Elmi

Accountant specialising in Govt & and public finance.
Interests: state-building, contested sovereignty, int'l business, and game theory. | #Somaliland |

[Elmi @Geeraare01]

@GuleidJ Lol, @MYKAAHPARTY is a deadbeat party and they needed an issue to rally around in order to make their presence known since the people have entirely forgotten about them. There is your clarification.

[Elmi @Geeraare01]

Wow! Rubio is surely a giant. He has the aptitude to lead America at a time when the world is edging towards a power transition, but whether he will do so or not remains unknown; whether America will remain the leading superpower or abdicate that position remains to be seen. R-28

[Elmi @Geeraare01]

@Sitti_Salal_Dji @Jawar_Mohammed Key take aways concerning Somalis waa maxaym

[Elmi @Geeraare01]

@MiddleEast_24 The translation is completely off on a tanget. Should've checked before sharing 😒

[Elmi @Geeraare01]

@KbnooShahrA @Step_Agency One would think the Emiratis don't consider thousands of projectiles being launched at them as a sign of friendship.

[Daniel Morgan @shyn37389]

People seeking freedom and sovereignty naturally value those who listen to their aspirations and support their cause with fairness and respect.
#Somaliland
#somalilanders
#Israel

[Elmi @Geeraare01]

@IsraelPersian Not Khamenei. The Imam went hiding before the air strike, and he will reapear in the right place at the right time. Wise Ayottollahs estimate his return will be in the next precision cycle. Let's keep an eye on the earth's wobbles for at least a mellinium.

[Elmi @Geeraare01]

@JSLToday @Elior_Paul Amen to that.

[Elmi @Geeraare01]

@SLMoEM This is good news. Thanks for the clarification.

[Élior @Elior_Paul]

IT’S OFFICIAL

“The Council of Ministers of the Republic of Somaliland has approved the Joint Declaration issued by the Republic of Somaliland and State of Israel.

In accordance with the Constitution, the agreements will now be submitted to the country's legislative bodies for consideration.”

💚🤍❤️

[Elmi @Geeraare01]

@tedcruz Will the current U.S. administration be financing the processions?
VP Vance must know a thing or two about Persian history and declaration of hostile intent. Anyone can confuse lack of willingness to make peace with a perceived enemy with classic Persian negotiation tactics.

[Elmi @Geeraare01]

@OrwellTruth1984 @netanyahu to be honest.

[Elmi @Geeraare01]

@EngDualeh @musebiihi Lol, @musebiihi intuu noolyahay Somaliland faraha kala bixi maayo ee wixii uu qasi karo ayuu qasi. Odayaal nacasiin ah ayuu Ilahay inagu itixaamay.

[Elmi @Geeraare01]

@T1ggghouse Israel gains an ally in strategically vital maritime region(southern litoral of the Red Sea) crucial for its survival. Both countries have existential stakes at play. It's a match made by geography and strive for legitimacy morphing into long-term interdependence. Embrace 🇮🇱.

[Elmi @Geeraare01]

@slmolsaf @toadmeister

[Elmi @Geeraare01]

@deltastorm2 @slmolsaf Standard preemptive measure taken to secure the site and prevent abuse.

[Elmi @Geeraare01]

@slmolsaf @RVInews @UniLeipzig @AfricaIai @ROAPEjournal @SozKultAnthro @allegra_lab @SpeechUnion

[Elmi @Geeraare01]

Here we go again. @NimkoAli only echoed an allegation that was circulating for more than a decade already. It seems the allegation could be true but can’t be proven, so you want to keep the issue alive to shift attention away from yourself. What are the odds of that?

[Markus Virgil Hoehne @HoehneVirgil]

I started researching on conflict and identity in northern Somalia, in Somaliland (northwest), Puntland (northeast) and in-between, in 2002. Criss-crossing the region extensively for years, I realized various “political identities” (Mamdani 2001) emerging which were based on genealogical ties, but also on certain interpretations of regional history and biographical experiences (Hoehne 2006). Those political identities were in important regards opposed to each other. While, as a rule, people in the centre of Somaliland positioned themselves as “Somalilanders”, claiming independence from Somalia, people in the east, especially in the area between Buuhoodle, Lasanod and Badhan, typically adhered to Somali unity against Somaliland secessionism. My research documented the expressions (and continuous developments) of these identities in different ways, over years. Yet, for long, luckily, no political leader tried to enforce such visions (secessionism or unionism) across the region.

This changed in 2023, when the government of Somaliland reacted to a popular uprising in Lasanod by attacking the town. Within days, hundreds of people were injured or killed, many of them civilians. In this context I became active on twitter/X. Initially my aim was to put the conflict into perspective, based on my earlier research. Then, as the fighting and especially the shelling of Lasanod by the Somaliland forces went on, I focussed on collecting information on victims in town. By this, I made myself the “ally” of one side and the “enemy” of the other, in an area in which, in the past, I had very good and warm contacts on all sides (to the degree that some colleagues perceived me as “Somaliland-scholar”).

