Somaliland: An Election Without A Country

What if they held an election, but nobody noticed?

That is the situation faced by Somaliland, which held, by all accounts, a fair and largely peaceful election this past weekend to elect a president for a country, which according to the rest of the world, doesn’t exist.

Like you might guess from the name, Somaliland is part of Somalia (specifically, the northwestern most quarter of the nation); Somaliland broke away from Somalia in 1991 after Somalia’s dictator Siad Barre was overthrown. The circumstances of the two places have diverged widely since then: while Somalia has spent the last two decades being fought over by warlords, pirates, Islamic militants and foreign troops; Somaliland has been relatively peaceful and stable. Somaliland operates its own government, military forces and even issues its own currency – it is a functioning nation in just about every way that matters, except that no nation on Earth recognizes their claim of independence, citing the need to respect Somalia’s “territorial integrity” (two of Somaliland’s neighbors – Djibouti and Eritrea maintain informal relations with the Somaliland government, but have not recognized their independence).

Despite this, Somaliland has continued to hold elections for the office of president, including the one held this past weekend. Three candidates were on the ballot, including current President Dahir Riyale Kahin; the vote tally is not expected for several days, though the results are expected to be close. The International Republican Institute, a US-based organization, provided election monitors who reported few irregularities in Sunday’s voting. There were however, some reports of violence at a few voting stations in a disputed area claimed by both Somaliland and another quasi-independent region of Somalia, Puntland; one incident left four people dead. If the name Puntland sounds familiar, it is because it has been in the news recently for its status as a haven for both Somali pirates and Islamic militant groups like al-Shabab, who were blamed for the attack on the polling station, supposedly in an effort to disrupt the Somaliland election.

But maybe that just furthers the case for actually recognizing Somaliland as an independent nation? After all, shouldn’t the people of Somaliland receive some credit for operating a stable “country” in the midst of the chaos that is Somalia today? It would seem like any stability that can be brought to that region of the world should be encouraged, not ignored in favor of the idea of “territorial integrity” for a nation that in a very real sense doesn’t exist.

Black Stars Shine at WC

So the United States’ World Cup dreams ended on Saturday with a 2-1 loss to Ghana’s team, also known by their nickname the “Black Stars.” While it’s sad to see Team USA lose, it’s also nice that there is an African side still playing in the tournament that has become a continent-wide event. With that in mind, I wanted to link to this story by Dan Wetzel from Yahoo! Sports (assuming that you can actually read it, thanks to the bizarre choice of background design…), which takes a look at the match from an African point of view, showing just how much the entire continent has embraced the team from Ghana. For example, consider this quote from Ghana’s Dede Ayew: “we feel we have a continent behind us and the whole of Africa behind us and that’s given us a lot of energy to fight more.”

On a side note, given that the World Cup is a truly global tournament, with two years of preliminary matches to decide on the 32 tournament berths and that the seedings for the eight four-team pools are done by random draw, how bizarre is it that the United States has been knocked out of two consecutive World Cups by the same team and by the same score each time?

Support for “President” Abbas

Good news for Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas – a recent poll shows that he has the support of a clear majority (54%) of those surveyed.  Maybe he can go ahead then and hold the presidential election that Palestine was suppose to stage a year and a half ago…

Ask an international diplomat who leads the government in Palestine and they’ll point to Mahmoud Abbas.  Technically though, Abbas’ term in office actually ended in early 2009; he’s been pretending to be president and the world has been pretending he’s legitimate ever since, largely because under the terms of the Palestinian constitution, the presidency should pass to ranking members of the Palestinian Legislative Council (their version of a national parliament), who also happen to be members of Hamas, and no one wants that.  Abbas cancelled the scheduled elections in 2009 by declaring a state of emergency following Israel launching Operation Cast Lead – their full-fledged military assault on the Gaza Strip.  In the year and a half since though neither Abbas nor the Palestinian Authority has found the time to reschedule them, again in large part because of the belief that Abbas would lose to a candidate put forward by Hamas.

