Introduction
Since the collapse of the Siyad Barre
military dictatorship in January 1991, the southern part of the erstwhile
Somali Republic (i.e. the ex-Italian Somalia) has become the living definition
of a ‘failed state’ with the exception of the north-eastern part of the
territory which has forged a functioning, clan-based government as the
autonomous region of Puntland. By
contrast, the ex-British Protectorate of Somaliland, having recovered the
sovereignty and statehood it hastily, but voluntarily, ceded in 1960 in order
to unite with ex-Italian Somalia to the south, has managed to establish the
only functioning multi-party democracy in the Horn of Africa with a written
constitution, separation of powers between the executive, a bicameral legislature
and judiciary.
It is the position of this paper that
the glaringly different outcomes to the collapse of the Siyad Barre
dictatorship in the two segments of the erstwhile Somali Republic are rooted in
the different experiences of colonial rule, the different perceptions of the
nature of the state and consent thereto, and also to different impacts and
importance of Somali nationalism and its attendant dream of Greater Somalia (Somaliweyn
in Somali) in the two territories. This
analysis focuses upon Somaliweyn as the underlying ethos that gave birth
to the ill-fated union between the ex-British Protectorate of Somaliland
(present day Somaliland) and the ex-Italian Colony of Somalia (or, to give it
it’s legal name at that time, the UN Trust Territory of Somalia which was
administered by Italy under a UN Mandate) and argues that a critical, and
perhaps determining, cause of the opposite responses to the collapse of the
state between the two territories is the former’s emphatic rejection of Somaliweyn
in preference for alternative formulations of nationalism, and the latter’s
continued fealty to this failed dream.
Of course, the eight hundred pound
gorilla in this room is the role, machinations and preferences of regional and
international powers in response to the collapse of the erstwhile Somali
Republic. However, this paper is focused
upon the internal drivers, i.e. the specifically Somali components, of
Somaliland and Somalia that has resulted in their markedly different responses
to the collapse of the military dictatorship in the erstwhile Somali Republic
and to the efforts to re-establish the state in their respective
countries. Hence, the role and
machinations of the regional and international powers are not examined here in
detail.
The Historical Background
The Somali people inhabit
the land of the Horn of Africa (HOA) stretching from the coastline of the Red
Sea as far north as Djibouti to the Indian Ocean as far south as the Northern
Frontier District (NFD) of Kenya. Inland, the Somali inhabited territory
stretches from Dire Dawa in eastern Ethiopia to Garissa in northern Kenya. The
Somali people share a common language, culture, religion and ethnicity. While
there are sedentary agriculturalists in the fertile region around the Juba and
Shebelle rivers in the south, Somalis are principally pastoral nomads
constantly migrating with their herds of livestock (primarily sheep, goats and
camels, but also cattle) in a constant search for pasturage and water. The
independent, self-reliant and sometimes fierce culture bred by nomadic life and
the tough environment of their land is thus the dominant culture.
This unity of language,
culture and ethnicity combined with the arbitrary (at least from a Somali
perspective) division of the Somali people and lands among different colonial
powers combined to give a unique character to Somali nationalism – namely the wish
to unite all Somali people and lands in one, independent nation-state. This
feature of Somali nationalism has been much discussed and analysed by both
Somali and foreign scholars under the hubris “Somali Irredentism”. When Somali
nationalism began to develop in the 1950s as a distinct political movement, motivated
by the desire for independence from colonialism and self-rule, the idea of
uniting all the Somali peoples in one unitary state was an integral feature of
this nationalism. In fact, ‘Greater Somalia’, as it came to be known, was
achieved only once in the modern era, briefly in 1941/2 when Britain defeated
the Italians in east Africa and the NFD, the Italian colony, the Haud &
Reserved Areas (i.e. the eastern, largely Somali-populated province of Ethiopia)
and the British Protectorate were under the control of Britain. At the end of
the 1940s, Aneurin Bevan, who was the Foreign & Commonwealth Secretary in
the government of Anthony Eden and the eminence grise of the Labour
Party at that time, proposed uniting the Somali territories into one political
entity under British colonial sovereignty. This was vehemently opposed by Haile
Selassie of Ethiopia, the French (who wished to retain their dominion over
Djibouti) and the Italians who had not relinquished their colonial aspirations
with respect to their ex-colony in the south.
