Yet another international donor conference on Somalia. "A history of broken promises" might have been a rather more appropriate title for the Ministerial High Level Partnership Forum (HLPF) which was held in Copenhagen on 19 and 20 November. The conference was intended to review progress against Somalia's New Deal Compact endorsed in Brussels in September 2013 and chart the way ahead to the implementation of Vision 2016. This "blueprint for action" entails three main threads, the "democratic formation" of regional interim administrations and Federal States, the revision and adoption of the Constitution and the holding of national elections in 2016. The goals are ambitious, but they seem to be contained within a floating bubble. Blown by the international community, the bubble is growing and may eventually burst. The HLPF meeting in Copenhagen was supposed to build upon the "current momentum" on Somalia, both nationally and internationally. That sense of "momentum", however, which had made southern Somalia breath more easily for some months after September 2012, is gone. The federal government's performance has become a concern for both Somalis and the international community, though on different grounds. The British government's enthusiasm has faded, since it turned out that Somalia was not going [...]
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