore, Africa as a whole has been unwilling to entertain. The African unity consensus has been characterised by an assumption of territorial integrity based on ‘unitary states’ wherein federalism and/or confederations were discredited as way-stations toward secessionist independence.
This unitary state-centralist bias is shared by Egypt and other Arab state actors. This is further reinforced by the overlapping African Union and Arab League memberships. Hence the tendency toward federal arrangements, such as once obtained between Ethiopia and Eritrea, being overridden under the guise of building strong centralised states, irrespective of the regionally- based cultural pluralism of such states and the authoritarian implications that such annulments carried for effective governance.
Federalism thus discredited, the OAU could never openly admit to the tensions and conflicts that clearly begged creative flexibility in the exercising of political imagination in bringing North-East Africa’s interminable conflicts to closure. The Ethiopia-Eritrean conflict thus ultimately had to be settled militarily, in favour of the latter’s independence. This carried with it implications that resonated within Ethiopia itself, as reflected in its current ethnic ‘self-determination’ federation experiment. Sudan’s north-south conflict had to be fought to the mutually assured exhaustion of both parties, before the OAU’s increasing focus on conflict resolution in the interests of stabilising Africa, began to move inexorably toward a negotiated settlement that now, under the AU, contemplates south Sudan’s possible independence as an ultimate solution.366 Thus, Eritrea and, most recently, south Sudan, have set precedents for the type of flexibility that the AU and its sub-regional economic communities (RECs) must show in seeking peaceful resolutions of intractable post-colonial intra-state conflicts, where armed African opposition movements seek self-determination from regimes that no longer enjoy the legitimacy of the supporters and constituencies of such movements.
Law professor Garth Abraham sums up the situation by arguing:The boundaries of Eritrea, a successful secession, conforms to the Italian colony prior to its federation with Ethiopia in 1952; the boundaries of Somaliland, a secession that has yet to receive international recognition, conforms to the British colony of Somaliland prior to the creation of the Republic of Somalia in 1960; the boundaries of Southern Sudan, a potential secession, conforms to the three provinces of the southern Sudan during the period of British colonial administration.
As the AU approaches the resolution of the Somali coast conundrum, it has arrived at such lessons as the Eritrean and Sudan conflicts have to offer, at great cost, in the destruction of lives and infrastructure throughout a vast expanse of the greater Horn of Africa. Eritrea’s struggle for independence spanned 1961 to 1991. Somaliland’s quest for recognition is one that, like Eritrea and south Sudan, similarly emerges as a variation of the theme of post-colonial African liberation struggles for self-determination and/or democratic autonomy from oppressive centralised power. Somaliland’s struggle has also been similarly decided upon by military means in as much as the SNM, which led it into unilateral independence, contributed to the military defeat and ousting of the Siad Barre regime in coalition with other Somali armed opposition movements.
However, unlike the case of Eritrea, in relation to Ethiopia and south Sudan, vis-à-vis the Khartoum government, the successful military outcome of the anti-Barre resistance in Somalia resulted in the collapse and break-up of the Somali state. Yet, Africa and the rest of the international community have responded to developments in the Somali coast as if all that needed to be achieved was the installation of a successor regime in Mogadishu. The very real ‘facts on the ground’ in the actual territorial disintegration of the state in and around Mogadishu have been ignored, as have the independence of Somaliland and the short-of-independence autonomy of Puntland. Realistically, Somaliland’s independence from the rest of Somalia can no more be reversed by military means than Eritrea’s independence from Ethiopia can be militarily reversed – or south Sudan be forced militarily to remain part of Sudan after the south’s referendum on self-determination in six years’ time. Mark Bradbury refers to the international attitude to Somaliland: The strategy in Mbagathi [peace talks] was to ‘park’ the issue of Somaliland, in order to protect the stability in that region. The message from Somaliland, as always, is that it won’t wait, that it pulled out of the car park some time ago. It is steering its own course, and hopes that the international community will follow this.
Another prominent academic of Somali studies, Ken Menkhaus, sums up the situation by asserting: Whether one embraces, rejects, or is ambivalent about Somaliland’s bid for recognition, Somaliland’s progress in democratization, stability, and economic recovery constitutes one of the few pieces of genuinely good news in the troubled Horn of Africa.
5.3 Somaliland Quo Vadis II: The Dilemmas of Self-Determination and Regional Integration
If the AU and the rest of the international community must now come to grips with Somaliland as an established ‘fact on the ground’ amid a still-to-be reconstituted Somalia, the leaders of Somaliland, in their quest for recognition, are also confronted with having to face the realities of an emerging new post-OAU inter-African order; one that further complicates their self-determination/recognition project. Acknowledgement of this reality, in fact, proved itself as early as 2000, when the late President Egal called on the UN to afford it an interim “special status” which, at the time was reported as “a significant climbdown from his previous determination to secure international recognition for Somaliland as an independent state”.
This special status option will be elaborated on in greater detail later in this chapter, in terms of the AU’s capacity for flexibility and creativity. Otherwise, it is useful here to address more fully the realities confronting Hargeisa’s leaders. The significant point to be stressed here is that the AU, unlike the OAU, is emerging as an embryonic continental proto-government of what could well evolve into a “union of African states.”
Interacting with NEPAD, as its blueprint for the continent’s economic development and regional integration, both politically as well as economically, tops the AU’s agenda. Thus, within this context of continental ‘African unity’, all outstanding African self-determination questions will have to be re-thought and re-conceptualised in terms of how they contribute to or detract from African integration, and reinforce or overcome Africa’s already debilitating fragmentation.
In fact, to the extent that this fragmentation remains in effect, in a very real sense, Africa cannot be said to have fully progressed beyond the era of colonialism, as it is this penultimate colonial legacy that is at the root of the continent’s endemic weakness and disarray. That being the case, Somaliland’s quest for recognition must be approached, factoring in this new continental integrationist agenda – as must other self-determination issues or incipient issues like Western Sahara, southern Sudan, Cabinda, the Senegalese Casamance, Zanzibar’s relations with mainland Tanzania and any number of outstanding boundary disputes.
The Somaliland recognition conundrum, therefore, must be approached within the context of considerations pertaining to the future of regional integration in North-East Africa, including the greater East African community.373 This poses thorny questions for Somaliland’s leaders, as it does for other actors, including the AU, IGAD and EAC, the chief one of which is how to approach a resolution of the recognition question vis-à-vis Hargeisa and a reconstituted Somalia based in Mogadishu, in such a manner that advances the overall stabilisation of the Somali coast, while promoting its incorporation into a larger ‘regional integration community’, as envisioned by the AU. Within this context, related to the AU’s larger vision for the continent and its sub-regions, can Somaliland’s leaders and their sympathisers afford to view Somaliland’s independence and international recognition – beyond a special interim status – as an end in itself?
To be sure, Somaliland has an unassailable legal case for remaining outside the current Somalia re-building project. But, how politically – and economically – sustainable is such a posture in the long term, given the current integrationist trajectory of African development and inter-state relations? And if full independence/recognition is not, ultimately, an end in itself, what are the intermediate options for Somaliland and all other actors with a vested interest in stabilising the Somali coast?
The foregoing are the questions which this concluding chapter attempts to address. This entails examining the pros and cons of Somaliland’s case for recognition; how its diplomacy of gaining recognition relates to its inter-state and regional relations with its neighbours and key players in the IGAD Somalia peace process – principally Ethiopia, Djibouti and Kenya, as well as those traditionally opposed to its aspirations such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the Arab League. This analysis, then, expands into assessing the role of the AU and important ‘’out of area’’ African actors such as South Africa, before examining how the broader international community factors into the equation. Against the sub-regional, regional-continental and extra-continental backdrop, Somaliland’s recognition prospects are then explored vis-à-vis the reconstitution of Somalia and the overall question of stabilising the Somali coast. This involves considering possible scenarios within the quest of the AU’s advancement of ‘regional integration communities’.
5.4 Who Will Take the First Step? The Dynamics of Somaliland and the IGAD Sub-Region – Scenario I
At this stage, Somaliland’s diplomacy could be summed up in the recurring refrain that greets its leaders and officials: “We will be the second to recognise Somaliland.” Which begs the pregnant question: Who will take the first step in breaking the diplomatic ice in recognising the Hargeisa regime? Non- African powers like the US and Britain, which seem reasonably-to-favourably disposed toward Somaliland, are looking to the continent for their cues. To this effect, UK’s Minister for Africa, Lord Triesman, asserted:
My Lords, there are continuing contacts with the Government of Somaliland. I pay tribute to that Government; although they are not internationally recognised, in the sense of there being a fully fledged state, the stability of Somaliland stands in sharp contrast to the position across most of the rest of Somalia, with the possible exception of Puntland, directly to the east of Somaliland. Anything that can preserve that stability is very important. I believe that that will be the subject of some discussion at the African Union conference in the Gambia in the first few days of July [2006].
This, in turn, shifts the spotlight on Somaliland’s relations within its immediate neighbourhood among the IGAD stakeholders intimately involved in the politics of resolving both the Sudan and Somalia questions and those ‘out of area’ states like South Africa and Nigeria. Before surveying these relationships, it is instructive to examine Somaliland’s legal case for recognised sovereign status.
5.4.1 A Legal Advisory
In April 2003, the Office of the Chief State Law Adviser (International Law), Department of Foreign Affairs, in South Africa, prepared a legal brief on ‘Somaliland’s Claim to Sovereign Status’. After establishing that “there is no generally accepted and satisfactory modern legal definition of statehood” in international law, it was noted that “the best-known formulation of the basic criteria for statehood is that laid down in Article 1 of the Montevideo Convention, 1933”, defining a state as “a person of international law”, possessing such attributes as “a permanent population, a defined territory, government and capacity to enter into relations with other states”. On this latter point, which impinges on the question of recognition, the brief advised that “although recognition may not create a state”, which should be borne in mind in the case of the Mogadishu-based Somali TFG in terms of Somaliland, “it seems it should be taken into account in deciding whether the fourth requirement is met” – which, in the case of Somaliland, remains elusive. On the other hand, it is also advised that “the role played by the principle of self- determination in the process of creation of states cannot be ignored” either.
Importantly, the brief establishes the circumstantial context in which Somaliland’s independence was declared, one that has yet to change to this day; the fact that “as the struggle for power in Southern Somalia degenerated rapidly into civil war, the SNM leadership abandoned hopes that an acceptable government could be established in Mogadishu”, which effectively created a default situation which, under the pressure of popular sentiment led to a declaration on the dissolution of the 1960 union and “restoration of Somaliland as a sovereign state” – this last caveat alluding to Somaliland’s sovereign, though brief existence separate from the south prior to union.
While not formally recognised, the ability of Somaliland to interact with other states is noted by the fact that it has “established bilateral relations with several countries including Djibouti and the European Union”, where the EU had “approved an extensive project to support rehabilitation of the core road network in Somaliland, with a total budget of 4.5 million Euro”. The government was also “involved in a number of multilateral agreements involving the United Nations Specialised Agencies” although “according to the EU and other countries, Somaliland doesn’t exist …”
In concluding the South African international law analysis, the legal brief pointedly notes a piece of OAU history, as a precedent for the AU that is little known; the fact that “the OAU consistently permitted states to retrieve their sovereignty following an unsuccessful union,” citing Egypt, Gambia and Senegal,381 which are the points of reference that Somaliland’s leaders and supporters stress in arguing for recognition of its sovereign status. Reinforcing this point, the brief states that “Somaliland had not only been a separate colonial unit but actually a separate independent state for five days” … which makes Somaliland’s case unique and special as a legal justification for secession when things have not worked out”.
Comparing Somaliland’s case to that of Eritrea, which, according to the brief, had a less compelling justification for secession, apart from military facts on the ground, whereas Ethiopia and Eritrea separated by mutual agreement, “Somaliland is unable to receive an agreed farewell that was so helpful to Eritrea”. This says volumes about how unhelpful the OAU was, a track record which the AU must try to overcome. In the final analysis, the legal brief concludes that “it is undeniable that Somaliland does indeed qualify for statehood, and it is incumbent upon the international community to recognise it.”384 This brings one back to the question that animates much of the rest of this concluding chapter: ‘Who will take the first step?’
5.5 Ethiopia, Djibouti, Kenya and the IGAD Factor
5.5.1 Ethiopia
Ethiopia is the most strategic African actor in Somaliland’s recognition calculus. Moreover, the ‘empire state,’ in the wake of Somalia’s collapse and in terms of the role it – Addis Ababa – has played within IGAD in the politics and diplomacy of reconstituting the Somali state, has emerged in a hegemonic position in determining the fate of the Somali coast.385 Addis Ababa rides several horses in the Somali regional calculus, much to the chagrin of other state actors like Egypt and its Arab League allies, such as Saudi Arabia. It not only assists Somaliland, but it has also been an important backer of Puntland and its erstwhile leader, now the Somalia TFG’s President Adullahi Yusuf. In its backing of Yusuf, it has also been the main backer of the coalition of southern Somali clan factions and warlords – the former Somali Reconciliation and Reconstruction Council (SRRC) – which opted for a federal dispensation in opposition to the ‘Arab caucus’, led by Egypt and Saudi Arabia which had been the main backers, along with Djibouti, of the Arta Transitional National Government regime, which emerged from the Arta process of 2002 and were proponents of a ‘united Somalia’ as a bulwark against Ethiopia.
The above is all by way of underlining the essentially geo-political ‘proxy’ nature of the politics of reconstituting and stabilising the Somali region. The diverse Somali protagonists, Somaliland included, are essentially proxies in what has been a long and protracted geo-political power-struggle between the Nile Basin powers of ‘downstream’ Egypt – dependent as it is on the Nile in terms of its security interests – and its Arab League allies, and ‘upstream’ Ethiopia. The latter’s land-locked status and sense of encirclement by Arab- Islamic forces drives its vested interests in the outcome of the Somali question. Hence Ethiopia’s vested interest in a federalist resolution of conflict throughout the Somali region, as a safeguard against any future resurgence of Somali irredentism and Egypt’s vested interest in a Somali unitary state throughout the entire expanse of the Somali coast, including Somaliland, as a bulwark against Ethiopia and any possibility that Addis Ababa might disrupt Egypt’s access to Nile waters. Egypt currently enjoys predominant access in the face of growing opposition by other riverine states in greater East Africa, who feel their development retarded by Cairo’s opposition to any developments – political or developmental – that would affect this status quo. Within this greater Nile basin context, Somaliland, along with south Sudan, represent incipient revisionist states against the status quo desired by Egypt.
