By Osman Hassan
Prof. Ali Khalif Galaydh, the President of the Khatumo State of Somalia, has lately toned down his usual virulent anti Somaliland rhetoric. The one-clan enclave, he says, is not the one responsible for the creeping break-up of Somalia’s unity contrary to the hitherto received conventional wisdom since the clan’s declaration of secession in May 1991. The culprits, he intones, are Mogadishu and its myopic self-seeking southern rulers, namely Culusow and company, who couldn’t care less about the union, and have done much to ruin it. Few in the north, whether unionists or secessionists, would disagree with the professor’s perceptions and assessments.
Prof. Galaydh’s revelation about the current southern ambivalence about the union is nothing new but goes back to the negotiations for the union at independence, when northerners had to press for Somali unity at all costs to them and, in the face of foot-dragging from southerners, had to satiate their greed and consent to their grab of all the leading posts of the State. For all their sacrifices, their reward was to be ungratefully dubbed as the “misguided dimwits”. In their defence, those founding fathers of Somalia were at least honourable nationalists for whom the union once enacted became sacred, unlike the current incumbents in Ville Somalia who are shamelessly corrupt and trade on the unity, sovereignty and territorial integrity of Somalia
Caught between a rock and a hard place, with Khatumo a victim preyed on by its predatory neighbours, Somaliland and Puntland, often in unholy alliance, and with the tacit or open collusion of Hassan Culusow and his Prime Minister for their personal or clannish ends, Prof Galaydh sought guidance in history. He took leaf from the book of the former Egyptian President, Anwar Sadat, who, despairing of liberating their Israeli-occupied territories, resorted to the most inconceivable desperate action by opening peace talks with his arch-enemy. He could claim some modicum of success for his daredevil initiative albeit at the cost of making himself a pariah in the Arab world and beyond.
For his part, professor Galaydh, who like Sadat has failed so far to liberate his regions occupied by Somaliland, but merely relies on typically arm-chair professorial rhetoric and empty threats, felt obliged to do the unthinkable and do a deal with the devil he knows best, – the renegade one-clan secessionist enclave calling itself Somaliland. Just as Sadat did not consult his people as becoming of a typical Arab autocrat, so has the professor, no less autocrat in his own ways, embarked on this audacious mission without consulting even key members of his government let alone the wider stakeholders of Khatumo. Unlike Sadat, Prof Galaydh has nothing to show for his one-sided goodwill, and if anything has made Somaliland that much more provocatively cocksure and uncompromising. The talks are for all practical purposes aborted by Somaliland, reckoning Khatumo is in the bag and they can dispense with talks with a vanquished adversary. Over confidence, which is typical of the enclave, could be their worst enemy.
Read more: Somaliland and Khatumo Talks Herald the demise of the Union
Osman Hassan
Email: osman.hassan2 @gmail.com
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Osman Hassan is a seasoned journalist and a former UN staff member. Mr Hassan is also a regular contributor to WardheerNews.
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