ANALAYSIS
Somaliland has a special place in the political developments in Africa, especially in the Horn. The country was lucky to be liberated by a group which resembles a mass movement than an authentic liberation force. I spent the 1990s trying to decipher Somaliland and the positions of neighbouring countries and major global powers, when I was so oddly interrupted by the emerging menace and litrature of the Islamists and their entry to military politics. By Medhane Tadesse
Anyone who served on the academic front of conflict analysis in the Horn of Africa is likely to prick up his ears and experience a kind of mental salvation at the recent democratic elections in Somaliland. Somaliland has a special place in the political developments in Africa, especially in the Horn. This paper is concerned with the broader political issues surrounding the recent democratic elections.It will no dwell on the details of election politics or the nature of political parties. It aspires to serve as an analytical guide through the pressures and triumphs of one of the most important but least-recalled political achievements in Africa.The fact that Kulmiye won the election is not a surprise, and is beside the point. The most important issue is the political background that led to a vibrant multi-party politics and the most democratically contested elections in Africa.
The three most revealing moments that shaped my view on and engagement with Somaliland are 1) the locally rooted traditional conflict resolutions mechanisms in the early 1990s that brought calm and stability 2) the death of its President, Mohammed Ibrahim Igal and the coronation of a new president in less than three hours, all constitutionally administered. Somaliland is very lucky to have survived the death of its most important president. It also proved that politics in Somaliland is more about rules and less about individuals. And thirdly, the fisrt closely contested democratic election in 2003, in which the incumbent won by only less than 80, highly controversial, votes but failed to result in post-election violence. This tells more about the nature and historicity of the Somaliland elite and the political culture of negotiation, than the strength of its institutions. With little help from outside, Somaliland has achieved considerable progress in the consolidation of statehood: in a nationwide referendum held in 2001, the country adopted a new constitution with overwhelming support from the voters.
In April 2003, presidential elections were held and in September of the same year parliamentary elections took place. Both elections were declared open and fair by foreign observers. All this triggered hope and eagerness to continue engage in Somaliland affairs. It became a passion. With all the interruptions and distractions from the multi-faceted peace and security issues surrounding the Horn of Africa region, I had to always revert back to dealing with the case for Somaliland. Unlike other new-born states Somaliland was not something of an enfant terrible as a young and unrecognized nation of a few million people. Despite the enormous odds and challenges faced at the time of its 1991 declaration of independence, Somaliland has made tremendous progress in building peace, security and a constitutional democracy within its borders inherited from the colonial period. It is a telling commentary of what works and what don’t work in the Horn of African sub-region. My engagement with Somaliland in the closing decades of the twentieth century was both thrilling and discomforting. Thrilled to see a young and hopeful political community, but depressed to learn the world was not paying attention, let alone provide support.
If there is one thing that supporters of Somaliland insist upon, it’s that the independent country has become a source of hope and pride in the volatile and politically backward Horn of African region. It is the only area hospitable to credible and democratic elections. Somaliland proved that even an impoverished nation can succeed in building and nurturing local institutions for peace and democracy. They are home grown institutions. As Somaliland concluded its recent democratic election this week the one thing that seems to hover in my mind is the uniqueness of its experiment. Some of the stories had already been told. At least some of the facts are simple enough to understand: the dominance of one major clan, the Isaaq clan family. But again one would expect the same sub-clan politics as in southern Somalia.
The unique process in Somaliland is not hard to explain. I think there are various and multi-layered political reasons for it. Unlike other parts of Somalia, Somaliland followed traditional mechanisms of conflict resolution and used them to their highest limits. The protracted clan and political reconciliation processes cemented in the successive Borama conferences in the early to mid-1990s served as bedrock for long term political stability and political transition. More innovative were the clan sanctioned Disarmament Demobilization and Reintegration/DDR/ rituals that led to comprehensive and parallel demilitarization of all the major clans. It created trust and confidence among the main Isaaq sub-clans and ensured predictability between them. This must have removed the weaponry that would have inflamed conflict and violence. This was done without external support. No wonder this is glaringly missing in southern Somalia, where misguided demobilization efforts by the US/UN forces run amock.Nonetheless,the role of traditional leadership in Somaliland is critical to the whole political process.
