The Early Morning Phonecall: Somali Refugees' Remittances 9781845458324

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THE EARLY MORNING PHONE CALL

STUDIES IN FORCED MIGRATION General Editor: Roger Zetter, Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford Volume 1 A Tamil Asylum Diaspora: Sri Lankan Migration, Settlement and Politics in Switzerland Christopher McDowell Volume 2 Understanding Impoverishment: The Consequences of Development-induced Displacement Edited by Christopher McDowell Volume 3 Losing Place: Refugee Populations and Rural Transformations in East Africa Johnathan B. Bascom Volume 4 The End of the Refugee Cycle? Refugee Repatriation and Reconstruction Edited by Richard Black and Khalid Koser Volume 5 Engendering Forced Migration: Theory and Practice Edited by Doreen Indra Volume 6 Refugee Policy in Sudan, 1967–1984 Ahmed Karadawi Volume 7 Psychosocial Wellness of Refugees: Issues in Qualitative and Quantitative Research Edited by Frederick L. Ahearn, Jr. Volume 8 Fear in Bongoland: Burundi Refugees in Urban Tanzania Marc Sommers Volume 9 Whatever Happened to Asylum in Britain? A Tale of Two Walls Louise Pirouet Volume 10 Conservation and Mobile Indigenous Peoples: Displacement, Forced Settlement and Sustainable Development Edited by Dawn Chatty and Marcus Colchester Volume 11 Tibetans in Nepal: The Dynamics of International Assistance among a Community in Exile Anne Frechette Volume 12 Crossing the Aegean: An Appraisal of the 1923 Compulsory Population Exchange between Greece and Turkey Edited by Renée Hirschon Volume 13 Refugees and the Transformation of Societies: Agency, Policies, Ethics and Politics Edited by Philomena Essed, Georg Frerks and Joke Schrijvers Volume 14 Children and Youth on the Front Line: Ethnography, Armed Conflict and Displacement Edited by Jo Boyden and Joanna de Berry Volume 15 Religion and Nation: Iranian Local and Transnational Networks in Britain Kathryn Spellman Volume 16 Children of Palestine: Experiencing Forced Migration in the Middle East Dawn Chatty and Gillian Lewando Hundt

Volume 17 Rights in Exile: Janus-faced Humanitarianism Guglielmo Verdirame and Barbara Harrell-Bond Volume 18 Development-induced Displacement: Problems, Policies and People Edited by Chris de Wet Volume 19 Transnational Nomads: How Somalis Cope with Refugee Life in the Dadaab Camps of Kenya Cindy Horst Volume 20 New Regionalism and Asylum Seekers: Challenges Ahead Susan Kneebone and Felicity Rawlings-Sanei Volume 21 (Re)constructing Armenia in Lebanon and Syria: Ethno-cultural Diversity and the State in the Aftermath of a Refugee Crisis Nicola Migliorino Volume 22 ‘Brothers’ or Others? Propriety and Gender for Muslim Arab Sudanese in Egypt Anita H. Fábos Volume 23 Iron in the Soul: Displacement, Livelihood and Health in Cyprus Peter Loizos Volume 24 Not Born a Refugee Woman: Contesting Identities, Rethinking Practices Edited by Maroussia Hajdukowski-Ahmed, Nazilla Khanlou and Helene Moussa Volume 25 Years of Conflict: Adolescence, Political Violence and Displacement Edited by Jason Hart Volume 26 Remaking Home: Reconstructing Life, Place and Identity in Rome and Amsterdam Maja Korac Volume 27 Materialising Exile: Material Culture and Embodied Experience among the Karenni Refugees in Thailand Sandra Dudley Volume 28 The Early Morning Phone Call: Somali Refugees’ Remittances Anna Lindley Volume 29 Deterritorialized Youth: Sahrawi and Afghan Refugees at the Margins of the Middle East Edited by Dawn Chatty Volume 30 Politics of Innocence: Hutu Identity, Conflict and Camp Life Simon Turner Volume 31 Zimbabwe’s New Diaspora: Displacement and the Cultural Politics of Survival Edited by JoAnn McGregor and Ranka Primorac

The Early Morning Phone Call

SOMALI REFUGEES' REMITTANCES

Anna Lindley

Berghahn Books New York • Oxford

First published in 2010 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2010 Anna Lindley

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lindley, Anna. The early morning phonecall : Somali refugees' remittances / Anna Lindley. p. cm. – (Studies in forced migration ; v. 28) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-84545-644-3 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Emigrant remittances– Somalia. 2. Somalia–Emigration and immigration–Economic aspects. I. Title. HG3983.2.L56 2010 332'.04246096773–dc22 2010007453 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Printed in the United States on acid-free paper ISBN: 978-1-84545-644-3 (hardback)

Contents

List of Illustrations and Tables

vii

Acknowledgements

ix

Abbreviations

xi

1 Migration, Conflict and Development: Situating Refugees’ Remittances Migration–Development Linkages Conflict and Local–Global Connections The Livelihoods of Refugees Approach 2 The Somali Context: People and Money on the Move Nomadism, Sedentarism, Urbanisation Extra-Regional Connections The Postcolonial Republic: Refugee Arrivals, Labour Migrants and Political Exiles Civil War and Diasporisation Feedback: a Wartime Remittance Economy Xawilaad: Crisis as a Business Opportunity From ‘Dirty Money’ to ‘Humanitarian Lifeline’? Beyond Collapse: Grasping Continuities and Change 3 Migration and Remittances in a Precarious State: the View from Hargeisa Oppression, Insurgency and Crisis: Diaspora Dimensions From Translocal to Transnational Families Coping in a Tough Economy

1 2 6 10 13 19 19 23 25 27 33 35 40 46

53 55 61 65

vi | Contents

Investing Diaspora Capital Following the Money into the Wider Community The Diaspora in Post–Conflict Politics and Development Beyond Complacency: Migration–Conflict–Development Contingencies

71 75 81

4 Traffic at a Global Crossroads: Eastleigh, Nairobi From the Northern Frontier to New Horizons in Nairobi Remittance Traffic, Mobility and Strategic Households Going into Business A Global Crossroads Beyond Categories: Making a Living, Circulation and Containment

91 93 100 105 109

5 The North–South Divide in Everyday Life: Londoners Sending Money ‘Home’ Seeking Asylum Settling in a Global City Who Pays the Biil? The Social Micro-Dynamics of Remittances Economic Sacrifices and Strategies, Social Reaffirmation and Tensions Beyond Economics: the Violent Origins and Social Texture of Remitting

86

112

115 116 120 123 127 132 139

6 Concluding Reflections

145

Glossary

151

References

153

Index

169

List of Illustrations and Tables Figures 2.1 2.2 3.1 3.2 4.1 5.1 5.2 5.3

Somali clan structure Map of the Somali regions Remittances received in the last twelve months by individual respondents Recipients’ work type or reason not working by gender Map of Kenya Remitters and Somali-born population by gender and age Remitters’ migration Remitters and Somali-born population by economic profile

Photos 2.1 People leaving Mogadishu in 2008 3.1 Hargeisa market scene 3.2 Hargeisa street scene 4.1 Eastleigh street scene 5.1 Money transfer advertisements in Wembley

20 21 67 68 94 125 125 125

31 77 77 98 126

Tables 2.1 2.2 2.3 3.1 5.1 5.2

East Africa comparative human development indicators, 2000 Somali refugee population by top twenty countries of asylum, 2007 Key macroeconomic indicators Remittance patterns Remittances and other transfers Comparison of human development indicators

30 31 35 63 124 132

Acknowledgements

During the research for this book, many people made time to talk with me. I cannot name everyone individually, but I would like to thank you all for sharing your experiences and thoughts, many of which have made their way into this book. It has been hard for me to stop here, for now – there is still so much more to learn. Were it not for some inspiring conversations with Mark Duffield and Saad Shire some years ago I might never have set off on this journey. Most of the research was conducted as part of a Ph.D. and postdoctoral project at Oxford University, where I benefited hugely from the supportive atmosphere at the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society and subsequently the Refugee Studies Centre. Nicholas Van Hear was a wonderful source of friendly support and generous and detailed feedback. David Anderson’s advice was invaluable, delivered with infectious energy and enthusiasm. Later, Stephen Castles and Roger Zetter helped me set off on the path to writing this book. The research and the writing process benefited greatly from discussions and feedback from Fatuma Abdullahi, Mohamed Aden, Ismail I Ahmed, Oliver Bakewell, Roger Ballard, Alex Betts, Richard Black, Mark Bradbury, Jørgen Carling, Christina Clark, Laura Hammond, Hein de Haas, Mohamed Hassan Ibrahim, Karin Heissler, Cindy Horst, Kristine Krause, Sue Lautze, Peter Little, Kate Meagher, Kenneth Menkhaus, Ahmed Samatar, Hussein Samatar, Dimitrina Spencer and Nasir Warfa. I would particularly like to thank Cindy Horst and Sarah Collinson for their detailed and constructive comments on the first draft of the manuscript. I was lucky to meet Samira Hassan Ahmed in Hargeisa, Abdullahi Mohamed Qambi in Nairobi and Ayan Mohamud Mohamed in London, who provided excellent research assistance, bursting with ideas, skills and energy. Ahmed Ismail Dahir, Ayaan Hussein Elmi, Dahir Isaaq Jibril, Khadra Abib Mohamed, Khadra Ahmed Mohamed and Mohamed Abdullahi Abdirahman ‘Caynab’ worked hard on our survey in Hargeisa. Many others have been sources of practical help and advice, in particular the welcoming and friendly staff at the Academy for Peace and

x | Acknowledgements

Development, Africa Educational Trust and Hargeisa University; Edna Aden Ismail and her hospital colleagues; the staff at Dahabshiil who facilitated the survey research; Mahdi Abdi Ahmed; Ahmed Farah and Abdul Abikar at Horn Stars; Dahabo Isse; Abdi Abby; Nancy Wanjala; and Abdulqadir Diesow. Loren Landau and Karen Jacobsen kindly allowed me to use the Migration and the New African Cities Survey data. Financial support for elements of the research was provided by the ESRC postdoctoral fellowship scheme, the Overseas Development Institute, UNDP Somalia, St John’s College and Oxford University. Marion Berghahn, Ann Przyzycki and Mark Stanton at Berghahn Books have patiently guided the manuscript to publication. In many ways this is a book about families and friendship – and I have been immensely fortunate in this respect. In particular I want to thank Nafisa Nur Osman, for sisterly hospitality and good times in Nairobi; Ruqia Mohamed Farah, an inspiring teacher in so many ways; and Fadumo Isse Mohamed for her warm spirit and constant encouragement. Martin Gillies has been a constant source of strength, love and happiness, and the Lindley family, Kate Wilkinson and others have stepped in with wise words, kind acts and laughter along the way. Some of the material here was published in ‘Between “Dirty Money” and “Development Capital”: Somali Money Transfer Infrastructure Under Global Scrutiny’ in African Affairs, 2009, 108(433) and ‘Leaving Mogadishu: Towards a Sociology of Conflict–Related Mobility’ in Journal of Refugee Studies, 2010, 23 (1), both published by Oxford University Press. An earlier version of Chapter 5 was published in ‘The Early Morning Phonecall: Remittances from a Refugee Diaspora Perspective’ in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 2009, 35(8). My thanks go to the journal editors for allowing me to incorporate this material into the book.

Abbreviations

APD BBC BME DFID EC FATF FSNAU GLA ICG ICU IMF JVA NELM NFD OECD SNM SPM TFG UNDP UNHCR USC

Academy for Peace and Development British Broadcasting Corporation Black and Minority Ethnic UK Department for International Development European Commission Financial Action Task Force Food Security and Nutrition Analysis Unit Greater London Authority International Crisis Group Islamic Courts Union International Monetary Fund Joint Voluntary Agency new economics of labour migration Northern Frontier District Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development Somali National Movement Somali Patriotic Movement Transitional Federal Government United Nations Development Programme Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees United Somali Congress

Chapter 1 Migration, Conflict and Development: Situating Refugees’ Remittances

In a drawer in her London home, Farhiya1 keeps a plastic box crammed with small papers. One afternoon she was telling me about her family, and she brought out the box. The papers are receipts for money she – like many Somalis – has sent to relatives and friends during her life in the UK. As we sorted through them, it soon became clear that over the last few years she had sent several thousand pounds. She was used to the phone ringing early in the morning as relatives tried to catch her before she left the house for work. Each piece of paper had a story behind it: a jobless brother with hungry children, a sudden hospitalisation, a compensation payment when a relative shot someone from a different clan, renting a truck to transport drought-weakened livestock to the nearest water source, a plane flight for a bright young relative to seek his fortune in Nairobi… Farhiya had come to London in the early 1990s. When it became clear that it was too dangerous for her to return to her country, by then engulfed in violence, she sought asylum and then citizenship in the UK. Married with three children, working for the National Health Service, she sees herself living in the UK for the foreseeable future. But she still maintains substantial social and economic links with her place of origin – reaching from the heart of the global North to people in wrecked cities, refugee camps and remote rural areas – links that have been crucial to the survival and welfare of people in the war-torn Somali regions.2 Yet, while perhaps not typical in keeping the receipts for her remittances, Farhiya is one of a growing number of people who are beginning to count the cost of supporting relatives ‘back home’. Her experiences – and those of the others who participated in this study – point to the significance of migration and remittance processes stimulated by political upheaval and violent conflict, often occurring across vast global disparities.

2 | The Early Morning Phone Call

This book is a collection of the stories behind remittances – and an attempt to understand their dynamics and effects in the Somali regions and in the diaspora. Following the money opens a window on lives entwined in the complex processes of conflict, migration and development. The stories collected illuminate the horror, grief and heart-stopping fear of war and fraught processes of migration: the trucks, rickety boats, tired bodies, dusty border post, airport at midnight, false passport, the officials, paperwork and the waiting. They illuminate life in exile: the refugee camp, rations, the bustling immigrant slum of the global South, the Northern cold, counting pennies at the supermarket checkout, new workplaces, council flats, the dinner-time talk, pillow talk, telephone talk and the not talking. Meanwhile, a world away, the remittance stories collected here illuminate the life that goes on – the circumspect return, the ears glued to the radio, the home destroyed and rebuilt, school day routines, negotiation of daily risks, moments of alarm and renewed violence, the mobile phone in the hand of the nomad, the livestock market, high street shopping throng, family gossip gone global, the hunger of meals missed, hunger for loved ones gone, and hunger for peace and progress. Across these fragmented geographies, remittances are traced as a vector of power, survival and affection, one means among many by which people navigate and indeed contribute to processes of social transformation. The Somali regions are of course far from unique in having a vigorous remittance economy, but conflict-affected countries have been largely overlooked by the flourishing field of research on the impact of migration and remittances in poorer parts of the world. This chapter situates Somali refugees’ remittances in relation to wider analytical efforts to understand the linkages between migration, conflict and development, outlining the conceptual underpinnings of this study.

Migration–Development Linkages Families linked by remittances are quintessential players in the era of globalization. Like entrepreneurs who seek out markets, capital and labor around the world, they too hop borders in search of competitive advantage. The United States may be a better place to earn wages; Mexico may be a better place to raise children… By facilitating migration, family networks allow them to seek economic opportunity wherever it can be found, and their digital networks allow them to instantly convey money, information and affection across borders. They successfully rebelled against geography and redrew the map of the Western Hemisphere with new networks of economic interconnection. (Suro 2003: 4)

Migration, Conflict and Development | 3

This vision is typical of the rather upbeat migration–development consensus that has emerged in recent years. But the fraught reality of migration for many people still contrasts with these more upbeat views. To understand how we have got to this point, we need to set current views in the context of longer trajectories of migration–development thinking, and its relationship to shifting social scientific and development paradigms (for an excellent review, see de Haas 2010). Prior to the 1970s, there was a general optimism that migration could provide a source of capital and knowledge transfer that would contribute to modernisation and economic ‘take-off’. Neoclassical migration theory claimed that migration results from the uneven geographical distribution of the factors of production, and that people move in response to the resulting wage differentials, ultimately leading to convergence of wages (Todaro 1969; Harris and Todaro 1970). But in that case, some asked, why did so many people not move, despite large global wage disparities? Why did wage differentials so rarely disappear – and when they did migration was rarely the most important mechanism? Clearly, states and political structures shaped migration in important ways that were not acknowledged in this model. In the 1970s and 1980s, radically different explanations of migration developed out of historical structuralist analysis of processes of development and change in poorer parts of the world. In this view, migration was produced by upheavals resulting from the incorporation of peripheral areas on unequal terms into an expanding global capitalist system dominated by a core of wealthier countries (Portes and Walton 1981; Reichert 1981; Sassen 1988). Migration thus raised serious concerns relating to the ‘brain drain’ of skilled people and malign sociocultural effects resulting from the disruption of family and community life. The sending of remittances was seen as small comfort, spent largely on imported products, failing to promote local manufacturing and investment, and exacerbating social inequality. But treating migration as entirely determined either by rational individuals’ responses to wage differentials or by macro-level political and economic structures leaves little room for explaining variability in migration patterns and the role of migrants’ agency (de Haas 2010). From the mid-1980s, against a background of the simultaneous proliferation of global travel possibilities and tightening immigration regimes, more subtle theoretical approaches developed, which embraced the role of households and wider social networks in the migration process. A ‘new economics of labour migration’ (NELM) emerged as a critical response to neoclassical theory, contending that migration should be seen as a household-level strategy to maximise income, spread risk and overcome local market constraints (Stark and Lucas 1988; Taylor 1999). Deciding whether a household member should migrate involved

4 | The Early Morning Phone Call

weighing up the costs of migration (such as the loss of family labour and travel expenses) against the anticipated benefits (such as remittance income). In this way, remittances became central to migration decisions, reflecting an implicit contract between the migrant and those ‘left behind’ – underwritten by altruism, self-interest, mutual insurance motives or loan repayment obligations. Thus remittances could help families overcome constraints and improve their economic situation, with numerous multiplier effects in the local economy. Meanwhile, on a distinct interdisciplinary trajectory, livelihood approaches (initially developed to analyse rural communities) were exploring how households mobilised their particular capabilities and resources, mediated by the wider structural environment, to produce particular livelihood strategies (Chambers and Conway 1992; Ellis 2000). Alongside agricultural intensification, extensification and diversification, migration was identified as a key way for people to adapt to or seek to better their circumstances (McDowell and de Haan 1997). Researchers also began to explore the role of transnational social networks in facilitating migration, reducing the uncertainty and costs involved. The often intense interactions and exchanges of information, money and ideas between migrants and their home communities began to come to light. Some researchers began to argue that through such exchanges, people were effectively forming transnational social fields that challenged the notion of the communities as localised and spatially bound (Basch et al. 1994; Smith and Guarnizo 1998; Vertovec 2003). This focus on ‘transnational communities’ had implications for the understanding of migration–development linkages, by showing that long-term migration did not necessarily involve a linear process of assimilation and detachment from the country of origin, but that transnational connections might persist for many years. Building on these conceptual advances, the 2000s have witnessed a boom in interest among policymakers in the impact of migration on development. The effects of emigration on home country labour markets and patterns of inequality, the human capital dimensions of migration, and cultural diffusion of ideas and practices are all important aspects of this relationship that researchers have been working to understand. But remittances have tended to take centre stage in migration–development debates, seen as a potential source of ‘development finance’. Processes of globalisation and technological advance have greatly facilitated the sending of remittances and there has been notable growth in recorded volumes and their macroeconomic significance in many countries. Remittances increased steadily from 1990, compared with other capital flows, which tended to be less reliable. In 2008, developing countries received official remittances of some $338 billion, compared with $621 billion in foreign direct investment, and $120 billion in overseas development

Migration, Conflict and Development | 5

assistance (OECD 2009, UNCTAD 2009, World Bank 2009). (The global impact of the recession on remittances is still rather unclear, although tightening labour markets in destination countries seem likely to have a moderating effect on overall volumes.) Meanwhile, it is thought that unrecorded remittances may amount to as much as 50 per cent of the recorded amount: recording systems fail to capture the often large transfers through informal channels and often exclude transfers made through regulated non-bank channels (World Bank 2006). This statistical analysis fell on receptive ears, catapaulting remittances to the status of a ‘new development mantra’ (Kapur 2003). Migrants helping their family members back home seemed to capture the spirit of contemporary development preoccupations in terms of the rolling back of the state, promotion of self-reliance and facilitation of local–global linkages. Remittances have seduced contrasting constituencies in development politics (Jones 1998). From the neoliberal perspective, focusing on economic stabilisation and growth, migration and remittances represented a transfer of resources to poorer economies in the spirit of comparative advantage. From the broader perspective of human development, remittances were also of interest, as family resources that could support education, health and housing. For supporters of grassroots participation, remittances were a form of ‘globalisation from below’, a way people coped with poverty and the ravages of structural adjustment, even a form of local resistance. The resulting pronouncements circulating in the policy world that migration and remittances are ‘good for development’ should be treated with caution. While recognising that the term is often used to describe particular politics and projects of progress, I am primarily interested here in understanding development as historical processes of change and social transformation – and the place of migration in these processes (cf. Skeldon 1997; Castles 2008). It is important that migration should not be seen as an exogenous variable in the development of countries of origin, but rather as something endogenous – generated by processes of social change, having its own internal ‘self-sustaining and self-undermining dynamics’, as well as having an impact on processes of social change (de Haas 2010: 43). Empirical evidence accumulated over the years in fact indicates considerable heterogeneity in the impact of migration and remittances in communities and countries of origin (de Haas 2010). Adjusting our perspective in this way helps to bring into focus the fact that many of the countries where remittances are most significant owe this largely to mass migration in the wake of recent conflicts and political upheavals. Remittances reached more than 10 per cent of the GDP in Bosnia and Herzegovina, El Salvador, Haiti, Lebanon, Nepal, Nicaragua and Serbia and Montenegro in 2005.3 Given the frequent collapse of formal banking and flourishing of informal financial mechanisms it is

6 | The Early Morning Phone Call

likely that official figures considerably underestimate remittances received by conflict-affected countries. For many countries engulfed in or recovering from violence – including Somalia, Liberia, Burundi, DRC, Eritrea, Timor-Leste, Zimbabwe, Angola and Iraq – remittances are known to be significant, but there are few reliable macroeconomic data. With conflict and post-conflict societies among the major beneficiaries of remittances, plenty of questions come to mind. The dominant conceptual model of remittances – the new economics of labour migration – suggests that migration is a deliberate strategy to diversify household income. It draws heavily on research in rural Mexican villages characterised by temporary migration to the US, but it is unclear whether it can explain migration and remitting in less established migration contexts or where greater insecurity prevails, as in the Somali regions (Sana and Massey 2005). Do we need alternative explanations for forced migrants’ remittances? How are remittances conveyed when most formal infrastructure has collapsed? Given the common claim that remittances are counter-cyclical, do they help to cushion the impact of conflict on affected communities – do they provide a safety net? To what extent do remittances help people survive hardship – and do they also contribute to wider processes of transformation? Are remittances captured by political actors – do these transfers get entangled in conflicts, and how? How does insecurity shape the scope for policy intervention in remittances? These questions remain largely unanswered. In contrast with the wealth of studies of remittance dynamics in labour migration settings, there has been relatively little research on remittances in contexts of conflict and forced migration (Fagen and Bump 2006). This is in large part because of the popular view of conflict-affected countries as exceptional, as separate cases from so-called ‘normal’ developing countries. Critical development thinking encourages us to be wary of attempts to ‘bracket out’ issues in this way (Escobar 1995). The role of remittances in countries affected by severe insecurity and conflict merits more attention and may help nuance the upbeat migration–development policy consensus. In pursuing this line of enquiry, however, we find ourselves at the centre of discussions about violence and change, and the role of local–global connections in conflict-affected settings.

Conflict and Local–Global Connections A collapsed state is an extreme version of a failed state. It has a total vacuum of authority. A collapsed state is a mere geographical expression, a black hole into which a failed polity has fallen. Dark energy exists, but the forces of entropy have overwhelmed the radiance that hitherto provided some semblance of order and other vital political goods to the inhabitants

Migration, Conflict and Development | 7

embraced by language affinities or borders … within the collapsed state prevail disorder, anomic behavior, and the kinds of anarchic mentality and entrepreneurial pursuits – especially gun and drug running – that are compatible with networks of terror. (Rotberg 2002: 90) This vision is typical of the regressive images of places like the Somali regions that are commonly invoked in state-centric political science. It resonates with the notion that the conflicts of the post cold war period in Africa and elsewhere represent ‘development in reverse’ (Collier et al. 2003: i). The proliferation of so-called ‘new wars’ confounded expectations of global peace following the withdrawal of superpowers from proxy wars, and was greeted with a variety of explanations (Kaldor 1999). Earlier, war had been seen as part of nation-building, conquest, revolution, colonisation or cold war dogma and neo-imperialism; now, it was more often explained as a matter of competition over scarce environmental resources, mindless ethnic barbarism or economic greed (Homer-Dixon 1994; Kaplan 1994; Collier 2000). Imposing a liberal peace4 – which fostered economic interdependence, democracy and the rule of law – would require the international community to intervene to fix the breakdown in development in weak states and set them on the path to progress (Willet 2005). Political economy critiques have turned this idea around, suggesting that conflict, far from a disruption of liberal development processes, is in many parts of the world intimately linked to these processes – particularly the undermining of the postcolonial developmentalist state by neoliberal reforms and the pressures of entry into a highly unequal global capitalist economy (Cramer 2003). From this perspective, conflict can be seen as a form of reflexive modernity (Duffield 2002). The Somali case is one illustration of how the aspirations of official development planning in many parts of postcolonial Africa have been constantly confounded, and how outside interventions purporting to foster ‘development’ can help lay the groundwork for conflict. This perspective draws attention to the fact that ‘Conflict transforms society, rather than simply destroying it, causing people to adapt their behaviour and their livelihoods in order to survive or to minimise risk, or to capitalise on the opportunities that conflict presents’ (Collinson 2003: 11). Describing collapsed states as ‘black holes’ fails to do justice to the complex changes under way. Life goes on, albeit in ways that outsiders often find it hard to imagine. Conflict is the scene of the emergence of alternative systems of profit, power and protection, the maintenance of which – backed by violence – often becomes an end in itself (Keen 1998). The challenge becomes to understand how these systems work. The term ‘conflict-affected settings’ is used here to capture a range of environments from full-blown violent conflict to ultra-marginalised post-conflict and/or conflict-prone settings. This is deliberately broad because the intensity of

8 | The Early Morning Phone Call

conflict often varies over time and space, going through periods of uneasy peace and violent relapses (quite often according to no clear overall ‘cycle’), and unevenly diffused over affected territories and across borders (relatively rarely is a whole state engulfed in all-out violence). In the interstices of state disruption and globalisation, and in the shadow of violence and political uncertainty, extra-state economic activity has flourished, often with a significant transborder and global dimension. Conflict-affected territories are often viewed as somehow marginalised from the formal global economy, but there are multiple ways in which they ‘reconnect’ beyond the ambit of formal economic interactions (Castells 1998). Foreign visitors to the poverty-stricken and war-torn Somali regions are often surprised to see how closely everyday life here is connected into the globalising world. There is a tendency to focus on the more dramatic local–global connections: how conflicts are fuelled by transnational profiteering in high-value resources such as oil, diamonds, coltan, opium and even humanitarian aid (Goodhand 2000; Reno 2000). But war economies (economic activities to finance conflict) intertwine in complex ways with shadow economies (profit-making on the margins of the conflict, outside state regulations) and coping economies (people trying to survive and maintain assets through low-risk activities) (Bhatia and Goodhand 2003). The ways that people adapt their livelihoods to conflict have long been the subject of rapid appraisals and baseline surveys by humanitarian agencies, and are gradually being illuminated more fully by ethnographic research in conflict-affected territories (Nordstrom 2004; Richards 2004). An important local–global economic connection in many conflict-affected territories is the diaspora. Condensing considerable discussion,5 the working definition of ‘diaspora’ used here is a set of geographically dispersed people, identifying with a shared homeland and engaging in some form of transnational activity (although as we shall see the term ‘Somali diaspora’ glosses over a range of identifications). Although family remittances remain a relatively under-researched aspect of life in conflict-affected settings, diaspora support and funding for political and military activities have been subject to more scrutiny. Diasporas are often seen as belligerent actors: ‘longdistance nationalists’ playing out the same identity politics often deemed to be the root cause of conflict in internalist explanations (Anderson 1998). It is argued that diaspora members feel the need to support homeland movements to reassert their identification with their place of origin; can mobilise considerable resources by homeland standards and thereby command influence denied them in their host country; and do not suffer the daily consequences of violence, making their transnational participation in homeland political struggles radically unaccountable (Anderson 1998; Collier et al. 2003). One of the most cited works on this issue is Collier and Hoeffler’s (2004) econometric analysis which suggested that large diasporas increase the

Migration, Conflict and Development | 9

risk of countries relapsing into conflict – due to the assumed proclivity of diasporas to finance rebel groups. However, these findings remain controversial, in particular because their observation of a constant conjunction between US-based diasporas and the risk of civil war does not necessarily support the causal explanation proffered (for example, it might rather indicate that refugees prefer not to return to unstable countries) and because their findings seem to be contradicted by their later work (Hall 2008; Horst 2008a).6 Recent case study research has somewhat unsettled the earlier consensus that diasporas necessarily foment conflict, pointing to diversity within diasporas, as people of different migration cohorts, gender and age, social groups and economic means often engage in different ways (Al-Ali 2007). There is also evidence that some diasporic engagements may in fact help to promote peace, or at least help people to survive conflict (Zunzer 2004; Monsutti 2005; Young et al. 2005; Savage and Harvey 2007; Smith 2007). There is a problematic tendency to frame this discussion in a dichotomous way – asking whether diasporas are ‘good or bad’ for conflict – whether they are ‘peace makers or peace wreckers’ (Vertovec 2006; Smith 2007). This is a bit like asking whether migration is ‘good or bad’ for development. The question tends to assume a shared, normatively charged understanding of the dependent variable, which narrows the analytical horizon. In this case, the implied understanding of conflict is that of the dominant new wars/liberal peace discourse, with war served up as an inherent ‘bad’ (society ruled by instincts and base desire) compared with peace as an ideal ‘good’ (society ruled by principle and law), and war itself identified as the common enemy of humankind, wrenched from its social context (for an extended critique along these lines, see Richards 2004). To go beyond these broad-brush views, it is important to locate analysis of conflict – and the related processes of diaspora formation and transnational engagement – in specific social contexts in which they occur. Another problem with the bad/good, conflict/peace dichotomy is that it tends to focus attention on narrower, more formally institutionalised transnationalism, concentrating on the more dramatically political diaspora engagements that are seen to have the most direct impact on the course of conflict: recruitment and provisioning fighters, sheltering dissidents, lobbying and protest, fund-raising for military and political campaigns, participation in elections (Østergaard-Nielsen 2003). But what of the wealth of broader transnational practices that also have important implications for life in conflict-affected territories: sending remittances to family members, supporting charities and hometown associations, making investments and doing business, and engaging in sociocultural exchanges through the media, events and virtual dialogue (see, for example, Brinkerhoff 2006; Lubkemann 2008)? This book particularly focuses on the diaspora’s multidimensional material engagements – and the imaginative engagements that they

10 | The Early Morning Phone Call

express, sustain, and shape. What are their implications for everyday life, as well as for the high politics of conflict? How does this change over time? How are family remittances and other material contributions mobilised in diaspora communities? The last question brings us to the issue of the dispositions and abilities of people in the diaspora, and the third theme underlying this book: refugees’ livelihoods.

The Livelihoods of Refugees Who is a refugee? The 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees offers the classic legal answer to this question, defining refugees as individuals who are outside their country of origin and face a wellfounded fear of persecution for reasons relating to race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion. But several major refugee hosting countries are not party to the Convention, and the incorporation of the Convention into the national legislation of signatory states varies. Many people displaced by conflict do not qualify, cannot prove that they qualify or cannot access a system of status determination that will allow them to prove that they qualify for Convention refugee status. People displaced by conflict are sometimes given subsidiary forms of usually temporary status on humanitarian grounds, and often when large numbers of people arrive they are registered as prima facie refugees on a group basis. In this book, the term ‘refugee’ is used in the older and broader sense, which is also in common usage, to refer to people who have migrated in the wake of war and persecution in their country of origin, thereby embracing convention and prima facie refugees, people with other forms of subsidiary status and people who may have no legal status in the countries where they live. Beyond the legal classifications, refugees are commonly constructed in humanitarian discourse as dispossessed, vulnerable and helpless, a miserable ‘sea of humanity’ in need of immediate assistance (Malkki 1997: 223). Indeed, this conviction is what drives the fund-raising and machinery of humanitarian action. Directing aid towards the most vulnerable, to the most exemplary victims, becomes an important part of the management of scarce resources in humanitarian operations. Such is the strength of this ‘victim discourse’ (Terry 2002: 76) that when refugees are seen to act in ways that indicate that they are not, in fact, helpless – say by being highly politicised, or even militarised, by being assertive with aid providers, economically successful, or somehow negotiating their way through European border controls – this is often taken in hostile political climates to indicate that they are not ‘genuine refugees’. In this context it is hardly surprising that both advocates and sympathetic researchers have tended to emphasise refugees’ predicament as victims

Migration, Conflict and Development | 11

rather than their agency. However, forced migration research is increasingly sensitive to the idea that even in the most constrained circumstances, people remain ‘purposive actors’, responding in variable ways to conflict (Richmond 1994; Van Hear 1998; Turton 2003). Moreover, in exile, it is increasingly recognised that displaced people rework their livelihoods ‘from below’, both within and beyond the structures of the official refugee regime. To understand refugees’ livelihoods, we have to analyse their resources and capabilities and how they mobilise these in particular structural contexts to generate a means of living. While conflict presents new livelihood opportunities for some, for many it entails the loss of important human, physical, natural, financial and socio-political resources on which people’s livelihood previously depended. People’s family members may be killed or conscripted; farmland and rangeland may be confiscated or become inaccessible; homes, businesses, cash, livestock and tools of trade may be destroyed or stolen; and people’s social networks and political position may be radically reconfigured, with implications for material welfare and security (Lautze and Raven-Roberts 2006). Migration is a very common strategy in response to such problems. People fleeing to neighbouring countries are not, however, entirely bereft of resources and capabilities – in particular many have skills and knowledge, social networks and sometimes financial resources, which help them to navigate life in exile. The regime of protection and assistance of refugees shapes their livelihood possibilities in important ways. Convention refugees are in fact accorded substantial rights in terms of wage earning, self-employment, participation in the liberal professions, freedom of residence and movement. But the prima facie status granted to large numbers of refugees from conflict, while permitting people to remain and access basic humanitarian assistance, generally accords them more limited rights. It is well known that the three internationally accepted ‘durable solutions’ to refugees’ problems – repatriation to the country of origin, local integration in the country where they first seek asylum or resettlement in a third country – remain elusive for many refugees. In poorer countries where many refugees arrive, host governments, concerned about the pressures that integrating a large number of refugees locally might produce, often restrict refugees to camps run by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), often in remote border areas, where they are supposed to wait until they can be repatriated or resettled in third countries. While it can be argued that this is a reasonable and pragmatic short-term response, by the 2000s it became obvious that many people were being ‘warehoused’ in camps for substantial parts of their lives due to the protracted nature of the conflict in their country of origin and the lack of political will among states to make alternative arrangements. UNHCR has defined protracted refugee situations like that of Somali refugees in Kenya as ‘A situation in which

12 | The Early Morning Phone Call

refugees find themselves in a long-lasting and intractable state of limbo. Their lives may not be at risk, but their basic rights and essential economic, social and psychological needs remain unfulfilled after years in exile. A refugee in this situation is often unable to break away from enforced reliance on external assistance’ (UNHCR 2004: 1). Eric Werker has calculated that, if the 3.9 million people living in UNHCR’s camps in 2004 – assistance to whom accounted for much of UNHCR’s $1 billion or so budget – were producing the same as typical citizens in Zambia or Senegal, then their GDP would amount to $4–6 billion. ‘Yet, for the most part, these populations live in the most extreme examples of the welfare state … the unique distortions imposed by the camp regime stifle the productivity and thus the economic welfare of refugees, causing them to live in poorer conditions than is necessary’ (Werker 2007: 461). Most refugee research has focused on refugees within the structures of the official refugee regime, on the interaction of refugees with the institutions and methodologies of assistance. But it is also important to look ‘beyond the refugee horizon’, exploring the relationships of people displaced by conflict to broader social and economic processes in the host community, and the wider national and global systems and structures in which they find themselves (Chambers 1986; Bascom 1998: 164; Castles 2003; Polzer and Hammond 2008). Many people reject what they experience as a life of enforced impoverishment in the camps and seek their own ‘solutions’ beyond the structures of the official refugee regime. Even within institutionalised settings people are not merely passive aid recipients but are often actively negotiating access to scarce aid resources in various ways, and often engage in a range of other livelihood strategies – from collecting and selling firewood, to mobilising remittances, to smallscale trade and services (Harrell-Bond 1999; Jacobsen 2005; Jansen 2008). A further response to the constraints of camp life is migration. First, during many protracted conflicts, there are times when people do return to their country of origin (even in the absence of formal repatriation exercises – indeed, often people prefer to return on their own terms). Sometimes they believe that the situation has improved, or decide to gamble their safety for other reasons – finding family members, doing business and so on. Some remain, some build cross-border livelihoods around split households, some are subsequently displaced by renewed violence. Secondly, refugees may move to live in urban areas in countries of asylum where they generally do not receive assistance – sometimes entirely bypassing the refugee regime, never registering as refugees, making their own way in the world. A recent flurry of research focuses on the livelihoods of these ‘self-settled’ refugees living beyond the structures of official assistance, and the extent to which they manage to achieve a kind of de facto local integration (including Clark 2006; De Vriese 2006; Horst 2006a; Jacobsen 2006). These urban refugees are often ‘out of place’

Migration, Conflict and Development | 13

in the refugee regime, reflected in their designation by policymakers as ‘spontaneous settlers’, ‘self-settlers’, ‘unassisted refugees’, ‘irregular secondary movers’ and even ‘free livers’ (Bascom 1998). Thirdly, people may also move onwards to third countries via clandestine means. Given a choice between (often inadequately) protected impoverishment in remote refugee camps or an informal and precarious existence in cities in neighbouring countries, many displaced people seek out destinations where they hope to find work or gain secure status. Thus, in the absence of official ‘durable solutions’, refugees seek alternative ways to make their way in the world, below the radar of the official refugee regime. This means that in many refugee groups, including the Somalis, families can be dispersed between the country of origin, refugee camps and urban areas in the global South, and further afield as labour migrants or asylum-seekers in more affluent countries, experiencing very different social, economic and political conditions. The economic dimensions of these transnational social networks are gradually coming to light. Although largely neglected in the migration–development debate, there is growing evidence that refugees do remit, and receive remittances, with significant repercussions (see for example Dick 2002; Van Hear 2002; Monsutti 2005; Riak Akuei 2005; Horst 2006b; Shandy 2007; Lubkemann 2008). Through these and other mechanisms, refugee exoduses can have important feedback effects in the country of origin, and onward migration can have feedback effects in countries of first asylum. Several questions spring to mind: to what extent are the dynamics of remittances to refugees in the global South similar or different from the dynamics of remittances to conflict-affected countries of origin? How do remittances affect regional and transborder economies? Have we overestimated the role of official aid in the survival of refugees – how do remittances interact with the aid regime? To what extent are refugees’ experiences of sending money similar to or different from those of labour migrants? How does this form of transnationalism affect refugees’ settlement in the host country? Does receiving money help ‘buy’ integration? Does sending money mitigate against integration?

Approach Thus, Somali refugees’ remittances are situated at a crossroads of contemporary thinking on migration and development linkages, the role of local–global connections in conflict-affected territories, and refugees’ livelihood strategies within and beyond the structures of official assistance. The term remittance is used in this book in a broad way to refer to the money and goods sent by migrants to contacts in their country of origin or displacement settings – of primary interest here are family remittances,

14 | The Early Morning Phone Call

although other material transfers, for example non-family investments and community-related donations will also be explored (see Carling 2008 for an exploration of varying definitions of remittances). Remittances may be viewed from a variety of perspectives – as household income, investment capital, life-saving assistance, a social obligation, a sign of love, a token of power, a source of military finance, a business opportunity, macroeconomic inflow – or loss – potential dirty money, or potential development capital … Against this background, this study was guided by two key principles. The first is that remittances are more than money. These transfers are embedded in complex social relations, given rather short shrift in the majority of remittance studies, which have been quantitative and economic in focus. This study attempts to illuminate the social texture of remittances, exploring both the material transactions and ‘the quality of relationships which these transactions create, express, sustain, and modify’ (Firth 1967: 4; see also Polanyi 1957; Granovetter 1992; Sahlins 2004). This has implications for methodology. The quantitative survey has become the gold standard methodology for investigating remittances: this book takes a different approach, combining quantitative and qualitative approaches. It draws where possible on secondary analysis of existing survey data and primary survey data collected on remittance practices, but also on ethnographic research exploring the meanings that people attach to these practices. The second principle is that remittances are inescapably transnational. This may sound obvious, but the bulk of remittance research remains rooted in a particular location, most often the receiving region. In attempting to illuminate the remittance process, this study also crosses borders, opening three ‘windows’ on the remittance process in key locations that offer substantially different perspectives: Hargeisa, a northern Somali city, the capital of the self-declared Republic of Somaliland; Nairobi’s Eastleigh district, where there is a large Somali refugee population; and London, a major Western destination. The views from Hargeisa, Nairobi and London reflect Massey’s (1999) understanding of place as an articulation of power-filled and often geographically extensive social relations. While the way that this project evolved did not make it possible to carry out a matched sample study (where research is carried out with migrants and a set of their family members ‘back home’), it did allow me to trace some family connections and contacts between research sites – and conducting research in these contrasting locations helped to build a more holistic perspective on the remittance process. I start with the micro-level perspectives of individuals and families directly involved in remitting, following the money outwards into their wider communities, and working upwards to situate the remittance process in relation to the wider global political economy. The bulk of the research was carried out in 2005, when I spent most of the year living in the three research sites – Hargeisa, Nairobi and London.

Migration, Conflict and Development | 15

Chapters 3–5 will explain in more detail the research carried out in each place. It began with consultations with key people (including government officials, money transfer operators and other businesspeople, UN and NGO workers and politicians), and spending time at community-based organisations, social events, money transfer outlets and family homes. Over time, interviews were carried out to collect some detailed examples of people’s experiences of migration and remitting, talking with a range of people in terms of gender, clan, occupation, age and (for the refugees) year of arrival – including personal acquaintances and people contacted through friends, research assistants, NGO workers and teachers. All the names of the interviewees used in this book are pseudonyms and where appropriate some details have been changed, in order to preserve participants’ anonymity.7 In addition, the book draws on analysis of survey data for each location: my own surveys of Somali remitters and recipients in money transfer outlets in Hargeisa and London, and the Nairobi sample of a larger survey which included Somali refugees. It also draws on further research in Somaliland in autumn 2007 and summer 2008, and informal discussions with people of Somali origin, government officials and NGO workers in the UK, US, Denmark, Norway, and the Netherlands. It is not always easy asking people about migration, or about money. People are busy making a living, busy with their families and friends, busy planning for the future. People have sound reasons for being wary when approached by a stranger – and a foreigner – asking about family matters and remittances. Some people were initially unfamiliar with the idea of research. The rigours of the asylum or resettlement processes in which many refugees were engaged often exhaust their willingness to discuss their experiences. There are private family concerns and tensions around money that many do not want to share. There were fears that it might become harder to send money home following the closure in 2001 of the largest Somali money transmitter based on allegations of links to Al-Qaida. People are also sometimes reticent because of their irritation at often negative Western press coverage of Muslim people and refugees in general and Somalis in particular. However, over time, some people shared with me their reflections and often deeply personal stories about their migration experiences and family relationships.8 Quite often, people were less comfortable to talk about migration, because it recalled memories of painful experiences and a difficult time in their lives, but, in comparison, most people had a lot to say about remittances. There is a general recognition that remittances are a major issue, from family to macroeconomic level – and it was a relatively common subject of debate among the Somali people I came to know. Remittances are often seen as evidence of self-help and family loyalty, a reaffirmation of positive cultural traits, which people tended to enjoy discussing with the interested foreigner.

