Somaliland: identity matters


Medeshi 24 Aug, 2008
Identity matters... Matt?
All identities are constructed, but as blogger Matt Eckel likes to remind us, that doesn't mean they're irrelevant.
Here's a short example from Somalia by Emily Meehan:
There is a drought in Somaliland, so I go to the desert to interview nomads who are living without water. I find a father outside his home, a structure of sticks and mats of woven grass covered with tin and colorful fabric. Ali Jama Odowa allows me and my team of two soldiers, a guide, and a driver to sleep on the ground outside his family's tent. Before we go to bed, and after everyone has listened to the scratchy shortwave broadcast of the BBC World Service, he tells me his problem: The drought might kill his cows, and they hardly have enough water to bathe with, cook with, and drink. The children look dangerously thin. I ask if he can take his family and move to another region where there's more rain. I have heard this is what nomads do.
"It's difficult for us to go where our clan doesn't live. We can't," he tells me.
"But there might be water there," I say, suggesting that he move into a region where the Darood clan rules. Odowa is from the Isaaq clan.
"There's no problem that would force us to go that far. We haven't seen that kind of a drought yet," he says, flustered. "We can travel inside Ethiopia where our clan lives, and we can wait for Allah to bring rain."
My guide and translator, Mohamed Amin Jibril, reminds me that Siad Barre, Somalia's dictator for 22 years, was Darood. Somaliland is populated by the Isaaq clan. Barre killed more than 50,000 Isaaqs in the Somali civil war of the late 1980s. In one incident, his soldiers tied more than 1,000 Isaaq men and boys to trees with barbed wire, pumped them full of bullets, and then drove over them with tanks, burying them alive. Barre's army bombed and razed Hargeysa, Somaliland's capital.
Isaaqs fled as refugees to Ethiopia or, if they were rich, to the United States, Canada, or Europe. So, to ask Odowa if he would move to a place where Daroods live is ridiculous, cruel even.
"You have made this man deny that there is even a drought!" my guide says disapprovingly. Odowa would rather die of starvation than travel inside the territory of an enemy clan, however lush.
Wandering around some more, we cross the unmarked border with Ethiopia. We run into a small, smiling lady in threadbare clothes; she has a dozen sheep. She and my guide speak in Somali, and I see that she is mentally ill. My guide picks up one of her sheep to joke with her, and she throws a stick at him and runs away, bursting into tears.
"It is something from the war. Maybe her parents were murdered in front of her," says Mohamed. "I asked her if she knew she was in Ethiopia, but she doesn't know what Ethiopia is. She does not know her own country even. She only knows her clan."

Qaar ka mid ah Ururada Bulshada Rayidka ah oo walaac ka muujiyay mudo dhaafka golayaasha deegaanada

Annaga oo ah Ururada Bulshada Rayidka ah ee Madaxa-banaan waxaanu si wayn uga walaacsanahay