Somaliland seeks a little respect

Somaliland seeks a little respect



Written by Paul Salopek
Chicago Tribune

Jun 08, 2008

HARGEISA, Somaliland — Somalia isn't supposed to be this normal.Untroubled by petty crime, money changers in this quiet desert city leave their stacks of currency unattended—in piles the size of refrigerators — while they pray in mosques.Earnest government officials, elected in what may be the cleanest voting in Africa, eagerly meet reporters in roadside cafes, a practice that would be suicidal in the violent south of the country, where occupying Ethiopian troops do battle with a ferocious Islamist insurgency. (Even more unusual, the officials insist on picking up the tab for camel-milk tea.)

Across town, another private university is being planned—the sixth in the region. It won't teach the Quran, unlike the few other surviving educational facilities in war-ruined Somalia. Instead, its curriculum will be secular and American—pinched from Portland State University in Oregon, to be exact

"This is what frustrates us," said Dahir Rayale Kahin, president of the obscure self-declared republic of Somaliland, a parched enclave the size of Oklahoma that proclaimed its independence from Somalia in 1991 and is angling to become a platform for U.S. power in the region."We are a functioning state, but the world still ignores us. Instead, it props up a failed state in the south, in Mogadishu, a place with no rule of law, a state that is nothing."

Remote, desperately poor and unrecognized by any country—yet astonishingly stable and free—the separatist republic of Somaliland marked 17 years of democratic self-rule last month, a remarkable milestone of good governance that served to remind its few Western visitors, wistfully, of what's missing in the rest of Somalia: airports that aren't mortared by rebels, streets that are safe to walk at night, votes that are counted fairly, and a fledgling army that has managed, so far, to trump the divisive Somali obsession with tribe and clan.

Not everyone is celebrating.The U.S.-backed transitional federal government of Somalia, which theoretically rules this shattered nation from the war-gutted capital of Mogadishu, condemns Somaliland's leaders as traitors and renegades. And local and international human-rights groups have noted that Kahin, Somaliland's second president, has become more authoritarian in the past year, jailing and then pardoning local opposition politicians and reporters.

But as the United States struggles to contain the threat of Islamic terrorism in Somalia—and in the rest of the volatile Horn of Africa—dusty Somaliland, population 3.5 million, has stepped up as an unlikely partner in that Herculean task.Stretching across the north of Somalia along the blistering-hot shores of the Gulf of Aden, Somaliland recently offered its derelict port of Berbera as a base for the Pentagon's new Africa Command, or AFRICOM. The Pentagon, which already operates a counterterrorism base in neighboring Djibouti, has yet to respond to the proposal.

Welcome to oil firms

Somaliland's government also has invited U.S. oil companies to reclaim their 1980s exploration rights in the region, abandoned during the civil wars that led to Somalia's collapse. So far no companies have returned, citing legal concerns about Somalia's claim of sovereignty over the region.

For the same reason, Somaliland receives little foreign aid.Washington must walk a tightrope in its relations with a rustic statelet that covers about a quarter of Somalia and is inhabited primarily by camel and goat herders.Officially, the Bush administration has deferred the issue of Somaliland's independence to the African Union, which has a historic aversion to tinkering with old colonial borders on the continent. Angry Somalilanders argue that they actually are restoring their colonial boundaries: The region was a British protectorate that joined with Italian-ruled Somalia in 1960.

It is partly that history, Somaliland elders say, that girds their mini-state against Somalia's violence and chaos. While the Italians undercut tribal authority, allowing young warlords to seize power, the British left old clan structures intact. Somaliland's nascent government now includes a council of elders, or Guurti, that helps resolve disputes.

Still, U.S. policymakers fear that allowing Somaliland to become Africa's newest country would sink the already feeble transitional government of Somalia, which is propped up by U.S. cash and troops from the African Union and another U.S. ally, Ethiopia.Ethiopian forces, aided by U.S. intelligence, installed Somalia's unpopular federal authorities 18 months ago after an invasion that toppled a conservative Islamic movement.

Since then, thousands of people have died—and hundreds of thousands have fled their homes—in a stubborn Islamist rebellion.Except in Somalia's strangely placid north.

America's 'only real friend'"I don't know why America ignores its only real friend in the region," said Mustafa Farah, a youth chewing khat, a popular narcotic leaf, in Somaliland's self-designated capital of Hargeisa. "You could walk with an American flag across this city and nobody would bother you. We like Americans."

In fact, many Somalilanders are Americans.Though statistics are scarce, the regional government here estimates that as many as 100,000 Somaliland expatriates may live in the United States. Some of the region's parliament members speak English with cornfield-flat Minnesota accents. Entrepreneurs building the new university are modeling their classes on those of their alma mater in Portland, Ore.Remittances sent to local families from the United States and elsewhere are believed to dwarf the Somaliland government's annual budget of $50 million—a figure roughly equivalent to U.S. funding for fighting brush fires this year in San Diego County, Calif.

For its part, the State Department has allocated $1 million to help Somaliland organize its next presidential race, to be held no later than April 2009. It will be the region's fourth round of elections since declaring independence. No free elections have been held elsewhere in Somalia for almost 40 years.Somaliland's experiment with democracy hasn't been without glitches.The president faced criticism last year for imprisoning three journalists on charges of defamation.

Three politicians also were held after trying to form a new opposition party. The government quietly released the men, fearing their arrest had damaged its bid for international recognition."We will go ahead with our elections and we will never give up," Kahin, the Somaliland leader, said while relaxing at the presidential palace one recent evening. "We are a patient people."Wrapped in a traditional sarong-like skirt and stirring a cup of tea, he cited Kosovo and East Timor as recent models for achieving independence. He noted that those fledgling states had separated from viable countries—whereas Somaliland simply wanted a divorce from the wreckage of Somalia.

Outside, in a handmade republic in one of the toughest neighborhoods in the world, the city's generator-powered lights punctually kicked on. And among the mosques' amplified calls to prayer there came the tinny strains of hip-hop.

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