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The structure of the book is as follows. The next chapter traces migration through Somali history – from precolonial times to the present day, highlighting continuities and discontinuities in the context of the conflict of the last two decades. It provides an overview of the remittance economy, and explores the role of money transfer infrastructure, known as xawilaad, demonstrating how, beyond failed official development and conflict resolution plans, life in the Somali regions goes on, subject to complex forms of social, economic and political innovation and change. Chapter 3 tells the dramatic story of Hargeisa, now capital of selfdeclared Somaliland, exploring the history of oppression, insurgency, civil conflict and associated displacement dynamics. It traces the transnational social relationships underlying remitting, and the economic effects on recipient families, coping and investing in the post-conflict economy. Moving out into the wider community, it explores the repercussions of remittances as they are recirculated through social networks and market relations, and analyses the role of the diaspora in Somaliland’s post-conflict politics and development. The findings point to the complex contingencies and reciprocities of migration–development–conflict relationships. The bustling Eastleigh district of Nairobi, where many refugees have settled, defying attempts to contain them in remote camps, provides our next window on the remittance process. Chapter 4 outlines the dynamics of regional refugee migration and demonstrates how remittances help people negotiate the challenges of protracted displacement. It traces the development of refugee businesses which have come to play a significant role in the city economy, and their onward migration pathways, and the role of the overseas diaspora in backing these activities. This view highlights the importance of livelihood strategies that involve circulation of people, money and goods beyond the structures of the official refugee regime. Chapter 5 turns to the experiences of Somali people living in London, a global city in the heart of the developed world. With historical roots in colonial labour recruitment, Somali migration to the UK has grown considerably since the conflict, and despite the challenges and deprivation facing the Somali community, remitting is widespread. The chapter considers the social micro-dynamics of remitting from the diaspora perspective, considering the experiences of people trying to get on with life in the UK, and the possible implications for future flows. Going beyond conventional economic explanations for remitting, it probes the implications of the violent origins of migration for Somali remittance behaviour, and the complex social texture of remitting. The final chapter draws together the key themes and reflects on their practical implications.

Migration, Conflict and Development | 17

Notes 1. 2.

3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8.

Note that all the names of interviewees in this book are pseudonyms. The terms ‘Somali regions’ or ‘Somali territories’ are frequently used to refer to the areas internationally recognised as part of the Republic of Somalia, acknowledging the currently fragmented governance of these territories. See World Bank data, http://go.worldbank.org/0G6XW1UPP0. Accessed 9 March 2009. Drawing inspiration from Kant's treatise on ‘perpetual peace’. See, for example, Safran 1991, Cohen 1997, Van Hear 1998. Earlier work indeed concluded that ‘The size of the diaspora is not directly significant in the initiation of conflict … However … a large diaspora significantly increases the risk of repeat conflict’ due to the assumed proclivity of diasporas to finance rebel groups (Collier and Hoeffler 2004: 575). However, later work suggested that ‘diasporas significantly reduce post-conflict risks … the result is somewhat surprising since diasporas tend to be a source of finance for politically more extreme organizations. The effect is quite large, doubling the diaspora reduces risk from 40% to 32.8%’ (Collier et al. 2006: 12). Note that, in some quotations, interviewees’ English has been edited to make it more easily understandable. My elementary Somali helped me to break the ice and obtain basic information, but was soon outpaced by the momentum of the research, the lucky collaboration with some excellent research assistants and interpreters and the fluency in English of many interlocutors.

Chapter 2 The Somali Context: People and Money on the Move

While now scattered all over the world, Somali people are concentrated in an area in the Horn of Africa that stretches from the far north-east corner into modern-day Djibouti, the Ogaden region of Ethiopia and northern Kenya. People have been on the move within and beyond these territories for centuries. In this context, this chapter provides a broad historical perspective on migration and remitting. The first part explores continuities and changes in mobility patterns over time, tracing inward and outward migration through Somali history, from the long-running patterns of nomadism and rural and urban settlement, to colonial and regional connections and post-independence refugee and labour movements. It charts the spiralling political crisis of the 1980s, culminating in civil war, state collapse and the progressive diasporisation of Somali society. These ethnoscapes – landscapes of moving people – are intimately linked to financescapes – landscapes of moving money – with each acting as a constraint and parameter for the other (Appadurai 2006). The second part of the chapter pieces together an overview of the remittance economy, by way of background to the more detailed case studies that follow. It also chronicles the emergence of xawilaad, the thriving money transfer infrastructure that links the Somali regions to the rest of the world. How has it managed to navigate threats posed by civil war and predatory political actors at home and government suspicion and financial regulation abroad?

Nomadism, Sedentarism, Urbanisation It is thought that people began migrating northwards into the Somali peninsula from an area near the present Ethiopia–Kenya border around the fifth century BC As the anthropologist Ioan M. Lewis emphasises,

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Sab (agricultural / sedentary tradition)

Samale (Pastoral tradition)

Darod

Hawiye

Harti

Isaq

Digil

Issa

Arab

Habar Gedir

Gadabursi

Habar Jaalo

Hawaadle

Biyamale

Marehan Ogaden

Dir

Abgaal Warsangeli

Murursade

Majertain

Sheikhal

Dublahante

Jajele

Mirifle

Ayub Habar Awal Iise Muse Sa’ad Muse Garhajis Habar Yonis Idegalla

Figure 2.1 Somali clan structure Source: Brons 2001: 18–19. There are more sub-clans and lineages than those listed here. This is a simplified version of Brons’ diagram, including all the groups mentioned in the book.

Somali society was traditionally stateless, and did not form a single polity, but rather an ethnic group based on shared language, religion and sociopolitical organisation through clanship (Lewis 1994). Somali is a Cushitic language, with some regional variations, first written in 1972, with a rich oral tradition of poems and songs. The vast majority of Somalis are Sunni Muslims, with widespread membership of Sufi brotherhoods. The segmentary lineage system is an important element in social organisation. Clanship is based on patrilineal descent (tol), combined with cross-cutting affinal ties generated through marriage (xidid), with customary law (xeer) laying out a series of practices – for example, regarding compensation payments (dia) – which regulate relationships between social groups. The structure of the major clan families is shown in Figure 2.1, but there are also smaller, socially marginalised minority groups, including the Somali Bantu, the Benadari, Bravanese and Bajuni, and the occupational castes known as the Midgan, Tumal and Yibir. These and other aspects of a traditionally stateless social order have both shaped and been shaped by the experiences of postcolonial state building and collapse, as we shall see. Somali society has been witness to three long-running elements of movement and statis. First, nomadic pastoralism has been the economic mainstay of Somali society for centuries, the arid/semi-arid climate in most parts of the Somali territories discouraging sedentary agriculture. Four of the major clan families – Darod, Isaq, Hawiye and Dir – were

The Somali Context | 21

Figure 2.2 Map of the Somali regions Source: Food Security and Nutrition Analysis Unit, Somalia

traditionally nomadic pastoralists, and attach great cultural importance to this lifestyle. Somali clan families tend to be concentrated in broad geographic areas, as indicated in Figure 2.2, where the pastoralists moved in routine seasonal cycles, in search of water and grazing for their livestock. Grazing areas and wells were associated by customary use with particular lineages, although historically no one ‘owned’ the rangeland.

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Nomadic families were multi-local during the dry season, with sheep and goats tended by the women and children based in the nomadic hamlet, known as the guri or reer, while the more resilient camels were herded over longer distances by the older boys and men. Thus movement combined with translocal interdependencies was an important way the pastoralists negotiated a means of living and spread risk in an ecologically challenging environment. At the beginning of the 1900s, it is thought some 75 per cent of the population were nomadic pastoralists (Bradbury 2008). It was traditionally primarily a subsistence economy, with the nomads relying on animal products (milk, butter, ghee, and meat) and wild foods and making their own tools and shelters. As the export of livestock increased over the course of the twentieth century, the pastoralist economy became more commercialised, and, as well as using livestock for subsistence, camels were also sold for export or to local markets for consumption, and their milk was marketed in urban areas (Gaani 2005). Meanwhile, the building of berkado (water reservoirs), small dams and enclosures has gradually reinforced the connections between the nomads and particular tracts of rangeland (Abdi et al. 2008). Pastoralism remains a dominant way of life, particularly in the northern and central areas – some 55 per cent of the population are still pastoralists or agro-pastoralists, and the Somali nomad remains a dominant cultural reference point (World Bank 2005). There are also sedentary farming communities in the more fertile areas. In parts of the north-west Somali regions, seasonal rivers offer opportunities for the cultivation of sorghum, maize and some khat farming. In the southern inter-riverine areas rain-fed and irrigated agriculture and cattle pastoralism is possible. There was traditionally some fishing among coastal communities and the production of salt on the Red Sea coast, frankincense in the northern mountains, and leather hides, skins and handicrafts from Brava (Brons 2001). Attempts by Italian and then postcolonial governments and the international aid community to foster the diversification of the Somali economy and the development of sedentary livelihoods were met with limited success. For example, following the devastating dabadheer drought of 1974 in the northern regions, some 100,000 people were resettled in the inter-riverine areas or on the coast in the south and encouraged to become farmers and fishermen, but many returned to pastoralism as soon as conditions improved (Brons 2001). Finally, urban centres flourished along Gulf of Aden, Indian Ocean and interior trade networks reaching into present-day Ethiopia and Kenya. In coastal centres, Somalis lived alongside Arab, Persian, Indian, Portuguese and Swahili populations, some of whom intermarried with the Somalis (Brons 2001). In some places localised city states and sultanates emerged (Luling 2002). In the 1900s, the commercialisation of livestock production and colonial administrations generated new

The Somali Context | 23

livelihood possibilities and opportunities for advancement in urban centres, and cyclical droughts prompted rural–urban migration by poorer pastoralists. Independence heralded a surge of urbanisation: the population of the capital Mogadishu doubled to some 121,000 by 1963, subsequently rising to over 1 million by 1980 (Brons 2001). The postindependence expansion of education in towns encouraged nomads to send children to stay with urban kin so that they could attend school. The population of the major urban centres – Mogadishu, Kismayo, Merka, Baidoa, Jowhar, Beled Weyne, Galkayo, Garowe, Bosaso, Burao, Erigavo, Hargeisa, Berbera, Borama – became increasingly cosmopolitan. People worked in the cash economy, and forged new social connections beyond their clan – schoolmates, neighbours, colleagues, and so on. But many town-dwellers were brought up in the bush and retained close links to family there. Although clan-based and other traditional social practices were adapted, they were rarely entirely jettisoned in town; indeed, ‘principles borrowed from pastoralism remain integral in urban Somali life’ – for example, dia payments would be negotiated following fatal traffic accidents in urban settings (Lewis 1994; Simons 1995: 97). There was further rural–urban migration in the 1970s and 1980s, and poor newcomers from pastoral regions emphasised clan affiliations as a survival strategy, which some suggest further politicised clan identities otherwise on the decline in urban areas (Marchal 2000).

Extra-Regional Connections Somalis have long migrated within Africa, to trade and work, particularly in the transport sector (for example, on the construction of the Tanzania–Zambia railway, or as truck transporters in Central and East Africa) (Omer 2002). But extra-regional forces have also left traces in Somali society and migration patterns. Over time there have been various flows and counterflows of people, goods and finance between the Somali regions and the Arab peninsula. Arabs migrated to the Somali areas to wage war, trade, proselytise and flee persecution. Arab merchants for a long time largely monopolised the livestock export trade, and, by the twentieth century, people of Arab descent formed a recognisable minority in Somalia (Lewis 1994). Meanwhile, Somalis have long travelled to cities in the Arab peninsula to trade or work, and for pilgrimage. With the oil boom of the 1970s and 1980s these connections grew, as we shall see, with Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries as a major migration destinations and trading partners. Meanwhile, British colonial involvement with the Somali regions formally began in 1887 with the inauguration of the Protectorate of British Somaliland, following the signing of various protection treaties with Somali elders in the north-west Somali regions (Mohamed 2003).

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Resistance mounted by Sayyid Mohamed Abdille Hassan and his forces from strongholds in the north-east ended only with a concerted campaign by the colonial powers, which involved the first aerial bombardment in African history (Lewis 2002). The Protectorate was of primarily strategic rather than economic significance: while some have lauded the ‘light touch’ style colonialism in this corner of the British Empire (Lewis 1994), others are less sanguine, suggesting that the British authorities were seen by Somalis as a ‘deaf government’, whose colonial intention was ‘to have no ideas and spend no money’ (Geshekter 1982).1 There were no British settlers in Somaliland, and few colonial administrators brought families (Lewis 2002). But the Somalis travelled – with the British army around East Africa and on British ships into the heart of the Empire. The merchant navy recruited men mainly to work in the engine rooms of cargo steamers, paying them wages often 25 per cent below the standard (Port Cities 2006). Known as tacabir, most were from northern Isaq or Darod pastoralist families, aiming to raise funds for livestock or business, and were seen as adventurers by their communities back home (El-Solh 1991; Hussein 1993). Contracted for long-distance voyages, they made a temporary home in the UK while ashore – they lodged in hostels near the docks, primarily in London’s East End, Bristol, Cardiff and Liverpool. Later on, small numbers of students and professionals also sought educational and work opportunities in the UK. As we shall see in Chapter 5, the lingering presence of a small Somali community in the UK in the 1980s helped draw many refugees there after the war broke out. In contrast, Italy’s influence was mainly in the south. The Italian government signed protection treaties with the Majertain in 1889 and ran its interests through trading companies until it purchased the Benadir coast from Zanzibar in 1905, heralding direct rule. After Mussolini came to power in 1923 the kolonya system was established, with the administration expropriating high-quality land and plantation owners using forced labour. Despite initial colonial hopes, there were relatively few Italian settler farmers in Somalia Italiana (Lewis 2002). In 1935-1940 Italy briefly held Ethiopia and British Somaliland, but in 1941 the British retaliated, gaining control of Somaliland, Somalia Italiana and Ethiopia, subsequently restoring Ethiopian sovereignty and under Somali protest ceding Ogaden, Haud and the Reserved Area to Ethiopia. Meanwhile, in 1950 the British government placed the former Somalia Italiana under an Italian-administered UN trusteeship. The Italian influence persisted: most of the teaching in Somalia’s only university remained Italian long after independence, and Italian involvement in the banana trade and other economic sectors continues to the present day, alongside schemes for professional training and technical assistance.

The Somali Context | 25

The Postcolonial Republic: Refugee Arrivals, Labour Migrants and Political Exiles The Republic of Somalia was created in 1960 from the union of the Italianadministered UN Trusteeship to the south and a newly independent Somaliland to the north. The governments of the Republic of Somalia remained heavily reliant on budgetary support from other countries, and there was growing public discontent at visible corruption and the overcentralisation of power in the southern capital, Mogadishu (Lewis 1994). Amid growing unease with the civilian government, General Mohamed Siyad Barre came to power in a coup d’état in 1969. Expounding ‘scientific socialism’, he launched a central economic planning process, supported by Soviet military and economic aid and technical assistance. Despite substantial successes in promoting literacy, improving the position of women and initially appearing to reduce the power of clan and religious leaders, the regime subsequently floundered (Samatar 1988). Under Barre there were three significant trends in migration: the arrival of large numbers of refugees from Ethiopia, labour migration to the Middle East and the exile of political dissidents. In 1977, in the wake of successes achieved by the Western Somali Liberation Front, Barre launched a full-scale offensive against Ethiopia to capture the Somaliinhabited Ogaden region. But, having lost Soviet support to Ethiopia, he failed to secure US backing, and the Somali forces were defeated, crushing the pan-Somali vision. The domestic economy was left in turmoil following the stoppage of foreign aid. Meanwhile, large numbers of ethnic Somali (mainly Ogaden/Darod) and Oromo refugees fled from Ethiopia into Somalia in 1978 and 1979 as Ethiopia recolonised the Ogaden. While government statistics were notoriously inflated, it seems probable that over half a million refugees were living in Somalia at this point, one of the largest refugee populations in Africa, and considerable compared with the normal population of around four million (Brons 2001). The refugee population had a big impact, attracting a huge influx of Western aid. The ports at Mogadishu and Berbera could not handle the volume, with ships waiting at anchor for weeks to unload their food and supplies (Tucker 1982). It was, however, eagerly received, coming as it did on the back of the complete withdrawal of Soviet military and economic assistance: ‘Trade in refugee commodities soon became the largest industry in Somalia, increasing the country’s GNP by an estimated 40 per cent in 1980. The relief effort also generated an enormous amount of employment and economic activity’ (Tucker 1982: 23). It also provided ample opportunities for diversion and corruption. One estimate suggests that up to three-quarters of relief aid was stolen before it reached the refugees, many of whom were living in desperate conditions (Kibreab 2004).

26 | The Early Morning Phone Call

New outward migration paths were also forged in the 1970s and 1980s. Soldiers from Somalia trained in military institutions in the USSR and then the US, but the most important and oft-travelled migration path forged during this period led to the Arab Peninsula. In 1973 oil prices rose to unprecedented heights, heralding an economic boom in the oilexporting Gulf states, particularly Saudi Arabia, and demand for migrant labour. Many Somalis went to work in the booming economies of the Gulf states as construction labourers, drivers, house-cleaners and maids, guards, carpenters, cooks, electricians, masons and heavy truck and machinery drivers. The migration had many impacts back home. It caused what has been called a ‘muscle drain’ from the home labour market (Lewis 1994). The famous Somali poet Maxamed Ibrahim Warsame (Hadrawi) joined the public debate in his poem ‘Baaq’, eloquently invoking Somalia’s attractions to young men hoping to go abroad in the 1970s. There were some ‘social remittances’2 of ideas, practices, identities and social capital – for example, Islamic revivalist trends and the tendency towards cousin marriage (Lewis 1994). However, the most important impact was the cash, as migrants’ remittances poured into the domestic economy. With large differences between official and street exchange rates, instead of losing money on bank transfers, migrants used the franco valuta system to remit funds home, giving funds to traders, usually of the same clan, who exported goods to Somalia and paid the migrants’ families from the proceeds of their sales (Miller 1982). This system – or aspects of it – was legalised for periods, particularly when there was an urgent need for foreign exchange. Somalia’s official economy was in grave difficulties, with stagnant per capita output, deteriorating physical infrastructure and public services and severe macroeconomic imbalances (World Bank 2005). Faced with the IMF’s doom-filled assessments of the state of the economy, the cash-strapped regime reluctantly endorsed and somewhat erratically applied neoliberal reforms in the early 1980s, but economist Vali Jamal (1988) has convincingly argued that there was effectively already a freemarket economy in Somalia. Urban wages more or less stagnated throughout the 1970s (particularly in the public sector, the main source of formal employment) while inflation doubled in 1970–1978, but, despite this, the economy did not show signs of its officially disastrous state. According to Jamal, this was because a large part of the population relied on nomadic pastoralism, remittances and informal trade, which were not adequately captured in official figures. In the 1980s, it was estimated that there were some 375,000 Somali migrant workers abroad, primarily in the Gulf states, earning more than five times the average Somali wage and remitting some $500 million annually (Green and Jamal 1987; Jamal 1988). Thus, even before the civil war, the overseas population was helping to keep the country afloat.

The Somali Context | 27

Meanwhile, Barre’s regime was becoming increasingly authoritarian, forcing those alleged to be kacaandiid (anti-revolutionaries) into exile. The Somali state had been strongly shaped by foreign strategic interests and resources, and has been described as ‘suspended above a society that would never have produced it and did not demand it’ (Luling 1997: 289). Foreign aid3 reduced pressure on Barre’s regime to generate revenues domestically, undermining political accountability and fostering domestic clientelism. While anti-tribalist laws formally banned manifestations of clan organisation, Barre used state finances to manipulate different interest groups – underneath it all he was in fact a ‘master tribalist’, consolidating his power base around the Marehan, Ogaden and Dhulbahante clans of the Darod family (Lewis 1994). A failed coup by Majertain army generals was followed by the establishment of the Somali Salvation Democratic Front in 1979. The Somali National Movement was established in 1981 by northerners in Saudi Arabia and the UK. But by the end of the 1980s, with dwindling aid (partially suspended due to human rights abuses), a shrinking formal economy to milk and costly counterinsurgency operations in the north, Barre’s regime was sinking into crisis. The state’s loosening grip on the national economy in the 1980s was ‘dialectically linked to the privatisation of the State by the ruling elite’ (Marchal 2000: 7). The regime was staggering in a clumsy embrace between predatory politics and a thriving informal economy. Looking back at the period since independence, geographer Ahmed Samatar came to a damning view of the unintended consequences of ‘development’ in Somalia: ‘Liberal order ended with three things: it disempowered local communities by centralizing authority in Mogadishu and its representatives in the provinces; it normalized venality and ineptitude, turning the country into a bottomless pit for foreign aid; and it perverted parliamentary politics into a flea market for the buying and selling of votes and public privileges’ (Samatar 1994: 136).

Civil War and Diasporisation Emigration patterns were dramatically affected by the outbreak of civil war in the north-western Somali areas in 1988. The government responded to attacks by the Somali National Movement (SNM) with savage reprisals, directed in particular at the Isaq population in the north, destroying Hargeisa and Burao, killing tens of thousands of civilians, and generating massive displacement, internally and into Ethiopia and Djibouti. In the southern and central Somali areas, two rebel movements were launched in 1989: the Hawiye-based United Somali Congress (USC) and the Ogaden-based Somali Patriotic Movement (SPM). In January 1991, the USC ousted Barre from Mogadishu and an acting president and

28 | The Early Morning Phone Call

interim government were rapidly appointed. Their authority was rejected by the SPM and the SNM and, as the main factions failed to reach an agreement, the civil war continued and state institutions collapsed. Borders proliferated within the Somali Republic, constraining travel by land through the territories governed by competing authorities and factions. In many places militia mobilised by the emerging ‘warlords’ killed, robbed, kidnapped, raped and evicted people associated by clan with opposing factions and minority groups. Where possible, civilians fled within Somalia to their clan homelands or abroad. The population was further decimated by famine in 1991–1992. UN missions in 1992–1995 failed in their goal of securing aid delivery and re-establishing law and order, and are remembered for the catastrophic ‘Black Hawk Down’ episode, in which hundreds of Somalis and eighteen US servicemen were killed (Bradbury 2008). The humanitarian aid industry continued to deliver aid in Somalia, negotiating highly politicised environments and the realities of diversion to factions, but the retreat to Nairobi of much of its staff for security reasons largely deterritorialised the management of Somali aid operations. The role of clanship in the collapse of the state has been much debated. While some analyses suggest that ‘the collapse of the colonially created state represents technically a triumph for the segmentary lineage system and the political power of kinship’ (Lewis 1994: 233), others rather suggest that dynamics of political and economic accumulation and violent predation ‘found expression in the Somali idiom of clan’ (Besteman 1999: 230). Through Somali history, clanship and traditional social practices have proved an often highly malleable resource for both armed mobilisation and non-state governance mechanisms. Over time, diverse systems of governance have arisen and continue to contest the control of the Somali territories, which are effectively divided into three main parts. The north-west seceded in 1991 as the Republic of Somaliland, and following a period of factional rule by the SNM, the Boroma peace conference of clan elders in 1993 laid the foundations for a new two-house parliamentary system, to incorporate elected representatives and a house of elders. In 1994–1996 civil strife erupted among the Isaq clans dominant in Somaliland, but since 1997, Somaliland has remained relatively stable, apart from intermittent hostilities with Puntland over the eastern border. A new constitution was endorsed in a referendum in 2001, and local elections were held in 2002, followed by presidential elections in 2003 and parliamentary elections in 2005. In 2009, however, rising political discontent at the delays to the presidential elections culminated in demonstrations and street violence, showing that the hard-won peace in Somaliland cannot be taken for granted. In the north-east region, a conference of the Harti clans (Majeerteen, Dhulbahante and Warsangeli) declared the autonomous state of Puntland

The Somali Context | 29

in 1998, aiming to eventually become part of a federal Somalia. Despite a degree of stabilisation and reconstruction, Puntland has had problems with the transfer of presidential power, corruption scandals and mutinies by soldiers. Recently its troops were deployed in southern Somalia, which weakened regional security – effectively leaving local politicians and clan elders to keep the peace (Hagmaan and Von Hoehne 2008). The primary source of government revenue is tax collection in the thriving port of Bosaso, and education and health services are mainly private or NGO-run. The southern and central areas were controlled for much of the 1990s and 2000s by multiple non-state actors: warlord and factional rule drawing on clan-based military support, councils of elders, municipal administrations and Islamist groups. In the most recent episode, the shariah courts, initially funded by Mogadishu’s business community to deal with chronic lawlessness, formed a loose coalition known as the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), which the US and warlord allies tried – and failed – to eliminate. In 2006, the ICU took full control of Hawiyedominated Mogadishu and rapidly expanded its rule to the border with Puntland in the north and with Kenya in the south. Militias were disarmed and brought under the Courts’ control, the air- and seaports were reopened and civilian security dramatically increased, while reportedly critics were intimidated and conservative social policies were announced in some areas (Barnes and Hassan 2007; Menkhaus 2007). But at the end of 2006 the Islamist coalition dissolved in the face of advancing Ethiopian forces, who installed in Mogadishu the Transitional Federal Government (TFG), originally formed in Kenya in 2004 as a result of long negotiations, under old-guard Darod President Abdullahi Yusuf. Devastating violence ensued between government and Ethiopian forces on the one hand, and opposition groups including the hardline Islamist militants Al Shabaab on the other. The eventual resignation of Abdullahi Yusuf in 2008 saw the moderate leader of the Islamic Courts, Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, installed as president, but the situation remains volatile. Peace-building efforts in Somalia have emphasised the restoration of the central state – the TFG is the fourteenth attempt to do this. But the Somali situation illustrates very clearly how what many see as a ‘complex political emergency’ on the way to state reconstruction can be seen from another perspective as a set of ‘emerging political complexes’ in their own right (Duffield 2001). Looking back at the history of the Somali regions since the collapse of the state, localised politics have provided a surprising degree of stability, despite the absence of the state. As Ken Menkhaus wrote in 2000: ‘Notwithstanding the general perception of Somalia as “anarchic”, basic law and order is in fact the norm in most locations… much of the Somali countryside – especially Somaliland, Puntland, and pockets of southern Somalia – is safer for local residents than is the case in neighbouring countries’ (Menkhaus 2000: 9).

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Meanwhile, the flourishing cross-border livestock market, Mogadishu’s trade entrepôt, banana commerce, telecommunications and money transfer services demonstrate that the economy has proved relatively buoyant despite insecurity (Marchal 2002; Little 2003; Webersik 2005; Hansen 2007; Nurhussein 2008; Lindley 2009). Table 2.1 compares key human development indicators for Somalia (which, given the uncertainty regarding the total population should be treated with considerable caution) with other countries in East Africa, suggesting that by 2000 health and education indicators in Somalia were appalling and substantially worse than in other East African countries, but Somalia was not in fact exceptionally poor for the region. Evidence of localised governance and economic resilience complicate the common image of Somalia as a vacuum of death and disaster. Table 2.1 East Africa comparative human development indicators, 2000 Djibouti Eritrea Ethiopia Kenya Somalia Tanzania Uganda Adult literacy (%) 63 Gross primary school enrolment (%) 32 Under 5 mortality (per 1,000 live births) 149 Maternal mortality (deaths /100,000 live births) – GDP per capita ($ purchasing power parity) – Population on less than $1 (at purchasing power parity) per day (%)* –

53

37

82

17

74

66

30

35

65

14

48

73

105

176

118

224

141

131

1,000

–

590

1,600

530

510

881

628

1,022

795

501

1,167

–

82

23

43*

–

–

Source: UNDP 2001 except * from UNDP 2003.

The civil war triggered migration on a massive scale. Over the last two decades, Somalis have consistently featured among the largest refugee groups in the world. People have trekked on foot or ridden on trucks over the border into neighbouring countries, embarked on overloaded vessels to Kenya, Yemen and across the Mediterranean and boarded planes destined for European, Arab and North American cities. Among those on the move, many have lost family members and faced abuse and lifethreatening violence. Others have moved to escape a melting pot of interrelated struggles: principally chronic political uncertainty, rampant unemployment, deep and widespread poverty, discrimination and skeletal education and health infrastructure.

The Somali Context | 31

The first mass displacement was to Ethiopia and Djibouti as a result of the war in the north-west in 1988–1991. There was a second large movement from the southern regions after the collapse of the state in 1991, as hundreds of thousands of people fled to Kenya and Ethiopia. The official refugee population reached a peak of over 800,000 in 1992 and then declined more or less steadily after the mid-1990s. Violence in 2007–2008 in the southern regions prompted tens of thousands more people to leave. However, refugee figures only capture a portion of Somalia’s overseas population. Some people left prior to the war and some are not registered as refugees. It is reasonable to assume that over one million people from Somalia now live abroad, while the local population is estimated at some 7.7 million (UNICEF 2006; Bradbury 2008). The contemporary Somali diaspora is dispersed across a range of destinations, as indicated in Table 2.2. Table 2.2 Somali refugee population by top twenty countries of asylum, 2007 Kenya Yemen United Kingdom Ethiopia United States South Africa Netherlands Norway Canada Djibouti

192,420 110,616 33,659 25,843 12,224 8,554 7,919 7,269 7,206 5,980

Sweden Egypt Uganda Eritrea Denmark Switzerland Germany Syria Tanzania Zambia

5,332 5,139 4,573 4,228 3,359 3,206 2,227 2,080 2,059 1,725

Source: UNHCR Statistical Online Population Database, data extracted 7 April 2009.

Photo 2.1 People leaving Mogadishu in 2008 Credit: Abdurrahman Warsameh / ISN Security Watch

32 | The Early Morning Phone Call

The largest group lives in the wider region, in neighbouring Kenya, Yemen, Ethiopia and Djibouti. In Ethiopia and Kenya, some people joined clanspeople living in border areas. Camps opened to accommodate refugees, often in remote areas bordering Somalia. Somali enclaves in Nairobi, Mombasa, Addis Ababa and Sana’a expanded. In addition, smaller numbers of Somalis have settled in other locations across Africa – for example, in South Africa (where there is a small business community), Egypt (a key resettlement hub) and Eritrea (which has welcomed former Islamic Courts Union officials since 2007). Many Somalis also live in the Middle East, especially Saudi Arabia and the UAE. When the state collapsed, some migrant workers were joined by relatives. In the Gulf War of 1990–1991, Somalis were among the foreign nationals expelled or displaced from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iraq (Van Hear 1998), some moving back to the Somali regions, others on to Europe to seek asylum and find relatives. It is hard to know the numbers of people that remain. Some estimates suggest that at least 20,000 Somalis still live in Saudi and 25,000 in the UAE (Pérouse de Montclos 2003a). In addition, there is some migration to Asia, particularly of students to study at universities in India, Malaysia, Thailand and Pakistan. Finally, substantial numbers of Somali people have settled in Europe and North America. When the war broke out, people who had travelled abroad for work or training found themselves stranded. Many more arrived by plane from Somalia or a neighbouring country, seeking asylum on arrival. Others obtained visas that allowed them to be reunited with relatives who were already citizens, or were relocated on official refugee resettlement programmes. As these opportunities have narrowed over time, many take the view, amba Yurub, amba yaxas (literally ‘Europe or the sharks’), gambling their lives on smugglers’ boats to reach Europe. Where they succeeded in penetrating border controls, Somalis proved relatively successful in gaining asylum of some kind in North America and Northern Europe due to the dangers of returning them to Somalia. The geography of this migration is socio-economically differentiated. People reaching the Gulf or the West, certainly early on, tended to be of urban backgrounds, better off and better educated than the average (ElSolh 1991). Travelling to Europe and North America entails substantial costs, which increased as immigration controls tightened in these countries and family reunion mechanisms privileged social groups that already had members abroad. The poor, including minority groups, were less able to afford the costs of emigration to richer countries, although some minority groups were singled out by resettlement programmes, for example, the several thousand people of Somali Bantu origin who have been resettled in the US.

`The Somali Context | 33

Feedback: a Wartime Remittance Economy These processes of diasporisation had many important effects back in the Somali regions. Most immediately, some towns and cities were largely depopulated, or at least depopulated by certain social groups, as people fled. There has been a phenomenal ‘brain drain’: it has been reported that some 80 per cent of the skilled population left the country (EC 2002).4 People who were better educated were often better able to mobilise the financial resources and social networks required to go overseas. There have also been complex patterns of return as some areas stabilised. Many families maintain some members abroad, and others travel back and forth, having acquired status in other countries, trying to make the best of both worlds. However, one of the most widely noted outcomes of the conflict-related mobility has been the mushrooming remittance economy: The sheer size of [the] diaspora means that in some ways Somali society as a whole has been ‘globalised’, and is no longer confined to the borders of a nation state … Somalia’s principal export is no longer livestock, but human labour, [giving] Somalia a role in the global economy as essentially a labour reserve. While this role is of marginal importance in the global economy, it is of real significance within Somalia, given the remittance flows, and has a wide-ranging impact on human development choices. (UNDP 2001: 132) A national-level survey in 2002 reported that remittances represented 23 per cent of household income (UNDP 2003). Several town surveys – of Mogadishu, Beled Weyne, Bosaso, Burao, Hargeisa – have suggested that remittances are received by a substantial minority of the population (Medani 2000; Marchal 2002; Adams et al. 2003). While the bulk of the funds are received in towns and cities, remittances also reach people in villages and rural areas: FSNAU livelihood surveys suggest that remittances have accounted for up to 20 per cent of income in poor households in some pastoral zones (Bishop et al. 2009). In the Jubba region’s rural areas, remittances from Europe or North America are low, but, thanks to family members working as traders or labourers in Kenya, regional remittances are relatively common (Little 2009). The precise scale of the Somali remittance economy is not known. Generally speaking, there are two main methods to estimate the volume of remittances. The top-down method uses data provided by the banks and other financial institutions to central banks or national statistics offices. In the Somali case, there have been no official data on remittances since 1990, and, even before the state collapsed, remittances were mainly travelling through channels not monitored by the Central Bank. As the vast majority of remittances today are conveyed by Somali money

34 | The Early Morning Phone Call

transfer enterprises, some of which are very large operations with central clearing houses, it is possible to use company data to calculate the total volume of remittances. For example, the World Bank, ‘extrapolating with a high degree of confidence to the entire sector the data on inflows and outflows and the market information gathered by the Bank separately from individual major companies and from their association’, estimated remittances to Somalia as at least $825 million in 2004 (World Bank 2005: 24). This estimate of remittances appears somewhat ill-defined: ‘Uncertainty … exists on the shares of this flow going to households … versus enterprises and NGOs’ (World Bank 2005: 25). In 2007, some money transfer entrepreneurs I interviewed were giving estimates of family remittances (as opposed to aid, trade and commercial investments) of around $1.8 billion to Somalia as a whole. The total money transfers handled by Somali remittance companies were estimated by the World Bank at around $2 billion for 2004. Top-down estimates like this have several shortcomings: they omit flows through other systems (e.g. traders or hand carrying); money transmitters can be unwilling to cooperate with data collection exercises (as transaction volumes are commercially sensitive information); and it can be difficult to disaggregate family remittances from other types of investment and trade transfers. In contrast, the bottom-up method of estimating total remittances draws on household surveys in the country of origin. An obvious challenge with this approach in the Somali context is the lack of reliable national household survey data. The UNDP and the World Bank funded a nationwide Socio-Economic Survey in 2002 which collected data on remittances, but unfortunately this potentially valuable source of information was lost when the survey database was apparently destroyed in a computer reconfiguration at UNDP.5 What remains is only the survey report with the much-cited annual figure of $360 million in family remittances (UNDP 2003).6 Omer and El Koury (2005) say this estimate was arrived at based on a combination of top-down and bottom-up estimates from remittance companies, household surveys and businesspeople. An alternative bottom-up method to estimate remittances is to use data collected on numbers of migrants in host countries and average remittance rates. For example, Pérouse de Montclos (2003a) came up with an estimate of ‘over $120 million a year’ in remittances sent by Somalis in major host countries to Somali relatives in the Horn of Africa, based on limited information regarding diaspora population and ‘guesstimates’ of savings and remittance habits (based on assumptions that people are relying on state welfare or minimum wages). A challenge of this diaspora bottom-up approach is that, while data on migrant population size and composition are available in many countries, data on income and the incidence and patterns of remittance behaviour are much harder to come by.

The Somali Context | 35

Thus, available estimates of remittance to Somalia vary considerably and are un-transparent and beset by issues relating to data quality and definition. But does the UNDP estimate of $360 million in remittances to families seem at all realistic? Crude conservative assumptions could be that 15 per cent of Somalia’s 1.2 million households receive average annual remittances of $1,800, which would give annual remittances of $324 million.7 This suggests that, even taking conservative estimates, the Somali regions do indeed experience exceptionally high levels of remittances compared with other estimated economic flows, shown in Table 2.3. In all likelihood, remittances regularly exceed overseas development assistance and exports. This means that remittances are key in Somalia’s balance of payments, as in several other countries overshadowed by conflict or disaster where remittances have also reached levels higher than or similar to exports – including Bosnia, El Salvador, Eritrea, Gaza/West Bank, Haiti, Honduras, Kosovo and Serbia (see Sander and Maimbo 2005; World Bank 2006). Table 2.3 Key macroeconomic indicators Indicator

$ million

Exports (2004) Imports (2004) Overseas Development Assistance (2004) Gross National Product (2001) Household income (2002)

266 461 272 1,300 1,537

Sources: UNDP 2001, 2003; World Bank 2005.

How was all this possible, given the collapse of the banking system? The Somali regions have seen the rise of a specialised indigenous money transfer infrastructure, arguably the most advanced in Africa. The transmission of migrants’ remittances is a multi-billion-dollar global business – in which many intermediaries compete. Who makes money and how remittances are channelled into economies (global banking corporations? indigenous money transmitters and traders? bus drivers?) is part of the picture when it comes to understanding the role of migration and remittances in processes of development. The rest of this chapter explores Somali remittance infrastructure in some detail, providing a crucial backdrop to the subsequent case studies of Hargeisa, Nairobi and London.

Xawilaad: Crisis as a Business Opportunity As civil war engulfed the Somali regions, the late 1980s and early 1990s were characterised by a high demand for money transfer – with new

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refugees remitting to relatives, factions raising finance and the international community making massive transfers to fund aid programmes and peacekeeping operations – combined with low-tech facilities and high fees. At first, as franco valuta was slow and trade shipments were easily disrupted by the violence, hand carrying money or delivering cash via the regular khat flights (khat is a green leaf that many people across the region chew as a stimulant) became commonplace. But these rather risky methods were soon superseded by a more ingenious and reliable mechanism: xawilaad. This is the Somali rendering of the Arabic word hawala, meaning ‘transfer of debt’, and refers to a system of value transfer that facilitated long-distance trade in the eastern Mediterranean, the Red Sea, Mesopotamia and Iran from the early medieval period of Islam and is still popular in the Middle East and Asia and their trading and migrant diasporas. In its simplest version, the customer gives money to an agent who contacts a second agent with the instruction to pay the recipient. Thus the value or debt is transferred rather than actual money. The debt is settled at a later point, via reverse transactions, trade transactions, multilateral transfers or consolidation of debts involving other agents. This soon took off in the midst of the Somali civil war, as high-frequency radios, which formerly only the military and police were authorised to use, fell into the hands of private individuals, and imported radios also flooded in. Radio operators would relay payment instructions to operators elsewhere in the region, usually clanspeople or trusted business associates. In some areas the factions got their cut, and middlemen abroad would charge a hefty commission – as much as 15 per cent – for transferring money to their contacts in Somalia (Farah 2000). The second half of the 1990s was a period of rapid growth in money transfer infrastructure, marked by continued demand from refugees and aid agencies, and increasing demand from the flourishing business community, accompanied by a revolution in communications technology, and falling prices. Over time, many xawilaad operators were incorporated as franchises into the agent networks of larger enterprises specialising in money transfer, enabling them to deliver money to or receive money from a wider range of locations than was possible through their personal contacts alone, to use a centralised hub to consolidate and settles debts and to relay payments, which are generally made available within twenty-four hours, in US dollars. Subsequently, the debts are settled. The sending agent deposits cash collected in a local bank account which regularly forwards funds to a national company account or to a central international bank account, generally in Dubai. Companies replenish the funds of paying agents in various ways: by importing goods to Somalia and using the proceeds to pay agents, by agents retaining outbound transfers or by sending people from Dubai with funds (although physically transporting cash is generally avoided) (Marchal 2002).

