TO: CENTER FOR STRATEGIC
& INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
SOMALILAND RECOGNITION IS THE
SOLUTION OF THE SOMALI PROBLEM
The international community has made several brave efforts to rescue
and reconstruct the disint egrated State of Somalia. All these brave
efforts had however failed and Somali proper still lies in ruins and
is still a theatre for marauding warring militants. All the experts,
the political analysis’s and the experienced anthropologists called
to help, have in their turn also failed to diagnose accu rately the
causes of the dilemma.
These experts have for the first time came up against native
problems, which defied their pet the ories, their quaint conclusions
and their misinterpretation of the abstract indices of native
cultures.
The poor eminent men and women could not admit that all their
learned treaties were wrong, it w as more convenient to accuse the
leopard of changing its spots. The search for a solution of the
Somali problem was always dogged by anomalies and ambivalences,
which in one form or another emasculated every reconciliation
effort. To understand those anomalies and ambivalences we must go
back to the recent history of the Horn of Africa.
In 1943 after the defeat of the Italian Colonies in East Africa a
British Military administration took over all the Somali inhabited
territories in the Horn of Africa. For the first time in one hundred
years the Somali people were under one common administration, with a
common currency and a common tariff. With the help of the huge
military expending of the conquering British forces, there was an
unprecedented boom in the Somali territories. The idea of remaining
united and holding on to this bonanza of the union took hold over
the minds of Somali leaders.
The British Labor government of the time welcomed the Somali
aspirations and proposed an expan ded British Protectorate over all
the Somali territories except the French Somali Coast; as the pre
sent Republic of Djibouti was known then. The proposal never found
support in the council of the great victorious powers but the Somali
clung to their hope and Greater Somalia was over since then the
centerpiece of their political aspirations.
In 1960 British Somaliland Protectorate and the Italian Trust
territory of Somalia gained their inde pendence and immediately
united as the first step towards Greater Somalia. In 1963 the third
ste p was almost taken when the British conservative Government of
Harold Macmillan showed some sympathy and undertook to ascertain the
wishes of the people of the NFD, Kenya and promised to act according
to those wishes. Then an alarmed emperor of Ethiopia appealed to
President Kenne dy and a phone call from the Oval Office in the
White House to No 10 Downing Street upset the So malis for good.
Consequently a disappointed and a bitter Somalia took up unrelenting
confrontati on with its neighbors and Horn of Africa had never known
peace or constructive development. Eventually the rebellion against
the Siyad Barre Dictatorship broke the spell of extreme nationalism.
Now all the great powers, the AU, and the Government of the Horn of
Africa countries, who is the 1960s denied Greater Somalia and made
it into a pernicious concept, are now talking in a confused
ambivalence about the Territorial integrity of Somalia. The
Territorial integrity of the Democratic Republic, which was ruled by
Mohamed Siad Barre “Af-Weyne”, is that of Greater Somalia but the
Territorial integrity of Somali is that Territory which was once an
Italian Colony. What is required for the solution of the Somali
Problem is clarity of objectives and expressions. The politics of
the Nile River must not be allowed to bedevil the Somali
reconciliation and the Ethiopian ambivalence over Somalia and
Greater Somalia must be resolved. A truncated Greater Somalia
composed of the former Italian colony and the British Protectorate
is impractical and unacceptable.
What then? I am proposes that if the Territorial integrity of the
Democratic Republic of Somalia is to be preserved, then I am asking
that the Government of United States of America, The Governm ent of
UK, and the Government of the Republic of South Africa should form a
panel to organize the formation of a state of the Somali inhabited
Territories in the Horn of Africa. Then were a golden opportunity,
which was missed in 1960, and a humanitarian mission of the first
category. The prob lem of the warning factions will immediately
evaporated at the moment this mission is announced and a new
grateful nation will appear in the Horn of Africa, bringing
constructive contributions to the region and an everlasting peace to
the Horn of Africa. We abjectly beg this Government to pit y the
agony of this tortured nation and to do the right thing at long last
Without embracing this noble scheme of building the only homogeneous
nation in Africa, the nation of any other territori al integrity is
a blasphemy, under such circumstance SOMALILAND DEMANDS RECOGNITION
of its so vereignty and resents vehemently and equation of itself
with the factions of Somalia.
ANIIS A ESSA…..DIRECTOR
SOMALILAND ADVOCACY GROUP
WASHINGTON DC.
ANIIS@YAHOO.COM
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