Contents
1. Somalia: Anarchy-Cursed Nation Looks to Bottom-Up Rule
2. From Statehood to Primordial City States: Architects of the “Building Blocks Approach” Aim to Finally Finish-off Somalia
3. SOMALIA: Are "building blocks" the Solution?
4. Anarchy Case Study - Somalia, Pt. 2 of ?
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/18/world/africa/18somalia.html
Source: NY Times, Aug 17, 2008
Somalia: Anarchy-Cursed Nation Looks to Bottom-Up Rule
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
Does the international community have it all wrong on Somalia?
A child in a building abandoned in March amid fighting by Somali forces and militants in Mogadishu.
After 17 years, 14 transitional governments and more than $8 billion in foreign aid, the country is as violent and lawless — and many say hopeless — as ever.
Early this month, a man who had been running an orphanage for 18 years was fatally shot in the head. A few days before that, 20 women sweeping the streets were blown up by a bomb buried in a pile of garbage. No one is safe, and perhaps no place on earth more closely resembles Thomas Hobbes’s description of a state of nature in which life is “nasty, brutish and short.”
Nothing seems to be able to lift Somalia’s curse of anarchy. And part of the problem, a rising number of Western academics and Somali professionals argue, is that the bulk of outside efforts have concentrated on standing up a strong central government, which may be anathema in a country where authority tends to be diffuse and clan-based.
The United Nations and donor countries are plowing millions of dollars into the Transitional Federal Government, an entity essentially created by the United Nations, with the idea of bringing order to Somalia from the top down.
But the transitional government is essentially on life support. Its presence in Mogadishu, the capital, is limited to a few blocks that are constantly shelled. It is unpopular and, by extension, weak. Its leaders are consumed by yet another round of infighting.
President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, a former warlord, is enraged that Prime Minister Nur Hassan Hussein, a former Red Crescent official, had the gall to try to fire Mogadishu’s mayor, another ex-warlord — the “ex” being a term of art because the mayor is widely accused of running an extortion ring.
Ken Menkhaus, a professor at Davidson College in North Carolina who specializes in Somalia, likened the transitional government to an hourglass, with no professional class or civil service at its core. Instead, there are “a whole bunch of ministers at the top, a whole bunch of soldiers at the bottom and nothing in between.”
But there may be another answer: going local.
Many Somali intellectuals and Western academics are pushing an alternative form of government that might be better suited to Somalia’s fluid, fragmented and decentralized society. The new idea, which is actually an old idea that seems to be enjoying something of a renaissance because of the transitional government’s shortcomings, is to rebuild Somalia from the bottom up.
It is called the building block approach. The first blocks would be small governments at the lowest levels, in villages and towns. These would be stacked to form district and regional governments. The last step would be uniting the regional governments in a loose national federation that controlled, say, currency issues and the pirate-infested shoreline, but did not sideline local leaders.
“It’s the only way viable,” said Ali Doy, a Somali analyst who works closely with the United Nations. “Local government is where the actual governance is. It’s more realistic, it’s more sustainable and it’s more secure.”
Technically, the current transitional government is a federal system that is supposed to share power with various regions, but it is unclear, even to the people in the government, what exactly that means.
Somalia has always been a tricky place to rule. On the surface, it seems like one of the most homogeneous countries on the planet: almost all of its estimated seven million to eight million people share the same language, religion, culture and ethnicity. But, in fact, it is one of the most fragmented. In Somalia, it is all about clan.
The Italians and the British colonized separate parts, but their efforts to impose Western laws never really worked. Disputes tended to be resolved by clan elders. Deterrence was key. “Kill me and you will suffer the wrath of my entire clan” — that, to many people, was social order.
The places where the local ways were disturbed the least, like in British-ruled Somaliland, seem to have done better in the long run, with less fighting today than in areas where the Italian colonial administration supplanted the role of traditional elders.
Many Somalis have grown suspicious of a strong central government, especially after the dark years of Maj. Gen. Mohammed Siad Barre, the dictator who ruled from 1969 to 1991. “The state has never had any legitimacy,” said Tobias Hagmann, a Somalia scholar at the University of Zurich.
