Hiiraan Online

by Muuse Yuusuf
Friday, July 02, 2010

Salute the Flag

This month marks the 50^th anniversary of Somalia’s independence from British and Italian rule and the unification of northern and southern regions, which created the Somali Republic. Since 26^th June in order to honour the occasion, many Somalis have been trying very hard to conceptualise what the occasion stands for and represents.

For some, particularly those who are striving for separation from the rest of Somalia, they perceive the occasion as a mistake that happened half a century ago, something that, rather than celebrating should be buried and forgotten forever.  For them the most important in life right now is to pursuing realisation of their dream of an independent Somaliland, which they hope will be admitted into the United Nations’ General Assembly as an independent state. They have been working very hard to put in place functioning state structures, such as the recent presidential election on 26^th June ironically held in the same date that the northern regions of Somalia were granted self-determination. Put it bluntly, they will not accept short of any thing than a sovereign Republic of Somaliland.

Equally, there are those who have mixed feelings about this big occasion in Somalia’s history. On one hand, they cannot deny the importance of celebrating the Independence Day because many Somalis sacrificed every thing they had for the sake of not only liberating occupied territories but also unifying them with those still under occupation. Therefore, for them to honour and celebrate the occasion is a must and a national duty at any cost. At the same time, however, they feel ashamed, guilty, and embarrassed of failures and missed opportunities that have led to the disintegration of the Republic into fighting fiefdoms and enclaves. Believe it or not, some Somalis are celebrating the occasion in Villa Somalia, the presidential palace, in a hostile and bunker mentality in which they are dodging assassination attempts. Even worsen than that others are not  allowed to celebrate the occasion and cannot even raise their beloved flag in their beloved homelands. This is because newly adopted flags with different names and colours are being forcibly erected to replace our beloved flag, reminding me of the famous nationalistic song “Kanna Siib Kanna Saar” lower the colonial flag and raise the national flag.  

Others are not so lucky as they have to commemorate the day in foreign and far away countries where they live as refugees and minorities some time in hostile and unwelcoming environment. For example, South Africa where, Somali refugees did not feel so welcomed by their black African brothers, but ironically where the Somali flag was proudly raised and waved by our famous Somali singer K’naan, who made us all  proud of his unwavering nationalism. Although Somalia is not officially participating in the World Cup fever, by allowing our singer to waive our beloved flag, which has been bruised and humiliated by its citizens, on its soil, maybe the collective political conscience of our African brothers and their leadership are consciously and subconsciously repaying their debt and gratitude to the Somali people. Remembering how the Somali people stood up with them against the white minority rule, the Somali people who were in the forefront of the international campaign to dismantle the apartheid regime. Thus helping their African brothers to lower down the much hated Oranje-Blanje-Blou racist flag and raise the new flag for the new South Africa, a flag that heralds a new era of unity in diversity.  Good friends and brothers remember you at good and bad times.

 Anyway for the record, I am celebrating with the latter group with their mixed feelings.

Thirteen years ago, I travelled to Eritrea to conduct research on how theories of nation-state building were being put in practice by the birth of the newest state in Africa. At the time of my trip I was sad and heart broken because I was grieving for the death of the Somali state in 1991, a state I grew up with and lived in its heydays and sad days from liberal to military regimes and to anarchy. I can not remember much about the liberal state and its civil governments as I was a child. However, I can still remember the day when I was taken to the polling station to vote in elections. I voted and had my hand marked with indelible ink as a confirmation of my vote and obviously to deter voters from voting again. Perhaps this innocent childhood experience in an election time would explain a lot about the corruption, fraud, and vote rigging that existed in the electoral system. But looking back to that time and if I compare the liberal state with the military and current anarchy most Somalis would agree with me that the infant liberal state was a post-colonial state that was working very hard to live up to the ideals of new concepts, such as democracy and liberalism that were alien to peoples’ culture. However, the military regime in which I lived in its glorious days as an adult was a brutal dictatorship that brought terror to peoples’ lives. Therefore, I was happy to see the back of that regime but I had never thought that the collapse of a central government (dowlad) would lead to the total collapse of the state (qaaran) and to the current anarchy, and this was what was causing me the pain, agony and sorrow.