In the wake of the federalist outcome of the Mbagahti talks, Ethiopia’s interests have been considerably advanced, irrespective of whether or not the TFG actually gets off the ground. Within the wider regional context, the continued existence and viability of Somaliland as an independent entity, separate from the TFG, contributes to the de facto confederacy of autonomous and federated Somali actors that, in terms of Addis Ababa’s security interests, enhances its position. On the other hand, Ethiopia’s hegemonic position has generated a strong backlash against the TFG in Mogadishu. Here, opposition has mobilised against any prospect of Ethiopian troops comprising part of an AU or UN peacekeeping contingent that materialises to facilitate implementation of the Mbagathi accord. Seen from this vantage point, such a force containing Ethiopian elements would be perceived as an instrument for imposing and entrenching a Yusuf ‘puppet regime’ on Somalis.
Thus, Ethiopia’s position vis-à-vis Somalia and Somaliland is a delicate one. This refers not only from the standpoint of opposition within southern Somalia to Ethiopia’s perceived dominance over a TFG seen as its proxy, but also from the standpoint of Ethiopia’s need not to push its luck in antagonising Arab League powers, given the economic interdependence that ties Addis Ababa to the Persian Gulf. Recognition of Somaliland would likely trigger such a backlash. Furthermore, since Ethiopia would become a major beneficiary of any advances that could be made toward regional integration in the Horn of Africa, its calculus in terms of Somaliland’s status would have to favour an arrangement that facilitated Somaliland’s integration into a regionally integrated greater Somali region, linked to a larger North-East African integration project; perhaps one associated with the prospective East African federation and customs union. The fact of the matter is that regional integration in East and North-East Africa is still very much up in the air in terms of how this mega-region will finally be configured. Ethiopia, therefore, will not want to initiate any major diplomatic moves, such as recognising Somaliland. That would prematurely foreclose greater East-North-East Africa’s integration options. This is probably why, in an August 2003 statement, Ethiopian Information Minister Bereket Simon, after a visit to Addis Ababa by President Kahin, stressed that Somaliland’s future lies within a united Somalia. On the other hand, as a three-year member of the AU’s PSC, and in terms of its need for regional stability, Ethiopia has a major vested interest in ensuring an environment of peace and security between all Somali coast actors: the Mogadishu TFG, Puntland and Somaliland. For these reasons, in addition to the OAU-inherited tradition of maintaining ‘territorial integrity’, irrespective of the legal case in favour of Hargeisa’s sovereign status, Ethiopia, for the time being, may opt for the status quo, while focusing on developing a close bilateral economic relationship with Somaliland.
Toward the end of 2000, Somaliland signed agreements with Ethiopia, aimed at boosting trade and communications. This was announced following a visit by the late President Egal on a three-day official visit to Addis Ababa. The core of the agreement centred on enabling greater use of the strategic port of Berbera, on the Gulf of Aden, by improving the road link to the Ethiopian border. Ethiopia would install a microwave communication link between Burao, Hargeisa and Berbera. Ethiopian and Somaliland central banks were intended to facilitate trade by providing links to the outside world. From the Hargeisa standpoint, the agreement was seen as a significant boost for Somaliland in its efforts to gain international recognition. This transport communications development between Ethiopia and Somaliland has proven to be in the pragmatic interests of the international community, as well as in the interests of those two countries.
In August 2003, the EU, for the first time, shipped food aid to Ethiopia through Berbera. At the time, it was reported that “some 15,000 tonnes of relief food have already arrived and more than 100,000 tonnes more will have arrived by next Monday, all through the port of Berbera. Security is not a problem in the region and 15,000 tonnes have arrived in Ethiopia without any a hitch”, which President Kahin said demonstrated “the credibility and confidence on the security situation”. For Ethiopia, the Berbera outlet helps alleviate the problems of congestion which it confronts in its use of the port of Djibouti. Thus, given Ethiopia’s status as Africa’s largest land-locked state and Africa’s second most populous country, it is not putting all its ‘eggs in one basket’, as it had also signed, at that time, a memorandum of understanding with Sudan for the use of its Red Sea ports and roads.
All this relates to the state of hostilities that exists between Ethiopia and Eritrea, which has placed the latter’s Massawa and Assab ports off-limits. However, given the capacity of the Berbera port and its strategic location vis- à-vis Ethiopia, further reinforcing its position as a regional transport hub with international backing, which cannot but help Somaliland. In this regard, the EU also undertook, in 2003, a feasibility study in preparation for rehabilitating a road linking Somaliland and Ethiopia. The study covered the road network from Berbera to the border town of Tog Wajale and to Addis Ababa. The French consultancy firm that undertook the study was also involved in consultations with Somaliland and Ethiopia on the prospects of a ‘Berbera corridor’ handling part of Ethiopia’s import-export cargo.
Prior to the EU-assisted strengthening of the Berbera link, Ethiopian Airlines had established a regular service between Addis Ababa and Hargeisa. Somaliland and Ethiopia have established rudimentary diplomatic presences in one another’s capitals; liaison offices as a means of managing their growing bilateral ties. In 2006, Ethiopia upgraded its representation in Hargeisa at the ambassadorial level. These ties are reinforced by regular official visits by Somaliland leaders to Addis Ababa for consultations, including the heads-of- state level, though such visits at that level reflect a one-way pattern without Ethiopia’s President Meles Zenawi reciprocating by visiting Hargeisa. There have, however, been several two-way ministerial visits. Clearly, as David Shinn wrote in the Addis Tribune in 2002, while “probably sympathetically inclined, Ethiopia is unwilling to be the first to recognize Somaliland” as “Somalia would immediately attribute nefarious motives to Ethiopian recognition of Somaliland, arguing that it wishes to balkanize Somalia and weaken Somali unity.” Ethiopia’s growing ties with Hargeisa has led the doyen of Somali studies, Ioan Lewis, to conclude that Ethiopia has more ties with unrecognised Somaliland than it possesses with many other recognised African countries. Recently, Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi summed up Ethiopia’s diplomatic position towards Somaliland, taking into account some of the key internal politics of identity challenges with which he is faced: “Others can be more adventurous than we are” to recognise Somaliland.
Ethiopia was “indicted for furthering Eritrea’s independence” and given Ethiopia’s historical baggage on Somali issues, it will be best for another country to take the lead. Short of formal recognition, Ethiopia will develop all the links possible with Somaliland. “Behind the scene, we will support justice and self-determination of Somaliland”.
Somaliland’s new 2006 Foreign Minister, Abdillahi Duale’s first external visit was to Addis Ababa for bilateral talks with Ethiopia’s Foreign Minister and to consolidate follow-up discussions with the African Union’s Professor Alpha Konare.
The June 2006 East African diplomatic tour of Somaliland President Kahin to Kenya, Zambia, Tanzania, Rwanda and Uganda, has opened new avenues for Somaliland’s case to be heard by other East African states and has lifted the pressure on Ethiopia to be the prime neighbouring champion of Somaliland’s case in Africa.
5.5.2 Djibouti
Djibouti, former French Somaliland, also shares a northern border with Somaliland. More than that, given the Isaaq predominance in Somaliland, there are important clan affinities between it and Djibouti. However, this has not made for a history of smooth relations between the two. As Shinn describes it, “relations between Somaliland and Djibouti are correct but not warm. Somaliland resents Djibouti’s initiative in helping to create the TNG in
Somalia and is not comfortable with the current Djiboutian leadership. Djibouti continues to have a complex set of financial and commercial links with the TNG” while Djibouti’s “commitment to the preservation of Somali unity suggests that it wants to prevent the emergence of a viable and independent Somaliland”. Though relations between Somaliland and Djibouti have improved, as witnessed by the 2005 visit by President Kahin to that country, Djibouti President Ismail Omar Guelleh’s mentoring of the Arta Somalia Peace Conference, which gave rise to the TNG, has made for a tense relationship.
In effect, Guelleh, in the eyes of Somalilanders, became an Egypt/Arab League proxy in its quest to influence Somali regional politics – a niche for Guelleh that – for a time at least, was quite lucrative. As articulated in a Somaliland Forum press release during July 2000,
… this move instantly won him some international friends and money – a badly needed cash infusion for his crumbling economy. The regional organizations such as the Arab League, OAU and IGAD, of which the old Somalia once was a member, all came aboard and bank-rolled Mr Guelleh’s latest political gamble on the Somali issue.
Hosting the Arta process was accompanied by Guelleh’s closing of Djibouti’s border with Somaliland; banning of Somaliland’s leading opposition daily newspaper, Jamhuuriya, from entering Djibouti; promoting/sanctioning of anti- Somaliland propaganda and attempts to co-opt “a token few Somalilanders to his conference, whom he thought, and still thinks that the world would believe that they represent the people of Somaliland”. This latter ploy would resurface during the Mbagathi process in the creation of what Afrol News termed a “new” Somali ethnic group called the “Northern Dir clan”. However, the upshot of these manoeuvres was to bring relations between Djibouti and Somaliland close to a flashpoint.
The descent of the Arta-engineered TNG, led by ‘President’ Abdikassim Salat, into dysfunction and disarray, and the triggering of the 14th attempt at reconstituting Somalia, placed Djibouti and its Arab-backers on the defensive vis-à-vis Ethiopia’s backing for the federal ‘solution’, which emerged as the successor to the TNG. The Afro-Arab geo-political confrontation surrounding Arta and the successor Mbagathi process ranged Ethiopia and its allies in Somaliland, Puntland and the pro-federalist SRRC against an increasingly fractured TNG, backed by Egypt, Saudi Arabia (which underwrote it), Eritrea and Yemen, as well as Djibouti. The terminal disintegration of Arta and its TNG progeny inexorably played into the hands of Ethiopia and its Somali regional coalition allies. These dynamics worked to eventually depolarise the tense relations between Djibouti and Somaliland, although the distrust that the Arta process had generated appeared to linger, fuelled by regional insecurities generated by jihadist tendencies of a fundamentalist political Islam associated with the post-September 11, 2001 ‘war on terror’. As recounted in the previous chapter on religion, the destabilising potential of this threat to Somaliland, internally and in its relations with Djibouti, surfaced during the murders of the two British nationals outside Hargeisa in 2003. This episode suggested, to some, the possibility that, as a corollary to promoting ‘Somali unity’ at Mbagathi, Somaliland’s stability was being sacrificed in the process by Arab acquiescence in, if not outright promotion of, terror attacks that would undermine confidence in Somaliland’s stability and hence work toward its isolation. Djibouti was thus seen as a possible partner in such machinations.
In spite of Somaliland’s tensions with Djibouti, the two states are inextricably linked through geographical proximity and culture. Shinn points out that “even with the current tension in the relationship, there is considerable informal trade between the two countries and, because taxes are lower in Somaliland, many Djiboutians buy goods there. Somaliland officials argue that Djibouti needs Somaliland more than Somaliland needs Djibouti. They also suspect that Djibouti fears competition from the port of Berbera once it is fully rehabilitated”, though at the time, prior to EU assistance, Shinn could add that “with so few ships now using the port, there is little incentive to rehabilitate it”. In any case, relations between Somaliland and Djibouti began to thaw during the latter part of 2001 when the two countries signed a six-point agreement.
Somaliland’s Foreign Minister at the time, Abdihamid Garad Jama, in announcing the six-point agreement, said that they had agreed to “cease all propaganda and other activities that have damaged relations between them in the past”. The agreement includes facilitation of the “free movement of people, goods and livestock between them”. A joint committee was established to ensure that Somaliland and Djibouti would “enjoy friendly relations in the future” and “join forces against anything that threatens their security”. Thus ended the border closure confrontation, which had brought relations to a new low.
In the wake of the conclusion of the Mbagathi process, resulting in the TFG successor to the TNG, President Kahin’s January 2005 visit to Djibouti, as his first stop on a tour that would also take him to Ethiopia and South Africa, demonstrated how far Djibouti-Somaliland bilateral relations had progressed.
Reporting on the Djibouti visit, Afrol News described the Somaliland president as having been accorded “an official welcome at Djibouti airport”. With him and his delegation (which included Foreign Minister Edna Adan Ismail and Information Minister Abdillahi Mohammed Dualeh, among others) immediately going into “talks with Djiboutian Prime Minister at the State House before holding official talks with President Ismail Omar Guelleh at the Presidential Palace”. As in Ethiopia, there is now a Somaliland Representative Office in Djibouti, which Kahin toured. The fact that the visit, overall, was seen to include all of the ceremonial symbols of an official visit by a foreign head of state was regarded as an “important symbolic victory” for President Kahin, as “Djibouti long has been regarded one of the principal opponents to the recognition of Somaliland, supporting Somali unity”. While the Djiboutian public position “is to continue to support a unified Somali state”, it took active steps, in 2005, to support Somaliland’s diplomatic office in Djibouti and is slowly beginning to incline towards support of Somaliland’s recognition. A key factor in this regard is Djibouti’s efforts to ensure a safe environment for the US military base in Djibouti and its key national interests, notably the substantial US aid to Djibouti.
5.5.3 Kenya
David Shinn, in his survey of Somaliland’s bilateral ties with different member states of IGAD, makes no mention of Kenya in spite of Kenya’s sponsoring role in the Somali talks, known as Mbagathi talks. Apart from Nairobi’s facilitating role, personified by that of its Special Envoy on behalf of IGAD, Bethuel Kiplagat, there is little to go on regarding how Kenya views Somaliland. Within the context of the Mbagathi process, it seems that Kenya and Kiplagat’s main preoccupations, as far as they had any relevance for Somaliland, were to manage any possibility that those talks might generate regional tensions between the Hargeisa republic and Somali parties to the talks by Mbagathi extending its mandate to cover the north-west Somali region – Somaliland. To the extent that these problems surfaced, Somaliland appeared to be ambivalent about Kenya’s intentions and those of Kiplagat. An object example, in this regard, was cited in the 2 September 2004 issue of Afrol News: “Somaliland protests being called ‘Northern Dir clan’ ”. This controversy arose during the especially sensitive concluding phase of Mbagathi.
