On July 1, Somali officials in Mogadishu will raise flags, fire ceremonial rounds, and tell themselves the story of a nation born in unity. The story is 66 years old this week, but the union it describes never existed.
What happened in 1960 was this: British Somaliland gained independence on June 26, a protectorate reduced overnight to a sovereign state. Its legislature passed a Union of Somaliland and Somalia Law on June 27. Somalia’s legislature met on June 30 and approved a different document, an Atto di Unione, in principle, a phrase that in legal terms means “nothing binding.”
In the June 1961 constitutional referendum, more than 60 percent of voters in the [north] rejected the new constitution.
The two instruments were never reconciled. Neither was signed by representatives of both territories. A presidential decree issued on July 1 to patch the gap was never presented to the National Assembly within the constitutionally required five days and lapsed, by the constitution’s own terms, from the date of its issue. Seven months later, a new Act of Union was promulgated retroactively to July 1, 1960, to fix a legal vacancy in a document that differed materially from the law Somaliland had passed. Legal expert Eugene Cotran wrote at the time that the validity of the instruments establishing the union was “questionable.” That assessment has never been superseded.
The north registered its verdict almost immediately. In the June 1961 constitutional referendum, more than 60 percent of voters in the former protectorate rejected the new constitution. The leading Somali National League boycotted the vote entirely. In December 1961, junior Somaliland officers attempted a coup to restore their region’s sovereignty. The court that tried them in Mogadishu acquitted the lot. The judge found they had never been sworn in for a country called the Somali Republic. The union survived anyway, held together by Pan-Somali sentiment and international indifference to the procedural wreckage underneath.
What followed for the north was not union. It was absorption. Political and military appointments skewed toward the south. Economic neglect hardened into policy. Then came the Siad Barre years. Between 1987 and 1989, the Somali dictator’s forces killed an estimated 200,000 civilians in what is now Somaliland. When the state collapsed in 1991, the Somali National Movement and clan elders convened in Burao, dissolved the union, and declared the restoration of Somaliland’s sovereignty within the borders of the former British protectorate. That restoration is now 35 years old—11 years older than the union it ended.
Mogadishu has not accepted this simple fact. President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, selected by a couple hundred hand-appointed electors rather than elected in a one-man, one-vote election, calls unity non-negotiable and has said so at every available occasion—most recently in January 2026, when he traveled to Las Anod for the inauguration of the North Eastern State, Somalia’s sixth federal member, carved from Sool, Sanaag, and Cayn, territories Somaliland claims as integral to the former British protectorate and international border demarcations. International law is on Somaliland’s side, as the British set its borders during its 19th and early 20th century protectorate. The new state encompasses roughly 40 percent of what was once British Somaliland. The purpose was territorial attrition and to fragment Somaliland’s colonial-border argument from within, before more capitals start taking it seriously.
July 1 is an annual diplomatic service that Mogadishu performs for external actors ... whose regional strategy depends on the union remaining notionally intact.
The strategy has exposed fractures that Mogadishu cannot explain away. The existing Somali federal state of Puntland refuses to recognize the North Eastern State and has been in open confrontation with the federal government over elections, constitutional reform, and the reach of presidential authority. A Jubaland court issued an arrest warrant against Mohamud on treason charges; his government issued one in return. The federal architecture Mohamud waves at Hargeisa is coming apart at the seams. A government that cannot hold its existing federation together has no credible claim over a territory that left 35 years ago and has not looked back.
July 1 is an annual diplomatic service that Mogadishu performs for external actors like Turkey, Egypt, and Qatar, whose regional strategy depends on the union remaining notionally intact.
Israel’s formal recognition of Somaliland in December 2025 has done what three decades of Somaliland advocacy could not: forced the fiction into the open. Israel became the first United Nations member state to extend diplomatic relations since Somaliland’s 1991 restoration. Mogadishu called it interference, canceled agreements with the United Arab Emirates in protest, and went on Al Jazeera to claim falsely that Israel planned to resettle Gaza in Hargeisa.
The African Union and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation issued their customary reaffirmations of Somalia’s territorial integrity. None of it has stuck. More than 25 countries sent delegations to Hargeisa for the 35th anniversary celebrations in May. The recognition question has moved from the margins to the center of Horn of Africa geopolitics, and no amount of ceremonial noise in Mogadishu on July 1 changes that.
