 |
Dr Fundji Benedict-VL
25/01/10
(lvs-foundation.org)
Genocide denial in the Horn of Africa is no longer confined to the familiar repertoire of silence, euphemism, and diplomatic evasion. It has matured into an active technology of power—an attempt to conclude, by informational means, what was begun by kinetic force. What the Siad Barre regime pursued through aerial bombardment, scorched cities, mass graves, and systematic group destruction between 1987 and 1989, the contemporary Federal Government of Somalia and its allied discourse networks increasingly seek to neutralize through semantic downgrading, platform contestation, and symbolic de-nomination. This is not a rupture with the past; it is its mutation. The target is no longer only bodies, but the conditions under which a people can be named, mourned, and politically recognized.
That shift matters because memory is not an epilogue to atrocity—it is one of its terrains. Denial is not simply what happens after violence; it is a method by which violence is domesticated, laundered, and made available for repetition. The Isaaq case exposes this with unusual clarity: a genocide executed within living memory and within the legal universe of the Genocide Convention, yet still subjected to systematic rebranding as “civil war.” The result is a double injury: first, the original destruction; then the later theft of meaning, in which survivors are pressed to accept the annihilation of their dead as merely an unfortunate chapter in a generic national tragedy.
“The result is a double injury: first, the original destruction; then the later theft of meaning, in which survivors are pressed to accept the annihilation of their dead as merely an unfortunate chapter in a generic national tragedy.”
The evidentiary archive, by any serious scholarly standard, is formidable. Yale’s Genocide Studies Program treats the late-1980s campaign against the Isaaq as a genocide case study, describing a deliberate and systematic campaign directed at Somaliland’s majority Isaaq population and noting the alleged existence of an “official genocide document” often cited as “The Final Solution to the Isaaq Problem” (while also signaling disputes over authentication). The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention has likewise issued a formal statement remembering the Isaaq genocide and characterizing patterns consistent with intent to destroy a protected group. The forensic record sharpens the archive into something harder than interpretation. A UN-linked forensic assessment mission—conducted under the human-rights mandate of the UN system—records that, when mass graves near Hargeisa were exposed by flooding in 1997, “several hundred bodies” were reportedly unearthed and reburied, including men, women, and children “bound by the wrist and roped together” in groups. The same report documents that dozens of features in multiple sites were consistent with mass graves and warranted investigation. This is precisely why euphemism is not merely inaccurate; it is ethically operative. A narrative of symmetric “civil war” cannot easily metabolize wrists tied together in rows. If denial persists despite such an archive, it is not because evidence is absent. It is because evidence is inconvenient. Contemporary denial rarely denies the dead outright; instead, it relocates them—out of law, out of specificity, out of moral clarity. One observes a recurring grammar of rebranding that operates less like argument than like laundering.
What emerges is a recognizable laundering sequence. The crime is first repositioned as symmetry: “civil war” becomes the master category—elastic enough to absorb state-directed extermination into the moral noise of disorder. Yet genocide is not defined by the existence of insurgency; it is defined by intent to destroy a protected group “as such,” and by the mobilization of organized capacity toward that end. When aerial bombardment levels civilian urban centers and mass-grave landscapes appear as a geographic signature, “civil war” functions less as description than as exculpation. From there, specificity is dissolved. “Isaaq” is displaced by “northerners,” “people of the north,” or “victims of the conflict”—a shift that is not rhetorical hygiene but a legal maneuver, because genocide becomes harder to name once the targeted group is linguistically evacuated. The dilution is then moralized through pan-Somali victimhood: because many communities suffered under Barre, the argument runs, no one may claim a particularized grievance—comparative suffering becomes a solvent that flattens an exterminatory campaign into generic national pain. Finally, remembrance itself is rendered suspect. Exhumations, memorials, and annual commemorations are recast as “separatist propaganda,” as though grief were merely strategy, and as though the insistence on the word genocide were evidence of bad faith. Yet the clearest mark of politicization is often not the refusal of euphemism, but the demand for it. All of this would already be deeply consequential in an analogue public sphere. But we now inhabit an epistemic environment in which truth is mediated by ranking systems, recommendation engines, and platform governance—an environment that permits denial to become not merely a posture but an infrastructure. Here lies what is often missed, and what must be made explicit: algorithmic systems can extend genocide’s effects by extending denial’s reach. They do so not because the platforms “choose sides,” but because attention-based systems reward repetition over rigor, provocation over precision, and mobilization over nuance. In such an environment, denial is not simply expressed; it is trained, amplified, and normalized—until it becomes the default interpretive frame encountered by outsiders, journalists, students, diplomats, and even automated knowledge systems.