According to Afrol News at the time, “a ‘new’ Somali ethnic group has been introduced at the ongoing Somali peace conference in Kenya; the ‘Northern Dir clan’. As Somaliland authorities refuse to partake in the Kenya talks, this new clan is to represent the people of the unrecognised state. Somalilanders however hold there exists no such thing as a ‘Northern Dir clan’ ”. From the report, this alleged clan that surfaced at Mbagathi first reared its head at Arta, allegedly “invented by Djibouti’s President Ismael Omar Guelleh”. In terms of the Kenya talks, the reappearance of this clan was seen as part of a fabrication of a “new Dir confederacy” serving as a “conduit through which fake delegates could be introduced in the Mbagathi conference as representatives of Somaliland”. Despite the elusiveness of the ‘Northern Dir clan’ term, the report went on to point out that “there is however documentation of IGAD country representatives admitting the term was created to embrace Somaliland representatives to the Somali peace talks despite the unwillingness of Somaliland’s government to participate”. This is where distrust regarding the role of Kenya emerges more clearly. The Afrol News article concludes: Ambassador Bethuel Kiplagat, Kenya’s special envoy to Somalia who heads the peace talks, has made it clear that IGAD will pressure for a united Somalia. IGAD does not recognise Somaliland. ‘Hence, you could say they are for territorial integrity and the unity of Somalia. It is implied that Somaliland is included in Somalia,’ Mr. Kiplagat last year told the ‘East African Standard’.
Somaliland authorities had been invited to the Mbagathi peace talks, Mr Kiplagat further emphasised. They were however invited on the same basis as Somalia’s war lords. The Somaliland government rejected the invitation, saying it had ‘no mandate to compromise Somaliland’s sovereign status’ following a pro-independence referendum. Consequently, the Djiboutian scheme to invite the ‘Northern Dir clan’ on behalf of Somaliland was endorsed by IGAD.
Thus, it appears that Djibouti’s mischief became Kenya’s mischief which, in turn, was given an IGAD identity. In fact, though Kiplagat and Kenya have, understandably, articulated an obligatory commitment to Somalia’s territorial integrity, they obviously did not push energetically for Mbagathi to extend its writ to Somaliland and, moreover, appear to have abided by the expectation that no unity talks between Somaliland and Somalia could take place until a new Mogadishu government was in place. On the other hand, it has been suggested that Kenya’s large Somali population in its historically contested ‘Northern Frontier District’ – as in the case of Ethiopia’s Ogaden Somali region – has rendered Kenya suspect in terms of its own commitment to Somalia’s territorial integrity as a counter to any possibility of a resurgent Somali irredentism. Hence, Kenya’s emphasis on a united Somalia during the course of Mbagathi could be seen in this light. Shedding light on this dimension was an interesting commentary by M.S. Ahmed who, in a March 2004 article,417 pointed out that “Kenya, which has a longstanding territorial dispute with Somalia, has an interest in confirming Somalia’s de facto disintegration into two separate entities (Somaliland and Somalia), as it has in the division of Sudan into a Christian-controlled south and a Muslim north”. The author links this calculus to the ongoing Nile controversy between regional states and Egypt by continuing:
Such a break-up will provide it (along with Tanzania, Uganda and Ethiopia) with an opportunity to demand the revision of the treaty governing the distribution of the River Nile’s waters. In fact it has already announced (as Tanzania has also done) that it will withdraw from the treaty, sensing no doubt that Washington’s success in forcing Khartoum to concede to southern Sudan the right to secede will eventually consign the treaty to the past.
The author’s case is backed up by a March 20, 2003 ‘Weekly Special Report’ circulated by the US State Department’s Office of International Information Programmes which suggests that “Kenya does not want a strong neighbor that one day revives the Greater Somalia concept. For this reason, it is probably quietly sympathetic with an independent Somaliland. But as long as it is trying to solve the larger issue of peace in Somalia, it must remain completely neutral”. Thus, Ahmed concludes by contending that, while both Kenya and Ethiopia support the idea of follow-up peace talks between Somaliland and Somalia after “the southern factions reach a final deal”, neither Kenya nor Ethiopia “will be keen to push a project that seeks to reunite southern and northern Somalia, and the US will not put pressure on them to change their attitudes”.
Ultimately, then, it is going to fall in the lap of the AU, in pursuit of its continental integrationist agenda, to tackle whatever new basis for reuniting the Somali region emerges, as IGAD will undoubtedly pass the buck to this level of African diplomacy. In any case, what Kenya, Ethiopia and Djibouti appear to hold in common is the necessity to maintain a stable stalemate between Somaliland and Somalia. Stalemated stability may be viewed as an interim status quo by default, which emerges from the uncertainties pertaining to both and the need for those uncertainties not to be allowed to spiral out of control; concerns periodically reinforced by Somaliland-Puntland border disturbances over Sool and eastern Saanag.
Kenya’s strategy at the Somalia Reconciliation talks at Mbagathi was to ‘park’ the issue of Somaliland in order to protect stability in that region. The message from Somaliland, as always, is that it won’t wait, that it pulled out of the car park some time ago. It is steering its own course, and hopes that the international community will follow this.
Recently, Kenyan President Kibaki (and Chairman of IGAD) invited Somaliland President Kahin to visit Kenya. An official invitation letter was extended for the planned June 2006 visit, and talks were subsequently held in Nairobi. It thereafter emerged that Kenya had taken a much more proactive stance toward consolidating Somaliland’s stability, emerging democracy424 and its case for recognition. Kenya is willing, like Ethiopia, to establish diplomatic ties and advance Somaliland’s bid for recognition in African multi- lateral fora including the suggested option of Somaliland seeking membership of IGAD.
5.5.4 The Anti-Somaliland Coalition
Apart from Egypt’s Nile-focused security calculus, it is hard to fathom Arab League opposition to Somaliland’s independence, except for geo-cultural hegemony concerns over the Somali region as an ‘Afrabian’ sphere of influence in North-East Africa under Arab-Islamic control. To a large extent, these influences impinging on the politics and diplomacy surrounding the reconstitution of the Somali region are held in check by the fact that, though pre-disintegration Somalia – and its Mogadishu rump – was a member of the Arab League, the region first and foremost falls within the African continental jurisdiction of the AU and its sub-regional economic communities. Since Ethiopia’s fate is so intimately intertwined with that of the Somali region in a way not comparable to Somalia’s relations with the Arab states, it is African dictates that carry the upper hand. There have been cases where the Arab League has tried creative diplomacy to gain the upper hand by isolating the AU and IGAD. A case in point is the recent “peace accord” between the TFG and Mogadishu’s Islamic Courts Union, where the AU and IGAD were not involved in this diplomatic initiative.
The stalemated stability between Somaliland and a pro-Ethiopian settlement emanating from Mbagathi reflects these realities. Nevertheless, the negative and obstructionist role represented by the Arab states with respect to a regional settlement, and the interests of Somaliland, are not to be underestimated. Moreover, their geo-cultural and geo-political-economic interest in the Somali region (indeed, the entire Horn of Africa) – as underlined in Chapter Four – is very real and historically rooted, and therefore not a factor that can be ignored in the debate over Somaliland’s recognition. Consequently, this section provides an analytical survey of the Arab interests influencing Somaliland’s fate.
5.5.5 Egypt
The same ‘Weekly Special Report’ of 20 March 2003 that articulates Kenya’s unstated interest in a balkanised Somali coast, divided between two Somalias as a means of changing the status quo surrounding the Nile, counterpoises Egypt’s well-known concerns that reflect Cairo’s interest in “a strong Somali state” as a counterweight to Ethiopia and as reinforcing the status quo on the Nile. “Eighty-six percent of the water reaching the Aswan Dam in Egypt emanates from Ethiopia.” Therefore, “the leadership in Cairo wants to maintain maximum leverage over Ethiopia. A unified Somalia that might one day reassert its claims to Somali-inhabited areas of Ethiopia and has close links to Egypt would add to this leverage.” As a result, referring to the post- Arta/pre-Mbagathi processes, “Egypt is one of five countries that has recognized the TNG and opposes an independent Somaliland”. The magnitude of Egypt’s opposition to Somaliland independence provided interesting insight from John Drysdale at a 2004 workshop in Hargeisa, when he recounted how former UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali tried everything in his power to prevent and reverse Somaliland’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI). Boutros-Ghali went to the extent of making a bid via the UN to have Egyptian troops deployed in Berbera as part of a ‘peacekeeping’ presence that would have given Egypt a major strategic military foothold in the Horn of Africa. This was part of an attempt to have a UN resolution passed which, according to Drysdale, would have declared the “territorial integrity” of Somalia, inclusive of Somaliland. Egyptian troops would have given force to such a resolution – had it materialised. Instead, as Drysdale recounts, it backfired on Boutros-Ghali and Egypt.
It effectively made Somaliland’s UDI irreversible and prejudiced future reconciliation between Hargeisa and any government that would emerge in Mogadishu. Drysdale went further in his remarks to assert that UN Secretary- General Kofi Annan and the UN Secretariat had regretted communicating the UN’s recognition of the TNG, in light of its dismal failure, stressing that the UN’s mistake in the Somali region has been its failure to balance its support for “territorial integrity” with the Charter’s “self-determination” principle, posing the question: “What is ‘territorial integrity’ vis-à-vis the fluidity and contestability of boundaries?”
More recently, in the context of controversy over African peacekeeping troop deployment associated with implementing Mbagathi, Cairo once again raised the spectre of deploying troops in Somalia to counter any troops that might be deployed from Ethiopia.434 Otherwise, Boutros-Ghali’s earlier actions in regard to Somaliland, undoubtedly entrenched a hard-line on the part of Somaliland’s leaders in how they would relate to developments in the south. Perhaps this has been to an extent that has gone against their ‘national interest’ in pragmatically influencing Egypt and other Arab states to be more accommodative of Somaliland’s interests. Thus, “an Egyptian envoy visited Hargeisa in October 2002, congratulated Somaliland for the success it has achieved, and then urged it to participate in talks in Kenya on Somali unity with groups from Somalia. The Somaliland president rejected any thought of participating in the Kenyan-sponsored talks. Apart from the fact that Somaliland would not have been accorded differentiated status from any other delegates at Mbagathi – which, in fact, would probably have made such talks a non-starter to begin with – Egypt’s track record on Somali regional politics has left it with no credibility, given the outcome of the federalist, pro-Ethiopian outcome of Mbagathi and Somaliland’s understandable rejection of participation in those talks. Egypt, as host of the Arab League, has witnessed the League making its first ever fact-finding visit to Somaliland in December 2003. Subsequently, the League has maintained contact with Somaliland’s Foreign Ministry. No change in its original diplomatic position has been detected, barring some basic humanitarian medical assistance to Somaliland’s health institutions. In September 2005, at the conclusion of the Somaliland parliamentary elections, the Arab League’s ambassador to Addis Ababa visited Somaliland and congratulated the Republic for the success of its first democratic parliamentary elections. At recent African Union meetings, such as the AU Executive Council meeting in Sirte, Libya (2005) and in Banjul, Gambia (2006), Egypt opted, at least in public, not to oppose discussion on Somaliland at AU fora.437 This may have been due to some external pressure, possibly from the US, Egypt’s largest provider of foreign aid.
5.5.6 Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States
According to Shinn, “Saudi Arabia poses a major dilemma for Somaliland” in as much as the livestock ban has provided a non-belligerent reason to apply economic sanctions against Hargeisa, without appearing to be openly hostile to it, while, at the same time, bank-rolling the TNG. The way Shinn put it in his 2002 paper:
A major financial backer of the TNG and supporter within the Arab League, Saudi Arabia was traditionally the major importer of Somaliland livestock. For the better part of the last five years, Saudi Arabia has banned livestock from Somaliland on the grounds that it might be infected with Rift Valley Fever. Somaliland denies the charges and there does not appear to be any current scientific evidence to support the claim. Recent investigations by the Food and Agricultural Organization and World Health Organization found no evidence of Rift Valley Fever in Somaliland. Several Gulf States that import small quantities of Somaliland livestock have lifted the ban. Some observers suspect that the ban is linked to Saudi business interests involved in the importation of livestock from other countries. The ban has hit nearly every kind of employment in the country – pastoralists, truck drivers, livestock traders, animal health staff, brokers, port employees and private business people. The impact is especially great in Berbera. The town is not prosperous, and the large international airport, built during the Soviet interlude in Somalia, is effectively shut down. Berbera is lucky to have one or two ships in the harbor on any given day. The problem is aggravated because the government of Somaliland does not have any access to the Saudi royal family and has been unable to make its case directly to the Saudi government. Governments with close ties to Saudi Arabia, including the United States, appear to have little interest in making Somaliland’s case. While other Persian Gulf states have lifted the livestock ban, their impact on Somaliland’s economy has been marginal compared to that of the Saudis. Given the failure of Arta and the reality of the federalist TFG, which the Saudis, Egyptians and others of the Arab League opposed, it is not clear how the current interregnum – before and, indeed, if the TFG succeeds where the TNG failed – might be made to work on Somaliland’s behalf in its Arab diplomacy. In fact, all of the five states that backed the TNG are having to recalculate their posture. Yemen, for example, which Shinn points out “has a long history of links with Somaliland”439 was in the process of improving its relations with Hargeisa when this initiative was disrupted by Arta, and relations between Yemen and Somaliland suffered. It is not yet clear what diplomatic ground with Yemen and other regional states might be regained post-Arta and now, on into the implementation of Mbagathi, though Somaliland’s thaw in its relations with Djibouti could provide a positive precedent. However, these prospects may depend on ‘out of area’ African state actors and the AU demonstrating a departure from the ‘territorial integrity’ diplomatic orthodoxy of the AU’s predecessor, the OAU. Certainly, the balance of forces in favour of such a departure may be reflected in the composition of the AU’s Peace and Security Council, where both Ethiopia and South Africa are among the PSC’s three- year de facto permanent members.