This circles back to a problem the United States and other “Western” powers have in dealing with the Middle East: while they preach the need for democratic reforms in the region, they consistently accept autocratic rule in countries throughout the ME, so long as the autocrats are reliable allies – for prime examples, look at Saudi Arabia and Egypt.  Speaking of Egypt, it will be interesting to see if the US continues to support the decidedly un-democratic Hosni Mubarak, who has ruled Egypt with an increasingly iron fist for the past three decades, now that the former head of the UN’s atomic watchdog agency, Mohamed ElBaradei is emerging as the head of an opposition movement set on opposing Mubarak in the next election. 

Stalin’s Gori End

The Georgian government took down a towering statue of former Soviet leader Josef Stalin Thursday night.  Two things that make this story noteworthy are that the statue was located in Gori, Stalin’s birthplace, and that Georgian officials for some reason decided to take the statue down in the middle of the night.  There is speculation that they removed Stalin under the cover of darkness to avoid any protests, though it’s hard to tell if there would have been protests in the first place.  Gori has a strange relationship with Stalin: like in Russia, he remains popular among older people who survived World War II, who tend to remember him as the “strong leader” who saved the Soviet Union from the Nazis; younger people though tend to view Stalin more harshly (focusing instead on the gulags, forced labor, ethnic persecutions, etc.); the fact that their hometown is also his birthplace is something of an embarrassment.

Georgia’s President Mikhail Saakashvili said: “a memorial to Stalin has no place in the Georgia of the 21st Century,” echoing the younger generation’s viewpoint of the Soviet leader.  Stalin’s replacement though is likely to provoke further controversy: the statue’s pedestal will be recycled and used as the base for a memorial dedicated to the nearly 400 Georgians killed or still missing from the country’s August 2008 conflict with Russia.  The two sides fought a five-day war over Georgia’s two breakaway republics Abkhazia and South Ossetia (Gori is located just a few miles from the border with South Ossetia).  Georgia initially framed the conflict as a Russian invasion, though increasingly international analysis has shown Georgia started the fighting when they shelled the Ossetian capital city, Tskhinvali during the night of August 7.  Since the conflict, Abkhazia and South Ossetia have both declared their independence, a claim only recognized by Russia and a handful of other countries. 

Update #1 – Coach Kim Jong-il

On Saturday I wrote about Team North Korea’s trip to the World Cup – the country’s first appearance in the global tournament since 1966. Among the oddities of Team NoKo, is the rumor that North Korea’s “Dear Leader” Kim Jong-il has a special, secret hotline to the North Korean bench to give his own special brand of soccer “advice” during their games.

Since then North Korea was thoroughly thumped by Portugal 7-0 on Monday, and South Korea’s Chosun lIbo is suggesting that Kim Jong-il himself might be responsible for the team’s crushing defeat. According to the Chosun, the North Korean team played in a way very unlike the style of Coach Kim Jong-hun (no relation), prompting some to speculate that he was influenced by someone outside to change the team’s strategy, and the only person with that sort of pull would be the Dear Leader himself. In a press conference last week, Kim Jong-hun confirmed that Kim Jong-il provides “advice” to the team, the type of statement he couldn’t have made unless permitted by Jong-il, which adds to the speculation that he was in fact whispering in the coach’s ear.

Kim Jong-il’s regime was apparently so buoyed by North Korea’s hard-fought 2-1 loss to Brazil, regarded as one of the best sides in the world, that they allowed the North Korea-Portugal match to be broadcast live on North Korea’s state-run TV channels, basically an unprecedented move in the Hermit Kingdom. According to people in the North contacted secretly by the Chosun, the move has backfired spectacularly, with some North Koreans so upset by the 7-0 defeat they “drank themselves senseless” and will “never forgive” the players for their lopsided loss.

Update #2 – Dudus Done

A follow up now to a post I did on The Mantle a few weeks ago: “The Other Drug War Next Door.” That post focused in large part on attempts to apprehend notorious Jamaican drug lord Christopher “Dudus” Coke and on attempts by residents in his Tivoli Gardens neighborhood in Kingston to prevent that from happening. News from Jamaica Tuesday night is that Dudus was finally taken into custody, but how that happened is open to interpretation – Jamaican officials say that Dudus was stopped at a police checkpoint; his pastor though claims they were stopped by police while on their way to the American embassy to surrender.

