Michael Keating Rejects Farmajo’s Strategy to Support Waddani, Destablize Somaliland

Mr. Michael Keating, the Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Somalia and Head of UNSOM, said in a letter he wrote to President Mohamed Abdullahi Farmajo of the Federal Government of Somalia, that the international community could not endorse or understand why destabilizing peaceful Somaliland has become a top priority for Somalia.

“While stabilizing Somalia is our top priority, we have failed to grasp the logic of potentially destabilizing the peaceful Somaliland by interfering in its local politics and favoring one candidate over the other,”  Mr. Keating stated in a letter that went viral on social media since yesterday, Wednesday.

Mr. Keating responding to, obviously, a communication from President Farmajo asking the international community to support Waddani  in its bid to clinch the presidency in the upcoming elections against the other two political parties, told Farmajo of Villa Somalia that he presented ‘your strategic initiative to our international partners and regretfully we have come to a unanimous decision not (to) support this effort’.  

Mr. Keating, the letter continues to show, reveals his and other partners’ sympathy to Somalia’s ‘goal of Somali reunification’ and ‘that your administration shares this mutual interest with the WADANI party leadership in Somaliland”, but, however, they ‘simply cannot participate nor endorse a plan that might lead to more instability to this part of the world’.

Mr. Keating went to establish that ‘our partners are not onboard with the premise of isolating Somaliland internationally by censuring its current president and Mr. Musa Bihi of Kulmiye as war criminals and referring their cases to The Hague’.

Mr. Keatign tells the junior president that ‘allegations of this magnitude require sufficient evidence’.

One need not read the original communication from President Farmajo to look into its content as the response Mr. Keating gives in these short – but loaded – paragraphs disclose the depth of the animosity Villa Somalia harbors for the Republic of Somaliland, its public, its leadership and against its very successful, time-tested democracy.

The letter also reveals how Somalia has seen in Waddani a weak link to defragment Somaliland people’s resolve to restore the independence they sacrificed for a Greater Somalia vision in 1960 which stalled in the ill-consummated union with only one more region of the envisaged 5 ‘Somalias’.

Mr. Keating’s civil but firm rap on Farmajo’s knuckles also confirms the validity of a similar communication which surfaced in which the internationally-propped, weak administration in Mogadishu made with foreign embassies and governments following the same vein evident in Farmajo’s letter(s) to Mr. Keating and the other international partners. This time around, the letter was written was written by the FGS foreign minister, Mr. Yussuf Garad. The copy shown below is addressed to the Qatari foreign ministry with the subject ‘Political Opportunity in North Somalia’ – meaning the Republic of Somaliland.

Mr. Garad says in his letter that the November presidential elections in Somaliland ‘leads to having key of opportunity to empower the union political party Wadani who is responsible the union reform’.

The letter is badly written and unbecoming of a foreign ministry – even that of ill-educated Somalia, but, then, there is not much doubt in 90% of Somalilanders’ minds that Somalia is using Waddani for its own ends. Whether it will achieve its goals even if Waddani wins is another matter that remains to be seen.