This reflects a remarkably shortsighted and myopic Saudi perspective. Despite decades of immense oil wealth, Saudi Arabia has continued to depend on external security guarantees, including military cooperation with Pakistan, highlighting the vulnerabilities of an absolute decayed monarchy that has struggled to develop a sustainable and independent security framework.
For more than three decades, many Arab and Muslim states chose to ignore the political realities in Somaliland. The historical record is clear: Somaliland and Somalia were separate British and Italian colonies that gained independence independently in 1960 before voluntarily uniting to form the Somali Republic. When that union collapsed alongside the Somali state in 1991, Somaliland reasserted the sovereignty it had briefly relinquished.
Thirty-five years later, Somaliland has established relative peace, democratic institutions, internal security, and self-governance without foreign peacekeeping forces. Meanwhile, Somalia continues to grapple with political instability, insecurity, terrorism, and dependence on the support of the African Union stabilization mission, African Union Support and Stabilization Mission in Somalia (AUSSOM).
Given these realities, Saudi officials are hardly in a position to lecture Somaliland about governance, stability, or state-building. Those who rely on others for their own security should exercise greater humility before criticizing a society that has maintained peace and stability through its own institutions. Enjoy the protection provided by Pakistan while Somaliland continues charting its own course.
This is one of my articles about hypocrisy of Arabs about Somaliland issue:
“One might have expected the Islamic and Arab worlds—so often vocal about Muslim suffering elsewhere—to rise in defense of Somaliland’s civilian population. They did not. On the contrary, many Muslim-majority states either openly sided with the Somali regime responsible for the atrocities or chose silence and diplomatic evasion. Even when evidence of mass killing was presented before international forums, solidarity was extended not to the victims but to the perpetrators, in the name of preserving a fictional unity. Based on credible reports from international human rights organizations, Israel brought the issue of the Isak genocide to the attention of the United Nations General Assembly.
This was not an isolated moral failure. History offers other stark examples. In 1971, when the Pakistani army carried out mass killings against Bengali civilians following Bangladesh’s declaration of independence, much of the Muslim world again looked away—or worse, defended the aggressor. It was a non-Muslim country, India, that intervened militarily to stop the slaughter and subsequently recognized Bangladesh as a sovereign state. Similarly, during the late 1980s, when Somaliland’s population fled aerial bombardment, it was Ethiopia—not Arab or Muslim states—that hosted refugees and provided limited material support. In both cases, moral action came from outside the self-proclaimed fraternity of Islamic solidarity.”
Read the full article here!
blogs.timesofisrael.com/isra…