And probably due to British indirect rule the power and influence of traditional authority remains highly significant. Indeed, the political culture in Hargiessa mutated into a hybrid political system of Westministrial and Somali traditional values, as is evidenced in the web of political negotiations of a traditional kind and some sort of parliamentary democracy. Probably, the political generation groomed by the British is fast disappearing due to age and the new socio-economic changes, not to mention the spread of Islamist movements. The culture of negotiation is still strong. Probably related to the above is the concession building mechanisms that developed between the business class and the political elite, particularly the livestock trading class. Compounding this is the locally rooted economic foundations of the political establishment which became relatively immune to the predatory nature of the state and its fatal dependence on foreign aid. Another significant departure from the processes in southern Somalia. The Somaliland political elite focused on internal legitimacy as opposed to external/international legitimacy. It pursued a political direction that is locally owned, participatory and locally financed.
Political ownership without some financial commitment is always illusive, and this partly explains the problems of state building in southern Somalia. A major disparity with the process in Somaliland. The contextual, albeit pragmatic marriage between the political elite and the business class was the main defining feature of the political system in Somaliland, though it was briefly attempted by the Somali Islamists in mid 2006,when the Union of Islamic Courts leadership cemented a kind of profit-sharing arrangement with leading business leaders in Mogadishu. This is quite revealing on what works and what don’t work in Somalia. Such largely magnanimous political arrangement in Somaliland averted the usual fight over the foundations of the state as evidenced in many parts of the Horn and the African continent at large. Clearly, in many parts of Africa, the fight over the state in the past decade and a half has been at once violent and so disabling that, state institutions are weak and their legitimacy is highly contested. Such a grim reality has been largely avoided in Somaliland. Governments run by small elite groups with partisan agendas and militarized conception of security are sources of turmoil and less suitable for conflict resolution. Most of these states have yet to create inclusive, representative and legitimate political processes and systems. Somaliland did. Besides, Somaliland was lucky that it was liberated by a coalition of clan forces whose end set was only the liberation of the territory, nothing more nothing less.
The Somaliland National Movement/SNM/ and its leadership did not aspire to capture state power and hold it for ever, as was the case with the other liberation movements in the sub-region. Many leaders of the SNM did not harbor partisan political and economic agendas. The SNM was constructed and designed only to fight the war and allow a political and reconciliation process go forward. Unlike, ideologically (leftist) oriented liberation movements; the SNM did not pose an inherent threat to democracy. The bottom line is that, the force that liberated Somaliland and prepared it for a new political process resembled a mass movement than a highly regimented, secretive, militarized and ideologically driven interest group. This allowed for a more participatory clan reconciliation process to be conducted. What followed was less of a victor’s justice and more of a broad-based reconciliation process. The problems and traps associated with liberation movements in power didn’t exist in the post-1991 Somaliland Republic. However, the new dispensation in Somaliland attracted little external attention. Ever since, the world has been almost exclusively preoccupied with Somalia (Mogadishu) and its instability, its endless fighting and the resulting famines, while turning its back on a stable and democratic Somaliland, rated as one of the most peaceful countries not only in the Horn of Africa but on the whole continent.
