     Shicib | Unrecorded Date
Supporting peace and stability in the North
It is evident that over the past year Somaliland, in the northwest, has been the symbol of hope throughout much of
the war-torn country. It is important to note that so much of the reconstruction and development that has been in
evidence during the recent period of peace and stability are due to the efforts of the people of that region. While the
international community has frequently spoken of a "peace dividend", the reality is that the resources required to
demonstrate a real bonus for stability has yet to be seen to any significant extent. That said, there is every indication
that a small wave of international donor interest is building up, and if the impact of such resources is to be felt, there
will be considerable demand for institutional capacity-building, and effective coordination and programmatic
coherence amongst UN agencies and non-governmental organisations.
However, the fate of Somaliland will in the immediate future depend upon a far more regional perspective than
assistance programmes have reflected in the past. Refugee reintegration is one obvious indication of the need for a
more integrated approach to programming and project design and implementation. At the same time, the possibility
of supporting an inter-state trade structure for the future has been opened up as a result of the likelihood of a major
humanitarian food operation from Somaliland's port of Berbera into Ethiopia, and the implications of that
operation's impact upon the trans-border infrastructure. And, while these prospects are real and possible, in the
immediate future Somaliland will have to come to terms with an extraordinary amount of mines and unexploded
ordinances that hinder developments both within the region and across the region's boundaries.
The northeastern area, known as the state of Puntland, has over the past year made a remarkable effort to promote
stability and peace. For all intents and purposes that effort has succeeded. More so than its northwestern neighbour,
Puntland's peace is fragile, dependent upon a delicate balance of forces that is complicated by a dedicated group of
religious fundamentalists. Puntland's authorities are particularly concerned about law enforcement and the judiciary
throughout the region. In addition, there is the persistent concern about Puntland's coastal waters, from which the
assets of the Somali people are being exploited through unregulated fishing and dumping of waste. These are but
two examples of how the authorities' lack of resources has left them open to international exploitation.
Response to the needs of Puntland has been slow. As a self-governing entity it is relatively new, and the
international community has needed time to determine how best to support Puntland's needs. Even recognising this
fact, the authorities are increasingly suspicious about the sincerity of the oft' announced peace dividend. While a
surprising number of activities have been launched during 1999 by UN agencies and NGOs, these have not been
sufficient to meet the urgency if not anxieties felt by the authorities to establish governmental structures and
law-enforcement capacities. |
| Observer | Unrecorded Date
Copyright 1994 National Public Radio.
Weekend Edition - Saturday (NPR), 02-06-1993.
Somaliland Struggles to Separate From Somalia
By Susan Stamberg
Host: This week, Secretary of State Warren Christopher said it's time to begin replacing U.S. troops in Somalia with
U.N. peacekeeping forces. Tensions between the Marines and locals have risen in the capital, Mogadishu, after a Marine
shot dead a 13-year old boy thought to be carrying a bomb. There are no Marines, no international troops in the
northern part of the country, the former British colony of Somaliland. Today, Somalia is made up of that territory and
the southern part of the country, which was once an Italian colony. The two regions united after each became
independent in 1960, but that union fell apart when Somalia collapsed into civil war in the 1980s. With the ouster of
dictator Mohammed Siad Barre two years ago, Somaliland once again declared its independence. NPR's Peter Breslow
recently visited the capital of Somaliland,the city of Hargeysa.
PETER BRESLOW, Reporter: Hargeysa is one of the few places in what the rest of the world call Somalia where an
immigration officer actually checks your passport upon entering the country.
IMMIGRATION OFFICER: Nationality? American?
BRESLOW: Yes.
IMMIGRATION OFFICER: What's your occupation?
BRESLOW: Journalist.
IMMIGRATION OFFICER: How many days are you staying here?
BRESLOW: The immigration office is a bombed out former Shell gas station, the glass smashed from the windows, the
walls riddled with bullet holes. The stamp a visitor gets in his passport is misspelled. `Entery' it reads instead of
entry. There is no country in the world that recognizes the independence of this place, but none of this matters to
the people here. This is their new country, ,a separate state from Somalia. Residents are quick to point out that here
there are no U.S. Marines, nor do they want them. There has been no famine here - the region exports livestock - nor
has there been much of the inter-clan fighting that has plagued the south. But something terrible did happen here. In
1988 and 1989, the forces of General Mohammed Siad Barre killed more than 50,000 people, most of them members of the
Isaak clan, Somaliland's dominant clan.
IBRAHIM URDU, Former Hargeysa Police Major: Your own airplanes flying from your own ground and bombarding the town, it
is something unimaginable. It's something that you never dreamt of.
BRESLOW: Siad Barre was trying to stop a rebellion begun against him in the north. Ibrahim Urdu was a major in the
Hargeysa police force back then. He says he was beaten, imprisoned and tortured by Siad Barre's people simply because
he was Isaak and a competitor for the spoils the dictator showered upon his own minority Darod clan. Urdu fled to
Ethiopia with his wife and 13 children, one of whom died in a refugee camp. He returned two and a half years ago to
find his city destroyed. Driving into town from the airport, you begin to realize just how long it may take Hargeysa
to recover from the attacks. Rutted dusty roads, collapsed buildings, contorted iron fences, corrugated tin huts
housing refugees. There are no telephones, little running water, and the only electricity is supplied by individual
generators. Abdu Rahman [sp], who now lives in Atlanta, grew up Hargeysa and came back for a visit.
ABDU RAHMAN, Former Hargeysa Resident: It was a beautiful medium- size town. It was the second largest city in
Somalia. Everything changed, everything. I mean, even the color of the sand changed, I mean, how everything looked so
dark and dirty, and you cannot even look at it.
