The Freedom Wire

From right to left: Ahmed Moalim Fiqi, foreign minister of Somalia, Hakan Fidan, foreign minter of Türkiye, Taye Atske Selassie, foreign minister of Ethiopia. Ankara, Türkiye July 1, 2024 By: Mohamed Garad      As all eyes are on Ankara in the mediation of the Somali maritime dispute between Somalia & Ethiopia, many have placed hope on UNCLOS to make a breakthrough. However, UNCLOS is not applicable or an effective tool to resolve the dispute. The dispute between the two countries lies over sovereignty & territorial integrity following Ethiopia's signing of an MoU with Somalia's breakaway region, Somaliland. UNCLOS explicitly rules that it doesn't override state sovereignty and territorial integrity, and if a country feels its sovereignty and/ or territorial integrity are in jeopardy, it can ban the transit state from its sovereign soil and maritime. In a state capacity, the Somali president officially declared Ethiopia's move to sign the MoU with Somaliland a d

  EAC heads of states summit, March 2nd, 2016, in Arusha, Tanzania/  Source  Getty images   By: Mohamed Garad "There's quartz here, there's gypsum, there's uranium, there's iron ore, a lot of gold, potential gas, potential oil. All these things are waiting for East Africans to take came in and because they have not been exploited by Somalis because they didn't have good government. So, if the Africans want to become rich, they will join, they will let Somalia in."  These are not sentences from a historical text of a European "explorer" reporting back to imperial home in the late 19th century. Instead, they are said by a member of the Somali delegation speaking at Somalia's readiness verification summit organized by the East African Community technical team in Mogadishu, Somalia, January 22nd—February 3rd, 2023. A careful read of these sentences might convey that after years of experiencing many national atrocities, Somalia may now be yieldin

Ethiopia's soldiers in Mekelle, capital city of Tigray, after they captured from TPLF forces, March 2021/Getty images  By: Mohamed Garad   About one hundred and sixteen years after the  Tripartite Treaty of 1906  in which the imperialists of Great Britain and France formally recognized “the independent African empire of Ethiopia,” Ethiopia proves to be an unresolved colonial empire that is burning in all its corners.    The world’s deadliest war is happening in the Tigray region, core region of Ethiopia’s State. Ethiopia’s National Defense Forces (E.N.D.F) and neighboring Eritrean military with the help of the Amhara regional militia called Fano are waging a full-scale war against the Tigray Defense Forces (T.D.F), a coalition forces led by Tigray Liberation Front (T.P.L.F), a former leading member of the ruling coalition of Ethiopia between 1991 to 2018.   The atrocities of the war in Tigray are catastrophic and devastating. So far, the death toll of the war is  more t

. The Statue of the the greatest hero of the Somali nation in 20th century,  Sayid Mohammed Abdulle Hassan (1856--1920), Mogadishu, Somalia  By Mohamed Garad The world we live in is full of mysterious events that sometimes change our perception of the globe forever. Among the events that sparked astound interests that the world has witnessed recently is the discovery of the archaeological remains of the great civilization of the Aztecs in Mexico City, Mexico. It was on the night of the 21st of February 1978 when a group of workmen digging electric cables hit struck the first stone of what once used to be a vast and advanced civilization just two meters into the earth. The discovery of this archaeological ruin was remarkable. President of Mexico, Jose Lopez Portillo, ordered the demolition of entire blocks of the city and a full-scale archeological dig of the area. The findings were astonishing. The more the archeologists dug in, the deeper they went into a vast empire beneath the e

  From right: President Hassan Sheik Mohamud at the podium of announcing his appointed PM Hamza Bare . June 15, 2022. Villa Somalia, Mogadishu. Photo by Villa Somalia For the last three-plus decades, Somalia has been dominating both in the literature and news headlines with one theme: a failed state. This has been the case due to the lack of an effective central authority in the country since the fall of the dictatorial regime of Mohamed Siad Bare in 1991 followed by the devastating civil war and famines and the new paradigm shift of the Somali agony: the piracy, terrorism and unvetted and malicious foreign interferences.  However, the Somalia I’m going to write about in this essay is not the one we know in the past 30 years of mayhem but a new one that is in the realm of the hands reach to create: a just and strong sovereign Somali republic that heals the past and inspires all Somalis to protect and live in it. By proposing so, one may think that it’s merely wishful thinking but I’m

  Photo:Aljazeeranews.com Woodrow Wilson, the father who first coined the quintessential right of nations, the right to self-determination , famously stated: "No people must be forced under sovereignty under which it does not wish to live." If one consciously observes Wilson’s grounding words of what later became the universal right that has been enshrined in the Declaration of the United Nations, it becomes a sunlight that the will of the people is the requirement to exercise the right and the former president had been granting the right to sovereignty to those who want to be sovereign. In that sense, the right to self-determination doesn’t apply to those forcefully occupied and still remain in occupation. Decolonization is their remedy and that is exactly what case of the Somalis under Ethiopia proves to be and sturdily demands. Decolonization of nations had not been in the political literature before Euro

  On October 31, 2017, the current acting president of the occupied Somalis, the Somali Galbeed/Ogadenia, cried “so, next time you meet a civil servant with management degree from Jijiga University and you ask who Abraham Maslow was and he tells you he was a dangerous anti-peace Eretrian captured by the gallant Liyou Police, don’t get discussed,” to protest against an alleged massive academic scandal in the university which granted many never schooled civil servants to academic degrees in the fields of business and economics.To those of you who are not familiar with Abraham Maslow, he was a leading American scholar in the field of psychology in the 20th century whose works are highly practiced in the fields of psychology and industry management. One of his major contributions is Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, a psychological theory used for motivating humans. With still staggering achievements, poor academic standing, higher presidency turnover, and its latest interim president fired on