Clan-based warlords toppled General Siad Barre, then turned on one another. In some places, limited local governments sprouted to fill the authority vacuum. They called themselves “administrations” and provided some services, like resolving property disputes or trying theft suspects in courts based on Islamic and customary Somali law.
By the early 2000s, several of those local courts began to gain strength, and in 2006 they united under an Islamist banner to fight warlords being paid by the Central Intelligence Agency. The Islamic courts won and disarmed and pacified much of south-central Somalia, following their own version of the building block approach. But the United States and Ethiopia considered the Islamic courts a terrorist threat, so the United States helped Ethiopia invade Somalia.
The result today is an ascendant Islamist guerrilla force, a wounded and divided transitional government and an increasingly impatient Ethiopia. Stir in Somalia’s war profiteers, including gunrunners and importers of expired baby formula, and the country seems to be a recipe for long-term disaster.
Aid officials say Somalia may be headed toward another famine, with nearly three million people dependent on emergency food aid, 1.5 million displaced, and aid workers being killed. Despite all this, local government has not been stamped out. In one area, a group of Somali-Americans has used its own money to set up a police force and a rudimentary court system based on clan ties.
“You can’t start from the top down; that’s a waste of energy,” said Mohamed Aden, 36, a health care manager from Minnesota who risked his savings — and his life — to set up a local administration in central Somalia.
He explained: “You have to start from the grass roots. People don’t trust each other. You start small, and when people see that it’s working, they will want to join.”
But the building block approach has its challenges. The United Nations tried to encourage representative district councils in the early 1990s, but the warlords in Mogadishu felt threatened and torpedoed the effort.
There are “always going to be spoilers from the center,” said Hassan Sheik Mohamud, the dean of a small college in Mogadishu. “Ideally, bottom up is very good for Somalia. But the problem is the warlords. To make any government work, they have to be included, in some way.”
There are also bureaucratic realities. Western diplomats, foreign donors and the United Nations prefer to deal with one government, not 26.
“I don’t think the transitional government is so effective,” said Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the top United Nations envoy for Somalia. “But it’s what we have.”
http://www.hiiraan.com/print2_op/2008/aug/from_statehood_to_primordial_city_states.aspx
From Statehood to Primordial City States
Architects of the “Building Blocks Approach” Aim to Finally Finish-off Somalia
Special Editorial
Hiiraan Online
August 27, 2008
This Editorial is in response to an article " Anarchy-Cursed Nation Looks to Bottom-Up Rule " posted on New York Time by Gettleman, Jeffrey
As Somalia continues to bleed from the merciless carnage of Ethiopian forces backing the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) of Somalia and the equally brutal forces of the opposition, the world is slowly and strategically moving away from maintaining Somalia’s current status quo. While the UN sponsored talks in Djibouti linger, some political analysts are considering alternative solutions to the endless and pitiful quagmire. They are insidiously hypothesizing dividing up Somalia into smaller primordial enclaves.
As the ineptness of clan inspired leadership leads to more internal disputes and warring factions, and as many reconciliation conferences fail for lack of principled leadership due in part to the shifting political actors and clan interests, the international community has been searching for a new strategy to finally resolve the prolonged Somali conflict. Of course there are no shortages of ideas in the international community and the one school of thought that has been gaining traction lately is the so called “Building Block’s Approach”. The architects of this ominous model appear to have taken lessons from the Berlin conference of 1884 when African countries were partitioned by European powers without regard to ethnic boundaries, grazing lands, languages and cultural affiliations. This neo-colonial strategy if implemented would vindicate the xenophobic claims made in the Berlin conference and will eventually take Somalia back to prehistoric ethnic enclaves.
The gist of the argument in the Building Blocks Approach is that a Somali state with a unitary central government can not be reconstituted and sustained through a top down approach as is currently pursued by the UN and the international community and must be replaced with a bottom-up approach focusing solely on grassroots community development. Developing social and governance structures at the grassroots level, they argue, will in the end help the reconstitution of the Somali state. Furthermore the protagonists of the model began an all out offensive to sell their untested idea in the corridors of power where the international community convenes and in the international media. They argue that the international community must give up imposing on the Somali people an untenable national government, parliament and charter. These institutions, they believe, disregard critical local and regional clan structures and therefore lack necessary grassroots support. The bottom up approach, the argument goes, will strengthen local governance mechanisms, maintain communal law and order, and establish strong regional leadership that in the long run will muster the necessary energy to reconstitute the Somali State!
