When the United Arab Emirates ' Red Crescent donated water drilling rigs to Somaliland , they almost certainly never taught one of those rigs would cause deaths and injuries. Unfortunately, that was exactly what happened in Monday's demonstration in Hargeisa where two demonstrators were killed and a score of demonstrators and police were injured. The immediate cause of the demonstration was the government's decision to move the rig from Hargeysa to another location. The government's rationale for stopping the digging in south of Hargeysa and moving the rig to another location was that they had come up against a technical problem and were awaiting more equipment from Abu Dhabi, and that in the meantime they did not want the rig to sit idly and were moving it temporarily so they could search for water somewhere else. The problem here is that the government's explanation was provided only after the damage was done. Moreover, the government's explanation was often inconsistent.
The bottom line is that the government made an important decision without thinking about possible consequences and without explaining its plans to the community beforehand.
No doubt the decision to move the rig was a hasty one, and the demonstrators had every right to object to it. The demonstrators, however, were wrong to throw stones and burn tires; they were also wrong because sometimes they sounded as if they were riled about the rig possibly being moved to the president's hometown (Borama) rather than it being moved per se.
Of course the police too were wrong to fire on the demonstrators and should have used better methods of crowd control. All in all, the government, the demonstrators, and the police were wrong in the way they handled the situation before, during and after the demonstration. And three wrongs don't make a right.
