Food for thought! I don't claim to be familiar with this part of the world, but a quick glance at the history of Somaliland suggests that Somaliland should perhaps be recognized as an independent state.
According to Wikipedia: "It is the largest unrecognised state in the world by de facto controlled land area. It is a member of the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization, an advocacy group whose members consist of indigenous peoples, minorities and unrecognised or occupied territories."
For a long time Somalia was ruled by the monster (Siad Barre from 1969-1991) propped up by the Soviet Union.
"... For 34 years, Somaliland has governed itself. It holds elections that matter and maintains an army that defends its borders. It collects taxes and delivers services, and it issues passports that are used across the world. By every measure of sovereignty, Somaliland is a state. What it lacks isn’t legitimacy, but acknowledgment. And the time for acknowledgement is now. ...
My family escaped Somalia when Siad Barre started persecuting supporters of democracy, my father included. He helped found the Somali Salvation Democratic Front, calling for a return to parliamentary government after Barre’s coup in 1969. For that defiance, Barre imprisoned him and condemned our family to death. We ran because to stay was to be executed. Barre didn’t merely rule Somalia—he dismantled it.
This wasn’t the crude tyranny of a petty strongman. It was Marxist-Leninist ideology enforced with calculated cruelty. Barre tore up the constitution, dissolved parliament, and outlawed political parties. In their place, he erected his Supreme Revolutionary Council, a body that answered not to the Somali people but to his Soviet masters. Under his regime, to speak of democracy wasn’t dissent. It was a death sentence.
The Majeerteen clan learned this firsthand in the late 1970s. When they dared to resist his rule, Barre’s forces answered with collective punishment. More than 2,000 civilians were massacred.
The Umar Mahmud sub-clan suffered a worse fate: their wells were poisoned, their reservoirs were drained, and their herds were wiped out. Tens of thousands of camels, cattle, sheep, and goats were slaughtered—an assault not only on livelihoods, but on survival itself.
For the Isaaq clan, the punishment was somehow even more savage. Between the late 1980s and the early 1990s, entire cities were bombed into rubble. Hargeisa and Burao—once proud centers of commerce and culture—were reduced to ashes. Fathers were executed in public squares before the eyes of their children. Mothers were violated, not as accidents of war, but as weapons of it. Families fleeing toward Ethiopia carried infants across the desert, only to be strafed from the skies.
These were deliberate acts of annihilation, designed to erase a people’s dignity and extinguish their will to resist. The death toll is difficult to reckon with. Conservative estimates put it at 60,000 lives in two years; some reports suggest nearly 200,000. A community was targeted for destruction simply because it refused to bow to tyranny.
And yet, this is where Somaliland’s story bends from tragedy to something extraordinary.
When Barre’s regime finally collapsed in 1991, the survivors had every reason to answer in blood. Their children lay in mass graves. Their women bore scars of violation. Their cities were reduced to rubble. Generations of trauma cried out for vengeance. In almost any other place, at almost any other moment in Africa’s turbulent history, the answer would’ve been the gun.
But Somaliland chose differently. Instead of succumbing to the familiar cycle of vendetta, its elders convened peace conferences rather than war councils. They drafted a social contract from the ashes of burned-out towns. They chose forgiveness where revenge would’ve been expected, consensus where rage was justified. ..."
Official portrait of Siad Barre (Notice his Hitler moustache, or was it Charlie Chaplin?)
No comments:
Post a Comment