Sovereignty’s End and Beginning

The last time I was able to go home was ten years ago, when I had just finished my first year of college. It would take me about fifty hours to travel from central Iowa to the Horn of Africa. Though I would eventually end up in Somaliland, where I was born and where my parents live, I had to first stop in neighboring Djibouti for an appointment at the U.S. embassy to interview for my re-entry visa. The visa would take three months to process, months I would spend in Somaliland trying to get reacquainted with my parents but mostly watching Bollywood movies and Turkish soaps dubbed in Arabic and eating with an acute awareness of my imminent return to the Midwest. At the end of summer my visa was ready, and I flew to Djibouti to pick it up before heading back to the States. At the embassy, the agent didn’t stamp my passport. Instead, she stamped a piece of paper, which she then folded in half, in half again, then stapled inside my passport. Printed somewhere in the back of this paper were the words: “The below named traveler has a passport that is not recognized by the U.S. Department of State or has had the passport requirement waived. This visa is being issued per 22 CFR 41.113(b).” 

The absurdity of this little diplomatic gymnastic has always struck me as both deeply humiliating and deeply hilarious. How could an otherwise empty piece of paper be deemed more worthwhile, more trustworthy than my passport, which bore the seal of the Republic of Somaliland? Did the agent know what it cost? That, although no country in the world at the time recognized Somaliland’s sovereignty, hundreds of thousands of people had died for its name? But it had also been funny because the non-passport had done what all passports do: helped me cross one border into another as if by magic, in my case from what was, by all measures, an unknown, unwanted corner of the world into the heart of the American empire. The passport was both symbol and its negative, its power cemented in the very moment it was declared moot. Only a Somali could appreciate the perverse humor in this double irony. 

Last December, I woke up to the news that Israel had become the first country in the world to officially recognize Somaliland as a sovereign state.

But living through one perverse irony does not prepare you for another—or so I was reminded last December, when I woke up in my Berkeley apartment to the news that Israel had become the first country in the world to officially recognize Somaliland as a sovereign state. With the deal, capped off by a televised video call between Benjamin Netanyahu and Somaliland’s president, Abdirahman Mohamed Abdullahi “Irro,” Somaliland had at last received the kind of recognition it had been after for more than three decades. But rather than coming from any of its neighbors or from another postcolonial nation, that recognition was handed down by an occupying genocidal state that has worked tirelessly to destroy another people’s right to self-determination. 

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“Does anyone know what Somaliland is?” Trump asked reporters when told of Israel’s decision. Among those in the United States who heard the news at all, I suspect that many had a similar incredulity. Even more people, I’m sure, wondered just what Israel, of all countries, wanted to do with this obscure African territory. Answers to both these questions, I think, begin with the question of where. 

Nestled just beneath the Horn of Africa’s tip, the self-declared Republic of Somaliland shares borders with Ethiopia and Djibouti to its west and south. To its east is Somalia, which, along with the rest of the international community, considers Somaliland to be a semi-autonomous territory of its own nation. Since it unilaterally seceded from Somalia in 1991 following the bloody fall of Siad Barre’s military regime, Somaliland has struggled to gain international recognition despite maintaining no formal ties with Somalia and donning all the trappings of statehood: an army, police force, governing bodies, elections, currency, passports. It even maintains diplomatic mission offices in several countries, including the United States, and periodically receives official representatives of others. 

None of these bureaucratic fixtures, however, measure up to Somaliland’s 850 kilometers of coastline along the Gulf of Aden facing the Bab al-Mandab strait, where the Red Sea connects the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea through the Suez Canal—the waterway through which about a third of global container traffic passes. The current closure of the Strait of Hormuz by Iran as a tactic in its war with the United States and Israel is an acute reminder of the critical leverage these chokepoints offer in an increasingly interconnected, increasingly volatile geopolitical landscape. Somaliland has long understood its coastline to be its ticket to securing international recognition. 

In 2016, the Dubai-based multi-national logistics company DP World signed a $442 million deal to build and operate a major logistics hub in Somaliland’s Port of Berbera. In 2018, Russia was purportedly in talks with Somaliland to establish a naval base in the historic port town of Zaila, next door to Djibouti (where several western states, including the United States, France, and Italy, maintain military bases) in exchange for diplomatic recognition. In 2024, Somaliland signed a memorandum of understanding with Ethiopia that granted the most populous landlocked country in the world access to the sea in exchange for future recognition of Somaliland’s statehood. Yet after Somalia protested the move, calling the memorandum a violation of its territorial sovereignty, recalling its ambassador to Ethiopia, and threatening to send home all Ethiopian peacekeeping troops present in its territories, Ethiopia quietly backed out and publicly reaffirmed its support for Somalia.