The subsequent British
government of Harold Macmillan was not beholden to this idea, and the Haud
& Reserved Areas (later popularized as the Ogaden) was ceded to Haile
Selassie’s imperial Ethiopia in 1948 in recognition of his support for the
Allies during World War II despite overwhelming support among the local
population for union with the Somaliland Protectorate. Equally, the NFD was
ceded to Kenya upon independence in 1962, in direct contravention of Britain’s
pledge to the nationalist leaders of British Somaliland Protectorate to abide
by a plebiscite which evidenced overwhelming support for union with the Somali
Republic by the people of the territory. It is safe to assume that British
desire not to endanger British interests and settlers amidst the bitter
atmosphere of the post-Mau Mau period after independence underpinned the realpolitik
calculus that lead to this volte face.
On June 26th 1960 the
British Somaliland Protectorate was granted independence from Britain and four
days later, on 1st July 1960 the United Nations Trust Territory of
Somalia was granted independence and Somaliland and Somalia united to form the
Somali Republic on the same date. The
first union government included four Cabinet Ministers from Somaliland in a
government headed by a President (a titular Head of State) and a Prime Minister
(the Head of Government). The two legislatures were united on an ‘as is’ basis,
thus Somaliland’s legislative assembly of 33 seats united with Somalia’s 90
seat legislature to form a new 123 seat National Parliament. It is important to point out here that the
distribution of seats in the new National Parliament did not reflect the population
distribution between the components of the new Republic but reflected the
nationalist driven rush to union. The
Act of Union and a new Union Constitution were to be ratified by a simple
majority of the popular vote through a referendum within two years. In point of
fact, the Union Constitution (and the Act of Union which it promulgated) was
ratified by over two thirds the votes cast in the ex-UN Trust Territory, while
it was overwhelmingly rejected by a similar margin in the ex-British Protectorate,
with crucial legal and constitutional ramifications for the recovery of
sovereignty by Somaliland some 31 years later.
The Somali Republic’s flirtation with
multiparty, parliamentary democracy lasted for some nine years, from 1st July1960
until 21st October 1969, when a group of army officers lead by Col.
Salad Gabayreh and supported by the Soviet Union seized power in a bloodless
coup d’état. While Somali democracy was by no means perfect and suffered from
many flaws, not least in the inequality in representation between the
ex-British Somaliland Protectorate and the ex-UN Trust Territory of Somalia, it
functioned and brought about two changes of government in 1964 and 1967 and one
change of President in 1967 through constitutional means. For all of its
faults, (e.g. vote buying and a preponderance of a large number of small,
clan-based parties during elections which would promptly merge with the winning
national party once one had emerged) Somali multiparty, parliamentary democracy
was the only such system that was functioning in Africa during this time. This
experiment in grafting the European parliamentary model onto an indigenous,
clan based, pastoralist body politic came to an abrupt end in October 1969 when
the Republic succumbed to a savage, totalitarian dictatorship initially
disguised behind a flimsy veil of Soviet style “Scientific Socialism”.
Somali Nationalism & the Failure
of Somaliweyn
The
colonial experience of the various Somali populated territories of the HOA has
been markedly different depending upon the foreign power which ruled over the
different territories. In British
Somaliland and the NFD of Kenya, the British colonial policy of 'indirect rule'
ensured that the local socio-political structures were largely undisturbed and
that the daily lives of the people were minimally affected by the colonial
experience. By contrast, the Italian and
French colonial policies of metropolitan rule and colonial settlement in
Italian and French Somaliland respectively, resulted in the imposition of a
colonial political administration complete with tax-levying powers, a civil
service and the police and security apparatus necessary to enforce metropolitan
rule in these territories, accompanied by an influx of Italian immigrants in
the former and of French Foreign Legionnaires in the latter. Thus, in these two territories a colonial
administration that directly impacted the daily lives of the local population
through civil administration, tax collection and policing was instituted which
largely eclipsed the informal, open and democratic socio-political structure of
traditional, Somali pastoral society that has been so ably documented by Ioan
M. Lewis in his seminal book, “A
Pastoral Democracy: A Study of Pastoralism and Politics Among the Northern
Somali of the Horn of Africa”.
Ethiopian rule in the Somali-populated eastern province of that country
comprised yet another category of colonial rule, given both the long history of
conflict between the people of that territory and the Amharic rulers of
Ethiopia, and the necessarily autocratic nature of monarchical rule. Thus, the Somali people of that region were
subject to military rule and occupation.
