On Friday August 25, 2000, an unrepresentative conference described as the “Somali Peace Conference”, which was held in the town of Arta under the auspices of the government of Djibouti, announced that it had elected Mr. Abdikassim Salaad Hassan as president of the defunct Somali Democratic Republic. To an international community that has been discouraged by the prevalence of prolonged violent civil strife in the South- the former Italian Somalia- and by the absence of a recognized government, the news was encouraging. However, despite the initial euphoria with which the announcement was greeted a quick reality check would show a genuine cause for concern.

First of all, the conference was dominated by personalities whose names read like a who- is- who of the dictator Siad Barre’s government including the very same politicians, army and security officers who plunged the old Somalia into one of the worst civil wars of the century. Abdukassim Hassan, a former confident of Mr. Barre, under whose watch as a deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Interior, Hargeisa, the Capital of the Republic of Somaliland was razed to the grown and 50, 000 civilians were brutally killed is one of them. Well-informed observers of Somali affairs identify him as a man who had received ideological orientation in pre-democracy Russia then became a post-Barre Islamist. Moreover, they point out with alarm that there is growing evidence that events, which both preceded and coincided with his recent short visit to Mogadishu have all but proven that his political come-back is propelled by Islamic fundamentalists.

They assert with sobering persuasion, that the leadership of the so-called Islamic Courts in Mogadishu and their allied businessmen are in the forefront of a feverish campaign to install Mr. Hassan as the ruling Khalif of a new Islamic Republic of Somalia. It is common knowledge, they add, that the terrorist Al-Itihad group and other like-minded Islamic extremist organizations such Al-Islah, Al-Jihad, the Arab Afghans, the Sudanese Islamic Front and others in the Arabian peninsula and western Asia are fully mobilized to spearhead Mr. Hassan’s proposed Administration. Their immediate aim, it is believed, is to eliminate Somaliland, the only secular democratic state in the Somali speaking region of the Horn, and to impose a Taliban-like government on all the inhabitants of the former territories of the Somali Democratic Republic. However, their strategic goal is to proceed with efficiency to topple the secular regimes in Ethiopia and Kenya and then to take over the entire Horn. “We must strengthen the new government and be wary of actions of non-believers who want us to follow their leadership,” said Sheikh Hassan Aweys, a former Barre jailer, and the current chairman of Mogadishu Islamic Courts.

The Republic of Somaliland, the former British Somaliland Protectorate, which announced in 1991 its withdrawal from the union of 1960 with the former trust territory of Italian Somalia, did not participate in the conference and has therefor disassociated itself with its outcome. Others such as the regional autonomous administration of Puntland and factional leaders elsewhere in the south have rejected and condemned the outcome of the unrepresentative fore-mentioned conference.

Somaliland Democracy Center

P.O.BOX 6463 Arlington, VA 22206