The Somali Context | 37

The sector rapidly incorporated new technologies to relay payment information, from radios to fax, mobile and satellite phones, to email and dedicated company software. Money transmitters’ substantial investments helped drive Somalia’s telecommunications revolution. Fixed teledensity is higher in Somalia than in many neighbouring countries and international phone calls are relatively cheap (World Bank 2005). This not only facilitated the operation of transfer services, but also fanned the supply and demand for these services by facilitating contact between refugees and their relatives at home. In order to establish a money transfer enterprise, substantial start-up capital is needed to pay core staff, establish agent networks, and provide operating funds: most remittance entrepreneurs have built up capital through prior business activities.8 Generally agents act as franchises, receiving a percentage of their transfer fees on a monthly basis, often operating out of other businesses serving the migrant community: Internet shops, call centres, foreign exchange bureaux, wholesalers, cafés.9 The main ways of making money in this business are through fees charged to the sender, the exchange rate spread (the difference between the exchange rate paid to purchase foreign currency wholesale and the less favourable rate offered to the customer) and linked trading activities. Over the years, the fees charged gradually came down: at the time of writing, most operators charge around 5 per cent to Somalia and 6 per cent to other countries in the region, with special rates for large transfers and exclusive customers. Managers claim that it is a vigorously competitive business. Spending a week in an outlet on a street in London that boasted several Somali transmitters, I saw that, while most people had their favourite, some went into each office to compare fees and exchange rates before choosing. The major money transmitters are now well-established businesses with agent networks spanning the globe, handling some $2 billion annually, destined for Somalia and other countries (World Bank 2005).10 The market is constantly changing, as companies are established, amalgamate or go under. Since the fall of Al-Barakaat, the two most wellestablished companies are Dahabshiil and Amal. Dahabshiil, which began in Somaliland, is now the largest money transmitter, with more than 1,000 branches and agents in forty countries, including over 400 in the Horn of Africa.11 Amal, which started in Puntland, has around 300 overseas agents and over 350 outlets in Somalia.12 Other companies of a reasonable size include Qaran, Mustaqbal, Global Money Transfer and Kaah. Dahabshiil is the only company to be owned by a sole proprietor – the others have multiple shareholders, and are run by a board of directors or executive committee. For example, Amal was established in 1997 by thirteen businessmen already engaged in trade and xawilaad, who established a base in Bosaso and initially targeted Puntland’s Darod communities. Two

38 | The Early Morning Phone Call

groups of shareholders broke away to form separate companies, Dalsan and Tawakal, leaving Amal with seven major shareholders and numerous minor shareholders. To prosper in the Somali regions, amid chronic insecurity and political uncertainty, remittance entrepreneurs, like other Somali businesspeople, combined muscle, political savvy and the mobilisation of traditional social mechanisms. On one hand, money transmitters face an internal threat in that agents could run off with large sums of money or otherwise undermine the company’s operations. Money transmitters tend initially to recruit agents through their clan networks, which helps ensure loyalty among staff and customers. A former employee in Nairobi highlighted the kin-based nature of the businesses: ‘If you go to Kaah, who is working there? The Ogaden. And who is working for Amal? The majority is Majerteen. And who is working for Dahabshiil? … If you have your own business, you bring your cousin, your uncle. I try to support … members of my family first, and then my community. That’s our way of helping each other.’13 But this is neither a necessary nor a sufficient criterion. Agents also ideally need to be reliable, of good reputation, with some business experience and good local contacts. Moreover, while intra-clan relations were the basis for the early development of these companies, forging inter-clan relations – with new agents and customers – has proved essential for their expansion. These high levels of economic collaboration and partnership across clan lines – also reflected in other business sectors – contrast with the chronic problems in the political realm. The larger enterprises deliberately diversified their major shareholders, agent networks and customer bases to reach new areas and clientele. For example, although Dahabshiil’s proprietor is Habar Jaalo from Somaliland, the company’s regional office in Mogadishu has been managed by a prominent Hawiye businessman, who in turn manages agent networks which include agents of various local clans. Social and financial guarantees are also often put in place, particularly with agents from other clans, underwritten by xeer, or Somali customary law, illustrating the old adage that the more the economy approaches a true market free of state influence, the more it depends on social ties (Portes 1994). Throughout the Somali economy, actors have found mechanisms, by means of revival/adaptation/innovation, that enable them to transact with reasonable confidence in an insecure environment (Little 2003). For example, the role of the precolonial abbaan (respected individuals who guaranteed safe passage for traders and their caravans) re-emerged to facilitate trade across volatile sub-clan-controlled territories, and shariah courts initially emerged in Mogadishu in part to deal with commercial disputes, sponsored by the business community. The internal logic of money transfer infrastructure also helps them to negotiate external threats. Clearly, money transmitters’ premises carry a

The Somali Context | 39

lot of cash and are vulnerable to armed robbery or interference from political authorities. According to one manager, speaking at a UNDPsponsored conference: ‘Politically Somalia is a minefield, where remittance operators have to tread carefully … Even in my speech I have to be careful lest I offend someone.’14 Where necessary the company pays armed guards to protect their premises, with particularly heavy security in Mogadishu. But as one manager put it, ‘If you have three lightly armed technicals, the local warlord has fifteen.’15 Muscle is clearly not enough. Money transmitters are able to count on significant local solidarity because they provide a service on which many depend, but must be careful to work with respected local people and preserve good relations with local elders. The money transfer sector’s experience seems to have been similar to that in the telecommunications sector, where according to one businessman: ‘If the equipment is paid for by local business, then people respect it as property. But if the equipment is from the United Nations, they feel it is given as a political payoff and they will steal it’ (Nurhussein 2008: 70). Few managers are willing to discuss in any detail the kinds of accommodations reached between local agent networks and armed political actors, over matters like protection, taxes and the use of their services. But, clearly, money transfer infrastructure is caught up in complex ways in Somali politics, despite systematic rhetorical distancing in public by senior management. For example, in the southern regions, there were allegations in 2006 that particular money transmitters had diverted funds in the ICU’s direction, relayed large diaspora donations and made donations of military hardware to the ICU (UN 2006). In 2007 there were reports of the TFG making demands of money transmitters and trying to impose tax and licence fees.16 In March 2009, militant Islamist forces controlling Kismayo closed seven money transfer offices in the city in retaliation for their refusal to pay funds into the authorities’ coffers (Garowe Online 2009). Navigating shifting landscapes of governance and violence clearly requires considerable political skill. For example, under Dahabshiil’s contract with UNDP, the company facilitated the payment of the TFG officials and much of the civil service during 2007–2008, but also had agents in the large parts of Mogadishu predominantly in the hands of the insurgents, testifying to the localised nature of agents’ community and security relations. The total collapse of the state in Somalia has been described ironically as a radical structural adjustment programme: it entirely freed the economy from state regulation, liberalising foreign trade, freeing exchange rates, eliminating subsidies, destroying the public sector and privatising parastatals (Drysdale 2000; Marchal 2000). But the story of the money transfer sector demonstrates that the market forces unfettered by the dismantling of the state were rapidly captured by new forms of sociopolitical authority. The conflict forged new forms of privilege and rights

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to wealth, reconfiguring patterns of predation and protectionism (Reno 2003). The managers of the major Somali money transmitters are no barefoot capitalists – they are distinctly well-shod entrepreneurs, many from well known pre-war business dynasties, with political savvy and substantial economic clout. Nor are they the classic conflict profiteers trading high-value commodities which have featured prominently in recent analysis of war economies and incentives for violence (Berdal and Malone 2000). The bulk of the money transmitters’ business deals in the steady rhythm of small family transfers, relieving suffering and furnishing livelihoods. However, money transmitters must also navigate threats emanating from outside the Somali regions, from the international community, which after 9/11 began to see xawilaad as on the one hand a security concern and on the other a humanitarian lifeline.

From ‘Dirty Money’ to ‘Humanitarian Lifeline’? By shutting these networks down, we disrupt the murderers’ work. Today’s action interrupts al Qaeda’s communications; it blocks an important source of funds. It provides us with valuable information and sends a clear message to global financial institutions: you are with us or you are with the terrorists. And if you’re with the terrorists, you will face the consequences. We fight an enemy who hides in caves in Afghanistan, and in the shadows within in our own society. It’s an enemy who can only survive in darkness. Today, we’ve taken another important action to expose the enemy to the light and to disrupt its ability to threaten America and innocent life. (Bush 2001) So said President Bush as he fired the opening shot in the financial war on terror against Al-Barakaat, the largest money transmitter in Somalia, sending shock waves through the Somali economy. In 2001, Al-Barakaat was a highly successful Somali business empire. Its owner had worked for Citibank in Saudi Arabia and then managed the money transfer operations in Jeddah of a rich Mogadishu trader before establishing AlBarakaat. The enterprise grew rapidly into a large conglomerate – the largest Somali money transmitter, with numerous linked companies and investments in other sectors. Its economies of scale allowed it to dominate the market, with other operators competing on clan or regional niches rather than on fees. In the late 1990s, US intelligence began to draw links between AlBarakaat, the Somali Islamist group Al Itihaad and Osama Bin Laden.17 Some sources claimed that Bin Laden invested heavily in the enterprise and remained a silent partner; Jimale managed Bin Laden’s finances and

The Somali Context | 41

moved money for him; and the enterprise provided protection for Bin Laden’s operatives when they visited Mogadishu. Less than a month after 9/11, the US government designated the company as a terrorist-related organisation, claiming that $25 million was skimmed from the company for terrorist operations and that Jimale was a ‘friend and supporter’ of Bin Laden. Reactions around the world were swift, with all the key countries in Al-Barakaat’s network freezing its bank accounts. The United Nations Security Council added Al-Barakaat to its list of suspected terrorist supporters. But, by August 2002, with no evidence forthcoming, the company was taken off the list. With hindsight, the 9/11 Commission found that the designation of Al-Barakaat had been driven by the perceived need to show the world that the US was serious about its financial ‘war on terror’, and that the evidence against Al-Barakaat was in fact quite weak – in the words of a Treasury official, ‘we were so forward leaning we almost fell on our face’ (9-11 Commission 2004: 79). The particular drama of Al-Barakaat unfolded in the wider context of increasing financial regulation of migrants’ remittances. After 9/11 the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), which spearheads international efforts to prevent criminal use of financial systems, issued a set of Special Recommendations on Terrorist Financing, including on ‘alternative remittance’, i.e. non-bank money transfer services, which exhorted service providers to ‘know your customer’ and ‘control your business’ in particular ways (FATF 2001). Although these ‘40+9’ recommendations are technically soft law, they have considerable ‘teeth’ due to the political and economic pressures that can be exerted on non-complying countries. Any financial institution doing business with US financial institutions – a vast number, given the fact that the US dollar is a global medium of exchange – is expected to uphold the international standards (Passas 2006). States around the world began to enforce existing financial regulations more vigorously and impose new regulations on money transfer activities. There was also pressure from banks which began to see money transmitters as high-risk customers and closed their accounts, crippling the businesses involved. There are, of course, important reasons for states to regulate their financial sectors, as a matter of macroeconomic policy, to maintain confidence in the financial sector by preventing criminal use and money laundering and to protect customers from losses through fraud and bankruptcy.18 However, the regulatory developments post 9/11 have come in for considerable criticism. Transnational crime expert Nikos Passas claimed that the US was ‘fighting terror with error’ in a ‘fact-free policy making process’ (Passas 2006: 315). He believed that the heavy regulation of alternative money transfer channels has been misguided (given the lack of evidence linking informal value transfer to terrorist operations), counterproductive (driving legitimate business underground

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where they may be more vulnerable to abuse) and damaging to innocent parties (as rising costs of compliance can reduce competition or be passed on to customers).19 Central to the way the Somali money transmitters have been viewed in this context by policymakers is their frequent but problematic description as ‘informal hawala’, which deserves closer consideration. There is an important backstory here in terms of policymakers’ changing attitudes to the informal economy. Diagnosed by neoliberal policymakers in the 1980s as the result of market distortions, the informal economy was being hailed across Africa by the late 1980s as exemplary barefoot capitalism and popular resistance to the failures of the state, and then from the 1990s it became increasingly associated with corruption, criminality, conflict and extremism (MacGaffney 1991; Meagher 2003). In particular, there has been great interest in how extra-state economic activities, often with a significant global reach, become part of the endogenous dynamics that can protract conflict. Thus, the suspicion of informal money transfer networks in the Somali case reflects a wider pattern of attitudes to the informal economy in general. However, it can be debated to what extent the term informal is meaningful in the Somali context, where a unitary and independent state was short-lived (just over thirty years) and unable to audit and regulate most economic activity, and where now multiple political dispensations vie for sovereignty, reaching into business sectors in diverse ways. Similarly, it is debatable to what extent economic activity may be described as informal when the state does not choose to regulate a particular activity, as was the case in some of the financial jurisdictions where the Somali transmitters operated prior to 9/11. Meanwhile, formal/informal boundaries can shift over space, as a money transfer transaction crosses jurisdictions. Formal/informal boundaries also shift over time: money transfer systems evolve in regulatory environments around the world that are themselves evolving, which means that changing regulations can lead to ‘passive informalisation’ (Portes 1994). Moreover, as already noted, major contemporary Somali transmitters differ substantially from ‘classic hawala’ in their more centralised structure, information flow and value flow; exclusive arrangements with agents; and use of the formal financial system. Suspicion of hawala echoes a contemporary tendency to elide the informal and illicit in analysis of African contexts (Meagher 2003). Important distinctions in the literature on informal economies between illicit and licit informal trade (activity that does and does not infringe criminal law) were reflected in the fact that prior to 9/11 financial jurisdictions, a distinction was made by law enforcers between ‘white hawala’ (legitimate transfers) and ‘black hawala’ (transfers considered illegitimate in most jurisdictions, for example for narcotics trafficking or fraud). But, since 9/11, hawala was

The Somali Context | 43

often presented in the media, financial and law enforcement worlds as at best vulnerable to use for illegitimate purposes, and at worst expressly designed for illegitimate purposes.20 Of course, from the perspective of many Somalis, the West’s efforts to regulate money transfer infrastructure were rich in geopolitical ironies. After the withdrawal of UN peacekeepers in the 1990s, the international community had largely left Somalia to the attentions of the humanitarian aid industry. In the intervening period remittances had become an important means of living for many. Amid Somalia’s other troubles, money transfer systems at least worked well, providing an effective and reliable – indeed the only – way to send money home. To jeopardise this for the sake of some (unsubstantiated) claims of links to the 9/11 attacks seemed terribly unfair. Meanwhile, warlords who terrorised the civilian population of Mogadishu for years used a wide range of money transmission mechanisms with no call for sanction on service providers from the international community.21 In many ways the Somali operator was a soft target: it seems unlikely that the US would have designated money transmission giants such as MoneyGram or Western Union, let alone Swiss banks renowned for dealing with ‘sensitive’ clients, on such limited evidence as appears to have been available in the Al-Barakaat case. More broadly, concerns about the threat to global stability posed by ethnic niche money transfer operators post 9/11 arguably pale into relative insignificance compared with the threat revealed in 2008, of the hidden mismanagement of global corporate banking. What was the impact of international intervention in the Somali remittance sector? Al-Barakaat’s closure meant that some remittances and deposits were lost. There was undoubtedly short-term hardship in locations where Al-Barakaat was the main operator, because it was harder to get remittances to people in Somalia and the price of sending money rose (Bradbury 2002). The disruption to remittances is thought to have contributed to the sharp drop in the value of both Somali currencies against the dollar in 2000–2001 (Omer 2002). In the immediate aftermath it was reported that closure of Al-Barakaat affected the ability of rural communities and families to participate in NGO-led development initiatives (Bradbury 2002). However, the economic disaster anticipated by some did not ensue, a fact which can be largely attributed to the adaptive response of the other enterprises – despite initial fears that these too might close. The fall of Al-Barakaat allowed the remaining large enterprises to secure considerably greater market shares, helped somewhat by customer preferences for more well-established companies following the closure (reportedly Dahabshiil’s monthly turnover went up by 30 per cent) (Marchal 2002). The extent to which international norms were translated into national regulation varied across countries, as did the impact of national

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regulatory changes on commercial realities for money transmitters, with considerable contrasts even between US states and within the EU. In some countries, money transfer licensing requirements – for example, fees, capital requirements, bank guarantees, scrutiny of staff and their qualifications and inspection regimes – proved prohibitively high for some smaller niche operators, which closed or ‘disappeared’. In other countries, regulatory requirements were relatively ‘light touch’ – in the UK, UAE and Canada it seems most Somali agents registered. Overall, where regulatory environments and market size permit, there has been a growing ‘professionalisation’ and development of the larger money transfer enterprises. As well as the regulatory pressure, economic success may have encouraged formalisation (Nordstrom 2004). Complying with new regulations changed the way that the enterprises operated. Some had to centralise their operations more in order to prove that they could ‘control their business’. They had to train agents to ask for identification. For cultural reasons this could be difficult, as some customers interpreted it as questioning their integrity (Shire 2006). Meanwhile, the privileging of state-based tools of ascertaining the identity of customers – ID cards and passports – could seem ironic to Somalis. For people from a country with ‘the dodgiest passport in the world’ (Economist 2004), ascertaining clan lineage seems a more reliable and effective identity check. Some companies introduced photo ID cards to speed up transactions with regular customers. Some enterprises bought software incorporating the UN lists of blacklisted individuals with whom financial institutions are not allowed to transact, but several managers found that as listed individuals have very common Muslim names, a considerable proportion of Somali transactions are held up by the software. These adjustments prompted some of these enterprises to critically assess their business strategy, again turning crisis into an opportunity. The growth of many of the enterprises had been vertiginously rapid and unplanned, based on short-term approaches aimed at rapid accumulation, with little long-term strategic vision – a close observer described the enterprises to me as ‘multinational companies with a kiosk mentality’.22 In recent years, various service improvements have been introduced, including real time payments technology, credit and debit card payments, online payments and text messaging. Some enterprises had already moved beyond the traditional Somali market, for example serving Kenyans and Sudanese Nuer and Dinka refugees (Riak Akuei 2005; Shandy 2007), and strategic partnerships were developed to serve other African communities as far away as Ghana.23 Some operators have worked with international NGOs such as Oxfam to help deliver cash relief or cash-for-work to project communities. Money transfer operators offer transfer, deposit and payment services for business people, aid agencies and political authorities in the Somali regions. The larger companies are

The Somali Context | 45

interested in developing such basic banking services further, and have begun to invest capital elsewhere partly with a view to eventually establishing banks outside the Somali regions. For example, Amal has invested considerably in property in Somalia and elsewhere, building four ‘Amal Plaza’ shopping malls in Mogadishu, Galkcayo, Nairobi and South Africa. As time went on, money transmitters began to make statements highlighting their role as employers, investors and socially responsible corporate actors (giving donations for relief and community projects and discounted commission on transfers to disaster-affected areas). They recognised the damage inflicted by the term hawala and began to reject it in favour of new terms like ‘remittance companies’ – as one manager put it, ‘We are far more advanced than Hawalas.’24 How the xawilaad enterprises responded to intervention might be explained by their hybrid organisational structures: a central hierarchical hub relying on extensive networks of agents. They exhibit some of the vulnerabilities and strengths of networks. For example, Al-Barakaat’s network was easily disrupted and decomposed in adverse circumstances, but the individual nodes (agents) survived and adapted. Other enterprises were able to rapidly extend their agent base to reach AlBarakaat’s former customers – the epitome of the fluid, adaptive response attributed to networked forms of organisation (Blaug 2000). Similarly, the fact that agents in some countries had to close did not devastate the companies: they adapted and consolidated their activities in more propitious environments. At the same time money transmitters exhibit some of the vulnerabilities and the strengths of more hierarchical forms of organisation. Al-Barakaat crumbled when its central hub was attacked – i.e. when the UAE bank account was frozen – which would not have been possible if they had been transacting and settling debts bilaterally or multilaterally like a ‘classic hawala’. But, where the central hub remains intact, other enterprises which kept their central accounts open, were able to weather adversity. But this is not the full picture. Concerned that, in the context of the downturn resulting from Saudi Arabia’s ban on Somali livestock imports, further disruption to remittances could precipitate total economic collapse, and needing xawilaad themselves to transfer staff salaries and project money, UN and the aid industry mounted a humanitarian defence of the remittance ‘lifeline’. The campaign was spearheaded by UNDP which issued dire warnings to media and governments regarding the potential consequences of further closures. UNDP intervened when specific companies were threatened with the closure of their bank accounts; facilitated the establishment of two industry associations;25 and held meetings and trainings to encourage compliance and conferences bringing together slightly bemused regulators and rather defensive Somali businesspeople. The UN agency’s engagement with money

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transmitters subsequently developed into longer-term efforts to support compliance, industry cooperation, development of regulation in Somalia and the incorporation of new technology.26 This ‘humanitarian defence’ had a distinct logic and mode of engagement from the financial war on terror, using the media to raise awareness and emphasising the need for dialogue, cooperation and training. Yet at this stage the aid agencies’ engagement was essentially reactive, a defence of the infrastructure aimed at mitigating the consequences of the financial war on terror on ordinary people in the Somali regions, and supporting the efforts to make the money transmitters more hierarchical, centralised and compliant. More recently, segments of the international community have begun to see the diaspora, remittances and the money transfer sector as a potential source of ‘development capital’ in ways that I shall return to in Chapter 6.

Beyond Collapse: Grasping Continuities and Change What does the evidence explored in this chapter tell us about the continuities, changes and significance of the movement of people and money in the Somali regions over time? There is no doubt that migration is a recurring and significant theme in the history of the Somali territories, long before the collapse of the state. There are some continuities, and some ways that migration antecedents influence the geography and forms of migration under crisis conditions, as communities accumulated forms of ‘migratory cultural capital’ that predisposed them to act in particular ways (Van Hear 1998: 51). The fact that many Somali families were already routinely translocal and even transnational meant that mobility and family dispersal were not in and of themselves necessarily experienced as destructuring phenomena (cf. the Hazaras in Afghanistan, see Monsutti 2006). Existing transborder and regional networks meant that some people were able to move largely within their ‘economy of affection’ – within a network of support, communications and interaction among people connected by kinship or ethnicity (Hyden 1983). Prior connections with the Arab and European worlds provided information and opportunities that shaped the longer-distance peregrinations of some refugees, as Somali people affected by the conflict demonstrated a vigorous tendency to migrate beyond the neighbouring countries where they initially sought refuge. However, there are also important discontinuities, particularly in respect of the dramatically different causes of migration under conditions of civil war. The conflict involved huge upheavals in the social and political fabric and prompted an unprecedented emigration crisis in 1988 and the early 1990s. It is important to emphasise that ‘the Somali civil war’ has been experienced very differently over time, across territory and

The Somali Context | 47

by people with different socio-political and economic positions, with implications for how we understand migration. However, in general, the intensity of the violence in many areas radically altered the frameworks in which people – even nomadic pastoralists used to moving for security as well as ecological reasons – made migration decisions. People were no longer migrating to access labour opportunities – they were primarily seeking safety. The warehousing of Somalis in refugee camps in neighbouring countries was also unlike any previous migration experience. Despite some return and some movement back and forth, people moving abroad generally found themselves living there on a more permanent basis, unlike the more temporary sojourns of migrants in the Middle East in the 1970s and 1980s. Moreover, processes of globalisation and technological advance opened up the possibility to travel further and faster than hitherto possible, and the situation in their country of origin allowed many people to claim asylum and citizenship in richer countries (although of course, over time, the same immigration and asylum systems contracted, making it extremely difficult for people to travel anywhere on Somali passports – more on this in Chapters 4 and 5). The continuities in migration are often wrapped up in a strong nomadic discourse, emphasising the age-old migratory cultural capital of Somalis. Travel and migration are inherent to the nomadic lifestyle and run deep in Somali culture and language.27 In this context, it is not surprising that many Somalis imagine and speak of themselves as globalised nomads: tough, independent, adventurous travellers (Simons 1995; Warfa et al. 2005; Horst 2006b). This is interesting for several reasons. It provides people with a culturally meaningful way to frame the traumatic experience of displacement and family dispersal, and an alternative to the ‘victim discourse’. Malkii (1997), describing how Hutu refugees from Burundi in Tanzania saw their exile as a time of moral trial and hardship within a longer narrative which would eventually see them reclaim their homeland, argued for the importance of paying attention to how people view their exile, suggesting that too often research ignores refugees’ political subjectivities in favour of a notion of the refugees as depoliticised, ahistorical, universalised objects of humanitarian action. However, like all cultural reference points, the nomadic trope tends to exclude as well as explain, hiding the real heterogeneity in society – for example, the experiences of people of urban or farming heritage, which as we have seen play an important role in the structuring of Somali society, and for whom migration was a considerable upheaval. A study of refugees in London suggested that the nomadic discourse is more common among the more educated strata of the diaspora, and is much less invoked by less educated people (Warfa et al. 2005). Moreover it is important to emphasise that the idea of a ‘culture of migration’ is hardly unique to the Somalis and patterns of secondary movement have been

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noted among a range of migrant groups, including other refugee groups (Lindley and Van Hear 2007; Shandy 2007; Jónsson 2008). The nomadic discourse also tends to gloss over the conflict-related discontinuities mentioned above, the highly constrained nature of refugee life (highlighted by Hyndman 2000 and Horst 2006b). The movement of people has had significant feedback effects, shaping many areas of social, economic and political life in the Somali regions, in particular through the movement of remittance monies. This has a long history. Sending remittances is simply not a wartime phenomenon; it was a major part of the Somali economy in the 1970s and 1980s and even earlier. Indeed, remittances were part of what kept many urban families afloat during the economically volatile 1980s. But, as we shall see in more detail in the next chapter, the remittance economy that mushroomed during the oil boom shifted geographically, diversified demographically and grew in significance in the Somali regions in the context of civil war. Since the collapse of the state, more than ever before, remittances represent a major source of income for many families and a key aspect of the Somali political economy. This is facilitated by a sophisticated money transfer sector that has built on earlier financial mechanisms and traditional social practices, introducing new technology and a successful business model, turning the crisis into an economic opportunity. Xawilaad defies pithy one-line definitions that are often used to characterise extra-state economies as local survival capitalism, or as global conflict profiteering (Nordstrom 2004). It is indeed a matter of local survival, facilitating infusions of funds on which millions depend, saving lives and furnishing modest livelihoods, relying on the careful leverage of intricate social ties in its organisational logic. But it is also a profitable industry, rapidly assimilating technological advances, lining the pockets of a transnational elite, becoming an integral part of the emerging political complexes that it navigates in the Somali regions. It is more formal than often acknowledged. The will to govern financial transfers varies – in intention and depth, and across space and time. From the point of view of state agencies many elements of Somali money transfer infrastructure are regulated, compliant and legible, while other elements are largely extrastate and opaque. Far from being just an intriguing financial mechanism used by a small number of migrants, xawilaad is a phenomenon of considerable scale and significance. In the absence of a banking system, it is this infrastructure that articulates the economic relationships between the Somali regions and the rest of the world – mediating remittances, trade, investment, aid and political finance. The Somali remittance story raises questions about international responses to real processes of change under way in conflict-affected parts of the world. The apparent economic resilience of the Somali regions in the face of state collapse and the vigour of the remittance economy and the

The Somali Context | 49

sophisticated money transfer business sit uneasily beside common tropes of collapsed and conflict-ridden territories as a ‘vacuum’ or a ‘black hole’ and academic analyses of internal conflict as ‘development in reverse’. Such ‘anomalies’ may be seen as evidence of reflexive modernity: ‘Actual development is not the result of official development efforts: it exists despite them’ (Duffield 2002: 160).28 Indeed, the aspirations of official development planning in many parts of postcolonial Africa have been constantly confounded. Outside interventions have often played a significant role in laying the groundwork for conflict and state collapse. In Somalia, cold war military sponsorship (and its switching and withdrawal), international aid (and its gluts and stoppages) and neoliberal reforms (and their misconceptions) helped to destabilise the state, and international intervention has conspicuously failed to resolve the conflict in the two decades since it began. But beyond the piles of failed blueprints for change, life in the Somali regions goes on, witness to various forms of social, economic and political innovation and change. The international response to these ‘actually existing developments’ in the Somali regions has been deeply ambivalent. International peacebuilding initiatives in the Somali regions have repeatedly failed to meet local political orders where they are, rather than where the international community would like them to be (Hagmaan and Von Hoehne 2008). This reflects the broader environment, in which international intervention in conflict zones since the cold war has been based on ‘a globalisation of the very idea of what a state should look like and how it should act’ (Paris 2002: 637). Broadly, the assumption is that a hierarchical, centralised, Western-style state is the best framework for governance and that the policies of liberal market democracy provide the best path of development and conflict prevention (Paris 2002). Somalia has seen it all. Successive international efforts to bring liberal peace have failed. Meanwhile, many of the indigenous governance mechanisms that have emerged – from Somaliland to the Islamic Courts – have been met with responses ranging from indifference to sabotage, because they did not fit the internationally palatable vision of a singular secular state. Somali money transfer infrastructure offers another example of this ambivalence. The international community has both scrutinised xawilaad for what has been defined as ‘dirty money’ within the specific geopolitics of the war on terror, trying to bring the sector into the regulatory fold, and at the same time embraced it as a lifeline and even a source of potential development capital. Arguably both responses are part of states’ struggle to make complex social realities legible (Scott 1998). Both these struggles to grapple and the processes of adaptation and innovation are set to continue in the years to come. Against this backdrop, the following chapters each open a window on the remittance process, focusing on three key locations on the Somali migratory map – Hargeisa, Nairobi and London.

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Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

Quoted in Samatar (1988). A term coined by Levitt 1998. By 1989 foreign aid paid for 70 per cent of the government’s operating budget (Little 2003). The definition of skilled population, and the source of the estimate was not clear from this document. Personal communications with UNDP staff, 19 October and 3 December 2007. The writers add that total transfers of $700–800 million are handled by Somali remittance companies, which also includes business transactions and remittances sent to Somalis in neighbouring countries and other amounts. Evidence underlying these assumptions are as follows: (a) According to the UNDP (2003) there are 1,174,322 households in the country. (b) National, regional and city-level studies offer insights into the incidence of recipient households: (i) Medani (2000) reports that remittances were the main source of income for 30–40 per cent of the urban population of Hargesa, Burao, Boroma and Bossaso (excluding poor IDP/returnee settlements); (ii) King (2003) reports that 10–20 per cent of Hargeisa households rely on remittances as their main source of income; (iii) Marchal (2002) reports that just over one-quarter of eighty households surveyed in Mogadishu were receiving remittances; (iv) various sources, including those above, comment that remittances are more infrequent and lower in amounts among rural households; (v) APD (2004a) reports that remittances accounted for 12 per cent of household income across Somaliland; (vi) UNDP (2003) reports that remittances account for 23 per cent of household income across the whole of Somalia. (c) $1,800 ($150 a month) is a conservative estimate of average annual remittances to regular recipients – for example, in Hargeisa, our sample of recipients received $2,624 on average. Most money transfer enterprises report that the majority of monthly remittances are between $100 and $300. Some commentators claim that some investors profited from state collapse via looting of state funds and lucrative gains from food aid brokering in the early 1990s. According to an experienced observer, commission is commonly split, with 50 per cent going to the head office, 30 per cent to the sending agent and 20 per cent to the paying agent. Somali transmitters also attract Ethiopian, Sudanese, Eritrean, Kenyan and other customers who find banks and larger international money transmitters expensive or inaccessible. http://www.dahabshiil.com/ Accessed 20 March 2009. http://www.amal-express.com/introduction.aspx Accessed 20 March 2009 Interview with former employee, Nairobi, February 2005 (see also Pérouse de Montclos 2003b). Speech at the UNDP/DFID Conference on the Somali Remittance Sector, London, 3–4 December 2003. Interview with manager, Hargeisa, July 2008.

The Somali Context | 51 16. Specifically, in mid-2007, a group of TFG ministers demanded that remittance companies collect $1 million each month in taxes from migrants’ transfers: it is thought that one-off payments were made by the remittance companies by way of compromise. Phone consultations with technical adviser and NGO worker, in London and Nairobi, July 2008. 17. This account draws on the detailed chronicle in 9–11 Commission (2004). Al Itihaad promoted a traditionalist Salaafi version of Islam, aiming to establish an Islamic state in Somalia and the Somali region of Ethiopia. It held territory in Somalia in the early 1990s, but later concentrated on promoting shariah courts, schools and clinics and providing relief, before throwing its weight behind the ICU, which rose to power in south-central Somalia in 2006. The US government designated it a terrorist organisation after 9/11. 18. Criminal use includes, for example, financial transactions relating to drugs smuggling, illegal arms sales, tax evasion, funding crime. Money laundering involves passing funds acquired through criminal activities through the financial system so that they appear to have been acquired legitimately. 19. See Passas 2006. The bulk of transactions went through formal banks, credit card accounts and wire transfers run by US and British institutions. Moreover, Passas’s interviews with financial investigators around the world suggest that even if the FATF’s Special Recommendations had been implemented prior to 9/11 this would not have red-flagged the hijackers’ financial transactions. 20. While the first claim seems reasonable in some cases, the latter is contradicted by the historical evidence. 21. Indeed, some of these very warlords were actively sponsored by the US in an attempt to eliminate the Islamic Courts Union. 22. Interview with technical adviser, Nairobi, March 2005. 23. For example, Dahabshiil’s agreements with GWK Travelex (to facilitate transfers from Travelex branches in the Netherlands to Dahabshiil agents across the Horn of Africa) and with Ecobank (to deliver remittances to several West African countries). 24. Speech by money transmitter manager at the UNDP/World Bank Conference on Somali Remittances, Washington DC, 1–2 December 2005, and 9–11 Commission (2004). It should be noted that rare in-depth contemporary studies of hawala networks also document more complex permutations (Ballard 2005). 25. Catalysing any kind of dialogue was a serious achievement given the clan, regional and business rivalries of many of the company managers, but industry cooperation has been bedevilled by mutual suspicion regarding political influence and potentially monopolistic banking aspirations of the larger companies. 26. Although in 2008 insider allegations of misconduct sparked an investigation into these activities, and UNDP has reoriented its programme towards promoting an inclusive financial sector in Somalia (Trevelayn 2008). 27. Reflected in numerous proverbs, for example, Nin aan dhul marin dhaayo ma leh (A man who hasn’t travelled across land is blind). 28. Taking his cue from the so-called ‘actually existing socialism’ in the Eastern bloc and the counter-argument about ‘actually existing capitalism’.

Chapter 3 Migration and Remittances in a Precarious State: the View from Hargeisa

In 2005, a mutual friend introduced me to Mohamed, who had recently graduated from the university in Hargeisa. He grew up in a small town and was still a child when the civil war began, but old enough to remember seeing government forces harassing and abusing local people. His father was killed in the army backlash on the civilian population, and his eldest brother joined the Somali National Movement and was killed in combat. After this he fled with his mother and younger sisters to live in a refugee camp in Ethiopia. His older brother and sisters went to stay with relatives in Djibouti, and later, in the mid-1990s, they all found their way overseas. His eldest sister married a Somali man who had Canadian citizenship and lived in Canada, working mother of three children. His other older sister got married in Djibouti and she and her husband sought asylum in Europe, where her husband found a job. His brother worked in the Middle East for a few years and then managed to move on to Europe, where he was working and studying part-time. Together they had provided Mohamed’s mother and the younger silings with their main source of income for many years: while they were in the refugee camp in Ethiopia, when they came back to Somaliland and were repairing their home and in the years that followed. The sisters still sent money each month to their mother. The brother had recently married a woman in Somaliland and had a baby, and was sending a monthly allowance to his wife, who had moved in with his mother. Mohamed’s elder sister in Canada, whom he held in great affection, always took an interest in his education and encouraged him from afar, later sending $150 a month to him so that he was able to go to university. He kept in weekly contact with

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his brothers and sisters overseas by phone, email or Internet chat rooms. When I met Mohamed again in 2007, he was working for a local NGO and no longer receiving any support. Mohamed’s life, like those of most Somalis, has been indelibly marked by the experience of conflict and migration. His family suffered death, displacement and dispersal as a result of the conflict. Thanks to the efforts, luck and loyalty of the older siblings who had travelled overseas, the rest of the family had received help to rebuild a life in Somaliland. This chapter explores the involvements of dadka dibadaha – ‘the people outside’ – in the lives of residents of the city of Hargeisa in recent decades. It explores the role of diaspora and remitting in the politics of violence, peace making and state-building; in social relations within families and the wider community; and in economic crisis and recovery. The findings highlight the complex contingencies and reciprocities in the relationships between processes of migration, conflict and development. Hargeisa, a key northern Somali city, provides an excellent starting point to explore the impact of migration and remittances in the Somali regions because of its size, its recent stability and the significant nature of international migration and displacement from the city. Located in the highland area known as Waqooyi Galbeed, at the intersection of trade routes leading from the Red Sea coast to the Ogaden and Abyssinia, Hargeisa was founded in the nineteenth century by the religious leader Sheikh Maddar, as a Qadiriya (a Sufi brotherhood) settlement (Lewis 2002). The British relocated their administration there in 1941. The area is traditionally dominated by the Isaq, particularly the Habar Awal/Saad Muse, and Garhajis/Idegalle and Arab, but over time people of various other clans also settled in Hargeisa. Some pastoralists would spend parts of the year settled on the outskirts of Hargeisa. By the late 1950s Hargeisa had a population of 30,000 – 40,000, which grew to over 100,000 in the 1980s, shrank to a few thousand at the height of the war in 1988–1991, and then expanded to over half a million people by the mid-2000s.1 Long a somewhat neglected provincial city, Hargeisa now holds an awkward position in the global political economy as the capital of a state that in an international juridical sense does not exist. This chapter draws on informal consultations and more than fifty interviews carried out, often with the help of research assistants, over the course of four visits to Hargeisa, with remittance recipients, returnees, businesspeople, money transmitters, teachers, NGO workers, government officials and politicians, among others. In addition, it draws on a survey of 538 people collecting remittances in money transfer outlets across the city belonging to the company Dahabshiil, the largest company in the city.2 Although not representative, the sample provided a good cross-section of people receiving money, painting a broadly indicative picture of remittance patterns.

In a Precarious State | 55

The first part of the chapter charts the troubled years between 1980 and 1997, when Hargeisa became the scene of oppression, insurgency and civil strife, and explores the diaspora’s involvements in what became the Republic of Somaliland. Then I explore the social micro-dynamics of remittances in transnational families, and the ways that remittances help people to cope in the post-conflict economy. The investment of remittances in trade and construction, education and emigration is considered, and the impact of remittances beyond recipients’ households, in the city as a whole. Finally, I examine how, since 1997, the diaspora and their remittances have shaped post-conflict political processes in Hargeisa and Somaliland more widely.

Oppression, Insurgency and Crisis: Diaspora Dimensions International migration is embedded in Hargeisa’s history. Apart from contact with the rural hinterland, the city’s residents have plied regional trade routes, travelled to the Arab peninsula for pilgrimage and commerce and worked shipping routes to more distant destinations, establishing small outposts in foreign ports, particularly in Britain. In the 1970s, Hargeisa’s men flocked to new job opportunities opening up in booming oil countries: Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar and elsewhere. As well as the pull of higher wages and better job opportunities, there were also push factors encouraging migration from the northern regions. Most obviously, many northern pastoralists were forced to find other employment during the Dabadheer drought in 1974. Moreover, the Isaq majority in Hargeisa were gradually finding themselves marginalised in the regime’s manipulation of clan politics. The northern Somali areas had been largely by passed by colonial and then state-led economic development efforts and the north-west region was receiving less than 7 per cent of development assistance in the 1980s (ICG 2003). The ‘scientific socialist’ programme of nationalisation and deepening state control of the economy was received rather ambivalently by the active Isaq business community. There was a sequence of economic interventions which they found particularly disruptive, including the state’s prohibition of franco valuta (following a brief legalisation in the early 1980s), withholding of export licences and measures targeting khat farms in 1983 (WSP 2005). Meanwhile, on the more directly political front, the Ogaden war of 1977–1978, while fought in the name of the pan-Somali ideal, created further tensions when northern soldiers felt that they had been undermined by the military hierarchy, bearing the brunt of the campaign (WSP 2005). This was compounded when after the defeat, between 100,000 and 200,000 Ogaden (who formed part of Barre’s Darod clan

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family) and Oromo refugees settled in large refugee camps and urban areas in the north, increasing pressure on resources (WSP 2005). The government exacerbated tensions between the communities by giving the refugees preferential access to water points, siphoning off aid into informal patronage networks, giving jobs to the Ogaden elite, and establishing militia groups among the refugees (Africa Watch 1990). Government jobs in Hargeisa – particularly police and security – were increasingly filled by non-Isaq people. The detention and torture of the Hargeisa Group in 1981, a group of young intellectuals involved in grassroots community work, was met with outrage and resentment by the city’s residents. The detainees were not to be released until 1989. Bribery, extortion and harassment escalated. In February 1982, imported goods worth $50 million were confiscated at Berbera (WSP 2005). Against this background, in 1981 the Somali National Movement was established, following consultations among northern expatriates in Saudi Arabia and the UK. Soon after, the leadership moved to Ethiopia, where the SNM began to organise as an armed force and by 1982 was undertaking cross-border incursions into Somalia. They began sending delegations and video cassettes of the forces to migrant workers in the Gulf, who, along with the major Isaq merchants, became the main source of finance. Money was raised through the sub-clans, like dia, with each lineage contributing an agreed portion.3 Individual contributions varied but it was not uncommon for people to pay $10 for every $200 that they earned. When they fell short of their agreed collective contribution, they called on richer clanspeople, particularly the big traders, to make up the difference. Sometimes businesspeople would advance funds to the SNM, which were paid back through the donations. The money was transferred to the SNM in Ethiopia through traders and xawilaad. Dahabshiil’s proprietor Mohamed Said Duale, an import–export trader from Burao, entered the money transfer business in the 1980s, establishing an office in Dire Dawa in Ethiopia, initially using radios to read out payment instructions to agents in Somalia. Daallo airlines also played a role in facilitating transfers of finance to the forces. According to one of the members of the central committee responsible for finance in the early 1980s, around 70 per cent of their resources at that time came from the diaspora in the Middle East.4 The rest came mainly from within the region, including in kind contributions of animals and food from pastoralists in the rural areas of Ethiopia. By the mid-1980s, he said, people were contributing both to the central committee and directly to the fighting units associated with their clan lineage (particularly to deal with sickness, disability and other basic needs). Back in Hargeisa, state repression ramped up: ‘Summary arrests, extrajudicial executions, rape, confiscation of private property and “disappearances” all became commonplace as the government sought to

In a Precarious State | 57

deprive the SNM of the support of the Isaaq public’ (ICG 2003: 6). Emergency regulations and curfews were imposed. Members of the Somali Revolutionary Socialist Party were made responsible for groups of twenty households – listing visitors and notifying the National Security Service when anyone left home to travel – to discourage contact between the civilians and insurgents (Africa Watch 1990). In 1988, ordered by Ethiopia to cease operations following a surprise meeting between Barre and Mengistu in Djibouti, the SNM attacked government forces in Burao and Hargeisa. Government forces retaliated with artillery and aerial bombardment. Between 70 and 90 per cent of the buildings were damaged or destroyed (Bradbury 2008). Tens of thousands were killed in the savage reprisals, including mass executions and detentions of suspected rebel sympathisers by government forces, led by General Mohamed Said Hersi Morgan, who became infamous as the ‘Butcher of Hargeisa’ (WSP 2005). Both the rebels and the government, as in many conflict situations, put out deep roots into the livelihoods systems of northern Somalia to support the war effort. The rebels drew on the sections of the business community for donations, pastoralist communities for in kind support and Isaq refugees for rations, volunteers and finance. Meanwhile, the government diverted aid, conscripted Ogaden refugees, tried to control trade, extorted and expropriated land and resources, victimised Isaq civilians and sought to undermine local livelihood systems to disrupt the rebels’ supply lines. The exploitation of natural assets such as grazing land was compromised by extensive land mining. The government also targeted social assets – systematically seeking to break up social networks between the Isaq clans (whom the regime identified with the insurgency) and other groups; marginalising clan elders; killing, imprisoning and forcing prominent people into exile. Large numbers of families suffered the loss of critical human capital, particularly as many male breadwinners fled, joined up, or were killed. The conflict left many physically disabled or marked by the trauma of the war. In its final phases, the civil war wrecked many of the area’s physical assets – destroying berkado, bombing city buildings and mining roads – and the forces looted homes and businesses of movable property. Hargeisa virtually emptied as people fled. In 1989, there were ghost towns across the north-west region (Lewis 1989). Around half a million people fled into Ethiopia, and others fled internally to rural areas or to other destinations abroad. The Habar Awal and the Arab clans from Hargeisa fled to Hartasheikh in Ethiopia, which housed 400,000 people in 1988 – then the largest camp in the world; the Garhajis and Habar Ja’lo from east of Hargeisa fled to the Aware camps, which sheltered some 120,000 people in 1988 (Ambroso 2002). In seeking safety, many families dispersed, with some who could afford to do so travelling to Europe or North America, where over the next few years they proved a critical

