Mogadishu (Editorial) — What can one make of the decision of Somaliland Administration to authorise its forces to shell Laascaanood? Putting at risk the lives of citizens in a district whose inhabitants are represented in the bicameral legislature of Somalia’s federal institutions constitutes a blow to the progress made in the state-building initiatives that Britain has been supporting since 2012, the year Somalia formed its first post-transition government.
Somalia is under Chapter 7 Article of the United Nations Charter. The United Nations Security Council has “powers to maintain peace”. Somaliland Administration justifies shelling Laascaanood by its forces under the pretext that it is a republic that seceded from Somalia in 1991. Its actions come under the three categories of Chapter 7 Article: “Threats to the Peace, Breaches of the Peace, and Acts of Aggression.”
There is a contradiction in the application Chapter 7 Article to Somalia: the Security Council, of which Britain is member, takes into account threats to security that transnational terrorism poses to the world peace, but it ignores the plight of Somali citizens being killed by forces waging a secession war based on flawed interpretation of colonial borders.
It is the Federal Republic of Somalia whose sovereignty is being questioned by an administration that claims to be enforcing colonial borders that only apply to sovereign states that became member states of the African Union. By failing to remind the Somaliland Administration of its obligation to respect the sovereignty of Somalia and refrain from waging an irredentist conflict, the Security Council undermines the very principles of Chapter 7 Article applied to Somalia. The Laascaanood conflict could plunge Northern Somalia into a total civil war given the number of clans fighting in the name of Somaliland Administration against the people of Laascaanood.
The Federal Government of Somalia called on Somaliland Administration to respect the wishes of Laascaanood people whose traditional leaders and a 33-member committee issued on 6 February a declaration calling for the withdrawal of Somaliland forces and reaffirmed their political representation in the Mogadishu-based federal institutions .
© Puntland Post, 2023
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