Anyway, the first few weeks of my trip were lovely and went smoothly. I was welcomed by an Eritrean friend, an American citizen who lived in the states a political refugee for a very long time. Disillusioned with life in exile, my friend had relocated to Eritrea where he was running business. Time was on his side and business was booming for him. He was enjoying the tantalising freedom and economic opportunities which were denied under the Eritreans were under Ethiopian rule. He was proud to be able to raising his young family in his country which he had fled 20 years ago when the country was under Ethiopian reign. His feeling was “No place is like home.” I must say I was jealous of him because my friend had a commodity that was missing from me, i.e. a functioning state that guaranteed the safety and security of its citizens at least. There were law and order in his country, but none in my country.

As a friend of mine jokingly remarked after my return to my adopted country in Europe, I do not know whether I brought a war bug from Somalia and then implanted in Eritrea on my arrival. However, on the fourth week of my trip a major war erupted between Ethiopia and Eritrea. Not a war again, war has destroyed Somalia, I cried silently again heartbroken because I was there to witness and experience how Eritreans were putting the concept of nation-state building into practice: establishing new national institutions etc. Imagine at the time Eritreans did not even have a national airline. I was not expecting war and I could not comprehend this happening here because I knew the two regimes in Addis and Asmara were both allies who fought together against the Mengistu regime. Furthermore, at the time Mr Afwerki and Mr Zenawi were seen as two progressive leaders, the embodiment of new African renaissance, emancipated from the use of force to achieve political ends. Therefore, it had never occurred to my mind that they would restore force in order to settle their political differences. In this case a dispute over a barren area at the border. 

Suddenly, Asmara was on fire and burning. Ethiopian fighter jets were roaming all over the city, bombarding the airport. War was declared in May 1998, ironically the same month in which Eritreans were celebrating their independence. Panic and confusion spread all over the city. The international community – aid workers from the west felt threatened by the bombardment. Urgent request for evacuation were demanded by this privileged community. American aircrafts evacuated westerners. Within three days the international community was gone. At once, all foreign and UN missions closed their doors. It was sad seeing the international community, which was supposed to help this poor nation to build it self as a new nation-state, turning its back on their Eritrean friends when they needed it most, hence abandoning much needed developmental and humanitarian work. Eritrea was left to cope on its own. What a betrayal! I thought friends were for life and would be there when you need them. But obviously some friends are unreliable and are not for life.

Immediately all international flights from and to Eritrea were suspended because of Ethiopia’s threat to shoot down all airplanes that dared to enter Eritrea’s air space. The proud and young state of Eritrea was reduced and declared by the Ethiopians to be no more than a secessionist region occupied by rebels!

I was bewildered by the new development. I questioned the concept of nation-state in Africa. Was this the destiny of the newest African state, I wondered. What is the concept of nation-state in Africa’s politics? Is it a fixed structure or is it a malleable socially constructed molecule that melts away as the Somali state did in 1991? Is it a concept imposed by Europeans on Africans and because of this it will never work? I asked myself. The two leaders were personal friends and close allies. Out of the blue they were sworn enemies. What are they fighting for? Don’t they know the futility of war as we, Somalis, have proven? I asked myself.  Or perhaps, war is an evil experience that new states must go through as part of their political survival. I wondered.

My Eritrean friends tried hard to come up with some geopolitical and economic explanation for the war. But I was not terrible impressed by this. I therefore struggled to come up with my own explanation, and here are the most plausible ones. Ethiopia is a massive land-locked country, which has no access to the sea. Eritrea is a small country with a long cost. Eritrean seaports had been serving Ethiopia for centuries. Therefore the feeling between the two neighbouring states must be: “I envy my neighbour because it has some tantalising commodity or facility, which I cannot have it” and because of this there will always be a conflict between them.

But my preferred explanation was what I called “the need for reforms cycle.”  This is a political cycle, in which some developing nations seem to go through. Unless bold domestic political reforms are introduced they either (i) go to war with their neighbours, (ii) end up in a coup d’etat, or (iii) in a bloody civil war or (iv) under brutal dictatorship. I noticed this scenario during the military regime in Somalia. After 6 years in power, the military regime was at beak of its power. It accumulated a large military hardware supplied by the former USSR. Meanwhile, domestically there was a need for political reforms, i.e. to allow the formation of political opposition parties and to hold general elections as the regime had promised. And because of lack of courageous political vision, the regime indulged itself in a self-destructive war with its neighbours, which was the beginning of its end. After the Ogaden war the regime, reluctant to accept defeat and to introduce much needed political reforms, waged an oppressive campaign against political opponents. This led to the current civil war and anarchy.

