Background and Context

Somaliland has had a difficult history and its legacy lies at the center of the territory’s identity today. Within days of winning its independence from Britain in 1960, Somaliland voluntarily gave up its existence as a separate state to merge with the rest of what then became Somalia.[1] It was a decision driven by a powerful belief in pan-Somali nationalism and by euphoria at the end of the colonial era.[2] Just 31 years later, in 1991, the last functional Somali government collapsed on the heels of a brutal and protracted civil war and Somaliland’s leaders decided to break away and leave the rest of Somalia behind. Since then, Somaliland has for all intents and purposes been functioning as a weak but independent state even though it has yet to be recognized by any country in the world.[3]

The list of grievances that supporters of Somaliland independence cite to justify the decision to break away from Somalia is long. But at the center of it all is the shared horror of a war whose many atrocities were carried out by the victims’ own countrymen from the south. The desperate attempts of former Somali President Siad Barre to hold on to power from the 1980s onward tore apart the whole country and devastated lives from north to south. No part of the country, though, was more thoroughly brutalized than the northwestern territories of the Issaq clan, which make up most of present-day Somaliland.

The Issaq-dominated Somali National Movement (SNM) was formed in 1981 and became one of the most formidable armed groups to challenge the Siad Barre government’s power. The government fought back by waging war on the entire Issaq clan. Government intelligence services arbitrarily detained, tortured, or murdered hundreds of Issaq civilians suspected of supporting the rebel SNM from the early 1980s onward. Government forces poisoned wells and slaughtered the livestock rural Issaq depended on for their livelihoods. When the SNM captured parts of Hargeisa in 1988, the Somali government bombed the city with planes that took off from the town’s own airport and strafed columns of fleeing civilians. As Isaaq civilians fled, the government systematically repopulated their communities with civilians from other clans. The war claimed tens of thousands of civilian lives across Somaliland, drove at least a million people from their homes, and left the region devastated. By 1991 Hargeisa was little more than a bombed-out shell of the city it had been. The abuses of that period have been amply documented elsewhere, by Human Rights Watch, and by others.[4]

In May 1991 following the collapse of the Somali government, SNM leaders and clan elders declared Somaliland’s independence.[5] The SNM then turned away from the rest of Somalia, which was quickly engulfed by internecine struggles for control between competing factions. A May 2001 popular referendum overwhelmingly approved a provisional constitution that reaffirmed Somaliland’s independence.[6] In the 18 years since declaring its independence, Somaliland’s government has been focused on two things above all else—winning international recognition and maintaining the fragile peace.

“Peace and Milk”

The situation in Somaliland is inevitably compared to the violence and chaos that have prevailed across much of south/central Somalia since 1991.[7] Viewed against that backdrop, the contrast is hard to overstate. The country has been largely at peace for more than a decade. It has held successful parliamentary and presidential elections. And in many respects the government’s human rights record compares well against any country in the region.

Somaliland’s record of long-term stability, however, is not without blemish. When it fought for power against the Siad Barre government, one of the SNM’s slogans was “nabad iyo caano”—“peace and milk,” which in Somali roughly conveys the idea of peace and prosperity. But the territory was wracked by two civil conflicts in the 1990s that threatened to unravel the unity of the territory.[8] Both conflicts were resolved through lengthy processes of mediation and consensus-building and Somaliland has been free of serious internal conflict since 1996.Somaliland and the neighboring semi-autonomous region of Puntland each claim Somaliland’s eastern regions of Sool and Sanaag and residents of those disputed territories are deeply divided on the question of Somaliland independence.[9] Nevertheless, Somaliland has been remarkably successful at preserving the peace. Given that Somaliland is surrounded by the chronic instability and violence of Somalia, including Puntland, the long-running insurgency across the border in Ethiopia’s Somali region, and the interminable border dispute between Ethiopia and Eritrea, this is a success that requires considerable effort to maintain.

Somaliland held its first—and so far only—presidential elections in April 2003. President Dahir Riyale Kahin won the polls, defeating opposition candidate Ahmed Mohamed “Silanyo” by the razor-thin margin of 214 votes.[10] Silanyo protested the legitimacy of the results but ultimately chose to peacefully accept defeat after exhausting his appeals. Somaliland’s first parliamentary elections were held in September 2005 and resulted in a resounding victory for the opposition—the opposition Kulmiye and Ururka Caddaalada iyo Daryeelka (Justice and Welfare Party or UCID) parties won a combined 49 of the House of Representatives’ 82 seats.[11]

Both polls were widely acknowledged to have been largely free and fair.[12] Together the two successful elections represented an achievement that was all the more impressive when considered in the context of the Horn of Africa—a region where elections have generally been disfigured by fraud or rendered meaningless by government repression, if they are held at all.[13]