I fell in love with Somaliland “more or less by accident” in the mid 1990s when I took the liberty to cross the Ethiopian border by car to reach Hargiessa. It is fair to say that up to this point I knew almost nothing about politics and history of Somaliland, two subjects in which I have become wise since. Unlike journalists who take every advantage of such an opportunity I only focused on what makes the dispensation in Somaliland very different from other parts of Somalia and quickly found an audience in Ethiopia ready to learn things about Somaliland. Even the name Somaliland was hardly recognizable in Addis Ababa. In those days, aid groups let alone journalists and diplomats were uninterested to visit Somaliland. My first write up when Somaliland was little more than a rumor in policy circles around the region and beyond, was a polemical and descriptive work. Very little analysis of the clan dynamics and nascent political forces. There was real hunger for news and information; more for analysis, on Somaliland. So I had to do that, and it was a truly fascinating experience. Often, the service I used to deliver to Somaliland, I should say, resembled a spontaneous advice on regional matters, much of it communicated orally to the president, his foreign minister or the speaker of parliament.
Clearly, in those days Somaliland was not experiencing a democracy but it was calm and peaceful. I am always the view that an injustice is being done to the Somaliland people and there is something scandalous about this. Most of the objections to Somaliland independence are either false or fairly trifling. The Republic of Somaliland was created on May 18, 1991 when the political leadership of Somaliland, strongly supported by the entire population, re-claimed the independence of its territory after the collapse of the Siad Barre regime and the Somali Republic it had ruled. Independence had originally been gained from Britain, the then colonial power on June 26, 1960. Shortly afterwards, Somaliland decided to unite with the former Italian colony of Somalia, thereby realizing – at least partly – the dream of a Greater Somalia that was supposed to encompass eventually all the territories inhabited by Somalis. As soon as the Greater Somalia project stumbled, unleashing a series of unnecessary wars and violence on its way around the region, the ideological imperatives of the Union went bankrupt. From the beginning, the union did not work out well for Somaliland, and finally ended in an absolute disaster. When, after a decade of liberation war, Somaliland withdrew from the defunct union, this was not an act of secession but rather the return to the status quo ante. So much is true. Somaliland independence is well grounded in history, probably legality, and definitely on the imperatives of justice and democracy.
I spent the second half of the 1990s trying to understand Somaliland and decipher its unique qualities as well as the failure of the international community. I continued to do so until the first few years of the new century, when I was so oddly interrupted by the newly emerging menace and literature from the Somali Islamist Movement: the Muslim Brotherhood Movements, al-Islah and al-ittihad, the UIC, so on and so on. Another glitch was the less impressive composition and strategy (at least for me) of the post-Ibrahim Igal political leadership on everything that matters to Somaliland. The case against President Riyale Kahin goes to character, integrity and competence. He makes grave decisions on the basis of inadequate or incompetent advice, willfully persists in them though they prove mistaken, and surrounds himself with people careful not to unsettle his misguided views. This is more evident on the strategy of securing international recognition and the issues surrounding the recent pre-elections crisis. The growing domination of Somaliland politics by less thoughtful figures and bizarre electoral considerations has made the task of ‘friends of Somaliland” more difficult than in the past. The ineptitude and inefficiency of those who surrounded the president has more and more overshadowed the case for Somaliland and its much desired international legitimacy. No doubt, Ahmed Silanyo, the leader of Kulmiye deserves support not only because he won in a fair play but also due to his strong personality and perseverance, most needed in a country that is facing the daunting task of creating an effective government and attracting the much needed international support.
While Somaliland’s position within the Horn generally improved, its relations with its Western partners/donors have deteriorated,aggravated bt the pre-election political crisis. This is particularly true for the Nairobi donor group of six members: EU, UK, US, Sweden, Norway and Denmark, organized in the Democratization Programme Steering Committee that funded the voter registration in Somaliland and had also committed funds for the elections themselves. Many partners and Somaliland intellectuals were frustrated by the way Somaliland foreign relations were run. Particularly, a core group of supporters became increasingly irritated by the occasional political flirtation driven by parochial interests which posed an imminent danger to democratic elections i.e. the repeated postponements of the election date, accompanied by extensions of the mandate of President Rayale by the non-elected Upper House of the Parliament, the Gurti.Clearly, there was a sense of rejection and apathy towards the future of Somaliland, when on 28 July the National Electoral Commission ruled that the voter register that had just been finalized at a cost of 10 million US$, would not be used for the elections, the donor group suspended any further funding and in fact withdrew from the whole election process. Internal and external pressure combines to resolve the impasse and considerably change the course of Somaliland politics. My appreciation also goes to president Riyale who decided to live up to the expectations of the Somaliland people, friends of Somaliland and the international community at large.President Riyale accepted the result and congratulated the president-elect Mr.Ahmed Silanyo.