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source of support to relatives remaining behind in the refugee camps, as was the case with Mohamed’s family. The refugee population were by now thoroughly alienated by the regime, horrified and outraged by the devastation of Hargeisa and other urban centres, and many people overseas were sending large portions of their wages and women were selling their gold jewellery for the SNM.5 Refugees in Ethiopia shared their rations and other resources, and many signed up in the SNM as new recruits. After losing nearly half of its forces in the 1988 offensive, and with little money left, the central fund-raising mechanism finally disintegrated. The SNM had gone from being a multi-clan army to a federation of clan militias, with fighters from non-Isaq clans peeling off into other rebel movements (de Waal 1996; Compagnon 1998). Funds raised overseas were now directly channelled to clan militia. But, facing rising armed opposition in the south also, General Barre’s regime was losing control. The SNM reached Hargeisa in February 1991. Some people of the non-Isaq groups (Gadabursi, Dhulbahante and Gaboye) fled to Ethiopia, fearing reprisals, while other displaced people returned to a bombed-out and nearly deserted Hargeisa, soon to become the capital of the self-declared Republic of Somaliland. Secession had never been on the agenda of the SNM’s Central Committee, whose vision for Somalia involved a more democratic and devolved government, better human rights, a mixed economy and neutral foreign policy. Instead, a process of local political reconciliation led by the clan elders was initiated. But on 18 May, under popular pressure, and in the context of the political disintegration in the southern Somali regions, the SNM declared Somaliland’s independence. Thus began the ‘long transition’, chronicled in detail by Mark Bradbury (2008). The territory’s economic infrastructure and public services had been devastated and the SNM struggled with the transition from rebel movement to post-war administration. With the war over, diaspora military funding dried up (although people continued to support their families), leaving precious little revenue base. In 1992 tensions degenerated into a violent power struggle between groups within the SNM, which led to serious damage to Burao and Berbera, putting some of the newly returned to flight. Meanwhile clan elders began a process of complex shuttle diplomacy, successfully averting further violence. The pre-war marginalisation of the local elite and the institutionalisation of the informal economy under the social control of the clan elders were a crucial force for stability, accounting for some of the differences in the trajectory taken in Somaliland compared with the southern Somali regions, where, in contrast, the conflict built on a pre-war history of elite appropriation of state assets through centralised patronage networks and a longer and more effective marginalisation of traditional forms of social control (Reno 2003). The efforts of the clan elders

In a Precarious State | 59

culminated in the Borama conference of 1993 where 150 elders representing clans from all over Somaliland elected Mohammed Haji Ibrahim Egal as president and (with barely any support from the international community) laid the foundations of Somaliland’s new political system, with a lower house of representatives, initially with seats distributed by clan, and an upper house of traditional leaders or Guurti. Despite these promising developments, the UN, ‘rather than supporting the agreement, almost derailed the process by announcing its intentions to send military forces into Somaliland’ (Walker 1995: 168). Considerable progress was made in terms of demobilisation and disarmament, but the situation remained fragile. Civil strife broke out among Isaq clans in 1994–1996 when the Somaliland government, dominated by the Habar Awal, tried to take control of the airport from the Garhajis/Idegalle group. The conflict spread eastwards to Burao, where most of the population evacuated the town as the Habar Jaalo, siding with the Habar Awal, fought the Garhajis/Habar Yunis militia. These events displaced tens of thousands of civilians in and around Hargeisa. Some 180,000 people fled the affected areas to Ethiopia (Bradbury 2008). The refugee camps in Ethiopia stayed open and were still playing an important role in the regional economy, as a pole of transborder commerce and because aid intended for the camps circulated in Somaliland, helping to avert the nutritional crisis experienced by people in the southern Somali regions (Bradbury 2008). The diaspora sent money not only to support the factions, but also to support the refugees, helping them to deal with displacement by supplementing their rations. Local observers estimate that as much as 50–70 per cent of funding for this conflict came from the diaspora. The Idegalle and the Habar Yonis militia received funds from their clanspeople overseas, as did Egal’s forces and the Habar Awal and Habar Jalo militias that came to his aid. Egal also received substantial financial backing from influential Habar Awal/Saad Muse traders based in Djibouti. A seasoned local NGO worker who lived in Burao at the time explained that as soon as war seemed likely the opposing clans called on their people overseas for money to arm their respective clan militias.6 People readily responded, escalating the situation. However, as the conflict unfolded, with heavy losses and few sustained successes, people began to see the conflict as an internecine war from which they were gaining little. Civic leaders began sending formal letters and making telephone calls to request that diaspora communities stop sending money to the militias. A returnee who was living in the Netherlands in the mid-1990s described to me how the massive mobilisation of resources looked from the other end. There was enormous social pressure to assist. When he refused to get involved, ‘It was difficult, I was even threatened by my own clan. I had to convince my own clan: the bullets are used to kill your

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brothers, you are part of the crime.’7 Talking across clan lines was not easy: many Isaq Somalis overseas, once largely united behind the SNM struggle, had stopped talking to people from clans from the opposing side. But peace campaigners eventually managed to stop the flow of funds to the militias, persuading their fellow Somalilanders to give money to reconciliation initiatives instead. Thus the diaspora was engaged in two-way communication with home community leaders, and could be mobilised not only to provide resources for conflict but also to put the brakes on the process: as one MP put it, a ‘double-edged life.’8 Meanwhile, a series of consultations among Somalilanders in Europe and North America led to a conference in London in spring 1995, which resolved to send an independent mission to Somaliland. This peace committee met in Ethiopia in 1995 (UNDP 1996; CPD 1997). It was hoped that as a third party they might be able to broker a deal: ‘Members of the Peacemaking Council seem to appeal to the opposing sides partly because they are not tainted by the politics in “Somaliland” and partly because they are driven by genuine concern rather than political or economic gain’ (Farah 1995: 2). The committee, composed of mainly self-financed intellectuals, met with both sides several times in 1995–1996. By early 1996 the fighting seemed to have reached a stalemate, but the government and the opposition were failing to reach an agreement. The committee switched its efforts to focus on promoting local-level lineage-based political reconciliation processes, which gradually led to a series of local agreements which effectively brought hostilities to a close (CPD 1997). On the back of these efforts, the Hargeisa reconciliation conference in 1996–1997 was able to appoint a new government and re-elected Egal as president. The extent of the committee’s influence can be debated, but it indicated an interesting departure in Somaliland politics, with the diaspora trying to play the role of honest broker, prefiguring some more recent political developments that are explored later in this chapter. In sum, it would seem that people overseas have engaged differently in different phases of the conflict in Somaliland – playing a prominent role in sending money for weapons that fuelled escalation in the 1980s and mid-1990s, but largely withdrawing following the termination in 1991 and the stalemates between Isaq clans in the mid-1990s, and even perhaps magnifying local tendencies towards peace by putting resources towards reconciliation efforts. We shall return to the high politics of diaspora involvement at the end of the chapter, but to understand more fully the impact of the diaspora’s material engagements we must first explore the role that family remittances and investments came to play in the social and economic life of Hargeisa in this period.

In a Precarious State | 61

From Translocal to Transnational Families Nimo was in her sixties and lived in Hargeisa with a houseful of relatives. She was born in Hargeisa but lived in Mogadishu for many years until 1991 when she, her husband and children sought refuge in Hargeisa. Her husband later remarried, moved out and stopped supporting her, but she stayed on in the family home, which he owned. All her children were grown-up, and three sons lived with her, along with a daughter-in-law, grandchildren and a nephew. She had other sons and daughters elsewhere in Hargeisa, Mogadishu and Ethiopia. One son worked in the Middle East but was deported when his work permit ran out. Two of her daughters had married Somali British men and moved to the UK. Nimo’s eldest son used to provide for the household, working as a sheep and goat trader, but, when he was forced out of business in 2000 by the Saudi import ban on Somali livestock, they fell on hard times. He started a small grocery shop, but they were still struggling to make ends meet. Another son was a mason and could earn up to $10 a day on building sites, but he found it hard to get work. So Nimo telephoned her daughter in the UK, who had occasionally sent them money to ask if she could send something more regularly. She agreed to send $300 every other month. Eventually business picked up and the shop began to generate enough to feed the family, so by the time we met the remittances were used mainly to cover school fees, water, electricity and other expenses. Ali, Nimo’s son, sometimes spoke with his sisters on the phone and asked if they could come back, but they told him that they were worried that the peace might not last and pointed out that if they came back then the family would lose the extra income. The family is lucky, according to him, to have some women abroad: ‘Men invest more for themselves. They build houses or start businesses. A daughter is concerned for the daily life of her family.’9 When Nimo’s sons in Hargeisa wanted to get married, she asked her daughters for help – because it was important for the family’s reputation to put on a good wedding – and they provided most of the money. Nimo’s brother is a pastoralist and when there is drought and times are hard, he comes to see them in Hargeisa – he was there the day I met Nimo. The first thing he would do is make a telephone call to Nimo’s daughter in the UK to ask for help. If she sent some money (which she usually did) he would go back home. Ali explained that their rural relatives often turned up like this: I get asked frequently for help. They take my clothes. They say can you give us something. I say that I don’t have anything to give. They say, at least give me a T-shirt, trousers, boots… There is a culture that the people who come from the bush do not pay. Also, if you go there, you get good hospitality.10

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Nimo’s story illustrates two key points about family relations and remittances in Hargeisa. Extended family households are common, and in analysing how Somali people accumulate and distribute resources within the household, one is constantly drawn into wider translocal and transnational webs of family and sub-clan interdependencies, in ways that confound conventional notions of the household as a co-residing and co-sustaining nuclear family unit. Nimo’s wide-ranging family network, with relatives elsewhere in Hargeisa, in the rural hinterland, Mogadishu, the wider Horn of Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and multiple exchanges between these locations, is not unusual. Many urban families are routinely translocal with regular circulation of people, goods, money and hospitality between family members within Hargeisa and in the bush. Migration to urban centres has been a routine way to diversify family livelihood strategies. A group of brothers often organise themselves so that some work in town taking advantage of nonpastoralist work opportunities while others care for their joint livestock, and the reer miyi (rural-dwellers) expect to receive assistance in cash and kind from the reer magaal (town-dwellers) (Lewis 1994). Those earning a good income often invest in the construction of berkado to help the pastoralists (Gaani 2005). International migration was already common in the pre-war period, but conflict dramatically diversified the geography of migration and remitting, as illustrated in Table 3.1. In the late 1980s, the Gulf states provided more than 60 per cent of remittances to Somalia (Green and Jamal 1987). By 2005, around 80 per cent of the volume of remittances to the people we surveyed at money transfer outlets in Hargeisa came from Europe and North America, where asylum opportunities opened up for people fleeing the conflict; the remaining 20 per cent came mainly from old labour migration destinations in the Middle East.11 People in the global North live in dramatically different economic conditions from people in Hargeisa, and there is strong social pressure to pay some of the biil (regular expenses) of their family members. Family support arrangements are often fluid, changing with people’s circumstances. For example, like many city-dwellers, Hassan, a young teacher, was born in the bush but had been sent to school in Hargeisa, along with some of his brothers and sisters. Their other siblings were pastoralists in the rural area, and an older brother had a good job in a factory in the United Arab Emirates. This brother had long looked after the family ‘like a father’, sending them money and supporting Hassan through his education. But, now Hassan had found a job, he expected things to change. ‘Now that I work I said I will take the part of the family in the rural area, and my brother supports us here in the town.’12

In a Precarious State | 63 Table 3.1 Remittance patterns Country of residence of senders (%) UK 41 US 12 Saudi Arabia 7 UAE 7 Canada 6 Other 27 Relationship of sender to recipient (%) Brother 22 Sister 20 Son 12 Husband 11 Daughter 9 Paternal uncle 5 Other 21 Gender of sender and recipient (%) Men to women 36 Women to women 25 Men to men 22 Women to men 17 Source: Recipient Survey, September 2005. Note: This is based on the number of remittance pairings recorded in the survey. Relationships describe the relationship of the sender to the recipient, i.e. 11% of the relationships involved husbands sending money to their wives, etc. By volume of remittances, the proportions were very roughly similar.

A second point to note about Nimo’s experience is that it was her daughter who was providing the family’s main income: remitting is increasingly gender-balanced in nature. Although remittances are embedded in wider social relations – remitters may send money obtained from other relatives, and recipients often use the money for general household needs or pass money on to other relatives – the identity of the sender and initial recipient is significant: it reflects livelihood arrangements and family politics. For example, people often prefer to send money to female relatives because they are generally responsible for keeping the home, feeding the family and looking after the children. Some people overseas fear that male relatives will spend the money on khat or on marrying a second wife rather than prioritising the existing family’s needs. Many remittance relationships, shown in Table 3.1, conform to traditional expectations in Somali society, with husbands, sons and brothers abroad supporting wives, parents and siblings in Hargeisa. Expressing broader patterns of social solidarity, remitting also extends beyond the nuclear family, with other uncles – particularly paternal uncles – and aunts, nieces and nephews, grandparents, cousins, in-laws

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and even friends benefiting. However, the prominent role of women in sending money represents something of a new departure, mirroring wider trends in economic participation in Hargeisa. As Suaad Ibrahim Cabdi (2005) explains, in the pre-war period, women in general had less of an economic role outside the home, although some were active in petty trade, domestic work and the professions. But the violence reconfigured roles in many households, as women were left to fend for themselves (due to death, displacement and rising divorce, often attributed to low wages, joblessness and male khat use). Even for families who remained together, men’s usual occupations and role as breadwinners were disrupted. Those who fled to other countries often found themselves depending on humanitarian relief, and women were propelled into economic activity outside the home to support their families. While old roles were resumed within some families on return to Hargeisa, overall women remained more economically active outside the home than prior to the war. Wives and mothers entered the labour force, particularly as petty traders, to the point where today some say that, if a woman is working, her husband will take it for granted that she will feed the family. Meanwhile, conflict also changed the demography of emigration beyond the region, hitherto dominated by young men. The people seeking asylum in neighbouring countries and the global South included men and women, young and elderly, the married and the unmarried, parents and children. These changing family economics at home and migration patterns abroad were reflected in the demography of remitting. Table 3.1 shows that women are participating vigorously both as senders and recipients of remittances. During the course of the research, I was told several times that it is better to have daughters than sons overseas because they are ‘better remitters’. In fact, our survey suggested that men still dominate as remitters, representing about 60 per cent of the remitters, sending about 60 per cent of the volume, and sending more on average to individual recipients than women ($2,000 compared with $1,750). However, the relative feminisation of the remittance process is undoubtedly a significant social shift and a matter of much debate in Hargeisa. Remittances are putting money in the hands of a variety of female and junior relatives in households across Hargeisa. How does this affect traditional relations of power and resources? Does it empower women senders and recipients to make resource allocation decisions that were previously the preserve of their male relatives? To some extent, urban Somali women have long been expected to make decisions about money involved in the day-to-day running of their households, but women’s sphere of influence and decision-making tended to be confined to the home (Gardner and El Bushra 2004, see also Gamburd 2000). Thus the increasingly common situation in Hargeisa, where the husband is not working and where the household income

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comes from the woman’s earnings or remittances, represents a considerable departure from traditional arrangements and would in the past have been viewed as shameful. Many women recipients interviewed seemed to manage their household with very little input or influence from their husbands or sons. Several women told us that they set aside $20–50 each month for their husbands to chew khat, so that they do not get bothered for money. While for many this is a logical strategy, it has the drawback of compounding the growing detachment of unemployed men from the household economy. Meanwhile, many women remain sceptical about the extent to which women’s increased access to cash has given them a stronger voice in the wider community in Somaliland. Other research suggests women’s increased economic role has not yet helped them make many inroads into the male-dominated world of family and clan politics (Cabdi 2005). More generally, research on the impact of cash transfers to women in other contexts cautions against assuming that greater access to cash automatically translates into greater influence over male relatives’ behaviour – especially when strong cultural factors mitigate against this (Adato and Mindek 2000; Kabeer 2000).

Coping in a Tough Economy People began to return to Somaliland in the early 1990s. Following the Hargeisa Conference in 1997, UNHCR officially assisted 170,000 refugees to repatriate to Somaliland in 1997–2001, a large number destined for Hargeisa, many with few resources, relying initially on relatives and charity to survive (Ambroso 2002). Even when the distance is not great, returning can be a big step for refugees (Hammond 2006). Many refugees returning to Hargeisa had lost relatives in the war, leaving widows and widowers, orphans and childless parents. People generally had to abandon much of their financial and physical capital: homes, businesses, stock, household items and tools were left behind, looted and destroyed. In the refugee camps where they sought protection and assistance, they had survived by accessing food aid, mobilising remittances or starting small businesses, but few had much in terms of resources to help reestablish a life in Hargeisa. They were returning to a politically tense de facto republic, where they were to face economic challenges typical of post-conflict situations: land and roads that were extensively mined; the problem of disarming and demobilising thousands of men in the context of few economic opportunities; homelessness, squatting and disputes over property; destroyed urban infrastructure; and skeletal public services. For many interviewees, remittances helped them to make this transition. For example, Mohamed’s family received remittances in the camps and to help them to rehabilitate their home on return to Somaliland.

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The progressive repopulation of Hargeisa did not only involve people who had been in Ethiopia returning to Hargeisa. Over time, people also returned from the Middle East or further afield, usually with somewhat more wherewithal; some of the returning refugees were not originally from Hargeisa but were unable to return to their old livelihoods following years in refugee camps; people from the war-torn southern Somali regions sought refuge there; meanwhile, pastoralists continued to migrate to the city to find casual work. As Mohamed, with whose experience this chapter began, put it, ‘Remittances are the backbone of the Somaliland economy … If they were not sent people would not have survived like this.’13 While small gifts, medicine, goods and vehicles are occasionally shipped to relatives in Hargeisa, the bulk of remittances come in the form of cash contributions. Remittances have helped recipients cope with crises and meet their needs in a tough economy. In an urban economy assessment in 2003 some 20–35 per cent of the city’s households were regarded as poor or very poor, living on less than $3.75 a day (King 2003). Evidence from other contexts suggests that at times of crisis remittances can smooth recipient households’ income and consumption, and enable people to preserve crisis-sensitive assets such as livestock (Lucas and Stark 1985; Schrieder and Knerr 2000; Gubert 2002). While a comprehensive assessment has not been possible, there are strong signs that remittances may respond to crises in Hargeisa. Faced with the personal crises of family illness, death and divorce, people affected often had little to fall back on other than their social networks for assistance. Money transfer enterprises verify that the flow of remittances increased during periods of economic strife, as people sought assistance from relatives overseas (Gaani 2005). Key economic crunch points included trade restrictions: intermittent restrictions on trade with Ethiopia and Djibouti, and most importantly the ban on Somali livestock imports to Saudi Arabia in 1998–1999 and Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states from 2000 due to Rift Valley fever. Nimo’s family was not alone in suffering from the effect of the Somali livestock ban and turning to relatives overseas for help. Revenues generated from livestock sales do not just accrue to producers, but also to numerous intermediaries and associated industries based in urban areas. The ban had repercussions on many families in Hargeisa – and throughout the Somali regions. All the money transfer companies in Hargeisa reported increased volumes of remittances following the livestock export ban.14 Over 40 per cent of migrants remitting to the Hargeisa sample began sending money in the period 2000–2003: this might be explained by the timing of emigration and settlement processes, but it also seems likely that the livestock import ban prompted requests for assistance. Other economic crunch points were dramatic exchange rate depreciations (the value of the Somali shilling against the dollar nearly halved in 1998–2003),

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increasing the cost of imported food and other goods. This posed a particular problem for households whose local wages or profits did not keep pace, but those receiving dollar-denominated remittances were relatively immune. However, while crises can trigger migration and remittances, in both Mohamed and Nimo’s cases, as for many others, they continued to receive remittances long after the initial reason for sending them ceased to apply. It can be difficult for expatriates, having proved that they are able to muster the money on a monthly basis, to justify subsequently withdrawing the support. Remittances did not just facilitate return and help people to weather crises, they also become a normal way of life in some families struggling to re-establish themselves and get on in the postconflict economy. The intense monthly rhythm continues fairly constantly throughout the year, with some variations. Most significantly, during the fasting month of Ramadan and at the Eid celebrations that follow it, money transfer operators estimate that their volumes increase by 10–20 per cent during this period as people overseas direct their obligatory sako (zakat, or alms), representing 2.5 per cent of one’s assets above a minimum threshold, to needy relatives and friends in Somaliland (Cabdi 2005).15 Meanwhile, there are also some outbound transfers: I met some better-off people in Hargeisa who support adult children abroad – studying in Pakistan, Ethiopia and Kenya, or stranded on the way to Europe. Figure 3.1 shows the amounts received by our survey respondents in the previous year. Survey respondents received an average of $190 per month in the previous year – roughly enough to provide for a family in Hargeisa at the time. The timing of the survey at the end of the month 25% 20% 15% 10%

$5000 +

$4500-4999

$4000-4499

$3500-3999

$3000-3499

$2500-2999

$2000-2499

$1500-1999

$1000-1499

$500-999

0%

$0-499

5%

Figure 3.1 Remittances received in previous 12 months by individual respondents Source: Recipient Survey September 2005

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likely led to an over-sampling of people who received remittances on a monthly basis – who accounted for over three-quarters of respondents. One-quarter of respondents reported that another member of their household also received remittances,16 bringing average estimated household remittances to around $215 per month. Some 60 per cent received under $200 per month on average.17 The significance of remittances in recipients’ livelihoods varies. For some interviewees, accessing remittances was one in a portfolio of livelihood strategies. This was the situation, for example for Ubax, a dynamic woman in her late forties, living with her husband and six of her children. Originally from Hargeisa, she used to live in Mogadishu, but moved to Hargeisa in 1991 after one of her daughters was shot dead. She has many siblings and half-siblings in Hargeisa and the surrounding rural areas and two brothers in the UK (her father had several wives). When they first arrived in Hargeisa, the family survived by her making and selling sweets outside the Madrassa. Then she got on an NGO training scheme and became a health worker. Her wages were fixed by the government several years previously at SlSh 240,000 per month, initially worth around $70, but by the time we first met, they were worth half that. The rent of their house was $100 per month and her husband was jobless. To supplement her wages, she ran a small pharmacy business, and also performed female circumcisions and delivered babies. When money was tight she could also earn money doing polio vaccinations, attending or giving health seminars and selling headscarves with her daughters. Her brothers in the UK sent $100 each month to pay for the children’s 200 Male Female 150

100

50

Figure 3.2 Recipients’ work type or reason not working by gender Source: Recipient Survey September 2005

Do not need to work

To elderly or ill

Student

Looking after family / home

Looking for work

Self-employed

Casual work

Regular employment

0

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education: one son attended Hargeisa University and two others attended a private secondary school. Her household was comfortably-off: her rural siblings often came to her for help when they were sick or needed help. Ubax’s whirl of multiple activities and connections is similar to that of many people – particularly women – trying to make a living in the postwar period. Nimo’s family also had other sources of income from the shop and the second son’s intermittent masonry work. In both these families, remittances had been ear marked for particular purposes. In contrast, other families relied nearly entirely on remittances. Figure 3.2 shows the employment situation of recipients or the main reason they were not working. Overall, just under half the recipients we surveyed said that their household had some other source of income from employment, self-employment and business or other assets, but the majority said that their household had no other source of cash income.18 This kind of reliance on remittances as a regular livelihood strategy is the bugbear of more structuralist perspectives on migration–development linkages, which view it as a ‘dependency syndrome’, damaging at both the micro and macro levels (Massey et al. 1998). This view resonates with the debates on aid (and welfare) dependency, revealing many normative assumptions about the social construction of families and appropriate individual lifestyles, as well as macro-level development paths (Harvey and Lind 2005). It is a topic of lively debate in Hargeisa. To understand what seem to be high levels of reliance on remitting, we have to take into account the routine nature of local, translocal and transnational familial interdependencies in Somali families. Even before the war, given the dire state of the economy, it was not uncommon for quite large family networks to rely on a single cash earner (Simons 1995). To a degree, reliance on family assistance is entirely normal within Somali society – and accounts for a high level of resilience over years of strife. The following viewpoint was typical: ‘When you have a choice you can talk about dependency. But when there is such high unemployment, you can’t blame people for not finding a job.’19 Urban unemployment in Somaliland was estimated at around 40 per cent in 2004 (APD 2004a). Indeed, it seems that the Hargeisa labour market would be incapable of absorbing all those without work who depend on remittances. Even when not directly invested, remittances can indirectly foster local livelihoods. As Nimo’s case illustrated, remittances can help a family to manage during adverse economic conditions – when business is bad and unemployment high – preventing them from eating into their business capital. Moreover, people are more likely to rely on family assistance at particular stages of the life cycle. The survey showed that remittances are often directed precisely towards those people who are not conventionally expected to be economically active – the elderly, married women with lots of children, and so on. For example, some 40 per cent of recipients

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surveyed were women who were not working because they were occupied looking after children. To pick up on Mohamed’s family situation, outlined at the beginning of this chapter, his widowed mother was able to rely on her older children overseas for assistance while her other children were young. But discussions with him showed a strong expectation that now he and his younger sisters were grown up they would get married or find a job: as he put it, ‘If I have a job I will feed the rest of the family and those in the diaspora will have a rest for a while … They may need a rest as they have been collecting and sending money for a long time! … They have been supporting the family for at least fifteen years and now everything has been rehabilitated.’ By the time I met him again in 2007, he was working for an NGO and was supporting his mother. It is important to emphasise that remittances are not always a source of income that can be relied on. When I talked with Suaad, the issue of remittances was very much on her mind. She, her husband and most of their children returned to Hargeisa in the mid-1990s after over twenty years living in the Middle East, because her husband lost his work permit. She missed her friends, and her husband died soon after they returned. She was living with her adult children, who were all jobless. The young men spent their time chewing khat, sleeping and hanging out with friends and the girls helped her around the house. Her eldest son worked in the Middle East and usually sent $300, sometimes more, each month, on which Suaad’s household depended entirely. However, when we spoke, he had not sent money for two months, and she did not know why. She had tried several times to reach him on the phone without success, although friends told her he was not sick. The family were just about managing because their local shopkeeper, with whom they usually left their money for safe keeping, had extended more credit. She did not know what they would do if her son stopped sending them money permanently. Suaad’s eldest daughter was engaged to a Dutch Somali man who already had a wife in the Netherlands – she hoped that if she had a baby with him he would support her, but so far he had only sent money once, at Eid. Some people in Hargeisa expressed concern that the inflation of bride price and anticipation of remittances were encouraging some women and their families to hold out for an expatriate husband, but that relationships with men based overseas were often in reality rather unstable and insecure – this may well have been the situation emerging for Suaad’s daughter.20 Suaad’s experience illustrates that reliance on remittances can be a far from cosy, but, in fact, a rather precarious, existence. This raises an interesting issue: a livelihood is generally seen as sustainable when it ‘can cope and recover from stresses and shocks and maintain or enhance its capability and assets both now and in the future’ (DFID 1999: 1). Although remittances clearly responded to crises experienced by recipients in many

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instances, often the transfers left people no more capable of dealing with future crises themselves than they were before. This is less likely to be the case when diaspora capital is invested in local livelihoods.

Investing Diaspora Capital Remittances in Hargeisa were invested in five key ways. First, in business: while relatively few survey respondents in Hargeisa said that they had used remittances to invest in business in the previous year, but business finance is usually sent in lump sums or large instalments, and so would be less likely to be captured in our survey data which focused only on the previous year. For example, Amran had built up a small wholesale business with the help of money from her daughter overseas. Her husband was an SNM fighter and was killed in 1991. She saved up $300 by preparing and selling food in the Ethiopian refugee camp and used it to buy clothes, which she sold on the street and to shopkeepers in Hargeisa. Initially she struggled to make ends meet but later the business took off, largely thanks to a daughter overseas, who sent some money which allowed her to open her own wholesale store. She began buying clothes from agents in China and Dubai and since then things had gone well and she was able to provide for a houseful of teenage children and other relatives. She never went to school but had a sharp business mind which was important for managing exchange rates and customer credit. She was able to get by spending about $100 a month on biil, $50 on education and something each month on paying off debts, and she was in a hagbaad (rotating saving system) with other women in the market. She had siblings overseas but did not want to ask them for help – her daughter would send $200 or so now and again if she needed it. Small and medium-sized trading investments like Amran’s are typical. Remittance recipients’ investments include small wholesale and retail food and clothes trade, import–export and taxi, bus or trucking businesses. This reflects the urban economy as a whole: relatively few people in Hargeisa engage in agricultural or livestock activities, and manufacturing remains limited. Many investments are made primarily in conjunction with family members in Hargeisa in order to provide them with an alternative livelihood strategy, but some investments are made on the migrant’s own behalf. For example, Somalis overseas have also been buying shares in the larger commercial enterprises in Somaliland – Telesom has over 600 shareholders, and it is estimated that one-third of share capital is held by Somalis overseas.21 While the relative stability of the city in recent years tends to encourage investment in business, the poor nature of Somaliland’s

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physical infrastructure (particularly transport, roads and energy), regulatory infrastructure (including the poor regulation of particular sectors and cumbersome procedures for opening businesses) and financial infrastructure (there are efficient money transfer facilities, which also unofficially offer deposit accounts, but people must go through informal channels for credit and insurance) constrains would-be entrepreneurs (APD 2004b). The situation of expatriates and their families also affects the propensity for business investment. Diaspora poverty can constrain business investment – many of those sending remittances simply cannot afford to send large enough sums to make a substantial business investment. There is the question of mutual expectations: recipients are unlikely to invest remittances when they are struggling to meet basic needs, and their propensity to invest remittances in business activities may be greater if they view the funds as unlikely to continue in the future or if the funds are sent for that specific purpose. Some also argue that business investment is also hindered by the tension between accumulation and the redistributive logic of Somali clanship: to navigate this without either going under or alienating people (and consequently probably going under) requires considerable skill. Businesspeople often find that their entire sub-clan expects a piece of the action – at least some kind of dillaal or commission for referring people.22 Against this background, it often seems easier to people overseas to invest in land and property than in production or trade in Hargeisa. Much of the city had been destroyed during the war – from private homes, to businesses, schools and government buildings. In 1993, and again after 1997, increased public confidence and security ‘encouraged a surge in physical reconstruction: newly built homes began to rise above the rubble and new companies opened for business’ (ICG 2003: 10). Relatives overseas were called on to send money to help rebuild family homes that were destroyed in the war or to build new ones – literally putting a roof – or a better roof – over their heads. The importance of this seems to have been underestimated in the migration–development literature, which has tended to dismiss diaspora investment in housing as excessive and wasteful – despite the evidence relating decent housing to health and well-being, particularly at the more modest end of the housing spectrum. Alternatively, diaspora-built property can be rented out to provide a source of income for relatives, which may mean that the migrant can stop remitting. Moreover, as time went on, people living overseas increasingly invested in land and property on their own behalf. With prices rising, property has been a profitable investment in recent years. In 2002 land on the outskirts near the airport and the Ambassador Hotel was reportedly worth $2,500 per plot but by 2007 this had risen to $6,500.23 For many Somalis who see earning interest as haram, investing in property is a profitable way of saving and accumulating funds. New areas of the city

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have sprung up, with names reflecting their financial provenance: ‘half London’, ‘New York’, ‘Berlin’, and so on (Hansen 2006). Those with relatives in Hargeisa may involve them as project managers, rent collectors, caretakers and house-sitters. For example, Jawahir became a prosperous landlady thanks to her siblings overseas.24 In her fifties, she was living with her husband, a businessman, ten or so children and various other relatives. Before the war she lived in Mogadishu but fled in 1991 to Hargeisa. Her eight older siblings had all gone overseas and jointly they sent her $1,800 each month, a considerable sum by local standards. With this money, she provided for her household, looked after the houses that her siblings had built with her assistance, ensured that the rent was collected and doled out assistance to her sub-clan in Somaliland. It can be difficult to rent out these large homes, but Jawahir had been successful in finding tenants for her family’s properties. The most obvious candidates are international NGOs and diaspora families retracing their roots or experimenting with living in Hargeisa. But overseas owners without someone working on their behalf in Hargeisa often end up paying a watchman $100 to look after an empty house. The fact that some are not too bothered about this highlights a further motivation for property investment. As in other countries, building a nice villa has a satisfying symbolic value, signalling ongoing engagement with the country of origin, which can help maintain good social relations in anticipation of eventual return, and is often a first step in a broader series of homeland-oriented investments (Massey et al. 1998; Osili 2005). It is important to see the recirculation of remittances through social networks also as a form of investment, particularly in the context of an uncertain economic climate. Gifts and obligations built up during the good times can form the basis of claims for assistance in the bad times. These forms of solidarity are crucial to someone’s social standing – as the Somali proverb goes, Nin boqol ari leh reerkiisana xoolo la’hiyiin waa faqri (The man who owns 100 goats, but his relatives have nothing, is poor). As Bebbington writes regarding livelihood decisions, ‘people’s assets are not merely means through which they make a living: they also give meaning to the person’s world’ (Bebbington 1999: 2022). Education is another important area of investment. While earlier remittance studies dismissed spending on education as a form of consumption, it is increasingly acknowledged that not only is education of intrinsic social value but it can also improve long-term economic prospects (Durand et al. 1996). The literacy and primary school enrolment rates in the Somali regions are among the worst in the world. The public education system was destroyed: teachers and students fled, schools were looted and often occupied by displaced people. However, the Somaliland Ministry of Education, NGOs and the private sector have made considerable progress in expanding education provision in Hargeisa since

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1993. Primary school enrolment reached 37 per cent in Somaliland as a whole by 2004 (UNICEF 2004). Access to formal education for children and young people depends on being able to afford the direct costs (for example public school parental contributions or private school fees, educational materials, transport) and the indirect costs of education (including opportunity costs of the child not working, in or outside the home). In Hargeisa, education is given a high priority in remittance recipient families and often specifically encouraged by migrants. As a crude indication, of more than 1,000 children aged six to fifteen years old living in recipients’ households, over 80 per cent were in school – over double the average primary school enrolment in Somaliland as whole. Nearly two-thirds of recipients surveyed said that some of their remittances were used for education, and teachers in all types of educational institutions notice the impact of remittances on their students’ families. Monthly transfers are sometimes fixed or increased to accommodate educational expenses. Remittances seem to be particularly significant in the participation of students from middle-income families in post-school education. Of eighty tertiary education students included in an ad hoc survey in classrooms and libraries, around a quarter said that their families received remittances regularly and another quarter said that they receive money sometimes (Lindley 2008). Administrators at the university noticed that of the 30 per cent of tuition fees paid on time in 2004–2005, most came from students receiving remittances and that sometimes students dropped out because these remittances decreased or stopped; for example, because their relative abroad lost a job or got married and had children. The return of relatively moneyed diaspora families and the flows of remittances to Hargeisa also stimulated demand for private education, encouraging providers offering smaller class sizes and English- or Arabic-medium teaching for higher fees (Lindley 2008). One young woman suggested that, in the context of high unemployment, taking these courses is ‘Better than children sitting around… doing nothing. When they see that their life is not going anywhere they just stop hoping for something to happen… if you see your son in private school you still have hope in him.’25 It can also be a way to keep one’s children at home. Coming full circle, emigration represents another key investment of diaspora resources. Given the challenges of life in Hargeisa, in the context of high unemployment, the clan-based structuring of labour market opportunities, widespread poverty and chronic political uncertainty, the emigration pressure is huge. The monthly infusion of remittances in the city is a potent encouragement. People’s transnationalised family networks facilitate migration. Thus many regional refugees who returned to Somaliland – as in Afghanistan, El Salvador, Kosovo and elsewhere – have subsequently re-migrated. Young people are often sponsored by

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relatives to study elsewhere in Africa, the Middle East or Asia: I met people with young relatives living as students in Ethiopia, Djibouti, Sudan, South Africa, Yemen, Pakistan, India and Malaysia. There are still some labour opportunities in the Middle East. And some embark on tahriib – long and difficult journeys to Europe. From Hargeisa, a common route is overland via Addis Ababa, through Sudan to Libya, where, if they avoid interception by the Libyan police, they reach the coast and board a boat for Malta or Italy. It is a risky process that causes parents many sleepless nights: young people from Hargeisa have drowned in the Red Sea and the Mediterranean in recent years. Kos and her husband, for example, had been depending on rather intermittent remittances from her brother-in-law and had just saved enough to open a clothes shop, when suddenly her son disappeared. He had finished school but was jobless, frustrated and at a difficult age – she was imagining all sorts of awful things had happened. After weeks of worry, she finally heard from him. He was in Libya trying to go to Europe and had no money. They were relieved to hear he was OK and sent him money for a place on a smuggler’s boat to Malta, putting paid to their business plans. But there are many permutations and people often travel complicated jigsaw routes to circumvent immigration controls. For example, Hodan, a shopkeeper in her sixties, sent her daughter out in 2000, and she got stuck in the Middle East, where ‘She became another burden to me. I put everything on hold until I got her to somewhere.’26 Eventually, by a circuitous route, she reached one of the Eastern European states that had recently acceded to the European Union, where she got a passport, found a job and started saving to move to the UK, sometimes sending money to help her mum pay off her debts. Hodan was very satisfied with her daughter’s move and was trying to smuggle her youngest son via Libya to join her. She said she was even prepared to risk her business again to finance the journey if necessary: ‘When the country is on the poverty line, sending a child abroad is like an investment.’27

Following the Money into the Wider Community Considering how remittances are used by recipients already prompts questions and provides some clues about the role of these funds in the wider community. Each month the city receives an infusion of cash from its diaspora. There are no official figures for remittances to Hargeisa, and making plausible estimates is hard, given the paucity of quantitative data. If we assumed – conservatively – that a quarter of the city’s households receive family remittances of $200 a month, it would mean that more than $42 million was flowing to Hargeisa each year.28 Money transfer entrepreneurs’ estimates of money coming in from the diaspora (as

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opposed to the money that they relay for aid agencies and traders) are wide-ranging. In 2003, some estimated that the city received around $60 million a year in remittances (King 2003). In 2007, money transfer entrepreneurs’ estimates of diaspora transfers to Hargeisa ranged up to $280 million per year, compared with estimates of as much as $700 million to Somaliland in general.29 Regardless of the exact volume, remittances have important effects in the wider community. Many suggest that inequality is on the rise in Hargeisa, partly fuelled by diasporic return and remitting. At one end of the social spectrum there are destitute pastoralists, impoverished returnees from Ethiopia, minority groups and displaced people from the southern Somali regions seeking refuge in Somaliland. At the other end there is the Somaliland political elite, the heads of successful business empires and moneyed returnees from the global North. The yawning gap between rich and poor is impressed on the visitor by the sight throughout the city of spanking new villas with nomadic tents or makeshift shelters pitched in the shade of their walls. Against this background, Khalid Medani’s survey (2000) of urban residential areas and the slum settlements suggest that 39 per cent of households in urban Hargeisa received remittances, and for some 23 per cent this represented their main source of income. The figures for the slum settlements were different, suggesting that only 5 per cent received remittances as their main source of income. Recipients tend to fall into the middle-income, rather than poorer categories. Even before counting any other sources of income, the average remittance of around $200 (the average receipt in our survey) was generally seen at the time as enough to meet the living expenses of an average Hargeisa household.30 In comparison, unskilled casual workers were earning around 25,000 Somaliland shillings (around $4) for a day’s work, but many were not able to find work every day. Meanwhile, all the Isaq clans have vigorous migration patterns and no particular Isaq clan in Hargeisa seems to have a monopoly on remittances (Medani 2000), although some suggest that the Habar Awal have particularly vigorous remittance patterns. The Darod/Dhulbahante and Warsengeli are fewer in number in Hargeisa, but also have strong migration and remittance patterns; the Dir/Gadabursi and the Isse and minority groups were more likely to stay put, a fact attributed to more sedentary customs, lack of an existing overseas community, position under Barre’s regime and resource constraints. However, the effects of remittances are, of course, not limited to the recipient families, but ripple out into the wider community as the funds are recirculated through social networks and market relations. The people who receive remittances tend to recirculate some of the income through their social networks. Although social networks are now considered key in the facilitation of migration and the mobilisation of remittances, they rarely feature in analyses of the impact of remittances. But recipients in

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Photo 3.1 Hargeisa market scene Credit: Dominik Helling

Photo 3.2 Hargeisa street scene Credit: Liba Taylor

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Hargeisa often become a hub of cash assistance and hospitality for the extended family, both those in town and those in the rural hinterland. Some 15 per cent of recipients surveyed spent some of their remittances on gifts to family, neighbours and friends locally. This likely underrepresents the degree to which remittances are indirectly redistributed, as this often occurs in informal, commonplace ways. Medani’s survey suggested that around half the urban households in Hargeisa, excluding those in the slums, supported relations in rural areas with monthly contributions of $10–100. Sharing food with poorer relatives and neighbours – indeed, with anyone who turns up around lunchtime – is common. Men flush with their brother’s generosity at the beginning of the month will often buy khat for their friends – although by the end of the month they may be looking for someone to return the favour. Participating in the religious and social practices of shaxaad (friendly gifts), sako (zakat or compulsory alms), sadaka (voluntary alms) and qaaraan (clan-based collections), better-off residents recirculate income through their social networks. In this sense, remittances support existing social buffers: as money is drawn from the diaspora to Hargeisa, so money and resources are drawn from better-off to poorer households and from urban to rural households. It is now well recognised that consumption spending of remittances can also have useful second-round effects. In the 1990s, Durand et al. (1996) turned the tide in academic thinking, finding that Mexican ‘migradollars’ spent on consumption significantly increased the demand for goods and services, increasing production, employment and national income. In Hargeisa, remittances clearly affect households’ purchasing power, with ramifications in the local economy. Remittance spending buoys demand for locally produced goods, including milk, meat, charcoal, fruit and vegetables. The city’s growing population and the changing eating habits of urbanised Somalilanders and returnees from the diaspora are tipped to create greater incentives for the intensification of livestock production, particularly dairy and poultry, in peri-urban areas and more fertile rangelands, which may begin to foster additional investments in the agro-industry (UN 2007a). However, Somaliland imports much of its food – key items like rice, pasta, sugar, cooking oil, flour, Ethiopian khat – as well as bagaash (bundles of consumer goods such as sandals, cigarettes, clothes), vehicles, space parts, construction materials, electronic items and petrol (APD 2004b). Purchasing these goods does not encourage local production, thus re-exporting some of the potential gains of remittances, but it does generate opportunities for those involved in the import trade, tax on which represents a major source of revenue for the government. Remittances also increase demand for services. By 2004 there were at least seventeen money transfer and exchange companies in the city:

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remittances form a major part of their business, alongside trade and aid transfers (Somaliland Chamber of Commerce 2004). Money transfer outlets across the city relay cash in a matter of hours to and from Addis, Mogadishu, Nairobi, London, Dubai, China and elsewhere. Dahabshiil dominates: in 1996 the head office moved to Hargeisa and the company expanded into other Somali regions, to become the largest Somali money transmitter – some estimate it holds a 60 per cent market share. The four main telecommunications companies also rely in part on the money pumped into the economy by remittances. One telephone operator in Somaliland in the early 2000s estimated that some 80 per cent of his customers were private individuals calling family overseas, with the remainder split between businesspeople and international NGO staff (Marchal 2002). Telesom’s management explained that when they are deciding whether to extend services to a particular location, in their feasibility study the key indicators are the amount of remittances that the local xawilaad agent pays out (as well as the level of khat use).31 They judge that if a good proportion of the people are receiving $100–200 each month in remittances then they may be able to afford to spend $5–10 on phonecalls. The financial intermediation of remittances is a crucial part of the picture of how they enter the wider economy. The pre-war formal financial sector which served only a privileged urban minority and was riddled with corruption collapsed as Barre’s regime crumbled (Omer 2002). Informal financial mechanisms abound, as people resort to long-standing traditional practices for keeping money safe, making savings, obtaining credit and insurance: for example, depositing money with shopkeepers; calling on richer clanspeople or local business notables for loans; using hagbaad, a rotating savings/credit system (particularly popular with women); and participating in the dia (clan compensation) system as a form of insurance. But these informal practices are limited in terms of size and deeply embedded in sub-clan, neighbourhood or elite networks. Beyond this, some money transmitters also offer limited banking services and in exchange for a fee will open a non-interest-bearing deposit account (Dahabshiil, for example, has several thousand account holders in Hargeisa), but, while willing to hold funds for remittance recipients and others, these companies have been unwilling to establish credit programmes without a solid political and legal framework. The Private Banking Law has been much delayed and meanwhile the Central Bank has reprimanded money transmitters for offering banking services that they are not authorised to provide. The lack of effective financial intermediation of remittances prevents the maximisation of their potential benefits: ‘To expect migrants to be proficient at turning savings into production is unrealistic. Migration is likely to have a larger effect on development where local institutions exist to gather savings by migrant households and make them available to local producers – that is, where migrants do not have to play simultaneous roles

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as workers, savers, investors, and producers’ (Massey et al. 1998: 261). In Somaliland – as in Palestine, Kosovo and other territories with uncertain political status (see Gillespie et al. 2001; ESI 2005) – foreign investment steers clear, most aid is directed through NGOs and government capacity remains limited. In such contexts, diaspora investment can play a particularly critical role. The diaspora-fuelled boom in the construction industry has been particularly important: it has been visibly changing the geography of the city, as the central areas become increasingly built up and the city expands outwards. Housing investments have often been dismissed in migration–development literature as a very poor second for investment in productive and trading enterprises – indeed, many studies classify housing as a form of consumption rather than investment (Massey et al. 1998). A common concern is that ‘Remittances flowing to emigration areas often end up producing… “private affluence and public squalor” or new homes reachable only over dirt roads’ (Widgren and Martin 2002: 223). Certainly, Hargeisa has its share of both the dirt roads and empty dream homes tucked away in its outskirts. Diaspora interest in property has undoubtedly pushed up land prices. In a way typical of many conflictaffected settings, Hargeisa has seen a lot of squatting and land-grabbing since the war – as the proverb goes, Ku qabso ku qadi meyside – Make a claim, albeit false, and you will end up gaining something (Abdi et al. 2008: 5). Although this has slowed with the introduction of land registration systems, there are still regular disagreements over plots of land, which can turn violent and require pay-offs, police intervention or clan mediation. The lack of local production facilities means that a large portion of the funds remitted are spent on importing construction materials from the Gulf, a ‘leakage’ that reduces the potential local impact, and the labour opportunities offered by the construction industry may have accelerated urbanisation and swelled the population of poor workers. However, it seems rather harsh to dismiss the role of housing investment in the economic development of Hargeisa. Set in a context where perhaps 70 per cent of the city’s buildings were destroyed in the late 1980s, rebuilding homes played an important role in the massive task of repairing the physical fabric of the city. Many of the people receiving remittances built modest dwellings and business premises that helped them to re-establish themselves on their return. The construction trade also generates casual employment for city-dwellers: by 2003, there were twelve construction companies in Hargeisa, and several brick-making businesses, employing around 8,500 people (Hargeisa Municipality 2003; King 2003). The manager of one of the major construction companies in Hargeisa claimed that 75 per cent of the houses his company builds are for the diaspora.32 Construction has become such a major employer that declines – whether due to a sag in diaspora investment, or to periodic

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bans imposed by the government – are viewed as a serious economic threat (King 2003). Finally, it is worth bearing in mind that a focus on housing investments is almost inevitable in contexts of high inflation and economic uncertainty, and can be the first stage in a broader investment relationship with countries of origin (Massey et al. 1998; Osili 2005).