“Algorithmic systems can extend genocide’s effects by extending denial’s reach.”
UNESCO has warned—specifically in the context of Holocaust memory—that generative AI and digital systems can distort historical understanding, enabling disinformation and hate-fueled narratives and even inventing false or misleading accounts through “hallucination” dynamics. The point is not to equate cases. It is to recognize a shared structural vulnerability: when atrocity history becomes “content,” it becomes susceptible to the same manipulation techniques that shape elections and conflicts. Denial actors do not need to persuade everyone; they need only to pollute the information environment—so that certainty becomes “controversial,” documentation becomes “disputed,” and the very act of naming becomes framed as “tribalism.” This is the hinge between extermination and erasure. The original violence sought to destroy a population; the informational violence seeks to destroy the conditions of recognizability—to make the genocide difficult to search, awkward to cite, risky to teach, and easy to downgrade. When the “civil war” label is algorithmically rewarded, it does not simply misdescribe the past; it shapes the present by disciplining what can be said without penalty and what is dismissed as partisan noise. In that sense, denial does not merely follow genocide: it can become one of the mechanisms by which genocide’s social and political aims remain live—by keeping survivors trapped in an endless struggle not only for justice, but for legibility.
The Herero–Nama genocide offers a clarifying parallel because denial across cases tends to follow recognizable grammars. Between 1904 and 1908, German colonial forces in German South West Africa (present-day Namibia) executed an exterminatory campaign against the Herero and Nama, an episode widely treated in scholarship as among the twentieth century’s first genocides. For decades, the atrocity was reframed through the idiom of colonial war—language that softened legal and moral consequence. Only much later did official discourse move toward explicit naming. In 2021, Germany’s Foreign Minister publicly stated that Germany would “officially call these events what they are from today’s perspective: a genocide,” and that Germany would ask Namibia and victims’ descendants for forgiveness. Yet the same political settlement became contested precisely because naming arrived in tandem with constraint: the 2021 arrangement centered €1.1 billion in funding framed around “reconstruction and development,” and it drew sustained criticism from affected communities and observers who argued that it avoided the full logic of reparations and marginalized direct descendant participation. This is the instructive mirror. In both contexts, extermination is recoded as conflict; “unity” narratives are mobilized to silence particular suffering; and acknowledgement is resisted not only out of shame but out of strategic calculation—because full recognition strengthens claims for restitution, autonomy, or separation. Denial is durable because it is not merely psychological; it is institutional.
Where the Isaaq case diverges is technology and tempo. The Herero–Nama genocide occurred before the 1948 Genocide Convention; its reframing was largely conducted through historiography, diplomacy, and state memory projects over a century. The Isaaq genocide occurred within the modern legal order and within living memory—yet denial is now being accelerated through digital systems that compress the timeline of distortion. In this environment, symbolic battles—names in databases, labels on maps, categories in drop-down menus, the phrasing that appears first in search—are not superficial. They are the contemporary infrastructure of political existence. De-nomination is not a clerical error; it is a political act, because to make a polity unnamable is to make it increasingly unthinkable. At this point, Gregory Stanton’s staging model is useful—not as statute, but as diagnostic. The model treats denial not as an afterthought but as a stage that persists, and it explicitly warns that denial is “among the surest indicators of further genocidal massacres.” Read in that light, the struggle over terminology (“genocide” versus “civil war”), the struggle over specificity (“Isaaq” versus “northerners”), and the struggle over symbolic presence (“Somaliland” as a legitimate name) are not semantic quarrels. They are contests over whether the moral and legal lessons of the past will be permitted to constrain the politics of the present. This is also why Somaliland’s statehood cannot be treated as a mere diplomatic footnote. A community that has rebuilt institutions after mass violence—and sustained relative stability and repeated electoral practices—does not only claim sovereignty; it performs it. Scholarly analysis of Somaliland’s status has long noted that it meets many functional criteria of statehood even in the absence of broad recognition. Contemporary geopolitical reporting underscores Somaliland’s strategic position at the junction of the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean and the significance of Berbera near major shipping lanes—facts that make Somaliland persistently relevant to regional security calculus regardless of formal recognition. That relevance has been sharpened by recent diplomatic shocks. Ethiopia’s 1 January 2024 Memorandum of Understanding with Somaliland—reportedly involving sea access and the prospect of future recognition—generated regional controversy precisely because it challenged the assumption that Somaliland’s diplomatic ceiling is fixed. And Israel’s decision on 26 December 2025 to formally recognize Somaliland as an independent and sovereign state—followed by high-level engagement, including the reported visit of Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar to Hargeisa in early January 2026—has further punctured that assumption, while drawing condemnation from Somalia and critical responses within continental institutions.
