First and foremost, I would like to convey to you, on behalf of our Khatumo people, the respects due to you as our President. Needless to say, no where has your election as president been received with such rousing welcome and instant stirring jubilations as among our people in Sool, Sanaag and Cayn (SSC) regions. This is for the simple reason that as devoted unionists they perceived you as someone ushering a new dawn for Somalia who would lead it away from its long-enduring failed state and defend its battered unity against its enemies, namely the one-clan secessionists in the north calling themselves Somaliland.
Alas, those hopes were too good to be true as the earlier premature euphoria started to evaporate into thin air, increasingly giving way to the familiar despair. Today, sadly, discontent with your presidency is gaining ground each day in the country, apart from those who would support you right or wrong out of blind clan loyalty. To be fair to you, some of the blame might be misplaced, but most are well-founded and are of your own making. More often than not, Mr President, your actions are not born out of well-considered national policies and strategies for the benefit of Somalia but amount to selected short-sighted and misguided initiatives aimed at gaining advantages at the cost of those you consider dispensable or perceive as clan adversaries. There is something déjà vu about all this, and unless you urgently change course, we are likely to slide back into the quagmire we thought we had emerged from on your election. If that happens, God forbid, you can only imagine your ignominious place in Somalia’s history.
Of all your questionable, if not reprehensible actions, I will confine myself to the one that concerns us directly and that is your unilateral, imperious plan to dispose of our existence as Khatumo, as distinct SSC regions and people within Somalia, and feed us to the tutelage of the enemies of Somalia and its unity. What makes your plan all more outrageous and offensive is that you conceived it over our heads, in total disregard of our fundamental rights, as if we were no more than disposable tradable commodities. All the same, all you have managed to achieve in one swoop is to alienate our people, perhaps irreversibly, while abetting rather than prevailing over Somaliland’s secessionist intransigence.
Mr president, you should know that the Khatumo State of Somalia was not established to fulfil myopic clan aggrandisement like the other mushrooming clan enclaves but simply as the only way we could distance ourselves from Somaliland and resist the secession that the one-clan enclave has been barbarically imposing on us through occupation of our capital Lascanod. Since then we have been single-handedly defending the unity of Somalia that you, your government and its predecessors have failed to defend in deeds and words.
Mr President, let me tell you that our problem with our brothers in the one-clan secessionist enclave in the north is not about perennial clan antagonisms that are common in the south. Indeed, the fraternity among the northern people whatever their clans have always been deep, apart from the occasional clashes between any two neighbouring clans over scare resources which have been settled through time-honoured conflict resolution modalities until perverted by the current administration in Hargeisa for unscrupulous political ends.
The problem, Mr President, is not with the secessionist clan per se but with their expansionist colonialist administration and our irreconcilable stands: on one side, it is their relentless obsession with the break-up of Somalia, their desire to have a state where as a clan they can dominate all other clans, and their use of force and occupation to make us succumb to their secession and tutelage; and on the other side, facing them, is our equally resolute determination to defy them and remain unionists adhering to the motherland. Our stand is the one any Somali leader worth his salt, whether a president or Prime Minister, or for that matter others in the government and Parliament, should have rallied to us and gave us material and moral support. Alas, far from doing that, you chose to stab us in the back and offer us to Somaliland as a sacrificial lamb.
Mr President, a little historical refreshment is in order. Let me remind you that we, the Khatumo people from the SSC regions, have never been part through consent of any territory by the name of Somaliland, whether the defunct one under British rule or the current phantom idolised by the one-clan secessionists. While other clans consented to British colonial rule through separate treaties, our opposition to British rule on the other hand, not only in the SSC region but in the wider Horn, was the raison d’étre for the liberation struggle under the banner of the Darwiish movement. We were simply occupied in the SSC regions after the defeat of the Darwiish but we never accepted British colonial rule. The British recognised this.
Another historical refreshment, Mr President, is that Somaliland as a separate country or entity ceased to exist when it joined Italian Somaliland on the first of July 1960. From that date, its regions, such as Sool and Sanaag, became separate regions of Somalia no longer bearing the name of “Somaliland”. Since its integration into Somalia on 1 July 1960, Somaliland as a name was only revived by the one-clan secessionists in May 1991 when they declared their secession from Somalia. Regardless of their phantom Somaliland, our SSC regions, now the KhatumoState of Somalia, will continue to be statutory specific regions of Somalia as they had been since union. That remains inviolate and can not be changed by any scheming on your part.
