Somalia’s breakaway region of Somaliland holds parliamentary polls later this month with the hope the exercise will boost its chance of world recognition as a state independent of a nation in chaos.
An island of relative stability in region blighted by conflict since it unilaterally declared independence in 1991, Somaliland will on September 29 conduct its third multiparty elections since 2000, as the rest of the Horn of Africa nation founders in lawlessness despite the creation of a transitional federal government.
With a growing dispute over the seat of that government hampering efforts to restore a functional administration to end 14 years of disorder elsewhere, people of Somaliland in the northeast see the polls as a way to show their political maturity.
While Somaliland’s ruling party and opposition traded accusations on the campaign trail ahead of polling day, Finance Minister Awil Ali Duale said he believed the region deserved a reward for its commitment to democracy.
”Our elections are more transparent than many countries in the region,” he said.
”I hope the world will give us the right of recognition. Recognising Somaliland is like promoting democracy in Africa.”
”The world should give us the place we deserve,” Duale said. ”Somaliland should not be left at the cold for nothing, we are free people who deserve better treatment from the outside world.
”Please give us credit for being disciplined, self-administering people. It is unfair to keep us away from the world until the warlords in Somalia agree on something. Bringing back Somaliland to former Somalia is like attempting to bring back the former Soviet Union.”
Despite such appeals, the international community has repeatedly spurned Somaliland’s quest for recognition, fearing this could exacerbate instability in the already highly volatile Horn of Africa.
The demand for international recognition is one of the few issues on which the ruling Union of Democrats (UDUB) party and the two main opposition groups agree.
All sides claim credit for Somaliland’s decision to secede from the fractured larger state in May 1991 after the ouster of strongman Mohamed Siad Barre plunged much of the country into a patchwork of unruly fiefdoms run by fractious warlords and their militias.
On other matters, the UDUB and its political foes — the Hisbiga Kulmiye (Solidarity Party) and Justice and Welfare Party (UCID), which lost in the 2003 presidential elections — rarely see eye-to-eye.
Since the campaign began last month, the Hisbiga Kulmiye and UCID have frequently accused the UDUB of using state resources to buy votes.
”It is unfortunate to see the government using the public funds to promote its single-party interest,” said Kulmiye leader Ahmed Mohamud Silanyo. ”This is illegal, unconstitutional and is decaying our democracy.”
”Our hard-won peace in Somaliland should be respected by all parties,” he said from the Somaliland capital of Hargeisa.
UCID leader Faisal Ali Warabe accused the Somaliland Electoral Commission (SEC) of failing to follow up opposition complaints that government vehicles were being used to ferry ruling party activists to campaign stops.
”UDUB is breaching laws of the country and we already reported the matter to the electoral commission [which] is slow to act on our complaints,” Warabe lamented.
Nonsense, protested Information Minister Muhamoud Duale, a powerful ruling party operative.
”Maybe some of our brothers in the opposition sense a message of defeat,” he said. ”I urge the opposition to wait for the verdict of the people and stop these unwarranted charges.”
An SEC official also dismissed the opposition claims.
The election board estimates more than 800 000 voters — out of Somaliland’s population of some three million people — will cast ballots in the polls in which 246 candidates, including five women, are vying for 82 parliamentary seats.
The next presidential election is to be held in 2008 and the next local elections in 2007. – AFP