Israel, seemingly unencumbered by such delicate diplomatic concerns, sees in Somaliland a golden opportunity. By establishing a presence in the Red Sea, Israel can monitor and counteract the Iran-backed Houthis, who have launched their attacks on Israeli shipping vessels from neighboring Yemen. Israeli presence on the Horn also has implications for the Saudi-UAE political rivalry in the peninsula. And it has the potential, too, to undermine the rising influence of Turkey and Egypt in the region. Last March, the Associated Press reported that the United States had reached out to three Muslim-majority African countries—Sudan, Somalia, and Somaliland—to inquire about the possibility of resettling two million Gazan refugees within their borders. Somaliland has thus far denied any such conversations took place, but that hasn’t stopped many from interpreting Israel’s recognition as a part of its grand displacement scheme. 

Still, Israel’s motives form only one side of the equation. It seems far more of a surprise, at least for anyone familiar with its political history, that Somaliland would so eagerly court Israel’s friendship. But should it? 

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I was born and raised in a small agricultural town called Gabiley about sixty kilometers west of Hargeisa, Somaliland’s capital. Gabiley is the municipal town of a district that produces the majority of the country’s food; the district is also the birthplace of many renowned poets and at least one Olympic gold medalist. When my parents were children in Gabiley, Somaliland was a British protectorate. By the time each, as teenagers, left town to try life elsewhere, Somaliland no longer existed, following the post-independence unification of Somaliland and Somalia in 1960, and Gabiley was now part of the Federal Republic of Somalia. But the partial experiment of Soomaali Weyn, where all Somali-inhabited regions would unite under one republic, would quickly unravel, the intervening years marked by bitter divisions and tribal politics. And in 1969, less than a decade after independence, a coup d’état ushered in a brutal two-decade-long military dictatorship led by army general and former colonial officer Siad Barre. So, by the time I was born in 1995—the same year as Barre’s death—Gabiley was once again part of Somaliland, now the name of the breakaway polity that cleaved itself off from Somalia alongside the old colonial borders. Somaliland and I were to grow up together, and we were each to behave as if the other had always existed. 

In the late 1980s, at the height of the insurgent war against the military dictatorship, thousands of residents in Gabiley and its surrounding areas were apprehended without cause and summarily executed, their bodies dumped in unmarked mass graves as part of Barre’s campaign of collective punishment of the Isaaq-majority northern regions, which were seeking independence. In what would later be referred to as the “Isaaq genocide,” Barre ordered the complete destruction of the north, where the majority of the Isaaq clan’s population lived. It is estimated that between 1987 and 1989, 200,000 people were killed, and millions more displaced. It is well documented how the strafing planes routinely followed civilians fleeing the violence and continued to bomb them at close range. As the resistance gained ground, the government intensified its tactics of collective punishment. The military targeted all the major water pumping systems in territories controlled by the opposition, sometimes going so far as to pollute the water sources with animal remains or sulfuric acid. They razed major cities, mined farms and grazing lands, poisoned the drinking water, seized civilian property, disappeared political dissidents, and massacred en masse. Barre had only one goal in mind: annihilation. 

By anointing themselves the seat of the insurgency, the people of my town wanted to retroactively make themselves the willing soldiers of the new republic—and therefore its ideal subjects.

This was a genocidal campaign funded and given diplomatic cover by the United States government, which started supplying Barre with considerable military assistance as part of its Cold War agenda. After Somalia-Soviet relations broke down in 1977 following Somalia’s invasion of Ethiopia over the contested Ogaden region, the United States saw an opportunity: over the next decade it would supply Barre with hundreds of millions in military assistance, in exchange for gaining access to Somali ports. In the wake of the Iranian Revolution, the United States wanted to preserve a military presence close to the Persian Gulf, no matter how cruel a despot they were supporting. If this is all starting to sound strangely familiar, I should add that one of Barre’s lobbyist friends in the West was Paul Manafort, who, three decades later, would become chairman of Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign.