5.6 Who Will Take the First Step? African ‘out of area’ actors and the AU – Scenario II
5.6.1 South Africa
Outside of Ethiopia, South Africa has emerged as the main ‘out of area’ African state willing to entertain Somaliland’s case for international recognition. While Pretoria hews to the politico-diplomatic convention of the AU’s derived commitment to ‘territorial integrity’ and aversion to anything that might smack of ‘secession,’ its track record on African issues falling in the ‘self-determination’ ambit has been decidedly pragmatic, being geared toward conflict resolution rather than rigid options. South Africa’s eventual recognition of the Sahrawi Republic, which the ruling ANC had long been committed to recognising,440 is indicative, as is the manner in which Pretoria has navigated its strategy toward the Sudan.
Rather than giving African dissident nationalists no quarter, the government, motivated by a diplomacy of conflict resolution and reconciliation, has made itself open to consultations with all parties involved in such intractable conflicts. Such a posture is deemed in South Africa’s national interest in stabilising Africa for purposes of economic development within the framework of NEPAD. This, among other things, serves South Africa’s economic interests as a major investor throughout the continent. As such, Pretoria has become a major actor in the AU as a leading member of the PSC where, as in the case of Sudan, it chairs the PSC ministerial committee on that country’s post-conflict reconstruction. Moreover, the liberal human rights sentiment that finds expression among civil society actors on South African foreign and peace and security policy, reinforces the government’s outreach on vexed self-determination issues. This has all been on display in the case of Somaliland, which has managed to forge excellent relations with Pretoria, short of achieving recognition. A 2006 International Crisis Group report concludes that: “South Africa has enjoyed an especially close relationship with Somaliland since the late President Egal first visited in 2002.”
The manner in which Somaliland’s leaders have managed to stabilise the country compared to the chaotic, stateless situation in the south, has had a major impression on the South African media, where Somaliland has generally received favourable press and the attention of South Africa’s key international relations institutes. Somaliland’s relatively good governance has, as a result, influenced Pretoria’s openness with Hargeisa. Through civil society, including the ANC, South Africa has found a means of participating in the important phases of Somaliland’s political transition. This has occurred through the encouragement given to non-governmental participation in election monitoring, pertaining to the referendum on Somaliland’s constitution and in the conducting of presidential and parliamentary elections.
Both Presidents Egal and Kahin and several of their officials have made visits to South Africa, where they have the attention of South African government officials and representatives in civil society and in the business community. The medical treatment that the late President Egal received in South Africa’s Military 1 Hospital in Pretoria, where he was hospitalised when he died, is indicative of the kind of relationship that has been achieved between Somaliland and South Africa.446 The fact that the South African Department of Foreign Affairs would investigate Somaliland’s status in international law, as cited earlier, is a further indication in this regard. As such, both South Africa and Ethiopia have been well positioned to influence the AU on its approach to the Somali coast. Needless to say, for now at least, Pretoria is not willing to make the first move in recognising Hargeisa. Instead, it has requested the AU to take the lead in the context of South Africa’s emphasis on multilateralism.
The early 2005 working visit of Somaliland’s President ended with a communiqué which asserted:
The Somaliland President and ANC leaders furthermore welcomed the planned African Union fact-finding mission to Somaliland and exchanged ideas, which urged African leaders in areas of conflict on the Continent to cooperate with the African Union to solve outstanding problems in a peaceful, and fair manner. The Somaliland President praised President Thabo Mbeki’s peace-building efforts in Africa and his efforts to promote Nepad’s goal of inter-African trade, to achieve the aims of a stronger and renewed African continent.
South Africa’s Deputy Foreign Minister Aziz Pahad re-asserted its position in relation to the AU leading on this matter by saying:
The African Union sent a high-level team to Somaliland to assess the situation. Their report indicated that Somaliland should be treated differently to other situations of cessation. This report is now being discussed by other countries to determine how to proceed on the matter. It is important to note however that the recognition of Somaliland is one part of a bigger situation with regard to Somalia.
5.6.2 The African Union
Given IGAD’s direct involvement and commitment to restoring a functioning government in Mogadishu, Somaliland’s future is largely dependent on the course that the AU adopts in navigating the Somaliland-Somalia stalemate. Currently, the AU has opened an office in the city of Jawhar/Baidawa and maintains diplomatic contact with Somaliland’s government.
As stated earlier, the AU’s continental integrationist agenda, linked to the evolution of ‘regional integration communities’ among its sub-regions, is likely to rule out AU official recognition of Somaliland no matter what the legal and political case for such a decision might be. Moreover, the very fact that the AU harbours major state actors belonging to the Arab League, such as Egypt and other North African countries, would also tend to rule out such an option. Nevertheless, in the wake of fourteen failed successive attempts to resuscitate Somalia, five transitional governments and the uncertain prospects facing the current attempt, the AU – unlike the OAU – has appeared willing at least to carefully weigh the options for stabilising the Somali coast in a manner that factors in the reality of Somaliland as an on- the-ground fact which will not go away and neither be forced into a shot-gun union with the Mogadishu-based TFG. Here, the track record that the AU is building up on the Somalia-Somaliland issue warrants a closer look.
Assessing the AU’s approach to Somaliland revolves around two reports presented to its PSC in 2004 and 2005. In the 2004 document, ‘Report of the Chairperson of the Commission on the Situation in Somalia’, AU Commission Chairperson, Alpha Konare, made the following observations about Somaliland: During the period under review, Somaliland has continued to experience relative peace and stability, compared to the other regions of the Somalia. As a result, Somaliland has made significant headway in the fields of health, education and economic development. The efforts thus made had benefited from the support of UN agencies and other international organizations and NGOs. Once they unilaterally declared the independence of their region, in 1991, the authorities of Somaliland have made sustained efforts to obtain international recognition. So far, these efforts have not yielded any result. On 13 March 2004, I received the President of Somaliland, who briefed me on the situation in that region and the achievements made over the past years. He stressed the need for the international community to accord international recognition on Somaliland. In the meantime, he requested an observer status within the AU, to enable Somaliland to follow the developments in the Union. On my part, I explained that the concerns of Somaliland could be addressed within the federal framework agreed upon in Mbagathi, in the context of the unity of Somalia. I stressed the need for Somaliland to contribute to the success of the Reconciliation Conference and to make concrete proposals to that effect.
Among his concluding observations, Konare indicated that “I welcome the continued stability in Somaliland” and “intend to continue to engage the authorities of this region, with the view of looking at ways through which they would, in due time, contribute to the restoration of peace and security in Somalia, as well as the unity of the country.” Of course this was at the end of April 2004, several months before the Mbagathi process would conclude in the formal establishment of the TFG, by which time an emerging sentiment regarding the outcome of Mbagathi reflected a growing sense of caution about any rush to recognise a new Mogadishu regime in the light of past history. While Somaliland was not making much headway toward achieving international recognition and the AU was towing the ‘party line’ on Hargeisa joining Mbagathi, how the AU and the international community at large would greet a new Somali settlement pertaining to Mogadishu became a major factor in the Somaliland status equation.
At the beginning of 2005, another Chairperson’s report was tabled to the PSC: ‘Report of the Chairperson of the Commission on the Support of the African Union to the Transitional Institutions of Somalia’.453 This report largely focused on the need to enhance the security environment in Somalia as a means of facilitating the governing of the TFG. The preoccupation was on relocating the new government from Kenya and on issues of deploying an AU peacekeeping mission. The issue of recognition of TFG Somalia was not raised, though the Chairperson pointedly stressed that “I wish to call for dialogue to resolve any outstanding national issues” which, within the context of the Mbagathi ‘party line’, would include Somaliland.
With regard to Somaliland, the Chairperson made the following observation: On a related development, I received a high level delegation led by the ‘President’ of Somaliland, in the course of October 2004, and another delegation led by the ‘Foreign Minister’ of Somaliland, in the course of November 2004. During the visits, the delegations submitted a request for the AU to accord Somaliland a kind of recognition, including the granting of an observer status within the AU. The delegation led by the Foreign Minister brought to my attention the skirmishes that took place at the end of October 2004, between the forces of Somaliland and those of the neighbouring Puntland, near the town of Los Anod. The delegation then requested the AU to dispatch a Fact-finding Mission to Somaliland, in connection with the incidents that took place around Los Anod. The delegation also brought to my attention the gains made by Somaliland in the social, economic and security sectors.
On my part, I encouraged the authorities to pursue the path of dialogue to address any differences and misunderstandings with the then authorities of Puntland and with the Transitional Federal Government of Somalia. I welcomed the progress made in the fields of social and economic development and security in Somaliland. I also undertook to dispatch a Mission to Somaliland as soon as possible. On 3 May 2005, a seven-person AU delegation, headed by AU Deputy Chairman Patrick Mazimhaka, visited Somaliland. Its itinerary included Burco and Berbera, where thousands of people reportedly poured out onto the streets to welcome what was an unprecedented visit of the AU team. The delegation was also scheduled to visit the Awdal region stopover in Gabiley. In Hargeisa, Somaliland’s political leaders took the occasion of the AU visit to frankly express Somaliland’s frustration with the AU. The Deputy Speaker of Somaliland’s Lower House, Abdulqadir Jirde said: “The wisdom that evaded the international community is to allow the more successful political entities that emerge from the death and decay of failed states to flourish and take their place in the society of states. Somaliland and Eritrea qualify as prime examples of such successful political units.” He continued by pointing out that the AU’s ignoring Somaliland’s achievements was “unwittingly jeopardizing the stability and security of the region” and further, that “Somaliland cannot be wished away by any stretch of the imagination nor can it be bullied into a forced re-marriage with Somalia…” .
Whether or not this AU delegation’s visit will result in any benefit for Somaliland beyond the narrow confines of the border dispute with Puntland, and a TFG headed by the former anti-Somaliland leader of Puntland, is uncertain. Similar uncertainty pertains to the AU’s openness to a dialogue with Somaliland via its Chairperson, though the May 2005 AU visit augured well, depending on how the visit impacted on the members of the delegation and how the AU follows through on their findings from it. Perhaps what is transpiring is an interim holding action on the AU’s part, pending signs of credibility in the actual relocation and functioning of a government in Mogadishu. It could even be argued that, at some point, the AU could enhance its leverage over the political situation in Mogadishu by extending observer recognition to Somaliland.
Alternatively, the AU may wish to hold off conferring observer status on Hargeisa pending a build up in transitional momentum for the Somalia TFG, to a point where it can package Somaliland observer status with a mutual commitment on the part of both Hargeisa and Mogadishu and negotiate some sort of regional reconciliation. Certainly, it is premature for talks between Hargeisa and Mogadishu at this stage, given the uncertain future of the TFG. Further, presumably the AU would want to position itself in such a manner so as to exert leverage over both, as a means of moving events in the direction it desired for bringing about a normalised situation along the Somali coast and for whatever vision it may hold for a regionally integrated Horn of Africa. Or perhaps this is wishful thinking that reads too much in the AU’s coyness toward Somaliland’s overtures.
For Somaliland, such speculation is far from idle as its development potential in terms of attracting international assistance and foreign investment is seen as largely contingent on recognition. At the 2004 workshop in Hargeisa, John Drysdale observed that financial self-reliance was becoming more and more critical for Somaliland as a result of the recognition challenge, coupled with Saudi Arabia’s economic sanctions under the guise of a livestock ban linked to the ‘Rift Valley fever’ pretext.
The July 2006 AU Summit witnessed for the very first time the case of Somaliland being raised at the AU Executive Council Meeting. East African states Kenya, Rwanda and Zambia called on member states not only to focus on Somalia, but to recognise the peace and stability in Somaliland. Prior to the above meeting, the AU’s Chair, Professor Alpha Konare, made time to meet with Somaliland President Kahin at the AU’s Addis Ababa headquarters on 29 May 2006.
5.7 Who Will Take the First Step III: Extra-African State Actors and the International Community
Hargeisa cannot, in Drysdale’s view, establish its own development bank to generate loans based on collateral which would allow it to convert assets into capital to reinforce its already self-reliant development path. Further, beyond the pragmatic engagement of UN agencies, there is a need for the World Bank’s involvement to enhance government’s ability to induce financial institutions and companies to enter Somaliland and look at assets in its urban areas. Moreover, for the UN to go beyond its current pragmatic engagement with Somaliland, some form of recognition would seem to be necessary and this is likely to commence with the AU and key member states such as Ethiopia and South Africa, for while the UN may by now be sufficiently gun- shy from recognising successive failures in Mogadishu, it is not likely to alter its position toward Somaliland until signals emerge from Africa. By the same token, neither are sympathetic Western governments likely to lead the way for recognition.
