Mohamoud Walaaleye
On December 26, 2025, a single video call between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Somaliland President Dr. Abdirahman Mohamed Abdullahi Irro quietly shattered decades of diplomatic fiction. With that conversation, Israel became the first United Nations member state to formally recognize the Republic of Somaliland as an independent, sovereign country—ending more than 30 years of international isolation for a self-governing territory that has maintained peace, democracy, and functioning institutions since 1991.
The information that was published on Semonegna Spotlight Youtube in 7 January 2026, which I wrote, begins with: But the real story isn’t the recognition itself. It’s the inconvenient truth the world has spent six decades trying to forget: Somaliland is not a “breakaway region” invented in the chaos of civil war. It is the legitimate revival of a fully independent state that already existed—and was internationally acknowledged—long before the Somali Republic was even born.
Five Days That History Tried to Erase
June 26, 1960. The British Somaliland Protectorate achieves full independence. For five historic days, the State of Somaliland stands as a sovereign nation under international law. It has its own constitution, a functioning parliament, a prime minister (Late Muhammad Haji Ibrahim Egal), a national flag, and a government seated in Hargeisa.
During that brief window of independence, more than 35 countries—including the United Kingdom, the United States, the Soviet Union, China, Egypt, France, Ghana, Israel, Ethiopia, and Libya—sent formal messages of recognition and congratulations. Queen Elizabeth II personally wished the new state well. Bilateral agreements were signed on the soil of Hargeisa. The world treated Somaliland as what it was: a new sovereign country.
Then, on July 1, 1960, Somaliland voluntarily entered into union with the former Italian-administered Trust Territory of Somaliland to form the Somali Republic. The union was born of pan-Somali idealism, but it was rushed, voluntary, and legally incomplete. The Act of Union passed by Somaliland’s legislature on June 27 was never matched by an identical act in the south. No joint parliament ever ratified the merger. No referendum was ever held. The legal foundation was shaky from day one.
The Unity Myth Unravels in Declassified Files
Declassified American intelligence from as early as 1948 already told the story the world later pretended not to know. A CIA assessment of British Somaliland noted that the Somali Youth League—the movement most associated with pan-Somali centralism—had almost no traction in the north. Only about 3–4% of the population engaged with such political organizations. Northerners were described as cautious, locally oriented, and deeply skeptical of distant, centralized authority.
That political DNA never disappeared. When the union descended into repression, clan-based violence, and the near-total destruction of Hargeisa in the late 1980s, Somaliland did not “secede” from a functioning state. It withdrew from a failed and fundamentally unequal partnership, reclaiming the sovereignty it had legally possessed in June 1960.
Why Recognition Matters Now
Israel’s decision is not sentimental. It is coldly strategic.
The port of Berbera sits astride the Bab el-Mandeb Strait—one of the world’s most critical maritime arteries. With Houthi drones disrupting Red Sea shipping, the ability to monitor and respond from just 500 kilometers away represents a serious force multiplier. The UAE has already poured hundreds of millions into upgrading Berbera’s port and airport, quietly anchoring the Abraham Accords in the Horn of Africa.
Somaliland’s alignment with Taiwan has also made it a natural counterweight to China’s growing footprint in nearby Djibouti. U.S. Senator Ted Cruz has publicly urged Washington to follow Israel’s lead as part of the broader contest against Beijing.
Meanwhile, Ethiopia watches closely. Its 2024 memorandum of understanding with Somaliland for secure sea access through Berbera now carries new diplomatic weight. Israel’s move provides Addis Ababa with plausible cover: if one UN member state can recognize Somaliland, others can too—without automatically triggering a continent-wide cascade.
The Reckoning the World Fears
The backlash has been fierce. Somalia, the African Union, Turkey, and several Arab states have condemned the recognition as an assault on territorial integrity. Yet the same voices rarely mention the African Union’s own 2005 fact-finding mission, which described Somaliland’s case as “historically unique and self-justified in African political history” and recommended a special approach that would not open a Pandora’s box of secession claims. That report was quietly buried.
For more than half a century, the international community has enforced selective amnesia: celebrating the voluntary union of 1960 while erasing its voluntary dissolution in 1991. Today, the Berbera dagger is unsheathed. The 60-year secret is no longer hidden.
Somaliland is not asking to become something new. It is asking the world to remember what it already was.
Is this the beginning of a long-overdue historical correction? Or merely the latest chapter in the great-power chess game over the Horn of Africa?
The flags are flying in Hargeisa again. History, it seems, has a long memory after all.