It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to untangle the imprecise logic of the proponents of this model in that, if thirty percent of the Somali people today (those twenty years of age and younger) do not know the value and importance of a Somali state and could care the least about its reconstitution today, why would they want a Somali state decades later when they become the majority and their numbers reach eighty percent or more!
The building block’s approach as is currently proposed will in effect pick the baton from where the Berlin conference left it off and will callously divide Somalia into several Bantustans lacking sovereignty and territorial integrity necessary to establish a full fledged state.
At a time when the global community is coming much closer and Europe is coming together as a single entity with one currency, why propose a small nation such as Somalia to be subdivided into smaller entities ostensibly modeled after the oil rich United Arab Emirates. The Emirates, they seem to forget, were never a unitary state in the first place and the natural wealth from the oil fields continues to be the glue that keeps their country together. What worked for oil rich UAE will not work for poor and multiethnic Somalia!
In retrospect, it is no secret that the plight of the Somali people is worsening on a daily basis and the current conditions prevailing there are unacceptable and insufficient for human survival. It is also a fact that current Somali leadership both in government and opposition do not show the will nor the capacity to envision a peaceful unitary Somali state, safeguarding its sovereignty and coexisting peacefully with its neighbors and the larger global community.
The response to these realities, however, is not to hastily break up Somalia into pieces as if that itself is a proven panacea for Somalia’s chronic ailments as advocated by the proponents of the building block’s approach--who may have ulterior motives of their own! On the contrary, to do so will only perpetuate the never ending cycle of clan conflicts that destroyed the Somali republic in the first place.
The proponents of the building blocks approach be they secessionists, dominant clan advocates, and regionalists, paid international lobbyists, impressionable foreign journalists or otherwise confused Somali citizens all want the world to believe that the inhabitants of Kismayo, Merca, Baidoa, Mogadishu, Beledweyn, Bosasso, and many others if left to their own devices would be able to resolve their inter clan conflicts and would have the potential to innovate viable regional administrations!
What a fallacy and a distorted logic at that! If the claim is true, what is preventing these locales to self govern themselves peacefully now!
Illustrating the point further, imagine that there are several autonomous Bantustan states sprouting all over Somalia as the proponents of this model propose: Who then is the citizen of these states? Does one have to be a member of a clan living in that area to feel at home? Does one have to claim land and property ownership to qualify for citizenship? How about one who was born, raised and owns property in one enclave, however, his clan is heavily dominant in another? In that case, would one qualify for a dual citizenship? What about spousal relationships, access to grazing land, sea and water, natural resources, ethnic boundaries and you name it! The thrust of the building blocks argument if given the light of the day will not hold water and thus is only gaining momentum due to the fact that Somali nationalist intellectuals are astoundingly absent from the market place of ideas generating these cataclysmic proposals intended to wipe the Somali state off the map. A weary international community already showing signs of a Somalia fatigue is therefore becoming susceptible to anything.
Make no mistake, that there is a silent one dimensional war of ideas taking place that is purportedly deciding the future of Somalia which has the potential to succeed, if left unchallenged, as has been the case all along.
The time is right and the world is eager to hear from intellectual Somalis who can collaborate beyond personal and clan interest and who can show the will and capacity to put forth a national agenda that can safe all of Somalia. A new counter strategy to the Building Block’s Approach is imminently needed that will not only refuse to compromise on Somalia’s unity and territorial integrity, but will give progressive and peace loving Somalis all over the world a voice in the molding and shaping of Somalia’s destiny.
Dividing Somalia further into several Bantustan enclaves in the 21st Century is adding insult to an already injured society. It can only take root if Somalia’s otherwise capable and conscientious intellectuals choose to remain silent, indifferent or on the sidelines.
