By Abdi Ahmed

Arbitrarily, Europeans clustered the post-colonial borders of Africa which left Africans into countries that don’t represent their heritage. Their bunching has extremely contributed the ongoing conflicts and troubles in the countries that don’t characterize their ethnicity. If you closely look at the most nations in Africa, who are having conflicts within or each other, have ethnic conflicts and boarder disputes due to the European boarder formation. For that partitioning, Africans have deepened into further disparities, hunger and civil war for so long, and no hope is visible in the horizon.

The title of this piece, Somaliland Is a Different Country from Somalia by CNN-Anderson Cooper, is the same title of a video from CNN-Anderson Cooper’s visit to Hargeisa for a program about the ABAARSO School. On one hand, it was enlightening to see the progresses and efforts made to educate the future generation of Somali children, however, on the other hand, it was a very disappointing and disturbing to watch and listen to a man with so much experience and knowledge on World’s geopolitics from his long time broadcasting from many parts of the world, yet to see him misinforming in a such embarrassing way for presenting Somaliland as a country that is different from Somalia.  For the benefit of the doubt, I assumed a lack of information on his part to depict Somaliland as its own country, but in later part of the video, he was very well aware of that Somaliland is not a recognized country and of course it’s still a region/state within the parcel of Somalia. I am not here to go about the legality and accordance of the World Nations and boarders because there is no discrepancy on that and never being a question about the fact on Somaliland’s status. Knowledgeably, Mr. Cooper went on ahead and described as such to mislead his audiences and cause further confusion and potentially create source of new conflicts by telling this incorrect information.

Then wonders came to mind that what was his actual purpose of knowingly saying that “Somaliland is a different country from Somalia” and eloquently explaining it more than the owners of this project could do. Does he have a new side gig as lobbyist? Or is this another all over again mission of the same yester- century‘s Europeans dividing Africa further more?  These are the mind boggling thoughts and questions one might has to seek for answers to pinpoint the real reason behind his new endeavors.

Anderson Cooper is a prominent journalist, and it’s distressful to see him propagating such an idea that has already caused many lives, and it could be another source of more conflicts within Somali people who have been suffering for so long from the intrusions of outside interest individuals and entities.  Having said that, if there were lack of information on his part, Mr. Cooper ought to be certain to study it before instigating more harm than good. Also he could just remained in imparting and presenting what actual was his assignment as he said it clearly that it was about the ABAARSO School rather than petting one clan’s dream to disunite Somali people further.

Lastly the Somali Federal Government and Somali people should condemn CNN, particularly Anderson Cooper’s mishap on distributing erroneous information on behalf of CNN. This was wrong in the light of legality, morality and journalism. It was deceitful and distorted reporting to call Somaliland is a different country from Somalia and contrasting them as they are two different nations when in fact they are just one.  It is a violation to Somalia’s sovereignty and no nation would have been accepted it if one of its region/state is illustrated as it’s a different country. CNN should inverse that wrong concept in that video and give a full apology to Somali people.

Abdi Ahmed
Email: hararboy@gmail.com