Mogadishu (Editorial) — The position paper from the government of Somaliland administration on Laascaanood conflict contains a wealth of information on how President Muse Bihi Abdi and his key advisers think. The path to what Somaliland administration calls “a negotiated settlement” passes through accepting Hargeisa’s terms and misleading narrative that its aggressor forces “are fighting Al-shabaab in Laascaanood”, and that Puntland State is involved in the war.
Somaliland misleadingly claimed that Puntland forces and Al-Shabaab had joined forces to fight secessionist forces. Puntland State has been at war with Al-shabaab, as evidenced by the trial and execution of Al-shabaab members found guilty of terrorism in Puntland. Somaliland claimed that Al-shabaab is linked with the terrorist outfit operating “in Ethiopia”, a piece of canard that will embarrass the Ethiopian government.
The spurious claim of Somaliland administration that it is a sovereign country whose forces are enforcing pre-independence colonial borders is partly the cause of the conflict. In Africa secession is consummated through talks, not through a unilateral declaration or unilateral referendum. Factors conducive to secession are absent in Northern Somalia.
The intransigence of Somaliland administration and its reluctance to accept calls to withdraw its troops on the outskirts of Laascaanood mask the risk that secession can pose to the sovereignty of Somalia. If a subnational entity can seek to secede from Somalia, other entities will have the same right to do so under similar pretexts. No Somali clan can carve out a republic in what is now the Federal Republic of Somalia.
The prolonged civil and state collapse forced many scholars to rethink the substance of homogeneity in state-building in Somalia. Homogeneity was once viewed as the glue holding Somalia together. Failure to consider socioeconomic differences in Somalia resulted in a type of Maoist politics immortalised in the late Chairman’s dictum “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun… whoever has an army has power, for war settles everything.” Somaliland has unwittingly ventured into a Maoist territory in the vain hope that a civil war can help it to attain its goal to secede from Somalia.
©Puntland Post, 2023
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