Given
this differing experience of colonial rule, it is not surprising that the
emergence of nationalism not only took different formulations, but also arose
at different times in the various Somali territories of the HOA. Thus, nationalist political parties first
emerged in Italian and French Somaliland in the late 1940s/early 1950s, whereas
such parties emerged in the mid/late 1950s in British Somaliland and the NFD,
and were never permitted in the Ethiopian ruled territory. Further, in Italian and French Somaliland the
focus of these nationalist parties was independence from the colonial masters
and control over the state apparatus, whereas in British Somaliland, the NFD
and the Somali province of Ethiopia the principal rallying point was the
irredentist dream of Somaliweyn that would unite all the
Somali-populated territories in one unitary state. This is not to say that Greater Somalia was
missing from the programs of the nationalist parties of Italian and French
Somaliland, but to point to the lesser, secondary priority the irredentist
impetus had in the aspirations of the nationalist parties in these
territories. This difference in outlook
is clearly evidenced by the differing attitudes of the nationalist parties of
British and Italian Somaliland to their union in 1960. Whereas the people of British Somaliland
viewed the union as only the first step towards realisation of the dream of
Greater Somalia, and were thus initially unconcerned with the terms of union
which they viewed as temporary, the people of Italian Somaliland viewed the
union much more objectively and maturely as the creation of a new state in
which they had to secure the most advantageous terms possible.
Much
academic analysis of Somali nationalism focuses upon the pastoral culture of
Somali society which did not historically have a central, political authority
that can be identified as a state or state apparatus, and goes on to
extrapolate that the irredentist nationalism that emerged among Somali people
after the end of World War II was largely a creation of the educated, political
elite. This narrative holds that
educated, political elites of the various Somali territories, inspired by
historical, Somali heroes such as Ahmed Gurey (or 'Gran') and Mohamed Abdulle
Hassan (the 'Mad Mullah') as well as by the anti-colonial fervour sweeping the
continent, adopted a pan-Somali nationalism as an integral part of their
rationale for independence and de-colonisation in order to inflame the passions
of their people and so secure their emotional commitment to the elite’s quest
for independence and state power. This
superficial perspective of Somali nationalism completely ignores the central
socio-political feature of Somali nationalism which derives from the
ethno-linguistic, cultural and religious homogeneity of the Somali people –
namely the fission-fusion paradox that lies at the heart of Somali clan
structure.
In
fact, at the heart of Somali clan structure is the belief that all Somali
people share a common lineage which dates back to the group of Arab religious
Sheikhs that brought Islam to the Horn of Africa in the late 7th/early
8th centuries and took wives among the local tribes that they had
converted. Thus, while clan competition
within Somali society can be very fierce, as evidenced by clan/sub-clan wars
over pasturage and water resources over the years, it is the norm for Somalis
of different clans to unite to protect their collective, pan-Somali interests
against non-Somali groups. Thus, in the
16th century, the charismatic warrior and religious leader, Ahmed Gurey
(i.e. Ahmed the Left-Handed), was able to unite all the Somali clans behind a
successful military campaign against the Christian, Abyssinian Empire that was
saved only by the intervention of an expeditionary force lead by Cristóvão da
Gama sent by the Portuguese Emperor. The
fission-fusion paradox contained within Somali clan structure does not impact
the open, egalitarian nature of traditional pastoral culture, since the basic
unit of socio-political organisation, i.e. the clan/sub-clan, operates on the
basis of open discussion and consensual decision-making. In the modern era, while the clans and
sub-clans within the erstwhile Republic competed strenuously for political
office, trade and other economic opportunities, they were fiercely united in
pursuit of union with their brethren in the NFD, the Haud & Reserved Area
and in Djibouti. This deeply felt
pan-Somali impetus was no construct of political elites, but is instead an
integral and indivisible feature of Somali identity itself.