The above political cycle or scenario do seem to happen in many African countries. Basically it goes like this: an African leader in power for 5-6 years; he can see the need for political reforms but ignores or refuses it for the sake of keeping power, and then the country ends up in one of the above scenarios. At the time, the two regimes in Addis and Asmara had been going through similar cycles and the border conflict was and is still a manifestation of a need for political reforms but the two regimes were/are unwilling to entertain such an adventure that might lead to their fall from the grace.

During the conflict, both leaders were under pressure from their supporters. Mr Zenawi’s supporters wanted him to bleed Eritrea to death, after all Eritrea was once an Ethiopian region, so why not restore the status quo?! On the other hand, Eritreans, who gained their independence after a long and bloody war, wanted to maintain the newly found state quo: an independent African state.

Through down to my trip, as it was my plan to visit Assab, a very remote city and a modern seaport by the Red Sea, I boarded on a ferry called the Aucan II from Massawa, the seaport at the Red Sea. On the board I made new Eritrean friends. One of them was an academic and a government officer. We indulged ourselves in discussing politics in the Horn of Africa, particularly the Ethio-Eritrea war. My friend was angry with Eritrea’s neighbours from both sides of the Red Sea. He called them expansionist regimes, violating his country’s territorial integrity. He said Yemen had attempted to capture Hanish islands, small islands in the Red Sea claimed by both Eritreans and Yemenis. He said Ethiopians had invaded his country. He added that Egypt (once a former colonial master) had been trying to influence Eritrea affairs. He explained some Egyptian fishing boats were caught fishing illegally in Eritrea waters. He said that even the very ferry that we were travelling on was a fishing boat owned by an Egyptian private company that was confiscated by Eritrean for illegal fishing in the Eritrean waters. I was shocked when I discovered that the fish boat converted to ferry was the only means of public transport from Asmara to Assab by sea as Daallo, a Somali airline private company, was the only means of transport from Eritrea to the outside world during the conflict and after the declaration of war. Daallo airplanes and pilots – Russians! - were the only one that dared to venture into Eritrea airspace. At the time, the seven years old or so Eritrean state, did not have a national airline carrier, it heavily depended on other airlines companies, including the Ethiopian Airline which was suspended after the war was had erupted.

Private companies such as Daallo, the confiscated Egyptian fishing boat and the Somali private company appear to have played an important role in servicing the State of Eritrea in one of its most crucial political moment. I then questioned whether the peoples of Africa do need nation-states because the public sphere, in this case the State of Eritrea, seemed powerless to provide air and sea transport in one of most difficult times of her life. I asked myself why not privatise every thing that is public so that economy, politics, security, defence and even morality could be provided by private companies, motivated by the pursuit of profit maximisation? Would not this be the perfect way of governing the peoples of Africa because the concept of nation-state seems to have created more problems, (e.g. border dispute) than solutions? Somalia is a classic example in which the private sector has replaced and monopolised the public sphere/sector. In the past 17 years or so, non-state actors: e.g. NGOs, private companies, UN agencies, and wealthy individuals took over the role of the state, providing much needed services and sometime dictating morality over their constituencies.

However, the fear of anarchy and the horrible impact it has had on Somalia persuades me that after all there is a need for a modern state structure in African so that political communities could be managed better. After all, the modern state structure is what the world knows and is comfortable with.

I left Eritrea and returned to my adopted home once again feeling sad and broken heart.

Again, in 2008, my feeling of sadness was exasperated by Ethiopia’s invasion and occupation of my beloved country under the pretext of national security: dismantling terrorist networks. Like many Somalis, that was a humiliating experience, which I hope will never be repeated again.

To conclude my article I would like to ask the following soul-searching question. If the Republic of South Africa with its diverse and complex social structure, where whites mingle with blacks and Asians, where 11 languages are spoken and different religions practised, is indivisible and is united as one sovereign nation; why the Republic of Somalia, which has all elements of a homogeneous society, is not allowed to be so? I ask this question, having taken into consideration of pros and cons of the debate over whether a modern state is viable and maintainable in homogeneous or heterogeneous societies, which is beyond the scope of a short article like this. However, as we know most of the modern states in our troubled world were formed by homogeneous societies.

Muuse Yuusuf

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