God Bless Somaliland

[Carafaat]

GoldCoast;753077 wrote:

Why didn't you post the replies to this article where the guy got a shellacking LOL?

 

First reply:

 

Roland Marchal is Research Fellow at SciencesPO Centre for International Studies and Research. He has written extensively on Somalia

 

 

With all due respect to Richard, this is a collection of all the clichés on Somalia (and Switzerland). That Switzerland reaches its current status is not the outcome of a bottom up approach: there were moments like that, but many others clearly shaped by a quite different logic. One should expect the reference to be more grounded in history.

 

John Lonsdale wrote an essay (published in African Studies) on the creation of pre-colonial State, and one would hardly find any process similar to the one designed by the author. But yes, history is creative. Anthony Giddens, in his book The Nation-State and Violence, also reminds us that States exist only in a system of States. This is also very true when analysing the conditions by which Switzerland was able to survive despite the wars at its borders. It is surprising how the issue of State Building in Somalia is seen as internal, though so many foreign actors are involved and imperative on its shape and orientation.

 

I have no idea whether Somalia is a fit for a strongly centralised State, for a loose federation or for the coexistence of many States: I hope one day its population can have a say on that issue after a proper democratic debate. One should however bear in mind a few points. First, the centralized State was not always a colonial legacy

. The Sudan Political Service was not made up of disciples of Napoleon, neither was their practical philosophy inclined to that thinking. Ethiopia was a very centralised State and did not need the Italians to be that. Ioan Lewis reminds us – I think in “Pastoral Democracy”- that Somalis could be fierce Repuplicans but also very obedient.

The focus on the current crisis should not pre-empt us to remember other periods of Somali history when centralizing dynamics were very much at play (the Ajuuran empire, or the post 1945 nationalistic period).

On should stop identifying State-building process with a UNDP/NGO project and see it as it is: messy, contradictory, often coercive and bloody, and much longer that a diplomatic assignment or a UN contract.

 

That Somali politics could eventually be reduced to clan politics is an opinion that still has some popularity. I would not say this is untrue, but as a sociologist I am amazed that no other identities play a role, neither those created by urbanisation, migrations, social classes, contacts with the State, political Islam and so on. Really, if the author is right, then Somalia is extra-ordinary: the “museum of one people that has not changed” (taking note that the author forgets the strong presence of Bantus and other refugees – such as Oromos – of all kinds). Moreover, I would like to hear what clan politics actually encompasses at a moment when all clans (at least in the South and in large parts of the North) are deeply divided, with the divisions often crossing nuclear families.

 

The proposal Richard makes just ignores history

and confuses the social setting of Somaliland and Puntland with most of the South where all clans are represented. What then are the regions he mentions? How to define them? Should we take those of the1960s? or 1990? Or repeat what Puntland and Somaliland did (very different approaches but still a creeping conflict between the two)? Puntland with a very small population and a relative clan homogeneity created more than 30 new districts to appease some of its elites. With little success, as we can witness today. The current problems faced by both entities have different origins but tend to prove that their survival is today increasingly connected or dependent of international support.

H

is idea is also debatable on another important point: why should Mogadishu port benefit only to Benaadir people? Should Berbera port benefit only to Sahel and not to the whole Somaliland? Ethiopia did promote this idea in the 1990s and got the support of other international players at that time (the EU among them). The achievement is to say the least, unimpressive. To a large extent, the growth of Islamism in the late 1990s and early 2000s was fed by a nationalistic reaction to what many Somalis interpreted as a balkanisation of Somalia.

 

Let us conclude on Somaliland: as someone who grew up in a democratic country, I always question unanimity (seemingly unlike the author) and my fieldwork experience shows that ‘yes ministers’ support their government in Somaliland, but opinions vary in the population at large. Some may die for Somaliland, others feel it is the best they can get for the time being, and few publicly or silently admit (since inside Somaliland they will be arrested or socially coerced) that they are against it.

Very weak and pretentious respond to the article without coming up with any historic argument why Somalia should have a strong cenralized State.