Front Page
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Somaliland News
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News Headlines
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Ali Guray: A Day Will Come When Basha Awil Is A Wanted Criminal
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Government Planning To Hit Media Even Harder
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Leaders Of Opposition Parties Decry The Government’s Assaults On The Media
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France 24 On Somaliland Independence, Media Repression
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Somaliland President Meets Nairobi-Based French Ambassador
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Ganey Arts Staff Detained By Government
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Government Arbitrarily Cancels Media Licenses
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Somaliland Government Confiscates FM Radio
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Local and Regional Affairs
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An Open Letter From Somaliland Focus (UK) Concerning Media Freedom In Somaliland
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Media Day Marked In Somaliland
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Somaliland Migrants Dying For A Life In Europe
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Leveraging State-Building In Somalia: Learning From Somaliland’s Non-Roadmap
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How British Firm Bribed African Officials To Get Tenders On Election Material
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Long-Term Plan To Boost Somalian Fisheries
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Understanding And Engaging Local Level Governance In Fragile States
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How Much General Knowledge Is Needed?
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Fourteen Somali Men Guilty Of Running Bristol Child Sex Ring
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The Man In No Man's Land: Photographer Narayan Mahon's 'Lands In Limbo' Opens At MMOCA
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Editorial
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Sillanyo An Invalid President Taking The Country Down With Him
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Features & Commentary
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Thinking Beyond Roadmaps In Somalia
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Somalia - The Big Picture, The Ugly Truth
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Piracy In Africa: The Ungoverned Seas
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International News
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Bristol Somali Sex Abuse Gang: Race "Not A Relevant Factor"
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Obama: The Only People With The Right To Object To Immigration Are Native Americans
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Opinion
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Sillanyo Drives Somaliland Into Black Hole
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President Sillanyo: Somaliland’s Next Dictator In The Making
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Communiqué: High Level Partnership Forum (HLPF)
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Somaliland Oil Prospects: How Transparency Avoids Resource Curse
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An Open Letter From Somaliland Focus (UK) Concerning Media Freedom In Somaliland
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H.E President Ahmed Mohamed Mahmoud Sillanyo
President, Republic of Somaliland (cc: Mr Abdullahi Mohamed Dahir, Information Minister)
16th November 2014
Re: Media freedom in Somaliland: the arrest of reporters from Horn Cable TV and SomSat TV
Read full text.
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Media Day Marked In Somaliland
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Hargeysa, Somaliland, November 22, 2014 (SL Times) – Media day was marked in Somaliland on Nov 9th. The event which took place at Haraf Hotel attracted representatives from the media, civil society, opposition figures, and the Dialogue Forum.
Read full text.
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Somaliland Migrants Dying For A Life In Europe
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Produced by Naomi Lloyd
Researcher & cameraman Abdi Bidhan Dahir, freelance journalist in Hargeysa
Every year, thousands of migrants risk their lives attempting to cross the Mediterranean from Africa into Europe. Read full text.
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Leveraging State-Building In Somalia: Learning From Somaliland’s Non-Roadmap
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By Dr Dominik Balthasar
Hope and optimism accompanied the installation of the new Federal Government of Somalia (FGS) in September 2012, but today, the administration appears to be drifting towards failure once again. Al-Shabaab remains far from defeated, social fragmentation within Somalia is on the rise, and while corruption continues unabated, political infighting paralyzes the country.
Read full text....
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How British Firm Bribed African Officials To Get Tenders On Election Material
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Nairobi (Kenya) - A case filed in the United Kingdom against a printing firm has exposed rings of corrupt public officials in Kenya, Ghana, Somaliland and Mauritania, who are reported to have received thousands of dollars in bribes to influence the award of tenders. Read full text.....
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Long-Term Plan To Boost Somalian Fisheries
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MEP will assess fisheries with the potential for sustainable harvesting and the associated onshore support infrastructure required
UK-based fisheries consultancy, MacAlister Elliott and Partners (MEP), is working to develop a long-term plan aimed at boosting economic growth for fisheries in Somalia and Somaliland. Read full text....
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Understanding And Engaging Local Level Governance In Fragile States
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By Nick Branson – Analysis Understanding and engaging local level governance in fragile states Based on a talk by Ken Menkhaus Ken Menkhaus is Professor of Political Science at Davidson College, with nearly thirty years of research experience in the Horn of Africa.
Read full text.....
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How Much General Knowledge Is Needed?
