The leadership of President Ahmed Sillanyo, Somaliland’s fourth president (2010 to 2017)
President Ahmed Sillanyo came to power on 26 June 2010 after successfully defeating Dahir Rayale in the presidential elections. A unique element of Sillanyo’s foreign policy was the change he brought to Somaliland’s relations with Somalia, particularly by entering Somaliland in talks with Somalia. Unlike the Sillanyo government, Somaliland’s previous administrations had always avoided engaging and dialoguing directly with the administrations of Somalia.
For example, the administrations of Egal and Rayale consistently insisted that Somaliland would never open talks with any government in Somalia that lacked the legitimacy and the democratic representation of the people of Somalia—instead, they were waiting for a credible counterpart with which to negotiate.
However, when President Sillanyo came to power, he immediately accepted the UK government’s invitation to have his Foreign Minister attend and participate in the Wilton Park Conference on Somalia’s state-building. Foreign Minister Mohamed Omar’s participation in that conference engendered widespread criticism from the public in Somaliland, leading to massive debates over the rationality of Sillanyo’s foreign policy regarding Somaliland’s quest for international recognition.
However, Sillanyo would maintain this course, and in February 2011 accepted the British invitation to attend a major donor conference in London, in which the primary objectives concerned the security and political process in Somalia. This again aroused the ire of the people of Somaliland and raised further questions concerning the foreign policy of the Sillanyo government.
However, Sillanyo was successful in mobilizing Somaliland’s two houses of parliament to amend laws that prevented Somaliland dealing in diplomacy that related in Somalia, thus giving a mandate to the Somaliland government to participate in the London conference in 2011. The communiqué of that conference urged Somalia and Somaliland to enter into the dialogue of the future status of relations of the two entities, which President Sillanyo and his counterpart within the transitional government, Sheikh Sharif, followed up within Dubai soon after.
These talks would continue throughout Sillanyo’s tenure in a stop-start and ultimately fruitless manner, and as such constituted the mainstream of Sillanyo’s foreign policy agenda. Among the broader society, there has been a great deal of interesting debate on the talks. Many analysts have contended that these talks were unlikely to produce any tangible results given that Somalia has no competent central government that has the mandate of its people as well as it’s federal member states to negotiate with.
Instead, they warn that entering the dialogue risks opening a Pandora’s Box, in which Somaliland slowly gets sucked into Somali politics, thus losing its unity and resilience in the face of outside pressure. Nevertheless, the other side of the debate has argued that Somaliland needed to start thinking out of the box in such a manner, and that negotiated path to independence has historically been more successful—as in the cases of Eritrea and South Sudan—than the unilaterally declared path.
Critics against Sillanyo’s foreign policy argue that Sillanyo had made risky maneuvers regarding issues existential to Somaliland, and yet did not have the pragmatic and robust foreign policy vision and strategy to back it up or to navigate the geopolitics of it. De Waal (2016) is among those who think Somaliland’s foreign policy rests on a precarious geopolitical foundation, and that the fluidity and lack of guarantee within the situation mean that vigilance, adaptability, and strategy in needed [[14]]:
“The regional environment will also be crucial: it is unclear whether the current benevolent protection afforded by Ethiopia and the neglect by other regional powers will prevail, or whether Somaliland will become the cockpit for regional rivalries. But, at the very least, Somaliland has demonstrated that it is possible to snatch stability and relative prosperity from violent turmoil”.
Nevertheless, one important area in which President Sillanyo’s foreign policy has shown success is its newly accelerated engagement with the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which can arguably be characterized as the most significant foreign policy move in Sillanyo’s time.
As a result of extensive diplomacy, Somaliland and the ports management company (Dubai Ports World Company) in 2016 agreed to a deal in which the company would invest in the expansion of the Berbera Port in order to transform it into a regional trade hub, while the government based in Abu-Dhabi secured access to Somaliland’s territory to establish a military base.
On 1 March 2018, Ethiopia joined the agreement as a 19 percent shareholder (DP World owns 51 percent of shares and the Somaliland government 30 percent), which includes a commitment to the financing of the Wajale-Berbera Corridor connecting Ethiopia to the port.
From the beginning, the Berbera Port deal has generated heated discussions among the public. The idea of partnering with UAE and DP World was welcomed, although concerns were raised over the transparency of the process as well as its potential geopolitical impact, at a time when political divisions in the Horn and the Gulf have increased tensions between trans-regional rival blocs.
However, it is not the intention of this piece to critically analyze the Berbera Port deal, and time will tell how Somaliland takes advantage of it. Nevertheless, it is our firm belief that Somaliland’s new government needs to capitalize on UAE’s diplomatic weight, as well as Ethiopia’s active role in the region for the interest of its state and people.
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