The case against recognising Somaliland

Writing in ConservativeHome on the anniversary of Somaliland’s 1991 declaration of independence on May 18th, Lord Ashcroft delivered the kind of dispatch that a brief, carefully shepherded visit will tend to inspire. He had travelled to Hargeisa, been impressed by what senior officials there told him, and returned to report that Somaliland had built “something exceptionally rare in the Horn of Africa: relative stability, functioning democratic institutions, and security.” 

He was struck by its army, coast guard, police and intelligence services. He noted that it had not become “fertile ground for Islamist extremism”. He concluded that Britain and the West owe Somaliland “significantly deeper engagement” in the form of security cooperation, investment partnerships and maritime coordination, and hinted, with studied vagueness, at “creative ways to deepen Somaliland’s relationship with the Commonwealth”.

It is a dangerously incomplete account, and Lord Ashcroft is not alone in repeating it. In January, Nigel Farage stood before a sea of Somaliland flags outside Downing Street and declared himself before the crowd as being “with you all the way”. Sir Gavin Williamson, who chairs the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Somaliland, called on Britain to stop “supporting the Somali terrorist state”. The APPG itself has published a thirty-eight-page roadmap to recognition. 

Something that might loosely be called a “Somaliland lobby” has existed in Westminster for some time now, and it is seemingly gaining momentum. Its confidence rests on a series of claims about the territory it champions — yet almost all of them are, at best, half-truths.

Ashcroft frames Somaliland as “a former British protectorate” that has spent three decades building a state after the devastation of a civil war which “destroyed Hargeisa and claimed over 200,000 lives”. The civil war in question was the campaign waged by Somali dictator Siad Barre’s regime against the Isaaq clan in the late 1980s — a genuine atrocity, and one that understandably anchors the Isaaq sense of grievance. But the British Somaliland Protectorate was never an Isaaq homeland with borders drawn around a single community. It encompassed multiple clan-families, each rooted in its own territory within those borders: Isaaq in the centre, Dhulbahante (Darod) in the east, Gadabuursi in the west, and Issa along the Djibouti frontier. When Britain granted independence in June 1960, it did so on the explicit understanding that these communities would unite with their kinsmen in the south to form the Somali Republic — an aspiration that was popular, voluntary and pan-Somali. The modern secessionist project is not a restoration of that multi-clan protectorate. It is, to put it plainly, an Isaaq political enterprise headquartered in Hargeisa, which claims sovereignty over the territory of communities that have never consented to it and, in several cases, have taken up arms to resist it.

In February 2023, Dhulbahante clan elders in Las Anod, the capital of the Sool region deep in the territory Somaliland claims, declared that they were not part of Somaliland’s administration and sought reunification with the Federal Government of Somalia. Somaliland’s response was a military one. What followed was roughly eight months of fighting, from February to August 2023, during which the Somaliland army besieged the city with artillery, deployed an estimated six to eight thousand troops, and cut the water supply to a civilian population already suffering acute food insecurity. Amnesty International’s investigation, published in April 2023, found that Somaliland forces had indiscriminately shelled the town with mortars and 107mm rockets, damaging the city’s general hospital (struck at least four times by April), schools, mosques and homes, killing and injuring civilians including women, children and healthcare workers. 

Médecins Sans Frontières withdrew from Las Anod in July, citing “extreme violence” and “recurrent attacks on medical facilities”. By August, Somaliland’s forces had been driven from their last positions around the city, and the SSC-Khatumo movement controlled Las Anod and its environs. Somaliland had been expelled from a substantial share — commonly put at roughly a third to forty per cent — of the eastern territory it claims as sovereign.

Not a word of this appears in Lord Ashcroft’s dispatch. He praises Somaliland’s army and security apparatus without mentioning that this same apparatus stands accused, by Amnesty International, of war crimes committed against people it regards as its own citizens. He lauds the territory’s “stability” without noting that it fought a war within its claimed borders eighteen months before his visit — a war it lost. The omission is deafening — perhaps the central fallacy of the pro-recognition case — and it recurs whenever British politicians take up the Somaliland cause.

Admittedly, to his credit, Ashcroft actually bothered to go to the region while most of the lobby’s Westminster champions have not. But his visit was confined to Hargeisa, the political and demographic heartland of the secessionist movement, and he appears to have spoken exclusively to senior Somaliland officials. He did not go to the Sool region. He did not go to Awdal, where protests erupted in Borama during the very independence celebrations he praises. He did not hear from the Gadabuursi and Issa communities in the west, who reject secession and have threatened armed resistance if it is imposed on them. He did not hear from the Dhulbahante, who went to war rather than accept it. What he produced, in short, was a dispatches-from-the-capital piece in which Hargeisa’s own official version of events was presented without challenge, arguably the equivalent of visiting Moscow in 1988 and filing a report on the stability of the Soviet Union.