Send comments to: editorial@hiiraan.com
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References:
Bryden, Matt. New Hope for Somalia? The Building Block Approach. Review of African Political Economy - Vol. 26 No. 79
Dinar, Ali B. Ali. SOMALIA: Are "building blocks" the Solution? [19990719]. Editor: African Studies center, University of Pennsylvania
Gettleman, Jeffrey. A new approach to bringing order in Somalia. International Herald Tribune. Published: August 18, 2008
Memo from Somalia: Anarchy-Cursed Nation Looks to Bottom-Up Rule: New York Times Published: August 17, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/18/world/africa/18somalia.html
http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Hornet/irin_71999.html
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA - AFRICAN STUDIES CENTER
SOMALIA: Are "building blocks" the Solution? [1999-07-19]
NAIROBI, 17 July (IRIN) - One of the latest attempts to resolve the conflict in Somalia revolves around the concept of "building blocks", using a decentralised approach to Somali unity, rather than the now discredited efforts to produce a unified administration in one go.
The Somali Aid Co-ordination Body (SACB)'s latest donor alert for Somalia (July 6), worth US $17 million, for the current drought and food emergency, with an estimated 1 million people at risk, underlines the lack of progress in finding solutions for Somalia.
Possible conferences
The latest current speculation that President Mohamed Egal of the self-declared republic of Somaliland might host a new Somali-wide reconciliation conference in Hargeisa seems premature. Although the suggestion, of holding a reconciliation conference of traditional leaders, appeals to several countries represented on the Standing Committee (of the Friends of the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development, IGAD), he would face significant criticism within Somaliland. There is still a considerable body of opinion which suspects Egal's adherence to Somaliland independence and would regard any Somali conference as evidence of his lack of enthusiasm for Somaliland and a continued desire to be president of all Somalia. Egal, indeed, would find it difficult to attend such a conference, let alone host it, unless it provided a significant improvement in Somaliland's international status.
More plausible is the possibility that Kenya, seriously concerned by the growing extent of Ethiopian and Eritrean activity inside Somalia and the spill-over into Kenya, working with Djibouti and through IGAD, will organise a new conference. President Daniel arap Moi has been talking to Somali leaders, including Hussein Aideed, and recently received Djibouti's former president Hassan Gouled Aptidon, who hosted two previous Somali conferences. At the end of June, the Somali desk in the Kenyan Foreign Ministry was instructed to report directly to the President's Office, underlining President Moi's interest in current Somali developments.
"Building block" theory
Kenya and Djibouti are, of course, both members of the Standing Committee whose current strategy for Somalia revolves around the "building block" approach, using the development of local administrative units as the basis for a decentralised approach to Somali unity. The Ethiopian and Egyptian-sponsored conferences at Sodere (January 1997) and Cairo (October 1997) only succeeded in highlighting the divisions among Somali faction leaders, and among interested regional powers. The idea of the "building blocks" arises from the SACB's evaluation of certain local administrative bodies as "responsible", and the UN's identification of zones of "recovery", "transition" and "crisis" in Somalia.
The concept has clear, if superficial, appeal, given the continued failure of Somali factions and parties to respond to efforts to recreate a unitary Somali administration. The possible units are frequently identified with the major clan families, which would allow for five or six territories. Two such units already exist, Somaliland and Puntland, based upon regions dominated by the Isaaq/Dir clan family, and by the Harti/Darod respectively. The Rahenweyne (Merifle and Digil) would cover the regions of Bay and Bakool and part of Lower Shebelli; a fourth region would be Jubaland, largely inhabited by Darod clans; and the territory of the Hawiye, in Central Somalia and including Benadir, would make up a fifth region, though Mogadishu, if it remained the national capital, might be administered separately.
The units
The most functional of these areas is Somaliland which declared its independence from the rest of Somalia in May 1991. This "restoration of the sovereignty" of the former colonial territory of British Somaliland has survived a number of vicissitudes including two brief bouts of civil conflict and the continued failure of recognition by the international community. Nevertheless, the Somaliland government has managed to establish a functional administration over most of the area, including police and defence forces, a judiciary and a parliament incorporating the elders (Guurti) as an upper house. A permanent constitution is supposed to have been drawn up but little progress has been made. Critics of the government claim that this is deliberate and that senior government figures, including the president, are ambivalent over Somaliland's independence. Despite this, the economy, although battered by last year's livestock ban by Saudi Arabia - now lifted - has been surprisingly buoyant. Somaliland still faces the serious difficulty of the international community's failure to offer more than acceptance and the government's failure to win full support from the non-Isaaq clans in the region, notably the Dhulbahante and the Warsengeli which border Puntland.