The Diaspora in Post-Conflict Politics and Development The role of the diaspora is not limited to the city’s economic and social life: since 1997, expatriates have been involved in processes of political change and development in Hargeisa and Somaliland more broadly. Many have become directly involved in Somaliland politics, and their relative material wealth has allowed them to exert considerable influence. As former Foreign Minister Edna Adan Ismail put it, ‘The diaspora has brought Somaliland to where it is today.’33 Migration is ingrained in the lives of the political elite: many of the most influential people in Somaliland have lived in the Middle East, Europe or North America for a period of time and have dual citizenship. In one busy government office I visited, those gathered declared, ‘We are all diaspora here!’34 The head of the Guurti, a third of the ministers in the twenty-nine-strong cabinet, two of the three heads of political parties and many of the MPs elected to the House of Representatives can be classified as diaspora returnees (Healy and Sheikh 2009). According to one NGO worker, ‘The diaspora is very influential. They are richer than local people and money talks. They come with their foreign passports and get government jobs.’35 Hansen (2006) has dubbed this Somaliland’s ‘transnational aristocracy’, also including those who return to good jobs with international NGOs and to start profitable businesses with cash raised overseas. The fact that the diaspora has supplied so many of Somaliland’s political protagonists has complex implications. Practically, it means that on numerous occasions, parliamentary business has been suspended because too many legislators were abroad which meant that there was a lack of a quorum (Hammond 2009). Some suggest that having second citizenship gives politicians a getout clause in case they get disillusioned or the going gets tough – that they are not fully committed to life in Somaliland. In a more positive light, diaspora politicians are sometimes viewed as less corrupt – less in it for the money and more for the change-making – precisely because they have chosen Somaliland politics despite having the possibility of pursuing more lucrative careers overseas. Some suggest that time overseas encourages particular attitudes, for example (depending on the destination) sympathy with human rights principles, Islamist currents, business-friendly approaches or emphasis on public services. The example of Faysal Ali Waraabe, leader of the third political party, UCID,36

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who after time in Finland has argued in favour of the establishment of a Scandinavian-inspired democratic socialism, is often cited in this connection (Hammond 2009). But overall it is rather hard to discern any systematic differences in political attitudes and behaviour of those returning from different overseas destinations and ‘local’ politicians. Apart from returning to Somaliland to take part in politics, people overseas have also provided financial support for candidates in the elections that have taken place in Somaliland. The three main political parties in Somaliland, initially formed to contest the 2002 local elections, have all sought finance abroad as well as locally. In the presidential elections of 2003: The real campaign … was less about getting out the message than raking in the money. Of the three, Kulmiye [the main opposition party] was the undisputed fund raising champion, its international offices reportedly attracting hundreds of thousands of dollars from supporters in the diaspora. UDUB [the ruling party] tried to match Kulmiye’s success, sending officials abroad to drum up support, but they were unable to reproduce Kulmiye’s results. What UDUB lacked in private donations, it made up for with public funds and assets – in direct contravention of the Political Parties Act. (ICG 2003: 22) In the 2005 parliamentary elections, with the political parties offering little assistance, prospective MPs had to raise their own funds to meet the costs of providing transport for voters, organising rallies, handing out khat at meetings, securing the support of key opinion-makers, advertising and Tshirts and so on. It is widely claimed that some candidates spent as much as US$200,000 on their campaign, although estimates of typical costs ranged around $50,000. Clearly, this required the kind of personal wealth or resources which excluded many from participating in the political process, and put candidates with supportive overseas contacts at a relative advantage (Abokor and Kibble 2005). Politicians encouraged their friends abroad to exert their influence on particular clan lineages of whose vote they were uncertain. Because of this, it is said that some candidates prefer summer elections, when the Somali Europeans and North Americans visit on holiday: ‘They pay the biil of families. If he says we belong to that party 37 they will listen to him.’ Expatriates are still seen primarily as a source of finance or influence rather than actual votes: although members of the ‘Somaliland clans’ (Isaq, Gadabursi, Isse, Dhulbahante, Warsengeli) living abroad are technically citizens they are not able to vote, unless they both 38 registered locally to vote and are present on election day. People overseas have also been involved in Somaliland’s political affairs through diaspora lobby groups formed to promote Somaliland’s interests in abroad and contribute to political development in Somaliland.

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There is a vocal lobby for recognition of Somaliland as an independent state, particularly in the UK, where some people turn out regularly for speaker and fund-raising events, intermittent demonstrations, letterwriting campaigns and the All-Parliamentary Group on Somaliland. For many, the shared homeland is no longer Somalia but Somaliland, and accordingly they identify themselves as the Somaliland diaspora. However, there is some debate about the extent to which real political engagement reaches beyond the more elite sections of the overseas community (Kleist and Hansen 2007). The pro-recognition lobby abroad is also drawn sometimes into internal affairs. Egal had been arguing since 1999 that the only way to get international recognition for Somaliland’s de facto state was to move towards multiparty democracy (Bradbury et al. 2003). While this has attracted positive interest from some foreign affairs ministries, it means that any anti-democratic moves in Hargeisa complicate the task of those campaigning for recognition overseas. Although there is an element of self-censorship in the cause of what many of those involved see as the overriding goal of recognition, in recent years Somaliland diaspora groups have begun to give voice to criticism about what they see as negative developments in Hargeisa, taking more of a monitoring or advocacy role. For example, after a ‘goodwill mission’ in 2006, the US-based Somaliland Policy and Reconstruction Institute issued a report calling for pro-democratic reforms to diffuse the tensions over the extension of the Guurti’s mandate in a tense political climate, declaring that ‘The issues at stake are so critical that they need immediate attention by the Diaspora, which has the capacity to bring the sides together and act as an “honest broker”’ (SOPRI 2006). In 2007 various organisations issued press releases to protest against the arrest of critical journalists from the newspaper Haatuf and the forcible closure of the human rights network SHURO-Net by the government (Somaliland Focus 2007a, b; Somaliland Forum 2007). The influence of the overseas lobby adding their voice to what are already vigorous domestic debates is hard to gauge. But there is some interesting positioning going on: just as the Peace Committee had tried to do in wartime, in the post-conflict period the educated and mobilised elite overseas are cultivating a niche voice in Somaliland politics. In 2009, this was again demonstrated by the numerous statements issued by diaspora groups regarding the deadlock between the political parties on the controversy around voter registration and the much-delayed Presidential elections (Hammond 2009). The ways that remittance funds actually enter the coffers of the Somaliland authorities are limited and indirect. In this sense, the contribution of the diaspora in Somaliland’s state-building process has been primarily society-driven, making an interesting contrast with another regional secession, Eritrea, where the mobilisation of the diaspora was also significant but primarily driven and channelled by the state (Al-

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Ali et al. 2001a). Some wealthy individuals living overseas initially supported the administration directly, but many claim that such donations were misused, encouraging the diaspora to donate to community projects instead. There is no formal mechanism for raising revenue from the diaspora and the government does not tax incoming remittances – indeed, there would be a public outcry if this were attempted. However, the government does collect some tax revenue from money transfer enterprises and on occasion persuades them to donate to public projects and to loan funds to or help bail out government ministries (Hansen 2006). Moreover, a considerable proportion of remittances are spent on general imported goods and khat, which represented 43 per cent and 12 per cent respectively of government revenue in 2002 (Bradbury 2008). Thus, there are other ways and levels at which people overseas influence processes of politics and development, beyond direct involvements in processes of secessionist politics and state-building. These may be less obvious perhaps but I would argue no less significant. What is often thought of as ‘the Somali civil war’ can in many ways be seen as a series of conflicts – even within Somaliland there is a tendency for violence and politics to have a strong local logic, and the diaspora’s involvement is often most visible at local level (see also Horst 2008a). Thus people tend to put their hands in their pockets for the Habar Jaalo or for Burao (for example) rather more readily than for Somaliland. Examples of local-level political engagement include dia – compensation payable when one of your clanspeople has caused the injury or death of someone from another clan. Payments are decided according to customary law and negotiations between elders, and by tradition contributions are calculated according to the number of male family members and livestock that they possess. Men overseas may be called on to contribute their portion, and in fact increasingly women overseas are asked informally to contribute on their menfolk’s behalf. The diaspora has also been called on to fund shir, or reconciliation meetings. These kinds of mechanisms help to resolve conflicts that otherwise might escalate. People overseas also contribute substantially to schools, hospitals, mosques and community improvement projects. Euros and dollars can go a satisfyingly long way: for example, in 2007 it cost around $15,000 to 39 build a new berkad or water reservoir, or half that to repair one. Many of these fund-raising initiatives would be best defined as informal solidarity networks, or ad hoc campaigns; others are more institutionalised relationships, where committees abroad hold regular fund-raising campaigns, visit projects and play a role in the management of partner organisations in Somaliland. In Somali, this kind of fund-raising for the public good is often refers to simply as jaaliyaad, which roughly translates as ‘community-in-exile’. This can be particularly important outside

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Hargeisa, where there is less in terms of service provision. Educational initiatives are particularly popular: half of the remitters I surveyed in London (see Chapter 5 for more details) had made donations for community purposes in the Somali regions related to education in the previous year, on average around $150. The funds collected pay for repairing and building schools, teachers’ salaries, scholarships, or the shipping of materials and equipment. In Hargeisa, the university, Hargeisa Group Hospital and the city orphanage are among the prominent public institutions supported by the diaspora. Edna Aden’s Maternity Hospital was also established with the help of considerable donations from people overseas. As with diasporic engagement in conflict and peace making, much of this activity is concentrated at the local level. Indeed, there has been a certain amount of competition between towns and their corresponding overseas communities to raise funds for civic improvements. However, due to its position as the capital of Somaliland and with its more diverse population, big projects in Hargeisa have been seen as important flagships of progress, and often attract considerable cross-clan collaboration (Kent et al. 2004). How do these community improvement initiatives interact with Somaliland government and international NGO service provision? Several schools established with diaspora funds by the local community have been transferred to the management of the Ministry of Education. The Ministry of Finance often waives tax on imports for school projects. Hargeisa Municipality has tried to promote diaspora investment in light industry through dinners for diaspora holiday makers and mayoral tours overseas (Kent et al. 2004). But, while welcoming and recognising the importance of remittances, diaspora investments and donations for community projects, the Somaliland government has not systematically 40 promoted or monitored these transfers. Cooperation between diaspora initiatives and international NGOs is similarly ad hoc. As outlined in Chapter 2, the international development community has recently shown a growing awareness of and interest in remittances and diaspora philanthropy, but cooperation has been stymied by mutual caution and differing organisational rationales. However, there are signs that this is changing, with several European donors expressing interest in or piloting partnerships with diaspora development associations. Smaller ‘international’ NGOs, less mired in bureaucratic procedures and internationalised uniform operating models than the larger agencies, seem to have been in a better position to respond to and cooperate with similarly open and enterprising diaspora groups (Lindley 2008). While there is much celebration from all quarters of the role of diaspora money in helping families and supporting development initiatives, there are also rumblings about the effects of all this on political accountability in Somaliland. The nature of large resource flows shapes

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how authorities develop their extractive and redistributive functions. The post-conflict authorities have not been directly able to ‘capture’ a stream of revenue from the diaspora: indeed diaspora resources have if anything tended to foster rather decentralised processes of change. However, the Somaliland authorities’ political calculations may be still be shaped in less direct ways. Some argue that electoral fund-raising overseas distracts Somaliland’s politicians from the job in hand: ‘Many Somalilanders joke that they “have a government in exile”, i.e. ministers (and political party leaders) etc. spend more time soliciting support from the diaspora than working on policy at home or engaging with Somalilanders’ (Kibble and Abokor 2006: 9). There are also concerns that diaspora philanthropy means that the responsibility for providing public services slips down the government’s agenda: ‘Dependence on diaspora funding for much of the social services … means the government does not concern itself with many elements that other governments do’ (Kibble and Abokor 2006: 9). Concerns about the relationship between remittances and political accountability are hardly new or unique to Hargeisa/Somaliland. Writing of Mogadishu in the late 1980s, Simons argued that, in the context of rampant unemployment and political repression, ‘remittances helped subvert the need to seriously protest’ (1995: 177). Writing of the southern Somali regions in the late 1990s, Roland Marchal suggests that: ‘One negative aspect of remittances is that they have allowed the factions to survive without delivering anything to the people’ (2000: 14). In Somaliland, it would seem that people overseas have – in direct and indirect ways – helped a new political system to endure despite delivering little more than a delicate peace to the people.

Beyond Complacency: Migration–Conflict–Development Contingencies Of course, more research is necessary to understand the extent to which the migration and remittance dynamics found in Hargeisa pertain in other parts of the Somali regions. There are likely to be geographical variations by territory, urban/rural settings and clan. For example, in Bossaso or Mogadishu one might expect more people to have relatives in North America and the Middle East; in rural areas fewer people receive remittances, perhaps because they have non-cash sources of food or are less likely to have close contacts overseas; in more insecure territories, it seems probable that people mobilise remittances less for property investment and more for assistance with emigration, or local protection purposes. But the view from Hargeisa provides a starting point for exploring migration–conflict–development linkages in the Somali regions. A clear example of ‘actually existing development’ that challenges international

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models of conflict resolution and development, Somaliland also illustrates the highly transnational dimensions of economic activity in the shadow of conflict and state disruption and reconfiguration. While certainly on the fringes of international diplomacy, Hargeisa is far from isolated from the world: migration and remitting have become a key way in which the city is incorporated into the global political economy. The evidence in this chapter challenges us to reinvigorate the migration–development debate, beyond the rather bland and overworked statement that remittances are a source of ‘development finance’. On another track, the evidence in this chapter also points beyond glib assertions about the belligerence of diasporic communities. Diaspora support for violence must be contextualised to be understood properly. In Hargeisa in the 1980s, state violence was met with insurgency and massive displacement. The pre-existing and rapidly expanding diaspora was clearly involved in the insurgency, providing a major source of military finance and ultimately contributing to the overthrow of an oppressive regime. By situating conflict in the social context in which it occurs and exploring the specific organisation of violence, it becomes harder to see the rebels as troublemakers against an otherwise benign state, as implied in some analyses of determinants of conflict (Richards 2004). In the shadow of state violence, the suggestion that diaspora members’ support for armed movements made them ‘peace wreckers’ seems to be a rather impoverished description of what was going on. The evidence from Hargeisa in fact points to the dynamism of diaspora responses to conflict situations in the country of origin – how attitudes and material engagements can shift in relation to the changing nature of the conflict and as ideas and information flow back and forth between local communities and those overseas. Diaspora responses were not uniform – there were disagreements and disengagements, processes of persuasion and changing of minds – suggesting that it is dangerous to assume that (any part of) ‘the diaspora’ has a permanent, monolithic project to which all subscribe. Moreover, scale is clearly important – in Somali society, diaspora mobilisation for collective projects (from political and military to community improvements) is very decentralised, reflecting the segmentary nature of socio-political organisation. This chapter illustrated the importance of focusing not only on collective and directly political material involvements, but also on broader family-oriented forms of economic transnationalism, which have complex ramifications that often cannot be neatly boiled down into the conflict–peace dichotomy. People do send money for militia and violent confrontations and for election campaigns; but far more often they send money to help regional refugees to return, to buy food and medicine, pay school fees, start businesses, build homes and leave for other countries. In doing so, the diaspora has helped families to cope in a tough economy

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and fuelled wider cycles of investment and trade. In the conspicuous absence of any ‘peace dividend’ from international donors and foreign investors due to Somaliland’s uncertain political status, such material engagements have contributed substantially to the repopulation and reconstruction of its once bombed-out and deserted capital. Yet the extent to which positive outcomes at the micro level can influence the macro-level development context is somewhat limited (de Haas 2010). The fragile institutional contexts which caused and continue to cause migration constrain the extent to which remittances have been able to contribute to cycles of improvement in places like Hargeisa. However, there may be implications for stability: migration and remittances have quite possibly provided a ‘safety valve’ against frustrations associated with demobilisation and high unemployment that might otherwise jeopardise stability (see also Zunzer 2004; ESI 2005). The view from Hargeisa demonstrates how emigration and remittances are now deeply entrenched in Somali society and likely to continue to play a prominent role in the years ahead. However, flows of remittances to places like Hargeisa depend on the dynamics of life in transborder and global refugee communities, and it is to these contrasting experiences that we now turn.

Notes 1. 2.

3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

Lewis 1961; Laitin and Samatar 1988; Ambroso 2002; King 2003; Bradbury 2008. The survey was carried out in twelve branches across the city over a six-day period at the beginning of September 2005, as most remittances arrive after emigrants receive their wages abroad. Randomly sampled respondents were interviewed in Somali by a team from Hargeisa University led by the author. Interview, NGO worker, November 2007. Interview, former SNM official, December 2007. Interview, former SNM official, December 2007. Interview, NGO worker, Burao, December 2007. Interview, returnee, Hargeisa, December 2007. Interview, Somaliland MP, December 2007. Interview, Nimo and Ali, Hargeisa, August 2005. Interview, Nimo and Ali, Hargeisa, August 2005. When asking who counted as dadka dibadaha, I generally found that people talked about Europe and North America as ‘outside’, rather than neighbouring countries, indicating a clear distinction between the diaspora in the global North (with more financial clout) and the regional diaspora. When asked, some said that the Middle East counts as ‘outside’, some not. Field notes, Hargeisa, March 2005. Interview, Mohamed, Hargeisa, August 2005. According to unpublished survey data collected by the Academy for Peace and Development; thanks to Mohamed Hassan Ibrahim for this information.

In a Precarious State | 89 15. Some money transfer operators also note small surges after tax rebate payments in particular countries. 16. For the purposes of the survey a crude co-residence definition of the household was used – ‘people you usually live with’. As people may not know for sure whether other family members receive remittances or how much, total household remittances calculated here are taken as an estimate, probably an underestimate. 17. Amounts in this paragraph are rounded to the nearest $5. These findings contrast with the higher average remittance amount of $4,170 obtained in Ahmed’s (2000) survey of 116 recipient households in Hargeisa, due to differences in the sample size and sampling approach (for example, Ahmed sampled people from the telephone lists of clients whereas our survey sampled people collecting money). 18. Remember that the survey sample is a little biased towards people who received remittances regularly. 19. Interview, NGO worker, Hargeisa, August 2005. 20. While it is more common for diaspora men to marry local women, some people could recall instances of diaspora women marrying local men. 21. Interview, businessman, Hargeisa, December 2007. 22. Interview, Construction Company, Hargeisa, November 2007. 23. Interview, NGO worker, Hargeisa, December 2007. 24. Interview, Jawahir, Hargeisa, December 2007 (conducted by Samira Hassan). 25. Informal consultation, NGO worker, Hargeisa, December 2007. 26. Interview, Hodan, Hargeisa, December 2007 (conducted by Samira Hassan). 27. Interview, Hodan, Hargeisa, December 2007 (conducted by Samira Hassan). 28. Assuming population of around 500,000 (see Note 1 above), average household size of around seven (King 2003). The average household remittance reported in our survey was around $200 and Medani's survey suggests that more than one in four households receive remittances. 29. Consultations, December 2007, and personal correspondence, money transfer operator, March 2008. 30. See also the urban economy assessment conducted in 2003, which suggested that most remittance recipients fell into the middle-income category of $150750 per month (King 2003). 31. Interview, Telesom, Hargeisa, December 2007. 32. Interview, Construction Company, Hargeisa, November 2007. 33. Edna Adan Ismail, former Foreign Minister of Somaliland, speech in Portcullis House, London, 17 March 2004. 34. Informal consultation, Ministry of Rehabilitation, Reintegration and Reconstruction, Hargeisa, March 2005. 35. Interview, NGO worker, Burao, December 2007. 36. The Party for Justice and Democracy (Ururka Cadaaladda iyo Dimoqraadiga). 37. Interview, Somaliland MP, Hargeisa, December 2007. 38. Informal consultations in Hargeisa and London, July and October 2008 and December 2009. 39. Informal consultation, engineer, Hargeisa, November 2007. 40. Interviews and informal consultations in Ministry of Education, Finance and Planning in Hargeisa, March 2005, August 2005, November 2007.

Chapter 4 Traffic at a Global Crossroads: Eastleigh, Nairobi

I met Rhoda, a mother of seven in her early forties, in Kenya in 2005. She was living with her children in a small flat in Nairobi’s bustling Eastleigh district, known in Swahili as Mogadishu ndogo (little Mogadishu), which has a reputation for thriving business activity, dilapidated infrastructure and crime. Her family had moved when she was young because of the dabadheer drought, and settled in southern Somalia. She married a welleducated man and the family were doing well. But when the war broke out the family business and home were looted. The militia killed her father and brothers. She fled with her husband, children, mother and sisters to Mogadishu, then Kismayo and then crossed the border into Kenya and registered at Liboi. Some relatives overseas sent $1,000 and she and her husband, children and sisters moved to Nairobi. After a year their money ran out and they went to Thika camp, which was at the time completely overwhelmed and soon closed. They made their way to Mombasa and settled in one of the camps there. During their stay in Mombasa, their home was destroyed in camp fires three times. They received little international aid, so Rhoda began trading charcoal and food. Meanwhile her mother and sister had returned to Somalia to find relatives. In the mid-1990s, after three moves around Mombasa as camps were closed down, they allowed themselves to be relocated to Kakuma refugee camp in northern Kenya, where life was really tough: there was another fire, after which they were relocated to a new area, water was scarce and sometimes armed Turkana men would enter the camp and attack Somali and Sudanese refugees living there. They tried to get resettled through various official programmes. As she put it: ‘In the refugee camps, if you don’t exaggerate the problems you have, you might never leave.’ Hearing about their difficulties, a relative in Canada

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managed to arrange a spouse’s visa for Rhoda’s husband. As soon as he arrived, he and his relatives sent $500 to Rhoda to move the family to Nairobi – they felt it was risky for her and the children to stay in the refugee camp alone. He found work immediately and was sending her $350 each month, $200 for living expenses and school fees at the beginning of the month and $150 for the rent later on. In addition to her six children, she now looks after two of her sisters’. Her husband’s job did not pay very well, but, according to Rhoda, ‘He’s very good, he’s someone who is dedicated, he’s stable, he’s a father … Life could be much worse.’1 He also sends money to support his brothers and other family members in Kenya. It remained uncertain how, indeed if, the family could be reunited. Every time she heard there was going to be a census of the refugees in Kakuma, she went to be counted, and, in the meantime, her ration card was used by a poor family that she knew. When we spoke, she had an Alien Card that she had been given in Kakuma camp, which, although expired, had saved her once or twice from being picked up during police sweeps through Eastleigh.2 Rhoda’s experience exemplifies the difficult and multiple journeys that many refugees make in search of security. Having reached the relative safety of a neighbouring country, the journey is rarely over. More than a decade after being displaced, Rhoda’s family attained a reasonable degree of economic security at the cost of indefinite separation from her husband and the children’s father, but still had insecure political status in Kenya, despite many of her children having been born there. There are well over 5.5 million people around the world struggling in similar situations of protracted and unresolved exile (UNHCR 2006).3 These people are allowed to remain in the country where they have sought asylum, but lack basic rights. They often receive meagre – and dwindling – international assistance, and look for alternative and additional ways to provide for themselves and their households. In urban areas, they remain relatively ‘invisible’, trying to stay below the radar of the authorities, which often do not allow people to live in the city, seeing those that do as a political inconvenience. UNHCR has historically had very limited involvement with refugees in urban areas, due in part to the fear that providing assistance would attract refugees and cause tensions with the host government and local residents.4 Forced migration research has tended to focus disproportionately on refugees living in formal camps (Bakewell 2008a). The view from Eastleigh prompts consideration of the ways that refugees negotiate life beyond the structures of the official refugee regime, through the vigorous circulation of people, money and goods through regional and global networks, and state efforts to constrain this circulation. This chapter is based primarily on informal consultations and thirty interviews carried out often with the help of a research assistant, while living in Eastleigh with a Somali friend in spring 2005. I have also drawn

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on the Migration and the New African Cities Survey carried out by the Universities of Nairobi and Witwatersrand in 2006 (using a combination of cluster and quota sampling), which included 145 people born in Somalia who were living in Nairobi, mainly in Eastleigh, and collected data on their migration and remittances. In the first part of this chapter I explore how, after the arrival of large numbers of Somali refugees in the early 1990s, the Kenyan government tried to confine refugees to remote camps, but tens of thousands ended up in Nairobi, their presence shaping the landscape and social and economic relations of Eastleigh district. Secondly, the patterns of remittance traffic are outlined, and the implications for mobility, livelihoods and household formation. Thirdly, I explore the investment and spending of remittances in Eastleigh’s thriving market for goods and services, and the way that Nairobi has become a global crossroads for Somali refugees seeking onward migration opportunities.

From the Northern Frontier to New Horizons in Nairobi Somali pastoralists of Darod (Ogaden) and Hawiye (Degodia and Ajuran) clans have long lived in what are now the Kenya–Somalia borderlands, around Wajir, Mandera and Garissa, in a harsh, semi-arid climate and with a troubled history of political unrest and state repression. Under British colonial rule, the ‘Northern Frontier District’ (NFD) was designated a buffer zone between Kenya’s borders with Italian Somalia and Ethiopia and its railway and white settler populations. The colonial administration enacted policies to contain what it termed ‘the Somali problem’ on the other side of the Frontier, including travel bans and pass requirements (Hyndman 2000). The unification and independence of Somalia in 1960 prompted a campaign for the NFD’s incorporation into Somalia, culminating in a commission which ascertained that the ethnic Somalis – forming around 60 per cent of the NFD’s population – overwhelmingly preferred unification. However, in the face of Ethiopian and French alarm about potential moves towards a ‘Greater Somalia’ and Kenyan politicians’ determination to maintain Kenya’s territorial integrity at independence, the British disregarded the commission’s findings, determining that the NFD would become the North Eastern Province (NEP) of Kenya, shown in Figure 4.1. Sorely disappointed, stipended Somali chiefs resigned in outrage and the Somali Republic briefly severed diplomatic relations with Britain (Lewis 2002). The armed resistance that ensued became known as the shifta (bandit) wars. The British declared a state of emergency and imposed mobility restrictions, which were maintained by the newly independent government in 1963. Shortly before independence, incoming President Jomo Kenyatta set an uncompromising tone, stating that pro-secession Somali Kenyans ‘were

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Figure 4.1 Map of Kenya Source: Alex Lugadiru, Data Exchange Platform for the Horn of Africa

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free to pack their camels and join Somalia’ (Reporter 1963). In order to deal with what came to be known as ‘the Somali problem’, the Kenyan government gave its forces powers to detain without charge, which continued until 1991. Indicative of the effective bifurcation of legal systems between the NEP and the rest of Kenya was the Indemnity Act (1970), which effectively institutionalised impunity in the NEP: parliamentarians are still campaigning today to repeal it (Mohamed 2009). Under President Moi, in the 1980s a series of atrocities took place: of particular note, in 1984 the army detained some 5,000 men in Wajir on suspicion of being rebels; it is believed that around 2,000 may have been killed by the army (Milner 2006). These histories of repression, violence, surveillance and expulsion have influenced the subsequent treatment of refugees arriving from Somalia. There is still a considerable gulf in social, political and economic terms between the NEP and the rest of Kenya – such that, when people travel from NEP to the capital or to other provinces, they refer to the journey as ‘leaving for Kenya’ (Mohamed 2009). While many are of pastoral heritage, some Somali Kenyans trace their families back to the traders or colonial employees who settled in Kenya’s towns and cities in colonial and post-independence periods (Turton 1972; Anderson 2005). David Turton (1972, 1974) recounts how, in the first half of the twentieth century, members of the Isaq diaspora in Nairobi and Isiolo mounted one of the most unusual tax protests in colonial history. Their persistent campaign to pay a higher tax rate represented a bid to negotiate their way upwards in colonial Kenya’s racial hierarchy, to acquire ‘Asiatic status’, which would confer better trading privileges, representation on the Legislative Council and better treatment in jails and hospitals. Although ultimately unsuccessful, the Isaq did succeed in mobilising clan members around the world, in British Somaliland, Tanganyika, Uganda and Britain, to provide funds and lobby the British government on their behalf – an early example of Somalis mobilising their diaspora as a political resource, often repeated since the civil war, as the previous chapter has indicated. Kenya still has a substantial indigenous Somali Kenyan population, and the historical antecedents described have shaped the experiences of Somali refugees in important ways. When civil war broke out in southern Somalia and the state collapsed in 1991, hundreds of thousands of Somali refugees fled the killing, seeking safety in Kenya, initially mainly Marehan (Barre’s clan) and other Darod clans, but, as the violence intensified, people of other clans joined them. They fled on foot or crammed into vehicles over the border into the NEP; by dhow from Somalia’s coastal towns to Mombasa; and by plane to Nairobi. After initial attempts to block arrivals, Kenya allowed them in. Large numbers of people were registered by UNHCR as prima facie refugees in camps at Liboi close to the border with Somalia, Dadaab also in the NEP, Mombasa on the coast, Thika near

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Nairobi and Kakuma near the border with Sudan. In 1992, there were some 285,000 registered Somali refugees in Kenya. The refugee population subsequently decreased, and from 1999 remained stable in the region of 150,000. Some people returned voluntarily to Somalia (although not always permanently) and others went overseas. But large numbers of Somalis arrived following fighting in southern Somalia since 2006, and by mid 2009 the numbers in Dadaab refugee camp alone approached 300,000. Clearly, even protracted refugee situations like that resulting from the Somali crisis are not static but exhibit evolving conflict and migration dynamics (Loescher and Milner 2007). What is the legal situation of refugees in Kenya? Kenya signed and ratified the 1951 United Nations Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, and is also a signatory to the 1969 Convention Governing the Specific Aspects of the Refugee Problem in Africa, which embraces all people who have been obliged to leave their country due to external aggression, occupation, foreign domination or events seriously disturbing public order. But until recently, there was no national legislation for refugees in Kenya. The Immigrant Act (amended in 1972), Aliens Restrictions Act (1973) and Citizenship Act (1963) affected refugees but the laws were mainly aimed to ensure public order and failed to significantly distinguish between refugees and non-refugees (Verdirame and Harrell-Bond 2005). As in many countries, refugee protection in Kenya has been influenced by other policy areas, including migration, security and economic development considerations (Betts 2006). In contrast with the more open and accommodating refugee policy of earlier years, James Milner (2006) characterises Kenya’s refugee policy after 1990 as effectively one of ‘abdication and containment’. First, the government abdicated to UNHCR the responsibility of determining the status of asylum-seekers and ensuring their protection. Most refugees were designated prima facie refugees, as often occurs when refugees flee generalised insecurity and conflict in large numbers and it is not feasible to conduct individual status determinations. Secondly, the government tried to contain the problem by only allowing Somali refugees to reside in designated camps, restricting their movements and not giving them the right to take up employment. Movement passes, known as ‘travel documents’, are only issued to people with urgent health problems or security problems that cannot be dealt with in the camps (in which case they are eligible for UNHCR assistance in the city), to visit embassies to for resettlement purposes, to trace family members or in the event of a relative’s death, or to purchase stock for trade in the camps (Crisp 1999; HRW 2009). Verdirame and Harrell-Bond (2005) have documented numerous infringements of the civil, political, social and economic rights of refugees in Kenya, fostered by the camp environment and the lack of freedom of movement.

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The Refugees Act of 2006 represented a step forward for refugees, translating the 1951 Refugee Convention and the 1969 OAU Convention into national law for the first time, creating an institutional framework, formalising procedures for seeking asylum, and restoring camp management to government. Yet, by 2009, refugee advocates and commentators reported rather limited progress on the ground.5 While many of the people fleeing southern Somalia since 2007 entered and were registered, there have also been reports of people unable to register, border closures, detentions, and unlawful involuntary returns (HRW 2009). The deep material deprivation and physical insecurity of life in the refugee camps is well-documented (Crisp 1999; Hyndman 2000; Horst 2006b; Milner 2006). Dadaab – one of the largest refugee concentrations in the world – is located in an ecologically hostile area, where clean water is scarce and the opportunities for local cultivation are limited. There are high levels of lawlessness in the area and people leaving the camp risk attack and rape by bandits. Food aid is provided, but is often limited, and many go hungry. Access to education and health services is basic. ‘Emergency’ and ‘care and maintenance’ phases have long since given way to a protracted refugee situation: given the ongoing conflict, there are few willing to return to the southern and central regions where most came from. At the same time, Kenya’s camps defy the common depiction of refugee camps as isolated and temporary phenomena. Given their size, population and permanence, camps like the Dadaab group (Ifo, Hagadera and Dagahaley) might in some respects better be thought of as cities than camps (Pérouse de Montclos and Kagwanja 2000). The refugee camps and the aid machines that supply them have become integrated in complex ways into local, national and cross-border livelihood systems through the actions of refugees and local people seeking alternative means of living (Pérouse de Montclos and Kagwanja 2000; Little 2003; Werker 2007). Horst’s (2006b) extensive research in the camps has also highlighted the global connections between Somali refugees in Dadaab and relatives overseas, estimating that at least 10 to 15 per cent received regular remittances. Moreover, despite the government’s attempts to contain them in remote regions, many refugees end up in Nairobi and other towns or cities, often selling or donating their ration cards to another family. The people I met in Nairobi had several reasons for moving to the city: to avoid the harsh conditions (heat, scarce rations, recurrent sickness among their children, risk of rape and violence); to access better educational opportunities and health facilities; to find work and build a different future for themselves and their families; and to get in contact with relatives abroad with a view to resettlement. The majority had lived in urban areas in Somalia before coming to Kenya. Their pathways to the city vary. Some people arriving in the 1990s had the wherewithal to set up home in Nairobi, or stayed with relatives, and never declared themselves

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to UNHCR (Goldsmith 1997; Farah 2000). When the Mombasa camps closed in 1995–1997, following tensions between Kenyan and Somali traders in the city, many refugees preferred to make their way to Nairobi instead of relocating to other camps or voluntarily repatriating to Somalia (Verdirame and Harrell-Bond 2005). Meanwhile, many refugees registered in Dadaab and Kakuma have moved to Nairobi, either for temporary periods or more permanently. The numbers of displaced Somali people living informally in urban areas are uncertain – estimates by the mid 1990s ranged from 20,000 to 100,000 (Hyndman 2000). By the end of 2008, 14,524 recognised Somali refugees and 566 asylum-seekers had been registered in Nairobi – nearly half the total registered refugees and asylum-seekers in the city – but this is assumed to be a fraction of the total number of Somali nationals living in Nairobi (HRW 2009). Most people have ended up in Nairobi’s Eastleigh district, located to the far east of the Central Business District. As Elizabeth Campbell points out, Nairobi has a long history of residential segregation between European settlers, African workers and Asian traders: ‘Nairobi was a perfect Apartheid city without trying’ (Lonsdale 2002: 220, cited in Campbell 2005). Eastleigh was formerly a lower-middle-class and predominantly Asian suburb, with some shops and businesses, although over the years Kenyan Kikuyu landlords began to buy up property. There was a small Kenyan Somali community prior to the civil war – some of the Kenyan Somali shopkeepers I met grew up on the estate – and most of the

Photo 4.1 Eastleigh street scene Credit: Manuel Herz

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Somali refugees arriving in Nairobi in the 1990s and have since settled in Eastleigh. The community is now well established: more than half of the Somali nationals included in the African Cities Survey had lived in Nairobi since before 1996. While many Somalis in Nairobi are still prima facie refugees or lack any official immigration status, some were able to bribe officials to obtain Kenyan papers or were granted citizenship in a covert bid for support from Daniel arap Moi in the tense elections of 1997 (Campbell 2005). Eastleigh has seen some dramatic changes as the population of Somalis and other newcomers – Eritreans, Ethiopians, Congolese, Rwandans, Burundians, and Sudanese – has grown. It became a major business and shopping district in Nairobi. Businesspeople, including incoming refugees, invested in import and export businesses, retail outlets (from small-scale hawking and street stalls to large shopping malls), chemists, property letting and real estate development, hotels, lodges, miraa (khat) outlets, cafés and restaurants, long-distance transport companies, taxis, phone and Internet bureaux, and international money transfer and exchange services. While it is a place of both deprivation and entrepreneurial wealth, Eastleigh is a long way from being the poorest district in Nairobi, and there are much more deprived parts of Nairobi’s slum settlements. The arrival of large numbers of Somalis in the 1990s also had an impact on the property and housing market. Increased demand, as Eastleigh became known as a Somali enclave, raised the cost of accommodation: the rent for single rooms after the influx in the early 1990s was five or more times the previous levels, pushing many Kenyan tenants out into other areas of Eastlands, while the refugees often lived in overcrowded conditions, sharing and subletting (Goldsmith 1997; Hyndman 2000). Commercial development, particularly in the area known as Section Two, also accelerated, pushing up the price of land. The centrepieces of Eastleigh’s commercial development are its large shopping malls, such as Garissa Lodge and Amal Plaza. By 2008, according to one property developer, front-row plots on the main road were going for around KS50 million, and KSh20 million further inside – compared with commercial plots in Nairobi’s Upper Hill office area going for about KSh30 million and plots in the busy Ngara area for about KSh8 million (Kariuki 2008). The largely unregulated expansion of business and the increasingly overcrowded population soon outpaced repairs and improvements to public infrastructure. Drains, sewers and rubbish collection are very visibly inadequate. Roads are in a dilapidated condition, with deep mud during the rainy season and rising dust when it is dry. Meanwhile, Eastleigh became strongly associated with crime, which has been on the rise in the wider area of Eastlands, and in Nairobi in general, often associated with the increased hardship created by structural adjustment (Anderson 2002). Muggings and street thefts of

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mobile phones and cash are common, and matatus (buses) to Eastleigh are held up and robbed fairly frequently, particularly at night. Refugees have also suffered from police harassment over the years. Some Somali refugees obtained Kenyan or Alien ID cards through various means, but the majority just had a UNHCR letter saying that they are a prima facie refugee, which was of little use due to their ambiguous politico-legal situation outside the camps (Verdirame 1999; Hyndman 2000). Threatened with arrest for being in Kenya illegally, many Somalis would pay bribes to be released. According to the refugees, such extortion has varied over time, reportedly reaching particular heights of openness and impunity in 2001–2002. Many people remain cautious, sticking to their area, and not venturing into town or out at night. Eastleigh is a cosmopolitan place. Somali Kenyan families – whom the newcomers nicknamed sijui (Sw. ‘I don’t know’), referring to their lack of knowledge of Somali culture – were an important source of assistance for their close relatives and clanspeople. Although there are some tensions among refugees of different Somali clans, some more generalised solidarity is derived from being Somali and Muslim in Kenya. For their part, Kenyans in Eastleigh generally appear to have come to terms with the obvious fact that ‘Somalis are our neighbours’. Kenyans, Somalis and other nationalities share washing lines and cramped stairways; their children go to school together; they truck and barter. However, when times are tough – as they have been in Kenya with rising levels of urban poverty and internal tensions – attitudes can harden. The history of rebel activities in the NEP, Somalia’s present disarray, fears of religious extremism and the large numbers of refugees in the capital make Somali nationals a convenient scapegoat for urban ills (see Gimode 2001).