Failures and Setbacks

However, looked at from another perspective, Somaliland’s accomplishments are in many respects limited. The territory has devoted itself with great success to maintaining the ever-fragile state of peace and order and a trend towards free and fair elections may—or may not—be taking root. But the government has largely failed to make progress on other fronts. Economic development has stalled and government efforts to provide basic services such as health and education run from paltry to almost nonexistent in many areas. Unemployment is a rising problem in Hargeisa and other urban centers and, according to government officials and activists, has led to a concurrent rise in street crime.[14]

A large part of the explanation for many of these failures lies in Somaliland’s enduring poverty. Without recognition, Somaliland lacks access to many significant streams of international development assistance and outside of remittances by Somalilanders abroad finds it more difficult to convince outside investors to put their money into the local economy.[15] The sum total of government expenditures in recent years has hovered around US$30 million, meaning that per capita government spending is less than nine US dollars.[16]Government officials say that the rapidly expanding capital city of Hargeisa is run on a shoestring budget of roughly $2.4 million per year.[17] A longstanding ban by Saudi Arabia on direct importation of livestock from Somaliland has hit the economy hard, depriving it of the natural market for its most important export.[18]

“The Old Mentality”

Somaliland President Dahir Riyale Kahin came to power in 2002 when then President Mohammed Ibrahim Egal died in office. Egal had ruled Somaliland since 1993.[19] Riyale’s ascension to the presidency aroused considerable concern in some quarters because of his close association with some of the worst human rights violations of the Siad Barre era. Riyale served for many years in the Somali government’s feared National Security Service (NSS). He was the highest-ranking NSS officer in Berbera in the late 1980s,[20] a time when the NSS and other security agencies were carrying out mass arrests, torture, and extrajudicial killings of suspected SNM supporters.[21]

President Riyale has never offered a full accounting of the role he played in the worst abuses of that period, but he was in a position of command within an agency that oversaw massive crimes against the civilian population. Human Rights Watch reporting from the period directly implicates Riayle in the arbitrary detention of suspected SNM supporters in Berbera.[22]

Several other officials in the current government are also former officers of the NSS from the period when many of its worst abuses took place.[23] Political figures and civil society activists interviewed by Human Rights Watch cited the Barre-era backgrounds of many key officials as one of the primary obstacles to solidifying Somaliland’s nascent democracy. As one local analyst lamented to Human Rights Watch, “Many [government officials] were in the Siad Barre government and they have a tendency to backslide in that direction...for many, it is the only experience they can draw on.”[24]

The Aftermath of the October 2008 Bombings

On October 29, 2008, at least 24 people were killed and 28 wounded in simultaneous suicide blasts in Hargeisa that struck the presidency; the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) office; and the Ethiopian trade mission. In addition to the traumatic blow the attack amounted to in and of itself, it further set back Somaliland’s efforts to engage with the outside world. Heightened security concerns led to restrictions that hamper the implementation of programs providing development assistance.

The Somaliland government says that 19 people were arrested after the attacks and that 12 were still in custody as of May 2009. One senior government official acknowledged that “Some were wrongly arrested, but they were soon released.”[25] The Somaliland government alleges that the primary ringleader of the attacks was a man named Abdullahi Gutale, who escaped Somaliland on a Dallo airlines flight and has not been caught. At least one of the bombers was believed to have been a Somalilander.[26] The 12 suspects still in custody had their first appearance in court on May 23, 2009.[27]

The Somaliland government is currently drafting a counterterrorism law, which it hopes to introduce in Parliament for passage into law in 2009. The threat of terrorist attacks are a real fear for the Somaliland government—in January 2009 the government announced that it had seized 10 rocket launchers from a residence in Hargeisa and alleged that these were meant to be used in a terrorist attack.[28] In May 2009 the government claimed that it had foiled yet another planned attack.[29]

“Hostages to Peace”

Somaliland’s painful memories of war have left most of its population desperate to avoid any threat to their fragile and hard-won peace. This has proven to be a double-edged sword. On the one hand this fact has helped create space for the painstaking processes of consensus-building that are at the heart of Somaliland’s continuing stability. But when the Riyale administration has pushed past the legal and constitutional limits of its power, failed to hold elections, and banned public protest of its controversial actions, the same fear of threatening the peace has often precluded any kind of effective opposition. And many Somalilanders who openly criticize the government’s human rights record or other failings find themselves confronted with accusations that they are undermining Somaliland’s chances of international recognition. Many Somalilanders describe this dilemma by saying that they are “hostages to peace”—so desperate to avoid the risk of instability that they look the other way even when their rights have been infringed.