Issue No. 919

Unpacking Somaliland's Independence Quest

The scramble for Africa left deep scars across the continent, but few colonial partitions proved as consequential as the division of Somali territories in the late 19th century. Today, as Somaliland seeks international recognition, the story of its brief independence and hasty union with Somalia reveals how the colonial powers, keen to divest themselves of imperial responsibilities, left behind a crisis of contested sovereignty that would take decades to resolve.

When decolonisation swept Africa in the mid- 20th century, the British and the Italians, two of the colonial powers in the Horn of Africa moved quickly to wash their hands of the Somali territories. Britain granted independence to its protectorate on June 26, 1960, creating the State of Somaliland. More than thirty countries, including UN Security Council members, promptly recognised this new state. Yet, Somaliland's independence lasted only five days before merging with the Italian-administered United Nations Trust Territory of Somalia. The union was driven less by careful legal and political planning than by the powerful currents of pan-Somali nationalism. Leaders like Muhammad Haji Ibrahim Egal, the first (and last) prime minister of the newly independent State of Somaliland, were under immense pressure to unite with other Somali territories. The dream of Greater Somalia – uniting all Somali-inhabited regions namely British Somaliland, Italian Somalia, French Djibouti, Ethiopia's Ogaden region, and Kenya's Northern Frontier District – had captured popular imagination as an anticolonial vision.

On June 27, 1960, Somaliland's Legislative Council passed a Union Act intended as an international treaty between the two sovereign states to form the Somali Republic. But the political reality was messier than the legal framework suggested. The southern legislature drafted its own separate Act of Union, approving it only "in principle" on June 30. No common agreement was ever signed by both parties. When the joint legislative assembly convened on July 1, Somali leaders simply adopted a provisional constitution by acclamation – without debate, and without the unified treaty they had promised their respective peoples.

The legal irregularities mattered because, in the absence of an act of union, Somaliland and Somalia remained separate sovereign entities. When the new ‘Somali Republic’ held a constitutional referendum on June 20, 1961, the leading northern party, the Somali National League, urged a boycott. Only 100,000 Somaliland voters participated, of which 60% rejected the constitution. But when the votes were tallied, Somalilanders’ objections were swept aside by an overwhelming endorsement of the constitution by Somalia's much larger vote count. In a very real sense, Somaliland surrendered its de jure sovereignty to a de facto rule from Mogadishu.

Political inequalities become entrenched. President Adan Abdalla Osman, Prime Minister Abdirashid Ali Sharmarke, Interior Minister Abdirizaq Haji Hussein, Foreign Minister Abdillahi Esse, Speaker of Parliament Haji Bashir Ismail Yousuf, and Chief Justice Dr Haji Nuur Mohamed all hailed from the south. Army commander General Daud Abdillahi Hersi and Police Commission Mohamed Abshir Muse were also both southerners. Mogadishu – over 1,000 kilometres from Hargeisa – became the national capital. For Somalilanders who had supported the union, disenchantment set in quickly. Jobs were concentrated in Mogadishu. Northerners, who spoke Somali with a distinctive accent and were unfamiliar with Somalia’s official lingua franca, Italian,* found themselves treated as second class citizens in what should have been their own capital city.

Northern frustration erupted in December 1961 when a group of military officers - trained at Britain's prestigious Sandhurst  military academy - attempted a coup to restore Somaliland's independence. The revolt failed, but their subsequent trial exposed the union's shaky legal foundations. The presiding British judge, Justice Hazelwood, acquitted the officers, ruling there was "no case" because the accused had sworn an oath to the State of Somaliland, and the union establishing the Somali Republic had never been legally concluded.*

When a bodyguard assassinated President Sharmarke on October 15, 1969, Prime Minister Egal rushed back from abroad. Within days, General Mohamed Siyad Barre seized power in a military coup, and Egal was imprisoned. Barre initially attracted northern support through promises of scientific socialism and the Somali Revolutionary Socialist Party's development agenda. From 1969 to the mid-1970s, the garrison state delivered infrastructure and raised hopes that Somalia might finally function as a unified nation. But by 1974, Barre's attention turned to recovering lost territories in Ethiopia and Kenya. In 1977, he launched the Ogaden War. Somalia's military achieved initial successes, but the Soviet Union – which had backed Barre's regime – switched sides to support Ethiopia. Somalia’s ill-judged invasion ended in 1978 with a catastrophic defeat, from which the country would never truly recover.

The first stirrings of rebellion emerged later the same year, with a mutiny by officers from northeastern Somali who went on to form the Somali Salvation Democratic Front (SSDF) based in Ethiopia. They were followed in 1981 by the Somali National Movement (SNM), whose roots lay in northwestern Somalia (formerly Somaliland). By 1982, the SNM began engaging in armed resistance. The government armed 400,000 refugees from Ethiopia's Ogaden – settled in camps across Somaliland – to support military operations against local communities. In May 1988, after SNM attacks on Burao and Hargeisa, Barre's forces subjected both cities to indiscriminate aerial and artillery bombardment. Between 50,000-200,000 civilians are believed to have been killed. Half a million people sought refuge in Ethiopia, with hundreds of thousands more internally displaced. Ninety per cent of the northern capital, Hargeisa, was destroyed. Hundreds of other towns and villages were laid to waste and sown with an estimated 2 million land mines. Dozens of mass graves littered the countryside.

When Barre's government finally collapsed in January 1991, Somaliland faced a choice. Rather than joining the scramble for power in Mogadishu, the SNM convened the Burao Grand Conference in May 1991. There, clan elders, civic leaders, and armed factions were forced to make a momentous decision, leading them to abandon efforts to reform Somalia and instead reassert Somaliland's independence within the borders inherited from Britain in 1960. The essential argument for Somaliland's recognition rests on the argument  that the independent State of Somaliland entered into a voluntary union with Somalia in 1960, which it withdrew from in 1990. By invoking the legal principle of uti possidetis juris, Somaliland was essentially reclaiming the sovereignty bestowed upon it by the British on June 26, 1960, within the borders received upon achievement of independence.

In 2001, the Somaliland government organised a referendum to approve a new Constitution, Article 1 of which declares Somaliland to be a sovereign, independent state. The process was widely described by international and domestic observer teams as free and fair, though parts of the Sool and Sanaag regions boycotted. With 97.9% voting in favour of the constitution, the referendum served as a democratic exercise in self-determination – a popular validation of the 1991 declaration. Nevertheless, no UN member state had formally recognised Somaliland's independence –  until Israel chose to do so on 26 December 2025.

In November 2024, Abdirahman Mohamed Irro took office as Somaliland’s 6th president since 1991 – the fourth to be elected through a free and fair electoral process. Somaliland’s parliament and local governments are also chosen through multiparty elections, in sharp contrast with most other countries in the region. Despite international isolation, Somaliland’s economy, anchored in livestock exports and transit trade with Ethiopia through the Port of Berbera, has proven increasingly robust. The legal basis of its claim to independence is uniquely consistent with the Constitutive Act of the African Union, whose own Commission acknowledged, in 2005, the strength of Somaliland’s case for recognition.

But recognition, as Somalilanders have learned to their chagrin, is a political act, rather than a legal one. And as Mogadishu, together with its international allies, mobilises armed forces to challenge Somaliland’s prospects for wider recognition, the struggle for independence may once again become a military one. For Somalilanders, that is precisely the point: after decades of subordination, subjugation, and devastation at the hands of Mogadishu, Somalia has nothing to offer but more of the same.

The Somali Wire Team