The strategic case Ashcroft constructs is more serious and deserves a more serious answer. Somaliland does in fact sit on the Gulf of Aden at a moment of acute maritime insecurity. The port of Berbera, developed by DP World with Emirati financing, does indeed have strategic potential. The Houthi threat, piracy, Chinese expansionism, and the general deterioration of security in the Horn of Africa are real. None of these I would dispute. What is in dispute is the extraordinary logical leap from “Berbera is strategically useful” to “Britain should therefore back a secessionist claim that the African Union has rejected, that every government in the world except Israel refuses to recognise, and that a majority of the communities within the claimed territory actively oppose.” Port access, security cooperation and maritime coordination do not require recognition of sovereignty. Britain has maintained deep defence and intelligence relationships with unrecognised entities before, and can do so again, without lending its diplomatic weight to a project that risks setting the Horn of Africa on fire.

This curious fixation on the part of British politicians, particularly on the right, is not new. In 2012, then Foreign Secretary William Hague made much the same case that Ashcroft and Farage and others make now: Somaliland is stable, it is democratic, it holds elections, and therefore it deserves recognition. Ahmet Davutoğlu, Turkey’s foreign minister at the time, recalling the exchange in a later interview, apparently asked Hague why, if stability and elections were the criteria for statehood, he would not begin with Northern Cyprus. Hague, according to Davutoğlu, could hardly demur. Turkey then brokered talks in Ankara between the Somali federal president and Somaliland’s leader, and independence was put aside for a brief while. Hague was no doubt reminded that recognising unilateral acts of secession on those grounds would oblige Britain to extend the same courtesy to every half-functioning breakaway territory on earth. Are we seeing here traces of what Enoch Powell had diagnosed as the “imperial sickness” in 1968 — the compulsion of British politicians to go on acting as though they still had authority over faraway lands? One wonders whether the Somaliland lobby might simply be a rather belated symptom of an old post-imperial reflex, now going by “Global Britain”.

Who, exactly, is the domestic political constituency for this anyhow? One answer lies in the only recognition Somaliland has actually received. In December 2025, Benjamin Netanyahu announced that Israel would recognise Somaliland as a sovereign state, a move promptly condemned by the African Union as “null and void” and rejected by Somalia, the Arab League, and the broader international community. Farage applauded the decision, and Williamson cited it as proof that “many once said would never happen”. The APPG’s roadmap treats it as a precedent rather than an outlier. Of course, Farage’s support for Somaliland recognition predates Israel’s move by a decade, so it would be wrong to suggest he is simply following Tel Aviv’s lead — but the convergence is telling. The only state in the world to have recognised this project is one pursuing its own strategic agenda in the Horn of Africa — an agenda that purportedly includes, as Somalia’s foreign minister has publicly alleged, exploring the territory as a potential destination for displaced Palestinians. Whose interests, then, does the Somaliland lobby serve?

Even on its own terms, the Somaliland lobby’’ logic is self-defeating. Ashcroft himself concedes that Somaliland’s “eagerness for recognition has at times exceeded diplomatic caution”, citing remarks about the Falkland Islands that “understandably went down badly in Britain”. If the secessionist government is diplomatically reckless on the Falklands, on what basis should we trust its account of internal unity in Sool and Sanaag? If it cannot manage its own messaging on a question of distant symbolic importance, why should anyone believe it can manage the explosive realities of a multi-clan territory in which three of four constituent communities have rejected its authority?

British public figures who know perilously little about Somalia are championing a secessionist movement in a country still recovering from decades of civil war

Farage and his allies in Reform UK campaign relentlessly on the theme that Britain should tighten its borders, reduce or eliminate its refugee intake, and resist being drawn into distant conflicts whose consequences wash up on British shores. Yet the policy they are championing — recognition of a secessionist entity over the armed objection of a majority of its claimed population — is precisely the kind of intervention that produces refugees and displacement. The 2023 war displaced between 150,000 and 200,000 people. Another round of fighting, triggered by the perceived legitimacy that British or Western recognition would confer, could be far worse. The people who would bear the human cost of that war are not the ones voting for Reform UK, but some of them would, in time, arrive at Britain’s borders, at which point Farage would doubtless be there to decry their presence.

British public figures who know perilously little about Somalia are championing a secessionist movement in a country still recovering from decades of civil war. They are doing so in alignment with the strategic interests of a foreign government, in contradiction of their own stated principles on immigration and foreign entanglement, and in apparent ignorance of the fact that the territory they celebrate is riven by an internal conflict that has claimed lives, displaced hundreds of thousands, and ended in military defeat for the very administration they support. Lord Ashcroft, at least, had the courtesy to visit. But he visited only Hargeisa, heard only Hargeisa’s story, and returned to tell it as though it were the whole truth. It is not, and the communities of Sool, Sanaag and Awdal have their own story, spelt out in artillery craters and displacement camps, of a secessionist project that cannot hold together the territory it claims except by force. 

Britain ought to have no business helping Somaliland try.