Elections, Somaliland

There’s a Filipina woman called Yvette Lopez who is one of my heroes. She has been working for around two years now for a Catholic-based international development organization— deployed in Somaliland.
Do you know where or what Somaliland is?
It’s a portion of what on international maps is called Somalia… a place that is today– tragically– an almost totally non-functioning country. But some years ago Somaliland and, I think, a couple of other portions of “Somalia” just decided to carry on doing their own thing, trying to rebuild their society from the ground up.
Yvette has been there as one of a small number of international development workers helping them do that. To do her job in Somaliland she left her husband and daughter behind at home in the Philippines.
And she writes a really beautiful blog. It’s in English, and she posts great pics that give you a real idea of what Somaliland is like.
(Hint: it’s a very, very poor, war-ravaged country. There are frequent security scares. But Yvette usually seems to be able to be very productive. She seems to have made some great friends there, too, and has become quite a connoisseur of the best camel-meat restaurants in the capital, Hargeisa.)
This past week, Yvette’s been one of the international election monitors in Somaliland’s parliamentary elections. You can read a great account of her activities doing that if you start at this Sept. 26 post on her blog, and then go forward a page at a time until October 1 (and probably beyond there, too.)
Mainly I read (and link to) Yvette’s blog because I admire what she does, so much. But I’m also very interested in the situation of Somaliland itself, which seems to be a little like that of Iraqi Kurdistan, or Kosovo, or perhaps now Gaza. In other words it’s a part of the inhabited world where the sovereignty situation is very fluid indeed, and where fairly strong locally based based communities are trying to develop their own “nation state”-type institutions.
I guess you could put Somaliland’s nascent parliament into the category of such institutions.
Regarding Somalia, meanwhile– the country from which Somaliland has been breaking off– the famous war photographer Kevin Sites has started his “Hotzone” direct newsfeed for Yahoo.com from there this week. Mainly he’s been showcasing the misery and violence in the capital, Mogadishu. (Like here.) Actually, he hasn’t just been doing photography. He’s also been making videos and writing almost-daily blog entires. Boy, they keeping him busy!
Next week, Kevin’s going to be in the Democratic Republic of Congo. I must really try to see all the work he does there. Some four million people have died due the conflicts in DRC in the past five or so year– but the US MSM seldom even mentions the place…
Meanwhile, I want most of this post to be about Yvette and her steady, building-from-the-ground-up work in Somaliland. You’re doing such a great job there, Yvette.

4 thoughts on “Elections, Somaliland”

  1. ‎Somalia… a place that is today– tragically– an almost totally non-functioning ‎country. ‎
    Helen, What I see from introduction you are quite about something!‎
    Is this non-functioning country because the US invasion? Or I am wrong in stating ‎this?‎
    Please correct me. I know it was not stable or perfect politic system their leaded by ‎Major General Mohammed Siad Barre ‎
    More about Somalia (Look for Hennery Kissinger Work!!!!)‎
    ‎“Doing God’s ‎Work In Somolia”‎
    ‎

    history of the Somalian polity. Somalia became an independent ‎state in 1960, as the British and the Italians pulled out of their respective Somalian ‎colonies and the two joined into one nation. From the beginning, the Somalian ‎government was obsessed with fulfilling the promise of the five-pointed star of the ‎new Somali flag: to incorporate a Greater Somalia uniting all five groups of ethnic ‎Somalis. Two of those points: Italian Somaliland in the east and British Somaliland in ‎the north, had already been achieved, but there were (and still are) three remaining: ‎little Djibouti in the northwest, formerly French Somaliland and still a client state of ‎France and containing 5,000 French troops; northeastern Kenya, to the southwest of ‎Somalia, which is 60 percent Somali; and the Ogaden desert, to the west of Somalia, ‎which is called Western Somalia by the Somalis but happens to be groaning under ‎Ethiopian tyranny.‎
    Not much could be done about combating French imperialism in Djibouti, but the ‎other two goals were considered achievable. Kenya attained independence a bit later ‎than Somalia, in December 1963, and Somalia had hoped to lop off northeastern ‎Kenya for its own (called in Kenya the Northern Frontier District (NFD)). When the ‎Kenyan government insisted on keeping the NFD, the Kenyan Somalis, egged on by ‎Somalia, began a long guerrilla war against Kenya, an as yet futile war that still ‎continues, out of sight and out of mind of the United Nations.‎
    More explosive was the Ogaden, where Somalia and Ogaden Somalis launched a ‎guerrilla war against Ethiopia, but stood no chance against the superior American-‎trained Ethiopian army under the “freedom-loving, pro-Western” yet slave-holding ‎Emperor, Haile Selassie, the Lion of Judah. In 1967, the Somalian government, led by ‎Prime Minister Mohammed Egal, decided to succumb to reality, and to make peace ‎with their more powerful neighbors. Egal’s peace process had the merit of facing ‎reality, but it angered the Somali military, who accused Egal of selling out Greater ‎Somalia and betraying the five-pointed star; a military coup, led by Major General ‎Mohammed Siad Barre, ousted Egal and established a dictatorship in October 1969.‎
    Barre’s popularity was plummeting in Somalia; the hero of the Ogaden had become ‎the loser. And so Barre stepped up his dictatorship in Somalia, increasingly narrowing ‎the ruling clique to his own Marehan tribesmen and within that to his own relatives. ‎Impervious to any of this development, the new Reagan administration sent none ‎other than Dr. Henry Kissinger to Mogadishu in early 1982 to assure the despot Barre ‎of our eternal support for this “scientific socialist” dictator, all of course in the name ‎of anti-Communism and the Cold War. As Maren puts it, “From Washington, the ‎barren wastes of Somalia suddenly looked like downtown ‎Berlin.”

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  2. Is this non-functioning country because the US invasion? Or I am wrong in stating ‎this?
    I thought it was because, when the militias finally succeeded in getting rid of Barre, they started fighting each other because they all want power, and that’s why they have stopped their country from functioning.

  3. I’ve discussed some of the technical aspects of the Somaliland election here, here and here, and a very knowledgeable Somalilander has been taking part in the comment threads.
    I’ll also second the recommendation to read Yvette’s blog – it’s very well written and the depth of coverage is unbelievable.

  4. Thanks for those links, Jonathan– and for all the great work you do putting out Headheeb, in the first place! You’re right, your commenter Khadar really adds a lot to the knowledge-base there.

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