Puntland Now Backs Rival “South-Western State” in Somalia’s Jubaland Area

The government of the de facto independent but nominally unionist Puntland State of Somalia recently switched its support to a proposed South-Western State consisting of three regions in the mostly lawless far-south of the “Federal Republic of Somalia.”  Earlier, Puntland had supported the ambitions of another autonomous state, Jubaland, to win approval from the internationally recognized central government in Mogadishu for a legitimate autonomous territory—a status which Puntland enjoys.  (The proposed flag of South-Western State is pictured on the wall in the upper right of the above photograph.)

The March 31st statement read, “Puntland government conveys warm congratulations to Southwest State of Somalia’s people on their role in crowning an autonomous state,” and added that Puntland “fully supports the formation and the development of southwest state of Somalia.”  Jubaland has also been supported by the governments of Ethiopia and Kenya, two major foreign players in southern Somalia’s seemingly endless civil war against the al-Qaeda-affiliated Islamists of al-Shabaab.

Jubaland (which has at times also been called Azania and Greenland) claims Lower Juba, Middle Juba, and Gedo, three of Somalia’s 18 official regions.  South-Western State would include these as well as Bay, Bakool, and Lower Shebelle and would have a capital at the inland city of Baidoa, not the fiercely fought-over harbor city of Kismayo, which serves as Jubaland’s capital.  (The eight northernmost of the 18 regions are governed by two de facto independent “autonomous states”—Puntland and Galmudug—and by the fully independent but internationally unrecognized Republic of Somaliland.)  Somalia is currently in the beginning stages of a transition to a new system of federal states, but even their boundaries have not been agreed upon.

Madoobe Nunow Mohamed may one day take the reins
of power as president of South-West State of Somalia.

The administration of Jubaland bristles at South-Western’s aspirations, however.  A Jubaland government spokesman said last month that Jubaland officials “consider that administration illegal and its founders went beyond the constitution.” The spokesman accused Madoobe Nunow Mohamed, the recently elected “president” of South-West, of “fomenting violence since Jubaland enjoys wider recognition.”

Even true love doesn’t last forever.

[For those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with a forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Auslander and Fox under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements, Independence Struggles, Breakaway Republics, Rebel Provinces, Pseudostates, Puppet States, Tribal Fiefdoms, Micronations, and Do-It-Yourself Countries, from Chiapas to Chechnya and Tibet to Texas.  Look for it some time in mid 2014.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.]

Jubaland and Puntland Deals May Help Reassemble Fragmented Somalia

 Farah Sheikh Abdukadir and Ahmed Madobe shake on it, and bring Jubaland back into “Somalia”

On August 28th, the Jubaland State of Somalia reached an agreement to cooperate with the Federal Republic of Somalia.  It was signed in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, by the Somalian minister of state, Farah Sheikh Abdulkadir, and Sheikh Ahmed Mohamed Islam (better known as Ahmed Madobe), who only the most powerful and resilient of several warring self-proclaimed presidents of Jubaland, and not even the only one who claims to have been “elected.”  The deal allows Madobe to govern Jubaland during a two-year transition under a so-called Interim Jubba Administration (I.J.A.).  In exchange, the federal government will run the airport and harbor of Jubaland’s capital, Kismayo, and will absorb “all security elements” of what passes for government in Jubaland at the moment—i.e., Madobe’s powerful militia, the Ras Kamboni Brigades.  Though Jubaland is and will be to a great extent self-governing, this agreement makes nominally a part of a nominally federal “Somalia”—though true Somalian administration extends very little beyond the federal capital, Mogadishu.  The deal also represents a victory of sorts for Somalia’s prime minister, Abdi Farah Shirdon, who had been pushing Somalia’s skeptical president, Hassan Sheikh Mohamoud, to welcome the formation of Jubaland.

Jubaland consists, according to the new agreement, of the nominal Somalian gobols (regions, or provinces) of Gedo, Middle Jubba, and Lower Jubba.  Madobe’s Ras Kamboni fighters helped troops from Kenya and Ethiopia, under an African Union (A.U.) mandate, liberate the Jubaland area last year from an al-Qaeda-affiliated Islamist militia called al-Shabaab, which has since been dispersed into the hinterlands.  Madobe then tried to set up a Puntland-style (see below) federal autonomous region in the south called Jubaland (also spelled Jubbaland, and sometimes also known as Azania or Greenland) but met with initial resistance from Mogadishu.  (Jubaland was listed in this blog at the beginning of this year as one of “10 Separatist Movements to Watch in 2013.”)

A Somali political cartoon addresses the controversy over recognition of Jubaland.
(This is only one of several proposed Jubaland flags in circulation.)

