An Open Letter to President Hassan Mohamoud

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14 Apr 2013

Mr President

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.Continued