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CORRECTION: SOMALILAND WOULD NEVER BE SOMALI URAYSO

SomaliNet Forum (Archive): RA'YIGA DADWEYNAHA - Your Opinion: Somalia: Archive (Before Sept. 29, 2000): CORRECTION: SOMALILAND WOULD NEVER BE SOMALI URAYSO
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QOSLAAYE

Monday, September 25, 2000 - 10:57 am
To all of those who like to dream the daylight, I got one thing to say to you all. Let me tell you the greatness of somaliland, and we will always be fiercely independent, despite what the rest of somali(huuro) believe. Let me borrow your ears and tell you about somaliland:

For the men of the 11th Brigade, the Somali National Movement's (SNM) long war of liberation is finally over. Under a blazing blue mid-morning sky, they have assembled at Hargeisa stadium s dusty mid-field with their arms - a dozen weary battle-wagons four artillery pieces and two ancient tanks In a few moments the weapons with which they sustained their 10-year struggle against the •••••• - the forces of the deposed Somali dictator Mohamed Siad Barre - will be handed over to the government of Mohamed Haji Ibrahim Egal president of the Republic of Somaliland.

An animated colorful crowd of thousands has assembled to watch and to take part clustering around the troops and their vehicles though the 11 th is neither the first nor the last of the SNM s units to demobilize and there is little pomp or ceremony to hold the people s attention The atmosphere in the stadium is festive and familiar the speakers low-key more in the spirit of a town meeting than a martial spectacle since today s events are a celebration of normalcy and an affirmation of the hard-won prize of peace.

Far from the mayhem and surreal violence of Mogadishu beyond the reach of even the United Nations operation in Somalia Somaliland is struggling to reconstitute itself from the ashes of a brutal civil war But each success represents more than just another notch in the painful transition from war to peace For Somaliland' s secessionist majority each success drives home another nail in the coffin of the old united Somalia.

Somaliland's unilateral declaration of independence in May 1991 took the rest of the world - at least those bits who noticed - by surprise. Perceived against the backdrop of the south's hideous self-destruction the north s sudden decision to break away seemed just another aberrant twist in Somalia s dark spiral of fratricidal violence But the origins of northern independence and the SNM's secessionist tendencies are nothing new They are older than most of the young fighters of the 11 th and their younger comrades in arms among the SNM s other units.

Few of these young men are old enough to remember any other life but that of the bush fighter: long, hungry months in the semi-desert wastes of the Haud, exchanging fire with the Faqashin brief, furious skirmishes. Fewer still remember when resistance to the Barre regime began in the aftermath of the Ogaden war, or the unhappy marriage of north and south over three decades ago, which soured from the moment of its consummation. But there is no doubt among the fighters about what they were fighting for : the end to southern domination of the north and the liberation of their country under Somaliland or any other name

Only a few hundred meters from where the soldiers of the 11 th have assembled at the edge of a desiccated rock-strewn cemetery is the grave of Hassan Kayd the first of the fighters for northern independence. In 1961, defying the tide of popular sentiment that led to the merger of former British Somaliland and the UN Trust Territory of Somalia only one year before, Kayd - a Sandhurst graduate - and a group of young northern officers launched an abortive coup d'etat against the northern apparatus of unitary government. Brought to Mogadishu for court martial their trial was reportedly annulled on the grounds that as northerners they could not be judged by a southern court since the parliaments of the north and south had yet to ratify a single act of union. Though the officers failed to generate popular momentum for their struggle a national referendum on a unitary constitution later the same year failed to gain majority support in the north. Carried by the numerical superiority of the more densely populated south the dream of Somali unity was already losing its sheen.

Hassan Kayd himself lived long enough to witness the SNM s victory and to be buried in an independent country. Few of the surviving SNM cadre can match his historical record. The most senior date their opposition from the late 1970s and Somalia's crushing defeat in the Ogaden war when Barre resorted to increasingly Draconian methods to consolidate his hold on power. In the north especially crippling restrictions on merchants "special taxes" and preferential treatment for southerners persuaded many northerners to quit their homeland for greener pastures in the Gulf and elsewhere. Mohamed Hashi, one of the SNM s founding members was among many who read the writing on the wall early, opting for self-imposed exile in Saudi Arabia. In Jedda in 1978, he and a handful of others including future SNM leaders Hassan Aden Wadadid and Ahmed Ismail Duqsi came together without any specific objectives beyond opposition to the Somali regime.

