Tag: Subversion

Much like the current president of Russia describing the collapse of the USSR and the subsequent emergence of 15 sovereign states as ‘the greatest geopolitical catastrophe in the 20th century” the people of Somalia and their leaders have become psychological prisoners of the past – a past in which there was Somaliland and Somalia united as a single ethnonational state until 1991 when Somaliland re-asserted the statehood it voluntarily relinquished in 1960. To Somalilanders, what happened in 1960 shortly after independence from the U.K was nothing short of the greatest act of betrayal of one generation by another when they united the newly independent state of Somaliland with Somalia. The British newspaper, the Daily Herald mocked this decision with the following headline: ‘the colony that rejected freedom” in its Wednesday 29th June edition. Such betrayal led to a 30-year long struggle for independence that came at the tragic cost of genocide – the Isaaq genocide.