Two days after the Jubaland deal, President Mohamoud said the federal administration was open to talks that would repair relations with the Puntland State of Somali, a de facto independent parliamentary republic at the tip of the Horn of Africa which announced last month it was formally severing all ties with the Mogadishu government (as reported at the time in this blog).

These two developments indicate the possibility of the northern and southern ends of “Somalia” being brought into the nominal federal fold—or perhaps even more than nominally.  (Puntland is considered the northern end of Somalia only because Mogadishu has, despite official protests, in reality long resigned itself to the de facto secession of the internationally-unrecognized Republic of Somaliland, to Puntland’s west.)  The Jubaland agreement, in particular, is being praised by the United Nations (U.N.), by the mostly pro-Mogadishu international community generally, and by the government of Puntland.  But there may be associated tensions emerging in the nation’s middle section . . .

Jubaland delegates at an annual Somalia conference in London.  (This is another proposed Jubaland flag.)

In response to the Jubaland accord, hundreds of residents of Baidoa, Somalia’s third-largest city, took to the streets on August 31st to protest Jubaland’s reabsorption into Somalia.  Baidoa is culturally and geographically part of the larger Jubaland region and in fact used to be the capital of Upper Jubba province before internal borders were reorganized.  It is now the capital of Baay (also spelled Bay) province (see map above).

Protesters ralied in Baidoa, Baay province, on August 31st.

Like most parts of Somalia, Baay province is only nominally under Somalian administration, at best.  Local control is in the hands of clan elders.  An elder’s-council spokesman, Malaq Ali Mumin, who also represents elders from the province of Bakool, told media during the protest, “We have withdrawn our support from the Somali federal government in Mogadishu.  We call on parliamentarians and other federal government officials hailing from this region to come back.”  Elders said that federal government officials were now banned from Baay.  Mumin, of the elder’s council, told reporters that his organization was declaring war in order to “liberate the regions of ‘Lower Jubba, Middle Jubba, and Gedo.’”

Somali troops celebrating the taking of Kismayo from al-Shabaab in 2012

Jubaland and Puntland may be on the brink of being tamed and brought in from the cold.  But do we now have to contend with a Republic of Baay?

[Also, for those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with a forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Auslander and Fox under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements, Independence Struggles, Breakaway Republics, Rebel Provinces, Pseudostates, Puppet States, Tribal Fiefdoms, Micronations, and Do-It-Yourself Countries, from Chiapas to Chechnya and Tibet to Texas.  Look for it some time in 2013.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.]

Puntland’s Actual Declaration of Independence? Or Just Another Nail in Somalia’s Coffin?

On August 5th, the government of the “autonomous” region of Puntland within the Somali Federal Republic—a region which has been de facto independent in most respects since 1998—said it is now cutting off all relations with the internationally recognized but largely ineffective Somali Federal Government (S.F.G.) in Mogadishu.

The flags of Somalia (left) and Puntland

Puntland sits at the very tip of the Horn of Africa.  To its west is the de facto independent Republic of Somaliland, which since 1991 has considered itself both de facto and de jure independent of Somalia.  To Puntland’s south is the pirate-infested “autonomous” region of Galmudug, also nominally Somalian but de facto self-governing.  South of Galmudug is a vast patchwork of clan and militia territories which the rest of the world calls “Somalia” but of which only the capital, Mogadishu, and its environs are governed by the internationally recognized Somali government.

President Abdirahman Farole

At issue in the lastest dispute is the new federal system that the newly-christened Federal Republic is supposed to respect and implement.  Puntland’s president, Abdirahman Farole, claims that Mogadishu is reneging on promises of the “sharing of power, resources and foreign aid” in a way that is fair to the regions.  Mogadishu’s most concrete expression of disdain for federalism lately has been its refusal to recognize the self-declared Jubaland State of Somalia (a.k.a. Azania) founded by Kenya-backed warlords in the formerly Islamist-infested far south of “Somalia.”  Puntland supports the Jubaland administration—or at least the same one of the five bloodily competing ones that the Kenyan military also supports—but the Somali government in Mogadishu would rather pretend to the outside world that it administers the area itself, which it doesn’t.  Some of the al-Qaeda-affiliated al-Shabaab militants rooted out of Jubaland merely relocated to Puntland’s mountainous regions, a situation which Puntland also blames Mogadishu for not doing enough to fix.

Like any map of who controls Somalia, this one became out of date almost immediately.  Al-Shabaab now controls less territory than shown here, and what is shown here as “Khatumo” is now mostly under Somaliland’s control.

