Somaliland: A Victim of International Duplicity and Double Standards

There is probably no better example in modern history of a failed state than the conditions that prevailed in Somalia on May 26th, 1991, the day Somaliland declared its independence. The utter refusal of the international community to acknowledge Somaliland’s independence over the past three and a half decades, and the outrage at Israel’s recent recognition of Somaliland, is thus not only ethically abhorrent, it is also absurd.

When Somaliland declared independence, Somalia literally did not exist: there was no central government and the territory had devolved into violent shambles. Somalia’s state of non-existence was protracted: it remained without a central government for at least another decade and a half.

When I arrived in Mogadishu in 1993, a year and a half after Somaliland declared independence, Somalia was in a state of anarchy that would continue for at least another decade. The capital city, Mogadishu, had been cut in half by opposing warlords, and then each half chopped into a hundred separate pieces. Fifteen-year-old boys from various clans and subclans twirled submachine guns as they patrolled their square block or two. Wherever you were, a constant rat-a-tat-tat could be heard in the near or middle distance.

There was no police, no electricity, phone or water systems, no post office or public transportation, no public schools or health system, no taxes, no authority at all. There wasn’t even someone to take your passport when your UN or Red Cross flight landed; just another sub-clan that controlled the airport, and wanted $20 in cash to let you step off the plane. Seemingly random groups of armed men careened through the city riding “technical cars” or Mad Maxes, as foreign journalists called them – pickup trucks mounted with machine guns or anti-aircraft missile launchers with four or five armed warriors aboard. I was nearly killed by one of them for taking a photograph.

The army of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre, which had been chased southwards across Somalia a year and a half earlier, had ravaged Somalia’s farming area as they passed through, stealing the seeds and the oxen and stopping up the wells that irrigated the land. As a result, hundreds of thousands of Somalians were dying of famine: The food the Red Cross attempted to bring in as relief was often immediately stolen by armed groups – I was at the port one day, terrified, when I witnessed what looked like an almost ritual theft of food meant to ward off starvation. Fields of earthen mounds – what passed for graves – many of them, heartbreakingly, the size of small children, filled some of Mogadishu’s open spaces.

An island of stability

This was the horrifying state of affairs in Somalia in 1991, when Somaliland dissolved the union they had voluntarily entered in 1960, after 76 years of separate, British colonial reign. Somaliland then proceeded to govern their territory peacefully and democratically for the next three decades, holding regular elections whose results were honored by peaceful handovers of power, using their own currency, army and judicial system. Meanwhile, the entity from which they escaped took years to begin to recover – and still has not completely – from violent and murderous anarchy.

But there is more. Barre had ruled Somalia for 20 years. What finally brought his government down was the genocidal war he waged against other Somali clans. Estimates of the number of his victims, the great majority civilians, range in the hundreds of thousands. One of his chief targets was the Isaaq clan, whose ancestral homeland is the Somaliland region, and who make up the majority of Somaliland’s population today.

Even though Somaliland agreed to unite with Italian Somalia after decolonization, it was no surprise that they reasserted their separate identity after they were brutally massacred by their erstwhile partners, especially as, in the aftermath of the massacres, they watched the rest of Somalia descend into unholy chaos.

One might think that Somaliland deserves honor and appreciation from the International community for creating and sustaining an island of stability next door to a nation plagued by violence and instability. Instead, Somaliland was boycotted and isolated for thirty years – for what? For the sin of separating themselves from a state that had imploded inwards, a state defined by violence and starvation, with none of the features of sovereign statehood remained.

Israel’s recognition of Somaliland is the beginning of the righting of a historic wrong. The EU, England, Russia, Turkey, Qatar and China’s condemnation of Israel for recognizing Somaliland sets new standards of diplomatic hypocrisy. The UN’s emergency convening of the Security Council in order to respond to Israel’s diplomatic recognition of a state that the entire world should have recognized thirty years ago, while staying silent as Iran attempts to crush yet another civilian uprising, demonstrates once again its irrelevance and lack of judgment.

The scenes we’ve witnessed in recent days of an Islamic population, women in hijabs, men with hennaed beards and prayer caps, jubilantly celebrating their country’s ties to Israel, are a symbol of hope in a rapidly changing world.

By Micha Odenheimer

The Times of Israel