The international community has made several brave efforts to rescue and reconstruct the disintegrated State of Somalia. All these brave efforts had however failed and Somali proper still lies in ruins and
is still a theatre for marauding warring militants. All the experts, the political analysis’s and the experienced anthropologists called to help, have in their turn also failed to diagnose accurately the causes of the dilemma.
These experts have for the first time came up against native problems, which defied their pet theories, their quaint conclusions and their misinterpretation of the abstract indices of native cultures.
The poor eminent men and women could not admit that all their learned treaties were wrong, it was more convenient to accuse the leopard of changing its spots. The search for a solution of the Somali problem was always dogged by anomalies and ambivalences, which in one form or another emasculated every reconciliation effort. To understand those anomalies and ambivalences we must go back to the recent history of the Horn of Africa.
In 1943 after the defeat of the Italian Colonies in East Africa a British Military administration took over all the Somali inhabited territories in the Horn of Africa. For the first time in one hundred years the Somali people were under one common administration, with a common currency and a common tariff. With the help of the huge military expending of the conquering British forces, there was an unprecedented boom in the Somali territories. The idea of remaining united and holding on to this bonanza of the union took hold over the minds of Somali leaders.
The British Labor government of the time welcomed the Somali aspirations and proposed an expanded British Protectorate over all the Somali territories except the French Somali Coast; as the present Republic of Djibouti was known then. The proposal never found support in the council of the great victorious powers but the Somali clung to their hope and Greater Somalia was over since then the centerpiece of their political aspirations.
In 1960 British Somaliland Protectorate and the Italian Trust territory of Somalia gained their independence and immediately united as the first step towards Greater Somalia. In 1963 the third step was almost taken when the British conservative Government of Harold Macmillan showed some sympathy and undertook to ascertain the wishes of the people of the NFD, Kenya and promised to act according to those wishes. Then an alarmed emperor of Ethiopia appealed to President Kennedy and a phone call from the Oval Office in the White House to No 10 Downing Street upset the Somalis for good. Consequently a disappointed and a bitter Somalia took up unrelenting confrontation with its neighbors and Horn of Africa had never known peace or constructive development. Eventually the rebellion against the Siyad Barre Dictatorship broke the spell of extreme nationalism.
Now all the great powers, the AU, and the Government of the Horn of Africa countries, who is the 1960s denied Greater Somalia and made it into a pernicious concept, are now talking in a confused ambivalence about the Territorial integrity of Somalia. The Territorial integrity of the Democratic Republic, which was ruled by Mohamed Siad Barre “Af-Weyne”, is that of Greater Somalia but the Territorial integrity of Somali is that Territory which was once an Italian Colony. What is required for the solution of the Somali Problem is clarity of objectives and expressions. The politics of the Nile River must not be allowed to bedevil the Somali reconciliation and the Ethiopian ambivalence over Somalia and Greater Somalia must be resolved. A truncated Greater Somalia composed of the former Italian colony and the British Protectorate is impractical and unacceptable.
What then? I am proposes that if the Territorial integrity of the Democratic Republic of Somalia is to be preserved, then I am asking that the Government of United States of America, the Government of France, The Government of UK, and the Government of the Republic of South Africa should form a panel to organize the formation of a state of the Somali inhabited Territories in the Horn of Africa. Then were a golden opportunity, which was missed in 1960, and a humanitarian mission of the first category. The problem of the warning factions will immediately evaporated at the moment this mission is announced and a new grateful nation will appear in the Horn of Africa, bringing constructive contributions to the region and an everlasting peace to the Horn of Africa. We abjectly beg this Government to pity the agony of this tortured nation and to do the right thing at long last.
Without embracing this noble scheme of building the only homogeneous nation if Africa, the nation of any other territorial integrity is a blasphemy, under such circumstance SOMALILAND DEMANDS RECOGNITION of its sovereignty and resents vehemently and equation of itself with the factions of Somalia.
ANIIS A ESSA.
SOMALILAND ADVOCACY GROUP
WASHINGTON DC
ANIIS@YAHOO.COM