Somaliland: A Beacon of Stability in a volatile Region
For 34 years, Somaliland has governed itself. It holds elections that matter and maintains an army that defends its borders. It collects taxes and delivers services, and it issues passports that are used across the world. By every measure of sovereignty, Somaliland is a state. What it lacks isn’t legitimacy, but acknowledgment. And the time for acknowledgement is now.
I know this not as an abstract argument, but as lived experience.
My family escaped Somalia when Siad Barre started persecuting supporters of democracy, my father included. He helped found the Somali Salvation Democratic Front, calling for a return to parliamentary government after Barre’s coup in 1969. For that defiance, Barre imprisoned him and condemned our family to death. We ran because to stay was to be executed. Barre didn’t merely rule Somalia—he dismantled it.
This wasn’t the crude tyranny of a petty strongman. It was Marxist-Leninist ideology enforced with calculated cruelty. Barre tore up the constitution, dissolved parliament, and outlawed political parties. In their place, he erected his Supreme Revolutionary Council, a body that answered not to the Somali people but to his Soviet masters. Under his regime, to speak of democracy wasn’t dissent. It was a death sentence.
The Majeerteen clan learned this firsthand in the late 1970s. When they dared to resist his rule, Barre’s forces answered with collective punishment. More than 2,000 civilians were massacred.
The Umar Mahmud sub-clan suffered a worse fate: their wells were poisoned, their reservoirs were drained, and their herds were wiped out. Tens of thousands of camels, cattle, sheep, and goats were slaughtered—an assault not only on livelihoods, but on survival itself.
For the Isaaq clan, the punishment was somehow even more savage. Between the late 1980s and the early 1990s, entire cities were bombed into rubble. Hargeisa and Burao—once proud centers of commerce and culture—were reduced to ashes. Fathers were executed in public squares before the eyes of their children. Mothers were violated, not as accidents of war, but as weapons of it. Families fleeing toward Ethiopia carried infants across the desert, only to be strafed from the skies.
These were deliberate acts of annihilation, designed to erase a people’s dignity and extinguish their will to resist. The death toll is difficult to reckon with. Conservative estimates put it at 60,000 lives in two years; some reports suggest nearly 200,000. A community was targeted for destruction simply because it refused to bow to tyranny.
This article was published at Americanmind.org
