Aid And Sovereignty

EDITORIAL

The newly appointed UNDP resident representative for Somalia, Mr. Enric Laroche, might have been ill-advised to come to Somaliland only a few hours after he had presented his credentials to Abdillahi Yusuf in Baidowa. But the fact remains that Mr. Laroche was directed to take this unprecedented step of presenting his credentials to Abdillahi Yusuf by top UN officials including Kofi Annan. No other UN resident representative designated for Somalia has been required to do so since the fall of Siyad Barre in 1991 and Somaliland’s withdrawal from its 30-year long union with Somalia in that same year.

What happened in Baidowa on last Monday is a total departure from the previous UN policy of avoiding any unnecessary confrontation with Somaliland over its defacto sovereignty. But it is not only the UN system that seems to have changed the way it has dealt with Somaliland . The European Commission’s mission in Nairobi, following the formation of the so called Transitional Federal Government of Somalia in Kenya on October 2004, has been promoting the TFG at the expense of Somaliland regionally as well as internationally.

While the EU has in the last 2 years been meeting the administrative and operational expenses of the entire TFG, including salaries for ministers and parliamentarians and air travel costs, the Europeans retracted on their parallel commitment to provide developmental aid for Somaliland . While both the EC and the UNDP were trying to build the TFG’s institutions from scratch, they denied developmental assistance to similar institutions in Somaliland.

The problem is that the UN and the EC officials operating from Nairobi have not only withheld developmental assistance from Somaliland but also embarked on a dangerous policy aimed at weakening the Somaliland government while undermining this country’s sovereignty.

This dangerous new policy has already been under implementation to the extent that the bulk of the types of activities that attract funding nowadays in Somaliland are the seminars that bring together participants from here and Somalia. Another salient feature and more far-reaching example of this policy is the TFG initiated Joint Needs Assessment project that the UN and the EC recently imposed on the Somaliland government.

This unnecessarily provocative policy pursued by the UN and the EC is deemed to solicit a reaction from Somaliland. President Rayale has snubbed Mr. Laroche but that is not enough. The Somaliland government has to take appropriate policy changes in its relations with international organizations.

Somaliland is not a country that lives on aid. Both the UN and the EC are irrelevant here. Only a very small portion of the little aid they annually dispense in the name of Somaliland does actually reach here. The rest is lost to corruption or misuse in Nairobi .

The Somali republic came into being as a result of a merger between the two sovereign states of Somaliland and Somalia. Why the UN should confer legitimacy only on the Somalia part of the now-defunct Somali republic while the Somaliland part with its democratically elected government is treated with defiance?

The Somaliland government must no longer accept the presence in this county of any international organization that has not been specifically mandated to operate in Somaliland. Any organization mandated by its head office to work in Somalia must not be allowed to establish offices here. The ineffective and usually corruptive habit of operating from Nairobi should also be discontinued. All those who want to help must be required to establish their own country offices here. These are simple demands that any aid agency that is seriously interested to assist would be able to meet.

The people of Somaliland who paid a very high price for their freedom can not tolerate anymore their country being defined as the Northwest region or northern Somalia by aid officials. It was the UN agencies which first started using the term “north western region” to denote Somaliland back in the early 1990s. This confusion cannot be brought to an end unless Somalilanders act to stop it by asserting their identity and separate nationhood. But this will be unachievable if we continue to accept being characterized as part of Somalia .

It is also essential that the Somaliland government immediately withdraws from the JNA. By participating in this exercise which is meant to raise funds for the TFG at a donor conference to be held in Rome in mid this year, Somaliland will definitely be seen as forfeiting its claims to sovereignty. If David Bissiouni and his team sincerely believed that the JNA could work for independent Somaliland, then they would have proposed the establishment of two separate trust funds for Somaliland and Somalia as proposed recently, during a similar exercise for southern Sudan and the Khartoum government (northern part).

Source: Somaliland Times

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