By Joshua Keating
When you are in Somaliland, there is never any question that you are in a real country. After all, the place has all the trappings of countryhood. When I arrived at the airport, a customs officer in a Somaliland uniform checked my Somaliland visa, issued by the Somaliland consulate in Washington DC. At the airport, there was a Somaliland flag. During my visit, I paid Somaliland shillings to drivers of cabs with Somaliland plates who took me to the offices of ministers of the Somaliland government.
But, according to the US Department of State, the United Nations, the African Union and every other government on Earth, I was not in Somaliland, a poor but stable and mostly functional country on the Horn of Africa. I was in Somalia.
Even among unrecognised states, Somaliland is a special case – it is both completely independent and politically entirely isolated. Unlike South Sudan before its independence, Somaliland’s claim for statehood is based not on a redrawing of colonial borders, but an attempt to re-establish them. Unlike Taiwan, it is shackled not to a richer, more powerful country, but a poorer, weaker one. Unlike Palestine, its quest for independence is not a popular cause for activists around the world.
The journalist Graeme Wood has described places such as Somaliland as the “limbo world”: entities that “start by acting like real countries, and then hope to become them”. What separates “real” from “self-proclaimed” countries is simply the recognition of other countries. There’s no ultimate legal authority in international relations that decides what is or isn’t a real country, and differences of opinion on that question are common. What separates the Somalilands of the world from, say, Sweden is that Sweden is recognised by its peers.
Statehood may be a legal concept, but achieving it is an entirely political process. To the degree that foreign officials acknowledge Somaliland at all, they are generally sympathetic to its history and admiring of its recent accomplishments. Somaliland’s main obstacle is not the world’s animosity, but its indifference. Its current predicament answers the question: what would happen if you created a new country and no one noticed?
Somaliland is pretty easy to get to. There are regular flights to the capital, Hargeisa, from Dubai and Addis Ababa. The city – a scruffy, sprawling town of cinderblock houses and potholed roads – feels coated in a fine film of desert dust. It’s usually extraordinarily dry, although periodic violent downpours in the rainy season leave the mostly unpaved streets damp and soggy. Camels are the traditional livelihood, food source and currency of Somali herders, and even in the big city, it’s not unusual to see them loping through busy downtown traffic. Food stalls crank out steaming, heaping plates of chewy camel meat (not bad) and thick, frothy camel milk (nauseating – to me, anyway).
From other stalls, money-changers dispense grimy, faded bricks of shilling banknotes held together by rubber bands. When I was visiting, the shilling was trading at about 7,000 to the US dollar – although given that you can’t exchange Somaliland shillings anywhere outside Somaliland, I don’t exactly understand how this exchange rate is set. When paying for anything in a store with shillings, unless you know what you’re doing, it’s generally best to just hand over one of these bricks to the clerk and let him take out what he needs. Nowadays, most people are more likely to pay for basic goods and services by transferring cellphone credit.
Try to book a hotel in Somaliland online from the US and you are likely to be referred to a travel advisory stating: “The US Department of State warns US citizens to avoid travel to Somalia because of continuous threats by the al-Qaida affiliated terrorist group, al-Shabaab.” But once you’re there, you quickly realise that such warnings are unnecessary. Hargeisa is one of the safest large cities in Africa, and, aside from the pollution and the traffic, there’s not too much to be concerned about when you’re walking around, although foreigners travelling outside the capital have been required to hire an armed guard since the killing of four foreign aid workers by bandits in 2004. There’s been almost no terrorist activity in Somaliland since 2008, when suicide bombers attacked the presidential palace and Ethiopian consulate. In contrast to the south, there is no pirate activity along Somaliland’s shores.
Hargeisa’s main work of public art is a war memorial consisting of a stubby Mig fighter plane – a real one – shot down in 1988 and now mounted on a pedestal along the city’s main thoroughfare. Hargeisans will tell you, with some ironic pride, that their city is one of the few places in the world that was bombed by planes that took off from that same city. The event is part of a long chain of events, most of them tragic, leading up to the country’s strange current predicament.
As the names of their countries suggest, there’s little ethnic or linguistic difference between the people of Somalia and Somaliland. The entity that today calls itself the Republic of Somaliland owes its existence to two main factors: its proximity to Yemen and its abundance of sheep. In the late 19th century, Britain (with the support of Italy) and France (with the support of Russia) were locked in a struggle for control of the Nile. As a means of both countering French influence and ensuring a regular supply of mutton for its garrison at the Yemeni port city of Aden, Britain signed a series of agreements with tribes in northern Somalia.
In the words of the historian Ioan Lewis, “in relation to its size and significance” Somaliland was “one of Britain’s least rewarding possessions”. Yet there’s a good case to be made that its marginal status as a colony benefited the country in the long run. Whereas Somaliland had been considered a backwater by the British, and therefore left mostly to govern itself through the existing clan structure, Italy considered Somalia an integral part of its short-lived ambitions to build a north African empire that also included modern-day Libya and parts of Egypt.
Read more: When is a nation not a nation? Somaliland’s dream of independence
Source: The Guardian