Puntland, in the northeast, is seen as the other moderately successful model for a "building block". An administration and government, with Colonel Abdullahi Yusuf as president, was set up in July last year, following a conference at Garowe. Unlike Somaliland, Puntland has never seen itself as secessionist. Originally, its draft constitution supported the idea of Puntland as an element in a future decentralised federal state, though in the final version this had been replaced by references to a more centralised state of Somalia. Indications are that Colonel Abdullahi Yusuf has his eyes more on Mogadishu and the leadership of Somalia as a whole than just Puntland.
Other areas still have along way to go before they can be considered as moving out of the zone of "crisis", and be considered as functional "building blocks". The Hawiye, in central regions of the country, have attempted to seek a local solution to their divisions, to provide a unified approach to national level politics. They have, however, failed to find any acceptable balance between clan-based factions, warlords and local administrative factions. An administration, essentially providing for a possible Hawiye region, was created for Benadir, including Mogadishu, in August 1998. Set up by the Egyptian and Libyan-backed coalition of faction leaders Hussein Aideed, Ali Mahdi and Mohamed Qanyare, it was from the outset opposed by an Ethiopian-backed grouping involving such figures as Hussein Bod and Mussa Sudde. Libyan funding worth US $800,000 allowed for the deployment of a 3,000 strong police force at the end of the year. However, it proved unable to open the airport or seaport, and in March, the police force, unpaid for two months, spontaneously dissolved, with members taking their weapons as they walked out. Nor did the supposed administration have either the resources or the will to dismantle the factional groups, a necessity if any administration is to be effective. Disagreements between the Mogadishu warlords have intensified more recently with the open support of Eritrea for Hussein Aideed.
The failure of Hawiye clan unity has been underlined by the Belet Weyne conference. This began last November as a Hawiye peace and reconciliation meeting, resolving most of the traditional differences between the Hawiye clans before moving into the political phase of the meeting in February. The conference, however, was not attended by many leading Hawiye political personalities, including Hussein Aideed, Ali Mahdi, and Mohamed Qanyare, nor indeed by their main opponents. Musse Sude, for example, though he declared support for the meeting's conclusions was not there; Hussein Bod attended for a time, but in mid-June returned to Mogadishu, announcing he had been elected chairman. In fact, the conference ended on 2 July with the election of Colonel Omar Hashi as chairman of the 11-man Somali Consultative Council chosen as the Hawiye political leadership, and including representatives from all the main Hawiye clans.
The conference has certainly strengthened the position of the traditional Hawiye leaders, the Ugases, which presided over the reconciliation conference, but it has not produced a unified Hawiye leadership. It is far from clear that the representatives of the Habr Gidir and Abgal clans on the Consultative Council will be able to undercut the support still enjoyed by Hussein Aideed, Ali Mahdi, or even by Hussein Bod. The most probable result will be the appearance of still more factions on the streets of Mogadishu. There is no indication any are preapred to moderate their own claims to position and power in Mogadishu, or in Benadir, or more widely. One longer term problem regarding Mogadishu, now largely inhabited by Hawiye clans, is the widespread assumption of non-Hawiye clans that any capital of Somalia should be outside the control of any specific clan. It is not a view shared by the Hawiye.
Similar uncertainty prevails in the Juba valley where last October the leaders of various Darod clans, including General Adan Abdullahi Nur "Gebiyou" (Absame/Ogaden), and General Mohamed Siyad Hersi "Morgan" (Majerteen/Harti) were planning to organise their own administration. Now General Morgan has been driven out of his base at Kismayo by supporters of Hussein Aideed, and General Adan's rival for support among the Ogaden, Colonel Ahmed Omar Jess, is again making a serious bid for Ogaden support and for control of Kismayo. The conflict for Kismayo has been complicated by the involvement of the Somali National Front, a Marehan/Darod front from Gedo region. The Marehan have always had interests in Kismayo, and the SNF faction of General Omar Haji Mohamed "Masaleh", which threw its lot in with Hussein Aideed two years ago, was substantially involved in the ousting of General "Morgan". However, General Omar is also facing problems in Gedo region from another SNF faction, and also from Ethiopia which has been supportive of both General "Morgan" and General "Gebiyou", and of General Omar's opponents.
