Somalia: Can Amisom cause a miracle?

This year, the British government is putting much of its diplomatic effort into trying to bring peace and stability to Somalia. A BBC reporter who has just returned from Somaliland, Kenya and Uganda, reports on the background to the London Conference on Somalia scheduled for February 23.

Not nation building, then. No grand schemes. The most hopeful political outcome for the London Conference might be East African governments, backed by European and American funding, supporting small scale programmes to encourage autonomous, commercially successful communities - with their own flags and governments, yes, perhaps, for now - from which Somali unity might be built in a far distant future.

Utility: Lessons from Somaliland
Somaliland’s forbidding landscape - sandy desert, volcanic rock and thorn bushes in temperatures up to 45 degrees, with roaming camels and goats - disguises a huge potential. The port of Berbera exports millions of dollars’ worth of livestock to the Middle East every year. The holding pens at the port hold 400,000 animals - not big enough, port director Ali Omer Mohammed told me. They are building a facility to hold a million animals at a time. “Camel herders drive their herds 2,500km from Kismayu near the Kenyan border because our systems are reliable and port taxes low,” he said.

More remarkable still is Somaliland Beverage Industries - a soft drinks factory outside Hargeisa, built by a group of young Somali investors who put in $15 million - and managed to persuade the Coca Cola Company that a franchise in an unrecognised country neighbouring a 20-year conflict zone was worth backing. The plant is as modern as any I have seen.

The obvious problem for that factory and most other industries in Somaliland is the lack of infrastructure. Local businesses pool their resources to lay sections of tarmac. But most roads are simply sandy tracks. Neighbouring Djibouti has a fine highway built with European Union funding - Somaliland’s unrecognised status means it can’t get that sort of help.

Somalilanders say they deserve better because they have established a clan-based system that works. They say the British didn’t destroy the traditional power of the elders but co-opted them. In Somalia Italiana, Italian colonisers broke the power of the clan elders, they say, and that has led to the present chaos.

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