Certainly,
it is true that the efforts of civilian governments of the erstwhile Republic
to deliver the 'missing territories' of the NFD, the Somali province of
Ethiopia and Djibouti during the period 1960-1967 through a policy of
belligerence towards its neighbours and creation of a strong army, proved
unsuccessful. It is also true that Siyad
Barre's ill-conceived gamble in 1977/78 to ‘recover’ the Haud & Reserved
Area (i.e. the present 5th province of Ethiopia) proved disastrous,
not only for the survival of his regime, but also for the Republic itself,
since the seeds of its collapse (and the subsequent wars and anarchy into which
the country plunged thereafter) can be traced directly to this failure of
leadership. The only period in the
post-independence history of the Somali Republic when the Somali inhabitants of
the ‘missing’ territories of the NFD and the Haud & Reserved Area secured
some tangible benefits from the efforts of a Somali government was during the
brief period of détente between the Republic and Ethiopia and Kenya during
1967-1969 which was initiated by Premier Egal[1]. During this period the borders between
Somalia and its neighbours were opened so nomads could travel freely in search
of water and pasturage; draconian security measures in the two territories were
lifted by both Kenya and Ethiopia; political prisoners were released by all
sides and assets seized by all three governments from the others’ citizens were
returned; and hostile propaganda directed at each other was stopped. However, it is a fact that the emotional
appeal of Somali nationalism, i.e. the hold of the common Somali social,
cultural and religious identity in the national psyche and self-perception of
Somali people throughout the HOA region, remains as potent and compelling as
ever.
The Triumph of Indigenous Politics
& the Re-Birth of Somaliland
The success of Somaliland in
establishing a functioning state built upon a representative system of
government is due to several factors which derive from the fact that the
traditional political structures have remained largely undisturbed and have,
therefore, retained their primacy in political discourse and action. During
the colonial era, Britain was only too happy to govern the territory with a
light hand through indigenous political structures since this provided the most
cost-effective approach to achieve its principal aim of suzerainty over the
Somaliland coast. After independence and
union with the ex-UN Trust Territory, Somaliland was largely ignored by the
central government as power coalesced around Mogadishu and the southern part of
the new country received the lion’s share of investment in physical and social
infrastructure as well as development projects. The preponderance of southern
representation in both government and the civil service ensured that northern
interests and needs were ignored in the main, while integration of Somaliland
into central state structures through grass-root organisations at local,
neighbourhood and district level never took place. Thus, by all significant indicators of
physical and social infrastructure, e.g. schools, clinics, hospitals, roads,
industrial plants, electricity, water & telephone penetration etc.,
Somaliland was very much a backwater neglected by central government in
Mogadishu.
After the 1969 coup, Somaliland’s
marginalisation became even more pronounced, as the coup was led by southern
officers and had deposed the Republic’s first and only northern Prime
Minister. During the early 1970s, as the
military regime consolidated its grip over the country and instituted its new
ideology of ‘Scientific Socialism’, it faced resistance to the widespread
nationalisation of private property, omnipresent and draconian security
apparatus and denigration of religious faith by the fiercely independent
pastoralists of Somaliland which even the British had not sought to
subdue. Thus, the territory graduated
from being a backwater in national development to effectively become an
internal ‘colony’ administered by a military governor appointed from Mogadishu. By 1977, when the military regime embarked
upon the ill-advised war to wrest the Haud & Reserved Area from a weakened
and divided Ethiopia, Somaliland was, in effect, governed as an occupied
territory subject to a harsh regime of military rule. Ironically, the war with Ethiopia brought
some respite from the iron rule of Mogadishu due to widespread nationalist
fervour and mass support for the war in the territory, despite the fact that it
suffered the worst consequences in the form of aerial bombardment of primary
water wells as well as the northern capital, Hargeisa, by the Ethiopian Air
Force. In addition, the ignominious and
disorderly retreat of the Somali army from captured Ethiopian territory at the
end of the war resulted in the widespread loss of livestock to the Somaliland
pastoralists as their herds were seized to feed the retreating soldiers.
However, the fact which changed the
ethos of Somali Nationalism and Somali politics forever was the response of the
Siyad Barre junta to the consequences of the failure of their gambit to seize
the Haud & Reserved Area from Ethiopia.