It is not yet clear what Farole’s announcement amounts to.   In his own words, “The fragmented country has been plunged back into a vicious cycle of violence, displacement, clan animosities, and a complete disregard for the country’s genuine Provisional Federal Constitution.  Puntland hereby suspends all co-operation and relations with Federal Government of Somalia.”  In one sense, this means a return to the situation that has mostly prevailed since 1998: foreign-aid agencies and foreign corporations and governments treat Puntland as sovereign but on paper call it a part of Somalia—almost the only politically and economically stable part of it, it sometimes seems.  So maybe this is just a return to the status quo ante that prevailed before the new constitution took effect last year, succeeding the Transitional Federal Government (T.F.G.) that had presided over a bloody civil war since 2004.  On the other hand, maybe this is Puntland’s way of throwing out the suggestion that it couldn’t be any worse off if it took the Somaliland route: declaring independence and lobbying the world community for full statehood, without asking Mogadishu for anything.

Somaliland is not doing too badly, actually.  Just this week, the governor of the Mogadishu government’s central bank, Abdisalan Omar Hadliye, had to reassure the public that his office had not, as had been reported, pressured the United Kingdom government to shut down the Somaliland central bank’s contract with a British firm to mint the Somaliland shillin (i.e., “shilling”), the national currency. Hadliye reiterated that Somaliland absolutely has the right to mint its own currency.  Mogadishu makes a lot of noise about not recognizing Somaliland, but it knows better than to interfere in any concrete way with the sovereignty of the resource-rich quasi-state.  Puntland may be beginning to see the advantages of that approach.

After all, Puntland, with an area almost as big as that of the U.K. itself and perhaps 4 million people (“perhaps” because a national census is one trapping of statehood Puntland lacks), has elections and a parliament and government ministries, and an industrial sector, and it does a better job of policing its offshore waters to catch sea pirates than “Somalia” does.

A few days later, Farole clarified his position by framing his country’s new position in xenophobic terms, saying, “Puntland will hold presidential elections on 8 January 2014, thus the traditional elders are really required to select academics and talented Puntland MPs, not political spoilers or anti peace elements who are known for their violent activities.  Enemies of Puntland want to infiltrate troublemakers into Puntland Parliament but we are vigilant against them.”

Perhaps Jubaland will also try independence on for size.

If Puntland decides to opt for full independence, then Galmudug will have to decide whether to follow suit.  Galmudug is less stable, closer to the violence in the center of the country, and more corrupt than Puntland, but it also has potential.  Two other “autonomous states” of Somalia, Hiiran State and Ximan and Xeeb State, might find it a little tougher to go it completely alone—to say nothing of the war zone of Jubaland.  But even the loss of Puntland might push Mogadishu and its diplomatic partners to rethink the whole failed idea of a united Somalia.  Somaliland itself might be the first to benefit.

Oh, except for one thing: Puntland and Somaliland can’t agree on a border, and in fact have been fighting over a swath of desert in the Sool, Sanaag, and Cayn (a.k.a. Khaatumo) region (which has at times declared autonomy itself) for decades.  Somaliland only just last year managed to bury the hatchet with local warlords and pacify its eastern border.  That battle may reopen soon.  If, that is, President Farole is serious.  Which still remains to be seen.

Should Puntlanders be preparing to celebrate quite yet?

[For those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with my forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Auslander and Fox under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements, Independence Struggles, Breakaway Republics, Rebel Provinces, Pseudostates, Puppet States, Tribal Fiefdoms, Micronations, and Do-It-Yourself Countries, from Chiapas to Chechnya and Tibet to Texas.  The book, which contains dozens of maps and over 500 flags, is now in the layout phase and should be on shelves, and available on Amazon, by early fall 2014.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even though you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook.]

Introducing the Republic of Wadiya

Last month in this space I introduced readers to the world and Africa’s newest (de facto) independent country, the Independent State of Azawad, carved for the time being out of the northern, Tuareg-dominated two-thirds-or-so of what the rest of the world still regards as the Republic of Mali.  While that drama is ongoing (and reported on in this blog’s “This Week in Separatist News” installments), yet another, not-too-dissimilarly named African country has made its debut: the Republic of Wadiya.  But it isn’t showing up on any real maps.  It is the fictional country ruled by the dictator Admiral General Aladeen, played by Sacha Baron Cohen in his new film The Dictator, due to be released in American theaters on May 16th.

