Mogadishu (PP Comment) — In October 1969, Mohamed Haji Ibrahim Egal was the Prime Minister of Somalia. He delivered a speech at the United Nations in which he made a strong case for allowing the People’s Republic of China to be included in the United Nations decision-making process. This was before October 25, 1971, when the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 2758 to recognise the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as “the only legitimate representative of China to the United Nations.” The United Nations expelled the representatives of the Republic of China (ROC). Since that day, Taiwan has not had a seat at the United Nations.
In 1993, Egal was elected in Borama as the President of Somaliland Administration. His argument for regarding secession as a defensible political position was based on what he viewed as the impossibility of reconstituting the Somali State. It did not bother him that Eritrea had not sought statehood through unilateral secession from Ethiopia. “Who can we reunite with? Ali Mahdi and General Aideed caused the death of more than 300,000 people in Mogadishu,” Egal once told a reporter.
As one of the Founding Fathers of the Somali Republic, Egal knew that disrespecting the international norms governing sovereignty does not earn any secessionist entity friends or allies. Egal would object to the idea that ties with Taiwan could turn a secession campaign into a sovereignty reality.
It is not only the Somaliland Administration authorities who can be faulted for lacking a sense of history. The Federal Government of Somalia can equally be accused of not denouncing the ties the Somaliland Administration claims to have with Taiwan. Diplomatic leniency on the part of the Federal Government of Somalia might have led Abiy Ahmed, the Prime Minister of Ethiopia, to believe that Somalia is not taking its sovereignty seriously, to the point that he signed an illegal maritime Memorandum of Understanding with the President of the Somaliland Administration, Muse Bihi Abdi, in January 2024. The People’s Republic of China remembers that Somalia’s position on China’s right to have a seat at the United Nations remained the same before and after October 21, 1969, when the Somali Army staged a coup that came to be known as the Bloodless Revolution.
© Puntland Post, 2024
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