On one hand, the regime was faced with the prospect of thousands of
heavily armed, battle-hardened and embittered northern soldiers returning to an
already restive Somaliland; on the other, the equally embittered Somali
population of eastern Ethiopia, which had been urged to revolt and join the
invading, Somali troops in expelling Ethiopian forces from their territory,
were now forced to flee with the retreating Somali Armed Forces. The regime’s solution to these two problems
was startling both in its simplicity and in its diabolical duplicity. The Ogaden people of eastern Ethiopia were to
be transplanted into Somaliland as the loyal, local ruling class while the
indigenous people were to be savagely subjugated to accept the new power
dispensation. This policy required that the returning northern troops be
disarmed and their command structure be dismantled. Accordingly, GHQ in Mogadishu ordered that
retreating Somali forces stop at the border and await further orders, while a
commission of senior officers from GHQ, led by Major-General Ali Samatar (Chief
of Staff of the Army), toured the camps and held summary military tribunals in
which northern officers were tried and convicted of war crimes and executed. At this time, throughout Somaliland local
families were being evicted from their homes and farms for ‘anti-revolutionary’
activities and the said homes and farms were being granted to Ogaden refugees
fleeing across the border.
Thus, was the nationalist dream of Somaliweyn
turned into a nightmare that consumed its most fervent acolytes. Having understood the regime’s game plan, and
what it had in store for them, the northern officers and many of their soldiers
decided to take their fate into their hands and they fled back across the
border into Ethiopia and asked their erstwhile enemies for sanctuary and safe
haven, which was generously granted them by their Ethiopian counter-parts in a
spirit of mutual respect and martial camaraderie. These Somaliland forces set up military camps
inside Ethiopia and they would later form the military wing of the Somali
National Movement (SNM) – the opposition movement of Somaliland that would
eventually evict the Siyad Barre regime from Somaliland and so lead to its
collapse. Somaliweyn, both as the
expression of Somali Nationalism and also as the political ambition to which
the Somali people of the HOA adhered, was truly dead and buried. In the ex-UN Trust Territory, during the
latter half of the 1980s, the regime had grown increasingly brutal and
ethnocentric as it began to lose its grip on power first in Somaliland, then
increasingly in the south. By 1991, when
its troops were evicted from Somaliland, the regime had resorted to a policy of
nightly extra-judicial killings of key leaders and civilian massacres of the
majority Hawiyeh clan in Benadir Region around Mogadishu. This resulted in the frenzy of tribal
massacres and widespread ethnic cleansing throughout the country in the
immediate aftermath of the collapse of the regime, as the Hawiyeh exacted
revenge upon their erstwhile Darod rulers.
The irredentist-driven nightmare that befell Somaliland had come to
Somalia.
Upon evicting the regime’s forces from
Somaliland, the SNM was faced with the prospect of ruling the country they had
just liberated and it is to their enduring credit that the guerrilla movement
understood that they needed to establish legitimacy in order to secure the
political consent of the people.
Equally, the elders of the clans that comprised the bulk of the
soldiers, membership and leadership of the SNM prevailed upon the guerrilla
movement leadership to cede to them the political initiative to form a
government. These elders called for and convened
a national conference in Burao in May 1991 which comprised all the clans of
Somaliland at which it was decided to recover the sovereignty of Somaliland
that was ceded to the Somali Republic in 1960.
The Burao Conference was also important for establishing, as the
defining creed of Somaliland’s national re-establishment, that all wrongs
committed by any clan against another prior to the said conference thereby be irrevocably
and unconditionally forgiven. In short,
the people of Somaliland granted each other unconditional and irrevocable
pardon for all sins and grievances of the past.
This fact is absolutely fundamental to understanding Somaliland’s
success in achieving reconciliation and peace among its people and thereby
establishing a stable, representative government. The country contained clans that had
supported the dictatorship and there were many among the dissident clans that
had collaborated with the regime, as well as many among the pro-regime clans
that supported the guerrillas.
This traditional reconciliation
process whereby representatives of all the clans, as well as other civil
society leaders, including intellectuals, religious leaders, women’s’ groups,
businessmen, poets and artists, was central and fundamental to the
re-establishment of the state and formation of a representative government by
securing the political consent of the people.
By contrast, the people of the ex-UN Trust Territory have never held
their own national reconciliation conferences.
Instead, their country was carved into separate fiefdoms ruled over by
clan and criminal warlords immediately after the collapse of the dictatorship,
and the numerous ‘national conferences’ convened in their name subsequently by
external forces and powers comprised unrepresentative and unaccountable forums
whereby competing foreign powers facilitated the ascendancy of a favoured
warlord or faction to the putative ‘Presidency’, up to and including the
current incumbent, Hassan Sheikh Mohamoud.
