Somaliland: The Defenseless Democracy

By Abdirahman Mohamed Dirye

The absence of international ties tellingly shows how Somaliland democracy has been suffocated. Our deep yearning for fully grown democracy has been continuously under threat from various forces that have no common currency apart from hatred against Somaliland’s prosperity and well-being!

These factions whose objectives are miscellaneous in yet united only against toppling Somaliland assembled a blind men in the diaspora to tarnish Somaliland’s image but this movement has failed to garner a little support in their local districts never mind wider Somalia, and then resorted a desperate measures.

Some of the deadly conspirators are: Unionists from Northern Somalia, Alshabaab, Sool, Sanaag, Cayn, (SSC) Djibouti, Puntland, the piracy-lords, and the list goes on.
However, for the last 10 years or so, these groups watched each other’s back and have been shoulder to shoulder with themselves in aggression and destabilization in the entire Horn of Africa to prevent people from utilization of their natural resources and sustainable development. Somaliland national asset is peace, and are, therefore, determined to keep it intact at the all costs. “He secured fear and starvation from…,” Surratul Quraysh or “Blessed are peacemakers….,” Mathew 5:9.

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East Africa: What Have We Learnt From Famine In Region?

By Mark Malloch-Brown

Twenty five years ago, in the aftermath of a devastating famine in Ethiopia, remembered for better and worse for Bob Geldof's Bandaid concerts, I wrote a book called "Famine: A Man-Made Disaster?" The question mark said it all. I ghostwrote the book for a group of African and other leaders who were more tentative than I was in declaring what had happened was largely the fault of African governments. So the great men added a question mark.

Yet while it was more convenient-not least for fundraising and handling a nasty regime in Ethiopia-to blame it on God and the weather, that famine was caused in large part by bad governance. A centralized regime in distant Addis Ababa, interested in its own survival, had little time for the development of far off rural areas where non-Amharic minorities were living.

So the first big change is what has not happened. Most of Ethiopia and for that matter Kenya have escaped the famine not just because they were beyond the strict epicenter of the drought itself but because a long investment in rural food security in Ethiopia and a buoyant market economy in Kenya has enabled both to ride out sharply higher food prices.

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The African Union And The Famine: Look The Other Way

The African Union has dismally failed to help the continent’s starving people

Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, September 3, 2011 – The UN estimates that 12m people across the Horn of Africa may still be at risk of starvation. Over 30,000 old people and children may already have died. The Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya hosts 400,000 Somalis and could receive another 100,000 by the end of the year. In response the continent’s overseeing body, the African Union (AU), recently held a pledging conference.

The idea was for African heads of state to come to the AU headquarters in Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, and make a bold 21st-century statement of African brotherhood. After several postponements, the conference took place on August 25th—but only 20 representatives of the AU’s 54 countries turned up, plus a handful of heads of state, notably those of Ethiopia, Somalia, Djibouti and Equatorial Guinea, whose president holds the AU’s annual chair.
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The Reluctant Revolutionaries

By Hussein Al-alak

I’d never contemplated joining the Royal British Legion, but I did. As one elderly gentleman said to me in June, a wry grin across his face; “Its where old men get together in dusty clubs, drink warm beer and talk about war stories.” Infact what I discovered at the British Legion’s 90^th Birthday celebrations in Manchester, was everything but dust, anecdotes and reminisces.

Having turned 90 in 2011, the British Legion was founded out of the horrors of the First World War, where among a few organizations, which also emerged at that time, was formed to provide those men with a focal point of remembrance, for the comrades who were lost in the supposed “war to end all others”.

The return from trench warfare was met with everything but applause, where in the 1920‘s and 1930‘s, besides unemployment, housing was the greatest social problem. “Rows of dismal terraced houses and crumbling cottages”, were the scenes that men came home to and just months after the Russian Revolution, which ended Russia’s involvement and gave birth to the Soviet Union, then British Prime Minister Lloyd George raised hopes by stating, that Britain would provide “homes fit for heroes to live in”.

Even creeping into the 1940’s, it was George Orwell who noticed, that in parts of Britain, still existed housing conditions where; “You might walk through hundreds of miles of streets, inhabited by miners, every one of whom gets black from head to foot everyday, without ever passing a house in which one could have a bath”.

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