Another Model in the North
While the south has been caught up in the cauldron of competing factions, a different model has emerged in Somaliland. Whereas attempts to build stable state structures in Mogadishu have mostly been top-down, with outsiders in the lead, Somaliland has constructed a functioning government from the bottom up, on its own, with little outside assistance.
When Somaliland broke away, it took with it six of Somalia’s eighteen regions, encompassing slightly more than a fifth of Somali territory and between a quarter and a third of the total population.5
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Northern discontent goes all the way back to the formation of Somalia in 1960. Subsumed into the larger, Southern-dominated state structures, in which unfamiliar Italian laws and colonial-era elites predominated, northerners felt like a people apart. When the new administration discriminated against them in sharing out top posts and other state resources, the northerners’ sense of grievance grew larger still.
Serious challenges to the union began as Siyad Barre’s grip weakened in the late 1970s. No fewer than ten clan-based resistance movements sprang up across the country. The most notable among them was the Somali National Movement (SNM), a group formed in 1981 and closely affiliated with the Isaaq clan that makes up some 70 percent of Somaliland’s population.6 In 1988, civil war erupted. Siyad Barre bombed Somaliland’s two largest cities to rubble, killing an estimated fifty-thousand people and making refugees of a million more. This brutality convinced northerners that they should find their own solution to the challenge of state-building.
Somaliland has profited from a unity conferred by its comparatively homogeneous population, modest disparities in personal wealth, widespread fear of the south, and a lack of outside interference that might have undermined the accountability that has been forced on its leaders.7 This cohesiveness—which makes Somaliland sharply distinct from both Somalia and most other African states—has combined with the enduring strength of traditional institutions of self-governance to mold a unique form of democracy.
From the onset of Somaliland’s independence movement, traditional democratic methods have predominated in efforts to create governing organs. The SNM was notable for its internal democratic practices, changing its leadership no fewer than five times in the nine years that it spent fighting the Siyad Barre regime. A Council of Elders established during this time to resolve disputes and distribute food among the refugees quickly gained legitimacy. When the war ended, it came to play a key role in promoting a process of representative decision making. Within two years of the SNM’s victory, it had turned power over to a civilian administration.
From the time independence was declared, a wide-ranging and inclusive process of national dialogue sought to construct a consensus on the system of political representation that should govern Somaliland. Between 1991 and 1996, the interclan dialogue went on despite conflicts and interruptions, eventually yielding the broadly legitimate government that has delivered security and growing prosperity since 1996.
Of the many interclan meetings, all financed by local business-people and community leaders, the 1993 Boorama shir beeleed (clan conference) was the most important. From it came a Peace Charter—based on the traditional law of social conduct between clans—that established the basis for law and order, and a National Charter that defined the political structures of government. The Boorama gathering, attended by five hundred elders, religious leaders, politicians, civil servants, intellectuals, and business-people, set the pattern of institutionalizing clans and their elders into formal governing bodies, something that is now referred to as the beel (clan or community) system of governance.
This “dynamic hybrid of Western form and traditional substance”8 formalized the role of elders in an upper house of elders (known as the Guurti) responsible for the security and managing internal conflicts, and allocated seats in the legislature based on clan numbers. A conference in 1996–97, after the war, increased the number of seats available to non-Isaaq clans. The 2001 Constitution, approved by an overwhelming majority of the population in a national plebiscite, sought to minimize clannism and entrench consensus-based decision making by limiting the number of political parties to three and requiring them to have significant support in each of Somaliland’s six regions.
Mohamed Haji Ibrahim Egal, who had been Somalia’s prime minister before the 1969 coup and who became Somaliland’s president in 1993, provided inspired leadership during the breakaway state’s formative years. His government negotiated with the relevant subclan in order to gain access to revenue from the port of Berbera, rebuilt government buildings, reopened the central bank with a new currency (the Somaliland shilling), created a new civil service, melded militiamen into a national army, and removed roadblocks and informal “taxes” from major roads. Somaliland now has many of the trappings of modern statehood, including not only its own currency, army, and cabinet ministers, but also license plates and even a national air carrier, Daallo Airlines.
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