Somaliland pilgrims to Mecca have always maintained their identity amid the teeming populace intent to execute their Hajj rites.
This year, according to social media reports, was given prominence because of the Tawhid emblazoned on top of its tricolored magnificence.
Each year Somalilander pilgrims fight for their identity in the face of Saudi obduracy which strove to lump them under the blue, white-starred falg of Somalia – of course, confusing the two.
The Republic of Somaliland restored, in 1991, an independence it ceded to a dominating, domineering, brutal younger sister in 1960 having been mesmerized by false – and not shared – commitment to a Greater Somalia that, then, included Djibouti, large areas under Ethiopia and what was then called the Northern Frontier District under Kenya. That dream has since dissipated to thin air.
That dream has since then dissipated into thin air.
Somaliland has built a fully-fledged state that owes nothing to an insouciant world except another lesson in “double standards” and “hypocrisy” as any ‘Lander would tell you if you give him half the time.
Let the world-cajoled, expensively pampered, AMISOM-guarded in Mogadishu try dictate to the Saudi kingdom as they did to Kenya – and a few more in order to stamp their jaundiced view of the more developed, more democratic Republic of Somaliland.