5.7.1 The West
While the EU is sympathetic to Somaliland’s development in relation to assisting Ethiopia’s logistical access to port facilities, not all members of the EU have been as accommodating, and this appears to be influenced by colonial legacies in the Horn of Africa. For example, apart from the Arab League, Italy, as the former colonial power in southern Somalia, has not been sympathetic to Somaliland and has consistently given diplomatic backing to interim regimes in Mogadishu. However, to the extent that there remains general international caution toward rushing to recognise the TFG, this negative may be something of a positive for Somaliland. Britain, by contrast, as the former colonial metropole for the northern Somaliland protectorate, has probably been about as sympathetic as any government can be under the circumstances. There has been a steady flow of Somaliland officials to Britain over the course of Somaliland’s existence as a self-declared independent state since 1991. In 2004, UK Minister for Africa, Chris Mullen, made an official visit to Somaliland. Britain’s goodwill is key to Somaliland’s recognition prospects, though it never appears imminent that London will be the first to recognise Hargeisa. This has not, however, ruled out British companies exploring economic opportunities in Somaliland. A cryptic report last year by the ‘Asia Intelligence Wire’ noted that the Somaliland ministers of defence, water and mineral resources have returned to Hargeysa … after a two-week visit to the UK, following an invitation from British business companies. Reports released after their return say the ministers signed an agreement with a British company to begin oil exploration in Somaliland. The company contracted is the same one that conducted the oil exploration in Sudan”. Overall, however, aid from bilateral donors has not been very forthcoming. As Shinn points out, many “probably shy away for fear that provision of assistance connotes diplomatic recognition”. There has been modest ‘democracy and governance’ aid for aspects of the country’s post- reconciliation transition and this is seen as an incentive for Somaliland to stay the course in implementing democratic reforms. Thus, US institutions like the Initiative and International Referendum Institute and International Republican Institute have had a presence in Somaliland during phases of this post-reconciliation transition. Importantly, the National Endowment for Democracy funds governance programmes which are implemented by more than twelve local Somaliland NGOs.Somaliland, it can be argued, would be an ideal model of a self-reliant developing African state, attractive for a conservative administration in Washington to support. Moreover, from an American perspective, there would be an interest in reinforcing the democratic development of a Muslim country strategically situated near the Middle Eastern theatre of the global ‘war on terror’. But there is little reason for Washington to unilaterally recognise Somaliland – especially given the unflattering ‘unilateralist’ reputation which, for obvious reasons, the George W. Bush administration has created for itself
– when it has invested so much time, energy, and political and diplomatic capital in what it would consider the real prize in the North-East African region, i.e. bringing peace to oil-rich Sudan, where it aims to counter China’s influence.
5.7.2 The United Nations
Although the UN has long been engaged in Somaliland, principally through agencies like the UNDP, UNHCR and UNICEF, there is unlikely to be any progress in the country’s relations with the UN until there is an ‘African solution’ to the question of its status (see map of UN Offices in Somaliland and Somalia). Sometimes there are ambiguously misleading reports concerning the UN’s posture on Somaliland that amount to very little. For example, a 2004 news item from the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization carried a heading on Somalia that read: ‘Somaliland: UN Secretary General calls for a Long Term Solution of Somaliland Status’, which, in fact, turned out to be nothing more than remarks that Secretary- General Annan made regarding the need for a “long-term solution to the confrontation between the pro-secessionist Somali areas called ‘Somaliland’ and ‘Puntland’ over the control of the Sool and Saanag regions…” .
As early as 2000, the late President Egal, as cited earlier in this chapter, had suggested that Somaliland should be accorded an “interim status” like Kosovo and formerly East Timor, to allow Somaliland to deal with donors and international financial institutions. While the UN is unlikely to move in this direction without African endorsement, it has been pragmatically engaged in Somaliland. But there are limits to this pragmatism. The fight against HIV/AIDS is indicative in this regard. In his 2002 article on Somaliland, Shinn noted that although Somaliland declared HIV an epidemic in 1998 and UNICEF had conducted a useful HIV/AIDS behavioural survey in 1999, there was still no UNAIDS presence in either Somalia or Somaliland. Nevertheless, Somaliland does possess a National HIV/AIDS Coordination Body, which held its first meeting in 2002. At the time, while it was generally believed that the prevalence of HIV/AIDS was low, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) believed that infection rates were on the increase. Shinn was of the opinion that “if Somaliland, aided by international organizations, bilateral donors, and NGOs, were to wage a major campaign now against HIV/AIDS, it might actually be possible to prevent the catastrophic situations that confront its neighbors”. Shinn advised that this is “…an area where Somaliland should seize the initiative and request international assistance and an UNAIDS presence”.
As it is, UNICEF appears to operate as the UNAIDS proxy in Somalia and Somaliland. In 2003, it supported a two-day workshop in Hargeisa to finalise an action plan on the prevention and control of HIV/AIDS and sexually transmitted infections in Somaliland. There is now a UNAIDS Representative for Somalia who, along with the broader Somalia Aid Coordinating Group (SACG), is based in Nairobi. In 2005, the UNAIDS Representative for Somalia visited Somaliland to confer with UNICEF on plans for HIV/AIDS prevention and control. Also engaged in this visit were committees established in Somaliland to fight HIV/AIDS as well as staff of other UN agencies based in the country. Given the magnitude of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, the absence of a UNAIDS presence in Somaliland tends to define the limits of the UN’s constructive engagement in the absence of Somaliland’s progress towards recognition. Recently, UNAIDS has corrected this sad situation and developed a presence in Hargeisa. This predicament kicks the question of recognition squarely back into the court of the AU and key states such as South Africa and Ethiopia.
5.8 Somaliland Recognition Quo Vadis: In Search of ‘An African Solution’
A good point to start with in trying to decipher a ‘way forward’ for Somaliland in terms of the recognition conundrum might be to focus on the implications that Somaliland’s predicament holds for the larger picture of peace, security and stability along the Somali coast region of the Horn of Africa and how these concerns relate to AU priorities in advancing African governance and stability; concerns that also relate to the AU’s promotion of regional integration. Here, Somaliland’s former Deputy Speaker of the Lower House touched on what should be a major concern for the AU’s conservatism on the question of Somaliland; the possibility, in the words of Jirde, that the AU may be “unwittingly jeopardizing the stability and security of the region” by not thinking ‘outside-the-box’ on a situation that, in spite of concerns about setting a precedent that undermines the principle of territorial integrity, is actually unprecedented: the disintegration of what once was a sovereign state. Somalia is not simply a ‘failed state.’ It is a disintegrated state; one that, in reality, no longer exists, irrespective of the fiction that African, Arab and international diplomacy has continued to attach to Somalia for whatever vested political interests this fiction serves.
As such, in a volatile interregional environment encompassing coastal North-East Africa and the Arab Middle East and Persian Gulf, the stateless situation pertaining to the governance vacuum in the Somali region, save Somaliland, has to be considered an ever-present security threat. The rise of militant sectarian fundamentalism in this region, interacting with transnational terrorist and criminal transactions, not to mention inter- and intra-state political tensions, cannot help but complicate efforts to stabilise the Horn of Africa. The seriousness of the failed or collapsed state challenge within the context of reforming the multilateral architecture for enhancing global peace and security was expressed in a 2005 commentary in Asia Times Online by Bhaskar Dasgupta’s critique, ‘Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty is a Crock’.476 Pointing out that UN reforms should be examined “more critically and aggressively”, Bhaskar argued that “in particular, some sort of international consensus mechanisms should be drawn up, so that failed or faling states can be looked at much earlier and if required with much more force than currently applied”.
Since the failed and failing state syndrome is more acute in Africa than anywhere else, this should present an opportunity for the AU and its new architecture to assume international leadership in breaking new ground in addressing such questions. To reiterate, the destabilisation of the Somali coast, emanating from the collapse of the state in Somalia, is without precedent in Africa’s post-colonial history. Therefore, the conservative adherence to the ‘territorial integrity’ principle, given the fear that setting a precedent should not apply, especially in light of the legal case supporting Somaliland’s re-recognition, based on its recognised statehood prior to its union with former Italian Somaliland. In addition, from a pragmatically realist perspective, Somaliland represents the thus far enduring stabilising centre of gravity in the greater Somali region. Furthermore, the country’s leaders have not, at this stage, been clamouring for full sovereign status.
Recognising the political reality of their situation and the understandable resistance of the AU in this regard, they have scaled down their recognition request to that of observer status in AU and international status comparable to Kosovo or East Timor (prior to its independence) as a means of overcoming their international isolation in Africa and globally, and in order to normalise their external economic relations. It would seem that the AU does not see it as being in Africa’s security interests for Somaliland to remain isolated in an unstable region. Therefore, the AU and key states like Ethiopia and South Africa might consider assessing Somaliland’s recognition case in terms of how this could either contribute to or detract from advancing the stability of the Somali coast and, based on such an assessment, whether or not Ethiopia and South Africa, together with the AU, could fashion a diplomacy of reconciling Somaliland and Somalia accordingly.
Given the fact that South Africa has already taken a major step toward involving itself in the diplomatic politics of the Horn of Africa by chairing the AU Committee on the Post-Conflict Reconstruction of the Sudan, it would therefore appear that Pretoria would be in a position to advance some ‘outside-the-box’ thinking in this regard. This should be done in close consultation with Ethiopia and its fellow three-year member PSC states, namely Algeria and Rwanda, since the Arab League dimension of such a strategy will have to be factored into such a process. What follows are elements of how such a process might unfold.
For starters, South Africa’s leadership on the post-conflict reconstruction of the Sudan might serve as a point of departure for the PSC to devise a more comprehensive North-East/Horn of Africa stabilisation strategy. Such a strategic vision would encompass the future transition of the Sudan toward a more sustainable governance framework building on the north-south interim (after all, this is not a permanent settlement) peace agreement and the pacification of Darfur parleyed into a broader Sudan accord; the management and eventual resolution of tensions between Ethiopia and Eritrea and, above all, conflict prevention; and arriving at a workable accommodation in the greater Somali region, centred on Somaliland as well as Somalia. Thus, the recognition question for Somaliland should not be approached in isolation from such an overarching, inter-linked regional stability matrix. It should be noted that the AU supports and tries to encourage a dialogue between Somaliland and Somalia, and the modalities pertaining to such a process do appear to be in place, to the extent that Somalia’s TFG remains unsettled as a governing entity in Mogadishu, and initiating such a dialogue is thus problematic. However, South Africa and Ethiopia, in conjunction with other members of the PSC, might prevail upon the AU to provide Somaliland with the observer status that it seeks, conditioned on its opening a dialogue with the TFG. Since it is unclear when the TFG will actually stabilise the governing entity in Mogadishu – and Somaliland’s observer status should not be held hostage to this uncertainty – the opening of talks between Hargeisa and the TFG should begin as soon as feasible. It is not as if there is nothing to talk about except the issue of union between Hargeisa and Mogadishu.
Pending the TFG more firmly establishing itself and implementing the various stages of transition, Somaliland-Somalia talks could, for starters, be limited to normalising relations between Somaliland and Puntland. The aim would, under the auspices of the AU Commission/PSC and IGAD, be to initiate a mediation of the Sool and Saanag border dispute between Puntland and Somaliland, culminating in a non-aggression agreement between Somaliland and Somalia. Negotiations between Somaliland and Somalia over the Sool and Saanag border region could, in the process of these talks, or following their conclusion, expand into an open-ended PSC/IGAD sponsored ‘Somali Coast Governance Forum’ inclusive not only of Somaliland and Somalia, but also Djibouti. ‘Out of area’ members of the PSC – South Africa, Rwanda, Algeria and Nigeria – could serve as a ‘contact group’ in tandem with IGAD.
For additional measure, Ethiopia and Kenya, in terms of promoting a regional integration dimension to such a forum, might field delegations from the Ethiopia’s Ogaden federal region and Kenya’s Northern Frontier District within a context of exploring shared sovereignty arrangements with Somaliland, the TFG and Djibouti as a corollary to cementing a wider regional economic and governing community. Nevertheless, the priority core issue to be ironed out is the relationship between Somaliland and Somalia within a wider regional integration context. Pending a mutual agreement between these two parties, both would enjoy observer status within the AU. However, these negotiations might end up, in the absence of full recognition, in Somaliland’s trade relations with Ethiopia being parleyed into Somaliland’s wider integration in the regional co-operation mechanisms of East and North-East Africa via COMESA and, perhaps even the EAC, which is heading for a federation by 2010.
As it is, academics and specialists on and from North-East Africa have already begun envisioning different regional economic and political integration scenarios that Somaliland’s leaders would eventually have to factor into the planning of the Somali region. AllAfrica.com, for example, carried an interesting ‘Analysis’ from the Addis Tribune on ‘The Horn of Africa: Background, Scope and Regional Initiatives’ by Sisay Asefa which may be instructive as to the type of potential for co-operation that could include Somaliland.
Asefa considers COMESA, IGAD and NEPAD as “three regional initiatives that can serve as the basis for regional cooperation” in what he envisions as the Horn of Africa Free Trade Area (HAFTA) though he later acknowledges that “a narrowly defined Horn of Africa free trade area that excludes Kenya, Uganda, and Sudan will not have much inter-regional trade benefits and complementarity”.479 This essentially means that a HAFTA would have to be linked to the EAC and its prospective federation as the integrative geo-political and economic centre of gravity and reference point for Horn countries, Somalia and Somaliland included.
Depending on how the Sudan situation evolves, a prospective East African federation could serve as the potential re-integrative fulcrum for that country and/or its regions, south Sudan notably, in the event that they opt for independence; independence within the new AU – as opposed to the OAU – context essentially re-defining independence as a way-station to a larger regionally integrated relationship for the African nation-state. This is all the more reason why the AU should not remain in a timid posture with regard to conferring observer status on Somaliland, for its ‘unilateral independence’ will eventually have to accommodate this newly emerging integration reality, as will South Sudan.
Somaliland, for its part, could embark on proactive diplomacy of seeking observer status, if not membership, of the EAC and/or COMESA. This could be with Ethiopia’s backing, linked to Addis Ababa’s interest in embedding itself in a larger economic community, factoring its bilateral links with Somaliland. These same options would also be open to Somalia. However, for good measure, in terms of Somaliland’s governance comparative advantage, another proactive move that it might make, in consultation with both South Africa and Ethiopia, would be for Somaliland to apply to join the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) as a means of reaching out to NEPAD and embedding itself as firmly as possible in the NEPAD process. In this process, Somaliland’s membership in the APRM would reinforce its status as the centre of stability in the Somali region and, perhaps, serve as an incentive for the south to follow suit.
A Somali coast governance forum could serve as the venue for both Somaliland and Somalia to explore such options as well as how the two governments might relate to one another politically. Given the wider regional implications that this dialogue would carry for their neighbours, these nations will also have an interest in such a forum. But, in addition, these countries need to be encouraged to exercise greater commitment to security-enhancing measures in the Somali region. For that reason, the UN’s ‘Monitoring Group’ may need to be beefed up into a ‘Transactions Monitoring Commission’ to oversee arms embargo violations and financial transactions involving non- Somali state actors and one or another Somali client actor. Of course this addresses the situation in Somalia TFG regions rather than Somaliland. But a continuing flow of arms into the greater Somali region cannot help but undermine the security of the entire region, Somaliland included.480 Moreover, such a Commission may be a necessary mechanism for contributing to the stabilisation of Mogadishu.