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By DD Phiri
Thirteen years ago I was on a flight from Guatemala to Quito in Ecuador. As we approached the destination the crew made all announcements in Spanish which I did not understand.
Read full text....
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Fourteen Somali Men Guilty Of Running Bristol Child Sex Ring
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By Agency
A judge questioned the wisdom of social workers placing a vulnerable teenage girl alone a flat and left almost unsupervised in inner city Bristol - leading to her being raped and prostituted by Somali drug dealers.
Read full text....
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The Man In No Man's Land: Photographer Narayan Mahon's 'Lands In Limbo' Opens At MMOCA
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By Gayle Worland | Wisconsin State Journal
Heading into Somaliland, Narayan Mahon made sure he had an exit plan. He was entering a country unrecognized by the larger international community — a stretch of the Earth with no official ties to any other country, isolated yet determined, self-contained and alone. Read full text......
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Ali Guray: A Day Will Come When Basha Awil Is A Wanted Criminal
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Hargeysa, Somaliland, November 22, 2014 (SL Times) – The third Chairman of UCID, Ali Yusuf (Ali Guray) sharply criticized the government for its behind the scene attempts to delay the elections. He also condemned the government’s gross corruption and its relentless attacks on the press.
Read full text....
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Government Planning To Hit Media Even Harder
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Hargeysa, Somaliland, November 22, 2014 (SL Times) – A recent meeting of Somaliland’s ministers was entirely devoted to how to shackle the press even further and how to destroy the community organization Jiidali, Haatuf reported.
Read full text.....
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Leaders Of Opposition Parties Decry The Government’s Assaults On The Media
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Hargeysa, Somaliland, November 22, 2014 (SL Times) – UCID’S presidential candidate, Jamal Ali Hussein, recently lambasted Sillanyo’s government for its dirty politics toward the media which based on suppressing the independent press while at the same time establishing bogus media whose purpose is to praise the government and to discredit the opposition.
Read full text....
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France 24 On Somaliland Independence, Media Repression
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Hargeysa, Somaliland, November 22, 2014 (SL Times) – France 24 had a segment on Somaliland that covered conditions in the country including the government’s suppression of the media.
Read full text....
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Somaliland President Meets Nairobi-Based French Ambassador
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Hargeysa, Somaliland, November 22, 2014 (SL Times) – Somaliland President met with the Nairobi-based French ambassador Remi Marechaux.
Read full text....
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Ganey Arts Staff Detained By Government
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Hargeysa, Somaliland, November 22, 2014 (SL Times) – Two of the staff of Ganey Arts, Hasan Ibrahim Nur and Abdifatah Abdillahi Hasan were detained this week by police in Hargeysa.
Read full text....
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Government Arbitrarily Cancels Media Licenses
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Hargeysa, Somaliland, November 22, 2014 (SL Times) – The ministry of information announced this week that it had canceled the licenses of some Somaliland-based news organizations.
Read full text....
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Somaliland Government Confiscates FM Radio
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Hargeysa, Somaliland, November 22, 2014 (SL Times) – Somaliland police confiscated the equipment of an FM Radio that it said was broadcasting in Somaliland without permission.
Read full text.......
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Bristol Somali Sex Abuse Gang: Race "Not A Relevant Factor"
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By Anira Khokhar
Yesterday Operation Brook concluded with convictions against the second group of men who were involved in Sexual Exploitation of young women, the reporting of the verdict has always been very biased, focusing on the ethnicity of these men, rather than the crime. This was also the case with the Rotherham verdicts. Read full text....
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Obama: The Only People With The Right To Object To Immigration Are Native Americans
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President Obama quite succinctly summed up the absurdity of the Republicans' issues with his immigration reform in Chicago yesterday, arguing that perhaps the only people who can legitimately be pissed off about illegal immigrants are Native Americans.
Read full text.....
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Thinking Beyond Roadmaps In Somalia
Expanding Policy Options For State Building
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By Dominik Balthasar NOV 18, 2014 Progress toward building a viable, functioning state in Somalia appears to have stalled in the face of political infighting, corruption, and insecurity. With its mandate due to expire in 2016, the Federal Government of Somalia is in danger of missing a series of deadlines, agreed with the international community, to pass a permanent constitution and hold national elections. In this report, Dominik Balthasar of the European Union Institute for Security Studies examines whether these priorities are the right ones for a government struggling to win public legitimacy. Citing the example of Somaliland, which broke away from Somalia in 1991 to declare an independence yet to be recognized by the international community, the author shows that state building is an inherently messy, elite-driven process that does not—and should not—follow a set path. Examining Somaliland’s singular approach to building a state is instructive in helping Somalis and their international partners consider new approaches to their own, faltering project.