Remittance Traffic, Mobility and Strategic Households The family networks of refugees from southern Somalia in Nairobi are extensive: two-thirds of the Somali respondents in the African Cities Survey had origin household members in a third country, mainly the US and Canada but also Europe. Most Somali refugees’ lives have been touched by the substantial incoming remittance traffic at some point: about two-thirds of the survey respondents received remittances (57 per cent of the women and 72 per cent of the men). The geography of incoming remittances was overwhelmingly centred on countries of resettlement and asylum in the global North – even more so than in Hargeisa – 80 per cent of recipients received money from US/Canada, 28 per cent from the UK and 17 per cent from other European countries. The majority of recipients – some 60 per cent – received money most months or more frequently, around a quarter received money ‘a few times a year’ and the rest less often. The amounts

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of money received from overseas varied considerably: just over half the respondents received about KSh9, 200–22,999 annually (then about $120–305), which was seen as enough to live on, depending on the number of children. Around a third received more than this, the remainder less. Nearly half of the recipients surveyed were women, and just over half were men – slightly different from Hargeisa (perhaps because men were more likely to be in Nairobi looking for work, while women might be more likely to stay in the camps with children). Like in Hargeisa, some two-fifths of the recipients received money from brothers and sisters overseas, and the rest from other close relatives. But there are also strong connections with the Somali regions. The vast majority of Somalis surveyed in Eastleigh – 93 per cent – have origin household members living in their community of origin. Some 41 per cent had been back to Somalia since they first arrived, nearly all for family reasons. Some of my interviewees, who were mainly of Darod and Hawiye clans and grew up in the central and southern Somali regions, had also tried going back, but returned to Kenya after traumatic or discouraging experiences. In Nairobi a substantial minority of Somalis were sending remittances – nearly 40 per cent of the survey respondents (one-third of the women and two-thirds of the men). Some people remit out of their wages or business income. Others receive money from relatives overseas or from other household members and send it on to relatives in the camps or in Somalia – just over one-third of the survey sample were both receiving and sending remittances. For example, Fadumo, a young woman who runs a market stall, keeps in touch via the taar (radio operator) with her nomadic parents in Somalia, and every few months, when she is able, sends them $50 or $100. Maryan, a housewife, explained that sometimes her husband, an import–export trader, gives her $50 to send to her mother in Kismayo and she tries to send perfume or clothes whenever someone she knows goes there. Overall, around half of the remitters surveyed in Nairobi sent money ‘occasionally’, 27 per cent ‘a few times a year’ and 18 per cent on a monthly basis. While smaller than international flows, regional remittances are important to those in the refugee camps and the turbulent southern Somali regions. The remittance economy shapes patterns of regional mobility and household (re)formation among refugees. The experiences of Saad and Abdiwali, as well as Rhoda (outlined at the beginning of this chapter), are illustrative. Saad was in his fifties, was born into a nomadic family but had been sent to school and became a government employee. When the war broke out he and his family fled and ended up in Dadaab refugee camp. His wife did some small-scale business to bring in some cash. In the 1990s, a relative of his wife sponsored his wife and children to go to the US. He remained in the camp for a while, then remarried and moved to Nairobi, hoping to retrain and find a job while waiting for resettlement,

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but he did not have the money to do so. When we met he had been living with his second wife and child in Eastleigh for several years. They rented a small apartment for $65 a month, subletting the second room to young clanspeople from the camps who were studying or looking for work in Nairobi. The family relied nearly entirely on the $250 Saad received each month from his older sons and daughters in the US, and every two to four months he forwarded $100 to his parents and siblings who were nomads in Somalia. He remained in close contact with his children, who were all still young and single and called him on his mobile every few days to chat. He was trying to resettle himself and his second family in the US, primarily because he sorely missed his children, whom he had not seen for more than five years. I later heard that he had indeed reached the US. Abdiwali, a former teacher, fled Somalia in 1991. He found it difficult at first in Kenya because he did not speak any English. He had problems with khat addiction, and tried to return to Somalia but it was a bad time politically and he was nearly killed. A relative gave him the money to go back to Kenya to the refugee camp, where he eventually married and had children. Gradually he learned English and found some incentive work. The term ‘incentive’ rather than salary is used to describe the small payments made to refugees by aid agencies for jobs ranging from watchmen or teachers. Paying below the accepted rates for Kenyan nationals for is justified by the agencies on the basis that the refugees are already in receipt of humanitarian assistance so do not require a full salary, but the practice has been criticised as unfair, with some refugees demanding equal pay for equal work (Kakuma News Reflector 2009). Dissatisfied with the possibilities presented by camp life, after many years, Abdiwali moved to Nairobi to work. With his monthly income of about $100, he could not afford to bring his wife and six children to join him, so they remained in Dadaab, but he tried to send around $25 a month to his wife to supplement their rations. He went back to the camps a couple of times a year and would try to bring money, clothes and other items that they needed. Very occasionally, he and his wife received some money from relatives overseas. For example, he spoke on the phone now and again with a cousin in Europe – not to request money, just to keep in contact. But, he said with a smile, ‘even though I don’t ask her for anything, sometimes she throws me some coins!’6 When he arrived in Nairobi she sent $100 and he bought a bed and mattress and other things he needed, but also told her that he did not want to become a burden on her. She also sent some money at Eid. Meanwhile, Abdiwali’s wife had an elderly relative in the US and asked his children to send money to her now and again. These cases illustrate several key points. First, there are some people whose very presence in Nairobi is entirely contingent on receiving remittances, like Rhoda and Saad. Some people would not have even got as far as Nairobi without these funds. Travelling from Somalia or the refugee camps to Nairobi can be costly and risky for those without proper

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documents. As there is the risk of ambush and attack by bandits, most refugees prefer to travel by the main road, but they are frequently subjected en route to police detention and extortion or return to the camps, incurring extra costs (HRW 2009). This regional mobility is often facilitated by someone sending money from abroad. Once in Nairobi, only a minority of refugees – only those in the city formally for health or security reasons – receive ongoing assistance from UNHCR. Their insecure legal status largely confines refugees to working in the informal economy. About 60 per cent of survey respondents engaged in business or petty trading. Others do casual work in the market, shops, restaurants or people’s homes.7 In this context, remittances may be mobilised in a variety of ways. For many, like Saad and Rhoda, mobilising remittances was their primary or only livelihood strategy, without which they would probably return to the refugee camps. Around half of the Somali recipients were unemployed and the majority of these were receiving remittances. As in Hargeisa, some interviewees expressed unease about relying on remittances, for example: ‘It takes away the feeling of… the need to be self-sufficient. It takes away your pride to be dependent on someone abroad for all your needs.’8 But, as discussed in the previous chapter, in Somali culture sustained reliance on better-off family members is in fact not unusual. Besides, what constitute ‘normal’ relationships and patterns of economic reliance are affected by protracted exile, the fluid and unpredictable patterns of refugee resettlement to the global North and the limited alternatives for prima facie refugees. However, for others, like Abdiwali, mobilising remittances is one of several livelihood strategies. In the African Cities Survey sample, nearly half of those receiving money were working (and around two-fifths of those working were receiving money). For example, Hussein, a father of ten, received some $300 a month from a brother overseas, but also worked in the mornings in a friend’s shop for KSh100–300 each day. Often refugees solicit remittances mainly in response to particular crises, for example, to help pay living expenses when other livelihood strategies collapsed, or to address health or legal crises. Abdiwali gave an example of when he might ask relatives overseas for help: If I have a problem today, for example road accident or maybe I’m arrested, then people will contribute money to solve my problems … Not only in Nairobi. These people will communicate to those who are outside, they will say this person has that problem, he’s admitted to hospital, he’s [in] a very serious condition. Then they collect money … The first people who will support me is my sub-clan in Nairobi. Then if they are not able to solve at home, then they contribute outside.9

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Hashi, a scholarship student in his twenties, had a sister in Canada, three aunts and three uncles in the US, an uncle in the UK and many cousins abroad, but only asked for support now and again for specific purposes: It’s nonsense to support someone who can support himself so I wasn’t really getting regular money … But … if I ask them, if I tell them there is this or that issue, in that case they send … I said that I wanted to start a course, in that case I asked. Such cases … You don’t need from them regularly … So when you need support they will support you very happily.10 In some instances remittances were not expected to fulfil any narrowly economic function, but rather were gifts sent or received on a special occasion (for example, Ramadan, a wedding or a birth) or as a spontaneous act of kindness. Many refugees had been dispossessed of assets in Somalia, and had experienced a radical change in socio-economic status. As Rhoda put it: ‘Up till now, we have not regained the life we had in Somalia.’11 But people who receive regular remittances, although some live frugally, are visibly more comfortable than those eking out a living at the harder end of the informal economy. Remittances were least common among survey respondents earning less than KSh2,300 – the poorest group. Around three quarters of those receiving money from relatives abroad had paid someone to do work for them since coming to Nairobi, compared with only one quarter of those not receiving remittances. As one businessman put it, ‘You see a difference between those who receive remittances and those who do not – even in simple terms, those who receive usually dress better. They can afford to send their children to good schools. Other people live in much more critical situations.’12 Family groups were disrupted by the conflict, and in the process of displacement and exile the shuttling of people between households (in Somalia, in the refugee camps and in urban areas) became an important survival strategy. Regular remittance income meant people were better able to offer less fortunate relatives a place to stay – for example, Rhoda was able to care for some of her sisters’ children, Saad was able to offer relatives a place to stay. Forming and maintaining fluid urban households are an important part of life for urban newcomers (Beall 2002). This said, there is a strong sense of contingency about remittances as a livelihood strategy among recipients in Eastleigh. Because they had the fallback position of returning to the refugee camps, some suggested that relatives in Somalia would generally be prioritised for support. Even among people relying on remittances as a primary source of income, whose relative overseas had a strong social obligation to support them, few saw their situation as feasible or desirable in the long term. People often saw their reliance as a temporary phase, explaining that the

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remittances were to tide them over while finding work, studying, until they started a business or found a way to emigrate. However, such plans can be hard to realise without the right to work or the necessary capital and skills. Despite high hopes, for refugees as for others, ‘The experience of many poor people in cities is as much of doors closing on them as of opening windows of opportunity’ (Beall 2002: 72). Many find that time rolls on, without a clear exit from the contingencies that brought them to Nairobi. The main route out of this situation was through business.

Going into Business Abdi, who was born in Mogadishu, is now a successful wholesaler. He was born in the early 1980s, his father worked in the military and his mother used to sell groceries in a small shop. When the war broke out his father was killed and the fighting was very violent so his mother sent him to Ethiopia with some friends. He went to Kenya in 1994 and made great efforts to locate his dispersed relatives, travelling to the various refugee camps, sending messages through personal contacts and the BBC Somali Service’s family tracing programme, Baafin. He finally located, though a xawilaad (money transfer) agent, an uncle and sister in Norway and two cousins in the UK. In his words: ‘I got the contact telephone numbers … They were very shaken … it was a giant cry, when they found me they were very happy and they sent me an express money of happiness.’ That sum allowed him to leave Kakuma and go to Eastleigh, where he earned his living by hawking leftover stock that large stores needed to shift. He bought the stock at cost price and retained any profit. A year later, once he had proved that he was working hard, his uncle and sister decided to send a substantial sum. He received around $2,400 in instalments over the course of two years. He developed a wholesale business, sourcing goods from the Middle East, Asia and the Far East and supplying stores in Eastleigh. His relatives sometimes asked him for particular items, usually traditional crafts or gold, so he often sent goods with people he knew who were travelling to Europe. His relatives there supported his mother in Somalia, but he sometimes also helped out. Mahamoud is a shopkeeper in Eastleigh with a young family. He was born in the late 1970s in Beled Weyne. The family was comfortably off and after the war broke out he ran a café with his mother and brothers. His uncle was by that time living in Nairobi, but maintained close contact with Mahamoud’s mother, via the taar. She told him how badly things were going in Somalia. The uncle paid for Mahamoud and his younger brother to come to live with him in Eastleigh. Mahamoud was happy to go, as he wanted to help his mother and ‘take some of the load’. At that time his uncle was doing well; he had a retail business and was receiving assistance

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from relatives abroad, but in the mid-1990s this assistance dried up and the business was deteriorating. Mahamoud and his brother turned the business around and he is now pretty comfortably off, although he does not receive any remittances. He is able to send $50–100 to his mother and brothers in Beled Weyne whenever business is bad or a relative falls sick. As Abdi and Mahamoud’s experiences show, people in the diaspora have helped with the establishment of refugee businesses in a variety of ways. Some of the wealthier Somalis arrived in Eastleigh with cash in hand or saved in foreign bank accounts and made investments. But most people lost assets in the civil war – homes and their contents; livestock, land and crops; businesses; money in accounts (when the banking system collapsed); and cash (stolen or used up in the course of displacement). Few of the refugees I interviewed had been able to bring much of material or financial value with them from Somalia, except women’s gold. Moreover, in the camps they were deprived of gainful employment and in Eastleigh informal sector wages were usually low. It was hard to save up money to invest. Thus upstream loans or gifts from better-off relatives – and subsequent chains of downstream assistance – are a key part of the history of many of the businesses in Eastleigh. Abdi’s experience illustrates several points regarding business finance. There is often more than one ‘investor’, and the group may include local as well as overseas relatives. Remittances for investment are usually sent in instalments and distinguished from regular subsistence transfers: people do not usually ‘save up’ remittances. A hard-working independent reputation helps to mobilise contributions, as Abdi explained: You know … people are going out [to other countries], maybe I’ll go there and I meet his relative [points to his friend], and they say, what’s that guy doing, and I say, he’s a good man, he’s working – they will be happy! The people outside are looking for information… so they will give him some money to help him to establish himself … They like people who work, they don’t like somebody they are giving biil … Friend: Endless biil! Abdi: Yeah, endless. So they like somebody who’s working. So they normally look around the family...and they find someone who is very active who can generate a business and then they give some money.13 As he hints, starting a business is seen by those overseas as an alternative to sending regular remittances, a way to help people provide for themselves and, quite possibly, as time goes on, help out other family members too. Hashi explained: One thing that is becoming quite common these days is that relatives instead of sending you regular money decide to engage you in an

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activity. They get together some resources and they ask if there is anything you can do, if you can do tailoring, anything, work in a shop. Once they see what you can do, they’ll send you a good amount to start that business … So we’re moving away from this dependency, it’s not really going to be around much longer.14 Despite this expectation, many business attempts – diaspora-backed and otherwise – flounder, or refugees continue to call on support from overseas to supplement their initially small profits. The insecure status of being foreign and a refugee is an obstacle to maximising the potential value of remittances received. Much depends on the resources available to invest, the economic viability of the activity, entrepreneurial skill and luck, and the social connections of the individual concerned. The spending of remittances plays a part in fuelling demand for goods and services in Eastleigh. In contrast with the predominantly outwardbound traffic of remittances by Kenyan residents sending money to their villages (60 per cent of Kenyans in the African Cities Survey sent money out of Nairobi, and only 18 per cent received money), Somali residents see more in-bound remittance traffic (40 per cent of Somalis sent money, but 66 per cent received money). The money transmitters usually pay remittances out to recipients in dollars, which are then converted into Kenyan shillings by the same money transmitter or by one of the numerous informal money exchangers. The cash is largely spent in Nairobi, indeed mainly in Eastleigh as many refugees avoid going into town, contributing to high levels of local demand. Many of the businesses meeting this demand are run by Somali refugees. Money transfer is an obvious example: there are numerous xawilaad in Eastleigh. In Kenya, at the time of the research, officially only banks or money transfer operators in partnership with banks were licensed to transfer money, but many Somali operators continued to transmit money, some operating totally informally, others operating under a foreign exchange licence but also transferring money on the side. Western Union has offices in Eastleigh, but has made little headway with the Somali refugees, who tend to prefer Somali operators. Like other Somali entrepreneurs, several Somali money transfer companies have sunk profits into Nairobi, including Eastleigh. A prominent example is the gleaming ‘Amal Plaza’ shopping mall. Numerous private schools have also emerged to meet the demand created by refugees, teaching English, Swahili and Arabic, and allowing them to catch up on missed education. For example, Yusuf came to Kenya as a boy and grew up in the camps. In his mid-twenties he moved to Eastleigh and borrowed money from relatives living locally to establish one of the district’s many one-room private schools for adults. By the third month he had fifty students, keen to learn English, Arabic and

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Maths, while trying to arrange onward migration to the West or the Middle East. He had also begun to repay his relatives: ‘So life’s not now bad, it’s moving… I get no other help from, like, UK or from America, but I get indirectly because the students I have at school, they get assistance from their relatives in the UK, Europe or America or elsewhere.’15 There are also travel agencies, money exchangers and telephone and Internet bureaux serving refugee and Kenyan clientele. Somalis have moved far beyond serving their own community, undercutting the wellestablished Asian Kenyan business community, with business in Eastleigh attracting retail and wholesale customers from all over Nairobi and indeed East Africa (Campbell 2005). Somali wholesalers in Eastleigh source a wide array of goods – from electronics to suitcases to sugar – from all over the world – from Brazil to China to Dubai. Much of the economic activity described is informal. In the face of the rigours of trade liberalisation and structural adjustment, informal sector economic activity – known as jua kali (hot sun) work – surged in Kenya. An apparent softening on the part of the government in the second half of the 1980s turned in 1990 to a tougher approach, with the demolition of slum areas and informal sector businesses. But the informal sector was deeply embedded in Kenya’s economy, accounting for some 50 per cent of Kenya’s employment in 1993 (King 1996). While undoubtedly the refugees are not unusual in working in the informal sector, their situation is distinct in that their insecure status leaves them with few alternatives. According to anthropologist Peter Little, ‘Eastleigh is “openly informal”, neither hidden from authorities nor entirely consistent with an official, public place of business. At the same time it is integral to the service economy of Nairobi and its 2.5+ million residents’ (2003: 164). Much of this economic activity has one foot in the informal and one foot in the formal economy. Corruption in the public sector allowed better-off entrepreneurs to circumvent customs, zoning laws and other restrictions (Campbell 2005). Small traders without business permits often sublet space from officially registered landlords. But many refugees themselves not necessarily authorised to stay in Nairobi, have managed to arrange permits and are paying taxes. Concerns about security among local traders led to the establishment of the Eastleigh Business Community in 1999 which has undertaken various initiatives to improve the business environment in Eastleigh: by 2005, a total of 2,800 businesspeople, mainly Somalis, were registered with the association – from women running small market stalls through to the large wholesalers. The important role that Eastleigh has come to play in Nairobi’s economy is demonstrated by the fact that advocacy groups have emphasised the tax revenue lost on informal business in campaigning for the regularisation of urban refugees (RCK 2006). Nairobi, which had been losing its earlier position as a major regional economic trade hub, is seeing something of a renaissance in

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Eastleigh, thanks to the Somalis: ‘Nairobi’s refugees are now such an integral part of the urban fabric that their forced removal would be devastating to the local economy. Just as the British settlers both needed African labourers in Nairobi and objected to their presence there, many refugees today live under similar circumstances’ (Campbell 2005: 10).

A Global Crossroads Many people come to Nairobi to try to arrange onward migration to the West, often with the heartfelt wish to be reunited with much missed children, spouses and parents resettled overseas. The circumscribed legal and economic existence of Somali refugees in Kenya provides another major motivation for onward migration: Many people were supposed to make money here, but the government… Even me myself, if I get a permit to stay in Nairobi… then I can make money, I can try to sustain my own life… [but] there is no way… my last incentive was $50 per month... When I was teaching… Not enough for myself alone, not enough for the family. I would love to export16 myself! Otherwise, you know the suffering here. You can’t find jobs, you can’t find any other opportunities… personally, the only thing I can do is… community service. But that will not pay me much to take care of the family. It is difficult.17 Those seeking opportunities overseas are eager to escape the precariousness of life in Kenya, eking out a living in the informal economy, surviving on meagre handouts from the international community and negotiating the risks of living in the camps or relying on family solidarity. It is well known that the unemployed in Europe receive caydh or ‘free money’18 from the government (as some humorously put it, in the UK ‘the Queen pays you’), a degree of economic security much marvelled at. While idealised images of the West certainly abound, the basic material inequalities are staggering and undeniable. Abdiwali had earned $50 a week in the camp as a teacher at one point and was in contact with a Sudanese colleague who had been resettled in the US and was earning $2,000 a month teaching. He, like many others, would like to obtain the legal rights and jobs that would enable him to provide better for his family. As the university student Hashi put it: Once they are here, they are not very useful, they are not very productive, they’re just consumers, because there’s no source of employment, there’s no way they can find money, so they have to ask for money every time … So, it is better for us to go to the countries

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where there are opportunities, the greener grasses, so we eat that grass and send some of it to our relatives back home!19 Thanks to the constant flows of remittances and information between Somalis in Kenya and those in Europe and North America – conveyed by xawilaad, telephone, the Internet and word of mouth – people in the camps and in Nairobi can compare their lives with those of people elsewhere. The dream of resettlement is called buufis in Somali and has been extensively analysed by Horst (2006c). Such dreams can help people get through the harsh realities of daily life in the camps, often by clutching at what seem to the outsider improbably small straws of hope. But many people also view the overwhelming desire for resettlement as dangerous, diverting people’s efforts from ameliorating their present situation and with potentially mentally destabilising effects. There are several channels of onward migration to the West. There are official resettlement programmes, usually targeted at people seen to be in situations of special need, particularly those in need of legal or physical protection, especially women seen to be at specific risk of abuse, survivors of violence and torture, and those who have been separated from close family members overseas, and so on. Resettlement may be offered on an individual basis, or for a designated group of refugees, like the Somali Bantu. There are also other channels for family reunion or sponsorship of refugees, access to which is generally contingent on having close relatives or sponsors with the wherewithal to finance the process. These resettlement opportunities are supposed to be regulated by clear, transparent rules and to target clearly defined groups. However this is far from the perception of many refugees – the programmes have been haunted by management and corruption scandals (HRW 2002; Verdirame and Harrell-Bond 2005; Horst 2006b; Jansen 2008). In this context, many refugees ‘developed a belief that resettlement was something that they could organize and achieve. It became more than luck or need per se; instead, need and vulnerability became intertwined with opportunity, and thus subject to negotiation’ (Jansen 2008: 573). Again, the boundaries between formal and informal systems blur, as refugees seek to negotiate in informal ways – often with diaspora support – official migration opportunities. Meanwhile, there are also clandestine channels, involving brokers (mukhalis) who will help arrange fraudulent passports and visas that will allow people to travel to Europe or North America on a false identity, and then seek asylum on arrival. Sperl (2001) points out that while originally UNHCR used ‘irregular’ only to describe unlawful methods of entry, increasingly the term ‘irregular mover’, carrying pejorative overtones, is applied to all refugees leaving a first country of asylum. He challenges this: ‘What is “irregular” about people who seek to leave an often de facto hopeless situation in a

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camp or a slum, in order to seek a better future through education, employment or resettlement?’ (Sperl 2001: 26). Indeed, although viewed by governments as illegal, ‘irregular’ migration has a rather everyday quality when viewed from the streets of Eastleigh. Against the background of the constraints of life as refugees in Kenya, arranging to be smuggled to a richer country is seen by those involved as entirely acceptable behaviour. In contrast, going abroad and earning a good living but failing to help relatives back in Kenya or Somalia is seen as unacceptable. According to UNHCR, ‘irregular secondary movement … may … be a symptom of protracted hopelessness among long-standing refugee populations’ (UNHCR 2004: 3). Put another way, this onward movement can be part of the quest for self-reliance and rights. The diaspora often play a key role in facilitating and financing resettlement in the West. First, they provide information, are sometimes able to request reunion, deal with paperwork or other arrangements from abroad and assist on arrival. Secondly, they often meet the costs of emigration, from sponsorship guarantees to smugglers’ fees, which can amount to several thousands of dollars. Nairobi is a key location, where people can meet, make arrangements through social networks, access brokers and attend interviews at the UNHCR, the Joint Voluntary Agency (JVA) which resettles refugees in the US, and foreign embassies, and, because telephone, Internet and money transfer services are more widely available in the city, at competitive rates. Relatives often send money to cover the refugees’ costs of living while in Nairobi making their arrangements. For many of the people coming to Eastleigh with buufis, months gradually turn into years. For example, Fadumo, a young woman originally from the north-east of Somalia, had established a business in a market in Eastleigh. When the civil war broke out and the relatives she was living with fled, she was forced into a marriage at a young age for protection. Later her husband left for Europe and cut off contact with her and her first child. An aunt helped her to come to Nairobi, so that she could be resettled in the US as part of the aunt’s family. But she was rejected during the screening process and left high and dry in Eastleigh with her small daughter, with no resources and few contacts. She made friends with women working in the market and began selling clothes for them on credit to other women she knew, gradually building up the funds for her own clothes business. Thus, for many, Eastleigh is a staging post to an uncertain future. It is a place where, by connecting into wider social networks, opportunities might arise. A minority, it seems – and generally people with secure status in Kenya or business interests – actually make a conscious decision to settle there. For many, though, a few months turn into a few years, passing the time working, strategising or simply waiting.

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Beyond Categories: Making a Living, Circulation and Containment Refugee research has been criticised for uncritically absorbing policy categories and concerns, in focusing primarily on legally recognised refugees living within the structures of official assistance (see Black 2001, Bakewell 2008a). This has occurred for several reasons. There is the belief that developing a better understanding of refugee life in these formal institutionalised settings is likely to be the best way to improve refugee protection and living conditions. There is the fact that much refugee research is funded by operational agencies, who are understandably interested in how to refine assistance methodologies. There is the practical issue that camp refugees are a more easily identifiable and locatable population than urban refugees. However, as this chapter has shown, camps and official aid provision are only part of the picture of how people affected by war make a living abroad. In the absence of official ‘durable solutions’, many Somalis are seeking their own ways to cope with the problems of protracted and unresolved displacement, often beyond official institutional settings and in the face of considerable obstacles. Highlighting the fact that some refugees are remitters or recipients relocates them as actors in adaptive family networks, despite the widespread assumption that social capital is decimated by conflict and displacement. The theme of circulation – of people, information, goods and money – ran through the accounts of the Somalis I met in Eastleigh. Jennifer Hyndman (2000: 60) has used the notion of the ‘geopolitics of mobility’ to contrast the circumscribed and contained movements of refugees in the Horn of Africa with the hyper-mobility of international humanitarian aid flows: remittances add another layer to this geopolitics. There have been strenuous efforts by Kenya and other states to contain the physical circulation of people of Somali origin. These efforts have a long history: resistance in the Kenya–Somalia borderlands was met with drastic methods of physical containment, repression and surveillance. The Kenyan government continues to see the borderlands as a security problem and to confine refugees to remote camps. In Nairobi, a historically segregated city, many Somalis’ mobility is still circumscribed by fear of police interference, such that they do not venture much beyond Eastleigh. Official resettlement and family reunion opportunities for onward migration are few and hard to access. Meanwhile state regulations aim to control the remittance economy, restricting intermediation to authorised corporate actors. And yet this is not the full picture. In the face of these restrictions, Somali people and money continue to circulate. Many refugees commute regularly back and forth from the camps to towns and the capital, where others have relocated permanently. Those able to source identity documents through

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the twists and turns in official policy or corruptible official contacts. Those who have more confidence and speak Swahili or English often circulate freely within and beyond Eastleigh. There is the constant onward movement of people from Nairobi to other countries, with refugees painstakingly negotiating resettlement systems or bargaining hard on the backstreets of Nairobi for clandestine passages to the West. Remittances originate from people who have slipped through these loopholes in migration regimes intended to contain and control their movement. They send money to family members back home or in displacement settings – vast numbers of small transactions amounting to sums that rival official development and humanitarian aid. They use an efficient indigenous financial infrastructure that has proved resilient and adaptive in the face of changing regulation. All this is possible because people use skill and money to negotiate state regulations, finding loopholes, official and otherwise, strategically blurring the lines between the formal and informal. While aid providers often overlook the significance of refugees’ efforts to provide for themselves and refugees are often fearful of jeopardising already meagre rations by exposing the support that some receive from overseas, aid and remittances are nevertheless interconnected and interact in various ways (Horst 2006b, 2008b). Assistance from family members living locally and overseas allowed many people to avoid or leave the camps and cope in the city. It seems likely that a portion of Eastleigh’s refugee population would have to return to the camps if they did not receive remittances to cover their living expenses. In some cases these refugees disappear from the list of aid recipients, in other cases they informally reallocate their aid allowances to others (by selling or giving ration cards). Thus, this family solidarity can partially or fully release refugees from the aid relationship. Considering the often transnational nature of many refugee families, Nicholas Van Hear asks whether ‘transnationalism may in itself be a “durable solution” for conditions of displacement – or at least an “enduring” solution. This might mean considering the encouragement or promotion of transnationalism’ (Van Hear 2003: 15). But, as he also points out, the sending of remittances cannot resolve refugees’ unique legal predicament. For example, a Somali man on a work permit in the Gulf may send money back to help maintain his family who are prima facie refugees in Kenya. While this may certainly alleviate hardship and the arrangement may sometimes continue for a long time, neither party has regained in their countries of residence the rights denied them in their country of origin – they are still in legal limbo. Such examples of refugee attempts to improve their situation may be lauded as evidence of refugees’ agency, resilience and self-reliance, but they simultaneously demonstrate the thinness of host countries’ and the international community’s response to many refugee situations. Indeed, the remittance economy is in some respects maintained by immigration and

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asylum restrictions which separate close family members. Furthermore, the capacity of resettled refugees and labour migrants to offer support to family back home is often rather limited, as the next chapter demonstrates.

Notes 1. 2. 3.

4.

5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18.

19.

Interview, Rhoda, Nairobi, February 2005. Some of the refugees in Kakuma had been issued with Alien Cards. This is based on national groups of refugees of 25,000 living for five years or more in the same country of asylum and excludes Palestinian refugees under UNRWA’s mandate. Although recent guidelines emphasise UNHCR’s duty to protect refugees regardless of their location and the promotion of self-reliance through creative assistance approaches. Thanks to Simon Konzolo (Refugee Consortium Kenya) and Dulo Nyaoro (Moi University) for updates. See also HRW 2009. Interview, Abdiwali, Nairobi, February 2005. Wages vary: in 2005 matatu drivers were earning around KSh600 per day; touts half this; cyber café assistants might earn KSh6,000 a month; shop assistants KSh4,000-5,000. Those working in Somali homes may be casual domestic workers, or younger female relatives, who are given bed and board but may not be paid for their work. Interview, Hashi, Nairobi, February 2005. Interview, Abdiwali, Nairobi, February 2005. Interview, Hashi, Nairobi, February 2005. Interview, Rhoda, Nairobi, February 2005. Interview, businessman, Nairobi, February 2005. Interview, Abdi, Nairobi, February 2005. Interview, Hashi, Nairobi, February 2005. Interview, Yusuf, Nairobi, February 2005. In Somali, people use the verb dhoofi to refer to people moving abroad (the same word is used to refer to the movement of livestock and goods abroad). Somali speakers sometimes translate this into English as ‘exporting oneself’. Interview, Abdiwali, Nairobi, February 2005. Caydh traditionally describes a person who has lost all his livestock, as well as what is given by other people to help him out. The word is also now used to describe social security or government benefits in the West. Interview, Hashi, Nairobi, February 2005.

Chapter 5 The North–South Divide in Everyday Life: Londoners Sending Money ‘Home’

I’m sending this one out to everybody that’s had to wait on a money transfer … You know how good it feels when they say: You can pick it up today, it’s fifteen minutes away … Feels like an angel’s beacon, I can hardly believe it … I got my biz in order, I made it cross the border ‘Such dazzle such a horror, his life is like an opera’ I haven’t gone astray, don’t drink or smoke or sway Though sometimes I don’t pray, it feels so good to say Go out and receive it, cause I just know you need it Your boy has grown up decent, Grandma can you believe it You can pick it up today, it’s fifteen minutes away … I just want to give a quick shout out to all those people who’ve helped me along the way … Now I’m sending money to people. Generosity is the key. (K’Naan ‘15 Minutes Away’ on the album Troubadour, 2009) Sometimes I shout at them … ‘Do you think we are collecting the money from the trees?’ … But they won’t understand. I told myself, when I left Somalia, when I looked down from the plane, I said ‘I never ever want to come back here!’ After one week I wanted to go back! … They have no minimum clue the position you’re in, how much pressure you’re under … They wake up in the morning and they don’t know where to get breakfast. That is the life they are dealing with … If they are lucky they got your phone number, so they call you hoping you can help. (Interview with Shamsa in London, May 2005)

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These views, the first from K’Naan, a Somali-Canadian musician, and the second from Shamsa, a single mother struggling to make ends meet in London, neatly capture the ambiguous feelings that soon become apparent when people talk about sending money ‘home’. A relative minority of the Somali regions’ ‘missing million’ have settled in the global North, but previous chapters have shown that they provide the bulk of remittance funds. A key node in global trade and finance, London has also witnessed ‘globalisation from below’: by the beginning of the twenty-first century over one-third of the workforce was born abroad (GLA 2005). While the dynamics and impact of immigration and asylum in London are relatively well recorded and well researched, the fact that London is also a key source of remittances for poorer countries has only come to the attention of researchers and policy makers in recent years. The World Bank (2008) suggests that migrants in the UK sent official remittances amounting to some $4.5 billion in 2006.1 We have seen how Somalis in Africa mobilise remittances, but what is the view from the global North? What does the view from London tell us about why people remit money and the effects on their lives? While remittance literature has been primarily concerned to understand the economic effects of labour migration and remitting on recipient households, regions and countries, by exploring the migration and remittance experiences of people of Somali origin in London, we are forced to consider the diaspora perspective, confronting the implications of the violent origins of migration for the remittance process and exploring the social texture of these transfers. This chapter draws on informal consultations, some thirty interviews and a survey of 175 remitters in a London money transfer office belonging to the company Dahabshiil.2 Although not a representative sample of remitters in London, the information that survey respondents provided gives a broadly indicative picture of remittance patterns. Although every host context is different, many of the findings from London are echoed in evidence from elsewhere in the Somali diaspora, and indeed among other refugee groups, as we shall see. This chapter first charts the particular migration history of Somalis to the UK. Despite often difficult circumstances, remitting is widespread: I explore who is sending money, the social micro-dynamics underlying remittance relationships and the repercussions of remitting on those involved in London.

Seeking Asylum There is a long, although initially numerically modest, history of Somali migration to the UK. As Chapter 2 outlined, Somali men working for the merchant navy sojourned in the UK’s port cities, and some of the elderly immigrants in London’s East End have resided there since before

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independence. From the 1960s, some Somali women joined their husbands in the UK, particularly after Aden won independence and members of the Somali community were expelled. There was a sense of solidarity and relative independence among these women, due to their husbands’ prolonged periods at sea – many found jobs as shop assistants, hospital cleaners and factory workers, and they formed the first Somali community associations (Summerfield 1993). With the gradual decline of British merchant shipping, some men returned to Somalia, while others took retirement in the UK. Others moved from the ports to work in heavy industry in Yorkshire and Midland cities, although they were hit hard, like many British workers, by the industrial restructuring of the 1970s and 1980s. Meanwhile, small numbers of students also went to train in the UK. While the first seamen working in the UK in the colonial era were viewed by their communities as intrepid adventurers, since the late 1980s people have come to the UK on an adventure not of their own choosing, as refugees. When the war broke out in 1988, displaced northerners travelled to the UK to join their relatives and seek asylum. After the state collapsed, many more refugees arrived to seek asylum. From 1988 to 1994 a special concession allowed UK Somalis to apply for family reunion for their relatives, rather than requiring relatives to go through the swamped British embassy in Ethiopia (Griffiths 2002). The refugees tended to be from the better-off segments of society, better educated than average and generally from urban areas; my interviewees’ fathers were traders, shopkeepers, doctors, government employees, reasonably prosperous pastoralists or migrant workers (see also Bloch and Atfield 2002). In general, the UK received relatively few claims for asylum until the late 1980s compared with other large European countries, partly due to its island geography. However, as a growing number of countries in poorer parts of the world were engulfed in internal conflict in the early 1990s, with the expansion of transport facilitating unprecedented global mobility, claims for asylum increased considerably. By the late 1990s, asylum had become a major party political issue and Parliament passed several immigration and asylum laws in a relatively short period. Asylum applications could only be made once the claimant had reached the UK, which, with the imposition of visa requirements and the Immigration (Carriers Liability) Act of 1987,3 was difficult without using illegal means, raising the cost of migration (Black 2003). Most of my interviewees had to lie about the purpose of their visit and use false documents (bought on the black market or ‘borrowed’ from friends and relatives). Shamsa described the process of getting her brothers out: We did everything … we even falsified the travel documents … we did everything to survive … If you analyse it, I’m not a drug dealer, it’s just I’m scared and want to survive. And if they get you, you are guilty. It’s

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terrible … Just you get a lot of money together and pay the fee … Anyway, a hundred ways, you are always involved with these people who are bringing people in illegally … I don’t remember exactly how much I paid, but I remember when they came here I had to work another four years doing cleaning to pay it back. You meet the dealer today and he’ll say I’ve got one place. And you have to take it, so you’re looking everywhere, to your friends in America, everywhere, for money, that’s the routine we were living. You have to put all that money together, or you might not get another chance. So then you have to repay it! Some people came directly; others after a period in refugee camps, cities in neighbouring countries or the Middle East; some ended up in the UK as a result of a smuggling process in which they exercised little control. For example, Osman was in his early twenties when the war came to Mogadishu and he fled to join relatives in Saudi Arabia. The difficulties of making a living in the Middle East and the threat of being deported made him seek other possibilities. With money from his brother in the Netherlands, he bought a false passport (of a nationality which at the time did not require a visa for the UK) for $300 and a plane ticket for $300. Some people were advised by friends or agents about possible destinations. Abdirashid fled from the violence in Mogadishu in 1991 to Addis Ababa, and initially wanted to go on to the Middle East because he could speak Arabic. But he met a friend who had been living in Italy for many years and was now an agent, who advised him to go to Europe because then he would be able to claim asylum and get secure status. For $1,000, his friend arranged a fake passport and a ticket. He was subsequently glad of his decision, emphasising the value of free education in Europe. Others deliberately chose to claim asylum in the UK, like Zahra and Nasir. Zahra, now in her forties, grew up in Hargeisa. She and her family experienced life in a city overrun with soldiers, in the grip of fear and abuse, in the late 1980s, described in Chapter 3. She left with friends to stay with Somali relatives in Djibouti. When full-scale war broke out at home, she went to Hartasheikh camp in Ethiopia and then returned to Djibouti. A friend gave her Djiboutian passport to Zahra and another friend, claiming that she was his wife, got her a visa from the British Embassy. She deliberately decided to go to the UK, where she had a sister, having been an avid listener of the BBC as a teenager. She landed late at night, and told the officials at Heathrow that she was visiting a British Somali friend in Wales, speaking French as if she was a Djiboutian. She got a lift with some other Somalis to Wales and, after a few weeks, applied for asylum. She was eventually granted full refugee status in 1997 and citizenship a few years later.

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Nasir, who was forced to leave Mogadishu in the late 1990s, was more conscious of seeking out a country that he thought would recognise him as a refugee. Two of his brothers had been killed and his wife had left: ‘I was in a poor emotional and mental state.’ He got a visa in a neighbouring country for Italy. He had previously worked there and spoke Italian: ‘I didn’t have to adapt to nothing. But it was impossible to integrate. They did not have any real system of recognising refugees. Without help you start from zero … They signed the [Refugee] Convention but I don’t think that they read it.’ So he bought a false Canadian travel document and got a train to the UK, where he had no contacts, mainly because he had heard that it had a reputation for respecting human rights and giving asylum to refugees. When he arrived, the officials saw that his documents were fake, and he applied for asylum. Still others just planned to leave, without making any deliberate decision about where to go. One young woman, Anab, was from a minority group and grew up in an area of Mogadishu controlled by a powerful Hawiye militia commander. He was known to have raped local women and girls, and one day in the early 2000s he threatened her. She and her family were very scared and her father, a small businessman, collected money from all their relations and paid an agent to take her away. Anab left on a flight via Dubai to the UK, accompanied by an agent, who told her to not to talk on the journey. She said: ‘I decided to leave the country only, I did not decide which country to go to. I need only a safe country. The agent decided to go to the UK. I did not know where I was going.’ When we met, the UK had given her temporary protection and she was learning English at college, trying to get a part-time job and planning to take a hair dressing course. These examples illustrate the varying degrees to which coming to the UK is a deliberate individual or family decision and the outcome of a process beyond the migrant’s control, and the often circuitous routes taken in search of security and rights. They highlight the frequent importance of social networks in providing information, money and accommodation, making travel arrangements or officially requesting family reunion. They also provide a contrast with some of the more upbeat literature on processes of globalisation and migration: For different social groups and different individuals are placed in very distinct ways in relation to these flows and interconnections. This point concerns not merely the issue of who moves and who doesn’t, although that is an important element of it; it is also about power in relation to the flows and the movement. Different social groups have distinct relationships to this anyway-differentiated mobility: some people are more in charge of it than others: some initiate flows and movement, others don’t; some are more on the receiving-end of it than others; some are effectively imprisoned by it. (Massey 1994: 61)

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Unlike in Kenya, there is a clear road to secure status in the UK. Like Osman, Abdirashid, Zahra, Nasir and Anab, the vast majority of Somalis coming to the UK applied for asylum. The numbers of applications have fluctuated considerably over the last twenty years, often under 2,000, but reaching over 7,000 in 1999. Many Somali people coming to the UK were recognised as refugees and subsequently became citizens, others gained some form of subsidiary protection. An unknown number are failed asylum-seekers:4 while deportations are reported to be rising, many still eke out a twilight existence, living rough or relying on support from NGOs, local councils or friends. Beyond asylum, some close family members of people permanently settled in the UK were able to apply for family reunion. Finally, there is some relocation of Somali EU citizens from other EU countries to the UK, particularly from the Netherlands and Scandinavia (Lindley and Van Hear 2007).