Some would declare that recognition of Somaliland will complicate the search for peace in southern Somalia. The fear that it will open a Pandora box is well-spotted, but hardly enough to support the tendentious assertion of the first. There is a vein of anti-Somaliland sentiment in the UN structure and the Arab block, which has long been characteristic of a state-based system and conventional if not obsolete geostrategic considerations and has been inflamed by the wars that engulfed countries after some kind of secession. The result was troublingly obvious. The international community through the Security Council of the United Nations, decided in 1994 to ignore the wish of the population of Somaliland and not to follow the precedent of numerous other cases where formerly independent countries had quit larger unions (United Arab Republic, Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Senegambia, Serbia and Montenegro) and been once again recognized as independent. Somaliland is not only independent; it is also a democracy. Probably, the only country in Africa where the opposition controlled the majority seats for more than six years while the ruling party fully commands the Executive branch. And this happened in a sub-region allergic to political reconciliation, power sharing and democratic elections. That is no small achievement. In a region not welcoming for free and fair elections, Somaliland remains towering.
I was attracted to Somaliland in a the most humbling way of appreciating the accomplishments of the Somaliland people and before I knew it developed into the defense of the Somaliland peoples’ will, their resilience and endurance. A curiosity that is empathetic, yet difficult to fool-spring up as a tool to help me study and engage. However, I must admit,that there was a sort of revulsion at the horror of war and destruction, and most importantly at the indifference of the international community and distrust of anything happening in southern Somalia but also because I believed in a mixture of sincere elements of antiauthoritarianism and anticlericalism. Of course, the symbolism was fragile, and often painfully easy to see through. The first closely contested democratic election in the Horn faced a crisis and had to fly to Hargiessa to consult with the political leaders and Somaliland intellectuals. Fifteen years later I still recall the first political event I observed at close range and shaped in my mind in the form of a story. But I have resisted the prospect and pressure of becoming a more useful Somaliland expert. But in another respect, my work was not in vain. I had to instill interest and energy on African,particularly Ethiopian foreign policy circles. In the early days I had often borne the burden of explaining the unique experiment in Somaliland and the achievement of its people to the Ethiopian-Horn of African-audience. Now the case for Somaliland is widely recognized by many, intellectuals and diplomats alike. Even this one is not a minor achievement.It is a strategic capital that Somaliland leaders need lean on to make their case.
Somaliland remained a country that had less and less importance for the global powers. For too long there was no Somaliland policy, only the de facto promotion of Somali unity. This left many, including the US ignorant about what was happening in Hargiessa, less the value of Somaliland. The Pentagon and CIA as well as the State Department had no presence in Somaliland or the capacity to monitor events there, let alone the ability to develop useful sources and allies inside the country. For the preceding fifteen years, I have been warning Western and African diplomats of the dangers of ignoring the country. That the UN and IGAD were involved in futile peace and reconciliation attempts in southern Somalia created the false impression that there was a policy on Somalia. In actual fact there was none. As events in Mogadishu have shown, this was an illusion.
A major gap in regional security policy is the lack of active international engagement with the government in Hargiessa.The international community’s policy on the Horn is failing because its Somalia policy wasn’t working. Its Somalia policy is not working mainly because a policy on Somaliland is lacking. Somaliland should become a vital component of any regional policy. The crisis of the state in the Horn and the Red Sea (including the volatile situation in Yemen) makes serious engagement with Somaliland more pivotal than ever. Somaliland badly needs international political support, adequate assistance for its security institutions, and funding for rebuilding the country. And that was not coming. Somaliland’s peace and democracy is being starved to death. All were neglected by the US. Similarly neglected was humanitarian aid and capacity building.