The possibility of a Rahenweyne administration in Bay and Bakool regions appears more plausible at the moment, despite the political complexities of its two main branches, the Merifle and the Digil, both of which are political confederacies as well as genealogical constructs. The victories of the Ethiopian backed Rahenweyne Resistance Army (RRA) over Hussein Aideed's Habr Gidir and the recapture of Baidoa in June have encouraged the likelihood that the Rahenweyne will recreate its Supreme Governing Council, a self-administrative body set up in 1995. It rapidly fell apart, when the Rahenweyne political faction, the Somali Democratic Movement split into three, and Hussein Aideed's father, General Mohamed Farah Aideed, and the Habr Gidir clan took the opportunity to seize a large area of the Rahenweyne regions of Bay and Bakool including the towns of Hoddur and Baidoa. With the aid of Ethiopian troops, the RRA have now retaken these and largely driven the Habr Gidir and Hussein Aideed's forces out of Bay and Bakool. This time, the Rahenweyne believe they are far more united, and their recent victories will provide the popular support necessary for a successful constitutional conference. The Malak (Sultan) of the Rahenweyne, the head of the Rahenweyne Council of Chiefs, says the Rahenweyne will hold such a conference and set up their own administration "soon".
The Malak has also indicated that the Rahenweyne are intending to advance further, and drive out the Habr Gidir from the airport at Balidogle, take over the Lower Shebelli valley and incorporate the ports of Merca and Brava and the coast as far south as Jillib, within a Rahenweyne region; the RRA has made it clear it has similar ambitions. They may, however, run into more considerable opposition in these areas. Hussein Aideed's support within his clan has steadily dropped in recent months following his reverses at the hands of the RRA, nor have his alliance with Eritrea and his use of Oromo fighters been popular. A Rahenweyne attack on the Habr Gidir in Lower Shebelli runs the risk that the Habr Gidir will once more unite behind Hussein Aideed to try and safeguard their lands, and prevent any Digil advance to the sea. It also raises the issue of whether the clans along the coast will welcome a Rahenweyne advance.
Conclusion
The appeal of "building blocks" lies in the realisation that any unitary Somali state is improbable for the indefinite future. It allows for other alternatives, a loose federal structure, even a confederal alternative modelled on the United Arabic Emirates. It also allows for greater participation and accountability. As an approach it is, however, only plausible if it can operate without external interference, and can get a degree of sympathetic and careful international support, not yet apparent. New institutions with public support have so far only emerged in Somaliland, and there the international community has added a serious level of uncertainty to the future by the failure to provide the necessary assistance or recognition. Puntland, with serious financial and administrative concerns unresolved, remains extremely fragile. Other regions have yet to make any significant progress in providing structures which have popular support or realistic alternatives to the warlords. The concept of "building blocks" suggests that Somali factions are being replaced by responsible and responsive local administrations arising out of genuine consultative processes. But theory and practice remain far apart.
http://www.philaahzophy.com/2007/11/12/anarchy-case-study-somalia-pt-2-of/
Anarchy Case Study - Somalia, Pt. 2 of ?
November 12, 2007
Part of the Anarchy Case Studies Series
Wow, it’s been almost a month since I added to the Case Study of Somalia. I apologize for the delay. I’ve been slowly working my way through Michael van Notten’s The Law of the Somalis: A Stable Foundation for Economic Development in the Horn of Africa. Van Notten was born in the Netherlands and received his Law degree from Leiden University. He married into the Samaron clan of Somalia in 1990 and, as a Western educated member of a Somali clan, shares his amazing insights into the structure of laws and customs that allows the Somali people to survive without government. This is not a book of anarchist theory. Rather it is a text on the reality of a functioning anarchist “state”.
According to van Notten, the Somali law system (or Xeer) consists of seven building blocks-
- Six major principles
- Rules of conduct in society
- Organizations that adjudicate and enforce the rules
- Procedural rules
- Rules of insurance
- Verdicts of the law courts
- Doctrines developed by learned men
In this post I’m just going to deal with the Six Major Principles of Somali law. I will address the other six building blocks in part 3 of this case study.
