Somaliland has once again made public its ‘peace and dialogue’ stance on the issue of armed conflict presently alive in the Tukkarq area between the national army of the Republic of Somaliland (RoS) and that of Puntland, one of the five federal states of Somalia.
His Excellency, Musa Bihi Abdi, President of RoS, speaking to graduates, academia and guests at a graduation ceremony at Amoud University marking its 11th year to honor successful students completing either first or second degree studies, urged the government of Federal Somalia and the Puntland administration to choose peace, co-existence and dialogue to war and want ion the area.
“We call for peace time and again even though opposing forces have encroached 70 kilometers into our constitutional boundaries; and that, same as any other national army, the first constitutional duty tasked on the army is to secure national boundaries from foreign incursion so to secure safety of citizens within,” president Bihi said, hoping that Somalia and its state, Puntland, will reciprocate the peace call.
The President admitted that Somaliland statesmen and women, elders, traditional leaders, civil rights organizations, religious scholars, foreign diplomats, international and regional organizations have all advised him to heed persistent calls on cessation of hostilities, and he accepted that view without reservation.
Somaliland has always maintained that the matter of borders was an issue for the roundtable talks between it and Somalia, the two former union partners of the Somali Republic founded upon the independence of the two parts from, respectively, Britain and Italy in 1960. Puntland, however, claims that the regions of Sool, Sanaag and Buuhoodle lay within the borders it proclaimed for the regional state that came to be in 1998, seven years after Somaliland reclaimed its lost sovereignty at an all-clan conference in Burao on May 18, 1991.
It was only last week that the federal PM visited Puntland to mark with it the state’s 20th anniversary thus lending it the Central Government’s open support to the ‘statehood’ of Puntland which includes sweeping areas of Somaliland. President Mohamed Abdullahi Farmajo paid a similar visit to Puntland in January 2018 which resulted in Somaliland taking over the small town of Tukkaraq to preempt a visit he planned to pay the area to consolidate Puntland territorial claims – or so Somaliland insists.
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Delegates from IGAD, UNSOM, the United Kingdom and the United States have all called for an immediate cessation of hostilities, the exchange of prisoners, a commencement of dialogue and easy passage to humanitarian assistance reaching displaced civilians. The government of Somaliland accepted the proposal but Puntland, backed by the FGS, parried it with a number of improbable conditions including the complete withdrawal of the Somaliland area to a point near Burao, justifying that logic on border lines based on clan settlements.
