Palestinians could do worse than setting up home in Somaliland
I've always had a soft spot for Somaliland. While visits to Somalia, just next door, entailed armed escorts and bullet-proof vests – hence I never went – to get to Somaliland you basically sauntered by foot over its border with Ethiopia, where I was freelancing, and hopped on a minibus which in less than three hours of driving through the desert dropped you off in the feisty capital, Hargeisa, where I'd stay at the wonderful pink-walled Oriental Hotel.
I haven't thought much about the country since I left the Horn of Africa, but now they are talking about it as one of the options, along with neighbouring Puntland – an autonomous region in northeastern Somalia – for rehousing Palestinians from the wasteland of Gaza.
I'm not convinced any of us should be considering or telling Palestinians where they 'can go'. But at the same time, one can't deny that the images of Gaza are pretty astonishing. What it takes to achieve that level of destruction is hard to comprehend, and I worked with a lot of bomb-dropping jets and Multi-Launch Rocket Systems in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Palestinians clearly need somewhere to live. Perhaps some of the more centrist ones check out the Daily Telegraph. So this is for them, regarding what Somaliland is like as a potential get-out-of-jail/Armageddon card.
One of the reasons I enjoyed going there is that the people are very friendly, especially after the recalcitrance and obstructionism of trying to report in Ethiopia. Somalilanders – like all Somalis –can't stop talking. They're upbeat, loud and gregarious. And exceptionally welcoming to a stranger.
This was partly due to the fact that the international community still hasn't recognised it as a country, despite its breaking away from Somalia more than 30 years ago, and so it exits in a strange limbo state, unable to access global financing and all the rest of the international community's infrastructure.
So the Somalilanders like the fact when someone comes to visit, thereby giving a degree of recognition to their self-declared sovereign state that no one else is willing to do officially. Hence the surprising proposal for absorbing Palestinians – reportedly in exchange for recognition of the country's sovereign status from Israel.
The warm welcome I encountered also had something to do with them looking favourably on the British as colonisers, who, unlike the Italians in Somalia, didn't leave the place a basket case.
But whether the locals would welcome a load of Palestinians is another matter – that said, Somalianders know all about having their homes and towns reduced to rubble, as happened during the civil war when the jets of Somalia's late dictator Mohamed Siad Barre pulverised Hargeisa.
So its current inhabitants, having rebuilt their city and lives with little international assistance – due to that lack of recognition – might well be sympathetic to the Palestinians' situation.
There is an uncomfortable truth, though, underpinning my good times spent there. Like all Brits embracing exciting adventure in foreign lands, I knew I could leave – as I did.
When I was there, other than carrying out my journalism, I spent much of my time at the tea stalls drinking deliciously sweet brews – it's a booze-free country – and other times chewing the leaves of khat, famed for its nice low-level narcotic buzz; there wasn't much else for a visitor to do. Something a long-term transplant is going to have to confront.
Islamist extremism has been gaining a foothold in East Africa for some time – one day as I walked through Hargeisa, a guy in Muslim frock mimed gunning me with an AK; I don't think it was meant humorously. This is a tough part of the world, and basically off the grid as far as most Western countries are concerned.
So, that said, perhaps having a load of Palestinians – the current cause célèbre – in Somaliland might get people to finally pay more attention to the country, with the mutual benefits helping keep good relations between the locals and newcomers. Hargeisa clearly has advantages to a bombed-out Gaza. Perhaps it could work as temporary residence until Gaza is 'restored'.
While Donald Trump's remarkable suggestions about turning Gaza into a 'Riviera of the Middle East' might seem typically Trumpian and outlandish, based on my time in Iraq, I get where he is coming from to a degree.
My first tour in Iraq was spent in the city of Al Amarah. It was out in the sticks, marooned from the country's main urban focal points. The ungenerous visitor might easily take one look at Al Amarah under the midday sun and describe it as an unbearably remote dump.
But during my first night at CIMIC House, the small civil-military outpost in the centre of the city (and where Rory Stewart initially held sway over the surrounding Maysan province), as I sat outside in my combats at a white plastic table, eating what the army chefs had rustled up and gazing over the Tigris River that ran by one side of the compound, I saw otherwise (this was before everything 'kicked off' and we took the country to hell and back again).
While my fellow officers discussed forthcoming operations, guard routines and the manning of tanks, as the lowering red orb of the sun hovered over the wide shimmering expanse of the Tigris, I imagined the glow of bare shoulders and elegant dresses and the pouring of wine and clinking of glasses. 'This would be the perfect spot for a restaurant,' I mused, 'were there not a war going on.'
I wasn't alone in succumbing to Iraq's hidden charms. Agatha Christie visited Iraq before its independence from Britain in 1932 and lived for a time in the city of Nimrud. Christie felt similarly about what she encountered as I did. 'What a beautiful spot it was,' she wrote. 'The Tigris was just a mile away, and on the great mound of the Acropolis, big stone Assyrian heads poked out of the soil…It was a spectacular stretch of country–peaceful, romantic and impregnated with the past.'
Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza – they all have such special qualities and potential. And yet they've all been taken down a terribly bloody path. Credit, then, to Somaliland for what it's achieved and the peace it's maintained. Perhaps not that bad a place to end up, then, at least for the time being.
James Jeffrey is a writer, assistant online editor for the Catholic Herald and a Camino guide who splits his time between the US, UK and further afield
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