Ethiopia: Should Ethiopia Recognize Somaliland?

opinion

The beginning of this month saw the Transitional Federal "Government" of Somalia, residing in a highly fortified Villa Somalia, cut non-existent diplomatic ties with Guinea Conakry because the latter accorded what looks like official reception to the Somaliland delegation led by its President. The diplomatic row may be inconsequential, but it illustrates how successive governments of Somalia hold African states and the wider international community hostage to their failed irredentist project of Greater Somalia that briefly, albeit in its incomplete form, existed between the early 1960s and early 1990s.

By rejecting and sabotaging Somaliland's quest for widening its de facto engagement with the international community, the Transitional Government is signaling its preoccupation with irredentism and that it doesn't give a crap about the pragmatic African consensus that colonial borders are sacrosanct and revered. A little reading of the 1964 Cairo Declaration would suffice.

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