Why go to the Americans? It was an extradition order from the United States on charges of drug and gun smuggling that kicked off the whole hunt for Dudus - eventually. The Jamaican government, led by Prime Minister Bruce Golding spent the better part of a year fighting the extradition request, which focused unwanted attention on the close links between the drug baron and prime minister. Tivoli Gardens lies within Golding’s district and reliably delivered large blocks of votes to his Jamaican Labor Party each election. Rumors in Kingston were that Golding finally decided to act on the extradition order after learning that the US Drug Enforcement Agency had evidence of the Golding/Dudus sweetheart deal on a wiretap of Dudus’ phones. Dudus’ decision to skip the middleman and surrender directly to the Americans may have been motivated by his own father’s death in a Jamaican jail after a fire mysteriously broke out in his cell. Meanwhile, residents of Tivoli Gardens don’t want Dudus to go to jail either in the United States or Jamaica, claiming that he (and not the Jamaican government) is the only one supplying much-needed social services in their poverty-stricken portion of Jamaica. Dudus has in the past funded schools, health clinics and job programs in Tivoli Gardens.

A Towering Humanitarian

I couldn’t let the passing of Sudan-born NBA player Manute Bol go unmentioned. At seven feet, seven inches, Bol tied for the record of the league’s tallest-ever player; but Bol’s weight never made it much past the 200lb mark, giving him an outstretched, even otherworldly appearance. I saw Bol play in person once; he used his big hands and skinny arms like giant flyswatters to block shots and could basically dunk the ball without leaving the floor. Phil Jasner of the Philadelphia Daily News gives a good account of Bol’s 10-year NBA career, including Bol’s wickedly good sense of humor.

But far more important were Bol’s actions off the court, where Bol worked tirelessly for social causes in his native Sudan; including reconciliation among warring factions - even after a large portion of his extended family was wiped out in the unrest in Sudan’s Darfur region. The Montreal Gazette ran this account of Bol’s humanitarian work shortly before his death; it’s well worth your time to read it. According to the paper, Bol gave away almost all of the $6 million he earned during his NBA career. To support his philanthropy after his playing career ended, Bol took on a series of stunts usually reserved for D-list celebs: he was on Fox’s “Celebrity Boxing” and agreed to play in a minor league hockey game (ultimately they could not find skates large enough for his feet), all in an effort to keep the donations rolling in for his work in Sudan.

The article does ask why the NBA’s own charity “NBA Cares” never made a donation to Bol’s causes, or for that matter why none of today’s ultra-wealthy superstars haven’t either. At the time of his death, Bol was trying to raise $18,000 to finish three classrooms in southern Sudan – that’s probably about what LeBron James will earn during the first minute of the mega-contract he’ll soon sign. Just something to think about…

Farewell Manute.

Mandela’s Fading Dream

With the World Cup in full swing, the world’s attention is focused on South Africa. While the games have so far gone off smoothly, the same can’t be said for the political situation in South Africa. The nation may see itself as both a rising regional power and the face of the continent in the new century, but at home South Africa is starting to slide into familiar patters of corruption and poor governance; quite a tumble for the prosperous, multiethnic country Nelson Mandela dreamed about. In my latest post over at The Mantle, I take a look at the state of the “Rainbow Nation” and how today’s leaders are failing to uphold Mandela’s dream.

Afghan Mines, Reporter Whines

I was getting ready to write another column on the utter pointlessness of America’s ongoing Afghan mission when the New York Times’ James Risen broke the news on Monday that the United States had discovered “previously unknown deposits” of vast quantities of minerals in Afghanistan, including rare earth elements like lithium (vital in producing high-energy batteries for consumer electronics). In fact, Pentagon officials valued the deposits at a whopping $1 trillion and breathlessly proclaimed that Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium.”

It was an announcement that promised to breathe life into an otherwise faltering mission in Afghanistan – no longer were our troops fighting and dying to support a corrupt regime in a fight against a collection of tribal insurgents for control over a primitive narcostate; they were helping to secure vital resources badly needed by our modern society. The timing couldn’t have been better; in fact I thought it was a little too perfect, and I wasn’t alone. Almost immediately criticism over Risen’s story popped up on websites across the Internet; many focused on the fact that the “new” minerals survey had actually been produced in 2007 and was itself largely based on reports that dated back further than that, some to the time of the Soviet invasion three decades ago. Some sites went further, suggesting that the Times had been “played” by the Pentagon hoping to turn the Afghan narrative away from a stream of negative news including a failed peace council, rising insurgency in the south and more comments by Hamid Karzai that he didn’t think the US-led coalition could “win.”