An added role for such a Commission, as a monitoring body, could be to monitor violence and/or cease-fire arrangements between different Somali coast actors by fielding peace monitors. This could reflect joint collaboration between the AU’s PSC and a Transaction Monitoring Commission. Such UN/AU collaboration could be made integral to a ‘Somali Coast Peace Accord’
– as an extension of a successful outcome to Somaliland-Puntland/Somalia border mediation – that included all Somali actors. All IGAD member states should also buy in to such an accord which, in addition to associated monitoring, would complement and reinforce an AU peacekeeping presence in and around Mogadishu.
Perhaps the kind of Somaliland-Somalia dialogue proposed here, in conjunction with the multi-faceted Sudan transitional dynamics, could serve as points of departure for elaborating a more coherent regional stabilisation architecture for the Horn of Africa. Thus, a Somaliland-Somalia Governance Forum might constitute one pillar of dialogue and stabilisation within an overarching Conference on Security, Stability, Development and Cooperation (CSSDCA) for North-East Africa; in other words, a regionalisation of the AU’s CSSDCA to specifically address long-term peace-building and regional integration in this part of the continent within a structured dialogue framework. Apart from whether or not any of these avenues might be explored and/or taken up by Somaliland, the AU and/or other vested interest parties, what are some of the possible scenarios that could be contemplated for Somaliland and the Somali coast, taking into account the unprecedented nature of the challenge presented by the disintegration of the Somali state and the need to stabilise the region? Four possibilities are presented below:

1. A conservative maintenance of the status quo;
2. mutual separation two-state solution within a Somali coast commonwealth;
3. Somaliland-Somalia confederation; and
4. Somaliland recognition, Somalia de-recognition.
   5.8.1 Conservative Maintenance of the Status Quo
   In this scenario, which is quite likely for the foreseeable future, the AU holds Somaliland in abeyance on the question of observer status, while concentrating all its efforts on making the TFG a credible and functional government in Mogadishu. The AU goes no further than advising Somaliland to begin a dialogue with the TFG which, in the absence of any political, diplomatic and/or economic and security incentives, Hargeisa refuses to do. Meanwhile, the TFG would remain unable to establish itself as a functioning government in Mogadishu; or make a bid to so establish itself, for which it would be violently rebuffed; or, in the process of establishing itself, it would spark off another round of civil war that effectively takes things back to square one with the collapse of the TFG. Meanwhile, the regional situation along the Somali coast would stagnate or deteriorate amid Somaliland’s continued frustrating recognition quest.
   5.8.2 Mutual Separation/Commonwealth Option
   With or without incentives from the AU for Somaliland and/or the AU forcing the issue with the TFG, Somaliland and the Somalia TFG are encouraged by Ethiopia and Djibouti, possibly with South Africa’s backing and the support/acquiescence of IGAD to negotiate their differences, perhaps starting with the Sool and Saanag border issue. These talks would result in a non- aggression pact or agreement that would expand into a mutual agreement by both Hargeisa and Mogadishu to present the AU with their choice to remain as separate sovereign states based on mutual diplomatic recognition. The TFG would become the first state – African or non-African – to recognise Somaliland, much as Ethiopia eventually chose to do in the case of Eritrea. However, this mutual agreement, based on the influence of Somali business communities, would be linked to Hargeisa and Mogadishu committing themselves to the joint establishment of an economic community embracing both countries to Djibouti’s membership; a limited regional economic integration initiative that could conceivably attract Ethiopia, in the process, opening up the prospect for the eventual formation of a HAFTA). Called a Somali Coast Commonwealth, Somaliland and Somalia would request full diplomatic recognition by the AU and the international community, not as the separate sovereign states that they would be, but as the ‘commonwealth’ in which they would field joint delegations and establish joint diplomatic missions to the UN and in foreign capitals. This would provide an economical opportunity for both countries to manage their inter-African and global relations. It is however also an unrealistic prospect given the zero-sum outlook of the TFG regarding Somaliland, the enmity between Hargeisa and Mogadishu carrying over from Somaliland-Puntland tensions, and Somaliland’s predictable refusal to initiate talks with Mogadishu, which would be based on anything but a solution that starts from the recognition of two separate if not totally sovereign states.
   5.8.3 Somaliland-Somalia Confederation
   In this scenario, Hargeisa and Mogadishu manage to go a bit further than mutual recognition linked by an economic commonwealth, and actually manage to satisfy the AU preference for the region’s territorial integrity. But such a settlement would be dependent on whether Hargeisa is likely to go short of full sovereignty: a confederation based on Somaliland and a federal Somalia as co-equal self-governing states; not Somaliland as a federated region of the TFG, as is the case with Puntland. This is possibly the only realistic solution out of the current impasse except that it is not likely to happen soon, for a variety of reasons, without a more proactive diplomacy on the part of the AU and key state actors on the PSC, namely South Africa and Ethiopia, and including pressure on the TFG in the form of disabusing it of any notion of full recognition unless it negotiates a settlement with Somaliland. Such a scenario would also, in all likelihood, include some political incentive for Hargeisa in the form of observer status for Somaliland in the AU. From there, the same regional integration possibilities would be obtained as in the case of the ‘commonwealth’.
   5.8.4 Somaliland Recognition/Somalia De-Recognition

This scenario would turn scenario one on its head, representing the most radical departure from the status quo. While this is not likely to happen or at least not soon, its logic rests on the reality of Somaliland’s stability which, if it continues to be sustainable, could make full diplomatic recognition increasingly compelling to African and non-African actors alike.482 This would be particularly feasible if the TFG remains stalled and/or worse, as the international community is unlikely to want to keep financing what, in effect, amounts to an abyss or a ‘black hole’ in a Mogadishu that is seemingly unwilling to reconstitute itself as anything remotely resembling a credible, functioning state. In this case, assuming that a consensus emerges about the need to stabilise the region, Somaliland becomes the beneficiary of diplomatic recognition on an understanding that it represents the core of what could evolve into expanding stability along the Somali coast. This could start with observer status, pending the continued monitoring of developments in Mogadishu and expanding to full recognition, if the TFG fails to become an effective government. Meanwhile, increased economic aid and interaction in support of Somaliland’s development, along with the breaking of the log-jam on recognition, would signal that the AU and the international community have decided to make it the focal point of stabilising the greater Somali region. Mogadishu and the various and sundry factions surrounding its dysfunction would have to face the reality of coming to terms with Somaliland, on Hargeisa’s terms, and/or Hargeisa could be made the mediating arbiter of reconciliation in the south – all with the backing of the AU and an international community exhausted with ‘Mogadishu fatigue’ and ready to wash their hands of failure after failure in the south, but nevertheless, cognisant of the need to fill the power vacuum in the greater Somali region. Again, while compelling, this scenario is unlikely unless the AU and its key member states become less conservative in their conflict prevention, management and resolution diplomacy.
The likely prospects for Somaliland on the issue of recognition, given as a survey of these possible scenarios and any variants that may arise, is what used to be the ongoing refrain in southern Africa: a lutta continua. The recent fact-finding visits of former Zambian President Kenneth Kaunda and the doyen of African Studies, Professor Ali Mazrui, suggests an era of hope for Somaliland.
Chapter 6: Conclusion Interplay of Internal and External Forces as a Strategy to Acquire International Recognition
Tani waa inoo xeer = This will serve as a precedent between us (Somali proverb)
While the previous chapters have separately explored the dimensions of reconciliation, reconstruction, religion and the quest for diplomatic recognition in the international relations of Somaliland’s ‘bottom-up’ state-building project, each aspect is intimately intertwined, and this interplay shapes a larger picture for understanding the emergence of Somaliland within the greater geo- political context of the Somali peninsula, and its search for international recognition.
The international relations of Somaliland’s state reconstruction forms an increasingly important dimension of the African and international politics of attempts to construct a new framework of democratic stability within the overall Somali peninsula and the greater Horn of Africa. As such, each of these essential and inter-related dimensions – reconciliation, reconstruction, religion and recognition – has provided a useful point-of-departure for making an assessment of the domestic politics and international relations of Somaliland’s state reconstruction with the recurring attempts at reconstituting a Mogadishu-based Somali state. Apart from the political dynamics of the fraught Somaliland-Somalia relationship and how it unfolded, Somaliland and Somalia represent alternative modalities for approaching the local, regional and international politics of state reconstruction along the Somali coast and, more broadly, in Africa as a whole.
Given the stark comparison that can be made of the relative success or failure of state reconstruction in Somaliland versus Somalia, the central hypothesis underlying this study is the importance of Somaliland’s example as a case- study in the efficacy of the internally-driven, ‘bottom-up’ approach to post- conflict nation-building and regional stability and the implications this approach holds for prioritising domestic reconciliation between indigenous culture and traditions, and modernity in achieving relative stability and international recognition in the nation-building project. For this reason, isolating the ‘reconciliation’ dimension in the first chapter was central to examining all other dimensions, in as much as reconstruction, the role of religion and the diplomacy of recognition are all aspects of Somaliland’s reconciliatory approach, a significant factor in disciplining domestic forces to nation-building and the project of international recognition. It is an approach that has been grounded in a consistent role played by the country’s clan elders, as a traditional elite, which has emerged as the ongoing arbiter in mediating political conflict and accommodation among Somaliland’s political actors within the shared goal of international recognition. This thesis has emerged as a study of the interplay of internal and external forces in shaping a strategy for acquiring international recognition and national self- determination.
6.1 Revisiting the Politics of Reconciliation
The comparative difference in British and Italian colonial governing cultures and strategies appears to have been a seminal factor in the evolution of divergent regional paths of political development between the north-west and southern regions of the Somali coast. References made to John Drysdale’s discussion of the different fates of the “Somali hybrid insurance system”484 can be seen as indicative of how Somali society, in the different Somali regions under various colonial influences, responded to the challenges of reconciling tradition and modernity. In Somaliland, in the north-west, a more workable accommodation between these tendencies took root. This, in turn, influenced the evolution of an intimate relationship between the traditional authority of clan elders as a coherent leadership class and the more modern nationalist political tendencies that developed from popular resistance to centralised authoritarian military rule from Mogadishu under Siad Barre. This relationship underpinned a more coherent anti-Barre resistance in and around Hargeisa, compared to the increasingly fragmented politics of anti-Barre resistance in southern Somalia; a fragmentation that has unfolded along clan lines of traditional authority interacting with more avowedly ‘modern’ post- colonial nationalist actors.
The emergence of the SNM in Somaliland, as the vanguard of the region’s resistance, cannot be adequately understood without examining the intimate interaction between the SNM leadership and the region’s clan elders. By not being marginalised by SNM nationalists, but rather by being allowed to play a key role in mobilising resistance, the clan elders became a crucial political factor in legitimising the resistance and in generating its popular base which, ultimately, in turn, forged a ‘national consciousness’ that propelled the SNM toward Somaliland’s unilateral declaration of independence. The independence drive was motivated by a popular determination not to become drawn into the endemic instability, which was already becoming an enduring feature of Mogadishu-based politics in southern Somalia. This, however, did not imply that the role of the clan elders in Somaliland automatically conferred stability on this sectional state-building project. As Somaliland’s brief history shows, the staying power of the nation-building project was far from guaranteed amid internal tensions and conflicts within the SNM and between the movement and local power brokers that erupted into recurring violence, conflict and civil war, before settling down into the more normalised political contestation of a stable polity. Furthermore, these internal conflicts which challenged Somaliland’s stability were accompanied by border tensions with an autonomous Puntland that opted to remain within a Mogadishu-based federal Somalia, thereby becoming a sort of ‘frontline state’ between Somaliland and the rest of Somalia, where political actors deemed Somaliland to be an integral part of Somalia.
Nevertheless, all along the way, the clan elders – and their increasing incorporation into Somaliland’s democratic political system – emerged as a decisive stabilising factor in reconciliatory conflict mediation, management and resolution; a role that endures to this day, as Somaliland has evolved along a relatively stable electoral path of local, presidential and parliamentary democratic politics.485 All in all, the traditional authority of the clan elders has evolved as a central factor in Somaliland’s nation-building politics of reconciliation. This political fact of life is testament to the extent to which tradition and modernity became rooted in north-west Somalia’s development, as Somaliland has found its own reconciliation in a workable accommodation. This defines a coming to terms with what Somalilanders consider to be their own home-grown approach to democratic governance.
Somaliland, therefore, is the organic product of an historical political process; one reflecting a degree of ‘national integration’ between elite and mass, traditional authority and nationalist leadership, reflecting a merging of ‘top- down’ and ‘bottom-up’ dynamics in arriving at the Somaliland national-state and social formation. This has occurred amid continuing conflict and fragmentation elsewhere in the Somali region despite repeated attempts at African and international externally driven ‘top-down’ interventions to reconstitute Somalia, including the latest embattled and besieged TFG initiative.
6.2 Reconstructing Polity, Society and Economy
The sustainability of national reconciliation in Somaliland’s precarious predicament of international diplomatic isolation has hinged on post-conflict reconstruction which, in turn, rests on the extent to which Somaliland’s leaders can engage the international community as a partner in its development, if not in their quest for recognition. However, diplomatic recognition remains crucial to Somaliland’s prospects of attracting sufficient donor aid and investment capital to underwrite reconstruction. This, in turn, reinforces reconciliation. Reconciliation, however, whatever the prospects for generating international support for reconstruction, remains central to the country’s leaders in enabling them to overcome international isolation by, among other things, projecting Somaliland as a demonstration model of self-reliant democratic political stability in an otherwise chaotic region. With the recurring failures at reconstituting a stable state in southern Somalia, reconciliatory nation-building has become more and more essential to attracting international partners in reconstruction. By extension, this increasingly affords Somaliland effective de facto, if not formal, recognition that is essential to generating reconstructive momentum. It would appear that Somaliland is succeeding in achieving this end.