Six Major Principles of Somali Law (dulaxaan) -
- The law is separate from politics and religion
- The law has a built-in method for its development
- There is a plurality of jurisdictions and norms
- Government personnel must abide by the law
- The law originates in the reason and conscience of the community
- Judges are specialists, each with his own method of analyzing the law
1. The law is separate from politics and religion-
“One can change ones religion; one cannot change the law”
“Between religion and tradition, choose tradition.”
-Somali proverbs
Somali politicians and religious leaders not only have no role in the creation of laws, but have no say in establishing courts, and may not participate in the legal system. There are no exceptions to this rule when it comes to politicians, but religious leaders can serve two limited purposes-
family matters (those relating to marriage and inheritance) are often settledusing Koranic law, and
When a judge is having difficulty determining the extent of a victims injuries he may ask a religious leader to investigate and testify as to the extent of the injuries. Even in these cases, the religious leader is more of an “expert witness” then anything else. All decisions are still reserved exclusively to the judge.
Even when asked to say a few words at the opening of a court session, religious dignitaries will not comment on the ‘crime’ itself, but rather speak about about the need to settle the dispute in order to maintain order within the community.
2. The law has a built-in method for its development
Since Soamali law originates not with judges or politicians, but with the people themselves, it is a set of broad principles applicable to any type of conflict and judges will never say that the law is silent or unclear on a specific issue. The Somalis acknowledge that people constantly innovate so precise rules cannot exist for human situations. As a result, the law develops along with the nations values and judges are always able to assess whether conduct is lawful or not and the law is always adapting.
3. There is a plurality of jurisdictions and norms
Just as the United States has Federal, State , County and Local laws, Somalia has a plurality of jurisdictions full of various rules - households, businesses, towns, even recreational associations all have their own sets of rules. This is all essentially contract law in that the rules only apply to that specific geographical region or social construct which all members are free to vacate if they don’t feel they can follow the specific rules required of them. Rules violations may be resolved by the head of household, in in-house judge or arbiter, or by any means determined within the contract itself.
When rules become common or widespread enough, they eventually gain recognition as laws. Typically, these are transgressions that are timeless in nature, such as the more “serious” crimes of murder, rape and robbery. These are universal “wrongs” and easily seen as such. Somalia has innumerable independent courts of law that recognize and adjudicate these laws. When varying courts disagree in their opinions of what the law is, these differences will be ironed out over time as the society as a whole makes a determination as to which ruling was “more” correct. This occurs as judges are chosen by the relevant parties in each dispute, meaning that judges known to have made rulings that go against current social norms will not be called upon to give further rulings.
On top of all these various jurisdictions, most Somalis are Muslim, so generally agree that matters regarding marriage, divorce and inheritance should have Koranic law applied. Generally the customary law takes precedence over Koranic law even in these instances unless a particular religious rule would settle the matter more expediently and to the community’s satisfaction. Finally, Somalis are completely free to settle disputes without conferring with a judge at all. Such a deal, however, cannot create a precedent under Somali law.
4. Government personnel must abide by the law
Somali judges have no more power or standing than any other clansmen. In fact, a judge who violates the law suffers heavier fines and penalties than a non-judge would in the same situation. This is because judges are expected to have a deep and unfailing respect for the law and be exemplary in their behavior.
5. The law originates in the reason and conscience of the community
Following the above logic, Somali judges are not believed to have superior intellect or wisdom, therefore they do not create law themselves. Rather they settle disputes by applying the rules of behavior that the general populace already observe. In other words, the law is not judicial, religious, or political, but that it originates in the actions of the people themselves.
Whenever a verdict is rendered the people of the community discuss it at length. Should they determine that the ruling was out of line with the society’s norms they will mention this to the judge himself. Should the judge continue to disagree with the people they will lose faith in him and he will no longer be called upon to render judgements on any issue.
Somali law has little in common with the laws of its nearest neighbors and even less in common with law systems anywhere else in the world. Additionally, legal terminology from other languages and cultures is almost entirely absent. These facts, combined with the lack of any research indicating the system was adopted means that it is safe to conclude that it is wholly a matter of Somali origin.
6. Judges are specialists, each with his own method of analyzing the law
There is no such thing as a Somali law school. Still, judges are specialists, albeit self-educated ones. They learn by attending court sessions and listening to the people analyze decisions. When they are ready to, people in conflict will come to them seeking judgement. Typicall, therefore, judges are already the head of their extended family, for it is always the wisest of people that are sought out in such cases.