The only genuine, indigenous, grass-root driven governmental authority
that Somalia has enjoyed since the collapse of the dictatorship was the brief
period of Union of Islamic Courts (UIC) rule in 2006. After the extremist wing of the UIC took
control of the organisation and foolishly decided to pick a fight with
Ethiopia, even before they had secured undisputed control over the entire
country, the writing was on the wall.
With the full support, if not the active urging, of the US, Ethiopia
decided to respond to UIC/Al-Shabaab’s provocations by invading Somalia and
deposing the Islamist regime.
Towards a Post-Colonial Pan-Somali
Ethos & Re-establishing the State in Somalia
The starting point to developing a
post-colonial Pan-Somali ethos is to accept the political reality that Greater
Somalia will never come into existence as it was originally envisaged as a
nation-state uniting all the Somali people of the HOA. That possibility died with the decolonisation
of the continent and the emergence of the OAU in the early 1960s, and all the
efforts of successive governments of the erstwhile Republic, and the deep and
heartfelt longings for Somaliweyn among the Somali people of HOA that
they stoked, were doomed to failure.
Further, the Siyad Barre dictatorship poisoned that dream by
deliberately and cynically using it to divide, oppress and decimate the Somali
people in order to maintain its grip on power.
Thus, the dream that was meant to liberate and realise the political
identity of the Somali people was distorted and perverted to divide, oppress,
dispossess and massacre them. In this
context, it is important to point out that in 1977 the majority Somali
population of Djibouti overwhelmingly chose independent statehood over union
with the Republic of Somalia when they secured their freedom from French
colonialism. The reason for this was
that they had learnt the lesson of the experience of British Somaliland, and
had no wish to surrender their sovereignty for the suzerainty of Mogadishu.
The poisoned political dream of Somaliweyn
must be replaced with a new ethos of representative government rooted in Somali
culture and historical experience, individual liberty and collective
endeavour. What all Somalis share, and
which cannot be denied or taken away by any power, is an ethno-linguistic,
cultural identity and common history which is evidenced by a tremendously rich
heritage of poetry, dance, music, folklore and oral tradition. Somalis must accept the African political
reality of acceptance of the colonial political boundaries, thus the division
of the Somali people of the HOA among five nation-states, i.e. Somalia,
Somaliland, Djibouti, Ethiopia and Kenya.
However, as a people divided among these five states, Somalis must
promote and champion open borders, customs union and free trade on the economic
front, and regional autonomy, representative government and individual liberty
on the political front within the HOA region.
It must be an axiom of a new Pan-Somali ethos that minority Somali
communities in Kenya and Ethiopia achieve their civil and human rights within
their home countries as Kenyans and Ethiopians.
This requires, perforce, that minority communities within majority
Somali countries also realise their civil and human rights as citizens of
Somaliland, Somalia and Djibouti respectively.
In short, a new Pan-Somali ethos must
embrace the both the political realities of the HOA region of which the Somali
people are inhabitants, and also reach for the growth and developmental
possibilities of that region for the benefit of all of its inhabitants, while
securing and developing the rich cultural and historical legacy of their unique
identity. This new ethos must abandon
the exclusivity of the Somaliweyn dream and embrace a vision of the
future which firmly places the Somali people at the vanguard of an inclusive,
economically and developmentally progressive, politically open and
representative HOA region which incorporates cultural diversity and personal
freedom. This coupling of representative
domestic political systems with regional economic integration has been shown to
provide not only the most optimal path for economic growth and development, but
also offers the best safeguard against autocratic rule and dictatorship in many
parts of the world, notably Europe, Asia and South America as well as in parts
of Africa.
The implications of the above with
respect to re-establishing the state in Somalia are clear and basic. Firstly, the emphasis upon forming so-called
governments needs to be replaced with efforts to identify, debate and agree
upon the terms under which the people of that country agree to live
together. The question of how and why
the people of Somalia agree to share a nation-state has not been visited since
independence in 1960, when the raison d’etre of that country was to
secure independence from the colonial power and create Somaliweyn. Clearly, this can no longer be the organising
principle of the state, so a replacement ethos or ‘Xeer’ (the pastoral,
Somali equivalent of the ‘social contract’) needs to be articulated. This will require much discussion, debate and
soul searching as it did for the clans in Somaliland. Equally, this is not a static, one-time only
exercise, but a dynamic, evolving discussion that each generation undertakes
and resolves for itself, but it is absolutely essential to commence the process
if the new state to be established in Somalia is to command and secure the
consent of its citizens. This process
has to be driven by the people of Somalia, although others may support and
facilitate the process, they can neither impose it nor guide it.
