The Regrettable Absence Of The UN
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EDITORIAL
The Organization of the United Nations has deliberately chosen to ignore Somaliland’s democratization process. As voters in Somaliland, a 100% Muslim country in the volatile Horn of Africa went to the polls on September 29, 2005 to elect their representatives to the country’s lower house of parliament for the first time in 37 years, UN officials in the region behaved as though this historic event wasn’t worthy of their attention at all.
Without so much as a word of appreciation, the UN has rather mischievously warned its field staff of security threats in connection with the Somaliland election. While international observers from 4 different continents and from places as far as New Zealand, Finland, Canada and South Africa converged on Somaliland in the last week prior to the 29 September parliamentary elections, the UN was no where to be seen.
Despite their conduction of the polling in a peaceful and reasonably fair manner, Somalilanders however have noticed the UN’s default with bitterness.
The UN has so far given no official explanation for its bizarre behavior but obviously the omission must have had something to do with Somaliland’s status as an unrecognized state. But even that would be no justification for a UN censure of a process under which people have been simply trying to exercise their basic democratic rights
While the people of Somaliland were voting in the 3rd multi-party elections to be held in their country in a period of less than 3 years, the UN was ironically engaged in the dispensation of international community resources for the appeasement of its host in Jowhar, warlord Mohamed Dheere.
The Somaliland parliamentary elections provided a window of opportunity for Kofi Anan’s UN to be associated, at least for once, with the only successful home-grown-and-driven democratization process going on at anywhere in Africa today. By missing this chance, the UN has oddly enough unknowingly put itself in the same camp as with the terrorists whose plot to undermine the elections was foiled by Somaliland security forces only a week before the voting.
The UN should rectify its mistakes by starting to cooperate with Somalilanders’ efforts to develop and sustain their self-made peace and democracy which could become a model for conflict resolution and good governance for countries in this region and beyond.
There are potential benefits for both sides to gain from such a type of partnership. The ball’s now in the court of the UN.
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