For Somaliland’s own historical-legal narrative, the crucial nuance is that Israel’s 2025 recognition is best understood as re-recognition in spirit: Somaliland was recognized as an independent state in 1960 during the brief five-day State of Somaliland period by dozens of states, including Israel, before entering union. Whether external actors accept that framing or not, the analytical point remains: the more Somaliland is treated as a functioning polity, the more denial becomes entangled with a second project—the attempt not only to downgrade past extermination, but to contest present existence. And this returns us to the moral core. The most consequential question is not which capitals recognize whom. It is whether a region can be stabilized on the basis of coerced forgetting. Denial forecloses transitional justice because it refuses the first condition of repair: acknowledgment. It corrodes any possibility of voluntary political union because it asks survivors to treat the destruction of their community as a negotiable narrative. It destabilizes the Horn by inviting external powers to exploit unresolved grievances and unaddressed crimes, converting historical wounds into present-day leverage. And it reproduces the Herero–Nama lesson with cruel fidelity: when states offer ambiguity instead of accountability, they do not close history; they lengthen it.
The conclusion, then, is not merely that denial is wrong. It is that denial is active—an extension of violence into the domain of meaning. Somaliland’s response has been, in the most literal sense, archival resilience: exhume, document, name, commemorate. These are not performative rituals for foreign audiences. They are the civic technologies by which a polity protects itself from the second death—the death that comes when the world is persuaded to forget. Somaliland should therefore insist on a principle that sounds simple but is politically explosive: genocide cannot be administratively reclassified without re-activating the conditions of its recurrence. To downgrade the Isaaq genocide into “civil war” is not to interpret history; it is to license the future by removing the constraints that truth imposes on power. And because the contemporary contest is increasingly algorithmic—fought through attention economies, ranking systems, and the mass production of euphemism—Somaliland’s memory work must also be informational: not only exhuming graves but defending the vocabulary by which those graves can be intelligibly mourned.
Finally, Somaliland’s resilience finds an echo in Israel—not because the histories are identical, but because both cases illuminate the same civilizational refusal: the refusal to let extermination be re-scripted into acceptable noise. Israel is a society shaped, in significant part, by the moral imperative of remembrance after genocide, and it has become a primary target of the digital age’s propaganda ecologies, where disinformation and algorithmic amplification seek to erode legitimacy by eroding truth. UNESCO’s warnings about AI-enabled distortion of Holocaust memory are a reminder that the struggle over genocide is now, unavoidably, a struggle over information systems. In that light, Somalia’s insistence on downgrading genocide into “civil war,” and on pressuring the world to treat Somaliland’s very name as illegitimate, reads not as prudence but as a collapse of political courage—a species of statecraft cowardice: the refusal to face an archive that indicts, and the attempt—through erasure rather than accountability—to escape the moral consequences of history.
About the Author
Dr Fundji Benedict, CEO, lvs-foundation.org
Disclaimer: The viewpoints expressed by the authors do not necessarily reflect the opinions, or viewpoints of Somaliland Chronicle, and its staff.
Notice: This article by Somaliland Chronicle is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 4.0 International License. Under this license, all reprints and non-commercial distribution of this work are permitted.
