When is a nation not a nation? Somaliland’s dream of independence (2018) | Hacker News Reader

When is a nation not a nation? Somaliland’s dream of independence (2018)

theguardian.com

60 pointsThevet12 comments

found on marginal revolution: https://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/31/opinion/31iht-edmyers.1.1...

an opinion piece by Pete Butigieg on Somaliland from 2008. Gives you an interesting perspective on his past experiences and foreign policy stance. (Also is a bit shorter than the guardian article but still gets the point across about Somaliland)

My take on the situation: when you're a small country you're just a pawn for the bigger countries around you, including the world powers.

From the article : >"Every member of Parliament in Mogadishu gets a salary paid mostly by U.S. and EU funds," one Somaliland official told us. "And every one of them is a killer. If you kill enough people, you are called a warlord and you get invited to conferences. Meanwhile, I was elected by thousands of votes in a free election, but the international community does not consider us a country. They should be rewarding democracy, not killing."

That's sadly the truth in some of our African states.

What possible benefit does the US and EU get from paying these people’s salaries? I understand the real Politik aspect - they’re now “owned”, to be perhaps a little crude, by the powers paying them - but what does the arrangement get the US and EU? Asked a different way, what would happen if we stopped paying them?

For example, in my neighborhood country DRC, there all kind of minerals that are used to build every tech product. You guess why EU and USA needs to keep a good relationship with the warlords there? In Somalia, I think it is a question of terrorism. The state of lawless that come with the downfall of Somali in 1991 made the country being prone to warlords running the country, even the seas. You remember how they used to take hostage of ships passing through the Red Sea. You better pay warlords or they will come back and take hostage tankers and stuffs.

In the end, maybe they came to the conclusion that it's better to buy peace with money than to deploy US/EU troops ( now there are African Union troops in Somalia assisted by US units).

We pay them money so they stay in power and don't get usurped by other killers, namely the Islamic groups that want to kill Americans. Right now the warlords just kill other Africans, which the U.S. government considers a win, sadly. Its a foreign policy based on the idea if we didn't support these warlords, other groups that kill Africans AND Europeans will take power.

> ...namely the Islamic groups that want to kill Americans. Right now the warlords just kill other Africans, which the U.S. government considers a win...

The Islamic killers kill more Africans too. Boko Haram are killing far more Somalis than they are Americans or Europeans. It is cynical, but it's probably not (on balance) morally wrong to support the opposition, god knows BH and friends get plenty of foreign support from our favourite Islamic customer in the middle east and others, so it's not as though the Americans are the only ones corrupting the failed state there.

I know from personal experience, being from a small country created by the war in the early 1990s, that the international community is very slow in this kind of thing. And if you're not making a lot of concessions in the state-making process, you simply remain unrecognized. Even if you have no natural resources, the situation is worse.

Somaliland should rebrand. Without renaming themselves they will forever fight an uphill battle to distinguish themselves as something other than (at best) a Somali provincial region.

Other than that, a great example is to follow the modern Taiwanese strategy to be a liberal democracy and a beacon of human rights, and develop powerful allies needed to maintain territorial integrity. Honestly, I would highly recommend hosting military bases for the US and other NATO allies. This is (part) of the strategy of the neighboring nation of Djibouti. The Gulf of Aden is geopolitically fraught and teaming with pirates, so there's room for plenty more military bases.

You mean like South Sudan did?

I shouldn't need to point out why such renaming would be difficult and controversial.

Is it too late to do New England?

For those planning a trip there, Wikivoyage has good information, as usual:

https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Somaliland

> Imprisonment and/or execution is the punishment for homosexuality here. So if you are gay and decide to visit, keep your sexual orientation secret.

yikes

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