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| Africa Horn | |
| Somaliland seeks a little respect | |
| 2008-06-09 | |
Free and stable, self-declared republic chafes at lack of world recognition
Earnest government officials, elected in what may be the cleanest voting in Africa, eagerly meet reporters in roadside cafes, a practice that would be suicidal in the violent south of the country, where occupying Ethiopian troops do battle with a ferocious Islamist insurgency. (Even more unusual, the officials insist on picking up the tab for camel-milk tea.) Across town, another private university is being planned—the sixth in the region. It won't teach the Quran, unlike the few other surviving educational facilities in war-ruined Somalia. Instead, its curriculum will be secular and American—pinched from Portland State University in Oregon, to be exact. "This is what frustrates us," said Dahir Rayale Kahin, president of the obscure self-declared republic of Somaliland, a parched enclave the size of Oklahoma that proclaimed its independence from Somalia in 1991 and is angling to become a platform for U.S. power in the region. "We are a functioning state, but the world still ignores us. Instead, it props up a failed state in the south, in Mogadishu, a place with no rule of law, a state that is nothing." | |
| Posted by:Steve White |