If the secession is one primary reason why we can not join the separatists, another reason why belonging to “Somaliland” as a state, whether independent or part of federal Somalia, is an anathema to our people, is the horrendous crimes they committed against our people. Over a thousand civilians, mostly nomads, defending their patrimony and their Cayn regional capital Buuhoodle, were killed by Somaliland militia around the Buuhoodle region. Close to 100,000 of the population of our capital Lascanod and surrounding areas were displaced when Somaliland captured it from Puntland on October 2007. Some of these people are internally displaced while over 60.000 ended up in Kenya’s Somali refugee camps. But that is not all. Daily violations of human rights and crime against humanity are widespread and routine. Your silence and that of your government, in the face of these abominable crimes against our people, your people for whom you are their leader, can be taken as approval or appeasement.
We would be the first to welcome if the secessionists give up their misguided secession and join their fellow Somalis in Somalia. When that happens, our relations can only be based on fraternity and equality- equal regions and administrations, living side by side in Somalia and maintaining our historical bonds. But otherwise, we will never accept to be part of Somaliland, or whatever other name it adopts. To do so is to consent to a two-tier rule over us: first under Hargeisa, something tantamount to legitimizing the current illegal occupation and one clan tutelage over us; and secondly rule under the federal government in Mogadishu. Khatumo can not have two masters, pure and simple: We are our own masters and relate only to the federal government in conformity with the provisions of the constitution.
This neo-colonial second class status that you are planning for us is something no other clan or regions in Somalia would accept under the new federal Somalia where sovereignty lies with the people. It is mind-boggling how you reckoned that we would be the exception or that we would go along with it passively. To persist in this regard, in your ill-thought plan of ceding us to Somaliland as if we were your personal property, is to import to the north the turmoil that had plagued the south since the collapse of the SomaliState. Clearly, you have underestimated our will to foil this plan and we will.
Finally, Mr President, there is a third refreshment for you, this time on the geography of Somalia. In case you are oblivious or imperceptive to the geography of Somalia outside your Benadir enclave, it behoves you to always keep in mind that the SSC regions are the bridge that link northern and southern Somalia. To break-up Somalia into north and south only requires breaking that bridge. This is something the one-clan secessionists understood from the outset and it is for that reason they had marshalled all their resources and militia hoping to conquer our SSC regions and detach it from Somalia. They would have succeeded if it was not for our resistance, and, God willing, it is only a matter of time before our own gallant liberation fighters chase them out to where they came from.
What could end the unity of Somalia, though Mr President, are Khatumo people disillusioned about the way you had sold them out to the secessionists. There is a limit to their devotion to the union and if all they get for all their sacrifices for Somalia and the union, now or in the past, is betrayal at your hands and lack of support from parliament, cabinet and the wider non-secessionist Somalia, we fear our enraged people would take matters into their own hands and force secession from Somalia on Khartoum, taking a leaf from Somaliland’s book when SNM rank and file members, bitter about their treatment under the former military government, forced secession on their clan at their conference in Burco on May 1991.
Embittered Khartoum people are likely to opt for secession as the lesser evil in their eyes than to be part of Somaliland against their wish. They could break that bridge joining northern and southern Somalia in no time, something Somaliland had failed to do in 22 years. Not only would you have poured oil on already troubled waters in the north that would fan the flames of the current on-going conflict but you could go down in history as the man who inadvertently broke up Somalia thorough your misguided actions.
Mr President, you are playing with fire, but it is Somalia’s destiny you are playing with. Stop it before it is too late.
Please accept, Mr President the assurances of my highest considerations
Mohamed Yusuf Halac
PresidentKhatumoState of Somalia
CC:
H.E. Mohamed A.Jawari, Speaker, Federal Parliament of Somalia
H.E Abdi Farah Shirdoon, Prime Minister of the FederalRepublic of Somalia,
Mr. Augustine Mahiga, UN Special Representative for Somalia
H.E. Dr Nkosaazana Dlamini-Zuma, Chairperson of the African Union Commission
H.E Amb.(Eng) Mahboub Maalim, Executive Secretary of IGAD
H,E James Swan, USA Special Representative for Somalia
H.E Matt Baugh, UK Ambassador for Somalia
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