"We were reacting," Hashi explains. "We didn't develop a political program until later when we formed the SNM." But Hashi's cell in Jedda was not alone in its basic, inarticulate anger. Similar groups in Riyadh, London, Mogadishu and Hargeisa were developing along parallel lines: planning, fundraising, circulating anti-government tracts. As contact and communication between such cells multiplied and strengthened, the network of northern resistance that would become the SNM began to crystallize.

Abdi Yusuf Duale "Boobe," former secretary of information for the SNM now produces an independent Hargeisa journal from a spartan, concrete room in the crumbling compound of Radio Hargeisa - one of the few installations in the city not completely destroyed. In 1979, he became involved with opposition cells within the ruling Somali Revolutionary Socialist Party, Barre's superficial effort to supply his military dictatorship with civilian credentials. Somalia's defeat in the Ogaden had dashed nationalist aspirations for a greater Somalia, a dream already soiled by Djibouti's emergence as an independent state in 1977, and disillusionment was rife both within and without government.

Many northerners, who had taken the brunt of Somalia's rout in the Ogaden, also discerned a pattern of increasing Darood influence within the regime which found expression in sharpening discrimination against the •••••. Meeting in small, secretive groups, ••••• officers began to formulate plans for safeguarding northern interests, Their efforts produced the Afaraad, the Fourth Brigade of the Western Somali Liberation Front (WSLF), guerrilla vanguard of Barre's efforts to challenge Ethiopia's control of the Ogaden and an instrument, in ••••• perception, of ••••••• hegemony among Ethiopian Somalis. When in 1980, Boobe was named to the WSLF'S central committee, he was already familiar with subversive nature of the WSLFs Fourth and its ••••• commander: "Afaraad was formed with the intent of protecting ••••• interests, with securing weapons from the government so that we could defend ourselves."

Boobe didn't join the SNM proper until 1982 when the movement moved its headquarters from London to Dire-Dawa in Ethiopia the same year that the first Afaraad officers crossed over to the rebels with their troops and their weapons. He defected first to the mainly Mijerteen Somali Salvation Democratic Front, then to Aden where he found the atmosphere charged with the heady idealism of a multitude of liberation movements from all over the world. When he finally linked up with the SNM in Ethiopia, the movement was basically an unsophisticated conglomeration of ••••• interests. "We had no real program, no constitution, only guidelines," he remembers. "Our 1982 charter spoke of unitary government, but we always had the idea of decentralization." The idea of secession, though unstated, was already a powerful undercurrent in the organization. "Especially among the grassroots," Boobe remembers. "Only a small group of intellectuals believed that Somalia would remain unified."

Whatever the rank and file of the SNM might have thought about independence, the leadership had good reason for not letting it show. From the beginning, according to Mohamed Hashi, Mengistu Haile Mariam, Ethiopia's strongman and the SNM's patron, already had an inkling of the group's secessionist orientation. In February 1982, he sent his liaison officer with the SNM, Ato Demise, to pass an unmistakable message to the movement's leadership: a secessionist movement would forfeit the support of the Ethiopian government - a clear indication of Mengistu's own preoccupation with the war in Eritrea. As long as the SNM remained in Ethiopia, independence would be restricted to the realm of quiet speculation. It could not, and never did become, an overt aim of the movement's leadership, but its roots ran deep among the ordinary fighters. Amina Yusuf, who lived for years in the bush among the SNM guerrillas with her husband, Mohamed Farah "Qadiimi", was convinced that victory would mean independence: "Only the policy-makers opposed the idea, but the front-line fighters were determined."

But the SNM did not have a monopoly either on resistance to the Barre regime, or on the dream of liberation. While the guerrillas struggled to build an effective military organization in the desolate Ethiopian-Somali border areas, popular anger with the Barre regime was also growing within Somalia itself. Afaraad's defection and increasingly daring SNM raids led the government to crack down hard in the northwest. General Mohamed Hashi Gaani, a clan relative of the president, took command in Hargeisa, effectively assuming control over all branches of administration. A curfew was imposed and arbitrary arrest, detention, and executions became routine.

