LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Somaliland: British Somaliland
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The Republic of Somaliland is an independent country that has not yet been internationally recognised. It has been independent since 1991, when it seceded from Somalia. Prior to its unification with Italian Somaliland in 1960, it was a British colony, the British Somaliland Protectorate. The capital of Somaliland is Hargeisa. The official languages are English, Somali, and Arabic. Somaliland is one of the few nation-states left today, as the Somalilanders are members of the Isaaq tribe.
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The Republic of Somaliland considers itself to be the successor state of the former British Somaliland protectorate, which had an area of about 137,600 km² (53,128 sq mi), briefly an independent country for five days in 1960. It is bordered by Ethiopia in the south and west, Djibouti in the northwest, the Gulf of Aden in the north, and the autonomous region Puntland in Somalia in the east.
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The establishment of the Somaliland Protectorate in the second half of the 19th Century epitomized the “absent-mindedness” with which much of the British Empire is said to have been acquired. Perceiving in the Somali hinterland a potential source of fresh meat for the British garrison across the Red Sea at Aden - a key naval coaling station on the sea route to India - the British entered into a series of agreements with the traditional leadership of the clans of the area. The original treaties represented no serious territorial ambitions on the part of British,4 but inroads by other imperial powers (namely France, Italy, and Abyssinia) endowed the British claims to Somaliland with strategic importance in the context of the “Scramble for Africa”. Through an awkward sequence of agreements strung out between 1885 and 1955, the colonial powers ultimately arrived at Somaliland’s present shape - a territory determined not by geography or demographics, but rather by the arbitrary logic of international and regional politics. In the process, the British surrendered considerable expanses of territory to the aggressive eastward expansion of King Menelik of Ethiopia (Drysdale: 1994). Most of the western, eastern and southern boundaries simply represent compass bearings.
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The conflict between the self-declared Republic of Somaliland and the Regional State of Puntland which is nominally a part of Somalia but runs its own affairs, is over two vast but barren regions known as Sanag and Sool. Somaliland claims both regions on a simple premise: They fall well within the borders it inherited from colonial Britain on 26 June 1960. On the face of it this claim is unassailable: Every African country bar none has the same borders it inherited from the European colonial powers. Even Ethiopia, the only Black African nation never to have been colonised owes its Eastern borders with Somalia and Kenya to the demarcations made by the British authorities in the 19th and early twentieth centuries. The adherence to the colonial borders was considered so vital to the stability of the continent that the first group of African leaders including great revolutionaries like Nkrumah, Nyerere and Sekou Toure issued a declaration in Cairo stating “ The colonial boundaries….form tangible realities… and must be respectedâ€. That fact Somaliland is not internationally recognised is irrelevant: Taiwan has clear, known and respected boundaries although it is not a recognised member of the United Nations.
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The unification of Somaliland and Somalia had been predicated not on the promise of a bilateral treaty, but rather a multilateral one in which the three remaining Somali territories would ... ultimately be incorporated. That dream would also be badly shaken in the years that followed independence. In 1963, the British awarded independence to Kenya, including the mainly Somali-inhabited Northern Frontier District (NFD), disregarding their pledge to respect the findings of an independent commission that an overwhelming majority of the people in the NFD sought unity with Somalia. The following year, in 1964, Ethiopia and Somalia fought their first major military action over the disputed Somali-inhabited region of Ethiopia, in which the might of the Somali armed forces was shown to be unequal to the task of annexing the territory. The initial momentum towards a pan-Somali state had suffered another setback.
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On 26 June 1960, British Somaliland became independent as the State of Somaliland. Italian Somaliland became independent four days later. On 1 July 1960, the two entities merged to become the Somali Republic. The first Prime Minister of Somaliland, Muhammad Haji Ibrahim Egal, became the Prime Minister of the new Somali Republic.
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British Somaliland