So you came to a Somali website to tell us that there are no Somalis or no sense of Somali community. You seem to be conflating a sovereign state with a nation or ethnicity. There might not be one unified Somali sovereign state but there is a Somali nation bound together by a common religion, language, manner/rituals and territory. All this manifest itself into one culture. That is unless you are telling us Somalis have managed to evolve indepent of each other and yet somehow and rather miraculously developed one culture and common ethnicity. Your argument of clanism actually reinforces the idea of the Somali identity. Nothing is more Somali than qabyaalad. And that qabyaalad touches every Somali of every region and permeates through all institutions. Dividing Somalis into smaller groups will not solve the problem as those smaller groups will be faced with the same problems i.e politics around clans and sub-clans and competition for meager resources. A solution to a problem is mot to create problems.

This is Firstly can you share the document (s) that you are referring to. Secondly, if you were being offered such grandiose offers like ruler of Somaliland, then naturally you must be a powerful figure with a power base that is present and cannot be ignored. Right? A follow up question is, why would a man with such present power would just be snatched, thrown into jail and sent on a one-way ticket to god-knows-where? And not even two sheep got hurt in the process. I like sheeko-xariir, but that was when I was a kid. Mar ayaa laga waynaada waxaas. Somalis say 'ama buur ahaw, ama buur ku tiirsanaw'. Ina Cali Shire buurna ma ahayn, buur na ku ma tiirsanayn. With regards to the 'Somali nationalism' theme, it is the oldest joke in my opinion. We all know the modus operandi of the Somali psych, it revolves around clans. If you want to picture what the Somali society was like 50, 100 or 200 years ago, just look and analyse today. It is exactly the same, nothing changed just different off-spring. Somali clans, whether or not, they are with or against a Foreigners, it depends on the story. And not necessarily has anything to do with 'nationalism', more to do with 'we can't find our interest' so lets fight - along those lines. Lastly, the years between 1900 and 1920, there was only one man that dominated the Somaliland from coast to coast and that was General Muse Farax Iggare. If anyone would have been offered to rule that whole of Somaliland, he was the man for the job.

It is tragedy that a man of that stature who was one of the few Somalis in history exiled by the British for their political activity isn't known to most Somalis. Also, Ina Cali Shire never signed the so called Somaliland protectorate agreement reached with other tribes mainly the Habro and the Awdalites. In fact, it is one of the major arguments that his land (SAnaag) and those in the eastern side were never fully part of the the British empire. I hope the current Suldaan has great stature like his ancestors. Soomaalidii xoriyada iyo gumetsiga diiday oo dhan hoosta ayaa la galiyey since 1960. I do not know how far he goes with his ancestors, in Awdal our Ugaas is the 19th and the first one was crowned in Zaylac in 1603.