From a practical standpoint, UN agencies have pragmatically seen it to be in their interest to nurture Somaliland’s development, as a means of having access to a stable outpost in the region from which to address the Somali region’s problems, apart from engaging the area from Nairobi in Kenya. This has underlined the importance of political stability as a precondition for advancing reconstruction and, along with that, the close relationship between the politics of reconciliation and the internal and external politics and diplomacy of reconstruction.
Somaliland’s relative stability has encouraged pragmatic creativity on the part of the UNDP in addressing development challenges in Somalia in such a way as to benefit Somaliland. However, many analysts question whether UN agencies have played a serious development role in Somaliland.
Reconstruction entails both political and socio-economic and economic dimensions. Hence, the politics of reconciliation organically merge into the political and economic imperatives of reconstruction. The political reconstruction of Somaliland’s institutions of governance, for example, are a natural outgrowth of the politics of reconstruction, in as much as stability has hinged on the importance of Somaliland developing a modern electoral system of democratic governance. But this had to happen simultaneously with the stabilisation of society through the repatriation of exiles and refugees interacting with a concerted disarmament-demobilisation-rehabilitation- reconstruction programme, while integrating marginalised groups, including women, into the socio-economic fabric.
Reconstruction has also entailed the building of an institutionalised civil society through the development of non-governmental research bodies like the SAPD, accompanied by the revival of primary, secondary and tertiary educational and training institutions. This is a process in which the Somaliland diaspora has played an active role irrespective of whether Somalilanders in other countries returned home or not.
Several civil society organisations, along with institutions of higher learning, have been critical in filling a ‘development gap’ that a fledgling and woefully under-capacitated government has been hard-put to address. These organisations, in conjunction with diverse inputs from the Somaliland diaspora, have expanded the spectrum of actors for donor engagement in the reconstruction and development process. The diaspora has also emerged as a critical constituency of socio-economic sustainability via the development of a remittance economy – and also as a political factor in the country’s modernisation of governance through the emergence of a constitutional democratic system. The extent to which Somalilanders outside Somaliland emerge as a major constituency in the mix of internal political actors could become an important factor to monitor when tracking the development of a normalising routine of periodic local, parliamentary and presidential elections that are able to take place with a minimum of state-threatening crisis. Here, the elders are continuing to play a major stabilising role amidst election outcomes that continue to be bitterly contested to a point where stability could be threatened without their intervention. Their incorporation into the constitutional governing process may prove to be an enduring stabilising feature of Somaliland’s political reconstruction over the long term.
While constructing and reconstructing government and non-government institutions, Somaliland has had to undertake an audit of critically strategic economic sectors for development, for which donor aid and/or foreign investment could be mobilised. While critical sectors include livestock, the marine economy, education and training, and the environment and transport communications, Somaliland’s Berbera port, along with Berbera’s enormous air strip for landing heavy cargoes has proved to be a critical comparative advantage for Hargeisa in the Horn of Africa’s strategic calculus of neighbouring state actors. Ethiopia’s quest for strategic flexibility and options in overcoming its land-locked status as a result of conflict and tensions with Eritrea has enhanced the role of Somaliland and Somaliland’s infrastructural reconstruction and development overall. As such, Somaliland has benefited from its relations with Ethiopia, with the latter nation emerging as a major benefactor in the country’s reconstruction and development in search of alternatives to being totally dependent on Djibouti as a port outlet for sea and ocean-going exports and imports.
Somaliland, therefore, has emerged as a major factor in Addis Ababa’s diplomacy of balancing its interests with other neighbouring states in the sub- region, Djibouti in particular, as the latter nation desires to be Ethiopia’s sole port outlet. Port Sudan and Kenya’s port at Mombasa are also other options. However, Ethiopia has gone ahead with its plans to increase links with Somaliland via Berbera, through which the Ethiopian Electric Power Corporation (EEPCo) has begun importing its cargo. Despite Djibouti’s misgivings, Addis is loath to place all its import-export eggs in one transport- communications basket. In fact, an Ethiopia-Djibouti-Somaliland transport nexus could conceivably emerge as a potential nucleus for forging a regional economic co-operation and integration zone that could eventually contribute to the stabilisation of the Horn of Africa. Here, Somaliland, as a stable political entity that resists reintegration with the rest of Somalia, is of immense strategic use to Ethiopia – Addis Ababa having a vested security interest in the Somali region restabilising more as a community of loosely associated, if not independent states, so as to forestall Somalia’s reconsolidation as an encircling irredentist threat.
6.3 The Role of Religion in a Turbulent Region
One of the overriding threats that has emerged as challenging stability in the Horn of Africa, apart from the various intra-state tensions and conflicts which regional states are grappling with, is the threat of militant politicised Islamist tendencies, notably the recent rise of Islamic Courts in Mogadishu. This observation, made in 2005, has been reinforced by the ascendancy of the Islamic courts to political dominance in Mogadishu and in much of the south during 2006, throwing the future of the TFG into serious doubt. Thus, in the wake of the September 11, 2001 jihadist suicide attacks in the US, the religious factor in North-East African politics has come under increasing scrutiny both from within and outside the region, given the Horn of Africa’s geo-strategic positioning within what Western observers widely consider to be an ‘arch of crisis’ and instability encompassing the ‘Afrabian’ Red Sea as well as the Persian Gulf up into South-West and Central Asia. Somalia’s post-1991 disintegration has heightened this perceived threat with regard to the role and prospects of Islamism within the region, with obvious implications for the sustainability of Somaliland’s status as an outpost of stability in an otherwise troubled area.
While groups that closely monitor developments along the Somali peninsula, such as the International Crisis Group, recognise southern Somalia, in particular, as a refuge for members of the al-Qaeda network that bombed the Kenyan resort hotel in Mombasa in November 2002, it is widely observed that Somalis in general have shown little interest in militant political Islam. In fact, more concern in this region appears to centre on developments across the Gulf of Aden in Yemen as a potential staging ground of jihadist initiatives. On the Somali side of the Gulf, Islamist-oriented movements have failed to gain broad-based ideological popular support in spite of the anarchic environment that has obtained in the region since the early 1990s. Nevertheless, the statelessness of southern Somalia has offered a convenient sanctuary for militant Islamists, including jihadist tendencies in an environment where fragmentation, factional and intra-factional tensions and conflict have become endemic to the point of rendering the region ungovernable. The establishment of Islamic courts in southern Somalia and their brief rise to dominance in Mogadishu has, however, revealed their own internal divisions between those favouring the establishment of an Islamist state and more moderate Islamist tendencies opposed to such an imposition. The balance has tilted against the moderate at the time of writing. However, it should be pointed out that such courts sprang up, in the first instance, largely in response to demands for increased order and security in a stateless society. Still, Islamists have been a factor contributing to the ungovernability of the region in terms of resistance to the establishment of a Mogadishu-based TFG administration and to an AU and/or UN peacekeeping presence, if it is at all possible that such foreign troops could help facilitate its establishment while stabilising the region. Whether or not negotiations materialise between the TFG and the Islamists to alter this situation is unclear, though clearly, now, political Islamism emerges as an unavoidable part of the Somali region’s stabilisation equation and, along with it, the offsetting potential for destabilising rival interventions in the region’s politics by Ethiopia and Eritrea.
Islamists throughout the Somali region, Somaliland included, have contributed to an environment of insecurity in terms of murders, kidnappings, hijackings and assassinations of foreigners and Somalis alike. However, Somaliland has emerged as a comparatively vigilant actor in countering jihadist threats within its own neighbourhood along the Somali coast. This in turn, has enhanced its relations with neighbouring Ethiopia, while making it an ally with Djibouti in the US-led ‘war on terror’ in the Afrabian Red Sea region of intersection between Africa and the Middle East. Furthermore, unlike the endemic fragmentation and in-fighting within and between clans in the south, the existence of a coherent clan leadership in Somaliland, which has been a mediating force for stability, has so far militated against Islamism gaining even a marginal foothold in the north-west Somali region. Thus, Islamic institutions such as Sharia law and Islamic schools funded by Islamic charities do not appear to generate the degree of concern that such institutions may generate elsewhere in the Muslim world, although Somali financial transaction networks such as the southern Somalia Al-Barakaat companies have come under pressure from the US as possible conduits for channeling funds to jihadists. Otherwise, the intimate intertwining of Islam and Somali culture and identity appears to have inoculated the region from the political goals of Islamism in the quest for an Islamic state or ‘caliphate’. This appears particularly to be the case in Somaliland, which exists at the very cross-roads of Islam’s historic penetration and dissemination throughout North-East Africa.
Prior to the events of 2006 it would have appeared that the Somali peninsula as a region steeped in Islam rather than alienated from it, did not seem to make the region and Somaliland, in particular, a fertile battleground in the ‘war on terror.’ With regard to the south, this may be debatable with the brief rise of an Islamist judicial regime. Otherwise, according to most analysts on the region, the variety of Islamic reform movements that have sprung up along the Somali peninsula have been non-violent and opposed to ideological extremism. Islamic schools that, like madrassas elsewhere in the Muslim world, have come under suspicion as mechanisms for disseminating anti- Western Wahabist extremist doctrine, are seen in Somaliland as a necessary complement to a still developing education system, though there is concern about the capacity of such institutions to adequately fill the gap in the education sector. It is in southern Somalia rather than in Somaliland where the greatest concern is focused on the potential destabilising influence of militant political Islam and jihadist tendencies as derivative of the south’s lack of stable governance. For the time being, the refuge that the south presents to jihadists appears not to show signs of developing as a destabilising threat to the security and cohesion of the Somaliland national project, though the irredentist goals of some Islamists could well prove a threat to Somaliland. In fact, it is this latter potential threat that has motivated recent rival Ethio- Eritrean interventions in southern Somalia’s conflict between the Islamic courts and the TFG; the TFG and the courts threatening to become proxies in a larger Horn of Africa confrontation emanating out of hostilities between Eritrea and Ethiopia.
6.4 Recognition Quo Vadis?
Developments in the Somali region have continued to reinforce the credibility of Somaliland as a stabilising ‘good citizen’ state actor that cannot be ignored in calculating the future of the Horn of Africa. The troubles that continue to plague the installation of the TFG as a reconstituted government for Somalia in Mogadishu, matched against the continuing political development of Somaliland as an on-the-ground state reality, is visibly eroding the historic African resistance to recognising new post-colonial states that were once part of already existing countries recognised by the United Nations, the OAU and its successor AU. Perhaps, the critical element of the timing of Somaliland’s emergence on the scene, interacting with the continent’s new priorities and those of a few major AU member states has made all the difference for Somaliland’s prospects, aided by the seemingly unending problems of re- establishing a Somali government in Mogadishu.
Somaliland’s strategic importance to Ethiopia is well-established. While nurturing without diplomatically recognising the Hargeisa regime, Ethiopia has also been orchestrating efforts to re-establish a Somali government based in Mogadishu along a federalist course that would also serve its national security interest in forestalling the regrouping of Somali irredentism. Somaliland, however, has emerged as a key ally of Ethiopia in facilitating its efforts to overcome its land-locked predicament. However, Somaliland has also had the good fortune to have been able to develop an excellent rapport with post- apartheid South Africa; South Africa’s leaders being drawn to Somaliland as an attractive model of a reasonably efficient, functioning example of good governance under the tenets that Pretoria has been promoting through NEPAD. As a result, Somaliland’s leaders have been able, through a tireless diplomacy featuring regular contacts and consultations with South Africa and Ethiopia, to make important headway towards its goal of becoming a diplomatically recognised government by the AU and the international community.
Ethiopia and South Africa, and more recently Kenya, Rwanda and Zambia have been instrumental in nurturing Somaliland into a position of gaining a serious hearing from the AU. Given Somaliland’s ongoing stabilisation under its home-grown reconciliatory nation-building programme, reinforced by a reasonably successful electoral transition, and given the continuing turmoil in southern Somalia, Hargeisa has been able to advance its case for recognition in at least two crucial respects. In the first instance, there has been progress in advancing the ‘legal and factual bases’ supporting Somaliland’s right to internationally-recognised sovereign status. In the second instance, interrelated to the first, Somaliland has been able to establish its own dialogue with the AU, including an AU fact-finding mission to the country that has further enhanced its credibility.
The AU fact-finding mission to Somaliland, 30 April to 4 May 2005, led by the Deputy Chairperson of the AU Commission, H.E. Patrick Masimhaka of Rwanda, in issuing its report, came to the following overall assessment:
• There has been an accelerated process of state-building anchored “on the recognition by the Somalilanders of the inherited colonial borders at the time of independence from Britain in June 1960”;
• Somaliland has a constitution “that emanated from grassroots consultations and was sealed in the referendum held in 2003 …”;
• Somaliland “has territory as defined by the colonial borders inherited from the British colonial rule on accession to independence in 1960” wherein it “has only declared its own independence, after ‘reclaiming it
from the collapsed union’” which is backed up by “a standing army with a ‘mandate to defend the independence and territorial integrity of Somaliland’ …”;
• Somaliland “has achieved peace and stability, through a home-grown disarmament, demobilisation and re-integration process and internally driven democratisation” alongside the fact that Somaliland “has a real economic potential, based on its surface and sub-surface resources and maritime resources.”
Among other findings, observations and recommendations, the mission report concluded that:
Whilst it remains a primary responsibility of the authorities and people of Somaliland to deploy efforts to acquire political recognition from the international community, the AU should be disposed to judge the case of Somaliland from an objective historical viewpoint and a moral angle vis-à-vis the aspirations of the people (italics added). Furthermore, given the acute humanitarian situation prevailing in Somaliland, the AU should mobilise financial resources to help alleviate the plight of the affected communities, especially those catering for the IDPs and Returnees.
Finally, given, also, the high potential for conflict between Mogadishu and Hargeisa, the AU should take steps to discuss critical issues in the relations between the two towns. That initiative should be taken the [at] earliest possible.