The last time Baron Cohen parodied the third world (while at the same time parodying the West and everything and everybody else) was with his 2006 mockumentary Borat! Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.  The title character, Borat Sagdiyev, was an amalgam of numerous stereotypes of Slavic, Muslim, Middle Eastern, and third-world men in general (he is the dark side of Steve Martin and Dan Aykroyd’s Czechoslovakian “wild and crazy guys” from Saturday Night Live), though the script is careful to mention he is non-Muslim, following an (invented) indigenous Kazakh religious system.  (Likewise, his new character Aladeen is “not an Arab” and is also, fairly apparently, not a “black” sub-Saharan African.)

Borat Sagdiyev in his native Kazakh village (actually, Romania)

The Republic of Kazakhstan, needless to say, was not amused at Baron Cohen’s deadpan portrayal of a Kazakh filmmaker who masturbates in public, tongue-kisses his sister, marries a prostitute, is gleefully misogynistic and anti-Semitic, cheerfully refers to African-Americans as “chocolate-faces,” and tries to stuff Pamela Anderson into a traditional Kazakh “marriage sack”—or the film’s portrayal of Kazakhstan as a nuclear-contaminated, backward, dirt-poor wasteland (the Kazakhstan scenes were shot on location in Romania) full of bigots, fanatics, perverts, and holders of an undying, unspecified grudge against Uzbekistan.

A timeline of Kazakh history, from the coffee-table book published to accompany the film Borat

The Kazakh government threatened law suits against Baron Cohen and his producers, and Kazakhstan’s president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, even very somberly took the matter up with the United States’ president, George W. Bush, during a state visit.  However, a Kazakh journalist who got around his country’s ban on the movie by screening it at a film festival in Vienna, declared, “Cultural Learnings is certainly not anti-Kazakh, anti-Romanian, or anti-Semitic.  It is a cruelly anti-American movie.  It is amazingly funny and sad at the same time.  I think this is the best film of the year.”  (Baron Cohen, incidentally, is permitted over-the-top anti-Semitic jokes; he is himself an Englishman of Jewish extraction, who wrote his Cambridge thesis on the role of Jewish Americans in the 1960s civil-rights movement.)

A scene from Borat showing Kazakhstan’s supposed annual “running of the Jews” ceremony

More than five years later, Kazakhstan’s ruffled feathers are not yet smoothed down.  As I reported in this blog in March of this year, the Kazakh government flew into a diplomatic rage after a Kazakh receiving her gold medal at a sharpshooting competition in Kuwait stood on the podium and had to hear the mock Kazakh national anthem from Borat played over the public-address system.  The lyrics say, in part, “Kazakhstan, greatest country in the world / All other countries are run by little girls ... / Kazakhstan, Kazakhstan, you very nice place / From plains of Tarashenk to northern fence of Jewtown / Kazakhstan, friend of all / Except Uzbekistan, they very nosey people with bone in their brain ... / Kazakhstan, prostitutes cleanest in the region / Except of course for Turkmenistan’s.”  The athlete, Maria Dmitrienko, smiled uncontrollably while it played (watch her reaction here), but her government refused to believe it was not deliberate and demanded an apology.  The incident in actuality showed nothing more than the dangers of hastily searching YouTube to find obscure countries’ national anthems.  (It is also worth mentioning that the tournament Dmitrienko won was called the Arab Shooting Championships—which, with or without a hyphen, itself sounds like something out of Borat.)

Kazakh markswoman Maria Dmitrienko hears the Borat version of her country’s national anthem

The Dictator—not to be confused with the identically titled 1935 silent classic featuring Charlie Chaplin as Adolf Hitler—not only stars but is written by Baron Cohen as well.  It is a fully fictional, scripted film, unlike the guerilla Candid Camera approach taken in Borat, where Baron Cohen is mostly improvising opposite unwitting American dupes who think he is a genuine Kazakh journalist.  The Dictator tells of Aladeen’s unlikely assimilation into American life.  One feature of the new film’s promotional campaign has been a website for the Republic of Wadiya featuring film trailers but also information on Wadiya itself.  (Its level of professionalism is eerily reminiscent of the actual website for the Independent State of Azawad, which may indeed have helped inspire the fake Wadiya site.)  A map, under “Invest in Wadiya” on the Wadiya site, shows its position, on the Horn of Africa—or, rather, on what used to be the Horn of Africa until it was digitally shaven down to resemble Aladeen’s profile.  (See this announcement of the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the newly sculpted Aladeen Beach, which more or less erodes the Puntland State of Somalia out of existence.)

