His Excellency the President of the Republic of Somaliland, Ahmed Mohamed Mohamoud ‘Silaanyo”, literally, chalked a nine-point presentation to an international community that largely ignored Somaliland’s pleas for diplomatic recognition despite the country’s uncontested legal and historical grounds for a restoration of its 1960 independence.

The President speaking at an occasion, Sunday, where the Ministry of Foreign Affairs revealed that Somaliland citizens appealed to the world for recognition on behalf of their country breaking the million-petitioners threshold, recapped his country’s argument for right to an independence and self-determination which can no longer be denied legally or otherwise.

The President pointed out that:

  1. Somaliland is a country that goes back in history as a nation up to 1887 with internationally recognized boundaries among the British protectorates.
  2. SL united with Somalia as an independent country. There are precedents in Africa on countries uniting and separating again:
  3. SL gained full independence from Great Britain on 26 June 1960. It moved to a union with Italian Somalia on 1 July 1960.
  • Egypt united with Syria in 1958 and withdrew in 1961
  • French Sudan united with Senegal in 1960 and annulled the union the same year
  • Gambia and Senegal united in 1981 and separated in 1989.

 

4. Fifty-three percent of the people of SL rejected the union with a now defunct Somali Republic in a 1961 referendum.

5. In December  the same year, 1961, military officers from SL attempted a failed coup in order to restore the independence lost to Somalia.

6. Somaliland never partook/participated in any of the reconciliation/stabilization conferences held for Somalia for the past quarter of a century. On the same token, Somaliland was not a signatory – or the process thereof – of the road map on which the Somalia federal statehood is based.

7.  SL reclaimed its independence on 18 May 1991 following a resolution reached (and signed) in an all-clan conference held for all traditional leaders and politicians of Somaliland in Burao.

8. In May 2001, 97.7% of the people of Somaliland approved the Constitution of the Republic of Somaliland and its re-declaration of independence as a sovereign state.

9. Somaliland is a country that fulfilled all prerequisites of nationhood as an independent, sovereign country.