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2. Debating Somali Identity in a British Tribunal: The Case of the BBC Somali Service
- Author:
- Abdi Ismail Samatar
- Publication Date:
- 12-2010
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- Bildhaan: An International Journal of Somali Studies
- Institution:
- Macalester College
- Abstract:
- The Somali Peace Conference sponsored by the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD), held in Kenya in 2003–05, was dominated by warlords and partisan mediators. It endorsed a political strategy whose objective has been to recreate Somalia as a clan-based federation. Advocates of this approach claim that such a dispensation will approximate the society's pre-colonial tradition and therefore has the best chance of restoring peace. An argument put forward in support of this agenda is that Somalia's former governments, particularly the military junta, misused public power by favoring and rewarding certain genealogical groups. Proponents contend that formally and openly using genealogical divisions as a basis for distributing public appointments and resources will prevent future clanist favoritism. This approach to political reconstruction mimics Ethiopia's seemingly novel political project, which divided the country into nine “ethnic provinces” in 1991. In the case of Ethiopia, the presumed rationale for this political strategy was to overcome past domination of the state by one ethnic group, rather than to revert to an old tradition. The imposition of Amharic culture and language on Oromos, Somalis, Afars, the people of the southern region, and other groups throughout the state—and the denial of their human rights—rationalized re-engineering the new order. The challenge for Ethiopia post-1991 has been how to undo past subjugation without reifying cultural differences politically. Dividing each country into administrative units based on ethnic belonging, the proponents argue, will promote democracy and produce a civic order in which no one ethnic group or clan dominates others.
- Political Geography:
- Kenya, Ethiopia, and Somalia
3. Intellectualism amid Ethnocentrism: Mukthar and the 4.5 Factor
- Author:
- Mohamed A. Eno and Omar A. Eno
- Publication Date:
- 06-2009
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- Bildhaan: An International Journal of Somali Studies
- Institution:
- Macalester College
- Abstract:
- The prolonged, two-year reconciliation conference held in Kenya and the resulting interim administration, implemented under the dominant tutelage of Ethiopia, are generally considered to have failed to live up to the expectations of the Somali people. The state structure was built on the foundation of a clan power segregation system known as 4.5 (four-point-five). This means the separation of the Somali people into four clans that are equal and, as such, pure Somali, against an amalgamation of various clans and communities that are unequal to the first group and, hence, considered “impure” or less Somali. The lumping together of all the latter communities is regarded as equivalent only to a half of the share of a clan.
- Political Geography:
- Kenya, Ethiopia, and Somalia
4. Editor's Note
- Author:
- Ahmed Samatar
- Publication Date:
- 01-2009
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- Bildhaan: An International Journal of Somali Studies
- Institution:
- Macalester College
- Abstract:
- We begin this 2008 volume with a number of announcements. First, we apologize to our readers for not delivering on our 2006 promise that this regular issue would include an interview with President Ismail Omer Gaileh of the Republic of Djibouti. We conducted the interview in the fall of 2005 but, by late 2007, events in the region (particularly Somalia and Ethiopia) had changed so dramatically that both the questions and the responses needed major updating. Consequently, we have decided to keep the extant interview in storage until we secure another opportunity, in the near future, to engage President Gaileh.
- Political Geography:
- Ethiopia and Somalia
5. The Porcupine Dilemma: Governance and Transition in Somalia
- Author:
- Ahmed I. Samatar
- Publication Date:
- 06-2007
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- Bildhaan: An International Journal of Somali Studies
- Institution:
- Macalester College
- Abstract:
- As of this writing, too far from “civil happiness,” Somalis continue sliding deeper into a fallen time—pitiful victims of their own follies and an ill-informed, if not manipulative, international and regional system. More precisely, the fight over the state in the past decade and a half has been at once violent and so disabling that, in the eyes of the rest of the world, Somalis have become the paradigmatic embodiment of self-inflicted politicide. Dismayingly, though the Somali state institutions are no more, the contestants wage their battles as if the prize is just waiting to be picked up. Oblivious, then, to the fact that the state and governance are more than the sum of capricious self-promotion and claims of Potemkin political appellations and appointments, the aggressively ambitious bestow a vulgar concreteness to Jorge Luis Borges' metaphor of the condition of “two bald men fighting over a comb.” The ultimate costs of the death of the state and subsequent communal strife are a withering of the national civic identity and spirit and, therefore, a descent into a form of moronic existence. Six instantiations of this condition are: (a) disunity exemplified by some in the northern Somali Republic (Somaliland) calling for a separate sovereignty in that region; (b) an essentialization of clanist maneuvers and mischief that have proven to be incapable of producing legitimate and competent leaders fit for the challenges of the epoch, let alone bring forth workable institutions for the immediate juncture; (c) the degeneration of Mogadishu from the once breezy, relatively cosmopolitan nerve-center of the post-colonial order to a dilapidated hell's gate overwhelmed by new deadly conflagrations and mountains of illdisposed filth; (d) a deepening socioeconomic impoverishment, barely assuaged by remittances from relatives in the diaspora, decline in educational opportunities and standards, and deteriorating public health, including the return of polio; (e) an acute national vulnerability to easy bamboozlement, and now direct military intervention or invasion by foreign actors, particularly neighboring Ethiopia; and (f) a mixture of incredulity and contempt on the part of the larger global community. To be sure, these negative attributes (and many more) make up the defining face of Somali reality. But it is also vital to note that, among the paradoxes of the current sharp cut in time (the meaning of civil war), numerous ordinary women and men, in every zone of the country, have taken it upon themselves to address the immediate concerns of their families and neighborhoods, the virus of sectarian cabals, and, commensurately, keep the candle of civic values flickering for a future undergirded by a peaceful and legitimate and competent governance.
- Political Geography:
- Ethiopia and Somalia
6. State and Politics in Ethiopia's Somali Region since 1991
- Author:
- Tobias Hagmann and Mohamud H. Khalif
- Publication Date:
- 07-2006
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- Bildhaan: An International Journal of Somali Studies
- Institution:
- Macalester College
- Abstract:
- When asked by an interviewer whether he felt more Somali or more Ethiopian, Sultan Korfa Garane Ahmed, a federal member of parliament representing part of Ethiopia's Somali Region, diplomatically responded: “I am an Ethiopian-Somali.” The MP's self-description as an Ethiopian-Somali highlights two crucial implications for the analysis of contemporary politics in what was formerly known as the Ogaden and is today referred to as the Somali Regional State or simply Region 5. For the first time in the history of the Ethiopian empire-state or, more precisely, since the forced incorporation of the Somali inhabited Ogaden into Ethiopia at the end of the 19th century, the Somalis are officially recognized as one of the country's “nations, nationalities and peoples.” Since the accession to power of the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) in May 1991, attempts to forge a distinct “Ethiopian-Somali” or “Somali-Ethiopian” identity have superseded the former regimes' patronizing attitudes toward the country's “subject nationalities.”
- Political Geography:
- Ethiopia and Somalia