Somaliland will not ‘unlive’ its history to satisfy Mogadishu’s discomfort

A Response to Mogadishu’s former Foreign Minister Abdisaid M. Ali

There’s a quiet fatigue that comes from hearing your own story told for you, and told wrongly.

Last week, The East African published a guest essay by Somalia’s former Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, Abdi Said, declaring, with an almost priestly finality, that Somaliland will never be recognized and that Somalia must therefore govern it. It was written with confidence. But confidence, as history often teaches, is not the same as correctness.

As Somaliland’s former Minister of Foreign Affairs and its current Ambassador to Kenya, I believe it is appropriate to provide a response.

The piece is built on a kind of fatalism, that recognition is a door long closed and that Somaliland should fold back into a Somalia-led framework. It is an argument dressed as realism. But it ignores the deeper truths of Somaliland’s history, the legal realities of statehood, and the moral consequences of forcing a people to unlive their reality for the comfort of diplomatic convention.

Let’s begin with the first claim: that recognition is not coming.

Somaliland does not ask the world to invent a new country. It simply asks that the world acknowledge what already exists. For thirty-four years, Somaliland has had its own government, constitution, elected parliament, army, police, currency, and borders, the very same borders the British left in 1960. In international law, that continuity matters.

The Montevideo Convention, the textbook definition of statehood, lists four criteria: a defined territory, a permanent population, a functioning government, and the capacity to enter into relations with other states. Somaliland meets all four. In fact, it meets them better than some

recognized states struggling with legitimacy and governance, including the Somali government that the author is representing.

The African Union’s own fact-finding mission to Somaliland in 2005 concluded that “the case of Somaliland is unique and self-justified.” It recommended that the AU “should find a special method of dealing with this outstanding case.” That recommendation was shelved, but not because it was wrong, only because the politics of the continent preferred silence to courage.

To say that “recognition is not coming” is less a legal truth than a political sigh. Recognition is a process. Slow, cautious, and often reluctant. But the absence of recognition does not invalidate existence. Taiwan is unrecognized by most of the world, yet fully sovereign. The same is true for Kosovo for many years, or even Israel in its early decades.

Somaliland is not a petition; it is a reality.

The article also argues that Somaliland has failed to prove itself because of the conflict in Laascaanood. That a state, which faces internal dissent, cannot claim legitimacy. Fair point, but selectively applied. Which African state has not faced contested regions or political strain?

The situation in the Laascaanood district is painful and complex. It deserves empathy, not exploitation, as an argument against Somaliland’s right to exist. Every state, from Ethiopia to Nigeria to Kenya, grapples with internal dissent. The difference lies in whether a government responds with reform or repression.

Somaliland’s approach is to reconciliation, decentralization, and dialogue. The peace conferences of Borama, Hargeisa, and Burao in the 1990s were locally funded and community-led – a rarity in post-conflict Africa. That same tradition continues today.

To reduce an entire nation’s legitimacy to one district conflict is to erase three decades of peacebuilding, elections, and institutional discipline. Somaliland is functional, stable, and accountable to its people. The Somalia that the article insists must govern Somaliland, on the other hand, remains mired in political infighting, weak federal institutions, and a fragile security environment where external actors hold significant sway. It is a state still struggling to govern itself, let alone a territory that has charted its own path for over thirty years.

The writer suggests that Somaliland should accept an autonomy deal under Somalia’s federal system, and that this is the only “realistic” path. The irony is heavy. Somaliland tried union before. It was voluntary, brief, and disastrous.

In 1960, two newly independent territories, British Somaliland and Italian Somalia, merged to form the Somali Republic. It was a hopeful union, but the hope ended quickly. The people of Somaliland were politically marginalized, their officers purged from national institutions, and their citizens bombed by their own air force in the 1980s. The genocide in Hargeisa and Burao remains etched into living memory.

When Somaliland withdrew from the union in 1991, it did not secede. It reclaimed its sovereignty. The act was one of self-preservation, not rebellion. The idea that Somaliland should now rejoin that same structure under a federal label is to ignore history’s lessons and invite old wounds to reopen.

The article presents recognition as binary. That one is either recognized or not, legitimate or not. The world is more complex than that. Somaliland already operates as a state in all but name: it maintains bilateral relations, hosts foreign missions, signs investment deals, and partners with international organizations.

The expansion of Berbera Port, a crucial gateway to the Horn of Africa, along with regional counterterrorism cooperation, is an example of the growing bilateral partnership and increased American interest.

The politics of the Horn are changing. The Red Sea corridor has become one of the world’s most strategic theatres. In this new geography, stability and predictability matter more than formal lines on a map. Somaliland provides both, while Somalia fails on all fronts.

Pretending that stability can only come through Mogadishu’s authority is not realism; it’s nostalgia for an order that no longer exists.

Beneath all the legal and political arguments lies a moral one. The right of a people to govern themselves in peace should not be held hostage to others’ political discomfort. The people of Somaliland have voted overwhelmingly for independence, 97% in the 2001 constitutional referendum. They have built their own democracy, their own systems, and their own sense of identity.

To tell them, after three decades of order and effort, that they must surrender all this because “Mogadishu does not like it” is to ask them to undo their own success. It is to reward collapse and punish stability and democracy.

The international system was not designed for courage. But moral clarity sometimes begins at the periphery. Somaliland has shown that African solutions can work. That peace can be built bottom- up, that democracy can grow without donors scripting it, and that sovereignty is not just a flag but a covenant between people and leadership.

Somaliland does not seek confrontation. We seek fairness. We seek dialogue between equals, not between a recognized and an unrecognized partner. Recognition should not be a reward for crisis, corruption, and terrorism, but an acknowledgment of responsibility and performance.

As the late scholar Ali Mazrui once said, “Africa suffers not from too many states, but from too few viable ones.” Somaliland is viable. It deserves to be engaged as such.

The world’s reluctance to recognize Somaliland does not erase its existence; it only tests its patience. But history has a way of rewarding endurance.

So, to those who say recognition will never come, I say: perhaps not tomorrow, but the moral arc of diplomacy, like that of history, bends. Slowly, quietly, and toward reality.

Mohamed A. Omar is the Ambassador of the Republic of Somaliland to Kenya. He is a former Minister of Foreign Affairs and Minister of Trade and Investment. Email: rep@somalilandinkenya.com