Leading the insurgence against the military regime was the Somali National Movement (SNM), founded on a nonalignment platform that sought an end to all foreign military presence in the region. To defeat Barre, the SNM needed to broaden the base of anti-Barre insurgency within Somalia, forming alliances with other clan-based opposition groups in central and southern Somalia, including the United Somali Congress and the Somali Patriotic Movement. And although there were significant political and ideological differences among these groups and each had to contend with intra-group divisions, their coalition proved effective. In 1991, the military regime collapsed and Barre went into exile—at which point the SNM’s coalition with other para-military groups dissolved. Rejecting the interim government, the SNM followed through with its separatist agenda and proceeded to unilaterally secede from Federal Republic of Somalia to form the Republic of Somaliland. 

This is the wreckage out of which Somaliland’s claim to sovereignty was fashioned. And having been granted neither permission nor forgiveness for their act of self-determination, the people of Somaliland would need to decide what kind of polity they would create with and for each other, to what use they would put this history. 

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Considering the host of crises plaguing African states in the decades since formal independence—long-serving autocrats, civil wars, economic stagnation, environmental degradation—it’s tempting to declare the postcolonial nation-state as having run out of political and theoretical steam. Such is the grim prognosis handed down, implicitly or explicitly, by much contemporary postcolonial scholarship, whose recent revisionist historiography has sought to show how the nation-state foreclosed other forms post-imperial freedom could have taken. Recent books by Adom Getachew, Frederick Cooper, and Gary Wilder, for instance, all return to the late imperial moment to consider how anticolonial African leaders, negotiating their contradictory desires between interdependence and autonomy, found in the nation-state an unhappy compromise.

But while the anticolonial struggle of the late imperial world might have considered more expansive, utopic forms of cultural and political autonomy—federalism, self-determination without state sovereignty, and other nonhierarchal forms of worldmaking—independence, in the end, took the form that it did. And to properly apprehend the African subjects’ relationship to their political present requires that we take seriously their continued investment in this form, especially in the moments it proves contradictory, even destructive. What happens when the nation-state is the form given to history, the entity that binds our experience of political time? And what happens when the form of the nation-state is denied to those desperately seeking it?

It’s been thirty-five years since secession, and in that time citizens of Somaliland rebuilt slowly, tenaciously, and in great isolation. They reopened hospitals, held democratic elections where they enthusiastically invited international observers, honored the peaceful transfer of power, updated their passport with a biometric chip, made K-12 education free, sent envoys abroad, re-opened music venues, built a national library, organized national sporting events, experimented with state-planned health care, innovated mobile money. But subtending the pride of self-sufficiency and the daily labor of securing relative stability in a volatile region is the persistent awareness that if we just did everything we were supposed to do, if we remained on our best behavior, then maybe, just maybe, we would be let in from the cold and into the only club that matters: the one that guarantees the right to have rights. For Somaliland, sovereignty (de jure sovereignty, as it has been a de facto state since the turn of the millennium) hasn’t just been a practical matter but an existential one as well.

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During the war, the national army’s Fifth Brigade was stationed near Gabiley, presumably for the area’s proximity to Ethiopia, where the SNM headquarters were located. The commander of the Fifth Brigade was the infamously ruthless lieutenant colonel Yusuf Abdi Ali “Tukeh” (The Crow) whose moniker refers to his signature command: “Kill all but the crows.” It is not a stretch to say that Tukeh and the conduct of which he was exemplar were responsible for the ruins that formed the landscape of my childhood. There was the dilapidated stadium across the primary school, where during recess we played yard games, where come evening adventurous teenagers met to explore tobacco, hashish, and each other, and where in the winter months the mad and the homeless took shelter. There was the half-functional guest house of my childhood home, which was not fully restored until after I hit puberty. Once, my sister and I found a litter of kittens in what had been the guest kitchen but to us and to the kittens was simply an undefined structure without a roof where my mother kept discarded furniture and various tools. There was my middle school Arabic teacher, a quiet, gentle man who, a few times a year, would fail to show up to school and instead wander half-naked about town, wailing and belligerent. On those days we would spend our free period in the stadium ruins, where, out of reverence and fear, we would not speak of our teacher. On the way home from school, we would pass HALO Trust workers dressed in their personal protective gear drawing what seemed like arbitrary lines on the sand in backroads and alleyways.  And yet, when I was growing up, I was told it was the insurgency, not the military, that was based in Gabiley, and that all the destruction our town suffered was a direct result of fending off Barre’s brutality. That is, the merciless violence and mass executions were, yes, forms of collective punishment, but a punishment endured from a position of resistance and agency. Until very recently I believed this to be the case. But so far, I can only find evidence of Tukeh’s presence, not the SNM’s. It is true that Afraad—an Isaaq-majority militant group, initially part of the Western Somali Liberation Front, the government-backed guerilla warfare against Ethiopia, before splitting from WLSF to join forces with the recently established SNM—was founded in Gabiley. But by 1982, the Afraad had already moved to Ethiopia. Why, then, in a town where people rarely told stories about the war, did they tell this one, which was at best only partly true? I suspect it has something to do with endings. While we did not talk about the ruins, or the madmen who roved the town in tattered camouflage holding decommissioned AK-47s, or the HALO signs, or the disappeared, we talked about what came after the violence: Somaliland. The nation-state was not only a consolation prize for what we lost but a metonym for an ongoing collective suffering that couldn’t be spoken. Somaliland, even as it referred to an older colonial order to justify the legitimacy of its territorial borders, became a way to mark a beginning. By anointing themselves the seat of the insurgency, the people of my town had wanted to retroactively make themselves the willing soldiers of the new republic—its heroes and heirs, and therefore, its ideal subjects.

