Land, property and law
One of the main drivers of social conflict is land disputes. The relation with land used to be a cultural one; each clan has its ‘degaan’ (plural degaano), ancestral grazing areas, and it was common practice to share access to pasture with friendly clans. There were no precise boundaries between the degaano; indeed they shifted according to clan strength, population growth, historic movements of clans and environmental change. Clan conflicts would typically occur around the watering holes in the dry season, when one lineage would lay claim to the scarce resource at the expense of all others.
The British colonial administrators sought to clarify the boundaries of degaano to quell clan conflict. The access to pasture and water was based on the right of the strongest, and they disproved of that. They embarked on a program to dig wells and water reservoirs, specifying which clans could use them. But this interference in the traditional sharing mechanisms sparked other conflicts. For example, the Habar Jeclo fought with the British against the Dhulbahante in the Dervish wars; this allowed them to lay a claim to pastures around Caynabo and toward the Hawd which are still being claimed back by Dhulbahante irredentists today.
More generally, the British, and later the independent Somali state, sought to establish an administrative ordering of lands, establishing boundaries where possible, which replaced the previous cultural relation with land. But the principle of communal rights to pasture still existed. This has changed under the neoliberal policies, in which land is considered either private or public (state-owned) – the category of ‘communal’, of collective property, has practically disappeared. Land is seen as a resource to be exploited, financially if not productively. It has led clans to lay an exclusive claim, based in terms of legal property rights, to large swathes of the country. Lineages then divide their degaan into plots allocated to their members. If one looks out of the window when approaching Hargeysa by air, a bizarre grid seems to divide the dry scrubland into regular plots, demarcated by bulldozer tracks. There is no sign of occupation or use, and herds of goats and sheep move across them, but now that is technically illegal – infringement on private property. As one may expect, the stronger and better-connected lineages have received more and better chunks of land than the weaker lineages. This is now a major source of discord. Meanwhile, pastoralists can no longer find a place to pitch their tents during the seasonal migrations outside their own degaan.
This situation is aggravated by the absence of proper dispute resolution mechanisms[1]. Courts do not work well – they are staffed by incompetent people, do not follow procedures, and are corrupt – and they usually decide in favour of the most powerful party[2]. It is unclear to most people what the law is. The official judicial system presents an extreme case of ‘institutional mimicry’. It is worthwhile to reproduce in extenso the words of one interviewee:
“The imposition of Western institutions is contributing to the deadlock. Al Shabaab is successful because all their rules and laws fit on one sheet of paper; everybody understands and knows them, and that makes their rule predictable and accepted. Their rules are a mix of sharia and custom. But here we have a system where for each legal topic there is a book of law of 100-150 pages, written by an NGO consultant who copied it from another country. Nobody in Somaliland has read these books, and their existence is used as an excuse for arbitrariness. The Supreme Court judge hasn’t read them. Very few judges or lawyers will have done what I did, namely read some of those laws. The environment law is 150 pages and makes provision for environmental courts, something nobody is aware of. The water law is 100 pages but in reality, the water supply in Borama is in private hands, in Hargeysa it is run by the office of the Presidency[3], in Berbera by the Ministry of Water and Energy, and in Burco by the municipality. In Sheekh the water supply is owned privately by the mayor of Berbera. In Hargeysa I pay 10-12 USD for a cubic meter of water brought by water truck, while in another neighbourhood people pay 2 USD, because they have tap water. This sort of injustice, which shields behind a law that nobody has read, deeply upsets people. It’s what will push people to join an Islamist opposition movement if they get a chance.
We have our own traditional laws, quite sophisticated. For example, on how to keep and treat animals. Or how to deal with incidents when you’re in the territory of another clan. Or the principle that each clan should take care of the environment in its degaan. But all that is topsy-turvy now, thanks in part to the imported legal institutions. When I suggested to the Supreme Justice to replace those books with one sheet of paper each, with ten rules, he said we already have a law, pointing to the most certainly unread books on his shelf. Impossible to have this discussion with a person who has no inkling of the theory of justice.”
Traditionally, clan leaders would arbitrate such disputes but in Somaliland they now largely discredited; they have either been marshalled into working for the government, in distant Hargeysa where they are locked into the power elites and their interests, or they are ‘upstarts’ with unclear authority. It is this lack of access to land, justice and redress which, as the interviewee also notes, is most likely to fuel a revolt against the current authorities.
[1] APD/Interpeace 2015 report “Mapping Somaliland’s Progress toward Peace” pp 65-66 notes that the prime concern of citizens is “the absence of proper dispute-resolution mechanisms, notably in the fields of land and access to natural resources.”
[2] “Government intervention in such disputes over resources often politicises them and can lead to corruption” APD/IP 2015:10
[3] Reportedly, this strange attribution was made to capture the considerable international funding made available to improve Hargeysa’s water supply by Hashi, Siilaanyo’s corrupt Minister of Presidential Affairs (see above)