Now, it is one thing to piss off the Republic of Kazakhstan, as Baron Cohen did with Borat.  A few Kazakhs even managed to figure out that Baron Cohen has no grudge against Kazakhstan per se; he chose it because Kazakhstan is so little known in the West, because it sounds remote and obscure and has a funny name.  It would be quite another thing to piss off an actual living dictator.  Aladeen, in his unhinged flamboyance, resembles no one more than Libya’s Moammar al-Qaddafi.  The Dictator was conceived and began shooting well before Qaddafi’s downfall and execution in October 2011, but presumably by that point Libya’s dictator was already clearly on his way out (a fate he might have avoided if he had done what Baron Cohen’s Aladeen does: in order to avert a possible future Arab Spring uprising, he has all of the spring months removed from the national calendar).  (See my blog article on conflict in post-Qaddafi Libya.)

The original Aladeen?

But, still, one doesn’t want any actual dictator deciding that he is the model for Aladeen and taking appropriate Lockerbie-esque or Salman-Rushdie-fatwa-esque action in retaliation.  So Baron Cohen has shifted his fictional country into a zone where hardly any government functions at all, Somalia.  Perhaps coincidentally, Azawad, which resembles Wadiya somewhat in name (see my recent blog article discussing the name Azawad), was founded during The Dictator’s post-production, though the name Wadiya also somewhat resembles Awdal, a self-governing pseudo-state in extreme northwestern Somalia (i.e. Somaliland).  (See my recent blog article on the fragmentation of Somalia.)

The actual mess that is “Somalia” today (at least as of a few months ago; it skips a few recently created statelets).

Neither Sacha Baron Cohen nor Evelyn Waugh could have made this up.

Situating Wadiya in the Horn of Africa also fits with the film’s portrayal of Aladeen and the Wadiyans as neither Arab nor really black African either—though there are hardly examples of Somali demagogues quite as colorful as, say, Qaddafi, Egypt’s King Farouk, or the Central African Republic’s Bokassa.  (Ethiopia’s Emperor Haile Selassie is a possible inspiration, however.)  In choosing the Horn region, Baron Cohen is also following in the tradition of Evelyn Waugh, whose darkly comic novels Black Mischief (1932) and Scoop (1935), which set the high-water mark for satirizing third-world inefficiency and venality, were set in fictional East African or Horn of Africa nations called, respectively, Azania and Ishmaelia.  (Azania has since then been suggested as a name for post-apartheid South Africa, for the aspirant state which was eventually named the Republic of South Sudan, and for the self-governing Somali state in the far south more often called Jubaland or, sometimes, Greenland (itself a confusingly unoriginal name, but let’s not digress too much).)  Waugh knew the Horn, having worked as a journalist in Ethiopia, covering the Second Italo-Abyssinian War.  The chances that Baron Cohen is not a Waugh fan are approximately nil.

The frontispiece and title page for the first edition of Black Mischief, including “Azania”

John Updike’s brilliant comic novel The Coup (1978), however, shifts the geographically unspecified action a bit to the southwest, Congo-ward, in the countries of Kush and Zanj, though a neighboring country referred to as Sahel perhaps suggests more proximity to the Horn—and the original, ancient Kingdom of Kush is approximately where the Republic of Sudan is now.  And readers of Marvel Comics may be aware that the superhero known as the Black Panther is actually a prince from the Kingdom of Wakanda, situated more or less in the part of Ethiopia wishing to split off as Oromia, in the Horn of Africa region.  (See my blog article on separatism in Ethiopia.)

Map showing location of Wakanda, home of the superhero the Black Panther.

Just out of shot, not far from Waugh’s Azania, is the island nation of Genosha, where mutants are kept as slaves.

(Boy, they were asking for it when they tried to enslave Wolverine, though.  I know, right?)

But perhaps Baron Cohen has not entirely escaped something like the barrage of lawsuits and diplomatic kerfuffles that followed upon Borat.  It seems possible that some African dictator—or, just as likely, some “non-state actor,” as the jargon has it—may decide that Wadiya bears a little too close a resemblance to a real country, or aspirant country, or deranged demagogue.  Qaddafi is safely in his grave, but I wouldn’t want to make any enemies among Ansar al-Dine or the Polisario Front or Boko Haram.  Their tentacles are everywhere.

Borat’s family tree.  Just because.

In the meantime, the Republic of Wadiya website’s Tourism page invites us to visit Wadiya and see for ourselves.  Attractions include the Wadiyan State Zoo (“including pandas, white tigers, and Amnesty International officials”) and the Wadiyan Museum of Tolerance (“Open daily from 9 to 5; Women, Jews, and disabled not allowed”).

The flag of the Republic of Wadiya

[You can read about many separatist and new-nation movements, both famous and obscure, in my new book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas just published by Litwin Books under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements and Aspirant Nations, from Abkhazia to Zanzibar.  The book, which contains 46 maps and 554 flags (or, more accurately, 554 flag images), is available for order now on Amazon.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even if you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook and see this interview for more information on the book.]