The Secession Movement in Northern Somalia Cannot Invoke Protectorate Agreements with the British Empire

[Deeq A.]

Mogadishu (PP Comment) — A question with which legal philosophers and geopolitical experts grapple to understand the secession movement in Northern Somalia is: To what extent does inattention to the facts about how pre-1991 successive Somali governments retrospectively honoured Protectorate Agreements, which Somali clans signed with the British Empire at the turn of the nineteenth century, expose the vacuity of the secessionist claims?

When the North and South united in 1960 to create the Republic of Somalia, the argument to grant Somali citizenship to any person from Somali-inhabited territories in Ethiopia was enthusiastically defended by Northerners. Northern politicians felt the pain of betrayal after Britain violated the Protectorate Agreements with Somali clans by allowing Ethiopia to annex Somali-inhabited territories. In a stroke of the pen, Somali nomads in the Haud and Reserve Area were forced to swap their British subject identity for an Ethiopian subject (colonised) identity. In 1959, Mohamed Ibrahim Egal, then the Chairman of the Somali National League, wrote to the President of Ghana to ask him to persuade Emperor Haile Selassie to stop killing Somalis in the annexed territories, where Ethiopian forces had killed many Somalis accused of harbouring nationalist sentiments.

The diehard secessionists in Hargeisa advocate the inviolability of colonial borders to break up Somalia, but they forget that the African Union Charter cannot be applied twice against Somalia — once when Somalia was accused of violating the sovereignty of Ethiopia, and again when Ethiopia violated the sovereignty of the Federal Republic of Somalia in an attempt to annex a Somali coastal district. The former Soviet Union and its allies defended Ethiopia’s sovereignty in 1977. Doesn’t Somalia have a similar right to have its sovereignty protected by its allies if Ethiopia attempts to violate Somalia’s sovereignty?

The Federal Government of Somalia has designated secession as a national security threat. This decision has wider implications for Somalia-Somaliland talks. The Somaliland Administration opted to allow Ethiopia to lease a coastal district in northern Somalia. Ethiopia claims it intends to build a naval base there in line with an illegal Memorandum of Understanding signed by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed of Ethiopia and President Muse Bihi Abdi of the Somaliland Administration in January 2024. The President of the Somali region of Ethiopia, Mustafe Omer, claimed that the illegal maritime Memorandum of Understanding would reduce Ethiopia’s dependency on other ports.

By signing an illegal maritime Memorandum of Understanding with Ethiopia, the Somaliland Administration violated the informal code of conduct that has guided Somalia-Somaliland talks since 2012. The paths taken by Eritrea and South Sudan to secede from Ethiopia and Sudan in 1993 and 2011, respectively, respected the process. In the case of the Somaliland Administration, the decision to collude with Ethiopia to violate the sovereignty of the Federal Government of Somalia indicates that secessionists in northern Somalia are neither guided by a sense of history nor respect for international norms.

Somalia respects international norms governing the sovereignty of nations. Ethiopia interpreted Somalia’s favourable stance on the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam and the defence pact signed in December 2023 by the Somali Defence Minister with his Ethiopian counterpart as signs of weakness. In February 2023, when Essa Keyd, the Foreign Minister of the Somaliland Administration, claimed that his administration was a buffer zone for Ethiopia, the Federal Government of Somalia did not rebut his claims.

In 2007, when the Ethiopian forces invaded Somalia, Abdirahman Yusuf Artan wrote that Ethiopia would not support three Somali-dominated sovereign states in the Horn of Africa. Both the Federal Government of Somalia and the Somaliland Administration made strategic miscalculations by signing agreements with the Ethiopian government, which is at war with its people in the Amhara region after the end of the Tigray War (2020-2022). The Horn of Africa is teetering on the brink of preventable proxy wars. Somalis wonder if the sovereignty of their country could be as dispensable as the Protectorate Agreements that Somali clans signed with the British Empire more than 130 years ago.

© Puntland Post, 2024

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