Whose Interests Does Somaliland Recognition Actually Serve?
The article argues that recognising Somaliland would primarily serve foreign strategic interests-not ordinary Somalis-and that Somaliland's claim to independence is weakened by territorial disputes, internal divisions, and the existence of a functioning federal Somali state. The author contends Britain should support a unified federal Somalia rather than Somaliland's separation.
Abdurahman Nur
5/29/20265 min read
A small but vocal lobby is pushing Britain to endorse Somalia’s partition. The case deserves closer scrutiny than it has received.
Reading Jake Wallis Simons in The Telegraph last week, I was struck by a familiar logic. In 1844, Britain colonised what is now Somaliland primarily to secure advantage over imperial France in the competition for East African sea lanes. Wallis Simons — with the same geography and the same reasoning — now argues Britain should recognise Somaliland to gain advantage over imperial China. This is not British foreign policy. It is the position of a faction. And before that faction wins any more column inches, the factual record it has assembled deserves scrutiny.
Wallis Simons claims “jihadi-backed militia” have seized stretches of Somaliland’s territory. The territory he is describing has a name, a government, an elected president, and a seat within Somalia’s federal architecture. The region — Sool, Sanaag and Cayn, formerly known as SSC-Khatumo — was formally recognised by the Federal Government of Somalia as a federal member state in April 2025. By July, following a constitutional convention of 417 delegates in Las Anod, it was reconstituted and renamed the North East State of Somalia. Its president was inaugurated in August 2025.
This is a functioning federal state representing more than a third of the territory Somaliland claims — and among the most economically neglected under Hargeisa’s administration. Those who resisted chose federal Somalia not because the option had just appeared, but because Somaliland’s army had shelled civilian areas and hospitals in Las Anod before being decisively defeated and expelled. The democracy Wallis Simons celebrates was experienced there as occupation and bombardment, and calling its people jihadis tells you more about the argument’s needs than about the people themselves.
The self-determination argument the article depends on contains a contradiction it never addresses. Wallis Simons invokes the right of Somaliland’s people to determine their future — but the people of Sool, Sanaag and Cayn exercised that same right, fought for it, and chose federal Somalia over Hargeisa. Meanwhile the Issa and Gadabuursi clans in the west find their land being offered to Ethiopia as a port corridor in exchange for diplomatic recognition — territory that is not Hargeisa’s to trade. Self-determination, in this telling, applies to one political project and not to the communities within its claimed borders who oppose it. That is the same majoritarianism Somaliland accuses Mogadishu of having practised — applied one level down.
Wallis Simons correctly notes that Somaliland has held competitive elections and achieved peaceful transfers of power. But this formal record masks a deeper erosion. What began after 1991 as a project of cross-clan reconciliation — institutionalised at the 1993 Borama Conference with proportional representation across the main communities — has been progressively captured by dominant kinship networks. The foreign investments Wallis Simons presents as evidence of Somaliland’s viability have, in practice, accelerated this process. As Markus Hoehne and Jethro Norman demonstrate in a recent peer-reviewed analysis in African Affairs, drawing on decades of fieldwork in the eastern and western peripheries rather than the Isaaq heartlands, the Berbera port expansion, mining concessions and infrastructure investment have concentrated political and economic power along a narrow corridor from Berbera through Hargeisa to the Ethiopian border — Isaaq territory — while systematically excluding Dhulbahante, Warsangeli, Gadabuursi and Issa communities.
The upper house of Somaliland’s parliament, the Guurti, has never been elected; its members were nominated at clan conferences in the 1990s and seats have since passed within families. Protests have recurred in Borama — the very town where the original multi-clan compact was struck — expressing rejection of Hargeisa’s authority and demanding either autonomy or reintegration into federal Somalia. Elections continue and transfers of power occur, but they now operate inside a single political space increasingly perceived as dominated by core Isaaq sub-clans whose effective reach no longer matches the territory originally claimed.
The democratic rituals remain. They no longer carry the consent of all the communities whose inclusion was supposed to legitimise the project. The very investments Wallis Simons cites as proof of Somaliland’s promise are, on the evidence, among the forces pulling it apart.
The same applies to his description of Puntland as ‘another breakaway Somali state.’ Puntland is a founding federal member state of the Federal Republic of Somalia, constitutionally identical in status to any other. The label makes Somalia appear to be dissolving from the inside, lending Somaliland’s separation the appearance of continuation rather than partition. On Montevideo, effective territorial control is a legal requirement. Somaliland no longer controls what it claims.
Treating Somalia as frozen in its 2012 condition may suit the argument being made, but it no longer reflects political reality. Somalia today has a consolidating federal architecture, a North East State now constitutionally integrated and a strengthening national army.
The obvious question is cui bono - who actually benefits? Strip away the democracy framing and what Wallis Simons is actually selling becomes clearer: access to gold and rare earth deposits, control of a deep-water port at Berbera, and an endorsement of basing rights for American and Israeli forces opposite Houthi territory across the Bab al-Mandab. The UAE has invested $442 million in Berbera’s port — though US senators have raised formal concerns that the same facility is being used as a logistics route for Emirati weapons transfers to Sudan’s RSF, which the United States has determined committed genocide. This is packaged as a counter to Chinese expansion — but China and the United States both already maintain bases in Djibouti, positioned at that same chokepoint. China provides the strategic cover, but the interests most directly served by a Berbera base are narrower and should be named as such. Recognition tied so closely to foreign military and strategic interests would leave Somaliland’s future contingent on decisions made well beyond Hargeisa.
Recent disruptions at Hormuz showed what happens when strategic straits become militarised flashpoints: insurance spikes, shipping reroutes, and economic pain felt far from the conflict. Bab al-Mandab already carries 15% of global trade and is under strain. A Western base at Berbera, directly opposite, risks importing the same instability to another vital chokepoint — the danger Wallis Simons avoids.
Nor would ordinary northern Somalis benefit from the recognition being proposed. Livestock accounts for around 60 percent of the north’s GDP and 85 percent of its export earnings, directly employing over 70 percent of the population. Saudi Arabia takes the overwhelming majority of those exports, concentrated heavily around the Hajj season. The political elite in Hargeisa are simultaneously being steered toward placing their embassy in Jerusalem — a step virtually every one of Somaliland’s key trading and diplomatic partners, including Britain and EU member states, has declined to take — at direct risk of rupturing the relationship with Riyadh on which those livelihoods depend.
Saudi Arabia has imposed livestock bans before. The longest ran from 2000 to 2009, and when it hit, the consequences cascaded through northern households and government revenues alike for nearly a decade. Further restrictions followed in 2016. The pastoralists and traders who would bear the cost of any future rupture do not appear in Wallis Simons’ calculations. The gold and the port do.
Britain has a genuine opportunity in the Horn as a serious partner to a sovereign Somalia that is putting itself back together. That relationship serves British interests and the interests of all Somalis — including those in the north, whose future is better secured through a federal settlement addressing their legitimate grievances than through a foreign-sponsored partition that serves other people’s strategies.
The lobbyists urging recognition have framed it as a gift to the north. They should be asked which northerners they consulted.