That concludes the Six Major Principles of Somali Law. This is a rather complex book and I’m doing my best to distill the information from its scholarly writing into something more accessible to the “average reader”. Questions are not only welcome, but encouraged! I promise to have part three up in much less than a month’s time!
Anarchy Case Study - Somalia, Pt. 1 of ?
Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral. It is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding; it seeks to annihilate rather than to convert. Violence is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love. »» Martin Luther King, Jr.
I’ve been working on a case study of the anarchist “state” of Somalia for a couple of months now. But have been unable to work it all into a cohesive whole. There’s just too much data from too many sources to water it all down to a single post. At the same time, I don’t want to just give you a bunch of links to academic papers that are difficult to sift through. If you wanted to read those papers you likely already would have done so. It’s my “job” to make you interested enough to read (or at least skim) them for yourself by giving you the highlights. So, in the intereste of actually moving things forward I’ve decided to break up the case study of Somalia’s current, ongoing, anarchy into several large “chunks” focusing on different areas. How many? I have no idea. But everything’s gotta start somewhere, so I’m going to start with a brief history of Somalia-
Egyptians, Romans, and Byzantines all traded on the Somali coast, but it wasn’t until the construction of the Suez Canal (opened in 1869) that Somalis had much contact with Europeans. Shortly thereafter, France, Italy, England, and Ethiopia all occupied parts of Somali territory, though they failed to penetrate the rural areas where nomads continued their daily life undisturbed by foreign influences.
In 1947, the United Nations arbitrarily split the Somali nation into five separate countries overseen by Italy, France, Britain, Ethiopia and Kenya. As an aside, isn’t it ironic that an organization called the United Nations was busy splitting up countries? In 1960, former British and Italian Somaliland were consolidated into the Republic of Somalia, which is the “state” generally referred to as Somalia today. In 1969, Brigadier General Mohamed Siad Barre overthrew the Republic of Somalia and established a Marxist dictatorship and Soviet client state, which he renamed the Democratic Republic of Somalia.
In 1978 Siad Barre declared war on Ethiopia. The Soviets backed Ethiopia, whereupon Barre became pro-Western. Barre lost the war, and his credibility with Somali citizens, causing rebellion to break out in the north. In the late 1980s a series of attacks in Berbera led to a government massacre of 30,000 civilians. In 1991 Siad Barre’s administration collapsed, and the government was dismantled. Clan fighting and widespread famine ensued, leading the United Nations to return, occupying the country and attempting to install a “democratic” government (as if democracy can be forced upon a people). In 1995 the UN finally acknowledged the will of the Somali people and withdrew leaving no formal government in place.
Instead of a government, the 11.5 million Somalis have returned to the customary laws of their ancestors, the Xeer. I will go into a lot of details about the Xeer in future posts, but here are some basics-
Law and, consequently, crime are defined in terms of property rights. The law is compensatory rather than punitive. Because property right requires compensation, rather than punishment, there is no imprisonment, and fines are rare. Such fines as might be imposed seldom exceed the amount of compensation and are not payable to any court or government, but directly to the victim. A fine might be in order when, for example, the killing of a camel was deliberate and premeditated, in which case the victim receives not one but two camels.*
A person who violates someone’s rights and is unable to pay the compensation himself notifies his family, who then pays on his behalf. From an emotional point of view, this notification is a painful procedure, since no family member will miss the opportunity to tell the wrongdoer how vicious or stupid he was. Also, they will ask assurances that he will be more careful in the future. Indeed, all those who must pay for the wrongdoings of a family member will thereafter keep an eye on him and try to intervene before he incurs another liability. They will no longer, for example, allow him to keep or bear a weapon. While on other continents the re-education of criminals is typically a task of the government, in Somalia it is the responsibility of the family.**
There is no victimless crime. Only a victim or his family can initiate a court action. Where there is no victim to call a court into being, no court can form. No court can investigate on its own initiative any evidence of alleged misconduct.*
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* MacCallum, Spencer Heath - The Rule of Law without the State
Van Notten, Michael. 2005. The Law of the Somalis: A Stable Foundation for Economic and Social Development in the Horn of Africa. Trenton NJ: Red Sea Press.