LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Somaliland: Somaliland National
built 641 days ago
Despite Somaliland’s preference that a single Act of Union be agreed to by both governments prior to merger, this fundamental step was never taken. A presidential decree entitled the “Law of Union of the State of Somaliland and Somalia” submitted to the combined legislatures failed to win their approval, and the matter was ultimately referred to the people in a problematic referendum. Somaliland’s Prime Minister was assigned the relatively junior post of Minister of Education in a cabinet heavily dominated by southerners. Likewise, Somaliland was allocated only 33 seats in parliament versus 99 for the south. The designation of Muqdisho as the remote national capital left the majority of Somalilanders estranged from their new government and alienated from the country’s social and economic nucleus.
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With the liberation struggle over in Somaliland, energies turned to the gradual restoration of the country. Peace-making and social reconstruction has followed a bottom-up path, starting at the grass roots with small local clan groups, and building up gradually in ever widening circles. This slow and often irregular process which, not without setbacks, has taken several years is reflected in Somaliland's contemporary two-tier parliament: A house of elected party representatives, and an upper house of nominated clan elders. This arrangement ensured a widely representative parliament and a government whose ministers similarly reflected Somaliland's diverse clan composition. As everyone here knows, there have been impressively conducted national elections favourably judged by international observers.
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The human rights community in Somalia and Somaliland includes journalists, non-governmental organisations, women activists and intellectuals. Human rights defenders in Somalia and Somaliland have been victims of intimidation, judicial harassment, arbitrary arrests and incommunicado detentions, torture, ill-treatment and death threats. There has recently been an escalation in the number of extra-judicial killings of human rights defenders. Press freedom is very limited, with the restriction of activities and/or closure of media houses reporting on human rights abuses. The National Union of Somali Journalists (NUSOJ) was set up in 2002 in Mogadishu to defend journalists and press freedom countrywide. Members of the NUSOJ have been frequently targeted by members of the militia in Somalia due to their work reporting on human right abuses and protecting journalists.
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The outbreak of Somaliland's second "civil war" since the unilateral declaration of independence in May 1991, was widely expected to do irreparable damage to the credibility of the "Republic's" claims to secession, as well as to its population's resolve for independence. This danger was further exaggerated by attempts of the opposition leadership to portray the conflict as one between Somaliland loyalists and "federalist" forces of the former Somali National Movement (SNM) allied with General 'Aydiid in Muqdisho. Instead, the federalist agenda was quickly proven hollow and collapsed, leaving both the government and opposition in the position of defending Somaliland independence. It is therefore somewhat confusing that the two groups should still be fighting at all... raising new concerns about the nature of the conflict and the prospects for peace.
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Somaliland's leaders, with no Western experts at their elbow, have brought freedom and secular democracy to the new and emerging country. They have demobilized thousands of the young gunmen who still plague Somalia and melded them into a national army. And, says Jeffrey Gettleman from the New York Times, "they have even held three rounds of multiparty elections, no small feat in a region, the Horn of Africa, where multiparty democracy is mostly a rumor. Somalia, for one, has not had free elections since the 1960s."
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In 1981, exiles from the northwest (now Somaliland), belonging to the Isaaq clan, formed the Somali National Movement (SNM), another Ethiopia-based guerrilla movement aimed at overthrowing the regime. The government responded with heavy reprisals against the northern population and fighting between the SNM and the national army developed into full-scale civil war in the northwest. In May 1988, the government ordered aerial bombardment of two northern cities, Hargeisa and Burco, and by early 1989 an estimated 50,000 had died and a half million people were displaced. The SNM continued fighting in the north while supplying southern opposition groups with weapons. In January 1991, Gen. Mohamed Farah Aidid advanced on Mogadishu, forcing Barre and his troops to flee.
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Somaliland National