Somalia’s Wasted Reunification Opportunities: Blame Mogadishu, Not Hargeisa – OpEd
Key Takeaways:
- The author rereads UN S/1999/882 (16 August 1999), recirculated by Markus V. Hoehne. It records Somaliland President Mohamed Ibrahim Egal telling the UN in late 1997 he wanted “special status”—autonomy short of recognition—until the south could talk, plus access to IFIs. That is framed as a door left open, not a walk-away in 1991.
- The same report, the piece says, shows no southern partner: Sodere/Bosaso and Cairo/Baidoa conferences never sat; tents later went to Arta 2000. Puntland (August 1998) billed itself as a future federal unit. Egypt and Yemen treated a Puntland–Somaliland thaw as a first step.
- Egal’s 1998 idea of a France–Saudi–UK–U.S. panel is called the right diagnosis, wrong cure. Hargeisa later hardened (2001 referendum). The author still blames Mogadishu for never becoming a federal counterpart—and says it is repeating that with Puntland and Jubaland now.
A declassified United Nations Security Council report, dated Aug. 16, 1999, has resurfaced in recent days after social anthropologist Markus V. Hoehne posted pages of it online. Document S/1999/882, “Report of the Secretary-General on the Situation in Somalia,” is a dry piece of UN bureaucratic prose. Read closely, though, it is something else: a contemporaneous record of the exact moment Somalia’s reunification became impossible — and a record of who made it impossible.
The conventional narrative, repeated in Mogadishu and in much of the international commentary that takes its cues from Mogadishu, holds that Somaliland’s leadership walked away from the Somali Republic in 1991 and has refused to walk back ever since. The 1999 report tells a more complicated story, and it is not flattering to the south.
Hargeisa was negotiating, Mogadishu had no one to negotiate with
The report’s paragraphs on Mohamed Ibrahim Egal, then Somaliland’s president, describe a leader whose position was far less absolute than his public rhetoric suggested. Egal reportedly told a UN representative in late 1997 that, given the peace Somaliland had built, it should be granted “special status” as an autonomous territory — short of full recognition — until southern leaders were in a position to negotiate a mutually acceptable future. That status, he said, could give Somaliland access to international financial institutions without requiring the outside world to first recognize it as sovereign. This is not the language of a movement uninterested in the Somali state. It is the language of a leader testing whether there was a Somali state left worth rejoining.
There often was not. The same report catalogs, in the same period, a Somali political establishment too fractured to hold a single chair at the table.
The Sodere Group — the 26-faction National Salvation Council formed in Ethiopia in early 1997 — tried to convene a national reconciliation conference in Bosaso that November. The goal was to draw in two holdouts: Egal, and Hussein Aidid’s faction, known at the time, by my own firsthand account of that period, as the Salbalaar. Neither had joined the original Sodere talks.
Egyptian mediation pulled the Salbalaar onto a separate track instead. Aidid traveled to Cairo, joined Ali Mahdi Mohamed, and signed the Cairo Joint Agreement in December 1997 as co-chairmen. That agreement called for a follow-on national reconciliation conference in Baidoa the following February. Neither the Bosaso conference nor the Baidoa conference was ever held, and both the Sodere Group and the Salbalaar dissolved without producing a functioning national government.
Out of that vacuum, Puntland State was founded in August 1998. Only later, in 2000, did the Arta Conference in Djibouti manage to convene a broader national process — and the two episodes were connected in a way that, as I witnessed firsthand, made the waste tangible rather than abstract. The large conference tents originally set up for the aborted Bosaso conference were later shipped by IGAD to Djibouti and used to house the Arta delegates: physical infrastructure for a reconciliation that Cairo’s rival mediation had scuttled, repurposed years afterward for the process that finally replaced it.
For more than a decade after Siad Barre’s fall, no government south of Puntland could credibly claim to speak for even a plurality of the territory it claimed to govern, let alone offer Hargeisa a partner.
Egal understood this. His January 1998 proposal — that France, Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom and the United States convene a panel to organize a Somali state, because he judged the south incapable of reconstituting one on its own — reads today less like separatist defiance than like a diagnosis. He was not wrong about the disease. He simply prescribed the wrong medicine, offering permanent secession where a transitional arrangement was still, by his own account, on the table.
Puntland offered the model Mogadishu could not
The same document records, in granular detail, what the northeast was doing instead: building a regional administration explicitly designed as “a constituent unit of a future Somali state,” not a rival to it. The Garowe conferences of February and March 1998, which culminated in Col. Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed’s election as Puntland’s founding president that August, were conceived from the outset as a contribution to eventual reunification — proof that devolved, clan-based self-governance and national unity were not opposites. Egypt’s and Yemen’s diplomats, shuttling Egal between Cairo, Sanaa and Nairobi in 1999, saw the same thing: they treated a Puntland-Somaliland rapprochement as the plausible first step toward reunifying the country, precisely because Puntland was demonstrating that federalism did not require secession.
That model needed a functioning Mogadishu to complete it. It never got one. Successive southern factions spent the 1990s and 2000s fighting over the shell of a capital rather than building the kind of credible, negotiating federal partner that could have met Egal’s conditions and drawn Hargeisa back into a Somali union on terms short of full unitary control.
The Arta process eventually produced a Transitional National Government in 2000, superseded by a Transitional Federal Government in 2004, and later a federal government after 2012. But the instinct in Mogadishu held through each iteration: federalism was treated as a grudging concession to be minimized, rather than the framework, already tested and vouched for in Garowe, that had shown it could hold the country together.
Despite these historical miscalculations and missed opportunities, Mogadishu has not learned the lesson. It is still pushing away Puntland and Jubaland today, just as it once pushed away Somaliland.
The verdict the document invites
None of this excuses Hargeisa’s own hardening over the subsequent two decades, including its 2001 referendum and its increasingly categorical rejection of any status short of full recognition. But S/1999/882 is dated evidence that this was not inevitable. In 1997 and 1998, Somaliland’s own president was on record proposing a negotiated middle path. Regional powers were actively brokering toward it. And a Somali-owned model for reconciling regional autonomy with national unity already existed a few hundred kilometers away, in Garowe.
What was missing was a Mogadishu capable of walking through the door Egal left open. The failure to build one — not Hargeisa’s refusal to wait indefinitely for one — is the opportunity this document shows was wasted, and the responsibility it places, correctly, on the south.
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