The on-going peace talks on Somalia seem to have reached the stage whereby participating faction leaders needed to find a scapegoat for their failure to come up with a solid agreement. Somalia’s warlords at the talks now claim that unless the participation of Somaliland’s is secured, the peace process cannot succeed. This stance is hardly surprising. Ever since the "Somalia Peace Process" was invented in Djibouti in 1991, Somali warlords have made it their practice, whenever peace talks were underway, to demand from the international community to bring Somaliland to the fold. On every occasion however, Somaliland opted to stay away from attending such gatherings due to the very simple reason that it was not a party to the conflict between armed factions vying for power in the former Italian colony of Somalia. On the contrary, Somaliland has been a peaceful place for much of the last 12 years or so. While war raged in Somalia, Somaliland had other priorities to address, including the urgent tasks of demobilizing thousands of SNM combatants and clan-based armed militia men and repatriating hundreds of thousands of its citizens from refugee camps in eastern Ethiopia. Not to mention the burden of reconstructing a whole country and state from scratch.
While Somaliland struggled alone for meeting the above challenges, it at the same time embarked on a parallel process of democratization. Though a lot still needs to be done, yet Somaliland’s tremendous achievements in all the above areas cannot be overlooked. Instead of learning from this uniquely successful experiment for conflict resolution and nation-building, Somalia’s defacto leaders continued, unfortunately, to deny that it even existed. In fact, the reasons why most of those leaders always insist on Somaliland’s inclusion in any peace talks on Somalia has nothing to do with the idea of preserving Somali unity. They know that Somaliland will never reunite with Somalia. The actual cause for their anti-Somaliland stance stems from the fact that most of them are wanted in Somaliland in connection with war crimes committed against the civilian population during the eighties. These suspected war criminals live with the fear that an independent Somaliland could succeed in bringing them one day before justice, to account for the atrocities they had committed in this country while working for Siyad Barre’s regime.
Pretending allegiance to the cause of "Greater Somalia" is also a good tactic for squeezing cash from Arab leaders who are interested in seeing Somalia as a "strong and unified" country that can possibly be used as a Trojan Horse against Ethiopia whenever the need arises. This familiar tactic utilized by Somalia's warlords for extortion and blackmailing seems to have worked on Mr. Bethwal Kiplagat, the Kenyan Mediator of the reconciliation process.
The talks are already in danger of collapsing, not because Somaliland is absent, but because the delegates have shown their inability to come to an agreement. Mr. Kiplagat will be wasting his time if he thinks Somaliland can be persuaded to send delegates to the talks over which he is presiding. Independent and peaceful Somaliland is in fact in the midst of a presidential election campaign. For the first time in over 30 years, Somalilanders will go to the polls on April 14th, 2003, to elect their next president with the election of legislators slated for May 2003.
Under such circumstances, wouldn't it be utter foolishness and a great insult if the Somaliland government were asked to send representatives to Nairobi to discuss peace with Somalia’s warlords?
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