Agony and struggle in northern Somalia

Abstract

In May 1991, the breakaway Somaliland republic was established in what had been the northern regions of Somalia, with its first president, Abdirahman Ahmed Ali. But this attempt at creating a stable polity in a rapidly disintegrating situation is yet to be recognised by western powers.The creation of this new republic was a direct result of the civil war in Somalia. This had begun to tear apart the fragile state from 1982, when the first organised resistance to the tyrannical rule of president Siad Barre had been mounted in the northern cities of Hargeisa and Burao.By effectively redrawing the old colonial boundaries between what had been British Somaliland and Italian Somaliland before the brittle unity that had come with independence in 1960, the people of the new Somali land have declared their final dissatisfaction with the economic and cultural bias, the political structure and inbuilt inequity of the former Somalia. They are also systematically rejecting the brutal overlordship they have suffered fo...