The Indelibles

If one-party democracy is often hard to tell from no-party dictatorship in Africa, Somalia is an exuberant exception. Election day brought 1,000,000 Somalis to the polls to choose among 21 political parties, including one fringe group running on the single fervent conviction that the country should import only Fiats, to ease the shortage of auto parts. If the proliferation of parties resembled the nightmare of French politics before De Gaulle, the Somalis' fist-swinging, rock-throwing, vote-early-and-often electioneering style seemed more like vintage Chicago. With African differences.

One difference is the absence of any means of voter registration. Instead, election officials traditionally dab each voter's hand with indelible ink to discourage indefatigable repeaters. But the ink always proved delible, the voters not so easily defatigable. In one previous election, the obscure hamlet of Aden Yaval racked up twice the votes of the capital city of Mogadishu with 150,000 inhabitants. When municipal elections came around last fall, Mogadishu's voters prepared for their battle against indelibility by emptying the stores of nail-polish remover and other ink-deleting fluids days in advance of elections. But determined experimenters soon discovered that the allegedly indelible inks could be removed by home solvents ranging from gasoline to papaya juice.

Faced with such voter cunning, the Interior Ministry before the latest election grappled for weeks with the delibility factor, finally developed an ink so potent that many a horny-handed Somali ballot stuffer came down with a skin rash. That took care of most repeaters. Despite scattered reports of overenthusiastic balloting, not to mention a slight riot (13 dead, 20 hurt), Somalia's election was the straightest in its young history--and one of the freest in all Africa. All but final results announced last week gave the ruling, middle-road Somali Youth League of Premier Ab-dirashid Ali Shermarke 68 of 123 seats in the unicameral National Assembly.

The Somali election was exceptional in one other respect: it was held in the midst of a continuing shooting war, the border conflict with Ethiopia. Last week Ethiopian fighter-bombers pulled a surprise daylight raid on the Somali town of Hargeisa--less than 17 hours before the agreed start of an armistice between the two nations. The Somalis, who like fighting as much as voting, were not too perturbed. As Prime Minister Shermarke observed: "We can teach Ethiopia that democracy can be practiced while people defend their soil."

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