The findings from the AU mission were followed up by the AU conducting its own ‘summary of the legal and factual bases for Somaliland’s right to international recognition as an independent state’. This unpublished document
– ‘Somaliland’s Right to International Recognition of its Sovereign Status: A Summary of legal and factual bases’ – echoes similar terrain covered by the South African legal advisory on Somaliland prepared by the Department of Foreign Affairs. However, it goes beyond the South African advisory by stating that “the OAU’s historical respect for the principle of uti posseditis favours Somaliland’s claim to sovereignty within the boundaries of the former British Somaliland Protectorate” and further: “Somaliland’s international recognition would also be consistent with Article 4(b) of the AU Constitutive act, since it preserves the ‘borders existing on achievement of independence’” and therefore, “from this perspective, Somaliland’s admission to the African Union would set no precedent for secession elsewhere in Somalia or the continent; it would preserve a well-established AU practice of permitting former states or colonial entities to reclaim their sovereign status” (italics added).
Somaliland, therefore, has indeed come a long way on its recognition journey from the point of its post-conflict reconciliatory nation-building beginnings in the early 1990s. How its leaders have managed to politically and diplomatically manoeuvre Somaliland into a position of credibility in a region where the OAU had built up a track-record of failure in navigating post- colonial African self-determination claims is little more than historic in the context of inter-African relations: unilateral declaration of independence from an OAU/AU and UN recognised African state without breaching the sanctity of ‘territorial integrity’; a breakaway without secession; and self-determination for a region of an existing African state without establishing a precedent for future secessionist initiatives elsewhere in Africa!
Moreover, short of actual full-fledged recognition by the AU and the international community, the AU mission report clearly advances Somaliland’s case for attracting international donor aid and foreign investment on humanitarian grounds that should go far in helping Hargeisa overcome Somaliland’s international isolation. If nothing else, Somaliland’s international isolation has been virtually overcome. The question is, after having gone this far in acknowledging the reality of Somaliland and its achievement of ‘peace and stability’, how far will the AU go in acting on the mission’s and the legal summary’s findings and recommendations? To what extent will the realpolitik of the status quo reassert inertia in addressing the question of Somaliland’s status? Will the AU leverage its acknowledgement of Somaliland’s credibility as an independent state in African terms into imposing order on southern Somalia while at least meeting Somaliland half-way in its recognition quest?
6.5 2006: Reflections
2006 was a year of momentous developments encompassing the Somali region; developments that involved radical shifts and reversals in the fortunes of the different actors in southern Somalia with implications for Somaliland. Here, in fact, it is instructive to reflect on a possible scenario that was outlined in this manuscript at least a year ago in addressing the possibilities of an Islamist ascendancy in the south following the formation of the Kenya-based Transitional Federal Government (TFG). Chapter 3, on the religious dimension of ‘the four Rs,’ in many ways anticipated the developments that would unfold in 2006 though not the actual outcome that transpired on the ground. The challenge confronting the TFG at the time was that it was unable to deploy from Kenya to Mogadishu while the establishment of an AU peacekeeping force in southern Somalia, let alone Ethiopian troops, had already generated an Islamist-inspired mobilisation.
In 2006, events pretty much unfolded as projected in Chapter 3, though the culmination of events went against the Islamists and rebounded to the benefit of the TFG’s final entry into Mogadishu after having been politically forced out of Kenya into the town of Baidoa. What unfolded was an Islamist ascendancy that swept away warlord ‘rule’ in Mogadishu and resulted in the establishment of a short-lived regime in southern Somalia under the rule of the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC). However, the Islamic Courts over-reached themselves in their militancy and began espousing irredentist sentiments that inspired Ethiopian military intervention to protect the TFG and, beyond that, launch joint operations with TFG militia supporters to roll back the UIC Islamists and install the Baidoa-based TFG in Mogadishu. The catalyst driving this scenario was the outbreak of a mini-civil war in Mogadishu between the Islamists, who had consolidated themselves into the UIC, and warlords backed by U.S.- funding in the name of fighting terrorism and alleged al-Qaeda influence.
It was a popular revulsion swelling up into a mobilisation that propelled the UIC victory over the warlords as Somalis grabbed the opportunity of the Courts emergence to make a bid for imposing stability by ousting the warlords. The U.S. decision to back the warlords as a narrowly focused anti- terror strategy may have been a fatal error, not only in discrediting the U.S. in the eyes of Somalis on the ground, but in tipping the political balance within the UIC toward the most militant, extremist, pro-jihadist elements. Beyond sweeping the boards of the warlords, the UIC began to eye the TFG itself which, in large measure, reflected an accommodation with warlord elements in its very unstable structuring. Moreover, the TFG’s vulnerability before the advance of the Courts in town after town motivated an Ethiopian troop deployment in Baidoa as protection of the TFG; a move which, in turn, inspired stepped up Eritrean military support for the Courts as a counter to Ethiopia’s intervention – hence adding a new potentially regionally destabilising dimension in the transformation of conflict in southern Somalia into a proxy war.
Eritrea’s backing of the UIC would dovetail with its support for Oromo and Ogaden insurgents within Ethiopia’s vast eastern borderlands in direct proximity to Somalia. The problem this caused however was that increasing expansionist rhetoric by the UIC regarding intentions of re-uniting all Somali- speaking territories into a ‘United Somalia’ fed Ethiopia’s threat perception of a return to the very Somali irredentism of the Barre regime. This sentiment had propelled the Siad Barre regime into the Ogaden in the late 70s, triggering the Ethio-Somali war that resulted in Somalia’s defeat, internal destabilisation and ouster of Barre. It was widely expected that a confluence of Islamism and irredentism would be just the cocktail combination to justify, for the Ethiopians, a military initiative against the Courts aimed at rolling back their political advances in the south and installing their TFG clients into power in Mogadishu.
The proxy dimension to the TFG-UIC confrontation extended into a broader alignment on both sides of the conflict. Beyond Eritrea there was a broader alliance. Egypt, Sudan and the Arab bloc generally, including Saudi Arabia and even Iran were lined up behind the Courts while the AU, including the member states of IGAD, were seen as committed to the TFG and, at least politically, in favour of the deployment of a peacekeeping force which the UIC and its allies rejected. Until the UIC over-reached itself, it was seen as generally having the politico-diplomatic upper hand as its backer sought to have the Courts negotiate their way into a power-sharing arrangement with the TFG which would ultimately favour the Islamist given their on-the-ground military dominance over the TFG. While negotiations gave the UIC and its backers the ‘moral high ground,’ talks arranged in Khartoum went no where, ultimately leading to the dead-end that resulted in the UIC’s ouster by Ethiopia and the TFG.
Although the Ethiopian intervention had the blessing of the U.S. and was generally depicted as a collusion between the two, in terms of Washington’s ‘war on terror’ and long-standing alliance with Addis, Ethiopia had its own intrinsic security interests which are widely understood. It’s land-locked vulnerability to ‘Islamic encirclement’ and threat to its territorial integrity combined with its tug-of-war with Egypt over regional influence centring on the Nile ensure that Somalia will always occupy a priority interest in Addis’ security calculations. Thus, in spite of the enmity between Ethiopia and Somalia, the AU initially sanctioned Addis’ intervention as a ‘right to self- defence’ although it quickly followed up by signalling the need for a relatively speedy troop withdrawal.
Ethiopia, indeed, at the time of writing, is implementing a phased troop withdrawal from Somalia irrespective of how rapidly it takes for an AU peacekeeping force to be deployed. The bottom-line is that whether Somalia is with or without a functioning government, Addis cannot afford to have a hostile Somali regime in Mogadishu. This is where consideration of the status of Somaliland comes into the picture given the good relations that exist between Addis and the unrecognised regime in Hargeisa.
The outbreak of hostilities in the south between the Islamic Courts and an Ethiopia-backed TFG was not seen as boding well for Somaliland’s future given the politico-diplomatic isolation of the TFG and Ethiopia prior to Addis’ military move against the Courts. The confrontation forced Ethiopia to tilt more in favour of the TFG and Puntland as the first lines of defence against the UIC Islamist advance while seemingly pushing Somaliland to the sidelines. Somaliland’s marginalisation was coupled by the threat of a steady encroachment of the UIC into Somaliland based on links between pro- Islamists linked to the Courts in Mogadishu. This prospect was being spearheaded by protest in and outside Somaliland over the arrest and detention of dissident Sheik Mohammed Ismail. A war of words ensued between the UIC and Hargeisa until the UIC changed tack in November when officials began emphasising an intent to apologise to the people of Somaliland for the atrocities of the Barre regime and to compensate them in the interest of an eventual re-uniting of north and south. This dialogue tack signalled an attempt to defuse a potential confrontation between the UIC and Somaliland, which would only have compounded the UIC’s main preoccupation with the TFG. Similarly, the ultimately victorious Ethiopian-backed TFG has also had to backtrack on statements that could be interpreted as implying an eventual confrontation between Somaliland and southern Somalia over re-unification.
From a strategic perspective of stabilising the Somali Coast, the travails of southern Somalia would seem to re-emphasise the importance of African and international diplomatic recognition of Somaliland as a stable, democratic ‘zone of peace’ in the region. Somaliland could become the focal point of an alternative bid to consolidate regional stability. On the other hand, given the new lease on life provided the TFG by Ethiopia’s intervention, some foresaw a possibility of Somaliland once again being marginalised in its unrecognised isolation as African and international attention sifted back toward shoring up a TFG now finally seated in Mogadishu. This could very well prove to be the case were it not for the sustained interest that the AU Commission has taken in Somaliland, which has taken the form of an ongoing dialogue interacting with AU fact-finding missions. This has resulted in what could very well be a bid by the AU during 2007 to unblock the unrecognised status of Somaliland as an acknowledgement that it is indeed a special case of restoring independence rather than an outright secession. Thus, Somaliland’s achievement of some form of interim recognition and/or AU observer status may be one of the outcomes of the UIC-TFG confrontation in southern Somalia and the intervention of Ethiopia; an outcome compelled by Africa’s felt need to stabilise the Horn region and check any prospect of an Islamist ascendancy in eastern Africa. Should the AU take such a comparatively bold step, this would ensure that Somaliland would not be back onto the back- burner by renewed international attention on a Mogadishu regime. Somaliland would emerge as an equalising factor in the stabilisation equation in the Somali coastal region. At this stage, the ball is in the AU’s court.
6.6 Somaliland: Implications for Further Inquiry
Thus, the progress that Somaliland has made along the road to still unfulfilled recognition raises more questions than answers. But these are very crucial and fundamental questions that beg further research into the politics and diplomacy of post-colonial African efforts at state reconstruction and the reconfiguring of regional inter-state relations and the role that extra-African actors and the international community can or may play in this process.
Further inquiry, inspired by the Somaliland ‘bottom-up’ nation-building experience challenged by Hargeisa’s quest for international recognition with its internal interplay and balance of forces, might focus on some of the following areas of interest:
• A more in-depth examination of how differing, regionally-based colonial experiences in the Somali region, interacting with the different nationalist responses to colonialism and post-colonial independence that have emerged, have contributed to the Somali region’s current predicament of a fractured Somali identity and the implications that the different trajectories of political development in north-west Somalia-cum- Somaliland versus the rest of the Somali coast holds for regional stability or endemic instability in the Somali-speaking lands and for the Greater Horn of Africa. To what extent can Somaliland and the rest of Somalia – based on their differing political histories – become reconciled in a new political relationship that might include other Somali-speaking communities in Djibouti, the Ethiopian Ogaden and the Kenyan Northern Frontier District within the framework of a Greater Horn of Africa regional integration project within the framework of the AU? To what extent are these prospects complicated by the rise of political Islam in southern Somalia?
• Somaliland’s quest for international recognition as a sovereign, independent state, while compelling, nevertheless, challenges the pan- African regional integration paradigm evolving within the framework of the
AU. At a time when Africa needs to overcome its colonially-inherited fragmentation which strikes at the very heart of the continent’s endemic weakness and instability, how can an internationally-recognised independent Somaliland contribute toward enhancing regional integration in the Greater Horn of Africa? This begs a more basic fundamental question for AU/NEPAD Africa: How can continuing post-colonial African aspirations for self-determination be reconciled with the imperatives of greater sub-regional and continental integration in an era of globalisation which Africa finds hard to cope with? Can such aspirations be satisfied short of sovereign independence within larger unions of federated or confederated states?
• Somaliland’s emergence is a product of state collapse and disintegration. To what extent can the Somaliland experience contribute to the gaining of new insights on how to overcome and/or recover from state collapse and/or disintegration within a larger unstable region, while at the same time factoring in a broader regional integration and governance agenda that political elites in a successor state must address in how they relate bilaterally to neighbouring countries and multilaterally within sub-regional organisations as well as at the continental level of the AU?
• Somaliland’s ‘bottom-up’ nation-building experience holds out important lessons for how other African states might approach the need for reconciling ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ in arriving at workable nation- building and governance strategies. This experience needs to be explored in more depth, perhaps within the theoretical framework offered by
Mahmood Mamdani’s ‘bifurcated state’ thesis on how the colonial state inheritance, post-independence, institutionalises an inherently unstable divide between urban democratic modernity and rural-based authoritarian traditionalism challenging national cohesion and democratic consolidation.
The foregoing barely scratches the surface of possible directions that future inquiry inspired by the Somaliland experience might take in developing a research agenda on governance, post-conflict state reconstruction and reconstitution interacting with pressing issues of regional co-operation and integration. The areas outlined above are purely illustrative of where the Somaliland experience might lead.
‘Somaliland: Post War Nation-Building and International Relations, 1991- 2006’, is intended to serve as a modest beginning by contributing to developing a new sub-field of International Relations dealing with the ‘internationalisation of domestic transformation’. This thesis explores how the shared goal of international recognition has been a significant factor in disciplining domestic factions, helping to entrench reconciliation, respect for human rights and democratic reconstruction of institutions because – whatever their domestic value – these were seen as key to gaining sovereign recognition within the Somali coast and the Greater Horn of Africa in the unfolding Age of the AU and NEPAD.

By M. Iqbal D. Jhazbhay