His Excellency the President of the Republic of Somaliland, Ahmed Mohamed Mohamoud ‘Silanyo’, urged the Federal Government of Somalia to respect the independence and sovereignty of Somaliland to withdraw statement/s in a communique released at the end of a consultation conference on Somalia’s Way Ahead concluded in Mogadishu on Tuesday, 12 April.
The President further called on the Mogadishu administration ‘to withdraw the statement as it affects Somaliland’.
The Somalia conference reached an agreement to hold ‘general elections’ later in the year. The type of elections proposed is based on a 4.5 formula accords equal status to four major clan groups in Somalia while the point-five would comprise an amalgam of smaller ethnic denominations.
In the same press release from Villa Somalia, the seat of the AMISOM-propped Somalia government, it was proposed that Lower and Upper Houses of Parliament would be formed based on clan nominations. Each member, for example, of a Lower House of Parliament or House of Representatives – to be composed of 275 MPs, will have to be voted on to a seat by a clan Electoral College of 50 members.
Ironically, the international community seems to be humoring Somalia on a game of pretenses that overlooks several one-man, one-vote elections that were successfully put to practice in Somaliland on which, presently, rest all executive and municipal councils in the Republic of Somaliland. The UN, the EU, IGAD and other international actors had all witnessed and admired the process – the same actors that do not rap Somalia’s knuckles for brazenly bamboozling a knowledgeable but fickle world.
The Somalia conference and its press release swept in Somaliland into the cauldron of an unstable Somalia regardless of the Republic of Somaliland’s sovereign status for the past quarter of a century, although internationally not approved yet, or fact that Somalia is still, in the eyes of the international community, a weak, house of straws structure largely propped up by the presence of African and other international military might.
The President of Somaliland’s letter clearly states that Somalia’s intrusion into the mandated structures of the Republic, and its desire to pull it down to its own lamentable level, ‘blatantly disregards the agreement between Somali and Somaliland on 10 January 2014’.
The full text of the President’s Letter was as below:
