Mogadishu (PP Editorial) — In his speech on the 18 May evening ceremony the Somaliland administration President Muse Bihi Abdi claimed that only him “can continue or stop the war.” The hubris contained in his speech is similar to follies and foibles immortalised in the classic Somali poem of the Dervish Commander Ismail Mireh: Ragow kibirka waa lagu kufaa kaa ha la ogaado “O men! Pride leads to downfall, keep that in mind”.
Bihi should have been as mellowed as had been when he delivered his November 2018 speech at Tukaraq in which he said : “It is a pointless to shed blood when we can sit under a tree and thrash out our difference.”
The Laascaanood conflict began 6 February, 2023, one month after Somaliland forces were forced to withdraw from the administrative capital of Sool, followed by retreat from Tukaraq into Goja’ade on the outskirts of Laascaanood. Initially, Bihi attempted to play the terrorism card to label people of Laascaanood terrorists before proposing a unilateral ceasefire aimed to give his forces a time to regroup.
The reckless decisions of Bihi damaged communal trust in Northern Somalia. As the International Crisis Group noted its latest report on the Laascaanood conflict, Somaliland is waging a war based on the British Protectorate identity that Bihi and men of his generation had before the independence on June 26, 1960 and the subsequent Union of the South and the North on 1 July, 1960. “The colonial-era borders, which placed Sool on Somaliland’s side of the line, remain central to Somalilander identity. But the majority of Sool’s population is Dhulbahante, a people who belong to a non-Isaaq clan family, the Darod. They strongly resisted British colonialism…” wrote ICG.
“In the middle of the nineteenth century, only a few years after Britain had cynically signed flamboyant Treaties of Protection with the people, it had secretly signed treaties with Ethiopia, ceding to that country a portion of those very lands it had undertaken to protect” said Mohamed Ibrahim Egal, a Prime Minister, in 1968 at the Royal African Society.
In Africa state-formation is based on decolonisation narrative, not a Protectorate identity. When Bihi claims that a Somali citizen from Garoowe is a foreigner in Laascaanood he is not only disrespecting the sovereignty of Somalia but he also causing reputational damage to the image of Somalia in Africa. President Bihi needs to wise up.
© Puntland Post, 2023
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