Every time I participated in a protest, signed a petition, wrote an editorial, cooked for a sit-in, spoke at a rally, I imagined myself carrying on a legacy of international solidarity.

All countries mythologize their origins, and the story Somaliland told about its origins meant something to me. I had understood that those who fought for the nation’s independence, both in the battlefield and in the poetic form, had understood themselves as part of the long human struggle for freedom and dignity. Buried in Gabiley is the anticolonial, anti-tribal poet Abdillahi Suldaan Mohammed Timacadde, after whom the town’s public (and at the time only) high school was named. On the eve of Somaliland’s independence from the British, as the new flag was hoisted, Timacadde sung his ode to liberty: ‘‘Kana Siib Kana Saar,” lower this flag and hoist this one in its place. Later disillusioned with the postcolonial Somali state and the ways clannism had undermined the nationalist project, Timacadde wrote many more political poems, including the now classic “Dugsi Ma Leh Qabyaaladi,” there is no shelter in clannism. Timacadde also wrote about imperialism and neocolonialism, penning not one but two poems on Patrice Lumumba’s assassination, describing him as “Geesiga madow uma ogola guusha reer Yurub,” the brave Black man whose victory Europe refuses to concede. And even though no one outside of the Somali-speaking world knew much about the great poet, he saw himself as responsible for the world. In primary school we were tasked with memorizing and reciting Timacadde’s revolutionary poetry, thus inheriting the responsibility he assumed in and about the world.  In Somali political life, the poet and the revolutionary are often one and the same. In the 1970s, the late Mohamed Ibrahim Warsame Hadraawi, who is arguably the best-known Somali poet outside of the region, spent five years in the notorious Qansax Dheere prison for his anti-authoritarian poetry and plays, including the poem “Ha La Qalay Raqdeedaa” (The Killing of the She-Camel). The poem depicts the vicious slaughter and consumption of the lactating she-camel—a Somali symbol for sustenance and communal prosperity—by gluttonous and unjust forces. In the 1980s, Hadraawi joined the SNM and took arms against Barre’s military dictatorship. But for Hadraawi, a commitment to Somaliland’s sovereignty did not have to be antithetical to Somali fraternity; in fact, it depended on it. In 2000s, he embarked on Socdaalka Nabada (Peace Journey), where he traversed the peninsula on foot promoting peace, fellowship, and reconciliation.  Because the poet is the custodian of the people’s language, he assumes certain duties to speak about and on behalf of the people. He gives form to the nation but is not bound by national borders. Hadraawi’s first political poem, “Galangal,” was not about Somali fraternity or on behalf of Somaliland nationalism but for Vietnam in solidarity with its struggle against Western imperialism. And in 1982, after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, Hadraawi wrote a poem in praise of Palestinian resistance. He would later explain, “the Palestinian cause is the same as the Lebanese cause, the Somali cause, the Vietnamese cause. They are all connected. And we ought to understand that the day they win is the day we win and their loss is our loss.”  It was from Hadraawi’s and Timacadde’s poetry of international solidarity that I understood the stakes of Somaliland’s right to self-determination. Every time I joined an organizing effort, participated in a protest, signed a petition, wrote an editorial, cooked for a sit-in, spoke at a rally, I imagined myself carrying on this legacy. My freedom has to mean something to someone’s freedom struggle because mine meant something to those who fought for it.  As I write this, well aware that I could easily draw the vengeful ire of not just this administration but also the one at home, I think of a black-and-white photograph depicting thousands of Somali women holding a rally in Mogadishu to demand the release of Angela Davis ahead of her trial in 1972. Did Davis know about these women? Did it matter? Or is what mattered that those women felt responsible for the world, that they imagined their freedom as contingent on the freedom of all the women in the world?