Now, how to engage ethically in such a situation? In my view, I had to stay true to my sources, especially my ethnography from the early 2000s, which showed that people in the eastern peripheries of “Somaliland” had rejected secession decades ago. This would also not change, in my assessment, through violently attacking them, as the Somaliland government did in 2023. I thus advocated against the violent politics of Somaliland. I also engaged those on twitter/X who legitimated the attacks on Lasanod by (falsely) claiming that “terrorists” were behind the anti-Somaliland uprising. My own, older data showed that the opposition by people e.g. in Lasanod and Buuhoodle, long pre-dated the founding of Al Shabaab (which is the major “terrorist” group in the Somali territories). Besides, the insurgents in Lasanod in 2023 received some military and logistic support from the Puntland administration in the northeast (to which people in Lasanod also had close genealogical ties) and from parts of the Somali government in Mogadishu; both of these supporting parties were actively fighting Al Shabaab in their respective areas of influence.

In this context, @NimkoAli, a known anti-FGM and women’s rights campaigner based in the UK, CEO of the Five Foundation (defending women and girls especially in the Horn of Africa), friends with Boris Johnson’s wife Carrie, commentator on the London Evening Standard and book author, and bearer of an Order of the British Empire (OBE) for her activism, appeared on X (where she had some 50.000 followers then), posting in late March 2023: “So this @HoehneVirgil [my twitter handle] is a paedophile who was kicked out of Somaliland for abusing girls. Please let's stop engaging with this disgusting man.” From her other tweets it could be easily seen that @NimkoAli was a strong Somaliland supporter, who was justifying the attacks on Lasanod in her tweets and fully endorsed the (clearly wrong) “terrorist” narrative mentioned above. She even criticised the UK government for calling upon Somaliland for a cessation of hostilities. Her statement against me clearly aimed at shutting me up as critical voice.

Nimko Ali’s allegations caused a massive reaction, and many who, like her, sided with Somaliland (regardless of moral concerns about civilian lives in Lasanod) used them to attack me online. Some even went so far to directly contact my (then) university in Leipzig, Germany outlining, sometimes in pornographic style, my alleged “misconduct” during my earlier field research. These were clear attempts to ruin my reputation and to destroy my livelihood as academic. Given the gravity of the allegations, I decided to take legal action against @NimkoAli in early 2024. @NimkoAli tried to delay and divert the case. Eventually she had to agree on mediation, which ended in a formal and legally binding agreement. As part of this, she agreed to publish the following statement on Monday, 29 June 2026:

"In a series of Tweets on 28 March 2023 I published gravely defamatory allegations about Dr Markus Höhne (@HoehneVirgil) who is a social anthropologist specialising in Somali affairs. I alleged that Dr Höhne was a paedophile who was kicked out of Somaliland for abusing girls. At the time of the tweets, I had been misinformed by third parties about these allegations, which I now accept are entirely false. Dr Höhne is not guilty of the conduct I alleged against him, and was not expelled from Somaliland for any such conduct. I wish to apologise unreservedly to Dr Höhne for the serious reputational damage and distress which my Tweets have caused him. I have agreed to pay him substantial compensation."

To conclude, this episode shows at least two things: First, it is notable that a defender of women’s and girls’ rights who indeed, also works to raise awareness about “child abuse”, weaponized the accusation “pedophile” without solid proof, in a public debate in which her personal political opinion about Somaliland clashed with the opinion of a known foreign Somali-ethnographer. Why damage your own credibility as rights-activist by engaging in libel, even if Nimko Ali, as she claimed, was “mislead by others”? Could she not cross-check her sources? If someone like me, with a visible profile on Somali issues, would have engaged in such a horrendous crime and would have been deported for that, as Nimko Ali tweeted in March 2023, would there not be traces of that somewhere, in some news archives, about such a scandal?

Second, regarding anthropological activism, the episode illustrates that morals and ethics are not only conceptually separate, with morals, largely, concerning the everyday encounters e.g. during field research, and ethics touching on more abstract principles of doing research and dealing with its outcomes. In my case, outlined above, morals and ethics clearly collided. In my view, it was morally correct to speak out on the conflict dynamics in northern Somalia in 2023 based on my long-term research. How could I not have done so, in the face of the brutal attacks of military forces on one of my long-standing field sites? Ethically, however, the dilemma was that the basic provision that the obligations to participants are primary could not be fulfilled. Even just by relativizing the propaganda of those justifying Somaliland’s attack on Lasanod and documenting casualties, I became an “enemy” of many of my (former) interlocutors, some of whom I previously had considered close friends over many years. In their view I worked against them, while I – morally correct, I would suggest – called out the violence of “their” army against people in Lasanod, where I also had close research partners and friends.

@RVInews @UniLeipzig @AfricaIai @ROAPEjournal @SozKultAnthro @allegra_lab

[Lord Ashcroft @LordAshcroft]

“We are a recipe for peace and security in the region” - read my exclusive interview with the President Irro of Somaliland @Abdirahmanirro @Presidencysl_ on @ConHome
https://t.co/TradLqru50

[Elmi @Geeraare01]

Central Bank website is also down. This is the result of systemic cyber vulnerability that has long been ignored. It’s a national digital security crisis that must be addressed with utmost seriousness. @Presidencysl_ has some work to do.