Settling in a Global City It is hard to know exact numbers but it seems likely that there are well over 71,000 people born in Somalia5 living in the UK, and the ethnic population, including European-born children and Ethiopian and Kenyan Somalis, must be much larger. Geographically, Somalis have tended where possible to cluster by lineage in areas of London with historic Somali communities – for example the Isaq (especially Habar Ja’lo) in Tower Hamlets – or ‘new’ Somali areas, including parts of Brent, Ealing, Newham, Haringey, Camden and Waltham Forest. But many refugees have no choice, living in poor, overcrowded temporary housing and taking some years to find permanent accommodation (Warfa et al. 2005). Economic indicators have been pretty poor. According to the 2001 Census, only around 16 per cent of Somali-born people in London of working age were officially employed – the lowest rate of all foreign-born groups (GLA 2005).6 Somali-born people were employed in diverse industries: particularly the wholesale and retail trade; real estate, renting and business activities; and health and social work. There are no major labour market niches as with some immigrant groups, although anecdotally, there are a handful of very specific niches where Somalis work in some numbers: community workers, taxi drivers, bus drivers, cleaners at Victoria station and workers at Heathrow airport. Labour market barriers include language skills, immigration status, racism and discrimination, poor literacy and problems with converting professional qualifications gained elsewhere (Bloch and Atfield 2002). At the same time, some people have established successful businesses, particularly money transfer agencies, Internet and telecommunications bureaux, taxi firms, and restaurants and cafés serving Somali food, following classic

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immigrant employment pathways into self-employment. Many Somali Europeans relocating to the UK cite the more promising business environment as a major pull factor, and there are suggestions that over time the economic integration of people of Somali origin, while still a matter of concern, may be improving. As already discussed in relation to remittance flows to Hargeisa, the process of migration has dramatically reconfigured conventional pre-war economic roles in many diasporic households, with women often taking a prominent role in decision-making and income generation in London (Griffiths 2002). The emotional and economic strains of displacement and adjusting to life in the UK and concerns about excessive khat usage among men have led to marital breakdown in many instances. As an illustration, there is a story people recount about a Somali man newly arrived in the UK. His wife had migrated before him and then had sponsored him to join her. When he arrived, some Somali men took him aside and explained to him that here things were different, that the women were in charge, and to be careful and do what his wife said or she would throw him out. One day he went out to do the shopping and on the way home he stopped at the mefrish (a place where men chew khat) to talk with his friends. He suddenly realised that it had got late and rushed home with his shopping. As he arrived, he saw his wife putting a black bag out on the pavement outside their house. Oh no – he thought – she has thrown me out with my things! Dejected, he picked up the bag and went back to the mefrish. It’s happened, he told the men there, she has thrown me out already. After some commiseration, someone remarked on an unpleasant smell. The other men all fell about laughing – he had brought the rubbish bag! The adjustments of familial relations that are prompted by the new social environment are also reflected in the remittance process, as we shall see. Another aspect of the settlement process of Somalis in London has been the establishment of Somali community organisations. Most of these organisations are small and survive on intermittent charitable funding and the energy and dedication of community workers, many of whom work long and antisocial hours on very low pay, trying to help other Somali people in the early stages of life in the UK, animated largely by the wish to make a difference and the satisfaction of being held in respect. It is not uncommon to hear Somalis and British commentators alike bemoan the often clan-based nature of these organisations, and the difficulties of developing cooperation and a ‘united Somali voice’ (see, for example, Hopkins 2006). At a meeting to launch a Birmingham network of Somali organisations that I attended, a local MP issued a typical call for unity: ‘I want to work together with you provided you are not divided among yourselves.’7 However, just as ‘tribal hostilities’ are an inadequate explanation for the conflict in the Somali regions, so they fail to explain

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properly the nature of Somali organisational life in the UK. Certainly, community organisations do often emerge to serve geographic clusters of clanspeople, and unsurprisingly animosities do often arise between people who find their families are aligned on different sides of what are often deadly hostilities in the Somali regions – hostilities which may have prompted their migration or taken the lives of relatives. However, there is also a discourse of soomaalinimo – Somali solidarity – which animates cooperation and mutual assistance across social groups and a certain sense of commonality derived from being Somali in the UK – in particular, women and members of the ‘1.5 generation’ (born in the Somali regions, raised overseas) have been active in organising events that encourage wider contact and dialogue. Attempts by frustrated local officials to call forth ‘a community’ of Somalis in the UK too often implicitly belittle the grave nature of the violence in the Somali regions, and the importance attached to developing ‘a united voice’ and community organisations as facilitators of integration reflects some of the shortcomings of the multicultural paradigm of migrant incorporation. As Griffiths et al. point out: ‘[M]ulticultural race relations involve the incorporation of minorities through the devolving of responsibility to designated community organisations and other forms of local representation … the parameters of post-war race relations in Britain had been decisively shaped by the earlier experience of Empire and colonial rule’ (Griffiths et al. 2006: 885). Thus, there is a strong contrast between how the host state wants to imagine and engage with diasporic and refugee populations as cohesive communities amenable to categorisation and bureaucratic administration and the complex, tense, transnational social worlds in which Somalis arriving in the UK often find themselves (Zetter 1991). While this chapter concentrates on family remittances, it is important to note that London is the hub of a wide range of transnational activities. It has been a destination for exiled politicians from all over the Somali regions and a source of political and military fund-raising. As one Somaliland MP put it, ‘It is where the big politicians are grounded.’8 Many of the community associations are also involved in fund-raising for or running schools and other community projects in the Somali regions. There is constant exchange of information between London and the Horn of Africa through phone calls, email, chat rooms, Somali newspapers, online news and visits by prominent people. Some people spend parts of the year in the more stable northern Somali regions – ‘revolving returnees’, or ‘part-time diaspora’ (Hansen 2006, Hammond 2009) – returning for periods to work in Europe to maintain homes and families ‘back home’. Summer visits allow people to spend time with their families, to show the children ‘their culture’ and in some cases to oversee house-building or investigate business opportunities. Parents sometimes send back teenage Somali Londoners – nicknamed as daqan celis (roughly

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translating as ‘return to culture’) – to get to know their families, language and culture or to keep them out of trouble. (Trouble in these cases can be defined as ranging from involvement in drugs, crime and truancy to failure to observe their parents’ Somali cultural norms or wanting to marry a person deemed inappropriate – sometimes the family confiscates the young person’s European passport for good measure.) Amid these various types of transnational exchange, there is the constant rhythm of remittances leaving London for the Horn of Africa.

Who Pays the Biil? There has been a tendency in remittance research to focus on recipient individuals, communities and countries, rather than on the senders of remittances. This is in part because of the concern to understand the impact of remitting on local development processes in poor countries, and in part because of the dominant model of remitting, the new economics of labour migration, conceptualising migrants as satellite or ‘shadow households’, linked to the core, recipient household through some form of implicit and mutually beneficial contract (Caces et al. 1985). Studies have generally deduced remittance motivations based primarily on household survey data collected in the country of origin. However, recent research based on surveys of immigrants or matched host/home country samples indicates that migrants’ characteristics and interaction with the host country environment also influence remitting in important ways (for example, Menjívar et al. 1998, Taylor 2000, Brown and Poirine 2005, Marcelli and Lowell 2005, Mazzucato 2005, Osili 2005). So, in the Somali case, who pays the biil? It is not known exactly what proportion of Somali people in the UK send remittances.9 Many people claim expansively that ‘Everyone sends money’. But, of course, some people do not: the desire to engage in transnational activities is influenced by various factors and is not always matched by the capability; conversely, some people who are capable of sending money do not wish to (Al-Ali et al. 2001b). However, most people whom I asked during the course of the research said they had remitted some money in the previous year – even if only an ad hoc, small amount. The remitter survey results regarding amounts transferred during the last twelve months are shown in Table 5.1. The first and most important type was remittances to personal contacts in Somalia or elsewhere, which averaged around $3,110 per year ($260 a month).10 Many people also made transfers for investment or community-related activities in Somalia, bringing total average transfers to around $4,440, although amounts tended to cluster in the lower ranges.11 Remittance patterns varied: in this sample, 61 per cent remitted to at least one individual on a monthly basis,

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although many remitted less frequently and some only on an ad hoc basis for specific projects or urgent needs. Table 5.1 Remittances and other transfers

Remittances to personal contacts Investment transfers (Somali regions) Community contributions (Somali regions) Total

Number of cases

Minimum Maximum (US$) (US$)

Mean (US$)

Median (US$)

171

50

22,550

3,108

2,250

21

19

50,000

990

0

113

10

8,756

341

74

175

50

52,400

4,438

2,493

Source: Remitter Survey June 2005. Note: Data for the twelve months leading up to the survey. Respondents were not asked about investments or community contributions outside Somalia. Averages calculated over whole sample.

Several remittance geometries were identified. First, there are individualto-individual remittances: the sender supporting one individual. Secondly, in individual-to-several remittances, the sender directly supports more than one individual – their ‘list’, as some say. Just less than one quarter of the respondents regularly sent money to more than one person, and many sent money to several people less frequently during the last year. Thirdly, in several-to-individual remittances, the sender organises with others to cooperate in remitting to an individual. Other transfer geometries involve groups marshalling resources for needy individuals or community purposes – not personal remittances, but part of the wider transnational economic picture. Figure 5.1 shows the gender and age distribution of respondents. Around three fifths were men and two fifths women; most remitters were aged twenty-five to forty four (broadly corroborating Chapter 3 and Shire 2006). The average household size was 3.4: around a quarter lived alone (mainly men); two-fifths lived with children under sixteen; around onethird lived with a spouse. The vast majority – 92 per cent – of the remitters surveyed were born in Somalia. Figure 5.2 shows that, although some have lived in the UK for decades, most left after the conflict began and immigrated relatively recently. Nearly all had citizenship or refugee or temporary status. Economic activities among the remitters varied. Figure 5.3 shows that 56 per cent of working age respondents were in work, 12 per cent were looking for work and 14 per cent were occupied looking after their home and family. People were employed in health, social services and the voluntary sector, public and private transport, warehouse/factory work and security. Only a handful of people were

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Female Male

70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% 16–24

25–44

45–64

65+

16–24

25–44

45–64

65+

Figure 5.1 Remitters and Somali-born population by gender and age Source: Remitter Survey June 2005

Scale 2000

x

x 15 x 10 x 5 0

Year left Somalia

1990 x x

1980

xx xx

x

x xx

x

x

x

x x x

x

x

x x

x

x

1970 1960 x

1950

1950

1960

1970 1980 Year arrived in UK Figure 5.2 Remitters’ migration Source: Remitter Survey June 2005

1990

2000

100%

Retired / sick / disabled / other Part-time student Looking after family / home Full-time student Looking for work Working

80% 60% 40% 20% 0% 16–24

25–44

45–64

All

16–24 25–44 45–64

All

Figure 5.3 Remitters and Somali-born population by economic profile Source: Remitter Survey June 2005

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Photo 5.1 Money transfer advertisements in Wembley Credit: Joseph Winter, BBC

self-employed. The sample fell into four crude household income groups. Around 30 per cent worked and one or more other household members also worked. Around 20 per cent worked but were the only household member doing so. Around 30 per cent were not working but someone else in their household was. The remaining 20 per cent or so lived in households with no apparent source of earned income, probably relying on state benefits. To calculate the determinants of the likelihood and level of remitting, it would be necessary to take a random sample from the migrant population and analyse the characteristics of those who remit and those who do not. However, some useful insights were gained from comparing the remitter sample with census data.12 In demographic terms, for example, Figure 5.1 showed that remitters were more likely to be aged twenty five and forty four than the general Somali-born population. In London as in Hargeisa, it is sometimes said that women are ‘better’ remitters than men. But the picture from London corroborates our findings in Hargeisa: in the London remitter sample there was a greater proportion of men than in the general Somali-born population and male respondents sent larger remittances on average ($3,645), although women still sent considerable sums ($2,340). This reinforces the point made in

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Chapter 3 that there has been a relative rather than an absolute change. Men dominate as senders, but women play a considerable minority role, widely noted because it runs counter to traditional culture. Turning to economic characteristics, the evidence suggests that, unsurprisingly, economic situation affects remittances. Figure 5.3 showed that the remitters surveyed had higher – by over three times – employment rates than the general Somali-born population. Moreover, workers sent around three times larger amounts than non-workers. Remitters in multiple income households sent the most, followed by those in single income households where the remitter worked.

The Social Micro-Dynamics of Remittances Conventional microeconomic approaches to studying remittances focus on explaining remittance behaviour by ascertaining the extent to which migrants are acting as if they are remitting in order to preserve their inheritance, to get relatives to look after their assets at home, to repay an implicit family loan or to fulfil their side of a mutual insurance arrangement. Such studies can be dismissive of people’s own explanations for their actions, for example: [Migrants] would seldom admit openly to acting in such a calculating manner [as remitting to repay an implicit loan], since sharing values and norms is deeply rooted in traditional cultures, and ‘internalized’ by individuals brought up in such cultures … the reasons people give for their acts in surveys may not help us much in explaining and predicting their actual behavior. (Poirine 1997: 590) However, insights from economic anthropology and sociology point to how economic actions are intricately embedded in social relations, and suggest that, particularly in more traditional societies: ‘[A] material transaction is usually a momentary episode in a continuous social relation. The social relation exerts governance: the flow of goods is constrained by, is part of, a status etiquette … Yet the connection between material flow and social relations is reciprocal … If friends make gifts, gifts make friends … the material flow underwrites social relations’ (Sahlins 2004: 186–187). It follows that to explain remitting, we have to explore not only how people act but also the meanings that they attach to these actions. Remittance practices vary and may carry rather different meanings in different cultural settings. For example, Cliggett (2005) outlines how Zambian rural–urban migrants make social investments through intermittent gifts in kind in order to be welcomed on their return. Bajic (2007) describes the proud resistance among middle-class urban

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Serbian parents, despite their worsening economic situation, to receiving remittances from migrant children. So what are the social micro-dynamics of remitting in the Somali case? By way of illustration, I want to return to Farhiya’s experience, with which this book began. As a working woman who came to the UK many years ago, Farhiya has continued to support her family over a long period of time. Her husband also works and both have siblings in Somalia, whom they separately support. Sorting through the receipts she had kept showed the complexity of some remittance patterns. In total she sent more than $5,000 in the previous year – not an unusual amount for a Somali Londoner to remit. First, she was supporting the family of her oldest brother in Somalia. He is an elder and was once well off, but his business collapsed during the war. She felt that she owed him as he played a key role in her upbringing. After arriving in the UK she sent money now and again, but then he asked her for more regular support, initially on a temporary basis. This somehow became a permanent arrangement, and for some years Farhiya sent $100 each month to her sister-in-law for general household needs. Her brother sometimes asked – directly or indirectly – for extra help. One day he asked her to send the money for one year in advance so they could start a small business. She agreed, on the basis that, once the business was set up, they would support themselves. With difficulty, for two years Farhiya sent larger instalments, but as no successful business emerged, and no clear explanation for why not from her point of view, she told them she would go back to sending $100 each month. Secondly, a few years ago, Farhiya decided to send her half-brother to Nairobi. He was a young man with a bright and hard-working reputation. She wanted him to study ‘something useful’ – perhaps computers, Swahili or English – and was considering trying to bring him to the UK. She sent money for his expenses, but then found out that he was just chewing khat. She threatened to stop if he did not get his act together, and said each month she would send $50 to him for rent and $50 to their cousin to cook his meals. He was angry that she had asked around about him, and went to live in a remote refugee camp where she did not know anyone. When we spoke, she told me that he sometimes phones and she is still sometimes persuaded to send him some money, but she does not send on a monthly basis any more. Lastly, she also occasionally helped another brother in town and her nomadic sisters. Another sister lives in London but has been back a few times, trying to arrange visas for her children: when she goes back she sometimes asks for help or relays others’ requests. Farhiya also remits money occasionally to extended family members, and contributes to qaaraan (clanbased collections) for individuals and social projects in their hometown. Farhiya’s remittance patterns are not easily explained by the standard

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microeconomic remittance motivations – the wish to preserve inheritance (her relatives’ material assets in Somalia were negligible compared with hers), or to get relatives to look after her assets (she had none in Somalia), or as part of a mutual insurance arrangement (she confronted no material risks in the UK that her family in Somalia would be in a position to alleviate). Her relationship with her elder brother in some ways corresponds to the notion of repaying an implicit family loan. Indeed, many remitters I spoke with expressed feelings of indebtedness to their parents, and often older brothers or uncles, for earlier material and nonmaterial assistance, particularly for bringing them up, or helping with their education and sometimes for paying for them to go overseas. The most common beneficiaries of the Somali Londoners surveyed were siblings and parents (71 per cent).13 Spouses were less common recipients (9 per cent of regular recipients, as many Somali couples were split by death, separation and divorce, and many others were reunited or were married overseas) although predictably had a strong claim for assistance, receiving the highest average amount. People also sent money to other family members and friends, who accounted for 17 per cent of the regular recipients and 12 per cent of the volume. However, in most cases where people expressed a sense of debt, it was rather diffuse and indefinite, resonating with the anthropological concept of generalised reciprocity typical among kin, i.e. an indefinite reciprocity involving no overt reckoning of debts, where returns may be much delayed and not necessarily equivalent in form or measure to what has been given (as distinct from balanced reciprocity, where returns of commensurate worth are anticipated) (Sahlins 2004). For example, Liban, a community worker, rationalised his own situation – supporting four uncles regularly and twelve aunts intermittently – by saying ‘You eat with your brother when he has money.’14 Also, debts were often transferable within family networks – for instance, if a man was assisted by an older uncle to migrate to the UK, he might return the favour by paying a cousin’s school fees. People explained that sending money was a way to maintain affectionate relationships, in the absence of other regular forms of face-toface interaction which usually reinforce family relations – a form of ‘kin work’ (Bryceson and Vuorela 2002; Zontini 2004). This resonates with evidence from Zambia, where sending gifts has been described as a way to ‘remember’ or ‘recognise’ people, and from El Salvador, where people are said to ‘measure affection’ in remittances (Cliggett 2005; Santillán and Ulfe 2006). For many Somalis in the UK, sending remittances became a critical factor in maintaining a sense of familial harmony and well-being. Such non-material returns to remitting can play a key – and as yet undertheorised – role in motivating remittances, a role which is hard to capture using survey methods. In some cases, people were also preserving in the

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back of their minds the possibility of eventually returning in dignity to the Somali regions – and in the shorter term some anticipated that, if they did wish to visit their home area, they could count on their family providing hospitality and security. The global infrastructure of telecommunications, travel and money transfer plays a key role in mediating the remittance process. As one money transfer agent pointed out, ‘If you have a call every morning from a family member, then you are going to send money.’15 It has been easy to send money from the UK to the Somali regions, as the UK has had one of the more liberal regimes for regulating money transmission, and there were around fifty Somali agents registered as money transmitters in the UK by 2004. The fact that fees on small amounts are reasonably affordable means that people are sending money on a monthly basis, and in some cases more frequently. These infrastructures are well developed and relatively competitive in the Somali regions – in sharp contrast with some other conflict-affected settings – which brings the lives of those overseas closer to those ‘back home’, and makes the whole remittance system more responsive to events. In this context, considerable social pressure can be applied. Many Somalis would be ‘shamed’ if they did not support their relatives: one respondent said he would be ‘struck off the family list’. Farhiya, like many others, said that, if she stopped sending to her brother, it would not only sour her relationship with him, but people in their hometown would notice and say that she had forgotten her family. Nasir left Mogadishu in the late 1990s after several family members were killed: his early years in the UK were tough and he was homeless for a period. Not remitting was one element in his disgrace: I was a disgraciato, my family connections were kaput … People at home think Nasir is in London and he is not going to help us. They think I am just a bad man … They think that in the UK you collect money in the street and send it … The image that they give me … Once you are not working and you are not sending money and they heard you are drinking.16 While some social pressure came from people back home, much also came from within the diaspora. ‘Conduit people’ – key family players – often play an important role, keeping contact with people ‘back home’ and mobilising their family overseas to send money as necessary. In some cases, these people are respected older family members, and in others they are younger people who take a galvanising role. General community pressure can also be strong: Farhiya said that, if she did not help her family, people from the community in the UK might also give her a hard time. Given the importance of diaspora networks in many refugees’ lives

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– for social contact, financial assistance, information and help navigating life in the UK – adverse gossip can have real repercussions on their lives. While Al-Ali et al. (2001b) coined the term ‘forced transnationalism’ to describe the strong social pressure felt by Bosnian and Eritrean refugees to maintain transnational connections, the term ‘pressured transnationalism’ is preferred here to avoid confusion. Although refugees can fall victim to threats and violence (in some instances, people from the southern regions have been forced to pay ransoms or protection money for relatives), far more prominent were the less physically violent, but nevertheless often powerful, forms of social pressure experienced (which can also affect non-refugees). Material need and economic disparities were another recurrent theme in people’s explanations. Interviewees emphasised the poverty and insecurity of many Somalis in Africa. Farhiya talked of the ‘misery’ in her home community: some of the extended family sometimes eat only once a day – canjeero (pancakes) with no sauce. Either directly or through other people, many Somalis in the UK are constantly hearing sad stories of relatives’ trying, desperate or dangerous situations. Abdirashid, from Mogadishu, spoke of his sense of responsibility: If we don’t send money to Somalia, people they don’t survive … the children, if they don’t go to school, they become militia, simple! … If someone called me today and says my child cannot go to school because I don’t have money for the school fees, I should feel guilty, if I have got money and someone told me that. Someone to die, or maybe 10p [for school fees], yeah?17 But it is not just about absolute need, it is also about the disparity between the relative positions of sender and recipient. This fits with the theory that within relationships characterised by generalised reciprocity: ‘The greater the wealth gap… the greater the demonstrable assistance from rich to poor that is necessary just to maintain a degree of sociability … the inclination toward generalized exchange deepens where the economic gap amounts to oversupply and undersupply of customary requirements and, especially, of urgent stuff’ (Sahlins 2004: 211). London, a ‘global city’ in the heart of the first world, provides a clear contrast with the country of origin. People commented that relatives in Africa think that people dibadaha are rich, seeing incoming remittances (often substantial amounts by local standards) as proof. There are concrete facts: Table 5.2 reveals some of the starkest disparities in a world of uneven development. Clearly, relatively small amounts by UK standards can go a long way in the Somali regions – $50–200 a month can provide for an entire family, depending on size and location. While regional migrants earning lower wages – like people in Nairobi – would generally find it harder to completely cover recipients’ needs, many people in the

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West are able to send monthly amounts that can meet all the needs of a family in the Somali regions and sometimes afford to make substantial investments. Even people who are pretty poor may be able to play an important role in relatives’ livelihoods, and it can be hard to justify withdrawing that support. In this context, one-way flows may continue for long periods. Table 5.2 Comparison of human development indicators Indicator

UK

Somalia

Life expectancy at birth Under 5 mortality rate (per 1,000 live births) Adult literacy rate Primary school enrolment rate Population on less than $1 per day (in purchasing power parity terms)

79 years 6 99% 99%

46 years 225 19%* 17%*

0%

43%*

Sources: UNDP (2006), except figures marked* from UNDP (2003)

However, there is evidence of some mutual re-evaluation. On the one hand, recipients are aware of some of the problems people face overseas, and some people try to impress these on them during visits and phone calls. On the other hand, as some progress is made in Somaliland and elsewhere, some people are beginning to deconstruct the symbolic poverty and insecurity of their place of origin, pointing to the relative affluence in better-off segments of society. As one Hargeisa resident put it, some people overseas who visit or see videos re-evaluate their ‘congested life’, penny-pinching in the tower blocks of the cold global North, with mounting electricity and phone bills. As we shall see, even those who have both the desire and capability to remit often find that doing so has important repercussions on life in the UK. Some people even return to Somaliland or relocate to Egypt, seeking a more middle-class life (Al-Sharmani 2006; Hansen 2006).

Economic Sacrifices and Strategies, Social Reaffirmation and Tensions Despite anecdotal evidence of migrants working long hours in several jobs to send money, the effects of remitting on senders are largely unresearched. The sparse qualitative studies that shed light on the experiences of refugees sending remittances tend to emphasise the elements of political coercion and the burden that sending money imposes on lives in the global North (see, for example, Al-Ali et al. 2001 b; La 2004; Riak Akuei 2005; Horst 2007). Interviews with people of

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Somali origin in London suggest that remitting has several types of effect on senders. First in economic terms, it appears that poverty may be reinforced by remitting. Without data on remitters’ incomes,18 it is not possible to establish the proportion remitted. However, it is clear that many remitters are employed in relatively low-paid jobs and are unlikely to have large amounts of disposable income. According to Idil, some remitters ‘don’t live lives because of it basically … Most of them, people who were working in factories, doing manual hard work, long shifts, sending money, getting the lowest incomes. Their basic wage is not much and they send to relatives.’19 As one woman put it, ‘When you get income support, you can save fifty dollars per month.’20 People on low incomes often economise hard – buying cheap food and pooling resources with people outside their household. When this is not enough, they borrow money from banks and social contacts, and women pawn their gold. Idil explained: ‘I have taken my jewellery to the pawnbrokers, and lost it all … I don’t regret it, it’s only things … I don’t pay bills until I get the red letters because I am always sending money!’21 Even some people relying on state support – for example, some elderly seamen relying on state pensions – send small amounts now and again. The survey was undertaken in an inner city area with relatively high unemployment and around 20 per cent of remitters surveyed lived in households where there were no apparent sources of earned income, presumably relying on state allowances. The finding is surprising because state allowances provide just enough money to live on in London.22 It is a small subgroup – thirty five people – in a small sample, and it is possible that some respondents in fact did have other sources of income which they did not want to mention. But remitting part of state allowances raises interesting issues. This money is the means by which the state ensures a minimal standard of living for its poor. Yet some people may quietly accept material poverty below this standard in order to send small sums to loved ones in need overseas. As Bryceson and Vuorela point out, for transnational families, ‘Imagining a family means giving it a definition that may conflict with the nation state’s definition of legitimate immigrant families’ (2002: 10). The fact that many migrants remit from meagre incomes is by no means unique to Somalis (Datta et al. 2007). Indeed, some have suggested that one reason that remittances remain relatively stable, even during economic downturns in developed host states, is because of social protection systems (Ratha 2003). However, the implications are serious for those involved – scraping together these funds by careful economising of minimal wages or allowances pushes them further into poverty. There are also implications for the role remittances play in the country of origin: entrenched diaspora poverty can prevent remitting, or trap people in a cycle of sending subsistence amounts, constraining remittance investments.

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Related to the above, labour market, savings and investment strategies may be affected by commitments to relatives, which make people more willing to accept poorly paid manual work in unpleasant conditions and work long antisocial shifts, and motivate people to find work as soon as possible, when they might otherwise spend time training or seeking jobs more appropriate to their skills. The more strategic development of remitters’ human capital through English language and vocational training and secondary and higher education can be curtailed. Many refugees arrived with few assets and have not accumulated much financial capital. According to the 2001 Census, only 7 per cent of the Somali-born population lived in a home they had bought, and only 1 per cent were self-employed – low rates even compared with people from other conflict-affected and African countries.23 Some remit most of their earnings, or save them to help relatives emigrate, leaving little to save or invest on their own behalf. The problems experienced by Somali remitters remind us that, while social networks can be an important element in economic life and considerably facilitate migration, they may also, in some instances, hinder migrants’ economic advancement by constraining accumulation (Granovetter 1983). Meanwhile, many people who do build up capital invest it in the Somali regions: 10 per cent of survey respondents had invested in property there in the last year. House prices vary, and land disputes are common, but money goes much further than in London. There is a practical and symbolic value of investing at home with a view to potential future return, and meanwhile relatives may occupy the property or live off the rent. In social terms, as already indicated, remitting can be an important source of familial and cultural reaffirmation. At individual and family level, being able to support relatives can contribute to a sense of wellbeing and make a painful separation seem more worthwhile. In the wider cultural sense, interviewees expressed pride that Somalis support their families, contrasting this solidarity with what they saw as a more fragmented and selfish culture in the UK and other countries they were familiar with. For example, If another country like Kenya has a civil war I don’t think it would survive … Somalia is a little bit different because they help each other … But in Kenya and Ethiopia … I think the culture is different … They don’t think this person maybe will give you something in the future. But in Somalia, it’s a different culture; at least one thing is good!24 However, there are also tensions, first, between senders and recipients. Some expressed unease that money always seems to creep in as an issue in relationships with people back home. Some felt that recipients did not appreciate their hard work and wasted the money. Shamsa’s brother remits regularly to their father in Mogadishu, and she helps out now and again.

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She was rather annoyed that this enabled her father to marry a younger wife and start a new family: ‘My father is having plenty of children and he’s not even taking a consideration … The more you make children, the more you are rich. And the more he is rich, the more we are paying the price!’ Recipients are sometimes less than honest according to Idil: I have an aunt who had had all the diseases in the whole wide world! She’s had diabetes, diarrhoea, blood pressure, cancer, heart and kidney problems. I wouldn’t mind if she just said I don’t have anything to give to my kids, she only has to say! [Once she phoned saying she had sight problems] … I rang my mum in the US to say can you help her … My mum said the woman has called me, she is building a house and she needs the doors and the window! … People say anything to get money.25 A second downside is anxiety and stress (see also Riak Akuei 2005; Horst 2007). Given the ongoing insecurity in the Somali regions, many refugees are already worried for their loved ones’ welfare and safety. On top of this, some spend sleepless nights worrying how to scrape together their family’s biil, or living expenses. Idil felt that some people were not ‘living here as a person’ but get ‘blocked out’ about remitting. Refusing insistent or desperate requests can be painful, as Shamsa, a single mother with four children, explained: How many people you used to know, relatives, calling you! … I would change my phone number every month if I could. But you can’t go to all those people, the children’s school, your college, the doctor, the Home Office … It’s not that I don’t want to help. But I can’t! … It is painful to me … ‘I need money, I’m hungry, even the phone call, I don’t know how I am going to pay for it, at least send me the money for the phone call.’ It irritates me! … I can’t ignore it, I can’t ignore it, I can’t ignore it … it’s like you are facing a big wave.26 Thirdly, remitting can be a source of tension among family members in the UK. Life in the UK is a jolt for many couples. Some urban women used to having help in the home feel the strain when they suddenly have to cope with looking after the children and running the home, alongside dealing with other matters, in an unfamiliar, sometimes hostile environment. For some men, immigration is an emasculating experience as they struggle to find work and re-establish their traditional role as breadwinner (Griffiths 2002). With marital relations already undergoing complex adjustments, remittances can impose an added strain. Where the wife works she is usually expected to support her relatives back home herself, but if she is a housewife she often wants her husband to help his in-laws as well as his own relatives, which can cause marital strife. In

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Minneapolis, Horst (2007) found that some young Somali Americans put off marriage and starting a family because of their remittance obligations. Geographically dispersed relatives are often galvanised by key family ‘conduits’ and cooperate to support their relatives. Despite this, brothers and sisters overseas also sometimes jostle over shared responsibilities – a frustrated Idil had resorted to calling all her siblings in London together for a family reunion at a restaurant at her own expense in order to broach the subject, hoping to shame them into taking a greater share of the responsibility for supporting the family in Mogadishu. Intergenerational tensions sometimes arise. Forty per cent of remitters lived in households with children under sixteen, many of whom grew up a long way from their relatives and sometimes struggle to understand why their parents send money. In transnational communities, children ‘have to construct their notion of a family and its emotional and economic utility more deliberately, rather than taking it for granted through continuous day-to-day interaction. A family in the absence of regular physical proximity requires conscious rationalization’ (Bryceson and Vuorela 2002: 15). While Somali diaspora culture has shown resistance to erosion from what are seen as Western and individualistic values, there is some ‘nuclearisation’ of families, as they bring up their children in London and elsewhere. Others make special efforts to cultivate a sense of responsibility for relatives. A man interviewed by Horst in Minneapolis stated: ‘They have to be taught, like I do with my five-year old daughter. I take her to the hawala and tell her to give the money to the owner, and my daughter can even ask me ‘father, when are we going to send them money again?’ But many parents do not teach their children’ (Horst 2007: 99). How do people deal with requests for assistance, which clearly can sometimes weigh heavy on them? While many simply persevere, others adopt various strategies to cope. First, negotiation within family networks can make remittance commitments more manageable. Seventy-two per cent of respondents had close family members beyond the Horn of Africa: people may take turns or each contribute towards a combined monthly amount. At the other end, the main recipient in Somalia may channel funds and buffer requests. Another strategy is to keep track of how much is sent and to whom. While many people find that difficult, some feel it is worthwhile in case they need to negotiate or deflect future requests. This is why Farhiya began collecting her receipts: They think that I never give them enough … One day if I go there I will calculate how much I have sent … I will be sitting in their home … it will come up … Maybe they will realise: either it doesn’t work sending all this money or … Maybe it will help them to think … I will take the receipts in the box! I have sent tens of thousands [of dollars], maybe hundreds of thousands.27

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There are also ways to keep tabs on the recipients. It can be difficult for people to impose conditions on how the money is used, acknowledging their distance from the local situation and fearing a cold response. Often the diaspora members are seen, or see themselves as xabxab (watermelon) hearts, i.e. soft touches. According to a money transfer agent in Hargeisa: ‘The diaspora for example in England, they spoil their families. They send money without any checking or consulting… No strings attached! You should… tell your people that you are not earning [money] by sitting down. You should say, “This is the last instalment, you have to do that job.” But they are shy, are ashamed to do that.’28 However, many respondents discuss with their family members how much money they need, and send just enough to prevent hardship – a kind of ‘subsistence ethic’. As we have seen in several cases, the gossip machine can serve migrants too, relaying information about how money is spent and identifying potential ‘worthy’ beneficiaries. Some people refuse to send money for particular types of community purposes – for example, for qaaraan when they think this will be used to bring weapons – or for purposes that they think frivolous or unnecessary. Another strategy to cope with remittance obligations is to help recipients invest in an independent future. We have seen some of the effects of this already in Hargeisa and Nairobi. Most directly, some save a lump sum to help recipients establish a small business. (Women sometimes use hagbaad, the rotating savings system, to do this.) But this is not always feasible – for example, if you cannot save enough, or if relatives are too old or young or live in a particularly insecure area. Alternatively, remitters often sponsor the education of young relatives; or help relatives move to neighbouring countries or further afield. From the remitters’ point of view this can turn a dependent into someone who may be able to help with, or even take over their remittance responsibilities, lending an internal momentum to the migration–remittance process. This echoes the longer historical patterns of rural–urban movement in the Somali regions: By providing their nomadic relatives with the appropriate means for success, city-dwellers could reduce the size of the net of relatives toward whom they had to feel responsible. Once the newly educated could stand on their own two legs they could then be counted on to help support their own parents and siblings, freeing the urbanites to invest more narrowly. (Simons 1995: 174) Finally, some people simply avoid remitting. Consistent refusals often eventually deter callers. Some evade contact by ignoring early morning phone calls, avoiding giving their phone number to people back home, and even changing phone numbers. Pleading one’s own poverty often

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fails to convince, but consistent excuses can be effective in the long term. For example, Osman has a lot of extended family in the Somali regions: You get calls from your relatives all the time and they want money. Most of the time then I didn’t have that money anyway because I was a student… The word got around that I don’t have money, or even if I have, I don’t give money to anyone! [Laughs] I built up quite a bad reputation in Somalia so people don’t bother to ask me for money! Anna: But initially, you got phone calls? Even now I get phone calls from time to time … They say they need money to do this or to do that. Anna: What do you say? I say well, it’s a bit tough this month, but if I get any spare money next month I will send some. If I don’t have money, I say, I myself am kind of experiencing financial hardship, so … But they don’t understand it and they think negatively, which is good, because then they just say I don’t give money to no one and then nobody calls me! I am not particularly proud of it, but when you are a student it helps.29 In light of these complex repercussions, and the strategies that refugees have developed to deal with requests, the sustainability of the remittance economy is much debated among the Somali people and foreign commentators. Sustaining or increasing remittance volume is a common policy goal of countries with high emigration, and the United Nations’ Transitional Plan for Somalia in 2007 aimed to increase remittances by 10 per cent in a two-year period, as part of the pursuit of the millennium development goals (UN 2007b). Given the nature of the remittance process as described from a diaspora perspective, were such goals desirable or realistic? It is generally assumed that remitting will decline over time, as migrants face competing claims on their income from their growing family in the host country, and social ties with family back home gradually weaken (Brown and Poirine 2005). Yet this apparently commonsense remittance decay hypothesis tends to ignore evidence regarding the growth of transnational communities, and has rarely been systematically tested. The absence of reliable macro-level and longitudinal data inhibits analysis of the Somali case, but we can identify several factors that seem likely to shape remittance patterns over the coming years. First, the settlement processes and ageing of existing overseas communities are likely to shape remittance behaviour. It is interesting to note that even some of the retired seamen who came to the UK many years ago and refugees who came in the 1980s are still sending money, suggesting considerable persistence, often despite difficult circumstances. But the existing diaspora are rather stretched and perhaps unlikely to dig deeper into their pockets – if anything, people claim, fatigue is setting in. While there is some evidence that the ‘1.5’ and second generation is

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showing interest in Somalia and being encouraged to maintain connections, it seems highly unlikely that the remitting will be reproduced at the present high levels across generations. All in all, it seems likely that remittances from the existing overseas population will (gradually) decline rather than intensify in the future. This might be offset for a period by improvements in the economic fortunes of Somalis as they become more established overseas. Secondly, opportunities for new movement will affect both the supply and demand for assistance. While asylum opportunities in the global North are narrowing, this may be offset somewhat by ever riskier forms of clandestine migration as well as family reunion and marriage migration (although the latter can also reduce the candidates for assistance in the home country), and increases in migration to alternative destinations. Changing immigration regimes may affect the remittance economy. For example, under the current asylum system in the UK, people given refugee status are subject to deportation after five years should circumstances in their country improve: this threat may encourage them to invest in relationships and assets back home or make savings, in case of return. Thirdly, future political dispensations in the Somali regions will have critical implications for the supply and demand for assistance. According to a darkly ironic joke that circulates in Hargeisa, two old men were sitting together and one said to the other, you know the kids overseas are forgetting us, they are going to stop sending money. The other says, no problem, we’ll have another war, then they will soon start again! Further war and instability would seem likely to lead to additional emigration and ‘survival remittances’. On the other hand, further stabilisation and continued stability in the northern regions may encourage remittances for investment projects and/or return of expatriates.

Beyond Economics: the Violent Origins and Social Texture of Remitting The new economics of labour migration represents the primary detailed attempt to theorise remittance behaviour, and guides the bulk of empirical research on remittances. It implicitly assumes a cohesive, coresiding and co-sustaining, core household and a voluntary, temporary (most likely male) migrant whose migration is underwritten by a set of familial expectations regarding eventual remittances and investments. Anticipated remittances are integral to the decision to migrate. While this model may fit the realities of some communities very well, particularly those in rural Mexico that have provided so much of the empirical material for theory-making, it has less purchase in other contexts (Aragno 2000; Sana and Massey 2005). Although quantitative testing of NELM

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hypotheses has not been possible based on the data available, it would seem that the Somali case raises several issues that would be worth exploring in future studies. First, the Somali case suggests a far more unsettled relationship between the act of migration and the act of remitting that is commonly envisaged. People primarily fled the Somali regions to escape lifethreatening violence: not to diversify their income (indeed, people have often lost important assets in the process of flight) but to save their lives. While choice of destination was understandably influenced by family, economic and status considerations, and as some regions stabilised the economic rationale for migration became more salient, migration is still a much more fraught process than that envisaged by NELM, which was developed to explain labour migration in peaceful settings. Yet, despite this, many refugees subsequently became remitters. It seems that, even when migration is not specifically undertaken in order to diversify household income sources, it may have that effect – that remitting represents a post hoc strategy or an ‘unforeseen burden’ (Riak Akuei 2005). The accounts of Somali Londoners suggest that more attention should be paid to the issues of need and disparities in explaining remittance practices. Sana and Massey also found that among Dominicans migration to the US was ‘a more dramatic, less carefully planned move, with the purpose of ensuring family subsistence in the absence of viable opportunities in the home country’ (2005: 512) and that as in the Somali case, Dominicans sent remittances to quite a wide variety of relatives (i.e. were not just configured around a strong ‘origin household’) and often continued to remit long after they became permanent residents overseas. The North–South divide clearly infuses the everyday lives of Somali Londoners. People involved in this study repeatedly emphasised the large disparities between the West, where the bulk of remittances originate, and Africa, where the bulk of remittances arrive. The glaring material gulf between the host country and the country of origin has also become almost ritualised, inscribed in the collective consciousness of those involved, with implications for remittance flows. Remitters in the West can often afford to play a significant role in the livelihoods of recipients, in a way that can continue over many years. It is interesting to note that, while wage disparities between places of origin and destination as well as the issue of patterns of relative deprivation within migrant-sending communities have been a central element in more functionalist migration theories, the implications of disparities is often overlooked when it comes to analysing remittance patterns. Given the frequency of global migration along steep income gradients, as, for example, between poorer African countries and Europe, as well as the segmentation of labour markets, which means that migrants are often restricted to poorly paid work, the issue of disparities (absolute and relative) in shaping the remittance process would seem to merit more attention.

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The view from London also demonstrates that, as migrants are not ‘just labour’, so remittances are not ‘just money’. This chapter has shown that sending remittances is an intense form of ‘relational work’, largely overlooked by more economically functional approaches (Zelizer 2005). Future research should address both the quantifiable aspects of remittances and the qualitative meanings that people attach to the practice of remitting. Remittances have become, in the Somali case, a major part of maintaining affectionate social relationships between people separated by war, distance and great economic disparities. Understanding the control and transfer of remittances requires careful scrutiny of the social construction of the family and community in specific cultural and transnational contexts. In Somali society, for example, polygamy is widespread, extended households are commonplace and strong family and clan mutual support systems play a key role in economic life: it follows that people’s remittances are less configured around a single core ‘original’ household. This was also reflected in the regular mobilisation of transfers for collective purposes and the recirculation of remittances through local networks and clan economies. It also draws attention to intra-household dynamics, individual decisions and non-household members’ influence, all of which, as we have seen, can play an important role (de Haas 2007). Finally, taking a diaspora perspective makes it clear that at the same time as providing a means to reaffirm relationships with distant loved ones, remitting can have substantial costs for migrants, a fact too often lost in the overwhelming focus of the literature on the impact of remittances in migrants’ countries of origin. In this sense refugees’ experiences, in particular, can offer a particularly clear antidote to transnational euphoria, providing a rather more troubled view of ‘globalisation from below’ (Black 2001). As Doreen Massey puts it: ‘Most people actually still live in places like Harlesden or West Brom. Much of life for many people, even in the heart of the First World, still consists of waiting in a bus-shelter with your shopping for a bus that never comes. Hardly a graphic illustration of timespace compression,’ (Massey 1994: 163).

Notes 1. 2.

Compared with earlier alternative estimates of £1.1 billion per year (Blackwell and Seddon 2004). Dahabshiil has a broad customer base in the UK and allowed the researcher to survey people sending remittances in one of its London offices (for practical reasons, thirty questionnaires were administered in a second, smaller office). One hundred and seventy five respondents were randomly sampled. The sample represents 17 per cent of the customers at the outlet

142 | The Early Morning Phone Call during the month in question. Ninteen per cent of those initially approached refused to participate, mainly giving time pressure as a reason, but there was no evidence that this led to the under-sampling of people with particular characteristics. Short face-to-face interviews were conducted by the researcher and an assistant, half in English and half in Somali. 3. This made it an offence for transport carriers to bring passengers without valid documents. 4. An estimate of failed asylum-seekers cannot be given here due to lack of government data. According to Home Office records, in 2001–2004 alone, 8,300 Somalis were refused on appeal – supposedly the last resort, meaning that they have no right to live or work in the UK. 5. This is the Labour Force Survey figure, according to Kevin Brennan’s (Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office) written answer to a question by Michael Fallon, 20 April 2009 (http://www.theyworkforyou.com/ wrans/?id=2009-04-20c.269752.h accessed 8 May 2009). This seems a reasonable lower-bound estimate when cross-checked with other sources: (a) The 2001 Census recorded 43,373 people living in England and Wales who were born in Somalia. (b) The Labour Force Survey 1997 estimated a Somali-born population of 47,000 (Griffiths 2002). (c) Home Office records show that around 68,025 Somali nationals were granted settlement in 1985–2007. It is thought that most will have remained in the UK. (d) None of these sources adequately capture failed asylum-seekers and irregular migrants, and some would not capture Somali Europeans who have moved to the UK, mainly since 2000 (Lindley and Van Hear 2007). 6. Formal unemployment is also reportedly high among Somali-born refugees in other northern European countries and Canada. Employment rates in Italy may be higher, where more Somali women are often employed as domestic and care workers. 7. Field notes, Birmingham, December 2004. 8. Interview, Somaliland MP, Hargeisa, November 2007. 9. Findings on the incidence of remitting in UK migrant communities vary. In a survey of black and minority ethnic households, over one-quarter had sent remittances in the previous year, with migrants from African countries most likely to send remittances (ICM 2006). In a survey of 396 low-paid migrant workers in London, 80 per cent of the sub-Saharan Africans sent money home (Datta et al. 2007). 10. As the money is transferred in US dollars, respondents found it easier to remember how much they had sent in dollars and they usually say how much they want to send in US dollars; then the cashier calculates the cost in pounds (of buying the dollars and paying commission of around 5 per cent). Dollar amounts are rounded to the nearest five. The $3,000 figure corroborates other estimates (Shire 2006; see also Chapter 3). 11. This would appear to be relatively high levels of remittances. The BME survey (cited in note 9 above) average remittance was £874 per year (ICM 2006). The low-paid migrant workers survey (also cited above) average remittances was around £100 a month (Datta et al. 2007).