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This is the history and the responsibility that was so cheaply traded with that fawning phone call between Netanyahu and Irro. In the days following the announcement, I watched in horror and disbelief the videos and images of exuberant crowds of my fellow countrymen celebrating. I bristled at the sight of young people wrapped in Israeli flags, the tall glass buildings in downtown Hargeisa illuminated in blue and white. On social media, I saw former classmates register their delight and, as several of them put it, “gratitude” for Israel’s supposed bravery.   As disbelief gave way to disgust, then to disillusionment, I thought of the first two lines of Hadraawi’s famous poem “Daalacan,” written shortly after his release from prison as a contribution to the influential Dheelley series, a debate in poems on the question of Somali nationalism. An ode to the stubborn, self-evident human quest for freedom and to the unique responsibility of the poet to keep count, “Daalacan,” begins with a declaration: “Ma da’furin ogaalkay / Xaska dabada maan gelin.” I went looking for this poem of my early schooling, for an encounter with the poet’s regard for national character, for what he imagines a Somali to be, for the way all of these are enacted by the poem itself. Indeed, I thought, were we not “bulsho duul, daacad iyo xishood badan” (a people known to be honest and humble), were we not “ogow doqonse maahee” (so easily tricked by tyrants), and where there is tyranny, were we not to “dib bay ugu muddaystaan / Dulmigiisu waw kayd” (keep count and hold on to it)?  In the last few months, I have tried to resist the charge of naivety I could easily levy against my own cruel attachments to my home. You see, Somaliland, in its past and present, had also been the form I gave to the series of accidents that determined my own place in history, and everything I had traded for my own personal acts of self-determination. Somaliland made me make sense. Somaliland cannot bring an end to the suffering of the Palestinian people any more than Israel can coerce the United States or any other country into stamping Somaliland’s passport. If anything, Israel has damaged Somaliland’s case. Following its announcement, the United Nations Security Council held an emergency session, where fourteen out of its fifteen current member states denounced the decision to recognize Somaliland, deeming it a violation of the UN Charter and the African Union Constitutive Act. The African Union, Arab League, and Organization of Islamic Cooperation, among the many others, likewise condemned the move.  But Somaliland’s unfortunate betrayal of its own history and founding ideals in its embrace of Israel tells us a great deal about the consequences of imagining political and cultural freedom as struggles for national sovereignty. For Somaliland, international recognition of its statehood isn’t just symbolic or even strategic but profoundly existential—to the point where the form of the nation-state takes precedence over the very history from which the struggle for self-determination found its legitimacy. Deeming recognition the only real way to be a full member of the world’s community, Somaliland has ceased to think of itself as part of and responsible to it. Here, symbol devolves into sign, for which history is nothing but an instrument for the telos of preordained form.

If the arbitrary nature of African borders attests to the fact that there is nothing natural or pre-ordained about the form of the nation-state, the continuous, contested redrawing of Somali territories reminds us that there is nothing symbolic about it either. I often think about how different, how much easier, my life would be if the world deemed my Somaliland passport legitimate. I could visit my aging parents; I could go on holiday in the countries where my siblings reside and get to know my nieces and nephews; I could attend the Pan-African Biennale in Nairobi in September; I could swim in the Aegean Sea, hike the Lion’s Head, revel in the smells of Darajani Bazaar. In short, I could be in the world—I could feel free. But these are things to do, modest bourgeois freedoms I could have with almost any other passport. In that freedom’s absence, there remains the things to be, the use to which I can put this accident of history. For now, I can only join the poet in keeping count: “Runta aan u daadego / Ducda hadalku waa hee.”   Independent and nonprofit, Boston Review relies on reader funding. To support work like this, please donate here.

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