The bitterness of inter- and
intra-clan feuding during the last twenty three years, not to mention the fact
that anarchy has been ingrained in the body politic as several generations of
Somali youth have grown up knowing nothing else, will inevitably complicate
this process. However, there is no
alternative to this fundamental cornerstone of nation-building if Somalia is to
escape its present misery and political stasis.
A strong positive support for the process exists in the fatigue of the
people with the barrenness of the current situation and the prospect of a seemingly
unending future of besiegement by foreign armies and religious nihilists. The
alternative to such genuine process of national reconciliation and state
formation is for Somalia to be balkanised into powerless Statelets, or
Bantustans, under the aegis of regional or international powers. To some extent, this situation is emerging
already with regional ‘governments’ beholden to Ethiopia or Kenya established
along their respective borders, i.e. Galmudug and Jubbaland respectively. This situation cannot be permitted to pertain
as it is inherently unstable politically, it does not promote representative
political structures and it acts as a deterrent to economic growth and
development. Further, while such
regional statelets may seem to serve the interest of their regional patrons in
the short term, in the long term, they will only serve to provide political
ammunition to the religious nihilists and other reactionary and backward
looking forces. Thus, they are a recipe
for continued instability and violence in the region.
Conclusion
The first practical conclusion that
can be drawn from recent Somali history is that the combination of indirect
rule under the British colonial administration and the marginalisation of
Somaliland within the Somali Republic from 1960 until 1991 had unintended
positive consequences that enabled the country to emerge from the collapse of
the Republic without disintegrating into anarchy. Conversely, the deeper penetration of
modernist socio-political structures and corresponding degradation of
traditional authority systems in Somalia have worked to ensure that traditional
conflict resolution mechanisms have not emerged to ameliorate the anarchy that
has bedevilled that country since 1991, with the exception of seven or eight
months of UIC rule in 2006 mentioned earlier.
In addition, the close involvement of foreign powers, particularly the
nomenclature of the international aid and development bureaucracy, in the
attempts to establish a government for Somalia has been counter-productive by
denying political space for grass-root reconciliation efforts to emerge and
develop.
The second conclusion is that the
central rationale underlying the creation of the Somali Republic, indeed it’s
very raison d’etre, has ceased to have political primacy or moral
authority. This is, of course, the dream
of Somaliweyn that underpinned Somali Nationalism and which was turned
into the dictatorship’s instrument of subjugation. Somaliland has accepted this harsh reality
and has succeeded in forging a new creed or social contract which underpins
their state and forms the foundation of its constitution. Somalia, on the other hand, has been unable
to develop such an alternative national ethos and continues to maintain formal
allegiance to the destructive ideology of Somaliweyn, even as reality forces it
to acknowledge the fact that the NFD and 5th Province of Ethiopia
are irrevocably Kenyan and Ethiopian respectively, while Djibouti’s existence
as an independent state is equally beyond discussion. Thus, successive Mogadishu ‘governments’ are
forced to contort themselves into the contradictory positions that Somaliland
cannot recover its sovereignty because of adherence to Somaliweyn, while
Djibouti, the NFD and the 5th Province of Ethiopia cannot be claimed
in denial of Somaliweyn.
The third, and final, conclusion is
the obvious fact that Somaliland succeeded and Somalia has failed thus far in
establishing legitimate government because the former secured the political
consent of its people to the new political system, while the latter has not
been able to commence the internal process necessary to secure said
consent. This fact is not just related
to the different perceptions of nationalism and the raison d’etre of the
state, but also to the roots of political consent and what it means to be
Somali in the 21st century.
It is our contention that in this important aspect, Somaliland points to
the future while Somalia remains a victim of its past. The international community should draw the
inevitable conclusions and engage with Somaliland as an independent country in
order to secure its collaboration to resolve the Somalia crisis. The present policy of holding Somaliland’s
success hostage to Somalia’s foreign-sponsored failure serves no one, neither
Somaliland, nor Somalia or the international community.
June
2014
[1] In
the interest of full disclosure, the late Premier Egal (who was also President
of Somaliland from 1993 until his death in 2003) was the father of the author.
