65 - Darkness and Light in the Horn of Africa: Somalia, Somaliland, Ethiopia, and South Sudan
Somaliland should become Africa’s fifty-fifth state. But just as Ukraine belongs within the European Union, but cannot be accepted just now, so Somaliland should be welcomed into the African Union, but will not be.
There once was a greater Somalia that included what is now Somalia – once the Italian-ruled UN Trust Territory of that name—and a colony called British Somaliland. The latter extends along the southern coast of the Gulf of Aden, the former along the southeast-facing shores of the Indian Ocean. When the British and Italian administrators gave their separate territories independence in 1960, they mistakenly merged, in a misplaced patriotic desire to unite as much of the Somali “nation” as possible. Doing so excluded the millions of Somali who live in the southeastern desert region of neighboring Ethiopia, as well as the residents of what was French Somaliland and is now Djibouti, an autocratically ruled nation on the Red Sea that harbors American, French, Chinese, and Russian bases.
Somalia
The merged Somalia, ruled after a military coup in 1969 by General Siad Barre, a southern (Italian) Somali, lasted only until 1991. The southerners have fought among themselves ever since, spawning two Islamist insurgencies, and a raft of incompetent governments backed by the U. S., Britain, and now Turkey. Hassan Sheikh Mohamud was elected last month as Somalia’s new president, but only by a few hundred clan delegates. He also served as Somalia’s president from 2012 to 2017.
Mohamud only presides over, at the best of times, about half of his nominal domain. He competes with an al-Qaeda affiliated Islamist organization called al-Shabaab (the Youth). Attacks by al-Shabaab on the Somali government, its infrastructure, and its loyalists, are constant. The U. S. has returned 450 military advisors to assist the large but under-motivated and under-trained Somali Federal Army in its existential combat against the legions of al-Shabaab.
Southern Somalia has been in constant internal conflict at least since 2006. Thousands have died, millions have been displaced internally. Others have fled, becoming refugees hoping to migrate to Europe, or to Yemen and Saudi Arabia.
Now, compounding misery, a drought more arid than the one that killed 260,000 Somali in 2011, has arrived in Somalia. Children are dying. Soon their parents will join them, especially if the war in Ukraine continues to keep wheat from arriving in beleaguered Somalia. Feeding Somalia’s 18 million desperate people is now a compelling problem for global humanitarianism.
Somaliland
Somaliland, the land to the north of Somalia, will experience drought, but its 6 million people are otherwise largely free from attacks by al-Shabaab. In fact, since 1991, Somaliland has prospered as a self-governing, democratic, state. The fact that it has long been a well-governed, economically growing, peaceful, separate polity entirely populated by Somali has distinguished Somaliland from its war-torn, tragic, compatriot to the south.
Despite the fact that Somaliland is an independent state in a troubled part of the world, it has one major handicap. It is unrecognized. Sweden supplies aid, and Somaliland trades robustly with its neighbors and, in happier times, with nearby Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and the other states of the Persian Gulf.
The African Union insists on withholding recognition from Somaliland because it still hews to the fiction that Somalia is one country that includes both. The African Union ignores, too, that there is a semi-autonomous section of northern Somalia called Puntland that wants full autonomy.
Because the African Union insists on its fiction, the rest of the world – even the United States – refuses to accord proper recognition to Somaliland. So it sits in limbo, waiting for the nations of the globe to admit the only functioning, fully self-governing, section of the old Somalia into their ranks. Many U. S. Assistant Secretaries of State for Africa have wanted to recognize Somaliland, but their bosses have always refused to disturb good relations with the African Union (and its 54 member states).
Although Somaliland is poor, with a per capita annual GDP of only $1,000, its inhabitants subsist more successfully than their brethren to the south. They graze camels, sheep, and goats on sparse, half-desert, terrain outside Hargeisa, the country’s sandy capital, and sell live animals and skins to the countries of the Arabian Peninsula. A good proportion of its national income is dependent on remittances from abroad. The coronavirus pandemic has curtailed Somaliland’s normal trade, but visitors to Hargeisa and the countryside remark on how well-organized and seemingly productive Somaliland is.
There is no reason, in 2022, to keep Somaliland outside the planetary political system. Somaliland would become one of the better performing and more upright nations of the African Union, if only it could be admitted. There is abundant reason to recognize it, and no point in continuing to maintain Somaliland – arbitrarily -- as a pariah. If Washington broke the prohibition, other world powers would follow.
An Ethiopian Breakthrough?
Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, who started the nonsensical internal war that has devastated the Tigray Province and forced many thousands either to flee or go hungry, has finally recognized that he cannot club Tigray into submission. In fact, Tigrayan soldiers have been fighting like Ukrainians to save their homeland and rule themselves. Abiy and his national army, like the Russians in Ukraine, have tried to starve Tigray into submission. But, because of international pressure, aid convoys eventually trickled into Tigray in March and April.
Now Abiy may finally have realized that kinetic power is not going to subdue Tigray’s militia forces. A permanent peace is theoretically possible, even though Tigrayans hardly trust Abiy, and fear being cajoled into betraying their sacred sense of Tigrayan separatism.
South Sudan’s Hunger
One of the world’s youngest countries, almost perpetually in civil war, will now suffer even more starvation than before. The UN says that it is ceasing aid to South Sudan because donors have not supplied the requisite funds. About 1.7 million South Sudanese are now at risk, with death from starvation likely for thousands.