The locally owned, participatory, genuine traditional conflict resolution process and grassroots support for peace and reconciliation in Somaliland should have been followed up by extensive local reconstruction projects, providing not only schools but, among much else, security forces, a basic welfare system, and jobs. If this has been done, local sources of reliable force against Islamist inroads would also have been found. Instead, the world focused on the warlords in the south, Somaliland was ignored, its achievements were not recognized and its people not rewarded. The political process in Somaliland is unique in the sense that it was a financial agreement between the political and business class. Its leaders were never provided with the funds, equipment, personnel, and other support they would have needed to put Somaliland peace and democracy on solid foundations. The hunt for the state in southern Somalia took on more importance than the existence of one in Somaliland, even though there is still no conclusive evidence that this will succeed. It ignored already achieved success over an illusive route to success.
Arguably, Somaliland is the only available platform to stabilize and democratize Somalia. After what appears to be the end of a political and constitutional crisis that had been consuming virtually all political energy of the Somaliland government to the detriment of foreign policy considerations, there is need of a thorough assessment of the support that external partners can and wants to continue giving to Somaliland. The lack of attention has probably allowed the Islamists to establish even closer links to the local population and to find a niche in political parties and find more support if they think they are threatened. No hindsight is required in order to make this judgement.What needed to be done after the first democratic elections should have been obviouse.Any one in his right mind should have recognized the achievements of the Somaliland people and provided support as soon as possible. What the world could have done to recognize Somaliland will always be debatable. What is unforgivable is the failure of the current US administration to channel and maintain meaningful support and provide the resources and man power needed to rebuild Somaliland and to arrest the deterioration of the socio-economic situation, and its decision to go to war with the Islamists in Mogadishu instead.
The recently concluded election matters for many reasons. It may have profound effects on how business is run in Hargiessa, or the conduct of foreign policy. Most importantly, this election will decide whether a capable and competent leadership emerges in Somaliland. The danger has always been that in foreign policy,the urge to quick answers(a kind of yes and no questions) and toward metaphysical simplicity eventually obliterates the careful weighing of interests and risks that must guide a more sustainable and serious process of achieving international recognition. A clearly articulated policy was developed with the help of academic specialists, who are also friends of Somaliland in 2006, but it has been easily ignored and the Riyale government reverted back to the old method and rituals of diplomacy. The new president should urgently reassemble the available resource and facilitate the development of a comprehensive strategic framework. The country could aim at a step-by-step improvement of its role, starting with IGAD and finally targeting the African Union. The wealth of experience represented by the new president could serve as a tipping point. After all, the immediate threat to Somaliland in recent years has never been the lack of international recognition or the possibility of a military attack from the radical Islamists in southern Somalia, but rather the lack of strong and solid leadership in Hargiessa. A functional government that could deliver social goods responsibly and effectively could go a long way in reinforcing democracy and achieving stability. Here in lies the importance of a strong leader and a credible as well as legitimate government. As to the international community, this is an opportune time to make real difference. Now the US, EU, AU and IGAD should try to make up for the lost time. The Islamists seem to have effectively interrupted my full time engagement with the affairs of Somaliland, and I hope they will not be able to do the same to the quest for democracy and prosperity in that country.
Sources
1. Most of the analysis in this commentary is the result of personal accounts as well as several discussions with Somaliland and Somali leaders spanning to more than fifteen years.
2. Medhane Tadesse,”Conflict Resolution Best Practices in Africa”. in the Twalu Dialogue. May 2008
3. According to the Electoral Commission Kulmiye won 49%,UDUB won 33% and UCID got around 17% of the votes.
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