President Musa Bihi Abdi urged Somalia and its Federal State of Puntland to reciprocate the respect the Republic of Somaliland had shown for a binding ‘brotherhood, cooperation and peaceful co-existence’
“We have a boundary with Somalia along the federal state of Puntland. We have all the respect for brotherhood, cooperation and peaceful existence,” he said.
However, he pointed out, an increasing number of incursions, crossing the border into Somaliland, on the part of that State’s forces had been reported. The encroaching army elements, he said, disturbed the peace, creating situations that did not augur well for peaceful co-existence.
“We urge Somalia to avoid activities that can overturn the balance of peace in the region. We are obliged to protect our people’s lives and material wealth if the situation persists by not heeding our cautioning signals,” President Bihi said.
The President promised just retaliation if Puntland and Somalia did not stop ‘military’ activities in the region.
Puntland, besides, stood accused of granting a base yo armed insurgents who, occasionally, raided Somaliland positions from inside its territory.
The Republic of Somaliland is based on the borders left it by Britain during independence in 1960. those boundaries were internationally demarcated and were shared with the then French Somaliland, Djibouti, Ethiopia and the Italian Trusteeship of Somalia.
An Internationally recognized Somaliland rushed into an ill-fated union with Italian Somalia after it, too, gained independence the same year. That union intended to become a beacon for the rest of the envisaged Greater Somalia nation which was to include Djibouti, and parts of Kenya and the Ethiopian Empire.
The union was rescinded in 1969 when a brutal military coup d’tat regime abrogated the ‘Somali Republic’ which united Somaliland and Somalia in their vision. The military chose to call the socialist government they led an interchangeable ‘Somali Democratic Republic’ and ‘Somalia’ – the latter still latched on to the old specter. Somaliland of the 1960s was not a party to either the 1969-1991 or 1991-date successive ‘Somalia’ administrations.
That military regime eventually used Somaliland, the senior partner in the 1960 union, as target practice executing thousands and thousands of its citizens, throwing hundreds of thousands in jails and makeshift holding cells, looting its wealth, strafing its cities from the air and driving tens of thousands more to seek refuge in neighboring Ethiopia and – to a lesser, uncharted extent – Djibouti.
The regime was overthrown through a costly, ten-year-long war started by Somaliland-born elements in 1991.
The Republic of Somaliland was declared in Burao on May 18, 1991, restoring the sovereignty it ceded to the Greater Somalia dream in 1960.
Inexplicably, however, Somalia kept insisting that Somaliland belonged to it – and a world that knew little of its history kept humoring it with the misconception.
President Bihi, during a constitutional address Somaliland Presidents made to a joint session of the bicameral parliament, Monday, stated that it has now dawned on the international community that the fallacy of a re-born union was no longer a viable option for either side.