Mohamed Barood, Somaliland's soft-spoken minister of rehabilitation and resettlement, was among the members of a Hargeisa-based dissident group called Ufo (Hurricanes). We sympathized with the SNM, but we didn't know what they wanted to do. People had doubts about them. Maybe they would just write letters from Jedda and London." The group decided to take matters into its own hands. At mid-day on June 26, 1981, the anniversary of Somaliland's independence from the British, Barood and other members of Ufo gathered for a secret flag-raising ceremony. Their banner was a Somali flag with only one point of the Somali star remaining - Somaliland. "You could see we had a vision even then," Barood remembers, though he admits that independence was not defined as one of the group's objectives. Over the next few months, he and several others began to distribute anti-government leaflets in signed with the provocative byline of Ragga U Dhashay Magalada (Men Born of the City). Equally provocative, they organized a self-help group for Hargeisa hospital, which suffered gravely from government neglect and was barely functional. "It was an act of defiance," asserts Yusuf Xirsi Garow, another member of the Ufo circle. The hospital did indeed become a center-piece of Hargeisa's resistance to the regime, provoking a response from the government which far exceeded the group's expectations: Between November 1981 and January 1982, 29 alleged members of Ufo were arrested and placed in detention. Barood himself was picked up on November 4 and brought to the headquarters of the dreaded National Security Service or NSS. His interrogation took place in the same room from which he now functions as a government minister, and through his window he can see the barracks in which he and several others were detained and tortured for the next four months.

We were never tortured in the town," Barood remembers. "They would extinguish the lights every night at the same time. Then we would hear the keys - there are so many keys in a prison...Everyone had his heart in his mouth is it me tonight? Then there's be a ride in a Landcruiser to a place about 3 miles away. They thought maybe we were part of something big. They would ask us questions like: Do you know Omar Arteh or someone big like that. Most of us didn't even know each other."

After four months, Barood was transferred to the infamous facility at Labaatan Jirow near Baydhabo in southern Somalia. He would spend the next six and half years in solitary confinement, shut in a cramped cell roughly three paces square, including the toilet. Once a day the outside door would be opened for air, and sometimes a little sunshine, to enter the cell. "In February 1989,1 heard that there was fighting," he recalls. "I heard that Hargeisa was deserted and demolished. It was difficult to believe a thing like that. l thought that the stories were exaggerated. l couldn't accept it." When he was released one month later, Barood discovered that the stories were accurate, but they were long out of date. The SNM's nearly suicidal offensive (1,200 of the lightly armed guerrillas confronted two fully equipped army divisions) against the heavily garrisoned northern towns of Hargeisa and Burao, and the government's savage and devastating reply, had transpired nearly a full year before.

For Barre, the SNM onslaught signaled the beginning of the end. Within months, a group of Ogadeni government officers, led by General Morgan's (military commander in Hargeisa and Siad Barre's son-in-law) operations officer, Colonel Ahmed Omar less, deserted their posts in the north and headed south to join the nascent Somali Patriotic Movement. In 1989, the Ethiopian-based military wing of the United Somali Congress (USC), under the leadership of General Mohamed Farah Aidid, had launched offensive operations along the border near Beled Weyne. Stretched between three fronts simultaneously, the Somali National Army would soon become distended and demoralized, fighting for a little more than its survival against the increasingly experienced, well-armed insurrectionary movements. Total collapse was less than two years away.

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Anonymous

Monday, September 25, 2000 - 09:48 pm
Warmiyaad marqaantay!!!!!!!!

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dal-xoreeye

Tuesday, September 26, 2000 - 02:13 pm
qoslaaye xishoo hana noosoo koobiyaaleeyn waxaa joornaalada kasoo aragtay, waryee dee kow ma'aha oo labo ma'aha intaad koobi sooqortay, waryee xishood dee. adiga inaad diyaarisay ha'iskadhigin dee. every body can copy something.

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somali

Wednesday, September 27, 2000 - 01:57 am
qoslaye
somaliland •••••• don`t want to be second citicen
and as a DAAROOT we never been a socond citicien so where are going? no way you have to be a some one we have

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Sabax

Wednesday, September 27, 2000 - 02:48 pm
To Qoslaaye ...the chicken leg

First of all, stop using the dictionary, cuz ya make non sense what so ever nigga. Secondly, stop using the English language n be proud of ur own damn language. Third, u just an idiot, perhaps a "nomad". Never the less, your English sucks, cuz after the first damn line; yo ppl get bord, fool. Indeed, I shall not waste my little spare time..argueing with ignorant fools like . Peace.

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