Picking up the pieces in Somaliland
Upstream, July 27
Barry Morgan
The Capital of the breakaway and still-unrecognised Republic of Somaliland, Hargeysa, wants to turn the clock back.
President Mohammed Egal's 10-year administration wants to regain the independence it claims was denied the arid territory - which covers the same area as the former protectorate of British Somaliland - when it merged with Italian-controlled Somalia in 1960 after decolonisation.
Though Egal then approved the union, consensus broke down in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when clan violence tore the country apart, scuttling United Nations peacekeeping credibility and embarrassing the US military in the process.
Egal has since declared a sovereign state, backed up by a recent referendum with a 75% turnout, of which 97% of voters supported him.
A peaceful and stable enclave, Hargeysa cannot boast one foreign mission, yet it plays host to no fewer than 57 international agencies. Internal UN strictures peg the country as a level-3 security risk. Rival Somali capital Mogadishu is level-5, while the crime-wracked Kenyan capital Nairobi is level-1 - an indication of how difficult it is to make sense of the UN's understanding of the Horn of Africa.
International recognition has now been accorded the new Mogadishu regime, ushered in under President Abdulkassim Sakat Hassan's Transitional National Government (TNG) late last year in New York with much UN fanfare.
Yet blue helmet officials privately admit the TNG controls "little more than one hotel and two blocks" in Mogadishu, while Hargeysa is running a full and secure administration.
"We have a flag, a currency and a constitution sanctioned by democratic plebiscite, so why is my country not recognised?" asks Foreign Minister Qasim Ibrahim.
Libya's Colonel Gaddaffi personally told Ibrahim he would be first in line, but Hargeysa wants a big country to lead the way. The reasons behind the gridlock are complex. Neighbouring Ethiopian Emperor Haile Sellassie and Tanzania's first president, Julius Nyerere opposed Egal's ambitions in 1963, even before the ink had dried on the Organisation of African Unity charter.
They feared that aspirations for self-determination could later ignite a movement to draw all the clans into a confederate Greater Somalia and inspire their own Somali minorities to rebel.
Saudi Arabia opposes a break-up, as does Egypt, which needs a strong and united Somalia to counter-balance Ethiopia in the region's increasingly complex water politics.
Saudi Arabia is secretly arming Hassan's TNG, while Addis Ababa has approved repeated incursions into the south of the country in support of rebel warlords to undermine the fragile status quo.
Meanwhile, Egal last month acknowledged that companies remain loath to invest in oil and gas exploration and production, since they cannot secure finance or get insurance cover for personnel and equipment in a country that does not formally exist. The Djibouti-based Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), which groups all countries in the Horn, including outlying states Uganda, Sudan and Kenya, began co-ordinated talks last month at expert level on regional oil and gas affairs.
Predictably, however, IGAD also opposes recognition, acknowledging only Mogadishu. However, Ibrahim remains optimistic for the future and hopes oil revenues will lubricate and not obstruct progress.
"Our dilemma offers a litmus test for the new Africa, which cannot progress until the Horn's problems are solved," he says.
"The fate of Somalilanders and of Somali minorities in Ethiopia's Ogaden and in northern Kenya will demonstrate whether Africans can show the necessary respect for one another.
"I assure all prospecting companies, especially those who had concessions before, that they are most welcome here," adds Ibrahim.
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Warlords' legacy casts grim shadow
Upstream, July 27
Barry Morgan
The prospective northern shelf and deep Indian Ocean basins off Somaliland's southern coast should be safe for offshore exploration.
For, according to veteran Somali geologist Mohamud Arush, a former ministry man in Mogadishu under the Siad Barre regime, now in academic retreat at Toronto University: "Warlords do not know how to swim."
However, local United Nations observers disagree. Dislocated clan politics has left an unpoliced coastline open to piracy of an intensity and brutality that rivals the Niger Delta. Onshore, at least, Somalilanders are united in mistrust of the southern clans that, under deposed President Siad Barre, bombarded Hargeysa and slaughtered their people.
A short drive outside the city reveals a bucolic idyll near a dried up watercourse - and striking evidence of why this fledgling state is determined to succeed.
At least 40,000 souls were slaughtered here by Barre's commanders, only to be discovered two years ago with fresh graves unearthed every week.
Each day villagers manage to identify loved ones and gradually piece together the horror of what happened on the blood-soaked banks of the Bogol Jire in 1988. As rains wash away the topsoil, the gruesome remains are laid bare, reinforcing popular support for Hargeysa's determination to go it alone. Civil society has been strengthened by the emergence of some 30 non-governmental organisations, all poised to extend their operations and seek foreign assistance.
The European Union has a liaison office in Hargeysa while the UN persists in describing the country as unstable, supposedly capable of exploding at any time. Yet independent US observers in town for the recent referendum noted very little disaffection except in specific areas bordering Punt and Djibouti.
Regional power-brokers and oil company suitors hoping that if Somaliland's inconvenient aspirations for statehood are ignored they will simply go away had better prepare for the long haul. |