BRESLOW: But the city isn't dead, far from it. A couple hundred thousand refugees have returned. The streets are lined
with little shops, and the marketplace is booming - sugar, tea, corn, flour, grains, clothing and the frankincense
this region was famous for. But that was before Siad Barre instructed his troops to cut down the frankincense trees
and poison the watering holes for livestock, his revenge for the rebellion against his corrupt regime. For this, the
killing, the corruption, the devastation, the Isaaks of the north now want their own country back.
HASSAN ESA JAMA, Somaliland Vice President: This country has got every reason to be recognized. We've got the legal
arguments. We've got historical arguments. We've got the geographical arguments, the ethnic arguments. I don't think
anybody could defend not recognizing Somaliland.
BRESLOW: Hassan Esa jama is the 41-year old British educated vice president of Somaliland. He's taking a break at an
outdoor tea shop on Hargeysa's main street. As we talk, a technical, one of those machine gun loaded Jeeps screams by,
and he mutters, `Fools,' under his breath. But the vice president will tell you law and order is not the big problem
in Hargeysa. As a matter of fact, the town has a brand new 300-man police force, complete with crisp green uniforms.
These days, the vice president worries about how to get foreign recognition, which would mean more foreign assistance
to rebuild his ruined country. Only a few international aid organizations have set us shop here, and most people in
Somaliland cannot understand why the world, and especially the United Nations, is paying so much attention to the
south and ignoring them.
Regardless of what comes of foreign aid or recognition, there seems to be no chance the people of Somaliland will
agree to reunite with the south. Just ask 40-year old Dul Jama [sp]. Three months ago, she came back to Hargeysa from
Ethiopia with her nine children. Her husband was killed in the air raid that partially destroyed her house. Her
possessions were all looted. But Dul Jama's feelings about Somaliland remain firm.
[Dul Jama speaks] "Somaliland is great, great,' she says. `We were born here and we're proud to be here. It's the only
place we have. We fought hard for this land, man and woman. We lost our husbands,' she says, `We don't want to hear
talk about reuniting with the south. We are here with nothing, but at least we're free.'
From a hillside neighborhood, you can look down on Hargeysa. There's the ruins of the national theater. Its roof
collapsed upon rows of twisted metal seat bracing. People say the place was packed when it was bombed. There are the
makeshift graveyards in parks and schoolyards. So many people were dying so fast that there was no time to dig proper
graves. Today, the mounds are marked with whatever scraps are available, a piece of turquoise plastic, a lead pipe,
cinder blocks, even an old bathroom sink. But the real legacy of the regime of Mohammed Siad Barre cannot be so easily
seen. It lies below the surface.
ALF SLINGSBY [sp], Rimfire International: We found all these in Hargeysa. This is Belgian, Pakistani, Egyptian,
Egyptian, Russian, American, British and Czechoslovakian. Now that gives you a rough idea of, you know, where all
these mines have come from.
BRESLOW: Alf Slingsby shows off a few of the more than 40,000 mines he and his team from Rimfire International have
unearthed over the past two years in Somaliland. Slingsby is right out of central casting, big and burly with a gold
earring and covered with tattoos. He was a demolitions expert in the Royal Navy and has worked clearing mines all over
Africa and the Middle East, but he says he's never seen a situation as nasty as northern Somalia.
Mr. SLINGSBY: The thing is, here it was mined by two different factions. Nobody kept any records. There's no charts,
and there's no markings at all. It's completely indiscriminate mining.
BRESLOW: And most of the mines are plastic, and therefore undetectable. So the work is done by hand, inch by inch over
thousands of square miles. Alf Slingsby estimates there are a million to a million and a half mines to go. Many of
them, like the American and Pakistani models, will catch the eye of a child herding sheep in the countryside.
Mr. SLINGSBY: Children pick these up. They all look attractive. They don't look like anything, do they?
BRESLOW: It just looks like a plastic gas cap or something.
Mr. SLINGSBY: That's all it looks like, and that's what the children think they are. Them two are particularly nasty.
The other one we have a lot of problems with is the Russian. We call it the pencil box mine. As you see, it's made of
wood. There's a block of explosives in the middle and sheets of shrapnel around the edge. They do paint them other
colors. We found them painted green, yellow, blue - nice colors. Children, again, pick them up.
BRESLOW: At the Handicapped International Workshop in Hargeysa, they' re making crutches today. There is a bunch of
them stacked against the wall. Most of them are very short.
Sixteen-year old Mohammed Ali Nur hopes to be off his crutches soon. After three weeks of exercises, he's starting to
get comfortable on his wooden prosthesis. His therapist takes him through a series of walking drills between the
parallel bars he uses to steady himself. Mohammed's right leg is missing from the shin down. The accident happened
four years ago when he was twelve.
Mohammed says he and his friends were playing when they found the mine, but they didn't know that's what it was. It
was small, black and round and made of plastic. And so they started playing with it. And then, Mohammed says, he
kicked it. That's when it exploded.
Mohammed's leg is destroyed. He's forced to use a crude artificial limb, and yet his face is open and shining. Like so
many people here in Somaliland, he seems to regard what has happened to him as nothing more than some terrible
nuisance, something that can be overcome by spirit and hard work. He talks about moving permanently into the city from
his home in the countryside, finishing his education and perhaps opening a business in Hargeysa.
Patiently, Mohammed Ali Nur follows his therapist through the drills, taking a step, catching himself when he slips,
trying again, the smile still steady on his face. This is Peter Breslow reporting.
STAMBERG: This is NPR's Weekend Edition. I'm Susan Stamberg. |
