Somalia’s peaceful democracy depended on parties abstaining from violence

Evidence

The American diplomat who authored these words in 1969 fittingly correlated the absence of “internecine splits” and the Somali state “remain[ing] intact for the foreseeable future” with the existence of genuine democracy. Government leaders and the political opposition needed to abstain from using violence and intimidation as instruments of politics for this system to work. Somalia’s most critically minded and eminent journalist in the 1960s, Yusuf Dhuhul, confirmed the veracity of this association in an essay he wrote thirty years after Osman and Hussen left office. — Abdi Ismail Samatar, Africa’s First Democrats, 1076