James Risen took the high road in his response to his critics, calling them “bloggers” who are “sitting around in their pajamas” instead of doing “real reporting” like him (note to Risen, I am dressed as I type this). It’s tempting to turn Risen’s critique around, and to say his report is emblematic of the laziness of the mainstream media, which is content to sit back and be fed leads from administration officials rather than going out and pounding the bricks for their own stories; after all, there was nothing preventing Risen from doing his own account about Afghanistan’s economic potential separate from a Pentagon briefing. Or more on point, Risen could have questioned where the Pentagon got their “$1 trillion” figure, something he does not do in Monday’s story.

Keep in mind, natural resources only have value if you can get them out of the ground (or wherever) and deliver them to a customer willing to buy them. That’s a pretty doubtful proposition in landlocked Afghanistan, a country with very little infrastructure (Afghanistan’s two main cities Kabul and Kandahar were only recently linked by a modern highway), even Risen’s story notes that truly developing the minerals industry could take “decades.” To look at another example, some of the world’s absolute lowest labor costs can be found in the Central African Republic, but multinational firms aren’t lining up to build factories in the CAR because the country is smack in the middle of the continent, with little infrastructure, no sea access and a history of poor governance (sound familiar?). So while there may be a lot of minerals buried beneath the dirt of Afghanistan, without a viable way of getting them out of the ground and to market, you really can’t say its “worth” anything, let alone $1 trillion.

And of course even if the geological assessments are correct and the infrastructure can be developed to exploit the minerals, that still doesn’t guarantee a bring future for the Afghani people, since the country is likely to fall victim to something in international development circles called the “resource curse.” Simply put, while having a valuable resource (oil, diamonds, lithium, you name it) should put a country on the route to prosperity – since there’s money now to build roads, schools, hospitals, and offer employment to people at good wages; more often than not though quite the opposite happens, wealth becomes concentrated in the hands of a small elite, while the rest of the population lives in poverty and are often oppressed by their government lest they upset the status quo (see Equatorial Guinea for a great example of the resource curse in action). With an Afghan government already notorious for its cronyism, it’s not likely they will behave in an egalitarian way with a sudden influx of mineral-based wealth. Of course that’s probably not the spin the Pentagon would like put on the Afghan story.

Go Team NoKo

Like many of my fellow Americans, I am in the midst of a strange quadrennial affliction – actually caring about soccer. A week into the tournament and I find myself getting up early to catch the opening round games on ESPN, and one team that I’m quietly pulling for is the squad from North Korea.

Since the Hermit Kingdom is arguably the world’s strangest country, how can we expect their national team to be any different? The Guardian described an “icy” press conference with Team North Korea’s coaching staff, where they said the goal of the team in the World Cup was to “bring great happiness to our Dear Leader [Kim Jong-Il].” Speaking of Dear Leader Kim, he has been credited with helping the North Korean side qualify for the World Cup in the first place by giving the coaching staff “advice” – it is even rumored that he has a secret hotline to the North Korean bench, though this may just be the North Korean propaganda machine trying to give Kim another mystical quality in addition to his alleged ability to manipulate time (seriously). Meanwhile, North Korea’s only imported player – Japan-born Jong Tae-se, who plays in that nation professionally – has had a grand time introducing his new teammates to technology uncommon in North Korea, like cellphones and pay toilets. According to Jong, when a teammate saw a pay lavatory in Switzerland, it prompted him to remark: “this is truly what capitalist society is like.”

And you won’t find many people already on the North Korean bandwagon – the team has reportedly hired as many as 1,000 Chinese to attend the team’s matches in South Africa as “fans,” something necessary I suppose when you won’t allow your own citizens to travel outside of the country unless they are members of the ruling elite. But then again, how can you not root for a team whose players make such Stalin-esque quotes as when goalkeeper Ri Myong-Guk said he felt as though he was “defending the gateway to my motherland”?

Team NoKo takes to the field again on Monday.