Read full text...
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Somalia - The Big Picture, The Ugly Truth
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By PD Lawton The Somali have always been united by one language, Somali, and one religion, Islam. They are the Irish of Africa, the last to submit to colonialism. “It is this deep personal belief in belonging to the Somali nation handed down from father to son which has driven our people to fight against impossible odds, to endure defeat, only to fight again and again and again.”
Read full text.......
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Piracy In Africa: The Ungoverned Seas
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STICK-SLIM and still, Captain Lube sits in Lagos’s commercial fishing harbor, watching his crew clean a rusting shrimp trawler. He used to look forward to guiding them out to the rough Atlantic waters. But nowadays he has grown too afraid to venture far from the coast. Pirates infest west Africa’s seas, and he has seen many fellow captains kidnapped and sometimes killed. He has become jumpy; every approaching vessel might pose a danger. The trawling company for which he works says that attacks last year were “too many to count”.
Read full text........
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Sillanyo An Invalid President Taking The Country Down With Him
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In our last editorial we pointed out that a plausible explanation for the failure of Somaliland’s current government to move the country’s quest for international recognition even one step forward is that President Ahmed Sillanyo had reached a gentleman’s understanding with the international community in which he has basically abandoned Somaliland’s quest for recognition in exchange for a small increase in foreign assistance to his government. We provided several pieces of evidence to support our contention. Mr Sillanyo unwittingly supplied more evidence that this is the case in an article by the Guardian while he was in the UK (https://somalilandtimes.net/sl/2014/658/9.shtml)
Read full text....
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Sillanyo Drives Somaliland Into Black Hole
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By Adan H Iman
Saturday, November 15, 2014, .will be remembered as a day of infamy.
It was supposed to be the day that President Ahmed Sillanyo engineers to remove the Speaker of the House of Representative and Chairman of the WADANI party Abdirahman Cirro from speakership. The motive: to put a compliant member at the speakership so that he can get an extension of his term in office and pass the necessary legislation.
Read full text...
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Hell Hath No Fury
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By Ahmed M.I. Egal
The famous quotation from which the title of this piece is drawn is usually listed as “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned” and it comes from a 17th century play penned by William Congreve called “The Mourning Bride”. The full quote is actually “Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned”
This phrase, in its totality, is extremely apropos for the relationship between the Sillanyo government and the people of Somaliland over which it rules with an increasingly brutal iron fist. The Somaliland public swept the Sillanyo regime into office with a massive margin in 2010 amid great expectations and even greater promises of what the septuagenarian political insider would deliver in economic advancement and international recognition.
Read full text.....
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President Sillanyo: Somaliland’s Next Dictator In The Making
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By Abdi Hussein Daud
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” George Santayana
Certain democratically elected leaders transform gradually into dictators. History has repeatedly attested the blueprints for turning a democratic system into dictatorship. Such blueprints have been employed recurrently in different shapes and forms, some of which are gorier than others. Notwithstanding their brutalities, dictators have distinct characteristics. Read full text........
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Communiqué: High Level Partnership Forum (HLPF)
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Copenhagen – The first annual Ministerial High Level Partnership Forum was held in Copenhagen 19-20 November, co-chaired by HE Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, the President of the Federal Government of Somalia, and the United Nations, and hosted by the Government of Denmark. [Communiqué]
2. Fifty-six delegations gathered to review progress made since the Brussels Conference in September 2013, where the New Deal Somali Compact was endorsed, acknowledge challenges encountered in 2014, and identify priorities for 2015.
Read full text.........
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Somaliland Oil Prospects: How Transparency Avoids Resource Curse
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By Abdirahman Mohamed Dirye
Resource curse and poverty have been number one twin enemies in Africa rich with resources; their eradication isn’t an easy task. Publishwhatyoupay.org and Extractives Industry Transparency Initiatives (EITI) at the frontline of combating the resource curse launched intense campaign worldwide to proclaim the necessity of accountability: “Extractives Industry Transparency Initiatives (EITE) is global effort to apply theory that providing citizens with information about workings of powerful institutions— namely in this case, the payment of revenues of governments by oil, gas, and mining companies— can empower them to better influence the actions in these institutions in the public interest” (Diarmid, 2013). Somaliland nationals therefore need to know secretive deals done by Oil Minister behind closed doors.
Read full text.........
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