Mogadishu (PP Editorial) — The speech delivered by Muse Bihi Abdi, the President of the Somaliland Administration, on May 18, 2024, contained deliberate misrepresentations and factual inaccuracies. Bihi asserted that President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud had claimed the maritime Memorandum of Understanding between Somaliland administration and Ethiopia “would lead young Somali men to wage jihad against Christian Ethiopia.” How does this align with Bihi’s claim in the same speech that President Mohamud said he was ready to let Ethiopia use Somalia’s coasts “on the condition that the agreement be signed by the Federal Government of Somalia”?
Bihi claimed that Ethiopia did what the Federal Government of Somalia is reluctant to do: treat Somaliland as a separate country capable of signing agreements with other nations. Although Ethiopia has not officially recognised Somaliland as a separate country, Addis Ababa faced legitimate accusations that the illegal maritime Memorandum of Understanding undermines counterterrorism operations against Al-Shabaab and poses a threat to global security.
Regarding the union, Bihi claimed that “Somaliland pioneered the search for Greater Somalia and dedicated resources and manpower to that goal.” This assertion, like his other far-fetched claims, aims to depict the sovereignty of the Federal Republic of Somalia as an irredentist project. Bihi is old enough to remember when in 1954 Britain, in violation of Protectorate Agreements, allowed Ethiopia to annex Somali-inhabited territories.
In March 1968, at the Royal African Society, Mohamed Haji Ibrahim Egal, then a Prime Minister, commented on Britain’s actions that violated the Protectorate Agreements with Somali tribes.: “In the middle of the nineteenth century, only a few years after Britain had cynically signed flamboyant Treaties of Protection with the [Somali] people, it had secretly signed treaties with Ethiopia ceding to that country a portion of those very lands it had undertaken to protect.”
When Bihi asserts the sanctity of colonial borders, he not only inadvertently defends the sovereignty of the Federal Republic of Somalia but also exposes Britain to potential calls for rectifying historical injustices. These injustices result from breaches of Protectorate Agreements with Somali tribes who upheld their end of the agreements. The Common Law system only safeguarded the rights of the coloniser.
© Puntland Post, 2024
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