Somalilanders have an ambiguous attitude toward June 26th. On the one hand June 26, 1960, was the date of their independence from Britain, a day immortalized in Tima Adde’s famous poem in Hargeysa’s Freedom Park. But that positive feeling is undermined by the bitter knowledge that 5 days later (July 1) Somaliland lost its independence to a cabal of ignorant but conniving southern politicians who saw Somaliland no more than a lottery prize that they had won and could do with whatever they wanted. Anyone who doubts that this was the attitude of most southern politicians should listen to the former Prime Minister Abdirizaq Haji Hussein’s last BBC interviews in which he justifies the fact that all the top positions other than the speaker of parliament in the first union government went to southerners. In that interview Abdirizaq Haji Hussein even withheld credit from Somalilanders for ending British colonialism in Somaliland and said that Somaliland got independence because of the SYL. The move from subjugating Somaliland into outright attempted annihilation of its people by Siyad Barre’s military regime was the next step in this sort of predatory southern thinking which will only accepts Somalilanders as playing second-fiddle to southern ignoramuses such as Abdirizaq Haji Hussein and Siyad Barre (By his own admission, Abdirizaq Haji Hussein barely had three years of elementary education, and yet as he mentioned in that same interview, he saw it only right and proper that he should have been the minister of interior whereas Abdirahman Tur and Abdirahman Abby both of whom were graduates of British universities should have worked under him).
The declaration of Somaliland’s independence in May 18, 1991 was an attempt to move June 26th from under the shadow of July 1st, and to bring back the original spirit of June 26th, the spirit of Somaliland’s independence. As a matter of fact, Somaliland’s history for the last 50 years is nothing but the struggle to restore the spirit of June 26th and to
remove the oppressive shadow of July 1st. Somalilanders will have another chance to redeem June 26th during the presidential election next month. The question is: will they rise to the occasion or will they squander that opportunity as they had done on July 1st 1960?



























 

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