Amina Mohamoud Warsame has watched Somaliland transform — from British colonial territory to a breakaway republic that the world still refuses to officially recognise — and she insists the formula was never complicated. Ordinary people, traumatised by war and displacement, chose peace when they had every reason to choose revenge, she revealed in an in interview with Rebel News.
From colony to conflict to calm
Warsame grew up under British colonial administration, which ended when Somaliland merged with the former Italian-administered Trust Territory of Somalia in July 1960 to form the Somali Republic. The union proved disastrous. Under the military dictatorship of Siad Barre, who ruled Somalia from 1969 until 1991, the northern regions — historically and culturally distinct — were subjected to systematic oppression, mass killings, and the aerial bombardment of Hargeisa in 1988, an event that drove hundreds of thousands into refugee camps in Ethiopia.
“We have been oppressed so much,” Warsame told this correspondent. “People came back from refugee camps with one understanding: they didn’t want anything to do with revenge. They wanted peace.”
If we had returned harm to poor people, it could have been a disaster for us.
— Amina Mohamoud Warsame, retired civil society activist
When Somaliland declared independence in May 1991, its liberation movement made a deliberate choice: there would be no score-settling. That decision — unusual by any regional standard — helped prevent the cycle of retaliatory violence that consumed southern Somalia and sent that country into decades of ongoing instability.
Pastoral democracy and clan architecture
The stability that followed independence was not built on foreign aid blueprints or imported governance models. It was built, Warsame says, on something older: the Somali clan council tradition, a form of what she calls “pastoral democracy.”
In this system, community elders historically debated decisions in relatively flat social hierarchies. Rank mattered, but so did argument. Young men could challenge older ones. Consensus, however slow, was the goal. That culture of deliberation translated, imperfectly but tangibly, into Somaliland’s post-independence political architecture, which grafted a bicameral legislature onto traditional clan structures. International observers have repeatedly praised Somaliland’s electoral record as among the most credible in the Horn of Africa.
Education, women, and shifting ground
When formal schooling first arrived in Somaliland, Warsame recalls, many families were suspicious. Modern education felt like a colonial imposition. Over generations, attitudes shifted as economic realities made literacy and credentials impossible to ignore. Today, women can enrol at university without legal barriers, though access remains constrained in poorer rural communities where infrastructure and cultural conservatism intersect.
Women, Warsame notes, have become indispensable economic actors. In many households, female income earners are the primary breadwinners, and she describes a growing social preference in some communities for daughters — valued for their perceived sense of responsibility. Yet political representation has not kept pace. Government and formal leadership structures remain overwhelmingly male, a tension Warsame acknowledges without minimising.
Faith without extremism
Islam is inseparable from Somaliland’s public identity, and Warsame speaks about it without defensiveness. Women’s conservative dress, she explains, is largely a social norm rather than a legal mandate — a distinction that matters in a region often painted with a single brush.
“If you are a good Muslim, you are a good person,” she said, framing faith as a personal moral commitment rather than a mechanism of control. The community, she argues, rejects attempts to weaponise religion, and a robust culture of community policing — neighbours monitoring for suspicious or radicalising behaviour — has made Somaliland relatively resilient to the extremist movements that have destabilised neighbouring states.
The recognition question and Berbera promise
On the issue that hangs over every conversation about Somaliland’s future, Warsame is direct. The territory has a legitimate claim to self-determination, she argues, grounded in its distinct colonial borders — a principle Somaliland advocates have pressed before the African Union. Recognition, she contends, would not destabilise the region; it would strengthen it.
Central to that argument is the Port of Berbera, a deep-water harbour on the Gulf of Aden that Warsame believes could serve as a critical trade lifeline for landlocked African economies, particularly Ethiopia, which lost its coastline when Eritrea became independent in 1993. Several international investors, including DP World, have already recognised Berbera’s strategic value, signing development agreements with Somaliland’s government in recent years.
“International recognition would benefit both the region and global commerce,” Warsame said — a geopolitical case she delivers not as a demand, but as an obvious fact she finds frustrating still to have to make.
After more than three decades as a self-governing territory with its own currency, military, and elected government, Somaliland continues to build what Warsame built her life around: the belief that people, given the space to choose peace, usually will. The world has yet to formally acknowledge what she and her neighbours have already proved.
