Mogadishu (PP Editorial) — The speech delivered by Muse Bihi Abdi, the President of the Somaliland Administration, on Might 18, 2024, contained deliberate misrepresentations and factual inaccuracies. Bihi asserted that President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud had claimed the maritime Memorandum of Understanding between Somaliland administration and Ethiopia “would lead younger Somali males to wage jihad in opposition to Christian Ethiopia.” How does this align with Bihi’s declare in the identical speech that President Mohamud mentioned he was able to let Ethiopia use Somalia’s coasts “on the situation that the settlement be signed by the Federal Authorities of Somalia”?
Bihi claimed that Ethiopia did what the Federal Authorities of Somalia is reluctant to do: deal with Somaliland as a separate nation able to signing agreements with different nations. Though Ethiopia has not formally recognised Somaliland as a separate nation, Addis Ababa confronted legit accusations that the unlawful maritime Memorandum of Understanding undermines counterterrorism operations in opposition to Al-Shabaab and poses a risk to world safety.
Relating to the union, Bihi claimed that “Somaliland pioneered the seek for Better Somalia and devoted assets and manpower to that purpose.” This assertion, like his different far-fetched claims, goals to depict the sovereignty of the Federal Republic of Somalia as an irredentist undertaking. Bihi is sufficiently old to recollect when in 1954 Britain, in violation of Protectorate Agreements, allowed Ethiopia to annex Somali-inhabited territories.
In March 1968, on the Royal African Society, Mohamed Haji Ibrahim Egal, then a Prime Minister, commented on Britain’s actions that violated the Protectorate Agreements with Somali tribes.: “In the course of the nineteenth century, only some years after Britain had cynically signed flamboyant Treaties of Safety with the [Somali] folks, it had secretly signed treaties with Ethiopia ceding to that nation a portion of these very lands it had undertaken to guard.”
When Bihi asserts the sanctity of colonial borders, he not solely inadvertently defends the sovereignty of the Federal Republic of Somalia but additionally exposes Britain to potential requires rectifying historic injustices. These injustices consequence from breaches of Protectorate Agreements with Somali tribes who upheld their finish of the agreements. The Frequent Regulation system solely safeguarded the rights of the coloniser.
© Puntland Submit, 2024
