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With the US officially reaffirming the recognition of President Hassan Sheikh Mahmoud’s government as the legitimate and sole representative of Somalia after twenty long years of civil strife and political wilderness, the secessionist entity of Somaliland that failed dismally to muster any meaningful support for its futile exercise for international recognition has now been given one last diplomatic lifeline: to federate with Somalia or face a slow death and total irrelevance. In the Q&A session that followed president Mahmoud’s reception at the US State Department, the outgoing secretary Hillary Clinton had confirmed that the infamous dual track policy that seemed to favor the secessionists at one stage is now dead in the water, ultimately delivering a hammer blow to the secessionists’ elusive international recognition.
The writing was always on the wall for the secessionists, except the SNM elites in Hargeisa and elsewhere in the former British Protectorate have adopted no-hear, no-see policy on the international law to the point of delusion that Ismail Omar Geulleh of Djibouti had ridiculed them in his interview with the Indian Ocean Newsletter by saying this: “they [the secessionists] put the cart before the horse”. To put President Geulleh’s remarks in plain and simple English, the secessionists have got their priorities spectacularly wrong.
Their unrealistic and rather hopeless quest for international recognition has become an obsession to the point that even their own people have now lost faith in them that they don’t take them seriously anymore. Who will blame them? What is more ironic about the secessionists is the fact that Hargeisa is teeming with men and women of high diplomatic stature and experience who are well versed on the international law, but unfortunately the men with guns in their midst have taken them for a ride and put the entire population on straitjacket.Continued
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