Limbo World

[military-mind]

They start by acting like real countries, then hope to become them.

Ethiopia, smarting from the loss of its actual colony Eritrea two decades ago, effectively adopted an unofficial second one on the northern edge of Somalia, called Somaliland. Somaliland was among the most noisome and rebellious areas in Somalia under the dictatorship of Muhammad Siad Barre. In the late 1980s, Siad Barre killed hundreds of thousands in bombings of its main city, Hargeisa, and the countryside. When Siad Barre fell, Somaliland rapidly asserted itself as an independent state, and it is now approaching 20 years of relative peace. The coastline that Ethiopia lost in Eritrea it has effectively gained back in Somaliland, with the port of Berbera now a key trade valve into the Gulf of Aden. Ethiopia's support for Somaliland also represents a perpetual outrage to the Somalis of Mogadishu. While continuing to fight among themselves for nearly two decades, most factions agree that Ethiopia is a mortal external threat, especially because it invaded Somalia proper in 2006.

Like the Abkhazians, the Somalilanders are as helpful as they are hapless, as I found from the moment I stepped into their small representation office in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa. At most African embassies, the diplomats regard visa applicants as captive sources of revenue. But rather than a droopy-lidded kleptocrat, the Somaliland office produced a slim, energetic young man with an endearing eagerness to show off his country. He came out to stamp my passport and sat down next to me to sketch a map of the complex land journey between Addis and Hargeisa. "They grow the best khat here," he said, referring to the mildly narcotic chew popular in the region. His index finger traced a proud little circle on an area just on the Ethiopian side of the border. For $20, he pressed into my passport a full-page visa, as official-looking as any in Africa.

On the journey he described, there was an emphatic lack of officialdom, a studied denial by Ethiopia that any border existed at all. At Jijiga, 10 hours from Addis and the last big town before I would cross into the nonexistent country of Somaliland, I had to hunt down a police officer to get him to inscribe my passport with a note confirming I had exited Ethiopia legally. This was a border that existed only by request.

Once on the Somaliland side it took about two hours of off-road driving -- through hills of desert scrub, past herders crouching in huts made of discarded U.N. and usaid flour sacks -- before I met anything resembling a sign of government. At the edge of Hargeisa, a hilly town whose lights were the one glowing dot on the horizon as I drove, two men with machine guns intercepted the car to demand my papers. This, I thought, would be my cue to do what one does at so many other African borders, which is to wink and offer smokes and a small bribe in exchange for safe passage. But before I could phrase my tentative offer, they found the inky blue stamp in my passport and waved me through, asking only that I register with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs the next day.

Unlike Abkhazia, Somaliland did not exactly enchant me as a place beautiful enough to die for. Perhaps it was the heat -- well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, with nothing to drink, due to strict enforcement of the Ramadan fast -- or perhaps the buggy eyes and green-flecked teeth of the khat-chewers outside my hotel room each night. The standard meal, spaghetti and ground camel meat, eaten with the hands, made clear why I had never been to a Somali restaurant outside Somalia.

The Somalilanders, of course, had already done quite a bit of dying for their land and for their spaghetti, and they missed no chance to tell me how cynical and cruel the international community had been by not recognizing their state. At the foreign ministry satellite office set up to stamp in the rare tourist, two excitable Somalilanders pointed out that Somaliland had multiparty elections, a free press, and an anti-terrorism policy that the government enforced with zeal. It had done all this without recognition and without help from the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, or any other agency that requires an international rubber stamp to operate. If this was illegitimacy, other African governments should try it.

And in any case, what was the alternative? A reconstituted Somalia would require reconnecting Somaliland with what may be the world's most spectacularly failed state. Where Somaliland has a fledgling coast guard, Somalia has flourishing pirates, and where Hargeisa has a form of democracy, Mogadishu has howling anarchy punctuated by fits of sharia law.

Yet this is the alternative urged by nearly everyone in the region. Arab states are reluctant to see Somalia, a fellow Arab League member, sliced up and leased to predominantly Christian Ethiopia. The African Union worries that the Somaliland example will persuade separatist movements that if they just fight hard enough, they'll eventually get their own U.N. seats. Somaliland, of course, retorts by pointing out that Somalia is being used by foreign states just as surely as Ethiopia is using Somaliland. Moreover, Somaliland asks whether peaceful and responsible democracy isn't something worth incentivizing, regardless of whether the peaceful and responsible democracy is being practiced by separatists. For now, even Ethiopia, Somaliland's closest regional ally, hasn't bestowed recognition, and there is no sign it intends to.

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