The North–South Divide in Everyday Life | 143 12. While the Census has limitations when it comes to reaching non-English speakers and inner city, transient and economically marginalised populations, it remains the most comprehensive and robust source of data on the Somali-born population. 13. The survey collected data on 177 people who received money from the respondents four or more times in the last year, mainly in the Somali regions. Due to the time constraints, detailed information was collected only on remittances to personal contacts that the respondents considered to be ‘regular’ and the amounts and destination of other remittances to personal contacts. Only a handful of senders classified remittances sent three or fewer times in the last year as ‘regular’, while many recorded transfers sent four times a year as ‘regular’, so the former were reclassified as irregular in the data analysis. 14. Interview, Liban, London, November 2003. 15. Interview, money transfer agent, London, June 2002. 16. Interview, Nasir, London, May 2005. 17. Interview, Abdirashid, London, May 2005. 18. It was deemed too sensitive to collect information on income in the survey. 19. Interview, Idil, London, May 2005. 20. Interview, Zahra, London, November 2004. 21. Interview, Idil, London, May 2005. 22. Income support for a single person over twenty-four years old was £56.20 per week (£2,922.40 per year) (www.rightsnet.org.uk accessed 19 December 2006). 23. Countries of birth compared were: Afghanistan, Angola, Congo, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Ghana, Liberia, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Sudan. 24. Interview, Abdirashid, London, May 2005. 25. Interview, Idil, London, May 2005. 26. Interview, Shamsa, London, May 2005. 27. Interview, Farhiya, London, June 2006. 28. Informal consultation, money transfer agent, Hargeisa, November 2007. 29. Interview, Osman, London, May 2005.

Chapter 6 Concluding Reflections

The diasporisation of Somali society and the emergence of a vigorous remittance economy were never part of anyone’s normative vision for the development of the Somali regions. Instead, it is the result of the failure of official development plans, violent political disintegration, the forces of globalisation and containment and the cumulative actions of hundreds of thousands of individuals affected by these processes. Nevertheless, remittances and other transnational linkages shape the lives of many people, and so enter into debates about progress in the Somali regions as well as discussions about social change. This chapter briefly draws together the key themes of the book and reflects on the political and policy implications. This is of wider relevance, given the importance of migration and remitting as a dimension of life in many crisis-affected parts of the world. This book’s account should be seen against the background of prevailing attitudes to the Somali diaspora, which are highly ambivalent, tending to veer between suspicion and celebration. For some commentators, the diaspora is a cast of wasters and warmongers, destitute clandestines, welfare scroungers, articulate and self-interested transnational elites, people of parochial tribalist mentalities, and muslim fundamentalists, intent on fuelling conflict in the Somali regions, whether as political movers and shakers, foot soldiers or financiers. However, for other commentators, communities abroad have been transformed from transnational belligerents into ‘The Diaspora’: educated exiles of peaceable and democratic mentalities, potential voices of moderation and advocates of liberal peace.1 Contrasting attitudes also extend to the role of family remittances in Somali communities. The economic significance of these flows was long overlooked by development actors (who tended to concern themselves primarily with the agricultural and livestock economy and humanitarian aid). When mentioned, remittances were generally seen as a symptom of dependency and violence in Somali communities. However, the 2000s saw a growing awareness of the scale

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and significance of remittances – which were suddenly transformed in policy discourse into an economic lifeline and potential source of development capital, in ways that paralleled global policy debates. Transnational social activism is also the subject of sharply diverging views. On one hand, diaspora-related humanitarian and development activities are often viewed in the international community as ‘sub-standard’: clan biased, ad hoc, small-scale, cowboy enterprises, lacking in technical expertise (whereas, by implication, international aid projects are neutral, large-scale, professionally planned and carefully co-ordinated). On the other hand, for some, diaspora associations are exemplary social actors, with unique levels of commitment to beneficiary communities, low overheads and privileged access to and understanding of difficult and remote contexts (whereas, by implication, international aid projects are institutionally selfserving, wasteful, ignorant of local contexts and suffer tarmac road bias). Similarly ambivalent attitudes are evident in analysis of the money transfer infrastructure conveying flows of remittances and political and social finance. Somali money transfer operators are still viewed by some with suspicion as potentially vulnerable to abuse by, or directly at the service of criminal and terrorist elements. Yet increasingly, the money transfer sector is now also simultaneously presented as one of Somalia’s few good news stories. With an emphasis on private sector development and a tendency to reconceptualise business communities as potential constituencies for peace, there is a growing international interest in engaging with the money transfer sector as a ‘development partner’.2 This study has attempted to move beyond these polarised images, offering a more nuanced analysis. As chapter one outlined, the topic of Somali remittances lies at the crossroads of contemporary thinking on migration–development linkages, the role of local-global connections in conflict settings, and the livelihoods of refugees. It is to these underlying themes that I return here. By bringing into focus the violent origins and fraught processes of much global migration and remitting, this book has challenged the functional frameworks that have tended to dominate the analysis of migration–development linkages in recent years. Countries where remittances represent the largest proportions of GDP are, in general, not icons of upward mobility on the global scale – they are often small island states or states overshadowed by conflict or disasters – and yet this fact has been somewhat glossed over in the sweeping optimism of recent migration–development debates. Preceding chapters have pointed to the unsettled relationship between the act of migration and the act of remitting in less stable settings. The migration trajectories discussed here were often rooted in life-threatening violence, precipitous, tortuous, infused with high levels of physical and financial risk. Meanwhile, the remittance processes discussed were typically not part of a seamless plan in which actors have

Concluding Reflections | 147

clear expectations of each other, but tended to be a largely unforeseen obligation subject to continual modification and negotiation. Turning to the impact of remittances, the fragile institutional settings which prompted migration in turn constrain the extent to which remittances can trigger wider cycles of improvement in places of origin. While the flows have important benefits for private recipients and may have note-worthy second-round effects in the local community, the amplification or ‘scaling up’ of benefits is often limited, and remittance flows in and of themselves rarely significantly erode wider structural constraints (see also Ballard 2003; Castles 2008; Connell and Conway 2000; de Haas 2010). This suggests that improving political and economic infrastructure in general is likely to be the best way to maximise the potentially positive impacts of remittances. By focusing on the multiple dimensions of diaspora involvements, this study sought to move beyond the old debate about whether diasporas are ‘good or bad’ for conflict, instead exploring their impact on local political complexes and everyday life in the shadows of conflict. There are forms of engagement that are clearly political, from local-level compensation payments and finance for clan hostilities and peace processes, to support for macro-political actors such as Somaliland’s political parties or AlShabaab. But there are also apparently non-political forms of engagement – family remittances, investments and contributions to social projects – which nevertheless can have political ramifications. For example, remittances may relieve the political pressures associated with widespread unemployment and poverty, and investments and diaspora social activism may bolster the relative status of a particular community, or particular segments within a community. Material flows between the diaspora and the Somali regions have been shown to be dynamic, changing over time and with different periods of conflict and transition, and non-uniform, with ‘the diaspora’ often divided in their responses. Importantly, it would appear that diaspora engagement may in some circumstances encourage stabilization as well as fuelling escalation of conflict. Finally, the analysis in previous chapters has explored continuities, changes, and underlying contradictions in the conceptualisation of and policy responses to mobility in the shadows of conflict. Mobility and the spatial diversification of family networks have long been an aspect of Somali livelihoods, and have been a particularly key way in which people have dealt with protracted conflict and displacement. A large diaspora has formed despite frequently strenuous attempts by host states, since the conflict began, to contain Somali migration within the country and region of origin. Current optimism about the potential benefits of remittances for poor countries of origin stands in stark contrast to increasingly selective and restrictive immigration regimes around the world. While the circulation of remittances is seen as ‘good for development’, the circulation of people from

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poor countries, particularly refugees, is seen by host countries as a risk to be managed – resulting in a world of borderless economies and barricaded borders (Andreas 2000). Indeed, in many ways the remittance economy is maintained by these apparent contradictions. It relies simultaneously on immigration regimes separating family members who otherwise might be reunited abroad, and on the selective permeability of border controls – official and unofficial – that allows the dispersal of family members in the first place. The vigorous translocal and transnational circulation of people and funds has been crucial in helping displaced individuals and families rework their livelihoods within and beyond the structures of the refugee regime, often becoming significant and dynamic economic actors in host communities. But it does not provide a substitute for effective refugee protection, and indeed in many ways the creative machinations of displaced Somalis trying to get on in the world serve to highlight the deficiencies in international responses to conflict-induced displacement. The significance of migration, remittances and other transnational flows mean that there is a strong rationale for policy actors to better understand, take account of, and potentially engage actively with these flows. While improving political and economic infrastructure is the primary way of ensuring that these flows are fully exploited for the widest possible benefit, there are some more focused measures that established political actors, donors, and non-governmental and civil society organisations might consider. First, focusing on the diaspora, given the significance of mobility and remittances in many conflict and post-conflict countries, more attention should be paid to providing opportunities for people to migrate in dignity with their rights respected. Not only is this desirable in itself, but denying or fulfilling those rights may have serious ramifications back home. It is also important to bear in mind that the forcible and sudden return of people given temporary forms of protection in their host countries3 would undermine the economic base of home communities. Meanwhile, efforts by the international community to recognise and encourage the involvement of displaced people as stakeholders in political and peacebuilding processes should be welcomed, provided they are informed by awareness of the risks of privileging transnational elite voices at the expense of more marginal people both in the Somali regions and in the diaspora. Regarding measures that might help to draw out the benefits of remittances as much as possible for home communities, it is important to understand that the choices people make about how to use the remittances they receive (including for key purposes often dismissed as ‘unproductive’ such as consumption, education, health or property) are based on their intimate calculations regarding what is in their own best interests given the specific landscape of opportunity and constraint in which they find themselves. Attempts to influence the use of remittances need to recognise

Concluding Reflections | 149

this and work in close co-operation with recipients and their local communities. Abortive attempts by local political actors to tax remittance flows have been met with public outrage and resisted by money transfer operators. But there are various measures that might steer the management and use of remittances in ways that could bring benefits to recipients and wider communities. Diasporic and home communities are increasingly wondering how to facilitate increased investment in local income- and employment-generating activities: possibly through more institutionalised financial intermediation of the funds, by linking remitting to deposit, credit and investment facilities, including microfinance; or by improvements to the business environment that help to release bottlenecks to investment. Given the widespread nature of diaspora support for social projects, it is understandable that donors and international aid agencies have begun to show interest. They are often operating in parallel with diaspora associations, in the same communities, even supporting the same institutions, and have considerable mutual interests and potential operational complementarities. Some suggest that diaspora philanthropy may represent a ‘third humanitarian space’, beyond the realms of UN and NGO humanitarian action (Lubkemann 2008). The polarised images conveyed earlier obscure the overlap between the two sectors: skilled diaspora members and locals have entered a range of roles in international humanitarian and development agencies operating in Somalia and some diaspora-sponsored NGOs are already the ‘local partners’ of these international agencies. However, there are considerable barriers to cooperation. Diaspora social activists are sometimes wary of the tarnished reputation of the aid industry and politicised nature of aid in Somalia, and feel that they need to focus their efforts rather than embarking on timeconsuming pursuit of the possibly elusive benefits of cooperation. For their part, western aid agencies are often held back by suspicion of Somali micro-politics, and the requirements of their own bureaucratic procedures and standards. In this context, research into diaspora associations, analysis of emerging examples of co-operation with other actors, and experimentation with different types of partnership should be encouraged. It is also important for policy-makers to recognise the importance of xawilaad in the Somali economy and understand better how it works. Money transfer enterprises are major private sector actors, effectively articulating economic relationships both within the Somali territories and between the Somali territories and the rest of the world, with corporate links into other business activities. They would be obvious partners in any attempts to influence remittances. The fact that money transfer operators (like other actors, including humanitarian NGOs) reach accommodations with shifting political complexes in the Somali regions should be recognised and factored into policy analysis, but is not in and of itself a reason not to engage when appropriate opportunities arise.

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Finally, there are three important caveats regarding political and policy responses to diaspora engagements. First, the interdisciplinary and transnational approach taken in this study emphasises that remittance flows are not ‘just money’, but have complex social micro-foundations that substantially shape the degree to which they are susceptible to influence by policy-makers and their likely sustainability over time. Second, any attempts to influence forms of diaspora engagement must recognise the diverse nature of the Somali regions, with multiple political dispensations, and varying situations in terms of security, economic infrastructure and social facilities and norms. In particular, what is appropriate and achievable in areas with reasonably effective and stable local authorities may not be achievable in areas afflicted by day-to-day violence. Third, contrary to the sedentary assumptions of much development thinking, peace and development will not stop migration (Bakewell 2008b; de Haas 2010; Malkki 1992; Martin and Taylor 1996). Evidence from around the world suggests that the stabilisation of conflict-affected societies, while it may stem acute massive migration, far from stops migration entirely, given significant global disparities and the self-sustaining momentum of migration processes once set in motion. People in the Somali regions are hungry for peace and progress, and it is something worth working for in its own right. But people migrate not only in response to disruption and desperation but also in response to the increase in capabilities and aspirations that peace and progress bring. Whatever the trajectory the Somali regions take, and whatever policies are dreamed up to contain people, migration and remittances are likely to remain a major part of life for many Somalis in the years to come.

Notes 1.

2.

3.

The appetite to engage the diaspora is reflected in DFID’s ‘diaspora consultations’ of 2008, and in the series of open ‘letters to the diaspora’ from the SecretaryGeneral’s Special Representative in Somalia, Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah. In particular, there was a flurry of analysis accompanying the World Bank’s re-engagement with Somalia, a key plank of which involves partnership with the private sector, and which pinpointed remittances as a major factor sustaining economic growth (World Bank 2003). An issue that has been raised in relation to Kosovars in Germany, and Salvadoreans and Liberians in the US. In the latter two cases, the governments involved have renegotiated the status of their nationals overseas and the timing of returns, motivated by the impact that large-scale return would have on their remittance-dependent economies.

Glossary

abbaan bagaash berkad biil buufis canjeero caydh

dabadheer dadka dibadaha dhaqan celis dhoofi dillaal diya Eid franco valuta guri Guurti xabxab hagbad hawala jaaliyad jua kali kacaandiid kolonya matatu

respected individual who guarantees safe passage bundles of consumer goods water reservoir (plural: berkado) regular living expenses a melancholic and unsettled state of mind (often linked to dreams of resettlement) pancake traditionally describes a person who has lost all his livestock, of the assistance that such a person may receive from others. Also used to refer to welfare benefits literally, long tail – refers to the drought of 1974 people outside (used to refer to emigrants) nickname for youths sent back to Somali regions (roughly translation: ‘return to culture’) to export (also used for emigration) broker or commission clan compensation Islamic festival (Arabic) system of import financing and money transfer home, house, nomadic hamlet Somaliland’s House of Elders watermelon rotating saving system system of value transfer (Arabic) community-in-exile (Arabic) hot sun (Swahili), used to refer to informal sector workers anti-revolutionaries colonial plantation system Nairobi bus (Swahili)

152 | Glossary

mefrish miraa mukhalis qabiil Qaadiriya qaaraan reer reer magaal reer miyi sadaqo sako shaxaad shir shifta sijui soomaalinimo taar tacabir tahriib tol xeer xidid xawilaad

place where men chew khat khat (Swahili) brokers, or people smugglers tribe, clan Sufi brotherhood clan assistance family, people, sub-clan town-dwellers rural-dwellers alms (voluntary) alms (obligatory – one of the five pillars of Islam) a favour given to a friend at their (often implied) request (reconciliation) meeting bandit I don’t know (Swahili) – nickname for Somali Kenyans Somali solidarity radio operator traveller/adventurer, used to refer to Somali seamen going abroad (implies long journey in difficult conditions) clanship (patrilineal descent) customary law marriage ties Somali version of the word hawala (see above)

All words are Somali unless otherwise indicated.

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Index

Abdi, M. et al. 22, 80 Abgaal clans 20 Abokor, A.Y. and Kibble, S. 82 about this book approach 13–16 background, diaspora and 145–6 principles guiding study 14 research 15–16 structure 16 Academy for Peace and Development (APD) 50n7, 69, 72, 78 Adams, L. et al. 33 Adato, M. and Mindek, D. 65 Africa Watch 56, 57 African Cities Survey 100, 103, 107 Ahmed, I.I. 89n17 Ahmed, Sheikh Sharif Sheikh 29 Akuei, Riak 44, 133, 135, 140 Al-Ali, N. 9 Al-Ali, N. et al. 83–4, 123, 131, 132 Al-Qaida 15, 40 Al-Sharmani, M. 132 Aliens Restrictions Act (Kenya, 1973) 96 Amal Company in Somalia 37, 38, 45, 99, 107 Ambroso, G. 57, 65, 88n1 Anderson, B. 8 Anderson, D.M. 95, 100 Andreas, P. 148 Appadurai, A. 19 Arab communities 20, 22, 23, 54, 57 Arabic language 36, 74, 107, 108, 118, 151

Aragno, J. 140 asylum-seekers 13, 96, 98 in United Kingdom 116–20, 142n4, 142n5 Bajic, I. 128 Bakewell, O. 92, 112, 150 Ballard, R. 51n24, 147 Al-Barakaat money transfer company 37, 40–41, 43, 45 Barnes, C. and Hassan, H. 29 Barre, General Mohamed Siyad 25, 27, 55, 58, 95 Basch, L. et al. 4 Bascom, J. 12, 13 BBC Somali Service, Baafin family tracing programme 105 Beall, J. 104, 105 Bebbington, A. 73 Berdal, M. and Malone, D. 40 Besteman, C. 28 Betts, A. 96 Bhatia, M. and Goodhand, J. 8 Bin Laden, Osama 40 Bishop, S. et al. 33 Biyamale clans 20 Black, R. 112, 117, 141 Blackwell, M. and Seddon, D. 142n1 Blaug, R. 45 Bloch, A. and Atfield, G. 117, 120 Bradbury, M. 22, 28, 31, 43, 57, 58, 59, 84, 88n1 Bradbury, M. et al. 83 Brennan, K. 142n5

170 | Index Brinkerhoff, J. 9 Brons, M.H. 20, 22, 23, 25 Brown, R.P.C. and Poirine, B. 123, 138 Bryceson, D.F. and Vuorela, U. 129, 133, 136 Bush, G. 40 Cabdi, S.I. 65, 67 Caces, F. et al. 123 Campbell, E. 98, 99, 108, 109 Carling, J. 14 Castells, M. 8 Castles, S. 12, 147 Central Bank 33–4, 79 Central Committee of SNM, vision for Somalia 58 Chambers, R. 12 Chambers, R. and Conway, G.R. 4 change in conflict-affected settings 6–10 continuities and, Somali collapse and 46–9, 127 dramatic change, in Eastleigh, Nairobi 99 political change, processes of 81–6 processes in Somaliland, international responses to 48–9 social transformation and 5, 145 in socio-economic status 104 Citizenship Act (Kenya, 1963) 96 Civil War in Somaliland 27–30 effects of 46–7 mass migration as a result of 30–33 clanship structures 20, 21–2 Clark, C, 13 Cliggett, L. 127, 129 Cohen, R. 17n5 cold war military sponsorship 49 Collier, P. and Hoeffler, A. 8, 17n6 Collier, P. et al. 7, 8, 17n6 Collinson, S. 7 Compagnon, D. 58 conflict 35, 117, 150 continuities and discontinuities in context of 16, 46–9 diaspora and 17n6, 46–7 displacement by, host communities and 12

informal economy, corruption and 42 land-grabbing in conditions of 80 local-global connections 6–10, 146–7 migration and development, processes of 2, 5–6, 54–5, 55–60, 81–6, 86–8, 96–7 mobility, conflict-related 33, 62, 64, 65–7 privilege and rights flowing from 39–40 responding to 11, 46–7, 104–5, 112–13, 123–5, 148 in Somali regions 121–2, 130, 145 survival capitalism and 42, 48 Connell, J. and Conway, D. 147 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (1951) 10, 97 cosmopolitanism 23, 100 Council for Peace and Development (CPD) 60 Cramer, C. 7 criminality 41–2, 51n18, 99–100, 146 Crisp, J. 96, 97 cross-border livestock market 30 Dahabshiil Company in Somalia 37, 38, 39, 43, 51, 54, 56, 79, 116, 142 Darod communities 20, 21, 24, 25, 27, 29, 37–8, 55, 76, 93, 95, 101 Datta, K. et al. 133, 142n9, 143n11 Democratic Party of Somaliland (UDUB) 82 diaspora conflict and 17n6 diaspora capital, investment of 71–5 diasporization of Somaliland 19, 27–32, 33, 145 engagements in, policy/political responses to 150 homeland heritage of 95 migration, ongoing nature of 150 multiple dimensions of diaspora involvements 147 post-conflict politics and development, role of diaspora in 81–6

Index | 171 role in Western resettlements 111 support for social projects 149 Dick , S. 13 Digil communities 20 Dir communities 20, 21, 76 dispossession of assets 104 Djibouti 19, 27, 31, 53, 57, 59, 66, 75, 118 human development indicators (2000) 30 Somali refugees in 32 Drysdale, J. 39 Dublahante, clans 20, 27, 28, 58, 76, 82 Duffield, M. 7, 29, 49 Durand, J. et al. 73, 78 Eastleigh, Nairobi Central Business District 98–9 connections with Somali regions 101 containment of peoples 112–13 cosmopolitanism of 100 criminal elements in 99–100 dramatic change in 99 entrepreneurship 105–9 family networks in 100–101 goods, circulations of 112–14 informal economic activity in 108–9 information, circulations of 112–14 livelihood strategies 102–5 Mogaduishu ndogo (little Mogadishu) 91 onward migration to West, channels of 110–11 pathways of refugees to 97–8 personal experiences of refugees in 102–5, 105–7, 111 policy categories and concerns, looking beyond 112–14 private schools in 107–8 property and housing market in 99 public sector corruption in 108–9 refugee businesses, establishment of 105–7 remittance economy, importance for residents 102–3 remittance economy, mobility patterns and 101–2 resettlement opportunities in West, channels of 110–11

resilience and self-reliance of refugee families 113–14 Somali community in, establishment of 97–9 transnational nature of refugee families 113–14 travel agencies in 108 xawilaad in 105, 107, 110 Ecobank 51n23 economics 3, 6, 16, 64, 123, 139 accumulation, violent predation and 28 conflict and economic greed 7 economic actions, social relations and 9, 127–8 economic disparities as reason for remitting 131 economic resilience 30 economic sacrifices of remitting 132–9 informal economic activity in Eastleigh, Nairobi 108–9 interconnections of, migration and 2–6, 7–8 macroeconomic imbalances 26 microeconomic inflows 14, 15–16 oil exportation and economic boom in Gulf States 26 planning process 24 Soviet military and economic aid 25 transnational social networks and 13 welfare of refugees 12 Education Ministry, Somaliland 73 Eid festival 67, 70, 102, 151 El-Solh, C.F. 24, 32 Ellis, F. 4 entrepreneurship 105–9 Eritrea 6, 31, 32, 35, 50, 83, 99, 131, 143 human development indicators (2000) 30 Escobar, A. 6 Ethiopia 22, 29, 31, 50, 51, 61, 71, 99, 105, 134, 143 human development indicators (2000) 30 migration and remittances 53–5, 66–7 Ogaden region 19, 20, 24, 25, 27, 38, 54, 55, 56, 57, 93

172 | Index Somali refugees in 32 European Commission (EC) 33 European Stability Institute (ESI) 80, 88 European Union (EU) 44 exile of political dissidents from Somaliland 25, 27 from Somalia, personal experiences of 91–3, 101–5, 105–9, 111, 115–16, 128–9, 138 travel, personal experiences of 91–2 in United Kingdom, personal experiences of 118–19, 128–9, 134–5, 136–7 extra-regional connections 23–4 Fagen, P.W. and Bump, M. 6 Fallon, M. 142n5 family networks 2, 62, 69, 74, 100–101, 112, 129, 136, 147 Farah, N. 36, 60, 98 Financial Action Task Force (FATF) 41, 51n19 financial war on terror 40–41 Firth, R. 14 Gaani, M.X. 22, 62, 66 Gadabursi clans 20, 58, 76, 82 Gamburd, M.R. 64 Gardner, J. and El Bushra, J. 64 Garowe Online 39 GDP (Gross Domestic Products) 5, 12, 30, 146 Geshekter, C. 24 Gillespie, K. et al. 80 Gimode, E.A. 100 GNP (Gross National Product) 25 Goldsmith, P. 98, 99 Goodhand, J. 8 Granovetter, M. 14, 134 Greater London Authority (GLA) 116, 120 Green, R. and Jamal, V. 26, 62 Griffiths, D. 117, 121, 135, 142n5 Griffiths, D. et al. 122 Gubert, F. 66 GWK Travelex 51n23

de Haas, H. 3, 5, 88, 141, 147, 150 Habar Awal clan 20, 54, 57, 59, 76 Habar Gedir clan 20 Habar Jaalo clan 20, 38, 59, 84, 120 Habar Yunis militia 59 Hadrawi, (Maxamed Ibrahim Warsame) 26 Hagmaan, T. and Von Hoehne, M. 29, 49 Hall, J. 9 Hammond, L. 65, 81, 82, 83, 122 Hansen, P. 73, 81, 84, 122, 132 Hansen, S.J. 30 Hargeisa Dahabshiil in 54, 56 demobilisation of forces 59 diaspora capital, investment of 71–5 disarmament, progress on 59 flight from 57–8 government forces in, SNM attacks on 57 Isaq clans, civil strife between (1994–6) 59 life in, remittances alleviating experiences of conflict 53–4 location of 54 migration-conflict-development linkages 86–8 Ogaden War 55–6 post-conflict politics and development, role of diaspora in 81–6 postwar administration, struggle of 58–9 remittances, effect in wider community 75–81 repatriations to 65–71 repression by state in 56–7 Republic of Somaliland, capital of 58 Somali National Movement (SNM), establishment of 55–6 transnational family movements from 61–5 Harrell-Bond, B. 12 Harris, J.R. and Todaro, M.P. 3 Harti clans 20, 28 Harvey, P. and Lind, J. 69 Hassan, Sayyid Mohamed Abdille 24

Index | 173 Hawaaddle clans 20 Hawiye communities 20, 21, 27, 29, 38, 93, 101, 119 Healy, S. and Sheikh, H. 81 Homer-Dixon, T.F. 7 Hopkins, G. 121 Horst, C. 9, 13, 47, 48, 84, 97, 110, 113, 133, 135, 136 House of Elders (Guurti) 59, 81, 83, 151 Human Rights Watch (HRW) 96, 97, 98, 103, 110, 114n5 Hussein, S. 24 Hyden, G. 46 Hyndman, J. 48, 93, 97, 98, 99, 100, 112 Ibrahim, Mohamed Hassan 88n14 ICM 142n9, 143n11 Immigrant Act (Kenya, amended 1972) 96 Immigration (Carriers Liability) Act (UK, 1987) 117 Indemnity Act (Kenya, 1970) 95 informal money transfer networks, western suspicion of 42 intergenerational tensions 136 International Crisis Group (ICG) 55, 57, 72, 82 International Development, UK Department for (DFID) 70, 150n1 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 26 Isaq communities 20, 21, 24, 27, 28, 54, 55–60, 76, 82, 95, 120 civil strife between (1994–6) 59 Islamic Courts Union (ICU) 29, 32, 39, 49, 51n21 designation as terrorist organization by US government 51n17 Ismail, Edna Adan 81, 89n33 Issa clans 20, 76, 82 Al-Itihaad in Somalia 40, 51n17 Jaalo, H. 38 Jacobsen, K. 12, 13 Jajele clans 20 Jamal, V. 26 Jansen, B.J. 12, 110 Jimale, A. 40

Jones, R. 5 Jónsson, G. 48 Justice and Welfare Party of Somaliland (UCID) 81–2 Kabeer, N. 65 Kakuma News Reflector 102 Kaldor, M. 7 Kant, I. 17n4 Kaplan, R. 7 Kapur, D. 5 Kariuki, J. 99 Keen, D. 7 Kent, R. et al. 85 Kenya and borderlands of Somalia 93–100, 101, 112–13 human development indicators (2000) 30 indigenous Somali population 95–6 legal situation of refugees in 96–7 North Eastern Province (NEP) 93, 95, 100 Northern Frontier District (NFD) 93 refugee camps in 91–2, 96–7, 101–4, 105 Refugee Consortium of Kenya (RCK) 109 Somali refugees in 32 see also Eastleigh, Nairobi Kenyatta, J. 93 Kibble, S. and Abokor, A.Y. 86 Kibreab, G. 25 King, K. 50n7, 66, 76, 80, 81, 89n28, 108, n30 Kleist, N. and Hansen, P. 83 Konzolo, S. and Nyaoro, D. 114n5 La, J. 133 Laitin, D. and Samatar, S. 88n1 Lautze, S. and Raven-Roberts, A. 11 Levitt, P. 50n2 Lewis, I.M. 20, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 54, 57, 62, 88n1, 93 Lindley, A. 30, 74, 85 Lindley, A. and Van Hear, N. 48, 120, 142n5 Little, P.D. 30, 38, 50n3, 97, 108

174 | Index Little, P.D. et al. 33 livelihood strategies in Eastleigh, Nairobi 102–5 systems in north of Somalia 57 Loescher, G. and Milner, J. 96 London, remittances from 115–43 asylum seeking 116–20 avoidance of remitting 138 disgrace for not remitting 130 economic actions, social relations and 127–8 economic disparities as reason for remitting 131 economic sacrifices 132–9 exiles in, personal experiences of 118–19, 128–9, 134–5, 136–7 geographies of remitting 124–5 global city, living as part of 120–23 intergenerational tensions 136 likelihood and levels of remitting 126–7 material need, remitting to alleviate 131 meagre incomes, remittances from 133–4 motivations to remitting 123, 128–30, 131 reaffirmation of social and cultural links 134–5 recipients and use of remittance resources 137 remittance payments, initiation of 123–7 remittances, violent origins of need for 139–41, 146–7 remitter survey results 123–6 repercussions on UK life of remitting 132 requests for assistance, dealing with 136–7 savings and investment strategies, effects of remitting on 134 settlement in a global city 120–23 social micro-dynamics of remittances 127–32 social pressures to remit 130–31 social texture of remitting 139–41

sustainability of remittance economy 138–9 tensions between senders and recipients 134–6 see also United Kingdom Lonsdale, J. 98 Lubkemann, S. 9, 13, 149 Lucas, R. and Stark, O. 66 Lugadiru, A. 94 Luling, V. 27 McDowell, C. and de Haan, A. 4 MacGaffney, J. 42 Maddar, Sheikh 54 Majertain clans 20, 24, 27 Malkki, L. 10, 47, 150 Marcelli, E.A. and Lowell, B.L. 123 Marchal, R. 23, 27, 30, 33, 36, 39, 43, 79, 86 Marehan clans 20, 27, 95 Martin, P.L. and Taylor, J.E. 150 Massey, D. 14, 119, 141 Massey, D.S. et al. 69, 73, 80, 81, 140 Mazzucato, V. 123 Meagher, K. 42 meagre incomes, remittances from 133–4 Medani, K. 33, 50n7, 76, 78, 89n28 Menjívar, C. et al. 123 Menkhaus, K. 29 migration to Arab Peninsula from Somalia 26 continuities in Somaliland 46, 47–8 internal migration in Somalia 28 labour migrants from Somaliland 25, 26 migrants from Somalia, socioeconomic differentiation of 32 migration-conflict-development linkages 2–6, 86–8 ongoing nature of 150 onward migration to West, channels of 110–11 Miller, N. 26 Milner, J. 95, 97 Mirifle communities 20 Mogaduishu ndogo (little Mogadishu) 91

Index | 175 Mohamed, H. 24, 95 Moi, President 95 Monsutti, A. 9, 13, 46 Murursade clans 20 Mussolini, B. 24 NELM (‘new economics of labour migration’) 3, 140 NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations) 15, 54, 59, 70, 120, 149 cash relief or cash-for-work, delivery to project communities 44–5 development initiatives led by 43 international NGOs 44, 73, 79, 81, 85 9-11 Commission 41, 51n17 nomadism 19–22 Nordstrom, C. 8, 44, 48 North Eastern Province (NEP), Kenya 93, 95, 100 Northern Frontier District (NFD), Kenya 93 Nurhussein, S. 30, 39 Ogaden War 55–6 Omer, A. 23, 43, 79 Omer, A. and El Koury, G. 34 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) 5 Organization of African Unity (OAU) Convention (1969) 97 Osili, U.O. 73, 123 Østergaard-Nielson, E. 9 Ould-Abdallah, A. 150n1 Paris, R. 49 Party for Justice and Democracy (Ururka Cadaaladda iyo Dimoqraadiga) 89n36 Passas, N. 41, 51n19 Peace Committee for Somaliland 83 Pérouse de Montclos, M. 32, 34, 50n13 Pérouse de Montclos, M. and Kagwanja, P. 97 Poirine, B. 127 Polanyi, K. 14 Polzer, T. and Hammond, L. 12

Portes, A. 38, 42 Portes, A. and Walton, J. 3 Private Banking Law, delay in 79 private schools in Eastleigh, Nairobi 107–8 property and housing market in Eastleigh, Nairobi 99 public sector corruption in Eastleigh, Nairobi 108–9 Puntland, autonomous state within Somalia 28–9 Ratha, D. 133 Recipient Survey (September 2005) 63, 67, 68 Refugee Convention see Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (1951) refugees arrivals in Somaliland 25–6 businesses in Nairobi, establishment of 105–7 camps in Kenya 97 international assistance for, meagre nature of 92 ‘irregular’ methods of entry for 110–11 legal situation of refugees in Kenya 96–7 livelihoods of 10–13 pathways of refugees to Eastleigh, Nairobi 97–8 personal experiences in Eastleigh, Nairobi 102–5, 105–7, 111 Refugee Consortium of Kenya (RCK) 109 security, search for 91–2 from Somalia, destinations of 31–2 travel for, personal experiences of 91–2 Refugees Act (Kenya, 2006) 97 Reichert, J.S. 3 remittances alleviating experiences of conflict in Hargeisa 53–4 avoidance of remitting 130, 138 benefits of, measures to help extension of 148–9

176 | Index contrasting attitudes to role of 145–6 crisis in remittance sector, opportunities resulting from 44–5 diaspora engagements in, policy/political responses to 150 effect in wider community in Hargeisa 75–81 future for, new generations and 139 geographies of remitting 124–5 impact of 147 likelihood and levels of remitting from London 126–7 meagre incomes, remittances from 133–4 migrants’ remittances home, increasing regulation of 41–2 migration loopholes and 113 money transfer infrastructure, ambivalent attitudes to 146 motivations for remitting 123, 128–30, 131 processes of, significance of migration and 1 reaffirmation of social and cultural links through 134–5 reasons for emergence of 145 recipients and use of remittance resources 137 requests for assistance, dealing with 136–7 social micro-dynamics of 127–32 to Somalia, extent of 34–6, 62, 123–5, 131, 136–7 sustainability of remittance economies 138–9 taxation of, attempts at 149 tensions between senders and recipients 134–6 UNDP/World Bank Conference on Somali Remittances 51n24 violent origins of need for 139–41, 146–7 western policymakers’ perspective on 42 xawilaad, importance of policy recognition for 149–50 Remitter Survey 123–6

Reno, W. 8, 40, 58 repartiation 11, 12 to Hargeisa 65–71 Reporter 95 Republic of Somalia, creation (1960) of 25 resettlement 11, 15, 32, 96, 97, 100, 102, 103, 151 negotiation of systems of 113 official resettlement 112 opportunities in West, channels of 110–11 Riak Akuei, S. 13 Richards, P. 8, 9, 87 Richmond, A.H. 11 rotating saving system (hagbaad) 71, 79, 137, 151 Rotberg, R.I. 7 Safran, W. 17n5 Sahlins, M. 14, 127, 129, 131 Samatar, A.I. 25, 27, 50n1 Sana, M. and Massey, D.S. 6, 140 Sander, C. and Maimbo, S.M. 35 Santillán, D. and Ulfe, M. 129 Sassen, S. 3 Savage, K. and Harvey, P. 9 savings 72, 75, 79–80, 134 and investment strategies, effects of remitting on 134 remittance habits and 34 rotating saving system (hagbaad) 71, 79, 137, 151 Schrieder, G. and Knerr, B. 66 Scott, J. 49 sedentary tradition 20, 22, 76, 150 self-reliance of refugee families 5, 111, 113–14 settlement 13, 19, 54 in global city of London 120–23, 142n5 processes of 66, 121, 138 Shandy, D. 13, 44, 48 Sheikhal clans 20 Shire, S.A. 44, 124, 143n10 SHURO-Net 83 Simons, A. 23, 47, 69, 86, 137 Skeldon, R. 5 Smith, H. 9

Index | 177 Smith, M.P. and Guarnizo, L.E. 4 social micro-dynamics of remittances 127–32 social pressures to remit 130–31 social projects 128, 147 diaspora support for 149 social texture of remittances 139–41 Socio-Economic Study of Somalia (UNDP and World Bank) 34 Somali Community in the Port of London (Port Cities) 24 Somali National Movement (SNM) 27–8, 53, 57, 58, 60, 71 establishment in Hargeisa 55–6 incursions from Ethiopia into Somalia 56 Somali Patriotic Movement (SPM) 27, 28 Somali Salvation Democratic Front 27 Somalia Al-Barakaat money transfer company 37, 40–41, 43, 45 Amal Company in 37, 38, 45, 99, 107 civil war and mass migration from 30–33 clanship structures 20, 21–2 collapse of state in 39–40 cold war experiences in 25–27, 49 colonial history of 23–24 cross-border livestock market 30 Dahabshiil Company in 37, 38, 39, 43, 51, 54, 56, 79, 116, 142 development agencies in 149 exile from, personal experiences 91–3, 101–5, 105–9, 111, 115–16, 128–9, 138 extra-regional connections 23–4 human development indicators (2000) 30, 132 internal migration in 28 Al-Itihaad in 40, 51n17 Kenya and borderlands of 93–100, 101, 112–13 labour migrants from 25, 26 peace-building efforts within 29 Puntland, autonomous state within 28–9 refugee arrivals in 25–6

refugees from 31–2 remittances to, extent of 34–6, 62, 123–5, 131, 136–7 Republic of, creation (1960) of 25 Socio-Economic Study (UNDP and World Bank) 34 Somali National Movement (SNM) 27, 56–8 Somaliland and 83 telecommunications in 37 Transitional Federal Government (TFG) 29, 39, 51n16 UN withdrawal of peacekeepers from 43 Somaliland Chamber of Commerce 79 conflict in 28, 55–60 economy 65–71, 71–73 elections in 81–2 formation of 23–4, 28, 58 House of Elders (Guurti) 59, 81, 83, 151 investment in 71–75 Peace Committee 83 Policy and Reconstruction Institute (SOPRI) 83 political system, development of 58–60, 81–83 Somalia and 83 Somaliland Focus and Somaliland Forum 83 Sperl, S. 110, 111 Stark, O. and Lucas, R. 3 Summerfield, H. 117 Suro, R. 2 Swahili communities (and language) 22, 91, 107, 113, 128, 151, 152 Tanzania 31, 47 human development indicators (2000) 30 taxation 29, 39 in Eastleigh, Nairobi 108–9 evasion of 51n18 of import trade 78 protests against 95 of remittances, attempts at 51n16, 84–5, 149

178 | Index Taylor, J.E. 3, 123 telecommunications 30, 37, 39, 79, 120, 130 Terry, F. 10 Todaro, M.P. 3 Transitional Federal Government (TFG) 29, 39, 51n16 transnational circulation of people and funds 148 communities 136, 138, 141 criminal activities 41–2 economic activities 87, 123–4 elites 48, 81, 145, 148 familial interdependences 69, 113–14, 133 family movements from Hargeisa 61–5 forms of exchange 123 linkages 145 mobility 46 nature of refugee families in Eastleigh, Nairobi 113–14 profiteering 8 social activism 146 social networks 4, 8–9, 13–14, 16, 55, 74–5, 122, 131 translocal and transnational families 61–5 travel agencies 108 travel documents 96, 117, 119 Travelex 51n23 Trevelayn, M. 51n26 Tucker, J.B. 25 Turton, D. 11, 95 UCID see Justice and Welfare Party of Somaliland UDUB see Democratic Party of Somaliland 82 Uganda 31, 95 human development indicators (2000) 30 United Kingdom (UK) 44 contrasts with refugees’ countries of origin 131–2 exiles in, personal experiences of 118–19, 128–9, 134–5, 136–7 Home Office records 142n4

human development indicators (2006) 132 Immigration (Carriers Liability) Act (1987) 117 London, hub of transitional activities 122–3 migration process, variability of 118–20, 121 National Health Service (NHS) 1 security in, process for 120 settlement process in 120–21 Somali community organisations in 121–2 Somali exiles living in 120, 142n5 Somali seamen in 115–17 unemployment of exiles in 120–21 see also London, remittances from United Nations (UN) 15, 28, 39, 43, 44, 45, 59, 78, 138, 149 Children’s Fund (UNICEF) 31, 74 Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) 5 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (1951) 10, 97 Development Program (UNDP) 30, 33, 34, 35, 39, 45, 50n5, 50n7, 50n14, 51n26, 60, 132 Food Security and Nutrition Analysis Unit (FSNAU) 21, 33 High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) 11, 12, 31, 65, 92, 95, 96, 98, 100, 103, 110, 111, 114n4 Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) 114n3 Transitional Plan for Somalia (2007) 138 withdrawal of peacekeepers from Somalia 43 United Somali Congress (USC) 27 United States government designation of ICU as terrorist organization 51n17 Joint Voluntary Agency (JVA) 111 Uniteed Arab Emirates (UAE) 32, 44, 45 urbanisation 22–3, 78, 80, 137 urban wages, stagnation of 26

Index | 179 Van Hear, N. 11, 13, 17n5, 32, 46, 113 Verdirame, G. 100 Verdirame, G. and Harrell-Bond, B. 96, 98, 110 Vertovec, S. 4, 9 De Vriese, M. 13 de Waal, A. 58 Walker, J. 59 War-torn Societies Programme (WSP) 55, 56, 57 Waraabe, Ali 81 Warfa, N. 120 Warfa, N. et al. 47 Warsameh, A. 31 Warsangeli clans 20, 28, 76, 82 Webersik, C. 30 Werker, E. 12 Werker, E.D. 97 Western Somali Liberation Front 25 Widgren, J. and Martin, P. 80 Willet, S. 7 World Bank 5, 17n3, 22, 26, 34, 35, 37, 116, 150n2 UNDP/World Bank Conference on Somali Remittances 51n24

xawilaad in Eastleigh, Nairobi 105, 107, 110 in Hargeisa 56, 79 importance of policy recognition for 149–50 international community and 49 money transfer mechanism 16, 19, 35–40, 45–6, 48, 152 Yemen 30, 31, 75 Somali refugees in 32 Young, H. at al. 9 Yusuf, A.H. 29 Zelizer, V.A. 141 Zetter, R. 122 Zontini, E. 129 Zunzer, W. 9, 88