Open letter to Israel Foreign Minister. H.E. Yair Lapid

[Deeq A.]

TO: Israel Foreign Minister.
H.E. Yair Lapid

The international community has made several brave efforts to rescue and reconstruct the disintegrated
State of Somalia. All these brave efforts had however failed and Somali proper still lies in ruins and is
still a theatre for marauding warring militants. All the experts, the political analysis’s and the experienced
anthropologists called to help, have in their turn also failed to diagnose accurately the causes of the
dilemma.
These experts have for the first time came up against native problems, which defied their pet theories,
their quaint conclusions and their misinterpretation of the abstract indices of native cultures.
The poor eminent men and women could not admit that all their learned treaties were wrong, it was more
convenient to accuse the leopard of changing its spots. The search for a solution of the Somali problem
was always dogged by anomalies and ambivalences, which in one form or another emasculated every
reconciliation effort. To understand those anomalies and ambivalences we must go back to the recent
history of the Horn of Africa.
In 1943 after the defeat of the Italian Colonies in East Africa a British Military administration took over
all the Somali inhabited territories in the Horn of Africa. For the first time in one hundred years the
Somali people were under one common administration, with a common currency and a common tariff.
With the help of the huge military expending of the conquering British forces, there was an
unprecedented boom in the Somali territories. The idea of remaining united and holding on to this
bonanza of the union took hold over the minds of Somali leaders.
The British Labor government of the time welcomed the Somali aspirations and proposed an expanded
British Protectorate over all the Somali territories except the French Somali Coast; as the present
Republic of Djibouti was known then. The proposal never found support in the council of the great
victorious powers but the Somali clung to their hope and Greater Somalia was over since then the
centerpiece of their political aspirations.
In 1960 British Somaliland Protectorate and the Italian Trust territory of Somalia gained their
independence and immediately united as the first step towards Greater Somalia. In 1963 the third step
was almost taken when the British conservative Government of Harold Macmillan showed some
sympathy and undertook to ascertain the wishes of the people of the NFD, Kenya and promised to act
according to those wishes. Then an alarmed emperor of Ethiopia appealed to President Kennedy and a
phone call from the Oval Office in the White House to No 10 Downing Street upset the Somalis for
good. Consequently a disappointed and a bitter Somalia took up unrelenting confrontation with its
neighbors and Horn of Africa had never known peace or constructive development. Eventually the
rebellion against the Siyad Barre Dictatorship broke the spell of extreme nationalism.
Now all the great powers, the AU, and the Government of the Horn of Africa countries, who is the 1960s
denied Greater Somalia and made it into a pernicious concept, are now talking in a confused ambivalence
about the Territorial integrity of Somalia. The Territorial integrity of the Democratic Republic, which
was ruled by Mohamed Siad Barre..Known “Af-Weyne”, is that of Greater Somalia but the Territorial
integrity of Somali is that Territory which was once an Italian Colony. What is required for the solution
of the Somali Problem is clarity of objectives and expressions. The politics of the Nile River must not be

allowed to bedevil the Somali reconciliation and the Ethiopian ambivalence over Somalia and Greater
Somalia must be resolved. A truncated Greater Somalia composed of the former Italian colony and the
British Protectorate is impractical and unacceptable.
What then? I am proposes that if the Territorial integrity of the Democratic Republic of Somalia is to be
preserved, then I am asking that the United Nations should form a panel to organize the formation of a
state of the Somali inhabited Territories in the Horn of Africa. Then were a golden opportunity, which
was missed in 1960, and a humanitarian mission of the first category. The problem of the warning
factions will immediately evaporated at the moment this mission is announced and a new grateful nation
will appear in the Horn of Africa, bringing constructive contributions to the region and an everlasting
peace to the Horn of Africa. We abjectly beg the UN to pity the agony of this tortured nation and to do
the right thing at long last.
Without embracing this noble scheme of building the only homogeneous nation of Africa, the nation of
any other territorial integrity is a blasphemy, under such circumstance SOMALILAND DEMANDS
RECOGNITION of its sovereignty and resents vehemently and equation of itself with the factions of Somalia.

ANIIS A. ESSA….Head
Somaliland Advocacy group
Washington dc.

 

 

As per usual the opinions expressed in this articale are those of
 the author and do not reflect the opinions of qarannews.com

Qaran News