Somaliland’s track to peace and democracy: Demobilization of clan militias, the role played by president Egal (Part three)

By Adam Musse Jibril

A controversial question has been raised by modern philosophy about who makes history, the masses or extraordinary leaders? However, Somaliland’s distinct experience uncompromisingly attests that both the people and great leaders, who in concerted efforts and through a favorable peace environment could make miracles in nation building. This had been true for Somaliland’s experience although it has taken a tough road, from ruin to construction through self-reliance without external assistance.

The late President Egal was undoubtedly a leader whose caliber Somaliland needed at a difficult historical juncture when the situation dictated that he play an extraordinary role in state building. As an elected president in1993 he had inherited a devastated country with enormous tasks ahead: State institutions existed only in name and the army and the police had been there only as clan militias, and revenue collection was not yet undertaken in most of the regions. Consequently, Egal’s top priorities included demobilization of different clan militias as an immediate task. In a time when the process of forgiveness and reconciliation had been going on satisfactorily and enough provisions for accomplishing institutional building were in place, This has made demobilization of clan militias possible, a task which was difficult and multifaceted.

Egal knew and faithfully respected the inherent psychological perception of Somali clansmen that ‘to disarm clansmen would be tantamount to humiliating and dishonoring one’s bride, not only as an individual but also as kin’. Once a clan felt that a power asymmetry is happening in favor of other neighboring clans, this would necessarily lead to an endless arms race and often clan wars. For this reason Egal requested and pursued community leaders to cooperate in a voluntary and a simultaneous disarmament of all clan militias.

Within the process of negotiation with clan leaders, the Somaliland Council of elders, (Guurti) played a central role. After long discussions that took more than a month consensus was reached about the need to an immediate demobilization, but a sensible question came into view, “who would take the first step”. Fortunately, however, the Sultan of the Arab sub-clan of Issaq, after consultation with his own clansmen volunteered t be the first to disarm. This was a key step towards demobilization.
Further ahead, another serious question had to be answered, this time more technical than political, what kind of weaponry had to be taken from the clans’ hands to be transferred to the state machinery? In which the answer was on heavy armaments (technical) which would be taken without compensation, but their staff would be employed within the new national army and police.
Thanks to the traditional leader’s commitment and their cooperation with President Egal, the demobilization process went without major problems. In this connection, one would notice that the demobilization was achieved through a two way traffic combined in one process; from bottom-up and up-bottom tracks.
This has made a consensus voluntary demobilization possible to realize.
However, building state institutions was a long term process in a country where the state structures brought by colonialism and which were functioning poorly during the post independence period since 1960-1969 and finally collapsed in 1991, had to be revamped that could include both a modern aspect and traditional consensus arrangement, in other words, revival of the colonial built state structures run by the political elite should not be seen as an absolute truth and the only way to democracy, but added and be combined with traditional grassroots aspect to national institutions.
This had to lead to a new experiment in the region and perhaps in the African continent. However, from the very beginning this had to address critical issues such as representation and participation, which has taken place in a contradictory process such as centralization of state powers and decentralization of these powers at the regional and community levels in the same time. This had been inevitable to address the need to appropriate dealing with the question of proportional power sharing on equity basis on different levels, clans, minority communities, regions and so on.

Under these challenging conditions, a new conflict broke out in 1994, in Burao and Hargeisa towns, between Egal’s administration and the Garr-Hagis sub-clan, one of the most influential branch of the Issaq clan family over power sharing, but this conflict was finally resolved amicably during the Hargeisa peace conference in 1997. In spite of this, there were lessons to be learnt from this unexpected conflict which reflected the fact that reconciliation is a long process, which needs not only a careful handling all the time, but also conviction that it is the only viable means in conditions like this to end political conflicts.
These achievements realized so far in the course of institutional building through voluntary demobilization and creation of a national army, police and custodial corps constituted an important step towards law and order as an essential instrument to peace and stability arrangement.

Nonetheless, law and order could not be immediately imposed, because of the fact that not all disputes had to be resolved by using police and military forces but mainly by continuous efforts through peaceful settlement using traditional mechanism of conflict prevention and conflict resolution and its management. That meant the functions of the Council of Elders, the Guurti, remained not only as indispensable part of this mechanism but also continued to exist as the highest organ of the lawmaking process together with the House of Representatives with conformity of the country’s constitution.

President Egal thought that democratization was an essential factor for consolidation of peace in the country and has started planning and preparing the nation for multiparty elections, and hence, political parties were allowed to emerge, but were limited by the constitution to three political parties only.
Worthy to mention here, that some sections of the society, intellectuals in particular, have shown skepticism towards the idea of an abrupt and hasty shift to Western forms of multiparty democracy, the outcome of which they thought would bring about majority rule political system in contrast to consensus based traditional form of governance, and warned the consequences that the total abandonment of Community Conferences (Shir Beeleed) as a base and source of traditional democracy that Somaliland was following since 1991 would be jeopardized at a time when enough prerequisite for further development had not yet been achieved.

This argument, however, was about whether or not acceleration of this transition from clan based form of democracy to modern patterns, a process which failed in Somalia in the 1960s is possible to regenerate an ideal governance, an idea which many people saw would require a long period of evolution, and which cannot be realized by random attempts such as bypassing historical stages of development.

The apprehension about the multiparty democracy by those Somalilanders who have shown anxieties at the time, was probably reasonable and even justifiable due to negative recollection left by the recent political history of Africa in general and in the post independence Somali experience in particular where both totalitarian one-party regimes and Western style multi-party systems did exist, all of whom adamantly claimed to be democratic.
As a result, this extremely important and relevant question appears to seem pertinent to the Somaliland’s nascent multi-party democracy, the future of which without traditional culture of peace symbolizing in the Council of elders might not have an ample chance to continue to exist in most contemporary African democracies. The pros and cons of the complicated process of the multiparty democracy Somaliland will be considered in the next part next week. •

July 28, 2007